I Am No One You Know (7 page)

F
UCK
I’
M THINKING,
Me is cracking up again.

This season I was 13 yrs old & Me began to be paranoid about staying in our new rented bungalow in Olcott, New York by herself. Or through the night even with her dog-devoted son Wolfie on the premises. It had to do (was Wolfie’s theory) with the wind blowing thin & whistling across wide choppy bruised-blue Lake Ontario & the fact, Me didn’t discover till she’d signed the lease for 12 months, that the lane leading down to our bungalow was mostly sand and mud and at night black as pitch, no street lights. Me’d stuck us at the edge of a broken-down lake-resort town, signed the lease in a 100-watt mood
(
100
-watt mood
was what Me called her happy-craziness, & this term was apt) & all to escape the enemy.

What enemy? (Wolfie didn’t ask.)

Me was in a habit of raking her nails through Wolfie’s tender feelings saying in her I-just-thought-of-this-shit voice how’d she know Wolfie wouldn’t side with the enemy if, in the night, the enemy suddenly showed up?

Enemy
was Me-code for
them
as in (for instance)
us
vs.
them
but mainly Wolfie’s ex-father whom we’d managed to elude for at least
two years by the time of Olcott. (Can you have an ex-father? The guy who was Me’s ex-husband is what I’m saying.) Says Me, “I wouldn’t trust a kid your age, wolf-eyes & wolf-habits, sticking his big toe in the muck of male puberty, as far as I could toss him.”

“Fuck you, Me.”

Wolfie’d mutter under his breath. So Me could hear or not-hear, her choice.

It was typical of Me, that manic-depressed year on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, to lapse into a silence of hours & no more speech communication than grinding her teeth (you could feel more than hear, a brooding vibrating noise like a train passing), then break the silence with such harsh pronouncements. Sometimes Me positioned herself in doorways, for instance the doorway of my room at the cobwebby rear of the bungalow, backs of her slender veiny hands resting on her hips, & beautiful steel-eyes glaring, & sometimes (the weirdest times!) Me spoke with her head turned away, as if thinking out loud, private thoughts suddenly bursting out of her crammed head like a radio turned up so that Wolfie (who happened to be present) was privileged to overhear. The cruellest was a flung-in-the-face remark as Wolfie, sleep-deprived & cursing, stumbled out the door to tramp through sand to the Newfane Central Schools bus the color of a demon pumpkin & spewing exhaust at the top of the lane, “Wolfie! It’s school you actually go to? All day? How can I trust a kid won’t look me level in the eye?”

“You can’t, Me. You’re fucked.”

It was like tickling Me, with rough fingers. Get her to laugh when she wasn’t expecting to.

“Where’d you acquire such a foul mouth, mister? Not from
me.
”

“Exactly that’s who: Me.”

By instinct I knew that the best defense against Me’s
bruise-mood
meanness
(bruise-mood
was what Me called her depressed state, & this term was apt) was a fast & unrepentant offense. Like a boxer who doesn’t wait for his opponent’s jab but goes for the head pronto.

“Bye, Me! See ya later.”

“Fuck
you.
”

Most mornings even if Wolfie was a few minutes late the bus was waiting for him, & the other kids staring out the windows like by himself
he, Wolfie, is a spectacle not just a scrawny long-haired 13-yr-old with shadowy doom eyes & sullen mouth like a girl’s, & the reason was (Me’s paranoia, but Me was accurate) that the bus driver was a true mother-type, all smiles & sympathy, who pitied Wolfie as a child-with-a-problem-mother. Olcott was a small town where rumors & gossip (not all malicious) were like radio waves continuously bombarding the air. Within a few days of Me & Wolfie moving into the bungalow on Seaview Lane with rusted screens & fake-brick asphalt siding & that weedy yard with a look of things buried in it, it was known through the neighborhood that this wasn’t your normal American TV family.

No dad, for instance.

“See what I say? People spying on us.”

“But not the
enemy,
Me. Not here.”

If Me flashed a little crazy after a restless night of smoking & prowling the darkened house with owl-eyes alert to suspicious noises outside & on the roof, it didn’t inevitably mean she’d still be in such a state when the schoolbus deposited Wolfie back home at 3:35
P.M.
In fact it could mean Me’d taken her meds & calmed her mind by working at collage-sculptures of “found objects” (which Me never finished out of superstition) & having a vitamin-enriched midday meal (yogurt, wheat germ), & possibly she’d take a miles-long hike on the windy beach & even a nap curled up like a cat among the dunes, & return refreshed & invigorated & maternal. All this was a possibility. In the universe in which Me & Wolfie dwelled, each hour was a new toss of the dice. Heads, tails. You don’t always lose.

So possibly Me’d be awaiting her only child home from school, a tray of peanut butter cookies (only slightly scorched) cooling on the kitchen counter, smiling & attentive like any Olcott mom. Teasing, “Oh hey: back so soon? Guess I gotta let you in, huh?”

(Not like any mom, maybe. Me’d have the screen door latched & within grabbing range, on a counter, one of her razor-sharp knives.)

“Guess so, Me.”

“Well, I love ya, dummy. C’mere.”

At 13-going-on-14 you’re expected to shrink from a mom’s kiss but I never did. Couldn’t take a chance it wouldn’t be the last.

W
OLFIE THE
D
EMEROL
kid. Me reminisced.

Meaning she’d had me by way of that “heavenly” drug. & other drugs keeping sanity afloat. Lithium, Dilaudid. Valium no more exotic than aspirin. If you grew up with them you saw them as greens, blues, whites, big-capsule, medium-size capsule, square-cut, pumpkin seed & clamshells. Some of the pills were manufactured with X’s imprinted on them, almost invisibly, & others were indented with lines at the meridian so, if you wished, you could cut the pill neatly in two with a knife & it wouldn’t crumble. Wolfie’d learned to split pills at a young age. When Me’s hands were shaky.

Wolfie was the Demerol kid but in fact that was Ralphie. Little Ralph, Jr. God damn what a name for a sweet innocent guy, Me said. She’d repented not having the kid but the circumstances. Except if you subtract the circumstances, where’s the kid? We’d ponder such riddles of metaphysics on our long drives in the ditchwater-color Chevy van Me’d borrowed (from a man friend in Stanley, Montana, who must’ve never seriously expected to get it back). Me was susceptible to
bruise-moods
when pondering how we’re essentially determined by our genes, locked into patterns of behavior rigid as ants if you had the perspective to judge, yet Me could be lifted suddenly into 100
-watt moods
by a vista of beautiful mountains, cloud-formations, rolling hills, farmland & dairy cows & horses grazing in fields, & the realization that mankind is essentially free, there’s free will for all, since we can’t foresee the future & strictly speaking there is no future until we make it. “See what I’m saying, kiddo?”

Wolfie grunted sure. By age 11 he’d become a metaphysician.

Figuring it’s only words Me batted around like Ping-Pong balls. But words with a certain power to pierce the heart.

Wolfie, the weird name, was Me’s compromise of Ralphie. She’d been pressured (not just by the baby’s father, but by the baby’s father’s mother) into agreeing to that name. Ralph, Jr. For the father was Ralph, Sr. He’d had his proud-father way with naming & baptizing as well in that long-ago time. Baptizing! In 1966! Me was disgusted. You’d think by then the Christian religion would’ve gone the way of the dodo & the duck-billed platypus but it just hangs on, fumed Me, & Wolfie interjected with wiseguy pickiness is the duck-billed platypus extinct, I don’t think so.

Me ignored this. If you hoped to correct her when she was slip-shod, she had a queenly way of not-hearing.

“Those Christians! All they want is to gobble up our hearts.”

Me was Wolfie’s version of Mommy. Mom
mee.
Me liked to tell how I was a breathless butterball-baby squealing & lunging for attention already in the cradle, & snatching at words but able to grasp, as with pudgy butter-fingers, only syllables. Coaxed to say Mommy, the best I could do was
Meee
even as a toddler. Daddee came out
Du-ud
(as Me told hilariously) & naturally that pissed the guy off. Even an asshole has feelings.

Wolfie, who was Ralph in school records, tested out high on I.Q. exams (not genius like the 160’s but pretty smart like in the 140’s), & this was actually held against him by Me in her down moods. Me believed that the smarter you are, the more you suffer. The more developed your brain, the more there’s to go wrong, like a high-speed computer. Me had a girl cousin in Geneva, New York, who’d had a Down’s baby & was that little boy sweet! Wolfie said sarcastically he was sorry he wasn’t brain damaged & Me said that’s typical of a bright boy, sarcasm & irony as bad as me. Me seemed to mean it saying over the years she’d have preferred a sweet dumb child of either sex, not brain-damaged of course, just normal, what passes for normal in America, boy or girl wouldn’t matter so long as this child didn’t inherit her tendency to malaise, mope & metaphysics & yanking out eyelashes in idle times.

Actually, neither Me nor Wolfie’d succumbed to this bad habit for a while. Our sloe eyes were thick-lashed like dolls’.

Me said a high I.Q. is like a laser beam, peering into cavedarkness where you don’t really want to go. She liked to retell Plato’s parable of the cave which was more than 2,000 yrs old & which Wolfie thought was overrated. Me said, “There’s two species within Homo sapiens, the illusioned & the disillusioned. You can begin as the first & end up as the second but not the other way around. You can be born either one & never budge an inch. Who knows why?”

Me had that teacherly way & with her icepick eyes was compelling.

Except in her own eyes where she was ugly & a scrawny blond
broad Me was a good-looking woman, & Wolfie’d seen how men stared at her in the street & sometimes followed her on foot or in their vehicles. That was how some mistakes were made, Me conceded. There were times she’d gone to a male barber & had her hair trimmed to a butch cut out of meanness to herself & whoever might’ve wanted to contemplate her, & there was her thin whiplash body & the scary glisten of her eyes & it was true Me had a scar on the underside of her jaw like a centipede (caused by tripping & falling on black ice Me insisted but Wolfie seemed to recall years ago the ex-father shoving Me down face first on a gas stove burner which lucky for Me’s looks hadn’t been turned on, Oh yes Wolfie recalled the blood & the crazed screaming & shouting of those lost days), still Me was a goodlooking woman & would retain her looks for another ten years at least. At 34, which was Me’s age in 1979 in Olcott, New York, in T-shirt & khaki jodhpurs & baseball cap & sandals she looked so young, the schoolbus driver had to ask Wolfie is that your sister & Wolfie blushed grunting a reply that might’ve been
yeh
or
naw
stomping on to the back of the bus so the goddamn question couldn’t be repeated.

The move to Olcott, like previous abrupt moves, had been an impromptu decision on Me’s part. Departing one place of residence for another, & leaving no forwarding address, gave Me a quick high. (Wolfie grooved on it, too. No need for this kid to sniff airplane glue like his white-trash classmates, with such a mom as Me!) In Olcott, population 1,600, there’d been a period of peace & calm of approximately five weeks as in the aftermath of a hurricane & tidal wave. Olcott was a “resort” town of which Me claimed she’d heard, & must’ve confused with somewhere else. Cheap lakefront rental cottages & bungalows, bargain-rate motels, a tacky boardwalk & amusement park including a neon-pink Ferris wheel visible from their bungalow a mile away—Romantic, huh? Me asked, late summer nights. But summer ended. Half the population departed after Labor Day like robots & businesses shut down & immediately the air turned chill. Lake Ontario was a bitch, Me admitted, so fucking
big.
A harsh wind blew from the distant Canadian shore, an odor of rotted clams & fish. The tide began (as Wolfie knew it would!) to seep back into their lives. The
bruise-mood
tide. Me began to brood on death again & asked
such questions: “Maybe we’re actually dead & don’t know it? Like you’re dreaming, & don’t know it? For the essence of the dream is to hypnotize you, right?” Me locked doors & windows in the five-room house when Wolfie was away at school & sometimes doubted he was at school & not elsewhere, kidnapped by the enemy. Or plotting with the enemy.

The lake winds brought hellish nights when Me’s adrenaline level was such she couldn’t sleep & her hunger for metaphysics kept her awake. But she was too excited to read, too. Her consciousness was piercing through to a higher level—“Beyond linear, man!” She worked with 25-lb dumbbells lifting & swinging the black weights for hours. Her biceps swelled like breasts. In Eagle Falls, Minnesota, she’d taken karate lessons with an ex-Marine instructor, a guy with thinning black hair in a ponytail who’d fallen in love with her (was Me’s account) & given her gifts she hadn’t wished for including money. & with this money, Me & Wolfie’d made their middle-of-the-night departure. If only the high could last forever! “Like those renowned rats,” Me told Wolfie, “they implanted electrodes in their brains & the rats could stimulate ‘pleasure zones’ & grooved on that & forgot to eat, & died of starvation.”