The Tsunami Thrillride | Chapter Two - We Can Work It Out
Things changed after Keith went away. My mom’s whole attitude changed. The last time they split up she was empowered. She went to school, got her degree, she really made efforts to change her life. Well, change most of her life anyway. She still went running back to Keith when he called. I think this time she felt almost defeated. She wasn’t bubbly anymore; she was deflated. She didn’t work for a while, instead opting to just lay around and cry. This was not popular with my grandparents at all, especially Grandma. I can remember hearing them scream at each other, over and over. My mom, Jesus bless her, felt like her innocence was robbed from her. Like a traveling salesman had come in and sold her gold painted coal. She felt like her life was ruined because of scumbag Keith. Now, I’m glad I wasn’t old enough to process this shit because if I could I probably would’ve hated the bitch for saying I was the root of all her misery. Truth is, the only time my mom ever smiled in those days was when we were together. Every Wednesday we would go to the park and just play. Sunshine, rain, or snow we were at that park. Those were the only days my mom showed life. Keith had that effect on a lot of people back then.
Not long after we moved back in, Grandpa John bit the big one. The old son of a bitch was playing the best golf game of his life and stroked out on the eighteenth hole when he missed a birdie putt. True story. Grandma took it really hard and that’s when things got really fucked up. You see, with all my mom’s bullshit, my Grandma was the one that took care of me. When John died...well shit changed. My Grandma got so fed up with my mom and her depression that she threw us out. Looking back on that it was probably more about her not knowing how to cope with loss but boy she took all that rage and sadness and funneled it all at Peggy Lane. My mom, with no money and no job, had nowhere to go. We ended up shacking up with my Uncle Jack. Uncle Jack is a chill cat. He was living in downtown Ann Arbor at the time in a small two bedroom apartment and smoked a shit ton of weed. And when I say a shit ton I mean literally a fucking ton. I don’t think he was sober the entire Clinton Administration. We moved into his spare bedroom, which was really his weed room. I can't say for sure but I’m pretty sure he was selling weed to University of Michigan kids. I would routinely have to go play in the kitchen when his “friends” would come over so he could use our room for whatever shady shit he was doing in there. Our stint at Uncle Jack’s didn’t last very long. Being out of Grandma’s meant my mom needed to work. She started bartending at this local shit bar in Ann Arbor. To this day she tells me how much she fucking hated that place but she got tipped well and she was able to get a small studio in the building across the street from Uncle Jack’s. I loved that apartment. It was like a giant living room with a bright blue carpet that I would pretend was the ocean. I would sit on the couch with my Fisher-Price fishing rod and fish for sharks and octopuses and god knows what else. Since my mom worked nights, we would play all the time during the day. When she worked, Uncle Jack would come over and hang with me. He would teach me about women, the Beatles, abstract art, punk rock, and of course...marijuana. He had a book that would identify all these different types of bud and he would show me his greens and then we would take turns finding and identifying it with the pictures in the book. Of course my mom would’ve fucking killed him if she knew, but I fucking loved Uncle Jack back then, and still do to this day. It was one of the best times of my childhood. Everything was great, great until that piece of shit Rod Foley came back around.
Rod was Keith’s best friend for a long time before Peggy came into the picture. When they got busted for their cocaine operation, my pops got the raw end of the deal. He was sentenced to five years and was sent to some prison in Omaha. Rod, that fucking prick, got two years and he was out in fifteen months. Of course, for all the fucking places in Michigan for him to end up, he lands right in fucking Ann Arbor. Now I’m not sure of the whole story, as my mom won’t tell me all of the details, but what I’ve collected from various sources is that Rod happened to walk into that dive bar that my mom was working in randomly one night. They ended up talking, probably about Keith, and that’s how it started. It was an innocent friendship at first from what Peggy tells me but by the end of 1999 they were dating. I swear my mom never learned from her mistakes back then. Rod for the most part wasn’t breaking the law at this time of his life. He was working as a driver for a tow truck company in Chelsea and actually making some decent coin. He seemed like he turned his life around so my mom thought it would be a great idea to move in with him, despite everyone else in her life telling her it was a bad fucking move. Rod didn’t like kids very much and he didn't like Keith very much either anymore which means he really fucking hated me. Believe me, I gave him plenty reasons to hate me too. Right before we moved in with him, my Uncle Jack sat me down and clued me, as much as you could a six year old anyway, about how much of a mega piece of shit this dude was. I found out years later why Jack really hated him, but that’s a story for a different day. Jack to me at that time in my life was the coolest fucking dude in the world so if he sad Rod was bad news, I believed him. I gave Rod so much shit that it’s really a surprise looking back that he didn't kill me. I would routinely let the air out of his tires on his tow truck, throw his shit in the garbage, tell him off, and hide his beer. What really set him off, and my mom too, was when I opened his driver’s side door and pissed all over his front seat. I waited outside on the porch of our small house and watched him jump into his truck and waited for the expression on his face when he realized he just jumped into a pile of piss. It was one of my greatest triumphs as a young kid. It was also the first time Rod beat the shit out of me. I didn’t tell my mom it was him. I told her I got beat up by some older kids walking home from school. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. This went on for months.
It was right around this time that I started the first grade. Primrose Elementary School was just two miles from where we were living at the time. It was an old brick building with a huge playground and field behind it. School was always difficult for me. Not because I couldn’t learn or follow along, but just because I couldn’t give a fuck at all. I had no real adult presence at home. My mom was working almost every night so I’d either spend my nights getting the shit kicked out of me by Rod or hanging with Uncle Jack in Ann Arbor. Looking back I feel like my mom knew what was going on with me and Rod and just couldn’t admit it to herself, which is why half the week I lived with Jack. That was ok with me because Jack’s apartment was like a revolving door of some of the most interesting people I had ever seen. There frat guys, sorority girls, punk rockers, gothic dudes, all sorts of mother fuckers. Jack was known around Ann Arbor and Lo-Jack...because if you needed something, he could find it. He was the most popular guy in the town that wasn’t on the Michigan football team and he was the best uncle I could’ve ask for at that time in my life. On my 7th birthday in 2000, I spent it with Jack and Grandma Louise. My mom was off somewhere with Rod and my Dad was...you know...in prison. For all the shit my pops did, and maybe I couldn’t process it all back then, but even being in prison, he was the better parent in my head. He’d write me all the time, telling me all the details and inner workings of jail. To a seven yea old that was cool as shit. That’s about the time that I decided I wanted to live with him when he got out. I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to convince my mom so I started acting out as much as I could. I figured if I could piss her off enough she would have no choice but to let me go. What I didn’t think about was Rod.
