My Family and How Suzie Became My Best Friend

Let’s be perfectly clear about this. I never had a dad.

Okay, I admit that I must have had a father. I’m not foolish enough to believe that I was the result of a virgin birth just like the Baby Jesus. Yeah, I fell out of the sky and right into the manger. I’m not that dumb. From what Granny said, as soon as the dude learned the news about me being around, he took off and never looked back. I heard later he joined the Army and never returned to the state. Granny always said he was part Indian, but he had blue eyes – that must have been the part that wasn’t Indian.

“My father” was a ghost in our house. Granny never referred to him as being mean or no-good or that she didn’t like him. He was just too young; he was only 16, so he ran. Personally, I can see how this happens. It’s not easy to be a teenager and have your girlfriend pregnant.

My mother wasn’t much of a mom either. In fact, I never called her “mom.” I always called her by the nickname her brothers gave her, which was “Pansy.” Why they called her that remains a mystery because her real given name was Joyce. She wasn’t pleasant or pretty like a flower, that’s for sure. Well, maybe she was when she was really little, but she didn’t end up that way later on. My mother had me when she was 14, so early motherhood probably pounded any sweetness out of her.

The weird thing is that Granny wasn’t really mad at Pansy for getting in the “family way” while she was just entering high school. If I was the mom, and the time was now, I would have a freaking cow and kill my daughter and her boyfriend. Yeah, even though I can understand how teenagers have raging hormones and all. Then I’d go over to his parents’ house and kill them, too. Not my granny. She took it all in stride. To Granny, this was all in the normal range. Probably it’s because Granny had her first child when she was 16, too.

Granny was the one who mostly took care of me. She was on disability, so she didn’t work. If she drank, it was only a beer or two. She said she didn’t like the taste much, but really she was so tiny, it only took a couple of beers and she’d be flying. Granny was a chicken, though, and she never liked to fly very high.

I ended up with my mother’s dark hair and my father’s blue eyes. Blue eyes are spooky if you’re a Native American. None of the 100 percenters in our town wanted to have anything to do with me or my family. Most of the white kids didn’t want to have anything to do with me either. What was left was my family, which wasn’t much of one, if you ask me.

My uncles were often drunk and when they got drunk, they were mean. And I mean, REALLY mean. They’d hit their girlfriends (thank goodness no one was dumb enough to marry any of them) and break up furniture or throw beer bottles around. They’d twist my Granny’s arm to try to get her social security money out of her for more alcohol. Pansy tried not to drink in the house, but she worked in a bar and came home wasted on a regular basis. She’s just fall into bed and black out. Pansy’s thing would be to get mean and angry when she woke up.

One day, a new girl came to school. She was a real brute, probably the biggest girl I’ve ever seen, and she had the palest white skin and dark hair. She looked like she easily beat up all boys in my school. I’d bet she could take on my uncles, too. For some reason, this girl, who was named Suzie, liked me. She would sit by me at lunchtime, and no one else ever did, and give me the parts of her lunch that she didn’t really care for. She especially hated tomatoes and plums, so I got a lot of those. This was a very good thing, because otherwise I would have to make my own lunch and a lot of times there wasn’t any food in the house. Certainly there wasn’t any worth packing up to take to school where everyone else in the whole world could see the kind of crap I was eating.

Pretty soon, Suzie started showing up at my house. I’d never think to invite her, ever! Are you kidding? I didn’t have any friends, and even if I did, I would never ask them to come over. My house was too weird. While my Granny was a nice old lady, she was really a strange bird. She’d come up with lots of strange sayings and she’d cuss like a sailor. My uncles were all pieces of work, and when Pansy was home, all she would do was sleep, and when she wasn’t sleeping, she was chain smoking and watching TV.

One day when I was about 13, I was minding my own business, trying to get my homework done. Pansy was gone, working at the bar. Granny must have been gone, too. I think she went to the store. She might have been disabled, but she liked walking to the store and chewing the fat with some of the customers. My two uncles Tom and Gerald came in. They were really drunk, too, because they were falling over the furniture. I heard them coming, you couldn’t help but hear them, so I tried to make it out of the back door before they saw me. If they were drunk, it was better to just get the hell out of their way before anything bad happened.

It was too late. They came in, saw my books and started giving me shit about my schoolwork. “You think you’re better than us, now?” one of them said. The other one jumped on the band wagon and called me a Smarty Pants, too big for my britches. Then one started slapping me, and the other joined in.

I was small and pretty quick on my feet. I tried to get out of the way, but with the two of them coming at me, I just couldn’t do it. I kept up a good fight for a couple of minutes, but with two big guys, it was hard to keep fighting.

All of a sudden, I heard a terrible crashing. First, Tom flew away from me like he was a toy a giant had picked up. He fell against the screen door and took it right off the hinges. I think he bounced all the way down the stairs. Then I saw a beer bottle come down on Gerald’s head. He staggered away and landed on the couch and rolled off. The bottle didn’t break, but there was blood on it.

I couldn’t believe it. It was Suzie, who must have come in after they did. She picked those two goons up like they were rag dolls and beat the crap out of them. Then she grabbed me by the arm and we ran fast out the back door.

After that, my uncles stayed far away from me when they were drunk. And Suzie became my best friend.

 

This is How It Started

It was really easy to do, really it was.

Back in the ‘olden days’ things were a little looser than they are now. In fact, I would say they were a LOT looser. You couldn’t get away with those kinds of things now. The police will now have you in jail, or if you are a kid, you’d be taken away from your home and be slapped into foster care faster than you can blink an eye.

Back then was a different time. My mother would come home early in the morning (code word, partying all night long) and be sick until two the next afternoon (code word, hung-over). About two thirty, she would sort of wake up and give me a dollar to go down to the corner store and get her some cigarettes. I started doing this when I was about seven or eight, old enough to walk down to the store by myself.

The clerk knew my mother from high school. All I had to say was, “Can I get a pack of Virginia Slims for my mom?” and she would give them to me, just like that. Then I’d walk back down to my house and give her the cigarettes. She’d take a couple of drags and it would be enough to wake her up. She’d still be groggy, but it helped with the disposition. She wouldn’t be so likely to snap at me or hit me with a broom.

When I was about eleven, I had the brightest of bright ideas. I decided that I would see if I could get a six pack of beer out of the lady at the corner store. We didn’t have very much money, but I made a little by returning cans and bottles. Every now and then I would find a quarter on the ground and would scoop it up so fast. Sometimes my teacher, Mrs. Glass, would give me a dime for doing errands for her. I hid all of it in an old tin and hid the tin in a heating vent in my room. It wasn’t long before I saved up six dollars.

It was a really nice spring day when I took my six dollars and a bottle opener and went down to the corner store. My mother was at work at the bar. I walked into the store and asked for a pack of cigarettes, just like usual. The clerk seemed busy stocking cigarettes, so I thought the time was ready to slip in my extra purchase. So I casually added, “Can I get a six-pack? My mother said to bring it right back.” I held my breath. I thought maybe the clerk would be onto me and she would say no.

Lydia (I think her name was Lydia) turned away and put a six-pack of Schmidt beer on the counter. It was my mother’s favorite, and she and I both knew it. Then she totaled my purchases, put everything in a bag and said, “Five forty-nine,” and took my dollars, and gave me fifty-one cents in change.

I almost couldn’t believe it. Well, I could, sort of. After all, I’d been going there for years buying cigarettes. I thought I was so cool!

I took my brown bag and headed off to the river. Like I said, it was a really nice spring day. There were caves by the river, where we would go to play and hang out. My favorite cave was a really small one, where only two kids could fit. It was above most of the bigger ones that were closer to the shore.

The caves often made noises when the wind blew through them. Legend had it that the Indians thought there were spirits in the caves. The bigger ones would emit a very low moaning and it was very creepy. I guess bootleggers used the caves back in the day to store their whisky, or at least that’s what my granny said. The noise was fearsome and people would stay away. My little cave made a sound more like a lady sighing. I used to call it the Whispering Cave. Most people couldn’t even climb to it. You had to be really spry and small just to climb to it.

The big caves often had rats and other critters in them. I didn’t like hanging out in the big caves much. Besides, the bigger kids who were teenagers would hang out in them and party. It wasn’t a good mix. I liked my little cave much better. Besides, no one else could climb up. Either they were too fat or too lazy to try it.

I climbed up and sat down. The sun was just starting to go down a bit, so it was shining brightly right into my cave. I popped the top of my first beer and drank it. About half way down, I lit one of the cigarettes and took a couple of draws. I didn’t like the cigarette as much as I liked the beer.

I can’t remember, but I think I stayed there all night.

And that’s how it all started.