Chapter 27 — Long Distance Mom

Later that year, about a week before Christmas, Steve called and told me that he wanted to take me out on a date. I got all dressed up like I did before I was pregnant, a denim top, leather leggings, and a white mesh shawl draped over my shoulder. By that time I was already working out at L.A. Fitness trying to lose all of my baby fat. Each morning my trainer—some clipper-cut former WAC—I think that her name was Nancy—would spend a whole hour busting my ass.

I don’t think he’s ever seen me like this, I said to myself as I looked in the mirror and dabbed on some lipstick. It turned out I was right by the look on his face when I answered the door.

“My, don’t you look nice!” he said like a teenage boy witnessing his first Playboy centerfold.

When we got in his car everything changed.

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“You’ll see,” he said.

He removed a CD from inside of his console, pushed it inside of the player, pulled the car over and before he hit “play,” he told me that it was “my song to you.”

“My God, I can’t wait to hear it.” I cooed, then pushed myself over to get closer to him. He pushed the “play” button and turned up the volume and I slowly began shrinking away as the venomous lyrics poured out through the speaker descending into an ear-splitting self-revelation. “Cause I’m a liar! I’ll tear your mind and burn your soul!”

“Take me home!” I shouted. “Goddamn it, take me home now!”

“What’s the matter, Pam? Can’t handle the truth? Did you really think that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with some chick who can’t even care for herself?”

“Well that still didn’t stop you from sleeping with me, did it now, Steve?”

“Well you were a good fuck, I have to admit,” he smirked, as he turned his car back into my complex.

“You asshole! If I ever see you again, I swear I’ll kick the living shit out of you!” I shouted through a gale of tears, clenching my fists and raising them up in front of my body. Then I kicked the door shut with one of my tall black boots and the side of his car with the other. “Fuck you!” I shouted as he pulled away then rolled down his window and tapped on the brakes.

“Oh, you’ll call me again,” he snickered. “The next time that you need some of this!” He opened the door, grabbed at his crotch, then slamming it shut, he hit the gas and sped down the street.

“You want me to go over there and kick his ass?” My brother asked when I told him what happened.

“Nah, don’t waste your time, bro,” I said as I thanked him for making the offer. “Besides, you don’t even know where he lives.”

The odd thing was that his sister Christina and I still kept in touch. “You were always too good for my brother,” she’d tell me whenever we’d talk, but then she would add, “Well don’t say I didn’t warn you about him.”

Another thing that helped me get over Steve was I was now back to working full time at the station. So the next few months, it was the station at night and the gym in the day. Sometimes when I got home in the morning, I’d play my new mixes on the stereo my father had got me for Christmas. Needless to say, that didn’t always sit well with the neighbors.

“Turn that shit down!” the lady next door would say as her and her husband would take turns banging on the side of the walls. “Goddamn it, we’re both trying to sleep!”

So, I moved the dial from nine to seven, but if the banging continued, I’d turn it back up to ten.

“That wasn’t loud!” I shouted back. “This, this is loud!”

A few weeks later I found a paper stuck to my door. The letters were big enough so even I could read them: EVICTION NOTICE it said right at the top.

I called up my dad and he got me some little rinky-dink joint on Laurel and Birch that looked more like a glorified studio. I think he was trying to do it to punish me. Not that it mattered, since I didn’t last that long over there anyway.

“What the hell am I going to do with you?” He shouted as him and my brother showed up on the weekend to get all my things. “This is your last chance,” he warned me. “Then I’m sending you back into a program!”

He found me a place in Birchwood Village right across the street from the mall. Less than a month after I moved there, some assholes broke in and stole all my stuff when I went out to the desert on Mother’s Day weekend. And speaking of Mother’s Day, it was the first time I had seen my daughter since Christmas. Don picked me up at the Greyhound Station in downtown Indio and drove me out to their house in the cove. My niece Amanda ran to the door let us inside and gave me a hug.

“Where’s Arielle?” I asked her.

“In the kitchen with mom. I’ll take you to her,” she said grabbing me by the hand.

The words first hit me like a slap in the face—in the kitchen with mom—but wasn’t I Arielle’s mom? Then I saw those eyes, so deep and so dark, and a face so innocent and bright. Her hands were outstretched looking up from her chair, she reached out to me and I bent down and hugged her like I never wanted to let her go. Yet even then, her eyes seemed so distant, like a maidenhair fern deprived by the sun—a past life regression concealed beneath a lifetime of shade, it seemed as if she knew so much more than she wanted to tell us.

After dinner, I sat down beside her on the couch and now and then she’d stare back at me, but not once did she put her arms around me the way that she did with my sister and brother-in-law and all of their kids.

That night when we all went to bed, I could hear Don and my sister arguing inside of their bedroom and it didn’t take me that long to realize that the fighting was all about me.

“So now every holiday, your crazy fucking sister is expecting to visit?” Don asked Veronica. It sounded like she was trying to defend me before he started yelling again. “We’ll then you go and get her. I don’t have time for this bullshit!”

I laid on the couch and pretended to sleep as I quietly tried to hush all of the sobs back down inside of me. The next morning, I kissed my daughter good-bye then Don threw my suitcase into his truck and drove me back out to the Greyhound station. When I got back home, most of my stuff was missing, not everything, mind you, just most of the things that mattered like the rest of the jewelry my mother had left me, and CD’s and tapes with all of my mixes.

“I think that I know who it was.” I told the police when they finally got there. “He must have come looking for me when he got out of jail.”

“We’ll check into it, ma’am.” The officer promised, then took a report and walked out the door. But from that moment on I knew that I needed to get out of Brea.

The next day, rather than calling my dad, I called up the guy who I sometimes worked with from Regional Center, Larry Miller, or “Larry the fairy” as my father had called him.

“He’s not gay, Dad,” I told him the first time after they’d met at my place and I sent out for lunch. “You just don’t like him because he’s a vegan.”

“Well I’m sure that he doesn’t refrain from all forms of meat.” My father said as he laughed to himself.

So, a few days later, Larry and I drove around and looked for a place.

“Here’s one that’s renting!” he said as he pointed to a complex on Yorba Linda Blvd. on the Placentia and Fullerton border. “You want to go look?”

We walked into the office and the girl who worked there showed us a place on the third floor overlooking the pool. It was only one bedroom, but it had lots of space and an outdoor patio if I wanted to start painting again.

“I love it!” I said, “Can we go and get it right now?”

“Pam, remember that you’re under a conservatorship,” Larry reminded me. “First we’re going to need to talk to your father. Do you want me to call him?”

“Sure. He gets home from work about five.”

“All right then I’ll call him tonight after five,” he told me. “And, Pam,” he said, “you need to let me talk to him first—promise?”

But when six o’clock rolled around and there was no word from Larry, I decided to renege on my promise.

“Absolutely not!” My dad shouted into the phone. “What, do you think I can just stop everything whenever you need something?”

“But dad…”

“But nothing! Good-bye.”

Click.

Sometime later, Larry must have called to convince him, but not before my dad called my brother and asked him if he minded having me living right down the street, but I guess that it was cool with Ron because on the first of the month, I was living in Fullerton.

Early that summer, it was still really cool outside, and to make matters worse, the angle of the street that I lived on made the sun appear to go down where it did in the fall, so it was like a place without summer, which was fine with me since I hated summer. So every night for a couple of weeks the clouds would roll in and absorb all the light from the streets then rain it back down like a sea of shiny gray mirrors.

At the end of July, I went out to the desert for Arielle’s first birthday. That night after dinner she got cake all over herself, and my sister picked her up and gave her to me and told me to give her a bath since after all “she is your kid.”

“My kid?” I asked. “Well I guess so, when it’s convenient for you.”

In order to get her to stop crying, I had to take off my clothes and sit next to her in the white creamy frosting-filled water. Then we stood up together and I turned on the shower—sheathes of warm water cascading against us cementing our bond.

A week after I came back home, summer decided to return with a vengeance, as the temperature soared to a hundred degrees and the sun’s angry face not only melted the clouds but seemed to follow me wherever I went. It was even hot out in Santa Monica where the station was at, and one night we were all afraid that the power would go out since some of the lights kept going off in the neighborhood as the air-conditioned upscale stores on the Boardwalk welcomed stragglers in from the heat but soon began to slow down the grid. But a few weeks later the plug was pulled, and it wasn’t due to a shortage of power. After more than a two-year run on KDLD, Groove Radio was replaced by World Class Rock, and once again we were looking for jobs.

“What do you mean that’s everything?” I objected when Jeff showed up at my door to give me my paycheck.

“Well you forget, Pam that twice this summer you went out to the desert to see your daughter instead of doing remotes, so that’s one part of it.”

“And what is the other?” I asked him. “Or are you trying to tell me that lately you’ve been ripping me off?”

“Ripping you off?” His voice now rising in anger. “So after seven years of working together, now I decide to start ripping you off!”

“Then where is all of my money going?” I demanded to know.

“Well let’s see now, there’s the traveling expenses that I never bothered to deduct for when I had to drive you all the way out to bum fuck Egypt and back. Then there was the time that you dropped an ‘F’ bomb on Mike Fright’s show. Cost the station five thousand bucks, and guess who paid it?” Then he answered his own rhetorical question. “I fucking paid it, that’s who! But you never thanked me for that, oh no, and now that I’m only trying to get what you owe me, you accuse me of ripping you off!”

We argued for a few more minutes before he literally invited me to take him to court and told me never to call him again. I guess I could have ended up suing his ass, but by that time it didn’t matter. His wife just had a baby that summer, his third, and I didn’t want to take food off their table. Besides I still had an estate, my rent and my utilities were paid every month, and I was getting two hundred dollars a week from my dad, so I didn’t really have anything to complain about, moneywise anyway. My personal life was a whole different story.