Parental Perpetrators of Stupidity

I “ran away” to Grandma’s tiny efficiency apartment many times in the years that Mother was married to Jesse. Here’s why.

I was thirteen years old, in junior high school. We rented a nice house in a great neighborhood in midtown. My Grandmother lived with us so it was mother, Grandma, and me. Occasionally my uncle, Mother’s brother, lived with us when the alcohol and the world got to be too much for him. Another story for later.

We walked to church regularly: Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. Church was composed of a group of weird, wacky people that occasionally did amazingly strange things and everyone would get all upset. Then it calmed down and everything went back to normal. It was a normal population of people in a really small environment. A group of really judgy people.

Mother started to “visit” one of the male church members after work who was in the hospital from an automobile accident in which he was passing a car on an Arkansas highway and hit another car head-on and killed the other driver. I remember that we were “praying” for him and praying that the state of Arkansas wouldn’t press charges against him.

Again, I was thirteen years old. This was all “adult news” to me that didn’t affect me in the least. Mother stopping to visit this man was not normal behavior for her. She always got on the bus and came home after work. Oh, did I mention that this man was divorced because he had physically abused his wife?

Yeah, he had been married to one of a set of twins. Her twin sister was also married – to a big fellow. They had all previously attended our church. Jesse’s wife had been my Sunday school teacher at one time (my best friend and I had been to their house on a Saturday once for a Sunday school social).

Jesse’s wife had divorced him which had caused one of those big stews (mentioned above) and both twins and the other husband left the church for another (greener pasture, no doubt). Not long after, Jesse had been involved in his accident.

Red flags, anyone?

So mother began to date Jesse, who was ten years younger than her. Thanksgiving came and we were about to sit down as a family for our very traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Uncle William came from the funeral home to join us. Just as we sat down, the doorbell rang and, lo and behold, it was Jesse come to join us. Everyone looked around shocked. Mother had invited him without telling anyone. No one was pleased.

They dated a few months and decided to get married. Thus began some of the worst years of my life. I stayed with Grandma while Mother and Jesse went on their honeymoon. When they returned they went to live in his apartment, within easy walking distance of our house.

A week after we moved in, I awoke in the middle of the night to an awful noise. It was ungodly loud and I had no idea what it was in my sleep. I got up and opened my bedroom door to see what in the world was going on. Jesse had the stereo on and it was turned up to about maximum loudness.

Mother saw me open my door and quickly tiptoed over to warn me to go back in my room and close my door. She was afraid and panicky. Apparently, the neighbor downstairs, a single guy had come home in the middle of the night (after drinking) and turned on his stereo where Jesse could hear it and it had infuriated him. So this was the backwards, dumb-ass way he decided to solve it. What an idiot.

Things didn’t get any better and he had temper tantrums and pushed me around and pushed me down and grabbed me by my arms and held me so I couldn’t escape and all that abuse bullshit by the little-children-adult-men dipshits who perpetrate this crap.

He was especially demanding that I make no noise after they went to bed (not easy for a confirmed nocturnal person). If I made a peep or a squeak, he would be in my room shaking me and yelling at me. He would go back to bed and I would pack a few things and go out the front door. I never closed the door behind me and I always walked to Grandma’s.

Grandma had moved into an efficiency apartment a few doors down from our rental house after mother married Jesse and outright abandoned her. Grandmother didn’t have nearly enough money from her pension to pay the rent of the house and utilities. Mother didn’t discuss it with her or help her to move. The next thing I knew, Grandma lived in a little apartment. She had a key made for me.

The first time I left, I stayed with Grandma an entire month before Grandma finally contacted Mother and asked if she was ever going to give Grandma money for my care – or make some attempt to get me to return home. Pathetic.

One of these times when I was staying at Grandma’s it was a Saturday night. I had watched Lawrence Welk with Grandma from the time I was a small child so we were peacefully watching that on her tiny television. The telephone rang and I got up to answer it. It was Jesse. He said, “Your mother has had a nervous breakdown and we’re in the hospital emergency room.” I had no idea what to say so I said, “OK.” And he hung up.

I went to tell Grandma what he said and she asked if he told me which hospital. He hadn’t. We needed to know this so I began to call hospital emergency rooms (there weren’t that many of them then). None of them said there was a patient by mother’s name in any of them.

So I began to call the apartment. Every ten minutes. I figured I would drive them crazy and they’d call eventually. Now as an adult I know they probably went out to dinner and went shopping for a few hours. Eventually, Jesse called and said they were back. I asked which emergency room they had gone to and Grandma wanted the phone so I gave it to her. To say that she was furious would be a grievous understatement.

He must have told her it was Methodist Hospital and Grandma told him that Uncle William had friends working down there and that she and Uncle William would be suing the hospital for telling us mother wasn’t there.

Grandma. She was a very wise but very unhappy person. She didn’t mess around. I talked to her a lot and she gave me good counsel.

When I returned to the apartment in a couple of weeks, Mother had her little pill bottle from the Methodist Hospital. Apparently, the two children-adults that I called mother and step-father had decided it was in their best interest to at least go to the ER and get a prescription and finagle the rest of the facts – just in case. Raised by stupid assholes, I was.