I was living in my parents house one winter because I was in between locked ward confinements, and, though not enough of an outlaw to have an actual price on my head, I was enough of a one to make living outside the family milieu difficult at best. I was in my 20's and had a neuroses now widely known but unrecognized back then by the quacks. I also suffered from a small number of other disorders but nothing really physically disabling, in fact, for a neurotic young man of aesthetic temperament and criminal tendencies my physical health has always been robust.
In the circumstances it was the safest and cheapest place to live. It was a disorderly house. That is to say I was not the only habitant with antisocial tendencies. I was once in the recieving cell down at the local police station awaiting transport to the nuthouse and overheard 3 coppers telling a new chum about us lot. Someone'd left the passthrough slot (belts, shoelaces, wallets & whatnot) open and they were chatting in the next cantora over, bragging to him about the fact they'd once had a situation in which there'd been outstanding arrest warrants against all - of us, individually, mother & father included, and had'nt done a thing about it other than occasionally watch us go about our daily business of dealing drugs, drunk driving, driving sans this and that bit of paperwork, fracas and assault, fraud et alia. This seeming immunity from active interference on the part of authority was more accidental than deliberate and was the result of the facts that we engaged mainly in what were then called 'victimless' crimes, that Dad had both friends and a relative on the force and that our collective misbehaviour was almost entirely individual rather than corporate in nature. Two or three of us might be up to this or that but there was no overall coordination or direction and we did not prey upon the neighbors. And who wants to stick their hand in a hornets nest? Try and serve a warrant or warrants on a bunch of drunk high-on urban miscreants? No fun entirely.
This sort of an upbringing begs the question of which came first, insanity or the Egg, but that is not an issue here. We lived 'way up north. So far so in fact that I was in the habit of casually crossing the border into the next country (Scotland? Canada? New Guinea?) further north just for a vacation or a day out or a quick change of scene. So winters could get very cold and vicious indeed. I spent many a winter's night drinking beer out of the bottle while standing in ankle deep snow in the lee of a boathouse just so's not to be at home. Not enough money to go to the local, drink outside instead. Popular notions to the contrary, living in a disorderly house is not jovial, carefree or relaxing. You have all the stresses you encounter in a normal family, with too much drink and drugs added into the bargain. It'd drive anyone nuts.
It was a real cold winter. I was sitting in the front room reading late one night. Dad was drunk, mother less so and my brothers were out. The back room at the other end of the house was where the TV and all the usual action was. I stayed out of there because of me being a relict of one of mother's previous liasons I was not my fathers favorite child. And that is putting it mildy. We ignored and avoided one another. He was 6 foot tall, fairly overweight and of an uncertain disposition, you never knew what might set him off. And though for the most part he was content with yelling and verbal abuse he was capable of swift and violent action. In fact he once came within a hairsbreadth of killing me outright with a flung ------ but I was already sprinting away from him at an angle when he threw it. Feeling the wind of a heavy object thrown in anger part your hair is a marvelous incentive to spend your evenings elsewhere, like drinking cheap beer out of the bottle in the snow outside the boathouse, or.. New Guinea! Anywhere but home. A word of advice! Never race directly away from an armed opponent, you may be gaining distance but from their perspective you are a stationary target, merely receding!
But home is where the hearth is, even if your anatomy wants to be elsewhere. And especially so in the wintertime when you are stony broke. So I'm sitting on the front room couch late one night reading a book and mother comes into the room. And she was acting very sly and regarding me in a singularly different manner to her usual indifference. I can't remember what she was wearing but being late at night and at home it was'nt very much. She sat down next to me and started making small talk.
A word must be said about my mother, and her relations with me. She was a strikingly beautiful woman who much resembled the actress Vivian Leigh, she was quite aware of the fact, I heard her mention it directly on more than one occasion. Her awareness of it did not make it any less true. She was (both of them were, in fact) a hopeless alcoholic. She kept her slim but very curvaceous figure by eating next to nothing and non stop tobacco usage. I believe she regarded me as a nuisance, mainly, and a convenience at best. The former in that I was a constant burr under her saddle in her then present (marriage) situation, the latter in that I was someone she could drink with whenever she wished, a captive audience as it were, and cadge or smoke pot with as needed. Mother and I drank many a bottle in that house, and smoked yards of reefer.
My brothers thought me her favourite but that was in no way true, they mistook, I think, her casual indifference and lack of real animosity towards me for affection. Which she may have possessed in some degree but not in any appreciable manner. In fact she favoured ---- and ----- out of all of us. I was an embarrassment, a remnant of a former love affair. Primarily we were simply drinking buddies. I loved her as well as I was able, but she did not encourage emotional intimacy.
Which was one of the reasons that that night was so strange. Because she did not call me out into the kitchen and say 'here, make me a drink.. or ask me had I got any pot. I seldom saw her without a drink in hand if she were not working. And this night she had'nt. No drink, no smoke, and she's sitting next to me making small talk, and by next to me I do not mean further along on the couch I mean right next to me, thighs touching, and we were not a family that got cozy with one another. We were a family that punched each other up once in a while, we were violent, not huggies. She put her hand on my knee, the small talk drifted to a halt, and I knew what she was doing, or up to, but was unable to deter her or put off the event. She put her head against my chest, was listening to my heartbeat. My heartbeat was going like a mad thing, it was going at a rate I'd normally associate with violent action, or a trip to the Quacks. Because this was not my idea of a swell good time, this was possible catastrophe, looming up on the horizon in the person of my Mother, with lechery in mind.
