All You Need to Know: In which I want your boots

Greg Proctor hated Wayne Martin. I’ve always thought it stemmed simply from the naturally codependent relationship between addict and dealer, compounded by one’s  self-centered charisma and the other’s misanthropy. But to hear both of them tell it, their whole issue was over a pair of boots. Greg Proctor used to always tell my mother that Wayne Martin snuck into his house one night and stole his favorite pair of boots, then went around wearing them in front of him. Wayne Martin tells it differently. He says he simply went up to Greg Proctor one night and said, “Gimme your boots,” and Greg Proctor gave them to him without hesitating. He does say he wore them around in front of Greg Proctor whenever he knew he’d see him. “I was a rogue back then, Johnny,” he says, with not that much apology. I think Greg Proctor, when he married my mother, saw her as those boots. It was almost like he was taking them back, taking Wayne Martin’s woman and child and making them his.

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Whoa, CREEPY.

I started reading Vanessa Veselka's essay "Highway of Lost Girls" about Veselka’s and many other girls’ horrific hitchhiking experiences in the Eighties, first published in GQ as "The Truck Stop Killer" and now anthologized in this year's Best American Essays, this morning after publishing a piece here for The List and the Story about my mother’s hitchhiking days in the Seventies. It was one of the most taut, convincing, devastating reading experiences I’ve ever had. Veselka tells her own story of nearly being killed in the backseat of one of the many vehicles on which she hitched a ride, but she also tells the story of researching the countless “invisible” girls she found out had been murdered in the Seventies and Eighties on the same highways she traveled, and finding that most of them had been forgotten, blotted out from police records, denied their existence by townspeople where the were killed:

…It occurred to me that this investigation of mine wasn’t a detective novel. It was a ghost story. The prisms of Regina Walters, Shana Holts, and Lisa Pennal refracted into a set of icons—one in the back seat of a car laughing as she leans on the headrest, one with the shorn red-gold hair and an expression of resilience, one slightly crazy and ready to fight—each casting her own light, each a hologram of girlhood.

Besides marveling at the courage and tenacity of Veselka’s research into the darkest corners of her own experience, I also couldn’t help seeing my own mother on those roads, hitching to Arkansas to take me back from my grandmother, getting me back to Kansas and back with her in whatever vehicle on the highway would take us. Veselka ends the essay with a scene outside a truckstop, the shitstain truckstop killer Robert Ben Rhoades telling his wife not to even look at a young girl outside one stop trying to get a ride, and all I can think is, That’s her. I see her. That’s my mother.

All You Need to Know: In which she rides

My mother was a prodigious hitchhiker in the Seventies. I found this out in the Nineties when she went to college and for her Freshman Composition class wrote a personal essay about hitchhiking to Arkansas to pick me up from my Aunt Joyce’s house after one of the times my grandmother kidnapped me. She spent most of the trip with a guy who’d picked her up outside of Garnett. They camped out under a bridge somewhere near Oswego, smoking pot and talking about the meaning of life. When they arrived at my Aunt Joyce’s house in Fort Smith, he walked her to the door to provide a witness. My grandmother wouldn’t let him in. Explaining the significance of that trip in her essay, my mom defines that as the moment she determined to find a man who would help her raise me, and stand up to her mother.

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All You Need to Know: In which it's all in the family

My mother’s parents raised me until I was two years old. My grandmother thought of me as her child even after my mother regained possession of me, taking me to K-Mart for family photos with her, and taking pictures of me for every season outside her trailer to mark my toddling growth. She periodically kidnapped me when she thought my mother was neglecting me, taking me across state lines to Arkansas, where we stayed with her sister Joyce. Her sister Isabel wasn’t allowed near me.

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New Resident Dad Post: Why "Do They Know It's Christmas?" may be the most important Christmas song to share with your children

"Sure, the sentiment is simplistic and overbearing—much like another favorite of mine, John & Yoko’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” (which is wedged between Band-Aid and Bolton on Now That’s What I Call Christmas)—but I think that’s why it’s so powerful: a child (myself at eleven years old, for example) can hear it, sing along, and at some point after countless reps of the refrain ask a couple of simple questions: Who are “they,” and Why don’t they know it’s Christmas? In this many, the song is the musical version of the storefront Salvation Army bellringers, only the Christmas bells are accompanied by extravagantly rich and famous, mostly British Eighties pop stars. Both use those bells to strike a common note in the listener, and remind us of “the world outside your window,” if only for a moment."

Read the rest here!

All You Need to Know: In which he moves

After serving nine months at Hutch, Wayne Martin came up for his first parole hearing. He’d gotten his GED in prison, and told his parole board that he was ready to put it to use and become a contributing member of society. With that he was released after serving the equivalent of a full-term pregnancy, and went back to Lawrence to begin his new life assisting Steve Palmer in local robberies. He moved in with Donna, ignoring my mother’s continual phone calls. After a couple of years, when Donna had two boys and a full-scale cocaine addiction, Wayne tired of Lawrence and moved back to Chicago to start fresh. Before he left, on my second birthday, he called my mother at 3:00am, drunk or high, saying he wanted to talk to me. My mother, fresh out of her final rehab and ready to be my mother, told him not to call again and hung up.

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All You Need to Know: In which the roots are tangled

One birth story about my mother is heavily contested. In fact, nobody in our family subscribes to it except my Great-Aunt Isabel. In Isabel’s story, she had an affair with my grandfather; gave birth to my mother, their love child; and then gave her to my grandmother and vowed never to tell. As far as I know she told no one but my mother, sending my mother monthly letters until she died in the late Nineties in either a convalescent home or a mental hospital. She had no insurance so each of her siblings, my grandmother included, had to pay for her funeral expenses. My grandmother was convinced she did this on purpose, as one final jab at her. I didn’t meet Isabel until two years before her death, when she showed up at a family reunion in Arkansas and hugged me like I hadn’t just met her. I remember she had two black children with her, whom she said she’d recently adopted. They both had runny noses. That was when my mother told me her birth story.

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All You Need to Know: In which she moves

When I think of Sara Goldfarb, the good-hearted, desperate mother who becomes addicted to amphetamines after her doctor prescribes them to her as an appetite suppressant in the book and movie Requiem for a Dream, set in the Seventies, I think of my mother sleepwalking from dirty couch to halfway house until she emerged from her own addiction and decided to become my mother before I was two years old. She doesn’t remember much about that time, except fondly bringing up how skinny she was.

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All You Need to Know: In which I am born

Jesus Christ, Pecos Bill, Frankenstein’s monster—everyone has a birth story. Some are sealed in myth and legend, others recorded on blogs and personal web pages, but they’re all important. They tell us from where we come, and in many cases foreshadow the rest of our lives.  My mother tells mine thus: 60 hours of labor, with the doctor urging her the whole time to give me up for adoption, that she was ruining her life. Wayne Martin being led in shackles to see me, and looking happy to see her for the first time since she got pregnant, then leaving for the last time back to prison. Handing me over to my grandmother, not knowing if she would give me to another family, and sobbing. Getting back to 80 pounds by the time I was a month old.

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All You Need to Know: In which the clock strikes 3AM

…and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream…

I tend to justify, even romanticize drug use as a gateway to both community and artistic expression, which I think is a by-product of being an American in the Twentieth Century. Fitzgerald and Exley both traded their families, their dignity, and their faith in the benevolence of the American Dream for the alcoholic visions of The Crack-Up and A Fan’s Notes. Burroughs and the Beats framed a counterculture around sex, drugs, and social critique that’s now so entrenched in our national identity that it’s a running trope of many of our movies, music, and ad campaigns. And even Fleetwood Mac—on a five-year cocaine bender in the second half of the Seventies that left Mick Fleetwood bankrupt, Christine and John McVie divorced, Lindsay Buckingham certifiably insane, and Stevie Nicks a diva who was too out-of-it to even comprehend her own influence—left behind two pop albums that realized perhaps most fully the reality of the American family in the Seventies. But my own family’s addictions led only to a community characterized by early deaths and old ghosts, and its sole artistic expression is a wide swath of disillusioned, fractured children searching for home.

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All You Need to Know: In which the progeny rises

For two years of the early Aughts I thought I had an older sister. R. had been given up for adoption by her mother, one of the female addicts who ran in Wayne Martin’s pack in the Seventies. After a slew of state and federal legislation in the Nineties extended the rights of adoptees, R. sought the papers she hoped would determine her origins. She contacted her mother, the only parent listed on her birth certificate. This woman, now a deeply religious mother of four somewhere in Colorado, didn’t want any contact with R., and told her to seek out Wayne Martin, her father. When I came home for my ten-year high school reunion, Wayne Martin asked me if I would accompany him to dinner with R., to keep things from getting awkward. "She works on an organic farm," he confided. At dinner, R. mentioned casually that she considered all people bisexual. “The way I see it,” Wayne Martin replied jovially, “you either suck dick or you don’t.” Noticing the waiter’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for our table and my new sister in particular, he asked what one does to get such good service. “Sleep with the waiter,” R. replied. Over the ensuing months he began wondering if R. was really his daughter, but never asked for a paternity test. Two years later, his wife did. When the answer came most of my family ceased contact with R., including all of my uncles who shared a roughly equal possibility of being her father. But I refused to let go of this person who is more like me than any of my paternal siblings, and we agreed that we are still brother and sister. I share a deep bond with this sister-not-my-sister: of an eternal hope, a fractured past, and an earned distrust of parental authority. Unlike me, she’ll never get the chance to speculate on her father’s true nature, because she’ll never know who her father is.

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CAPS LOCK RANT - Against Twitter, Part II

TWITTER, I'VE DECIDED I HATE YOU. THE ONLY SUBSTANTIAL THING I CAN USE YOU TO SAY LATELY IN UNDER 140 CHARACTERS IS THAT I HATE YOU. I HATE THAT I CAN'T HAVE A REAL CONVERSATION ON YOU, AND THAT YOUR FORM ENCOURAGES RUSHED, SHALLOW READING. I HATE THAT I CAN NEVER KEEP UP WITH MY TWITTER FEED. AND I HATE THAT I GET SO FEW RETWEETS. YES, YOU HAVE SO MANY LINKS TO FOLLOW, AND THAT IS PROBABLY GOOD ENOUGH REASON TO LIKE YOU. BUT LET ME GO AHEAD AND SPIN THAT INTO A NEGATIVE: EVERY SINGLE TIME I GO INTO MY TWITTER FEED I INSTANTLY SEE THREE OR FOUR THINGS I MUST READ, THEN I REALIZE THAT BEFORE I READ ONE OF THEM I'LL HAVE 50 NEW TWEETS. IT'S NEVERENDING, AND IT FEEDS MY OWN SUSPICION THAT I'M ALWAYS MISSING OUT ON SOMETHING.

All You Need to Know: In which I go Top 40

On the week I was born, “Brother Louie,” a one-hit wonder by Stories that was quite racy in 1973 for documenting an interracial romance between a white man and a black woman, was #1 on the Billboard singles charts. I’ve always found this vaguely ironic, as my mother was the only white woman to my knowledge that had a child with Wayne Martin. When I was sixteen years old and first met Wayne Martin, my Uncle Buster asked me if I was also into black girls.

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All You Need to Know: In which my mother replies

Wayne Martin didn’t tell me how he went to prison until I was almost forty years old. Part of me was afraid of actually knowing rather than trusting the mythology I’d built up around him, but a bigger part was afraid he wouldn’t tell me, that it would remain forever a part of him I couldn’t know. After he told me I immediately called my mother, ready to surprise her with this new bit of information I’d gathered. “Oh, yeah,” she said, giggling. “I remember Candy.” My mother had kept meticulous track of all of Wayne Martin’s girlfriends after he’d gotten her pregnant, and the winter after he’d gone to prison she and her friend Linda ran into Candy at a bar. Candy didn’t know who my mother was, and my mother and Linda bought her drinks until she was thoroughly soused. They then offered her a ride home. On the ride home, with Candy passed out in the backseat, they took a detour and drove ten miles outside of town. They steered off the road, into a frozen field, and parked. Then they pulled Candy out of the backseat, laid her down in the middle of the field between broken cornrows, and drove back to town. “That,” my mother said, “was the last I heard of Candy.”

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All You Need to Know: In which Candy says

In the winter of 1973, shortly after getting my mom pregnant and while living with his girlfriend Donna who would the next year bear him the first of two boys, Wayne Martin began seeing a woman named Candy. They got to know each other after she’d approached him for drugs. She seemed aloof at first, but soon became as sucked in by his charm as my mother, Donna, and all the others. Then, after a couple of months, Candy disappeared. One warm spring evening while making a routine sale of 50 LSD tabs and a pound of marijuana, Wayne Martin was picked up in an organized sting. At his first hearing he saw Candy in court, preparing her testimony against him. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation had made her get to know him as part of the sting that resulted in 23 arrests that spring. She approached him outside the courtroom and apologized, saying she loved him but if she didn’t do it they’d take her child. That summer, two months before I was born, Wayne Martin was sentenced to twenty years at Hutchinson State Penitentiary.

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All You Need to Know: In which we traverse

At the advent of the Seventies, Wayne Martin followed his father from Chicago with his brother Butch to Lawrence, Kansas. Drug connections with his old friends in Chicago, the mystery and allure of coming from a big city, and his own rapscallious charisma spawned him an almost-instant following among the disaffected local youth that would eventually become my extended family. He specialized in LSD, cocaine, and amphetamines. More than 25 years later, sitting with me at an Italian bakery in Brooklyn, he told me with a smirk how everyone in Kansas thought he had mafia connections. “I think it was because I was from Chicago.” “Maybe it was because you went to prison for selling drugs, and served a twenty-year sentence in nine months,” I replied. “Oh, yeah,” he said, feigning surprise.

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All You Need to Know: In which we pause for a word from our sponsor

Perspective changes with the passage of time. A story, or a life, is in essence a list of events. The greater the distance between the event and the telling, the more it’s cloaked in narrative, clothed in myth, retold, hardened into memory. At some point—adulthood, perhaps—all one person knows is backstory.

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All You Need to Know: In which the echo reverberates through decades

Steve Palmer died in the mid-Seventies when, while bending down to pick up a joint he dropped while driving a truck for Garrett’s Produce, he swerved into the middle of the road and ran head-on into a school bus. I never knew him, but my parents knew him intimately. Wayne Martin still talks about the heists they would pull off local businesses after he got out of prison. My mother was obviously in love with him, though they never to my knowledge dated. She still speaks of riding with him on his motorcycle as late as 1974, as if imagining riding off with him away from her family, her addictions, her life. His death marked a certain loss of hope for her. Palmer is one of the two links I can find remaining between my mother and my father after he left us. The other is Palmer’s half-brother, Buster Wisdom. Buster is still Wayne Martin’s best friend. I call him Uncle Buster. After my mother divorced in 1990, she dated Buster. After my mother’s sister Marti’s husband died in 2005, Marti dated Buster. In 2008, in the month I was married, Buster was almost killed in a single-car accident. Wayne Martin took a call from him while walking with me along the Hudson River the day after my wedding reception. I sat next to him on a bench as Buster confided that he wished he’d died in that accident, that he’d lost hope that life held anything for him. Looking at my father—who had existed to me in the Eighties only as a phantom, in the Nineties as an enigma, and in the Aughts as a periodic phone call—as he talked his oldest friend down from the ledge, I thought of Steve Palmer, and the burden he was spared dying young.

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All You Need to Know: In which we start at the bottom

In 1970, in an act that would define him for generations to come, Milton Metfesser, with a crowd of fellow teenage boys swarmed around him, drank a glass of milk with a piece of shit in it. Tripping on acid, the whole group had just gotten in a bidding war about the gross things each of them would do for money after reading in High Times that Jimi Hendrix had sucked a slushie out of Grace Slick’s crotch on a dare. The things each of them would do got grosser while the price for which they would do them shrank, until Milton sat back and said, “Hell, I’d eat a piece of shit for five dollars!” Wayne Martin, the leader of the crowd by virtue of being the supplier of their drugs, took him up on that bet, and Buster Wisdom told him he would supply the shit. Milton Metfesser left Lawrence shortly thereafter, and when he’s mentioned now it’s usually as The Shit-Eater. The Milton Metfesser Story has been told and retold to me by Wayne Martin and Buster Wisdom so many times that I can tell it as well as they can. Now, when our Chihuahua eats its own shit to prevent us from finding it, I think of Milton Metfesser. Milton Metfesser is not his real name.

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New Resident Dad Post: On Re-Nicknaming My Children

Presenting Crazy Eights and Checkers!

"Stringbean is actually a nickname that goes back generations in my family—I in fact am still Stringbean to a few family members, and occasionally to my wife. And Butterbean, in all honesty, is probably a fair enough descriptor of most babies.

But the more I thought about it, the more introspective I got. And the more I read about body issues in developing young girls...the more I realized that I don’t want to saddle either of my young girls with body-type nicknames. I want my four-year old’s Princess Thing to be a phase and not a way of life, and I want my 18-month-old to retain her assertiveness and spunk without being saddled with the “tomboy” label."

Read the rest here!