The Vocabulary of Guns

63.

It’s two a.m. Do you know where your mama is? I don’t. I imagine my stepmother is home by now, zonked out on alcohol and valium, but where my other mother is I have not a clue. Poor junkie soul, she might be dead. I guess no one would try to find us and tell us the news. We lived in an era of secrecy unimaginable back then. We had phones in our houses and when we wanted to find someone we consulted the phone book, or an operator.

‘Yes sir, how may I help you?’

You tell her that you’re trying to find your mother.

‘What’s her name?’

You tell her.

‘Where does she live?’

You don’t have the foggiest idea. Try Minneapolis, you say, and while the operator, a sweet-voiced lady with a touch of the Midwest on her tongue, searches the lists for all your mother’s names and aliases, you try to imagine what she, your mother, looks like now. It’s been many years. The last time you saw her you were saying goodbye, telling her that you wanted to go live with your father and his girlfriend. That hurt. It hurt to hear and it hurt to say it but your father told you that the Judge had ordered this to occur. So your father drove you across town to your mother’s apartment and he walked you to the door and left you. I’ll be downstairs, he said. Take as much time as you need. You didn’t need much time. You sat on the floor in your mother’s apartment and played with your new toy. It was a whirly bird, one of those long-beaked tin birds on a spring that appeared to be flying. It was yellow like a school bus. She asked you if you liked it and you said yes. You didn’t look up at her or around the room very much though it looked like all the other places you had lived with her, cleaner perhaps, a little less chaotic. Her boyfriend was back in jail. Your father had told you that. Her new baby was in a crib in the extra room. Your room, if you wanted to move back. You didn’t. You didn’t want to move back in with her because you didn’t miss your mother even a little bit. Nope, not at all. You’d gotten used to regular meals and your own bed free from crashing drugheads and a house that was quiet at night except for old movies on the black and white TV. You didn’t miss the wild, all-night parties that turned into soggy, grey depressed next days, ashtrays full of needles and a pool of vomit on the floor and a kitchen that looked like hell had broken out and taken over. You didn’t miss any of that. Nope. And you looked at your mother and you saw yourself, blonde hair, blue eyes, pale freckled skin. The woman who had nursed you and birthed you and loved you like a son sat there on the edge of her chair leaning forward, trying to get you to say that you preferred to live with her, right? She spoke as if you didn’t know your own mind, as if you hadn’t learned the hard way to think for yourself because in a house of heroin addicts nobody was going to think for you. No, you said, I want to live with papa. Her face snapped shut like a closing refrigerator door, click and the light was out. You had now joined the long and getting longer line of men who were letting her down. She stood, smoothed her groovy colorful skirt and she said, Okay if that’s what you want then fine. Fine. Go live with your father. But you remember that you had the chance to live with me and you messed it up. Remember that Gabriel. Remember that. And then she opened the window and called down to your father and he came upstairs and got you and took you out to his Volkswagen and put you in the front seat and made you buckle up and then the car started, you were moving, it was true, you were leaving now, she wasn’t running after the car or yelling at you or looking at you that way. You glanced up at the window and saw her orange curtains blowing. Then the window was shit, trapping a piece of curtain outside. That little flare of orange, peeking out into the world. It looked so lonely, so isolated. It wanted to be inside with the rest of its cohorts, the colors and warm room that would inevitably fade. And you knew it then, that she was born to lose and even if she had it together today it could and would all fall apart tomorrow, she’d lose the baby in the crib and she’d lose another baby way out west in Mormon country and she’d come as close as is necessary to losing her life before she’d get her shit together, before she’d send your father a letter saying that she was clean and she wanted to see you. You’d watch your father destroy the letter saying, I don’t want her back in my life and I don’t think you do either. She’s bad fucking news.

‘I’m sorry,’ says the operator, so maternally young sounding, so sweet and beholding. She could be your mama. She could pull you to her breast and rock your blues into the next century. She could be the one that would love you the way only a mother can, flesh of my flesh, product of my loins. She would look at you and say, I carried you inside me for the better part of a year. I brought you into the world in a fit of great agony and joy. You are mine and I am yours and we will never lose that bond. Say it. Please, say it. Say it, Miss Operator. Say you love me, say it. Say, I love you son. ‘I don’t show any listing,’ she says. ‘Would you like to try another name?’

No.

‘Thank you sir. Goodbye.’

Goodbye.