By the time I started at Ohio State, the Marine Corps had instilled in me an incredible sense of invincibility. I’d go to classes, do my homework, study at the library, and make it home in time to drink well past midnight with my buddies, then wake up early to go running. My schedule was intense, but everything that had made me fear the independent college life when I was eighteen felt like a piece of cake now. I had puzzled through those financial aid forms with Mamaw a few years earlier, arguing about whether to list her or Mom as my “parent/guardian.” We had worried that unless I somehow obtained and submitted the financial information of Bob Hamel (my legal father), I’d be guilty of fraud. The whole experience had made both of us painfully aware of how unfamiliar we were with the outside world. I had nearly failed out of high school, earning Ds and Fs in English I. Now I paid my own bills and earned As in every class I took at my state’s flagship university. I felt completely in control of my destiny in a way that I never had before.
I knew that Ohio State was put-up-or-shut-up time. I had left the Marine Corps not just with a sense that I could do what I wanted but also with the capacity to plan. I wanted to go to law school, and I knew that to go to the best law school, I’d need good grades and to ace the infamous Law School Admissions Test, or LSAT. There was much I didn’t know, of course. I couldn’t really explain why I wanted to go to law school besides the fact that in Middletown the “rich kids” were born to either doctors or lawyers, and I didn’t want to work with blood. I didn’t know how much else was out there, but the little knowledge I had at least gave me direction, and that was all I needed.
I loathed debt and the sense of limitation it imposed. Though the GI Bill paid for a significant chunk of my education, and Ohio State charged relatively little to an in-state resident, I still needed to cover about twenty thousand dollars of expenses on my own. I took a job at the Ohio Statehouse, working for a remarkably kind senator from the Cincinnati area named Bob Schuler. He was a good man, and I liked his politics, so when constituents called and complained, I tried to explain his positions. I watched lobbyists come and go and overheard the senator and his staff debate whether a particular bill was good for his constituents, good for his state, or good for both. Observing the political process from the inside made me appreciate it in a way that watching cable news never had. Mamaw had thought all politicians were crooks, but I learned that, no matter their politics, that was largely untrue at the Ohio Statehouse.
After a few months at the Ohio Senate, as my bills piled up and I found fewer and fewer ways to make up the difference between my spending and my income (one can donate plasma only twice per week, I learned), I decided to get another job. One nonprofit advertised a part-time job that paid ten dollars an hour, but when I showed up for the interview in khakis, an ugly lime-green shirt, and Marine Corps combat boots (my only non-sneakers at the time) and saw the interviewer’s reaction, I knew that I was out of luck. I barely noticed the rejection email a week later. A local nonprofit did work for abused and neglected children, and they also paid ten dollars an hour, so I went to Target, bought a nicer shirt and a pair of black shoes, and came away with a job offer to be a “consultant.” I cared about their mission, and they were great people. I began work immediately.
With two jobs and a full-time class load, my schedule intensified, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t realize there was anything unusual about my commitments until a professor emailed me about meeting after class to discuss a writing assignment. When I sent him my schedule, he was aghast. He sternly told me that I should focus on my education and not let work distractions stand in my way. I smiled, shook his hand, and said thanks, but I did not heed his advice. I liked staying up late to work on assignments, waking up early after only three or four hours of sleep, and patting myself on the back for being able to do it. After so many years of fearing my own future, of worrying that I’d end up like many of my neighbors or family—addicted to drugs or alcohol, in prison, or with kids I couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of—I felt an incredible momentum. I knew the statistics. I had read the brochures in the social worker’s office when I was a kid. I had recognized the look of pity from the hygienist at the low-income dental clinic. I wasn’t supposed to make it, but I was doing just fine on my own.
Did I take it too far? Absolutely. I didn’t sleep enough. I drank too much and ate Taco Bell at nearly every meal. A week into what I thought was just a really awful cold, a doctor told me that I had mono. I ignored him and kept on living as though NyQuil and DayQuil were magical elixirs. After a week of this, my urine turned a disgusting brown shade, and my temperature registered 103. I realized I might need to take care of myself, so I downed some Tylenol, drank a couple of beers, and went to sleep.
When Mom found out what was happening, she drove to Columbus and took me to the emergency room. She wasn’t perfect, she wasn’t even a practicing nurse, but she took it as a point of pride to supervise every interaction we had with the health care system. She asked the right questions, got annoyed with doctors when they didn’t answer directly, and made sure I had what I needed. I spent two full days in the hospital as doctors emptied five bags of saline to rehydrate me and discovered that I had contracted a staph infection in addition to the mono, which explained why I grew so sick. The doctors released me to Mom, who wheeled me out of the hospital and took me home to recover.
My illness lasted another few weeks, which, happily, coincided with the break between Ohio State’s spring and summer terms. When I was in Middletown, I split time between Aunt Wee’s and Mom’s; both of them cared for me and treated me like a son. It was my first real introduction to the competing emotional demands of Middletown in a post-Mamaw world: I didn’t want to hurt Mom’s feelings, but the past had created rifts that would likely never go away. I never confronted these demands head-on. I never explained to Mom that no matter how nice and caring she was at any given time—and while I had mono, she couldn’t have been a better mother—I just felt uncomfortable around her. To sleep in her house meant talking to husband number five, a kind man but a stranger who would never be anything to me but the future ex–Mr. Mom. It meant looking at her furniture and remembering the time I hid behind it during one of her fights with Bob. It meant trying to understand how Mom could be such a contradiction—a woman who sat patiently with me at the hospital for days and an addict who would lie to her family to extract money from them a month later.
I knew that my increasingly close relationship with Aunt Wee hurt Mom’s feelings. She talked about it all the time. “I’m your mother, not her,” she’d repeat. To this day, I often wonder whether, if I’d had the courage as an adult that I’d had as a child, Mom might have gotten better. Addicts are at their weakest during emotionally trying times, and I knew that I had the power to save her from at least some bouts of sadness. But I couldn’t do it any longer. I didn’t know what had changed, but I wasn’t that person anymore. Perhaps it was nothing more than self-preservation. Regardless, I couldn’t pretend to feel at home with her.
After a few weeks of mono, I felt well enough to return to Columbus and my classes. I’d lost a lot of weight—twenty pounds over four weeks—but otherwise felt pretty good. With the hospital bills piling up, I got a third job (as an SAT tutor at the Princeton Review), which paid an incredible eighteen dollars an hour. Three jobs were too much, so I dropped the job I loved the most—my work at the Ohio senate—because it paid the least. I needed money and the financial freedom it provided, not rewarding work. That, I told myself, would come later.