Now: I shit all over my jeans, legs, hand, and that greasy, disintegrating bag, as good Christian people in Ford Tauruses pretended they weren’t trying to figure out what was happening on the other side of Adam’s car. After the first wave, I kicked out of my jeans entirely, held my butthole closed as tightly as I could against the cold, wet air, and started digging a toilet hole in the snow. “YOU ARE A GODDAMN GENIUS,” John boomed proudly next to me, swirling snowflakes getting caught in his beard. I crouched again as another forest fire raced through my guts. Under ordinary circumstances I would be totally fucking humiliated, demanding that these dudes turn away from the embarrassment of my thighs, but when you are shitting yourself in public in broad daylight, the last thing you worry about is some drunk kid from Schaumburg seeing how long your pubic hair is. “Atta girl!” Coach John shouted encouragingly over the dull roar of the howling winter wind, awkwardly patting the top of my head as I was, once again, clinging miserably to his knees while evacuating my bowels onto the side of the road. “You’re doing so good!” An odd surge of pride rushed through me.
Adam, absolutely horrified, tossed me an NIU T-shirt he’d yanked from his gym bag. I fashioned it into a makeshift washcloth—GO HUSKIES—and then used mittenfuls of melting snow to clean out the diarrhea that had splashed into my vagina. John kicked fresh snow into my shit hole as Adam hyperventilated inside the car, punching buttons and twisting knobs like a man possessed as he tried valiantly to not look at my shame. The radio finally caught a spark, that “Bittersweet Symphony” song that was everywhere in 1997 suddenly crackling out of the tinny speakers. And then the car died.
Happy Birthday
Thursday, February 12, 1998, was the day before my eighteenth birthday. Some girls on our floor had papered the hallway with pink and red construction-paper hearts in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, and it was a source of constant annoyance to me. No one at NIU wanted to have sex with me, and that was fine, but I didn’t need a visual reminder that I was hideous and unloved every time I dragged my pore-unclogging face wash to the goddamned bathroom. I had a break after my English class and came back to the dorm to drink imitation Cokes and watch MTV while ignoring the mountain of homework I’d accumulated since the beginning of the semester. The phone on the wall rang as soon as I unlocked the door and I paused to figure out whether it was for me. Two rings for Cara, one long ring for Sam. Or maybe it was the other way around. The phone was for me.
On the other end of the line was a detective from the Evanston Police Department, and I knew, because he was using his gentlest inside voice, two things: (1) someone had made sure to tell him that I was seventeen years old, and (2) my father was probably dead.
At this point in the heartrending after-school special of my life, there would be a flashback to the week before, when I’d received another startling and unexpected phone call. But first, a little bit of background: Samuel Bishop Irby was the kind of alcoholic who made grain alcohol in our bathtub and sold what he didn’t drink in SunnyD bottles to the local degenerates in his crew. Samuel Bishop Irby was the kind of alcoholic who would drink three bottles of NyQuil if my mother forbade his going to the liquor store and hid his car keys where he was too drunk to think of looking for them. Samuel Bishop Irby was the kind of alcoholic who, when desperate for a fix and home alone with his preadolescent daughter and an empty liquor cabinet, would soak a loaf of bread with shoe polish and drink whatever he could filter through the loaf into a glass. SB, as his friends called him, was handsome and charming and affable, and he had the greatest laugh you’ve ever heard. But SB was also broken, just totally broken. And I couldn’t grow up around him. It wasn’t safe.
After my mom and I moved out when I was four, SB’s life underwent a series of changes, most of which I have no real idea about. He’d move away, get his life together, come back, destroy it again. I saw him randomly, in fits and starts, and always on the upswing. Always with a healthy glow and toothy grin, singing a new song about how he really was going to get his shit together this time. I’d like to think that eventually he pulled it together for me, that when he’d gotten word I was suffering, some paternal urge deep within him willed him clean and sober and back in town, superhero cape affixed firmly to his collar. The part of me that needs to believe my life was important to a person who created it clings to that, but I am logical, realistic. I know otherwise. At that point I was worth little more than the five-hundred-dollar-or-so monthly Social Security check that followed me like a dowry to whoever was willing to take me in. When he caught wind that this money was up for grabs, he was back in town in an instant, back in his chauffeur uniform and cap, buying me a futon and a tiny television set.
But SB had his eyes on a bigger prize. The state was paying my mother’s nursing home rent to the tune of nine hundred dollars a month, and my dad figured that if he could somehow get her into his household, that money could be his. “This is not a good idea,” I whispered into her ear as my father laid out his plan, fast-talking like a used-car salesman as he spread papers of zero consequence, full of calculations that she could barely understand, across the cafeteria table. I glared at him, my chubby fingers laced through her skeletal ones, my eyes shining with tears. She was nodding excitedly. “You need a nurse,” I murmured, my heart fracturing, incrementally, as I watched her excitement build. “This house doesn’t even have a ramp. How are we going to get your wheelchair inside?”
She didn’t want to hear me. She had been locked away in this place for three years already, waiting to die, and now she could have what she always wanted: her husband and her kid and a home. Together. I tried to hide how much I was crying as two techs and my father loaded her into the car, my father sweating and cursing as he folded her wheelchair and shoved it awkwardly in the trunk. It took half an hour for us to get her inside the house, me tilting her wheelchair backward up the concrete steps as SB grimaced under the weight of her balanced on his shoulder. I read the lists of her medications and the instructions that the Patient Care Technician had scribbled on a notepad over and over as she beamed up at me from the couch. As much as I wanted my mom back, this wasn’t the way to do it, with no nurse and no real money and a man with a hair-trigger temper sleeping in the next room.