Mother of all Defense Mechanisms

Shortly before Christmas 1996, I got a call from my mother, who I'd not heard from for several years. She was in Billings, Montana and seemed to be at a loss for words when I asked her how she wound up there- she really wasn't making much sense at all, she was drunk, rambling, crying.

And coughing.

Mom had been sick for a long time. First she thought it was the flu, then pneumonia or even TB- she had started noticing blood in her phlegm and went to a clinic; it turned out to be lung cancer, which had already started to metastasize. Mom had no insurance , in any case it was much too late for anything but palliative care. She only had a few months to live.

So I flew to Chicago and from there the Twin and I drove to Billings to see what could be done. When we arrived, we found Mom living as a boarder in a dysfunctional house of alcoholics and addicts. It was a terrible place to live and a worse place to die.

At this time, I had just ended a bad relationship with a heavy drinker, and I had decided to "take some time off" from booze- I hadn't admitted yet that I was an alcoholic , but I could certainly recognize it in others and Mom's room-mates were drunks of the worst kind- violent, thieving dangerous people that physically scared me. None of them had Mom's best interest at heart.

We convinced Mom to return home and stay with her brother in Richmond.

She arrived here early in 1997. She survived an entire year longer than the doctors said she would, and she and I used that extra time to try to mend what at one time was an irreconcilably estranged relationship.

She had abandoned us as kids...but we worked that out. Finally.

That's what I told myself.

After Mom died, I boxed up her meager possessions and put them into my closet and pretended they weren't there. I ignored them for years.

Sometimes, when the subject of cancer or illness would come up in a conversation, I would talk about how doctors are sometimes wrong, about how my own mother was granted an extra year of life etc etc...

My friends and family would sometimes look at me strangely when I made those sort of comments...but I never really thought about why. I just figured the whole subject is an uncomfortable one- it is- what I didn't know is that they were watching me for signs of a mental breakdown.

They needn't have worried. I had my breakdown a long time ago and it's over now. It was so traumatic that it took me almost ten years to even know that it had happened, and now it doesn't really matter- I had to face facts is all.

Last winter I started going through my mom's belongings, seeing what I could put together of her life, much of which is mysterious to me. In her things, I found a journal which I cannot help but call her "Death Book", because that is what it is.
It's her journal of dying.

It ends, suddenly, in 1997. Her last entry mentions going shopping for wigs with me.
I remember that trip- we had a blast, Mom had the saleslady cracked up laughing, trying to find the worst possible wig- "I want to look my best for my cremation!"... I remember that.

But I also recalled that extra year of life that Mom never really had.
I remembered an entire year that never was.
I first noticed this last winter when I couldn't find any photos of X-Mas 1997 that included Mom. I thought that was odd. She was here... where are the pics?
Then I read her Death Book.
There was no X-mas 1997 for Mom. She was ashes.

The truth is, Mom came home in 1997 and passed away shortly thereafter. There was no extra time.

After she died, I resumed drinking with a vengeance. Literally.
Not only was I punishing myself for a past I couldn't change, I was also trying to comfort myself with memories of things that never were.

I didn't just realize this this morning. I've known it since last Christmas, but it's not an easy thing to accept or discuss. I'm quite used to the idea of missing memories- some are repressed by trauma, most are blotted out by liquor- but I'm uncomfortable with imaginary memories. It makes me question reality, and that is a slippery slope...but now, when I try to recall that never-year, I find nothing. I'm glad it's not there.

I remember remembering it, but there are no details left at all. I find that to be reassuring, since that year didn't really happen the way I remembered it.

What really happened is that after Mom died, I tried really, really hard to drink myself to death and I failed to do so.

I failed because I wanted to live.

When I questioned my own will to live, I used my mother's memory as a source of strength- Mom was sick and she didn't give up...I would tell myself.
This was about as useful as a delusion could ever be- it kept me away from the booze for over a year; by the time I started to notice that 1997 didn't exactly happen the way I thought it did, I had already started to find other reasons to stay sober- one reason, really.

Not dying is my one-step recovery program.

So I guess I should be terrified that my mind is capable of fooling me in such a significant way, but I'm not. I think I created that extra year because I really needed something to hang onto, a source of courage-anything to get through my post-drinking adjustment to life- and when my subconscious decided that it had served it's purpose, I was compelled to finally read her journal, and learn the truth without falling to pieces.

And it worked. Despite my endless litany of complaints and troubles, I haven't felt the urge to drink. That imaginary year might have saved my life at one point, but I don't need it any more and it seems to have erased itself.

Better it than me, I say.

In Search of

Saturday becomes Sunday and I know it's going to be one of those nights.

There will be no sleeping. I have taken as many pills as I feel safe with and they haven't done anything.
I get out of bed at 3:30 AM and make coffee- not so strange considering that I usually get up at 5:30 on Sundays to do my show- when I turn on the radio I hear the same goddamned Mix Loop that was playing last week- it's what plays when the 3am-6am DJ doesn't show up. Drums n' Bass 180 BPM headache, I can't even shave with it playing, much less think.

Well, if I don't like what's on the radio, why don't I change it?
Good question!

I get dressed, grab some extra records and head to the station to do exactly that.


PART ONE- 5am - 6am:

Gong -Vive Gong, Gong est Mort - Sides A and D
I have some wiring to work on and it's much easier to work when there's no one else in the building- I put a record on each turntable and attempt to 'un-spaghetti' the cables behind the console. This is probably the best Gong record ever released, it's gets me into my zone.

Atomic Rooster W/ David Gilmour- Hold Your Fire
This isn't as good as I was hoping- I have a Pretty Things CD from around the same period (2001?) that also features Gilmour and he's not especially good on either one.
Oh well, it's 5:45 am and it sounds OK to me.

Cop Shoot Cop- Last Legs
I love this band. This is not a very nice song. Too bad.

Hawkwind -Master of the Universe
I think this is the first song that I ever learned how to play on bass. One of my bands used to do a cover of this and I was always too stoned to recall the lyrics, which was OK - "the winds of time are blowing through me/It's all a figment of my mind", it always worked out somehow. We used to play at parties in Park City,Utah - mushroom tea was served at the door, so we could be a little sloppy, if you know what I mean.

Billie Holiday- Lady Sings the Blues/Come Rain or Come Shine
I love Billie, but have a hard time working her into my regular show. There's a Gospel DJ coming in at 6AM, so I start toning it down with that it mind.

Anuna - Invocation
This Celtic choral ensemble are the second-closest thing to Gospel that I ever play...Hawkwind's Live- Space Ritual being the closest. (That and Aretha Franklin)

The 6 o'clock guy is here now:

"Dude! What are you doing here? Was that you playing all that space-warp music?"

"Well, I took a couple Ambien, went to sleep and when I woke up , I was here, playing records."

This is true- except for the sleeping part. I drive to a 24 hour pancake joint and have breakfast during my one-hour intermission. Mmmmaple syrup...mmmmaple syrup...
I'm tired.
Can I get two large coffees to go?

What, you don't have large cups?

Make that four coffees to go then.


PART TWO:
Spoon- Believing is Art
If there is Spoon that I don't like, I haven't heard it yet. The title of this track says it all.

Thin Lizzy -Johnny
This is what happens when I have too much time on my hands...there is exactly ONE person that knows why I'm playing this song. I'm hoping that they are in the audience, thinking: " He is playing it just for me!", because in this case, it's true. Plus I like Phil Lynott, he's seriously under-rated. Irish rockers rule!

10 CC- Worst Band in the World
Godley and Creme make me laugh...but they weren't even close to being the worst band in the world.

Uriah Heep- Roller
This is as close to the worst band in the world as I feel like getting. They aren't the worst, but 10CC was better.

Funkadelic- Cosmic Slop
Oh man, I was watching an interview with Bootsy Collins, he was talking about playing with James Brown and how you gotta get it on the 'one'- ONE 2,3,4 -ONE, 2,3,4...this, for me, is a very suitable Mother's Day song.
"I can hear my mama call, I can hear my mama call"

Ray Manzarek- Bicentennial Blues (Love it or Laeve it)
This is starting to become my favorite album of all-time. I bought it thirty years ago and it just keeps getting better. At the end of this song, Ray slips the organ riff from "Light My Fire" into the vamping...did he used to play in some famous band?
(You may gaze upon the fish-eyed majesty of Ray Manzarek's superlative sideburns here)
"Guess I'd better get out"

King Crimson- Heartbeat
I saw this tour. It was awesome...the contrast in style between Fripp and Belew was a joy to behold- Fripp sitting on a stool, staring at his floor pedals; Belew up front , whanging his twanger...ahhh, you shoulda been there.

Fiona Joyce- Cry Over You
I wrote about this song last week. Today, it reminds me of someone that I used to know.
No more tears, but I wonder: where are you?
People are looking for you.

Led Zeppelin- Ten Years Gone
Ten Years After-Once There Was a Time
For Mom.


The Wipers- Window Shop For Love
"I feel like a piece of cold ice forming inside a chamber of lost illusions...maybe the ground below will ease the pain- a perfect landing might just ease the pain, ease the pain, ease the pain...loneliness is such a drag"
Next Valentine's Day, I'm putting this song on a loop and playing it for 24 hours. Actually, I probably won't do that, but there was a time when I would have.

Hey, I left my Gmail chat open and one of my favorite bloggers (semi-retired) has tuned in!

"Play Misty for me", she asks, a request that I cheerfuly deny. I don't have the Kinks song she wants either- I usually do, but not today dammit!- but I must admit being called 'Mr. Fantasy' is kinda sweet.
I'll find something for ya...doing dishes, are we?
Gotta find something bouncy...

Joe Jackson- Sunday Papers
Oh yeah! Bouncy, subversive and it mentions Sunday. This could be my show's theme song!

XTC- My Weapon
I have no idea what this song is about.

Bill Nelson's Red Noise- Substitute Flesh
Does this relate to the preceding song or the one following? I don't know what it's about either. The word 'penetration' is used a lot.

The Kinks- Artificial Man
Need Kinks? I got Kinks.

Jethro Tull- Too Old To Rock& Roll, Too Young To Die
Yeah, I used to think that too.

Frank Zappa/Capt. Beefheart- Carolina Hardcore Ecstasy
This song makes me think about The Liberator.
"She put a Doobie Brothers tape on/ I had a Roger Daltrey cape on"

Flaming Groovies- Teenage Head
One of the best rock and roll records of all time.

Eleni Mandell- Dreamboat
If Tom Waits was a female punk rock caberet torch singer, he might sound like Eleni Mandell.

Eleanor Shanley- Road To Glory
Did you know Dublin was founded by Vikings? It was.

Nina Hagen - White Punks On Dope
Pure guilty pleasure- a Teutonic Tubes Tantrum! I love this! I think I'm the only one who does, but it's my show. Suffer! Love that guitar at the end...

Gary Numan- Film
Gary was singing about YouTube before it existed. Gary was way ahead of his time.

Wire- Ambitous
Wire were way ahead of their time.

Damien Dempsey- Celtic Tiger
Damien, where are my CD's? I wrote such a nice letter...well, if he won't send them to me for free, I'll buy them. New and at the 'import' price. I like the guy's work that much.

Paw- Seasoned Glove
I finish my Mother's Day show with a song about the world's worst father. Mom would be proud.

Early Late Stories

I am nearly finished with a project that I only recently became aware that I was working on.
I've been learning my mother's story.

She and dad divorced almost as young as they married; Mom remarried (and later re-divorced) and moved to Evanston, Wyoming.
She spent most of her life living in the West- Montana;Utah;Wyoming- pursuing bad marriages and abusive relationships; alcoholic partners and cocaine husbands.

I didn't know her that well in life. I loved her and a peace was made before she died but I never really thought I understood her.

But I do. A little.

Mom spent entire years in near-total seclusion , a self-imposed estrangement from her children and siblings that lead me to believe that she had stopped caring, that she had abandoned us in heart as well as body.

I've been reading her letters and journals, sorting and scanning photographs that she had carried with her for as long as thirty years and it's clear that, if anything, she cared too much. Her pain caused her to withdraw into physical and emotional isolation, months spent drinking alone in remote Montana cabins or ramshackle Wyoming cottages.

Through it all, she maintained a somewhat erratic correspondence with friends of hers that I barely remember- it seems that my mother really liked to write letters, she received so many. I
I wish I had the letters that Mom sent but the ones she received have quite a bit to say; it's my choice to leave that for another time. I've heard their story and that is enough.

The few possessions she kept have their own tales.

In the X-mas photo, there's a painting, two figures on a road (a copy of a 'real' painting) that my father painted for her. It's on cardboard, a square cut from the corrugated side of a box.

The date stamp on the photo says "Jan.67", placing the setting as Christmas, 1966. I was 3 months old.

Today, ten years after Mom's death, I have finally finished sorting through her belongings. I have thrown some things away, donated others and some I will keep. My brother will get the rest.

One of the things I will keep is that painting. It's in a portfolio case of prints and pictures that she somehow managed to cling to through thirty years of drifting and drinking.

The painting reminds me that my father- whose whereabouts are currently unknown- once possessed a capacity for art, for hope and for love and that he has long since squandered those precious gifts.

It's a warning to me to never, ever take the things I care about for granted. It's too easy to lose everything if you do. Not knowing that simple truth very nearly cost me my own life, but I held on and I am not following my father's path. I hope.

The painting also tells me that although Mom told me to never forgive my father for a certain deed, that she must have forgiven him in some way or she wouldn't have kept that painting. She saw something in my father that I have never seen, but if she saw it, it was once there.

My mother is dead and my father is lost, but the painting is still here and so am I.

I've made many of the same mistakes as they, yet I'm here and they aren't. I like being here.
I can still feel the passion of art, the breathless touch of love and the driving force of hope that they must have once felt. I thought I had lost those things but I was wrong. They are with me.

I found something new in myself while I sifted mother's papers. I found forgiveness.
I can't forgive my father- there are limits to everything, and some trespasses I just cannot abide- but I can forgive her for telling me what he did and I can also forgive her for doing what she had to do.
Which was to leave her children behind.
It wasn't easy for her. She never got over it and neither did they.Until now.

Getting over it is my gift to her and to myself. So this year my Mother's Day gift is a few days early and ten years too late.

Mom, I forgive you. Can you forgive me?




Love,
Allan

A War Child's Portfolio

When I was child we had a war. It was very far away and nobody seemed to understand what it was about. We heard about it every day because of the daily, detailed body counts, enemy and friendly ; this helped teach us the idea that some lives are worth more than others.

Between 'Nam bodycounts and Apollo Missions, I watched Planet of the Apes and Godzilla movies, so it was only natural that I'd write comic books featuring war between Apes and Dinosaurs, wars often fought in outer space.

My mother somehow managed to save some of them- she was literally homeless for months at a time, yet she held onto these. She's been dead nearly ten years and I am just now finding the strength to sort through the few possessions she left behind, but it's something I need to do.

Often, I find myself paralyzed with memory.

It's hard to deal with, but I want to share something that is important- to me anyway. It's a little lesson about how kids see war.
Let's start with one of my kiddie comics:


No big deal , right? Kids like war movies and monster movies- and by the time ( 1973?) I drew this , I already had a good idea of the difference between fake war and real war.

In real wars, you never got to see the grown-ups that you liked again- or if you did, they were never as much fun to be around after they were done with their war as they were before they went.

In fake wars, you got to see the adults later, in other movies, and they never stayed dead very long.

In my fake wars, dead was dead. When we played 'war' in the schoolyard I would argue that you don't stand up after you get 'shot'- you die and you stay that way.
In my comics, nobody won the wars, the only result was a dry recitation of casualties. Just numbers, really. I even blew up a planet in one story, which was years before Star Wars...

Apes and dinosaurs. Surely that's just a young child's fanciful imagination, right?

See for yourself:

In the circle in the bottom right hand corner it says "Make War No More. Peace". Even as a kid, I knew right from wrong, and war is almost always wrong.

Those bodycounts are among the most vivid memories I have of childhood- when I picture our old black and white Zenith console, I see a collage of Cronkite, NASA and 'Nam...countdown to lift-off, backwards to Zero; count forward to death, tick, tick, it's OK because more of them died than of us; who's playing? Kent State vs. Khe Sanh? March into madness...

Anyway, I was looking at those old scribblings as I was watching a cable news show called "This Week in War"- like it was a Sports show or something- and sure enough, there were the same old bodycounts...this time they move and blink and come with fancy animations, but it's still the same old death-as-numbers...and the more death we see the number we become.

That numbness may be the only thing saving us from madness.From noticing the madness, anyway.

In my mother's things I found another drawing. It's from a few years later and it scares the hell out of me because it's mine and I don't want anything to do with it.
There are parts of my life that I just cannot remember at all and this picture is part of that.

That blood disturbs me- thirty years after this drawing, I had boozed my insides into leaky, blood-soaked Swiss Cheese, and a fair amount of it came up through my mouth, nose and even my ears.
My hospital gown was the same color as that of the figure in drawing.

My question to parents: What would you do if your 10-year old drew a picture like the one above?
My mom took off, re-married and stayed away for years - she took this picture with her.

Was she hiding it?

To protect me?
To protect her?
Who? Why?

I'll never know.

I feel helpless.

1986- Not Such A Great Year

This is the cover of a calendar that my mother's boyfriend, Cal Sorenson, produced in 1985. That is my mother in the middle, Cal is the animal that isn't a horse.
He was a bizarre man and he took a lot of photographs before he vanished in the early Nineties; he's almost certainly dead by drink by now, I am sure.
My mother carried those photos with her for years after Cal left her; in fact, she carried them with her until she died.

I don't know why she did that.

Those photographs, slides and films became mine after Mom died.

Some I destroyed.

Some I kept.

I liked Cal when I met him, he was the only 'Mom BF' that showed any interest in being my friend. He taught me how to fire a rifle, even if it was only a .22...Cal had apparently been a Special Forces sniper operating in Cambodia during the 'Nam war and a biathlon athlete afterwards - I was never sure what to believe, but he could use a 30.06 to put a perfect star pattern on a target so far away I couldn't even see it without a scope. And he could throw knives, kicks and punches with equal precision, so I knew he'd been into something...just not sure what.
Cal also got paid to take pictures of balloons and rodeos , which I thought was a pretty cool way to make money.

But my mother never did have any luck with men, and Cal was no exception.
See this? These are the credits from the back of the calendar:
So what's the problem?
Well.
My mother spelled her name 'Janice' NOT "Janis." Cal, who she was living with, didn't even bother to make sure he spelled her name correctly even though he could not have finished the project without my mother's help and money.
This calendar sold several thousand copies in Park City, which was a much less-traveled destination back then- Peter Fonda bought one. Paul Anka got mom to sign his.
Those of you who remember when the Tonight Show was referred to as 'Carson' might recall bandleader Doc Severinsen's frequent laments about his ex-wife. Doc's ex-wife (see credits above) owned the bookstore that Mom worked at and she (and I) got to meet lots of celebrities as they visited Evonne's store.

To mom, having her picture on the front of a calendar that real-life famous people were buying was a big deal. Mom grew up poor and stayed that way most of her life, but during this brief period she was happy. The famous people liked her for the same reasons everyone else did- she was fun to be around. She was always doing new things, skiing, photography, drawing...trying to learn as much as she could about the world, despite having no real education.

It meant a lot to her that Cal used her as a model and I knew she expected him to propose marriage, he used to hint at it all the time - look at the freekin'pic-but he didn't have any intention of doing that.
He didn't even spell her name correctly.
He was living with her and he couldn't spell her name.
This hurt her a lot- an awful lot- but it took me years to understand that.

Years later, when I had my very first paid comic book story published, the publisher mis-spelled both my first and last names in the credits. I pointed this out to mom and she pulled out one of these old calendars.
Me too, she said.
Mom and I shared a bitter laugh at our own expense.

During this time, I was fairly happy too-I was 18, I had a place of my own and a really sexy girlfriend named Natalie, who just happened to sing and play piano. We were gonna form a band and be famous underground artists- it was inevitable. Fate.
I was nuts about that girl.

One day, when I was visiting Mom, Cal gave me a manila envelope. He asked me to give it to Natalie when I saw her next- sure, no problem.
What's in here?
Photos.
Ooo, cool. Let's look.

What. the. fuck.

That's Natalie on the left.

Tame by today's standards, but I was 18 and had only had two lovers in my life- and one of them was in this picture. I wasn't ready for that.

There were other photos, but I didn't see them all until much, much later.

I asked Cal what the hell was up with the naked graveyard pics of my girlfriend.

"She didn't tell you?"

He claimed that some semi-adult magazine had commissioned him to do some naked vampire shots...well, OK, he really was a pro photographer... but there's another man's penis in a photo with my girlfriend and I didn't much care for that.

So I took the pics to Natalie's...and it was pretty clear she hadn't planned on having me see them. She thought I wouldn't understand and she was right.

"How much did Cal pay you?"

"$100" (a lot back then)

"Did you fuck the naked guy?"

"No, he is gay. It was just pictures, is all."

I should have stopped right there, but I didn't.

"How about Cal? Did you fuck Cal?"

"Uh...."

"You fucked Cal! How cou..."

"Ah, no. I didn't fuck Cal. He asked me fuck myself with a lit candle though."

"....did...you...?"

"Yeah, sure. Why not? A hundred bucks is a hundred bucks..."

My mother's boyfriend was paying my girlfriend to masturbate while he took pictures of her.

I think I started pulling my records out of Natalie's collection and smashing them at this point. I don't remember much after that.

But it was over.

Treasures

By the end of my mother's nomadic and often estranged life she owned only what she could fit into her car.
Among those items were a handful of books, some of which I recall from childhood.

Knowing what little I do about my mother's missing years, it's remarkable that she was able to
keep anything at all. All I have are a few books , her journals and some photos, but to me they are treasures.

This (below) was published in 1965 and is a cautionary tale about the consequences of war for war's sake. For the Twin and I, this was a bedtime story. As I grew and began to understand the forces at work in the then-raging Viet Nam war, I looked back at this tiny tome and saw war as the tragic, fatal foolishness that it is. Today, it's just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so.




This book (below), again illustrated by the amazing Edward Gorey, explores how we learn and why we don't. We don't learn because we don't want to.
I didn't know what it was about when I was a child but I wanted to.





This (below) is more recent. It's a 1993 publication and I didn't read it until after my mother's death. Again, it's even more relevant now than it was then.

WE ARE ALL IN THE DUMPS
FOR DIAMONDS ARE TRUMPS
THE KITTENS ARE GONE TO ST. PAUL'S
THE BABY IS BIT
THE MOON'S IN A FIT
AND THE HOUSES ARE BUILT WITHOUT WALLS

It is very difficult for me to look through my mother's things. There are many treasures in there but there are some traps too.
That is why I didn't go to work today and I posted these scans instead.
I couldn't and I had too, respectively.

Didn't Know it Then

I needn't explain how soul-crushing the search for a decent job is- we all know that already- but I will say that its easier now that I have a spiffy new fax/printer/scanner courtesy of the Twin and my grannie- thank you for my miracle box!

I scanned some old baby photos that I found in my mom's boxes and emailed them to my dad, who showed them to my grannie on his new laptop.
We blogger-types take things like photosharing for granted, but my grannie and my dad had never seen such a thing- it's great that my dad is sober and can open email and stuff.

I'm proud of my father for being sober but I'm worried because he still looks terrible. At 61 he looks 80.
He is lucky that the men in our family have a longevity gene, except for the ones who have killed themselves with alcohol or handguns . No one is sure how long they would have lived.

For years, I've been terrified that dad would deliberately kill himself whilst under a spell of alcoholic despair but now I think he's away from that. I just don't think he's ever going to be 'alright' again. He's ...off.
But not suicidal.
A few months ago he told his mother he wanted to die. She's 86 and wants to live and hearing her oldest son declare his desire to die is not good for her health.
This fall we thought she was dying, but it was a false alarm. I talked with her a great deal when we were making plans...during our talks, she revealed what dad had told her about wanting to die.
I had to drive up and do an intervention of sorts after hearing that, a task that was no picnic but it seems to holding so far.

I joke about suicide, but it is something that troubles me -although I don't think it would be my choice- the idea is not unfamiliar to me.
My mother's older brother shot himself last year and my mother made several serious attempts before cancer settled the issue.
Usually a car accident was her thing, but she tried the pistol too-she almost shot me when I took the gun away.

I was 18 and living in Summit Park, Utah. I'd just graduated High School that summer and decided to move from Virginia to Utah, stay with my mom and her new husband until I got a place- I already had a job lined up at the restaurant I had washed dishes at the previous summer...ski resort here I come!

Stepdad was an oilfield worker and was gone four, six, seven weeks at a time which was great, because he was an asshole; but it left my mom alone in a big house in the middle of nowhere and this was killing her.
I didn't know that then, how the years of isolation,abuse and neglect had robbed her of her ability to feel anything but desolation, pain and the utter lack of hope, save for the hope that it would all just end forever, and end soon.
I was still a dumb child in some ways and thought she was just sad and drunk, not sick. I wasn't paying attention and I was all she had, and it wasn't enough.
Things were not at all well with my mother, but I didn't know any of that then.
Suspected, feared, dreaded the worst, but I didn't know.
I wouldn't have admitted it even if I did know, which I did and still won't admit now.

One evening I was playing guitar in my room when I heard a POW! from the kitchen, a heavy jar breaking maybe?, then a second report, unmistakably a gunshot.

As I ran into the kitchen my hearing went white- a close proximity gunshot is louder than the movies would lead you to believe- the bullethole at my feet added a further 100 decibels of panic volume.
Mom was beyond mere drunkenness, she was spinning on a bar stool and trying to shoot herself.
She was so wasted she kept missing, almost hitting me again as I took the weapon away from her- I walked onto the back porch and chucked the gun down the mountainside and deep into the snow-covered forest below.
Not the smartest thing in hindsight, kids maybe finding it and all, but I was overwhelmed. I didn't know what else to do. I just wanted the gun as far away from us as it could get.

I had knocked mom off her perch during our brief tussle for the gun and she couldn't stand on her own.She could talk though.
Her words will be repeated in my nightmares, not here.

Anyway, I carried her into her bedroom, put her on the bed, she couldn't get up ...I walked back to the kitchen and examined the damage.
Four shots, two in the walls, one in the floor and one in the ceiling.

Then the phone rings . It's the Sheriff.
(We lived in what was at that time a very remote and sparsely populated mountain community but the Sheriif lived only a mile or so away- why call?)

"Who's this?"
I introduced myself. I didn't know it then, but the Sheriff had been called to our house before I moved in. Several times.
He didn't seem interested in returning.

"Your mother says you beat her up and stole her gun. Is this true?"

"I stole the gun. I didn't hurt her."
I explained what happened.

"Do I need to come out there? She sounds heavily intoxicated, do you need rescue? "

"No", I said, "I won't be needing rescue".

It was a lie then and it's a lie now, but I didn't know it then.

Scanner #1

Mom, the Twin and I ( early1967?)

I miss you mom.
Love, Allan

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My childhood nickname was "Big Head".