“Pictures from a Mother’s memory”

It was cool and bright without much humidity when I first started my trips to Portsmouth a few months back. All of the fields I passed were full of young and leaping green corn stalks. We had a fairly easy time of it for a May and June in southeastern Virginia. The sky was a soft blue that day as I pushed the Ford up to the hospital for the surgery. It’s now eight weeks later and mom is still in the hospital. They let her go home after the first four days, to Suffolk. It was a short term escape as within two days she would be back at the ER for a spike in fever. The butcher told us that she had “leaks” in her intestines and that they needed to “rest” them for several months before attempting to fix the holes they’d left. She also told mom that all of her nutrition would be through her veins as everything she was ingesting would just leak out of her insides and then through the three large incisions left by the surgery. The only thing mom wanted, all she dreamed of was a summer tomato sandwich. It gave her something to chase; to wait for, look forward to. Then the gastro-barber told her that she would not be able to eat or drink anything for three months. Soon thereafter, a second escape was successful; she was moved to a nursing facility in Suffolk, out of the jaws of Portsmouth once again. She may have been there a week, I don’t remember exactly, before she developed another very high fever and what the doctors liked to call a “blood infection”. A blood infection is sepsis. In fact, my dad told me this interesting fact as shared by the doctors; all blood infections are sepsis but not all sepsis is blood infection. I don’t even know what that means, or why anyone would say that. It got better though, the nurses chimed in. After my dad told me that mom had been having trouble breathing he let me in on another little detail. The nurses said that “she has a little congestive heart failure.” “A little…” dad repeated, “You’ve heard of a little bit pregnant haven’t you?” I told him I had heard about that. The punch line was that mom had returned once again to the city of all of our births. Now the machines and the interns and the guessers and custodians and ICU had her again. Her lungs were filling with fluid and heart struggling to pump oxygen rich blood to everything that needed it. They gave her some shots for the lungs, the nausea, the cramps, the pain from coughing and a mask that she demanded to have taken off several hours later. Mom is claustrophobic. They equipped her with one of those that just goes into the nose and she seemed to get along with that fine. I went up early Monday morning before meeting Naples at the job. When I got there at eight she was receiving her breathing treatment; Albuterol if I had to guess. I could say that it was hard to watch; her twisted fingers almost autonomically reaching for the fog-smoking mask. I sat silent as she waved, and dad counted the numbers so she knew where her blood oxygen level was going. It hit the low 90’s while she wore the gas mask but as soon as she took it off it began to fall into the eighties…and into the seventies as she gasped to talk. She was trying to let the pulmonary boy know that she felt a new pain in her chest but he wrote it off to pleurisy. I watched her gasp to speak for maybe two or three minutes and she motioned for my dad to take me to the waiting room to talk because she could not; she asked the doc for pain meds. I leaned over her and kissed her forehead and told her that I love her and walked down to talk with dad. The talk lasted about ten minutes. Dad verified all of my suspicions that the heart failure was leading to the lung issue and that the sepsis was leading to all of that. He told me that they were still growing cultures and trying to track down the particular strain of bacteria in an attempt to get her on the correct antibiotics. Outside the window Portsmouth screamed and howled. I gave dad a hug and asked him to call me if anything changed and he said he would and to the ladders, the hobos, the dollar ice and Yellow lead I went. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ We sat on Naples’ back porch for a moment getting our heads right hoping the rain would stop. Most days we just packed up and piled in the Econoline bound for Olde Towne. This morning was more of an introspective time out. I sat and watched the rain drops send ripples across the reflected oily paintings of those houses of my childhood. Most mornings are more routine and fun; a distraction. For instance; if you leave Shea Terrace and drive straight down Constitution across London to High and take a right there is a really run down “Kwick-EE Mart”. This was the first spot I learned of upon my return to Portsmouth. The hipsters in Norfolk would cringe at the sight of what I saw that first morning. Bear in mind; leaving the lily white Outer Banks for the urban Petri dish that is downtown Portsmouth can be a bit of a culture shock, lucky for me I love that kind of stuff and have no fear of anything. I wasn’t too keen on getting on a forty foot ladder that first day, but the seeming “living dead” that moved slowly towards the van as we pulled in would have certainly scared most dumb ass white folks I know. Naples said “Okay, now I gotta get you caught up on the P-town hobo scene.” “Cool…” I said, looking straight forward as high and as green as that corn in the early summer fields of farmland that separate my sandbar and his living city. The first man to approach us was Brian. Chris knew him well. Brian was an alcoholic, homeless most likely, and wearing a large soft cast boot thing on his right foot. His eyes were red like a Jamaican rummy’s. They were sort of brown too where the white is, and big and round, taller than he was. He was having “the hanks” as he put it. Naples and I both gave him what change we had in pocket. All he wanted was a beer, maybe a dollar and five to get his morning started. He had his hankering and we had the jingle to get him most of the way there, in fact that’s what Naples always said to him; “I can’t get you all the way there, but I can get you part of the way…” as his sharp speech trailed off into a quick involuntary chortle. Chris introduced us, we shook hands and I told him I’d see him soon. The next guy was not a regular, some dude on a bike selling propane tanks, stoves, big equipment and the like. He was on a ten speed bike. Chris told him he had no use for any of that, and anyway, Brian was our daily tradesman. As we drove away Naples told me of another regular named “Superman”. He hadn’t been on the scene very much lately. Chris said he was sort of “half-retarded” or that something wasn’t quite right but that he was super cool. All Superman ever wanted was a Coke. He would come up and ask “d.d.ddo you ha have some money for a K K K CoCola?” Chris would usually just buy him one. Superman wore a white tee shirt with the words “Superman” and “Man Of Steel” written on the shirt with a black sharpie marker. I couldn’t wait to meet him. I haven’t yet to this day as he has been banned from the Kwick-EE mart. Superman was thrown in jail for “attempted abduction” of a toddler, but this is what really happened. One day Superman was at Wal-Mart and found a little girl wandering around, in fact he had seen her wandering aimlessly for quite a while so he approached her and asked “where is your momma and daddy?” The little girl didn’t know so he walked her straight to the front of the store and put her hand in the hand of the manager. Within an hour or so the mother of the child was in the store with a lawyer demanding Superman’s arrest. The hired gun and the manager along with the mother took a look at the video camera tape from the store. The tape showed the mother walking around on a cell phone while the little girl wandered off. It then showed the mother in the checkout, and then exiting the building, still on the phone while never apparently noticing she had no child with her. Next, some video from the bank next door was introduced to follow the timeline and actions of the woman. She was in line, in the bank, on the phone, no child. Then the store manager showed the video of Superman walking up to the girl, leading her directly to the manager and told the woman that she was unfit. A fight nearly ensued but the woman chose to walk out cursing, yanking the little girl’s arm as she strolled. Her lawyer was overheard telling her to never ever call him again and suggesting to the manager of the store that she be banned. Nevertheless, by that time there were Amber alerts and Superman was all over the Portsmouth television stations. He was taken into custody for a few hours before being completely exonerated. It sucks though, the ordeal got him banned from the Kwick-EEE Mart, well, that and a little too much effort to get that Coke money from some shit stained white kids that apparently didn’t understand the economy of the parking lot, the world karma bank and automobile insurance. Naples explained to me that he goes there every day; he even gets free ice for his cooler. He buys a couple drinks for the hot day, fills the cooler with ice and then gives whatever change he has to the fellas outside. This, he explained, is the cheapest form of vehicle insurance that there is. These guys may be bums to some folks, but they are people we see every day, and they know we see them, and they look forward to it. If we pull in and leave the van unlocked out there in the poorest section of town, nobody is going to blow a good thing by screwing with his van, not to mention, if some new blood by some chance decides to mess around, the neighbors we know are going to alert us or the management because they don’t want to look for another place to get their Coke, or cheap morning beer. We have a symbiosis. No! We have a mutual friendship, no parasite nor host. The cops and crooks of the city have a symbiotic relationship, but it’s hard to tell who the parasite is and who the host really is. Those lines are as blurry as Brian’s vision, and getting blurrier. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ A few weeks passed as we scraped, sanded, caulked and puttied away at the old house on Glasgow Street. We stood on steel stilts with the sun beating our backs as the city screamed all around. Portsmouth really does have a scream to it. You have to listen hard to discern all of the parts; which organs are failing and which are working overtime. As you stand and brush primer on the pre-American wood you can hear the saws, the church bells, the tree grinders, the beeping of the backing dump trucks, the hisses of the hydraulics on the public busses, the tears and laughter of the kids in the park and the fights between the Mocking Birds and the Crows fighting over the ripening figs that grow on a tree beside the creek on Naples’ property; right next to the creek I grew up in, Scott’s Creek. Everything together combines in a cacophony of nature, destruction, progress and ghosts. I drove up this morning on the same route passing the used car lots, the banks, golf courses, closed restaurants and cigarette stores of Currituck before turning off on my short cut to avoid the toll road. I passed the corn, now tall and browning in the middle and on the tops. Harvest time is coming. I sat on Naples’ back porch again, as we do, smoking the stuff and getting ready for the Kwick-EE Mart and the climb. We had been reviving that grey piece of Olde Towne for weeks now and still no paycheck. Naples was getting the run around from the city people. The PHRA, or Portsmouth Housing and Redevelopment Association needed invoices for everything and they didn’t pay until certain progress points were reached. Nonetheless, even though we had made much progress they owed Naples around ten grand. We kept working, he and I, while the rest of the crew started another job to keep the payroll coming. Naples was working nights in condos to make enough money to finance the wood needed to replace the rotten stuff we stripped off. We all needed money. My wife was getting worried seeing none, and the first of the month had come and gone, she wanted the six hundred I promised her weeks before. I barely had enough to get up there that day, but I made it. I stopped, filled my cooler with drinks and had one dollar left in my pocket. After that morning’s porch session we hit the block and saw the local hobos, right on time. Naples went in but since I had no needs I stood outside and talked to Brian. Walking around the blind side of the van I reached in my pocket and pulled out the one dollar and gave it to him. He was surprised I think. I told him “look man, I got one dollar to my name; it ain’t doing me any good right now so you use it. Hopefully when I need more later I’ll find it somewhere.” I then told him a story about when my wife and I were about seven hundred short on rent a few years back and we went to the grocery store with about fifteen bucks in the account. When the total was rung and the cashier asked if we wanted to round up the twelve and thirty to make it thirteen and donate the change to whatever they had going on I said “sure”. Once outside the wife gave me the business about giving away money when we are so tight. I explained my decision like this;” what is the difference in seventy cents and seven hundred dollars if we can’t really find either?” We would find the money we needed, I assured her, and asked her to please climb down off of my back…don’t worry so much. The moment passed without any further fanfare. As I told Brian this story his eyes lit up. I just said “God provides.” Now I am no follower of any religion, nation, man, group, affiliation, organization or cult; but I sometimes say things which can be universally translated and understood among the least of us. Brian said “Man, God is gonna bless you!” as he moved in to hug me. I just said “man I hope He blesses my mama…” then explained to him the ordeal that she was going through. She was at the time in that nursing facility in Suffolk. Brian had been in the same place but was kicked out for rules violations. He is an alcoholic, and he knew how to get it. He told me his story. “Look man, this is what had happened to my foot. One night I snuck out to go to the store. I had a little beer hid up in my room, but I wanted a little mo’…so I sneaks out and while I’m walking to the store I step in a hole. That was my fault. So I gets back to the place and it didn’t look all that bad so I just drank my beer and layed down. Next mornin’ I wake up and that jam had blowed up! I didn’t really wanna do anything cuz I’da had to tell the nurses what had happened to it, so I drank some beer and laid down but it was hurtin’ me BAD! Now I got this friend in there and he took a look at it. Now this dude is just half right enough to know he’s crazy as hell, so he looks at it and tells me I had better let the nurses know…he said it looked bad and I should get it cleaned up, cuz he got the cankers! So I had to come clean. I told the nurses what I had did, and that was on me, that was my fault. Turns out they had to cut the bone on both sides of my ankle and join it back together and now I got this rod that go down through here…” showing me where it was. “Damn…better take care of that shit man, don’t lose your foot over that shit.” “I’ma be alright” he told me, “I’m straight…” and about that time Naples emerged from the store, fat on ice and ready to hit the house. Brian shook my hand and again said “thanks brother…for real, you gonna get a blessing…y’all stay cool today.” Then he put his fist to his heart, looked me in the eyes and with wide eyes and the most solemn of tones just looked at me and said one more time, “thank you now, for real.” I took my sunglasses off and looked back and said “ah’ight man, see you in a minute…be good.” ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Everybody in Portsmouth has a story. Too many people who live down here at the beach like me don’t have them; we have lost them, like souls. We have schedules, classes, jobs, surf, heroin, murder, girlfriends, boyfriends, Wednesday nights, free music Fridays, wind, rain and sand. It seems that everyone here, me included has left their story where they came from. Most of these bodies however, unlike me, have replaced those stories with some meaningless rebuilt self image, lighted candles and false penance. I am in the process of remembering my story. I sit on the creek bank and smell the mud, watch the herons and egrets. I stare at the idyllic reflections of the same houses on the other side of the creek that were there when I was eight, ten, fourteen and then gone. The same oaks crack the same sidewalks I learned to ride a bike on. Everything is still right there, as if time has stood still. It even seems a little sweeter, though the names on the boxes have changed, the ivy and figs and salamanders and mosquitoes are all still there, noticing nothing. When I was a little kid I remember a guy that lived across the fence from my grandma, James Bald. Mom never wanted us hanging around him as he was constantly in trouble. It was usually petty stuff, weed, breaking into a car or house. He once broke into a house that he had the key for. I can’t make the case for him being a model citizen, but I can make one for negligence on the Portsmouth Police department for letting his brutal slaying go uninvestigated. It happened about three hundred yards from Naples back porch about two years ago. I remembered it from the news, but never really paid it much mind. People you know die every day. This death, however, had a back story. I didn’t know all of this until just the other day. There is a man named Blue that walks the city. He has no know last name, he doesn’t wear clothing that sticks out, and he doesn’t have a memorable face or voice…just stories. He told me one the other day as I sat looking at the creek, waiting for work, waiting for the rain to stop. He told me of a girl I never met and whose name he could not recall, a young woman who lived with monsters. She worked on a crew like mine, and she would be heckled by all the other guys…she was a tough beauty. She let on to him that one time that her father and brother, the two monsters would routinely beat her. They had hospitalized her and her mother several times, and her mother was gone, nobody knows where. The latest episode was about two years ago he told me. She had been brutally raped and beaten nearly to death by her brother for putting her father in prison for raping and beating her. Now she has gone on to make a fine life for herself, she won. She put that story before her and forged a new life through the brick walls and everything in the mind that tells you to quit because you deserve it, but she turned into a real genius and is now helping other battered women. She wasn’t really the focus of the story Blue told me, it was those assholes that once kept her tied to a whipping post, both free now. Apparently the son had an ex-wife a few years back, at least one really. One night he saw her and my old friend James Bald at a pharmacy and a fight quickly erupted. James and the ex were both injured sufficiently enough that the cops came and took the rapist son to jail. This is where I would like to remind you of what I alluded to earlier; cops, crooks, parasitism and blurred lines. As Blue told it, the sister and mother beater got out of jail around three in the morning the night of that fight. His son had bailed him out. A few hours later the cops, fire trucks and everyone in town except the paramedics were at James’ house. Sometime in the early morning hours the ex-wife had been stabbed around fifty times in James’ bed; James’ throat was slit and he was beaten severely, stabbed a bunch as well and then thrown in his car and set on fire. By the time the folks arrived at the scene he was part of the charred frame, a ghost, another Portsmouth ghost. The police never lifted a finger as Blue tells it, and that case is considered a cold one. That is pretty damned fucked up I thought to myself, looking at my shoes now as Blue walked away. Portsmouth, Virginia. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ This past Monday looked like rain, but it was the first chance I would have to see mom since she hit the ICU and was suffering from “a little” congestive heart failure. It sucked watching it as I said, but I was there, with her for a moment, another one to remember. She has since been on the mend, blood infection going down, breathing getting better, but still pretty messed up, all things considered. I left and headed over to Naples’ as the rain started in. We sat and waited, I feel like I’ve already gone over this…what the hell. This morning we wouldn’t ride out and see Brian, listen to the howls of the tunnel traffic or scrape the exoskeleton from that old ghost house. We just sat, and as we did a strange sense of calm took me over. I looked out over the creek; scanning from my left to right and remembering where the bridge was, and the piers. I remembered a recurrent dream I had as a kid. The dream was short, terrifying and always the same while strangely, slightly different. I was in the family car, a 1965 Pontiac Bonneville convertible with mom. Sometimes I could see her, sometimes not but I knew she was there. Sometimes she drove and sometimes me, sometimes the top was up and it was raining and sometimes the top was down. The dream always started on a bridge; a tall bridge, and there was a visible high, wooden retaining wall and sand and people below. As we progressed along the bridge we would lose all sight of land and a fog would set in. Soon the bridge would begin to shrink and before long we would be on a pier with no rails and the end fast approaching. This is when I would get terrified. I always woke up startled, heart pounding as we drove off the end and started soaring through the air, but downward, but I never remember landing. As I sat and stared at the creek, the remnants of the old bridge and the pier from my childhood that still stands today I began to think of the strangest things. My mother was with me there, then. Although I was born and raised in Portsmouth, I am pretty sure I was conceived in Nags Head. I have done the math, and seen pictures of mom and dad down here looking like they were having a blast about nine months, give or take, before I broke through the bubble’s skin. I thought of the old bridge across the sound and what it looked like, then the Leckie Street Bridge, and it slowly started kicking me. I was now looking at the things my mother had looked at so many times. She loved the beach down here. She still does. I take her a jar of salt air whenever I go to see her. I realized that the dream was not just mine but hers, only in her case it was in the form of mental snapshots and home movies. It was lodged in her DNA, her bones and blood and when she gave from that to create me the pictures, the stories all came along with it. It is my Portsmouth legacy, coming to call. My dreams, both sweet and scary were still and moving images from my mother’s memory. Everything made sense at that moment. I don’t have the dreams anymore, but hopefully I will soon as she gets stronger again. I thought about that a moment and then forced the Ford towards the tube, back down south. Last night though I had lots of dreams, none that I really remember, but I remember a short bit where I was driving that old drop top and had to get out several times to put the top up and back down. It was just as I remember as a kid, the same hinges, latches, canvas smelling of mildew and plastic window. I can assure you that a good percentage of the people I know will tell you all that the last half hour’s worth of my rant doesn’t mean anything more than I am slipping into insanity, but I would say they’re wrong. Fuck them! And please; God bless Brian, my mother, and Superman. Fire may burn the rest.