The Black-Night Voice
My mother was 37 when she gave birth to me in a hospital overlooking the St. John’s River. All the hospitals in Jacksonville hunkered down next to the river, a convenient place to dump waste. My brother drove my mother to the hospital though he was only thirteen. My father was on a bender while, under the sign of Sagittarius with a moon in Pisces, a shrieking me was dragged by a pair of forceps into the world from my mother’s twilight sleeping body.
“I felt like I was in prison in that marriage,” my mother told me once. “Like someone had locked the door and swallowed the key.”
“Why did you marry him?” I wanted to know.
“I fell in love with his mind,” she replied. “I didn’t know he’d become an alcoholic.” Her own father had also been an alcoholic, a renowned judge who had left his wife and four kids in the middle of the depression. She probably would have ditched my father long before she did if alcoholism hadn’t had such a familiar feel to it.
When I am three years old, I live with my mom, a black dog, and a big boy who keeps snakes. Sometimes the boy rages like a lunatic, but he is not mad at me. When I sit beside him, I can feel the anger blow off him in waves. But he never raises his voice to me. My mother plays the piano, and her face gets sad, and she flies away from us. I like to pretend I am a cat and crawl across the dark linoleum kitchen floor. I make a nest of blankets under the long wooden table.
Sometimes at night a man comes into this house. Everything gets loud then. I don’t know what I’ve done. I hide when he comes. I hide under my bed, in my closet, anywhere I can. Once I ran out into the woods behind our house and my brother had to come out and find me. But no matter what I do, I cannot get away from that yelling, booming, angry voice. Did I see my mother fall like a tall pine tree? Or did I dream it as a picture-book illustration to the yelling, booming angry voice?
See, my mother says, when I am older and the man never comes anymore, this is your daddy holding you. See how much he loves you. I look at the picture. Yes, the man with the black-night voice smiles and the little baby smiles back.
But my father never took to his own children. As we grew up, we tried to connect with him, but he always wanted to fight my brother and he had no idea what to say to me. He never gave us presents or took us anywhere. He never spent time with either of us. Once on Father’s Day, when I was in my 20s, I took him to lunch. He said something to the effect of “Mothers can’t help but love their children, but a father’s love must be earned.”
So that’s it, I thought. I hadn’t “earned” his love. Silly me.
This is an excerpt from my autofiction, The Hummingbird’s Kiss: My Life as an Addict in the 70s.
