The Album: Blood Sugar Sex Magik Red Hot Chili Peppers
The Story: I graduated. Yay! I got good scholarships. Yay! I got into college. Yay! What could go wrong?
Oh, so my mom came home. My uncle finally located her and my brother in North Carolina. The husband had left for parts unknown and she was ready to come back.
We all accepted this. My dad drove out there and got them. My grandparents let them move in. Grandpa bought her a truck. Ohhhh and then we helped her move to the town where I was now living because ohhhhhh Mom had decided she'd go back to college too. Where I was going. What could go wrong?
My mother was being just about ready to boil chaos all the time so I mostly just focused on having my brother back. He'd grown up a lot since I'd last seen him. He had his own love and interest in music now and he started playing Red Hot Chili Peppers for me.
One of my best memories of that summer is coming back from the lake with mom, my brother, and one of my friends. We just played "Under the Bridge" over and over, singing at the top of our lungs. I've always been in awe of the beauty in songs about heroin. More on that in later posts.
RHCP contributed their own elements to the way music was changing. Like with REM and Nirvana, they were blending elements (in this case, a lot of funk and R&B with callbacks to beach-meets-punk sound) and spearheading that with probably one of the best bass players of our generation.
The album itself is in this place of trying to find maturity, slipping back into the same idiotic patterns due to pain, finding brief moments of happiness that never compensate for your own anguish, and the fear of hurting the people around you.
Overall, that was a pretty good assessment of what was happening as college began.
Gail and I moved into the dorms, but on different floors. My mom and brother moved into a tiny trailer in a tiny trailer park. It was still better than the dorms though, so most of the time, Gail and I were there.
Mom was great until she wasn't. It was easy to fall under her spell. She was smart, funny, engaging, and treated all the children around her like adults. We'd stay there. She'd cook for us, and watch movies with us. Things would get great until she got TOO drunk or ran out of smokes, but I could usually get Gail out of there before it got too bad, until I couldn't.
I have no idea how she made contact with the husband again. She didn't have a phone until he called to have it installed and started paying the bill for it. All I know is that one weekend Gail, my brother, and I went back to Poteau to see people. When we got back, there was a ham in the crockpot, 100 dollars next to it, and a note saying she'd be back on Sunday. We found this ON Sunday.
At first, we just carried on, trying our best to believe the note. She'd come back. A few days later, we realized that wasn't happening. I found the husband's number jotted on a slip of paper and we called her. Nope. Not coming home. My brother was welcome to join if he could manage.
I was livid. It was one thing to abandon the 18 yr old legal adult kid who was defiant and a bigger bitch than you and you never wanted them anyway, but another thing altogether to abandon the 13 yr old kid you LIKED. My brother knew the trash fire he'd be walking into so he declined her offer. We decided to give her a week to change her mind, just live in limbo for 7 days and see if this could change before we had to take the steps that would hurt even more people.
And then we went insane.
Honestly, this is the only way to describe it. It's like we actively shut out parts of reality and just focused on what we HAD to do. We got to class. We manage to get my brother to school. We kept ourselves fed and clean.
We listened to a lot of music, especially Blood Sugar Sex Magik because it made my brother happy. We made up stories and our own songs. We thought there were ghosts in the trailer.
No one was going to wound me without me wounding them back. The only way I could see to get any blood out of this was the fact that the mother's husband would be paying the phone bill. We called EVERYONE we could. Keep in mind, long distance calls were expensive at this time. My brother called friends in North Carolina. I called all my friends in Poteau. At one point, I called a 900 number and told the person that the only pleasure I needed was knowing that I was going to leave this line open for the next 6 hours while mother's bastard husband got charged by the minute.
At the end of the week, the stress was getting to all of us. I knew I had to call my grandparents and my dad. They arrived within the day, looking more devastated than I'd ever seen them, and moved my brother back home. I think we were only like a month into the semester.
"I Could Have Lied" was written about Kiedis falling for Sinead O'Connor and her rejecting him. Even though the song is about a romantic relationship, I found myself listening to it a lot during all of this. I know some people who stop loving their messed up parents, but the rest of us never do. I loved my mother deeply. My brother not only loved her but most always took her side. When she left like that, it was like our love didn't even matter to her. It made me realize we were just obligations to her.
That sucks, but it's also freeing. People either love you or they don't. You can't convince them to love you. You can't guilt them into loving you. You can't scream at them to love you. If they do, they do. If they don't, you have to let go.
Thank you to: my brother, for surviving, for being strong, for being an amazing dad, for marrying the sanest, practical, and stable human I know, and for the music.
The Lesson Learned: There is the family you are born to and the family you choose. Choose wisely.
So when I was standing there looking at that damned crockpot, Gail was standing right next to me. I was mortified. She'd met when I was very much in control of the narrative and my mom was far away. Now things were spinning out of my control. I was so embarrassed.
I felt like trash. I felt worse than trash. All my life drama was vomiting all around us and I couldn't just brush it under a rug and pretend it wasn't happening. I couldn't hide this.
A casual friend probably would have bailed. I wouldn't have held it against her if she did. This wasn't just a casual friend though. This person was committed to being my best friend. She helped us and kept us going.
And understand, this hurt her too. She'd grown up with good parents and didn't know what abandonment was like. It's not an easy thing to process.
After my brother was safe and living with my dad, Gail and I did what we needed to in order to stay sane for the rest of the semester. We're both writers so we escaped into that. We made up more stories, built mythologies, constructed an imaginary world. One of the strengths that synchronic people have is the ability to move through the scary crap with creativity.
My mother, who gave birth to me, chose, once again, to walk away from me to be with someone else. My best friend who had only been in my life for a couple of years opted to look my chaotic life in the eye and NOT walk away.
At this point, I realized my own tendency to walk away from situations needed to be amended. Some people, some situations were worth staying for.
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