New Digs

The photo has nothing to do with the story unless you want to pretend that this is that of which I dreamed.  But it wasn't.  My dreams were empty, hollow, unknown things, the dreams of someone who suffers less because he has much ahead of him, who still believes in unlimited opportunity.  The photo is another from what I shot this week, the Polaroid adventure. 

I made it through the week sleeping in my car at Tommy's.  I washed some clothes in the trailer park laundry, but on Friday morning, just before I went to school, something crazy and improbable happened, a misunderstanding, a mistake.  I was lying in the back seat of my car when Tommy's sister came out.  We talked a little bit and she went back inside.  I don't remember what was said.  It was a throw away conversation and I was dopey with sleeping poorly in the car the past few nights.  But after school, it would be the weekend and I knew that Tommy's mother and step-father would be drinking, and it would all be the normal chaos and I would be able to come and go in the trailer, eat and shower and relax.  

But that wasn't to be.  In a little while, Tommy's mother came storming out of the trailer making a bee line for my car.  I thought that maybe she was going to ask me if I wanted some breakfast, but instead she flew off the handle and started yelling at me like a maniac, telling me that I was a no good shit, that she had always liked me and let me stay over on weekends and she couldn't believe I would say such things about her and she wanted me gone and not to come back.  She would NOT be insulted that way.  Then she began to cry.  

I didn't know what was going on at first and still didn't know what she was talking about, but I had gotten a grasp on the tone of things and knew she was complaining and then the shock began to settle in, but long before I had gathered my wits enough to speak, she turned on her heels and was gone.  I just sat there like a bombing victim trying to make sense of what had just happened.  

In a few minutes, Tommy came out, sheepish, and said his mother was really mad.  I had said something to his sister that she had repeated to her mother out of context, and the rest was what had just happened.  I told him that wasn't what I meant, that I wasn't meaning to insult his mother, and he said he knew that but I had better stay away for a few days until she settled down.  And so there it was.  I would need a new place to sleep.  

School that day was a chore.  I was about worn out and feeling hollow, though I thought I was proud of myself for enduring, too.  I was my own man, I felt, able to do what I like, calling my own shots.  But things were going to shit.  And my money was running out. 

After school, I drove out to visit my father.  He wasn't living much better than I was.  The place he was living was a cracker shack divided in two.  He had already heard about things when I drove out, though.  My mother had called him.  

"What the hell," he said, "I left the house to your mother so you could live in it.  Jesus Christ."  

And then there were two of us living there in that divided cracker shack with the table for two in the small kitchenette and the tiny, moldy bathroom that never dried.  I got the couch that came with the rent in what was referred to as "the living room."  Still, it was better than sleeping in the car.  It was only for a few months, I said, only until I graduated from high school.  Then I would get a job and I would get my own place.  

That night, a train passed on the rails that ran next to the house.  I lay in the dark and listened to the screeching of the metal wheels and the bumping rumble of the cars.  It was a long train that ran through the middle of the night.  It just seemed to go on forever.