That’s 11:46 A.M., America, and I’m still unshaven, unwashed, sitting in my bathrobe! Hah! Take that, you stinking Dominionist idiots!

Time to take the newspaper into the bathroom

Okay, okay. My wife is off practicing for a performance, all right? I’m not as stupid as I look.

What was the last thing that scared me with Helen? That she would disinherit me. No, really. I can hardly believe that actually bothered me, but of course it did. What the hell is THAT all about, and where did it come from?

It’s a very real possibility, although she’d have to stay sane enough to see her attorney, who would try to talk her out of it. But my automatic reaction, coming at the tail end of this last episode in Tucson, was the catalyst for what could modestly be called a thundering herd-of-elephants epiphany. Much too simply put (considering the ramifications) — and as I’ve mentioned before — if you take away the money, what is there?

[...crickets...]

Without the eventual reward of divvying up a couple hundred grand (the Dow Jones and nursing home accounting offices willing), why would I or any of us have kept calling or visiting over the last 30 years? Heck, the last 40 years.

To get a taste of those great Xmas cookies?
To reminisce about fun family times in days gone by?
To help with chores around the homestead?
To share good news and unload burdens?
To bask in the comfort of home?
To share each other’s love and affection?

Help me out here, I’m trying as hard as I can. But I swear to God, none of those apply. Maybe a little bit, here and there — nothing is ever all bad — but mostly not. She didn’t bake, either. Or even celebrate Christmas, except back in the early years. Or want to go anywhere, or even want to listen.

For as long as I can remember, even going back to puberty, coming face-to-face with Helen was a tense drill of raising inner shields, especially in the last 20 years. Share my innermost thoughts? (NOT ON YOUR LIFE!) Reveal my hopes and dreams? (ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND???) The same thing applied to dealing with the old man, of course, who had his emotional marching orders.

I know I’ve told this before, but the time in ‘76 or ‘77 when my sister T. and I showed up in Tucson was a horrible experience. I had a really nice Martin 12-string guitar with me that I’d bought from a new friend in Maryland and was sitting in the kitchen tuning up when my father ambled in. I’d already played a solo gig back home, singing all my own material, and I proudly piped up and told him that I’d decided to make it as a songwriter. He stopped dead in his tracks, uncharacteristically at a loss for words, and looked at me as if I’d just said I was going to suck dicks in a carnival sideshow. It was that bad, and it hit my 31-year-old heart like a skidding semi. I must have said something appropriate, and he left the room. A few minutes later he came back, his head hung low with guilt, to tell me that “Your mother and I just don’t want you to be disappointed…”

That was over 30 years ago, and I kept coming back. What did I know? I had a mother and a father. That’s what people do, right? That’s how parents talk to their kids, yes?? The terrible thing is that this incident is only one of hundreds. I can’t think of a single instance where I was encouraged to do something I loved. And when I succeeded on my own, regardless, it never did pass muster. They thought I “wasn’t right” because I was good at art and did so well in school but wouldn’t try out for Little League. I remember once in summer camp I made a wallet and produced a couple of not-bad paintings, winning first-place prizes and two engraved silver-plated cups. The upshot of that was that I came away feeling I’d done something unclean. They never knew what to do with me, I guess, and as a boy, I never understood why everyone but my parents thought I was hot shit. I know my siblings had to push against similar headwinds: we’re all alive, and each of us has in our own way accomplished quite a lot, done remarkable things, etc. — in one brother’s case, just surviving rates a ton of kudos — but no one is a CEO or has a PhD, and while nobody’s starving, not one of us is what you’d call well off.

I honestly wonder if I would have come back this last time, with Helen supposedly on her deathbed (again!), if I would have subjected myself to all the anticipatory stress (never mind the actual psycho-drama) without the underlying motive of wanting to keep enough of a lid on things to make sure the eventual transfer of the damn “estate” proceeded smoothly? The goddamn money, the constant reminders about it, the insidious little monologue inside my head that told me how much I needed it because I wasn’t any goddamn good and couldn’t earn it on my own…

Of course I wasn’t any goddamn good. How would I ever have learned otherwise?!?

Ironically, adjusting to the possibility of being disinherited helped tip the boulder over the edge. Now everything is different. I mean utterly different. I can’t emphasize that enough. Here’s just one example: over the last 72 hours, there’s been this strange thing happening inside me. Whenever something happens or I have a thought that makes me feel bad (dirty, uncomfortable, anxious, sad, or wronged), this automatic self-diagnostic program pops up in my head and asks me if the feeling came from Helen! So far, every single instance has, and then I sit back, letting go of the emotion, and the program checks my own resources: is there a reason for this state of mind? And so far, no! NO! No reason at all. And then I keep going, a little disoriented but not half bad at all.

I’m saying this as plainly and ineloquently as I can to make it stick. The guilt is gone. The thing that carved the ruts into my psyche just isn’t present any more. For someone who’s had a lifelong guilty conscience, this is monumental. I have 63 years worth of training to let go of. Everything in my life is directly affected, especially my relationship to my wife (and everyone else).

I stood by the kitchen window yesterday as I was getting ready to cook supper. The wind was blowing through the leaves of the big elm tree, causing thousands of vibrating shadows in the evening light. The air and everything in it shimmered: the outdoors was alive. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with emotion, because I finally knew that I was all right. My God, THERE’S NOTHING “WRONG” WITH ME AT ALL!

(No guilt.)

Who knew?

No, nobody died, at least not in the way you think, but the current focus of the chronicles are over with this installment. What a ride.

Most of the posts in this series are extremely emotional, somewhat overblown, and very dark. They’re also at least five times too long: if I could edit it down to 20% of what’s there now, we’d all be better off. But the literary flaws mirror the stress of these last few weeks quite clearly, reminding me of the whirlpool that sucked me under and still grabs me in the heart. (Biology is compelling, even in a lie.) There haven’t been many comments, though, probably most people have an intuitive appreciation of sorts, and whether from embarrassment or respect, one feels reluctant to speak up. That’s fine. What would I have to say to a friend who’d just lost an arm in a car crash, for example? The difference, however, is that the Helen Chronicles are revelatory for me, not crippling . The disability comes before, not after.

Without more exposition, one might make the mistake of thinking that the recent period represents a sudden personality change, the kind so many face when aging parents disintegrate before their eyes. There’s that, all right (the decline into an unsustainable state), but this wasn’t really sudden. Helen was always fragile, irrational, and deadly mean when hurting. In between, when growing up, I thought I had a mother and that everyone’s was like her: love ‘em when they’re good and leave ‘em when they’re bad. Affection that had to be earned, in other words. Think about that. What would be left of the emotion by the time it turned up as a temporary ration? Love reduced to doggie biscuits. And if that’s what you have, as lacking as they are, you still learn what to do to get the next one, because you’re always hungry.

So it was in the beginning and then got worse. Progressively, over time, a way of “dealing with it” grew alongside the rising emotional violence. This could be described as learning to expect the worst on any given visit, for example — only, why then go at all? Consciously, because that’s what good sons do, look after their dear old mothers, unconsciously, because I had to be good to get my biscuit, get that mother-love stamped in little Johnny’s passport. You can’t say that I was in control at all, really, continually revisiting the scene of the crime. We’re biologically hard-wired to love our mothers anyway: whatever the dance was, it seemed to fit the bill.

And then there was the money, I realize. Ultimately, always, the money, the great big bag of doggie biscuits in the sky. If she mentioned it once, she brought it up a thousand times: what would happen when she died, who would get what, who wouldn’t. On every single visit, every phone call. If I wouldn’t discuss it and pledge allegiance to the creed, there’d be an ugly, crazy-making breakdown in the next ten minutes. On every single visit for over 30 years, at least, though it wasn’t always due to my heartless reluctance to wallow in the “family” muck of greed and fear and counting pennies. A minor therapeutic sarcasm could grow in Helen’s mind into a slight, a slur, a vicious ingratitude for all she’d ever done. Soon I’d be “just like your father” and there’d be nowhere to escape: she’d follow me or my wife from room to room, spewing toxins. You had to take part in the combat or become a mortal enemy. It was for her or against her, or else you ran away and stayed away until the guilt built up enough to make you go back and renew your membership.

Madness upon madness, cranking, grinding, tearing, mindless pain and horror, always though within the “family,” because we were one, sort of, and this was just what “families” did, except they didn’t. Not all of them. And you wouldn’t believe how long it took me to accept this larger, non-approved, alternative truth. (Just ask my wife.) I know now that a mother’s unconditional love reflects a child’s soul back to him or her, and that is how we know we have one. Absent that, it takes whatever passes for divine intervention. Grace, luck, mystery… I don’t know how my siblings and I are still alive, considering.

But the nightmare I found in Tucson finally blew the doors off: that buggy is dead in the middle of the road. I know this, but I still can’t adequately put my reaction into words. This is monumental. Everything I’ve ever done, or dreamed, or tried to do, was corrupted by the greatest lie that ever was. Fundamentally, I never really had a mother. I never got my ticket punched, not for over 60 years! My God, chilluns. My God, my God.

This realization is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m still substantially in shock, but I also feel a kind of liberation, like I’ve been rescued after having been raised by aliens on another planet. So I’m a human being, after all — who knew?! — and I can do what humans do and follow my heart. I CAN DO WHAT I WANT! How can this be? Because I DO have a mother, and I finally know I have a soul.

After growing slowly in my awareness all along, it’s here now in the nick of time. I’m talking about the Big Momma, chilluns, the all-enfolding love of all Creation. MOTHER NATURE, Mother Earth, the stuff my body’s made of, the thing we can’t define or do without, the ultimate redemption: Goddess loves me, this I know, for my tears, they tell me so. (Put it any way you want.) I have the rest of my life, be it long or short, to do things differently and start again. Stunning and disorienting. Life-altering. Absolutely, totally, completely, mind-numbingly huge.

I feel like I need to go climb a mountain, curl up under a ponderosa pine, cry for a week, then sleep for a thousand years…

See, this is why it’s good to be an adaptable, creative fellow.

I thought things were going pretty well, until I went ballistic on a mailing list and sent people here who don’t need to see these things. VERY unprofessional, shows how serious this is for me and how much I need to take care of myself. Moment to moment, I forget that I just had a piano dropped on my stomach. (That’s the third body region I’ve tried with that metaphor, the best one yet.) Now people can tell stories about me, if they already don’t, or I can take lessons from my mother in how to think they are. These have not been my favorite two-and-a-half weeks on the planet.

Just amazing, isn’t it? This is 1945…

Accordingly, I decided to do more processing, spending a few hours working on my latest song. You have no idea what a relief it is to realize that writing-wise, nothing is taboo any longer. (If it were, I’d have to violate taboo to breathe.) Anyway, here are the most current lyrics. I tried recording this today, but that’s just not working — probably wasn’t done yet. Here we go, then. Transmutation through art, remember:

MOTHER DON’T KILL ME
© 2008 John H. Farr

Well I came ‘cause you said you were dyin’
I came ‘cause my siblings were scared
but the nightmare I found down in Tucson
was worse than I ever had dared

—————————-

(Chorus)
Mother I beg you don’t kill me
don’t put me outside with the trash
it don’t matter how much you’ve gone crazy
I’d be happy to turn you to ash

—————————-

You gave up on gardens and painting
abandoned your beautiful home
and pretended that nobody loved you
now you live in a world all your own

(Chorus)

I know that you’ve always been hurtin’
I realize you never were whole
now I know how the best parts went missin’
and I’m busy backfillin’ my soul

(Chorus)

Well I thought we could make a connectiion
in the middle where nobody goes
but that’s just a little boy’s longing
maybe this time the door’s gonna close

(Chorus)

Then I’d take you on back to Kent County
put you down in the ground next to Dad
there’d be no more abusin’ and fightin’
be the best time that I ever had

(Chorus)

Quite the exercise, dealing with my own personal hurricane. I hope someone learns something from this. (Ask me later.)

The latest word on the Helen front is that the old woman wants “the metal box,” the one with the will. Since she’s already declared that I’m “not part of the family,” you can guess where this is going. I really shouldn’t speculate, but it’s so hard not to: the grooves are so well worn.

She’s always used money to control. What makes it work is withholding affection, because that makes for hungry children. Generosity in love, as with finances, shows irresponsibility in the giver. Never lend out more than you receive! Love, like money, is finite in the false world where transcendance is a lie.

As a family lender of last resort, she’d always given out the checks. Need to buy a used car to get to work? Go to Helen if you dare. Over the years, it devolved into a ritual of madness. When she set up her very modest little trust eight years ago, she had figures in mind for how much each of our shares of the “inheritance” should be reduced for gifts of money already handed out. With the Helen loans, everyone started out in a hole. I never put much credence in her figures, but she had them codified in the trust documents. If Helen ever died, as successor trustee, I’d have to start by shorting all the heirs according to this nonsense. Unfortunately, that was just the beginning.

Helen’s attorney made it clear that there were to be no more individual gifts that might upset the “equalized” amounts as stated in the trust. The attorney also drew up a plan for yearly giving that’s in there too, so Helen could help her grownup kids with supplemental income. That’s how she thought of it at the time, but we’re only talking only small amounts: a hundred here, $200 there… And it never was that regular. There was lots more given out occasionally, several thousand here, another thousand there: “to even things out,” but not for everyone. If you hadn’t asked for any recently, then you were “good” and got rewarded. She did give me money once to help pay for my hernia surgery, but only after I asked for it — which made me “bad,” so subsequently I missed out. She never stuck to her attorney’s directions, in other words, which was fine as far as my siblings and I were concerned. But she was erratic and inconsistent, stirring up the muck and pitting one against the other.

To make things even worse, she kept records of it all in a lunatic’s diary, an evil green notebook stuffed with scraps of yellow paper where this gift or that was written down. Her intention was that when she died, the one in charge (presumably me) would add it all up and follow her commandment to cut so-and-so’s allotment by a specified amount. Whenever Helen brought it up, i.e. within the first hour of any visit and in every phone call, I had to promise to faithfully fulfill her wishes. All this was outside the trust, however, and subject to various interpretations. I thought the whole idea was absurd.

The notebook still exists, of course. I saw it when my brother brought it to me early in my final week of hell in Tucson. I know what he wanted me to do, to go through the crumpled hen-scratchings and add everything up, so I could tell him what the bottom line would be. That’s not quite the way it sounds: this brother and middle child, more damaged in some ways than any of us but with a solid loving heart, had long ago literally traded his independence for a symbiotic relationship with Helen that none of us understood or could have weathered. For years Helen had been telling him and anyone else who’d listen that “Johnny has gotten more money than anyone else,” something he wanted to see me confirm. I recognized this as fear that he’d be left out, for he was the hungriest of all.

It was always my intention to follow the letter of the law, according to the will — sorry, you get $20,000 less than she does, etc., etc. — and then to follow up by using property outside the trust to even up the piles, after which I’d liquidate the trust and divide it five ways, just the same for everybody It was the only way to balance the family karma: give everyone as much as I possibly could, in equal shares. If anyone objected because of what the damn green notebook said, I’d let them try to sort through all the mess and come up with adjusted figures, knowing that the exercise would quickly prove my point.

But the whole thing was disgusting and pathetic. You withhold love, because you never got it. And when someone needs a hand, you make them pay. (She’d even started counting birthday and Christmas gifts against our shares.) Every time she raised the subject, I felt I needed purifying afterwards: all this carping, abuse, and fear over an individual fortune roughly equivalent to the cost of a nice car and some dental bills. It was all she ever wanted to talk about, enough to send me screaming down the road.

And now I’m the villain for trying to help. Helen may even disinherit me, such as it is. More than anything, that’s the final punishment in her view, in mine the last gasp of a game to make me shoulder guilt and feel unworthy. Love is money, so being left out = abandonment, which in a child’s heart means he must have done something wrong and should be punished. But I’m different now, and there’s nothing of the guilty son in this equation.

And that, dear reader, is the gold down in the guano…

I’ve been back from Arizona for a week now, still exhausted, sometimes reeling from the backwash.

What’s happened is a terribly difficult thing to accept, because we’re biologically hard-wired to love our mothers. Few can probably even conceive of a situation where the reverse isn’t automatically true, but it happens. With Helen, I realize, the contract has always been broken: she doesn’t love her children… That’s the chilling thing, the part that terrifies a child and stops a grownup in his tracks. It isn’t natural. It’s a denial of who we are. It really isn’t completely human.

With relish and conviction, she tells my brother in Tucson: “Johnny will be investigated, you’ll be investigated, you’ll ALL be investigated!” Us? We who by all rights should never had made it this far? What for?

For looking in on her virtually every day for years? For coming from the grocery store with fruit and frozen Chinese dinners so she’ll have something in the house to eat? For walking her calmly out of the bank with a shit stain spreading on her skirt? For driving 600 miles to pick up the pieces and getting chased out of town?

It’s like looking at a huge crippled insect, pincers waving in the air.

So don’t mutter platitudes at me or judge. I’ve been there and I know different. I AM there, and now I understand my father better: what do you do, when you find out, when you’re an Air Force officer in the ’50s and you feel the fear? What does it take to hold it all together? What kind of life do you retreat to? He took the coward’s way out, with booze and womanizing in his own little world where kids were a distraction. But at least I understand, a little.

The mystery is that I am whole — the question, then, is why?

I forgot to get this posted a couple of weeks ago — gee, I wonder why? — but here it is.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize elements of previous blog posts assembled into a new whole. Not quite like building Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, although related, and with much better results. This was just published in the August edition of Horse Fly. What’s more, the publisher thought it was so good, he paid me extra, a thing possibly unprecedented in the history of writing. At any rate, you can read it now without coming here to buy a paper:

JOHNNY & THE HORNED TOADS

Years ago in Texas (sorry), we called them “horny toads.”

I’d just turned 13 and didn’t know what “horny” meant, outside of the context of the critters — adolescent urges notwithstanding — but you could find the lizards everywhere, even in town. Back in junior high school in Abilene, in those glorious pre-air-conditioned days when just surviving until the final bell was an accomplishment, the reptiles were a God-given source of distraction from the heat of study hall.

We sat at actual wooden desks with inkwells and lids that opened up. Nobody used fountain pens or had any ink, so dipping pigtails wasn’t an option. But you could grab a “horny toad” at recess, lightly scratch its scaly belly to put it to sleep, and set it gently on its back inside the desk where Peggy Sue would sit. After everyone had taken their seats and study hall had settled into a sodden stupor broken only occasionally by yawns and sounds of shuffling papers, the animal would wake up and start skittering around. The victim usually opened her desk to see what was the matter, and you can guess the rest. This trick only worked with girls, of course, because they screamed so well. The perpetrator generally came to the rescue while his comrades smirked, scooping the lizard up and dropping it out the window. (Why this reminds me now of Homeland Security, I’m not sure, but see what you can do with it.)

Three years ago in Llano Quemado, I missed the photo of a lifetime. I’d taken a walk without my camera — guaranteeing at least a miracle — and sure enough there was one. About halfway up the dirt track on the mesa, something wriggled in the road 20 feet ahead and then sat still. As I approached, I saw it move again: a horned toad trying to get traction in the fine brown sand. But what was that on its right hind leg? Good Lord, a baby horned toad riding on its mother’s back! I honestly couldn’t believe it. The lizards froze when I squatted down beside them, and then I saw a second baby in the dust a couple of inches to the rear. The baby on its mothers back was spotted just like she was, while this one matched the color and texture of the ground it sat on. The mimicry was perfect. The late afternoon sun illuminated the camouflaged tableau with golden yellow light. My camera, if I’d had it, would have been 18 inches from the horned toad family, who held their position until I stood.

* * *

This summer, for whatever reasons, I see horned toad hatchlings all the time, and I’m amazed. There’s just a twitch, a thing that might be real or not, like a floater in your eye, and there they are, fully formed and no bigger than a thumbnail! Yesterday I took my camera on a hike and finally got a close-up shot: the piñon needles on the ground are longer than the tiny beast… They must be like Fritos for the magpies. How ever do they make it?

Try to find out anything about horned toads, and you’ll encounter contradictions. They’re disappearing, or they’re not, for one thing. The young receive no parental care, supposedly, although I saw differently here in Llano. New Mexico writer S. Omar Baker, who died at the age of 90 in 1953, once wrote,

“The horny toad, ill-graced but harmless
Is thought by some to be quite charmless
At least he helps eat garden ants up
And does not try to crawl your pants up.”

The easy familiarity with something few see or take notice of today disturbs me, even as I smile. A couple of weeks ago, I was driving down a twisty, rocky lane. The air was sharply cool and damp from the previous night’s rain, the warm sunlight welcome by comparison. Halfway down the hill I stopped, incredulous: sitting in the road looking up at me below the open driver’s window was a HUGE GREEN BULLFROG the size of a cantaloupe! We stared at each other for a long moment, and then I drove off, checking in my rearview mirror that I hadn’t seen a mirage.

Sometimes I feel I’ve won the lotto on another planet, and then I wake up, remembering I’ve always been right here. What happens in the in-between, though, and where did everybody go?

Morning word: Adult Protective Services in Tucson spent two hours talking to Helen, then upset my sister in Los Angeles by calling about all the same bullshit: Helen told them she has five kids, but no one will help her. No one will help her? Oh, please. I expect they’ll be calling me too. The reality is that no one can help her…

It’s a crazy-making vortex. There’s no way to “win,” it can’t be defeated. Anyone who gets involved risks serious damage. The old woman is choosing to die by going straight out of her mind. That’s why she moved into a living grave. I could get her into the fanciest nursing home in Tucson or Austin if she’d only agree, but no hope there, apparently. She’s also practiced her litany of imagined offenses against her so many times that she can tell it to strangers and sound halfway sane.

Astonishing, isn’t it?

When last I typed that title, I told how I’d decided to let Helen do whatever she wanted…

The old woman wouldn’t budge and wasn’t so far gone she couldn’t fool a social worker. Never mind “the voices” and losing $2,500 in cash. Never mind paying too much for an awful trailer she didn’t need with 50 grand she needed to keep. Never mind the permanent reduced breathing capacity and a history of “minor” strokes. Never mind that she’d moved from a beautiful home with room for live-in help to a pathetic dark hole where nothing would ever work. Never mind that she was living out her own worst nightmare but had no self-awareness. Never mind, never mind. She could live on stale fig newtons if she wanted, there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t believe how far gone she was, and that her doctors wouldn’t help me.

It seems so bloody obvious. She can hardly walk, she wets the bed, her dentures are worn and make her look like hell. SHE HEARS VOICES. SHE GETS BATSHIT CRAZY MEAN WITH RAZOR BLADES. She thinks she has things fixed up “just the way I want them” when someone else’s pictures are still hanging on the wall, and she can’t take a real bath ’cause the tub is way too small.

If she wouldn’t accept help, though, there was no way for her to have it. I was letting go, and in this found a measure of compassion. Hopeless or not, maybe her wish to keep her “independence” rated more respect. Giving it up had to be a horrendous prospect, even if her material circumstances would be much improved. Maybe she had a right to go to hell in front of everyone and die unhappy. She’d be unhappy (or much worse), no matter what. Maybe there was something deeper going on that I was meant to watch and learn from.

At any rate, I finally went to see her. Her house was locked, and at first she wouldn’t let me in. I could see her sitting on the sofa while I knocked on the glass, and after a minute or two, she relented and let me in through the kitchen door. I got her a glass of water and sat down next to her on the dead man’s sofa.

“WHY DID YOU COME?” she asked, loudly and bitterly (the high point of the visit).

I told her I was deeply sorry for raising my voice against her the day before and trying to make her go into a nursing home. I told her she could stay in her trailer as long as she wanted, but that all five of her children believed she should be somewhere where she’d be looked after. I told her how worried we were and how much we cared. I told her she had taught me a lot about growing old,and I meant it.

“I DON’T WANT TO HEAR THAT MUSHY STUFF!” she shouted, livid with rage.

Amazingly, I was still detached and told her how my brother and sister in Austin had found a couple of very nice nursing homes she might like. I said I wanted her to come to Taos, but I knew she wouldn’t like the cold, and that we all thought it best if she would move to Austin.

“WHY WOULD I GO WHERE THERE’S NO ONE TO VISIT ME?”

Patiently, I pointed out my two siblings and their spouses in Austin, enough that someone would be able to visit almost every day.

“I DON’T WANT THAT!”

She then proceeded to excoriate and damn every one of my siblings. She said we’d never come to visit her in Tucson (not true), that no one cared, especially me, and that I never gave a damn about my father, either. I was witnessing a breathtakingly alien torrent of anger and hatred. There was nothing maternal at all to this entity, whoever or whatever it was, inhabiting the almost 87-year-old body of my mother. The dark wild thing was now off my shoulders and fully manifested in her. I felt released but in great danger and suddenly rose to leave. “I’m going back to Taos tomorrow, Mother,” I said.

“GOOD!” she snapped. I bent down to kiss her on the forehead, then opened the door. As I walked down the steps, she shouted after me, “I DON’T NEED YOU, JOHNNY!”

I drove back to her old home where I was staying, literally shaking from the impact of what had just happened. My solar plexus was throbbing. I called my wife and paced for two hours until I calmed down. In 63 years of relating to Helen, I’d never experienced anything this stark or clearly dangerous, but I also felt a hint of something unmistakably good. After all, my conscience was finally clear…

The elation I’ve felt since is not unlike the newfound appreciation for life that welled up some days after watching my father die some 20 years ago. It washed over me at the time like a healing flood. The energy is similar now, only deeper, and this involves release.

I couldn’t believe how beautiful the stupid rutted dirt road looked when I finally hit the last turn before our house. I couldn’t believe how stunning my wife was or how perfect the air felt. I couldn’t believe how happy I was to be home.

My honey says I’m different. I’m still disoriented and exhausted, but basically good. I may be standing straighter, and I’ll bet I’ve lost a little weight.

Now there’s a title you don’t see every day, and the guys who made it possible aren’t everyday fellows, either.

How it turned out that in my advanced decreptitude I’ve finally found friends who not only share many of my own predilections and cultural underpinnings but also take care of each other is mildly astounding to me. I say “mildly” because I always figured it was possible to live like that, but the actualization seemed to elude me. Probably I was too fucked up myself, not to put too fine a point on it. If that’s the case, then I must have evolved in recent years, or else I just hit the jackpot. Call it grace and good luck.

But these two fine companions, both outstanding musicians, having followed my recent travails as best they could from my raging emails, wanted to give me a chance to vent. I was invited to a night of therapeutic drinking and gentlemanly pursuits — well, mostly drinking — and vent I did. First I sang them a song I’d written yesterday afternoon, one that you’ll be able to hear soon. [See below*] In the course of the evening, we finished a fifth of Cuervo 1800 and I got dog hair all over my clothes. That would be from Popeye, the resident terrier (?). Much hilarity ensued after the venting, and I even got fed. I also heard an earful about another mother, and it shook me to the bone.

(How did we ever survive???)

When I got back to the run-down adobe on the side of the hill and sat down at my MacBook to catch up on my emails before crawling into bed, there was a message from my brother Rob. It was a beautiful message in many ways and ended with the declaration that the next time, we would both go to Tucson. That remains to be seen, of course, since I’ve said I won’t go back unless Helen is dead or in protective custody, but if she’s really out of it (say, crawling around in circles on the floor and drooling), then a guardianship hearing might prove productive. Time will tell.

What hit me hardest in the email, however, were a few sentences summarizing what life had been like at home in Houston during my younger siblings’ high school years, a period I knew little about. At that time I was at UT-Austin learning where to put it and getting my hippie credentials, so I hardly ever went “home” at all. Guana santo, man!

Remember, I was down in Houston living the hellhouse - ruled by an hourly cycle of shouting fights despite counseling and over God knows what while Mom was going for shock treatments and then the brain tumor. Back then I was hoping they’d divorce and I could move in with Dad. (Dad may have had his issues, but at least he seemed reasonable to me, and I now understand how he got so frustrated when I couldn’t grok his attempts to tutor me in Algebra II).

I got into bike riding back then as a means of staying detached from the madness at home. B____ stayed home and cried a lot. M____ practiced her saxophone and we both spent as much time at school as we could. Band, we called it. B____, not so lucky. He stuck around stuffing his face with chips while attempting to drown out the madness with a television set.

I had literally no idea. Dear God in heaven.

* Oh yes, the song. It’s the first one I’ve written in years, and the rest of the lyrics will fall into place shortly. This is all I have so far, but it sounds great accompanied by my resophonic bouzouki in Appalachian death-stomp mode. In a few days, I hope to have a recording posted here, so keep your eyes and ears open. In the meantime, here’s what I have so far. The title of this piece is [ahem], “Mother Don’t Kill Me,” and it’s a sure-fire hit in hell:

Mother I beg you don’t kill me
don’t throw me outside with the trash
it don’t matter how much you’ve gone crazy
I’d be happy to turn you to ash

Well I came ‘cause you said you were dyin’
I came ‘cause my siblings were scared
but the nightmare I found down in Tucson
was worse than I ever had dared

So Mother I beg you don’t kill me
don’t throw me outside with the trash
it don’t matter how much you’ve gone crazy
I’d be happy to turn you to ash

Then I’d take you on back to Kent County
put you down in the ground next to Dad
there’d me no more abusin’ and fightin’
be the best time that I ever had

Transmutation, chilluns!