In the spring of 1988, when I was 17 my mother was going through a difficult divorce from her second husband. He’d moved out of the house. Shortly thereafter my brother moved to my father’s house. My mother spent long hours at work, or she would return to the house after work and then leave again to go on long walks. She had stopped eating the previous autumn, and by the spring I had become good at boiling beans, and stretching the food for as long as possible.
We lived in a suburban house in a development with a sidewalk and old men who walked their poodles after work. There was a playground full of little kids at the end of the day. I could smell people with their BBQ. I kept the lawn mowed. I raked the leaves, but essentially from the spring of 1988 onward I had been kind of left to my own devices. I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons.
I didn’t really realize this at the time. My mother’s trips to the grocery stores became less frequent. She began to buy staples instead of the kind of convenience food like hot dogs, chips, soda. Instead she bought eggs, bags of rice, frozen chicken, and frozen hamburger. And gradually I became used to boiling beans or thawing chicken and making the food. My mother just didn’t eat anything. When she talked she talked in circles about the trouble with her exhusband. By the spring she had lost a massive amount of weight; some of her hair had fallen out; she was doing very poorly. She kept moving and talking and would wake in the middle of the night and sit on the sofa in the living room.
Mostly though she was gone. I went to school. I did my calculus homework. I played D&D. I mowed the lawn. I made food, and then the food ran low. I had started to apply to colleges, but the reality of college seemed like a remote, fragile thing. I had to enter my parent’s income on the financial aid forms. The schools where I wanted to go -- to a private school in Walla Walla, to Dartmouth, to a private school in Tacoma -- seemed expensive on a level that made it seemed possible to attend. That this, the amount of money required each year in tuition, much less the other expenses of attending school, seemed so preposterous, I just thought there was something I didn't understand. (Nope, they actually twice as much as money per year as my parents had originally paid for their house.) In practicality, even the state school cost too much. My mother encouraged me to apply to schools. My father shook his head. There is no way I will pay for you attend college he said. No one paid my way. I ended up confused and uncertain completely unable to see what my life would be like after I graduated. I was certain my mother would officially move out of the house, and then I was unsure where I would even life, much less what school I would attend.
During this time, an Army Recruiter found me. He was a tiny guy who wore Class As. He was missing teeth. He drove a dented Pontiac that had mismatched colored doors. He wore his hair short and oiled and slicked back over his scalp. He gave me a kind of used car salesmen pitch about the Army and then a handful of literature. Unlike the literature of Dartmouth say, the Army Reserve literature talked a about how much money I would make, they would provide training, and tuition for college. It would take nearly a year to train in the military. On one level everyone in my family had warned me about the Army. They do not tell you the truth; I had been told. But, I had in my hands promises and contracts. And all I had to do was enlist and when I graduated from high school I knew what I would be doing. I would get on an airplane (with a ticket the Army had paid for) and go to Basic Training and then school where I would, the literature said, learn a valuable skill.
I hesitated and delayed the recruiter and he went away. During the summer, my mother began to suffer panic attacks in the middle of the night. She went to bed almost every night and then ended up crying out at some point in the middle of the night. She rushed around the house. Doors slammed. The sink went off and on. She took a bath at three o’clock in the morning. When I woke, she was gone and wouldn’t return until the end of the day. She came home from work dressed in her work clothes with her security badge, and then left again. I lived on rice and beans.
When the recruiter called again, he took me out to lunch. I think that did it. I ate, and having not eaten food I’d (poorly) prepared for six months, I figured it couldn’t be as weird as it currently was and I would make the money I needed for college myself. I seemed like a fair trade. So enlisted. Enlisting suddenly put into my mind a kind of structure, a cap on what had bee happening. When I graduated from high school, I would climb on a plane and something else would happen.
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