There was nothing I would not do for D. I gave her the attention she had craved for the last decade. Although that was good for her, what she really needed was to be alone and find out who she was. When you start having children at 16 and are an excellent Mom, you put yourself on indefinite hold. Now that she was free of her former life, what she really needed was to let herself grow and see what she had within.
She told me about experiences that were so dark and brutal, I never looked at the world the same again. I fell in love with her, not in a healthy way, but in this weird duality of ways. First was a sort of hero worship in which, despite inhumane adversity, D maintained a loving bubble around her children. The second was that I felt a primal desire to rescue her and somehow undo her past. This was a leftover, ingrained childhood habit of mine from taking the position of protecting and guiding my mother through trials. My mother really did not need me worrying or trying to fix things, but at the time, I thought I was having some effect.
I don't think there is anything more powerful and destructive than an ignorant young man in love. I had no clue. I did not let that stop me. I was going to fix everything. I had never stood up on my own in this world. I was 19; for the most part, I had lived with either my parents or grandparents, with a couple of summers when I lived alone in campgrounds. I made $355.79 on the 1st and the 15th of every month. You could not tell me anything.
Because our relationship began so feverishly, it caught the attention of D's so-called family. Her Mom lived on the island, so did one of her sisters. The sister was pregnant and in a common law marriage with a guy who used to work for the City, as I was now. He was a brutal antagonist. He had some strange connection to her ex and took everything I said as a derogatory statement aimed at him. I tried to find common ground with him, but it never worked. As time went by, I tried so hard to win that battle, which meant lowering myself to what he was. It took me only 3 years to mature to see that this guy was the lowest of the low. Lowering myself to him to relate was pathetic. I had no compass. All I wanted was what I wanted. When I look back, what an absolute freak show this had to be for my father to witness. I feel eternally bad that during this time, I gave my father nothing to be proud of. In large ways, I showed him the worst of what I was while he was still here, more than I showed him the best.
Speaking of him, he was the only reason I did not end up dead or at least ambushed and beaten up within an inch of my life. Her ex and the so-called brother-in-law would have loved to do this. Fortunately, they were extremely afraid of my father, which allowed me to walk with immunity.
Dad and Brooke moved out of Jeri's old mobile home on Avenue J were we had been living since last fall, and moved into Charlie's mobile home on Oleander. That was bigger, much more fancy, and was on stilts, as many houses are on the island, so it sat 20 feet off the ground.
My new little family and I moved out of the cramped travel trailer in Mayfield's Park and into the mobile home on Avenue J. Not long after, her ex came and took the trailer and his VW Bus; he needed a place to live. Having the extra room was nice. I was trying to make this perfect life for us, but there were red flags and warnings almost hourly for the person with their eyes open. Mine were shut, but I swore to everyone voicing concern that they were open.
D needed her cycle broken, and with me it was, but that was the part she did not need. At nineteen, I was too naive to see it. Everything with us was intense. Her sister and her sister's boyfriend were with us so much of the time. He could never "find" a job and was supposedly out all day, every day, looking for one. His presence was more problematic for me than for everyone else. He was a drain on everyone around him. Every word spoken was a passive-aggressive manipulation.
It did not take a genius to see that he wanted D and that all his so-called loyalty to her ex was just leverage to keep me away from her. She loved a little buzz, and he knew it, so he made sure to show up with a little pot to share with her now and then. I never knew where he got it because he was not capable of earning any money.
We all drank. It was a way of life in Port A. A twelve-pack was legal tender. A windfall would be if you were walking on the beach and spotted black trash bags in the surf containing marijuana that was jettisoned off smugglers' boats, being approached by the US Coast Guard for inspection. The weed would be waterlogged, making it substandard. But it was like a redneck lottery in which the finder would dry it out, bag it up into small sales portions, and sell it for fifty cents on the dollar. Sea Weed it was called. The brother-in-law was frequently associated with these seaweed dealers and had some of this garbage on him.
He was always trying to get D alone and found many ways to do so. This consumed me with rage because I wanted her to tell him to get lost and never come back. It put a hole in me all day long as I worked. I was consumed with jealousy and worry. She and I worked at the same place and the same hours. There was one time she had the afternoon off. As I came down Park Road 53, driving past Avenue J, I could see her ex's 10-speed bike parked in my driveway, next to my dead car, which had not moved since the Great Dodge Space Time Disaster on March 4th. We walked and rode bikes to get around the island.
There were times her ex would stop by to see the kids, which, of course, was ok, but the history bothered me. I had heard about the bad, but I knew there were also many good times. The whole thing was too much for my immature brain to comprehend. Everything for me was a dance with hidden knives everywhere.
One Saturday morning, D walked to the store for milk. She was missing for hours. I had searched all over the island for her. I eventually found her at a woman she worked with's house, mellowing out and visiting. At any other time in my life, I could have understood this as no big deal, but in the here and now, I could not believe she would be so insensitive as to make me think something had happened to her. It should have been my wake-up call that she really needed to start her life alone to work through the last 12 years. She was carrying so much.
Every day was like self-inflicted conditioning for me, like Alice Cooper's No More Mister Nice Guy. I was an innocent, yet overbearing kid, just wanting to shower this amazing girl with all that was good. Most of the time, it was met with limited tolerance, anger, a lack of appreciation, and retaliation that seemed out of place. While it did not feel like it at the time, she was molding me into a very different person from the one I started out as. Somewhere down the road, despite all of the pain, the dying daily inside I felt, and inflicted upon myself, I would grow to become thankful for her and all of it. It was brutal and dark, but it wasn't her fault. She was always trying to tell me what she needed, and I could not hear it.
I tried to do things with her, Brooke, and Dad. Those times provided a little few hours of releif from my panic. It was clear that Dad and Brooke saw no good in this union. They were right, of course, but I could not be told. I have never met a person more stubborn than I was here until I saw my sons grow up decades later.
The summer played on. I was a tense, twisted knot of a person wishing that I could fix everything. I did not even have a car, which made me feel even more powerless. My Dad, who had been my best friend for over a year, was now watching from a distance that I put him at. It had to be like watching a heroin addict slowly slipping into the abyss.
I drank hard to numb the orchestra of torture I was feeling. I showed up to work so hungover every day. I worked mostly alone, so my 1977 Chevy Pickup and its 8-Track player, with my cousin Tom's old 8-Tracks, brought me some soothing. But the fact remained, I was into something that I had to figure out a way to get D away from these parasites of her past.
My Grandmother had recently made public that she was going to give her car to my father. He said he did not want it. So, I called her and told her about an idea I had: D, the kids, and I would all move to Connecticut, and if she was giving Dad the car and he did not want it, we could use it to get our lives up there started.
My Grandmother has had to deal with adversity that I cannot imagine. She handled this well with me, always speaking lovingly but with absolute direction, not the direction I wanted. I am sure that the next time she talked with my father, he probably told her there was nothing he could do because he had tried.
The conversation I did not know about was the one she had with my Grandfather. She was my father's mother. She called my mother's father. "You're his Grandfather. You have to get through to him. He is ruining his life. You have to go down there and talk some sense into him." As if that would ever happen, my Grandfather coming down to Port Aransas, to his ex-son-in-law's city of refuge.
The summer days and nights continued to eat at me like cancer. Highs and lows. Listening to lies conjured up by the brother in laws unscrupulous lack of morality. D even spending a Friday night at her ex's to "talk." I kept trying to mold everything into something I could somehow understand and manage. The whole time, it was like running ahead of a title wave that I knew I could never outrun. no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much help I received, I could not get any part of my life or the lives of those around me under control. 1985 was a little more than half over, and it was going to get worse.
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