Never Had a Home

I don’t know how to tell you I never had a home. We had houses–almost more than I could count, moving from one to the next, but no home. When people asked if my dad was in the military, I eventually just said yes, because that was easier than saying we got evicted again. Never having a friend for longer than six months, parents hanging up phones that I’d stay silent on, trying to think of something to say to the friends I left behind. They wanted me to leave it all, friends included. No reminders of the past.

I got it down to a science. Would get in a big fight with whoever picked on me first, blacken their eyes and bust their lip so I’d be left alone till we inevitably had to move again. Mom would work at gas stations or dollar stores, whatever she could hold down. Dad worked here and there as a driver, which gave him the idea that he could drive home after getting plastered at the bar on his days off. But if you pull the trigger enough times in Russian Roulette, you’re bound to find a bullet.

He went over a guardrail going 70. When the car came to rest at the bottom of the hill, it barely resembled a car. Let’s just say the ambulance didn’t exactly have to rush to the hospital.

After he died, my mom very quickly developed a chronic pain condition. The doctors had all sorts of reasons for it, but we all knew it was from heartbreak. Sometimes the emotional can become physical. She was prescribed painkillers, strong ones, but she never took them. Instead, she took to selling them when she was scheduled to work alone at the gas station, passing them to her customers along with their change. It was the only way she could keep us from being put out on the streets. She could’ve taken some and sold the rest, but she wanted to get the most money she could. She wanted me to be comfortable. So she suffered in great pain all day, every day. The logistics of managing a guilt that great are tricky, I can tell you. Having to sit by as a kid, helpless, as your mom cries in the bathroom, running the water in the hopes that you won’t be able to hear her, saying she was just freshening up when you ask.

Mom had a string of boyfriends, guys who by default went out in sleeveless shirts, made mountains of beer cans that would collect in the corners of the kitchen like some joke of an art installation. Years later, I’d do something similar at my first gallery feature: a pile of all the household items that can be used to destroy a life. Eventually, muttered insults would turn to shouts, and shouts would turn to pushes, and pushes would turn to punches. At 14, 15, 16, I didn’t have much chance of fighting them off of her, but I’d always try. Got a couple of black eyes that I’d cover up with mom’s concealer when she wasn’t around. I didn’t need Mom getting in trouble for something that wasn’t her fault.

I started reading, painting. I’d practice speaking into the mirror, refining the way I spoke. Saved up a summer’s worth of lawn mowing money and bought clothes that belied our poverty. A college roommate put it this way when I eventually let him in on my upbringing: “Man, I just thought you were some white dude from the suburbs.”

Here I am all these years later, settling in in Chicago, Wicker Park to be specific, standing in front of this gleaming white building that I’m meant to inhabit, meant to become the artistic director for this colony of artists. None of them have seen my eyes blackened, smelled the shirts I had to put on, day after day, when the washer would break and we had no money for repairs. They won’t know that I never had a home, and I’m not sure I’d be able to tell them even if I wanted to.

They say secrets keep you sick, but how bad can it be if I’ve been sick all my life? I’ve gotten used to it. So I’ll keep these stories close, hold them in so tight that they’ll never show. The best actors are the ones who don’t know who they really are. They disappear and reappear the way that they’re supposed to.

This will be the first city I’ve settled in my entire life. I have no plans to leave anytime soon, if ever, and it hits me that I don’t quite understand what this means. To plant my feet somewhere and call it home. Is that what this is? Maybe that’s what I’ll make it. And I’ll stay. Stay as long as I can. As long as the concealer stays on. As long as the new clothes hold up. As long as the smile can hide the pain.