Ballads of Suburbia (13 page)

December 1993

E
VERYONE WANTS TO KNOW THE STORY BEHIND
the tattoo. It's pretty hard to miss. Huge black letters down my forearms. Capital T-H-R-O-W-N on my right arm and A-W-A-Y down the left. In that fancy Old English scrawl, like all the rappers and the big skinhead dudes at hardcore shows get.

I say, you know how people got tattooed in concentration camps? It's kinda like that. This will always remind me that I survived the suburbs.

It's a shitty and un-PC thing to say, I know, but my shrink didn't label me a sociopath for nothing. And if I'm not saying something like that I'm making up a story:

I got it because my best friend and I got jumped. They shot us both for our sneakers and threw us in a Dumpster. I survived. He didn't.

I got it because my father flew into a rage about a golf game and came home so pissed that he threw me off a balcony.

I got it because my parents threw me out and I moved in with my
mother's best friend. She's my sugar mama. It says “Picked Up” on my ass cheeks.

I got it because I'm a Dumpster baby. You know, a chick on the cheerleading squad got knocked up, had me in the bathroom stall during prom, and tossed me out with the trash.

I like good stories. That's why I started to collect them. The newspaper clippings, my friends' stories. The stories of suburbia, there's some great ones, huh? I like to think my own story is a combination of the last two. Minus the sleeping-with-my-mom's-best-friend and the thrown-in-the-trash parts. And I guess it's about time I told it.

My parents and I have had a hard time getting along since the beginning. My adoptive parents, I mean. Apparently, they brought me home when I was six months old and I cried for the next six months. Of course, I didn't even find out I was adopted until sixth grade. I learned it in typical suburban fashion: at the shrink's.

I'd been forced to start seeing the shrink the year before because I was LD/BD/ADD—you name it, if it ends with a D for disorder, I got it. On the plus side, my whacked-out brain chemistry is how I met my best friend, Quentin. We were always in the principal's office for acting out in class and the two of us started doing drugs together when we were eight. The legal ones: Ritalin, Adderall, Dexadrine. We traded them like baseball cards and took more than our prescribed dosages.

Anyway, my parents told the shrink I was adopted and he decided they should let me in on the secret, so we had our first and only family session. Suspicious, I went in with my arms crossed and parked myself on a chair instead of with them on the couch. Dad just sat there while Mom clasped and unclasped her manicured hands and smiled her fake-ass smile. “You were born in New Orleans,” she began. I arched my eyebrows, but quickly settled back into a poker face.

Mom and Dad spent a couple years doing all they could to combine their own genes, and when that failed, my barren mother window-shopped for babies like she'd once shopped for shoes. They'd scoured the country from New York to San Diego, but none of the babies were good enough.

“Then we found you.” My mom squeezed her eyes shut, clasped her hands tighter, and I almost expected her to click her heels together three times like she was fuckin' Dorothy trying to go home. She even resembled Judy Garland with the perfect coif of dark hair and the sparkle in her eyes masking the doped-up sheen. I'd always thought I'd inherited that hair from her, but apparently not. My hair had drawn her to me, though. “You were perfect, with that head full of big brown curls and the most soulful eyes I've ever seen.” Yep, “soulful eyes,” like a goddamn puppy dog. My mom, creative as a stick.

As I listened to her, one thought played on a loop,
These people aren't my parents, that's why I'm nothing like them.
This was both liberating and frustrating because, well, who the hell
were
my parents? But by the end of the session, I was still too overwhelmed to ask. The shrink prescribed drugs and regular individual visits, more of the same. I did those things when I felt like it. Collecting the articles for my suburban scrapbook became my form of therapy.

We had an assignment the first day of seventh grade where our social studies teacher handed out a stack of newspapers and told us we had half the period to find an article that interested us. Then we'd explain how it affected our lives. I found something in the
Chicago Tribune
about a fourteen-year-old girl who tossed her baby in the Dumpster after giving birth and went back to her honors English class. I carefully ripped it out and was the first to raise my hand when Mr. Baldwin asked who was ready to present. I summarized for the class, being sure to mention the gory details, like the bloody mess in the bathroom. I said, So that relates to me 'cause I'm adopted and that's probably what my birth mother did to me when I was a baby.

Jaws dropped. Mr. Baldwin had been warned in advance about me, like all of my teachers had been, so he took me outside and asked in a concerned voice if I'd taken my meds that day. When I claimed that I didn't remember, he sent me off to the school shrink with a hall pass, but I just walked straight out of school with the article folded up in my back pocket. I eventually taped it into a fat, red, five-subject notebook that was meant for math homework. I'm sure the shrink would call creating the book a “meaningful act,” but everyone was so concerned about me ditching class, drinking, doing drugs, the typical
crap, that I never got around to telling anyone but my friends about my opus to suburbia.

I didn't ask for the real deal about where I came from until the beginning of junior year of high school, when my parents and I had our biggest blowout.

I dropped out of school today, I informed them at dinner while Dad scooped mashed potatoes onto his plate. The blue bowl smashed on the ice white ceramic tile. Dad finally lost it.

Up until that point, he'd lectured me, grounded me, and despite my every defiance kept his cool like a champion chess player. But that night the face that was tanned by weekly golf games turned purple and everything he'd wanted to say came out. “No son of mine,” he growled.

Technically, I'm not.

Dad turned on my dazed mother. “You were the one who wanted this.”
This
meaning the adoption.
This
meaning
me.
“I told you that with somebody else's kid there would be no predicting.” Yep, that was Dad, the accountant, a genius at logic, numbers, variables, and graphs. The more he spoke, the more I knew he'd always been distant not because I didn't enjoy golf or math homework or anything he liked, but because I wasn't his own flesh and blood. He made it clear he hadn't been the one who picked me out or even wanted me. “We knew nothing about how they treated him in the first six months of his life.”

Mom objected, “Wait! You said you knew they treated him well. He was your friend's daughter's kid.”

“Not ‘friend,' an old business associate. I never claimed to know about his personal life. You just had to have a baby…”

I couldn't believe they were talking about me like I was a dog that turned out not to be pedigreed. I wasn't their troubled kid who they loved and wanted to care for. I was the poorly trained poodle who kept shitting on the carpet. Dad probably wished he could put me to sleep. I hated him so much. I imagined that he and his “business associate” had stolen me from my real mom. She probably missed me. She probably actually
wanted
me.

It was my turn to break a dish. Lots of them. I threw things off the table, demanding, Who are my real parents? Where are they? Tell me now. Tell me right fucking now.

Mom and Dad watched in horror as dishes, sloppy potatoes, dry meat, and slimy gravy hit the pristine floor. Mom fretted over how long it would take to clean up, and Dad shouted about how much it would cost to replace all this crap.

And when the fight was over, the kitchen totally trashed along with any family bond the three of us had ever shared, the guy who raised me told me to get out, that I couldn't come back until I followed
his
rules and went back to school and therapy. But in my mind, I'd won the argument, because when I threatened to start on the wedding china, the woman who raised me ran to her bedroom and came back with a page from her address book. My real mother's info.

But I wouldn't even see what the inside of her house looked like. I made a fifteen-hour, NoDoz-fueled drive down I-55 to stand on her porch—if a house with columns like a Roman palace has something as lowly as a porch—and wasn't even invited inside.

When I arrived in the Garden District of New Orleans, I took one look at the mansion and figured it had to belong to my mother's parents—my stodgy grandparents who had brokered the deal with the people who raised me.

I figured they'd direct me to a graveyard and tell me I'd gotten my self-destructive genes from my real mom. She was a drug addict, that's why my brain chemistry was out of whack. Or maybe she'd killed herself after they made her give me up.

If she wasn't dead, she'd probably been disowned. In the five years since I'd found out she existed, I'd attributed everything about myself to her. I didn't fit in with my middle-class, suburban classmates and, in my mind, she hadn't either. I made weird collages and scrapbooks, so she had to be an artist of some sort.

I never expected her to come to the door of a palatial mansion, summoned by a maid, no less, completely comfortable with what wasn't just suburban housewifery but filthy, fuckin' old-money rich. She carried herself like a little girl taught to walk with a book on her head. She'd perfected the patronizing smile meant for the help. She dressed high fashion, gave no hint she was hiding anything like tattoos or piercings or suicide scars or stretch marks from some illegitimate birth sixteen years earlier.

The only thing I recognized of myself in her was the shape and shade of the brown eyes I saw in the mirror every day. And Pseudo-Mom must have been wrong about them being soulful, because Bio-Mom's were completely soulless.

She looked at me, this kid with rumpled, unwashed hair, bloodshot eyes, and stained, torn clothing, like I was dogshit on the bottom of her pricey shoes.

Even though my own emotions were rioting, I had to mess with this woman's world. She was the kind of chick I did that to, whether it was throwing fruit at her BMW or stealing her checkbook and buying more crap I didn't need.

I'm Adrian. I'm the kid you gave up, I told her.

She didn't blink for about a minute, but that was her only indication of emotion. Maybe we had the medication thing in common, too. Finally she asked, “What are you doing here?”

I retorted angrily, What do you think? I wanted to know who my real parents are.

She did the long blink thing again—I didn't come to think of her as Bio-Mom just because of biology; she acted like a bionic woman. “Your real parents raised you.”

No.

We would have remained there, holding an intense staring contest as the humidity in the air built, but a shuffling sound came from the house and then the shrill voice of a little girl. “Mommy, it's time to ride bikes!”

Bio-Mom looked trapped. She called, “Just a minute, Lily!” and closed the big, oak door, stepping onto the porch with me.

Concern flooded Bio-Mom's face. “You have to go home,” she whispered sharply. “You can't be here. I have a life.” She glanced back at the door, obviously worried that Lily might manage to heft it open.

I see that, I said bitterly, enraged that she'd cast me off because I'd come at an inconvenient time and then started a new family without any remorse.

Seeming to sense what I was thinking—maybe possessing some motherly intuition after all—her voice broke slightly when she told me, “I tried to keep you. It wasn't your fault. I was a sixteen-year-old rich girl who'd never dealt
with any responsibility in her life and you cried all the time. I couldn't handle the crying.”

I glared at her and spat, I suppose
Lily
never cried.

“Not like you did. I don't know why…I guess you knew how I felt…” She shifted from foot to foot, shorter than me even in her heels, and she broke our gaze to look over her shoulder at the door once more, cocking her ear for sounds coming from behind it.

I was ready to walk off then, but I realized I had one last hope. There was one more person I might identify with. My father, I asked. Can you tell me where he is?

This question finally destroyed her medicated mask, but somehow her tears didn't smear her perfectly applied makeup. “It was a crazy time when you were born. It was the end of the seventies. We were bored, we had money, coke was big. I was a different person. We were all different people. Someday you'll grow up. You'll grow up and you'll realize everyone does stupid things when they are young and everyone makes mistakes. But you'll be able to fix them like I was. I know you have good parents. My parents picked good parents for you.”

Yeah, obviously they're great, seeing as I'm here, looking for you, I snapped.

“They're good people. They'll help you find your way,” she continued to babble. Every word was so superficial. Basically she was saying:
“You can fuck up when your parents have money. That's why I gave you to someone with money. 'Cause inevitably you'd be fucked-up like me.”
I didn't want to hear it.

My father, I repeated.

She sighed heavily. “I don't know. Maybe he's my husband. I always told him that he was your dad, but I've always wondered…I've always known,” she corrected, after another over-the-shoulder glance confirmed we still had privacy, “it was his best friend, Joe.” Her eyes got shiny but not tearful. “Joe died a couple of years ago in the Middle East during the Gulf War. We all got our lives together after you. I went to college. Alex and Joe joined the army. Alex became a doctor when he got out and Joe stayed in, went special opera
tions. We got our lives together. I have a life.” She turned her body away from mine, back toward the door, where the kid she wanted waited for her.