Sleeping Pills

I wrote this a few nights ago when I couldn't sleep...it's called "Sleeping Pills."  

I try to fall asleep,
but rarely do.
At first I only take one,
but end up taking two.

Perhaps I should pursue a career as a poet?

Ouzo

Yesterday night, at approximately 11:30 pm, our neighbor, Ms. Linda, stumbled into our kitchen via the backdoor yelling that she needed my mom. 

"I'm going to kill myself.  I have a bunch of pills that I can take if you don't come down here!"  She yelled.

This was by no means a real threat, I think she just needed some attention.  Ms. Linda was wasted, or "sloshed" as we like to say around the house.  My mom came down the stairs, ready for the normal routine of calming Ms. Linda down.

When my mother accused Ms. Linda of being drunk, she responded with: "Julie, I'm not drunk right now, I'm high."

"On what?"

At this question, Ms. Linda paused for a moment in deep thought.  I expected her to say she had taken pills or something like that but a smirk took over her face as she answered: "vodka."

I don't know how long she has had a drinking problem but it has certainly has gotten increasingly worse the longer she lives with her mother-in-law.  A few months back, Ms. Linda's mother-in-law, Ms. Chris, lost the home that she had lived a great portion of her life in.  Ms. Linda's husband, Mr. Dan, had no other choice but to invite his mother to live with them.  Ms. Chris is a 99-year-old Greek woman.  She speaks broken English but I have a feeling that she understands more than she lets on.  Ms. Linda and Ms. Chris do not get on well at all.  They are constantly arguing with one another.  Earlier this summer, whilst my friend from England was visiting, we came home to find my mother talking with a disgruntled Mr. Dan.  The kids were sitting on the couch, eagerly listening in on the conversation.  When I offered to take them to Rita's for a treat, my 11-year-old sister motioned me to be quiet by moving her finger over her mouth.  They wanted to stay to hear the drama.

Apparently, while I was away, Ms. Chris and Ms. Linda had gotten into a epic battle next door, it was a clash of the Titans, Troy versus the Greeks.  Ms. Chris had proceeded to sink her teeth into Ms. Linda's arm.  Linda then came over to our house, screaming and upset, her shirt covered in blood.  My nine-year-old brother sat beside her, nursing her wounds with a wet washcloth and consoling her while my mother went next door to referee the fight.

I had only seen Ms. Linda's arm in the aftermath.  It looked pretty brutal.  There was a clear imprint of a jaw line sunk into her arm, that had now flourished into a deep blue-purple color.  Her shirt was covered in splats of blood.  It was quite apparent that shit had gone down next door.  I imagined this tiny Greek woman, almost a century old, with her one tooth latched on to her daughter-in-law's arm as Linda flailed about, trying to get this woman off of her.  This reminded me of a zombie movie.  The mother-in-law, thirsty for her daughter-in-law's blood had attempted to rip her arm off for food.  This is how I imagined the attack going down in my head.

I am glad that I was not here to witness this fight.  It would have ruined my individual picture of the two of them.  Ms. Chris is nice enough.  She sits on her porch and murmurs "such a pretty girl" as I make small talk with her.  Occasionally, when she wanders off the porch, I chase after her and offer my arm to help her back to the house.  She frequently smells of soaked urine but then again, so does Ms. Linda.

Ms. Linda is a sweet woman, when she hasn't switched over to Mr. Hyde.  It used to annoy me that it took her at least two months to figure out who I was.

My sister and I are almost polar opposites as far as looks are concerned.  She is tall, I am short.  She is a red-head, I am a brunette.  Our mannerisms are almost identical, however, our difference in looks provided me with the ammunition of telling Bella that she was adopted when we were younger.

"Think about it Bella, you don't look like any of us.  We found you in a basket in the stream."

I think this may have caused a lifetime of insecurity.  To this day, after looking the mirror, my sister sometimes says "I swear I am adopted." 

"Which one are you?"  Ms. Linda would ask me, referring to whether I was me or my sister.

I wanted to respond, "what are you talking about?  We just met earlier today," but I thought it was better not to.  Never rile an angry drunk.  So I'd smile and repeat me name, over and over again.

Hell, if I were in her position, I would probably become a raging alcoholic too.  Having to stay at home all day with a Greek mother-in-law, especially when her only child is her son.  Women are possessive over their sons because they are aware of the manipulative nature of girls in the same way that men are possessive of their daughters because they know when young men are thinking.  It's human nature.  Millions of years of evolution has made us this way, an infinite series of events that have shaped us.  It's going to take much more than good advice to change something like that. 

When Ms. Linda came over last night, she was in a particular drunken state.  Making it to 11 pm as an alcoholic is quite an accomplishment.  After 12 hours of continuous drinking, you're likely to enter an almost hallucinatory state by that point.  She came over, equipped with a 16 oz. can of Michelob Ultra, telling us about how earlier that day Ms. Chris had told her son that Ms. Linda had made out with the BGE workman, despite the fact that they were all together in the same house, in fact, in adjacent rooms.  The worse part is that Mr. Dan and Ms. Chris communicate with one another in Greek while Ms. Linda has no idea what they are saying to each other.  On this occasion, Ms. Chris had told Mr. Dan this is Greek, so Ms. Linda really had no idea what was actually said.  Ms. Linda sat on the couch, which left a faint smell of urine when she went home (much like marking her territory).

"This movie is shit," she barked, referring to 'The Count of Monte Cristo,' one of my mother's favorites.  "What's that movie with the girls drinking?  It was on the other day."

"Practical Magic?"

"Yeah, that one.  Let's watch that."

So we watched 'Practical Magic' while Ms. Linda calmed down and we finally got her to see the comical side of the day's earlier events.  She left, smiling and laughing.  No more Mr. Hyde, back to Dr. Jeckyll...until the magic potion once again touches her lips.

Coke and Cigarettes

My mother’s diet consists of two things: Coca-Cola and cigarettes. She could easily go through a 12-pack of coke and two packs of cigarettes in a day…two packs of Marlboro Reds, cowboy killers. She used to smoke Camel Lights (or ‘Camel Blues,’ as they are now referred to) but she switched to Reds when she claimed that Camels had begun to make their filters larger and use less tobacco. Personally, I think that she just enjoys the harshness of the Marlboro Reds, the classic American cigarette. There is so much nostalgia involved with a Marlboro Red…movie stars, cowboys, American spirit. Also, once you smoke Reds there is nothing further to advance to. It’s like reaching the top of the cigarette totem pole, the ultimate goal.

I never understood how she could live on this diet. A rock star maybe, but I think a lot of other drugs would be involved with that. After smoking a Marlboro Red, my throat feels like it has been grated down with sandpaper then covered in a thin layer of boiling tar. With every inhalation, I can feel the top layer of skin peeling off my pharynx. I would constantly feel like shit if I only smoked and then coated my aching throat with a cold, sugary combination of caramel coloring and carbonation. That being said, I suppose my mother always does feel like shit. She has always had severe migraines. My advice to her was to drink some water or stop smoking but that simply wasn’t an option for her – she’d go straight to the painkillers. Vicadin, oxycodone…you name it, it is probably in our house. That’s another staple of her diet: pills. After my mom finished the 200-tablet bottle of ibuprofen my sister had leant her (in a matter of days, potentially hours), Bella said that the only way my mom would drink water was if it were in pill form.

My mother got access to all these pills by simply going to the doctors’ office and they would write her out prescriptions for painkillers like they were candy. It wasn’t that she had a doctor friend that would help her out, this was the real thing. If she ran out of painkillers, it was time to go to the emergency room. I would drive her there, pissed off because I knew that she wasn’t really in life-threatening danger…infuriated when she would ask me to stop at Royal Farms for a pack of cigarettes and a 32 oz. fountain coke. I’d make a feeble attempt to dissuade her from getting a coke and cigarettes. I would get my only use of my recent biology degree, explaining to her that caffeine often triggers migraines and that maybe she should try drinking water. To this, she would bark back at me, “It’s not my head, it’s my fucking stomach. Water goes right through me.”

“Coke will go right through you too, mom. And water will hydrate you.”

“I feel like shit Soph, just stop at the god damn store.”

Weighing my options, I’d reluctantly pull into the Royal Farms parking lot and go get her what she needed. Dealing with her was bad enough, but without cigarettes and coke would be a nightmare. If my sister and I had learned one thing from growing up with my mother, it was that we could never win. Once when we were young and my mom had just begun smoking again, we read somewhere about a child who had flushed his mom’s cigarettes down the toilet in protest to get her to quit. Thinking it was a good idea to do the same; that our courageous act of valor would cause my mom to see how desperately we wanted her to quit and sympathize with us, we flushed all her cigarettes down the toilet. We were grounded and our allowances were taken away until we paid her back for all the cigarettes we had destroyed…and then some more for compensation.

In college, I would pick up my prescriptions at the pharmacy and not have to pay anything for them. I’d assume that it was because my parents switched insurance plans but I would later come to find that it was because my mom had spent a certain amount on prescriptions- once she reached a certain limit, they would be free. She spent at least twenty hours a week in a doctor’s office, it was much like a part-time job. And they would always give her what she wanted. She even got her gynecologist to prescribe her diet pills.

My mom has always been very persuasive. In high school, my family relocated to the Maryland-DC metro area from England. Although my sister and I attended school in Bethesda, we lived further outside the city because it was cheaper to accommodate our humungous circus-act of a family. Each morning, it took us about 45 minutes to an hour along I-270 to get into Bethesda. Commuting requires a great deal of time management. In order to arrive at school by 7:25, we would have to leave the house by 6:15 am (and of course arrive at school twenty minutes early). Any later than 6:15 am and we would be sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic for the greater part of the morning.

One day during my senior year of high school, when we had left later than 6:15 am because every morning my mom needed Starbucks, no matter how late we already were. This particular morning, my mother and I both fell asleep in the car. I was in the front with my mother, who was driving. Her falling asleep was not a rare occurrence, however, my sister or I would always be there to wake her when she began merging into another lane or about to swerve into the highway boundaries. On this day, I was not able to do this and to make it even worst, my sister was not with us. We awoke to the slamming of our green Mercury minivan into the trunk of a silver VW Jetta. Our van was a piece of shit. Back in 1997 when we bought it to accommodate the recent addition of a brother and sister, it was an amazing car…now, almost ten years later, it was anything but that. The right side of the van had already been destroyed by my step-father, a nervous city driver, who had scraped the car across a pole or something like that, leaving a long silver dent across the passenger side door, making it impossible to roll down the window or even open the door. The mirror had also been ripped off. I don’t even think it is legal to drive without adequate mirrors in the state of Maryland. On top of this, our tags were expired, not expired like the expiration date was September 31^st and it was October 1^st…at least three months over due, a result of complete neglect and laziness. Driving without insurance is an arrestable offence in Maryland, and sure enough, we didn’t have car insurance either. That’s not even the icing on the cake…my mom didn’t even have a driver’s license. She hasn’t had one since we lived in Virginia, which was when I was in second grade. Like myself, she preferred to be chauffeured around and also had no regard for meaningful laws, which is a contributing reason to why I still don’t have my license to this day. I still drive, just not legally and my mom has no problem with that.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she said, as she veered off the road into the shoulder of the massive six-lane highway. If we weren’t stuck in parking lot traffic that made it impossible to escape, I am positive that she would have done a hit and run.

My mom told me to wait in the car, while she spoke to the man whose car she had just hit. If only Bella were here, none of this would have happened.

Unlike my mother and I, she was the rational one of the family.

The driver was Asian and he couldn’t speak much English. While this was the point where two strangers would usually switch insurance information, my mom was showing her passport and trying to exchange phone numbers as she was rummaging through her disorderly purse pretending to look for her non-existent insurance information. Asian man was not having the phone number swap, he wanted a license number and insurance information. There was clearly no damage to the car but he began opening and closing his trunk, as if there was a problem. I studied my mom and wondered about how she planned to get out of this predicament when the familiar sounds of the law reverberated behind us.

“Well if we weren’t fucked then, we’re certainly fucked now,” I thought to myself.

The young, attractive police officer stepped outside of the vehicle after parking on the shoulder. Due to the lack of crime but excess amount of wealthy people in Montgomery County, fender benders were the most exciting thing that could occur to a police officer on any given day, except for maybe the chance to break up a high school party.

I watched through the cracked windshield as the police officer began to mediate the conversation between the Asian and my mother. Was my mom going to go to jail? The rumors would spread quickly around school, which was also coincidently my mother’s place of employment.

“Ms. ______ is in jail,” the students would say. The worse part was that my mom taught sophomore and senior English and this year, my sister was a sophomore and I was a senior so most of our friends ended up in her class. This would definitely have an effect on my social life at BCC. I needed to think of a badass story to cover up what really happened…and I needed to do it fast.

While I was coming up with the series of events that I would tell people about what had happened, I heard a familiar voice. Matt ______, my mom’s best friend, colleague, and neighbour had spotted our car from the highway. He pulled over on the shoulder in front of us. The road was now occupied with four different cars dealing with this one spectacle. It was a scene indeed.

My mom came over to the window. “Go with Matt. He’ll drive you to school.”

As much as I wanted to stay with my mom for moral support, I didn’t want to miss my first period class, peace studies. Today was protest day, which consisted of our class lining up along East-West Highway holding signs that said “Honk for Peace” and basking in the continuous sound of horns that would be sure to distract and infuriate teachers, who were already frustrated trying to keep students awake at 7:25 am. Our principal had been trying to prevent protest day on these very grounds, the noise was “too distracting.” After about fifteen minutes of continuous honking, he would march towards us, eager to catch us in the act of trying to cause a ruckus. Students would flip their signs over to read messages like “make love, not war” or “arms are for hugging.” With no proof of us antagonizing the drivers to honk, the class would explain that the drivers were simply excited by the prospect of peace in the morning, unlike you Principal Bulson, you peace hater.

After briefly considering my options, I willingly got into Boswell’s car. “Watch and learn,” he said as he veered back in to traffic. People are born as sirens, learning this stuff would be a much more difficult task. I watched my mom attempt to weasel her way out of this predicament from the rear view mirror.

Fifteen minutes later she called.

After realizing that she could not get out of this mess, she told the cop outright “Well, I may as well tell you all this because you’re going to arrest me anyways” and confessed to being uninsured, not having a license, expired tags, and all of the crimes committed on this perfectly normal morning.

He responded, “Well, ma’am, I at least have to give you a ticket for the expired tags.”

So she left the scene of the crime with a $40 ticket.

n.b. My mom is in no way a drug addict, just to clarify