In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World Page 4

  “Where is she going?” I asked.

  “To a rehab center. She’ll be gone for a few weeks. I already called Bob, and he’s going to move in and take care of you while she’s gone.” This made me feel relieved. I missed Bob, and I hoped that maybe once Mom got out of rehab and everything returned to normal, they might even get back together.

  She was supposed to be gone for a month. The rehab was about half an hour away, but we weren’t allowed to visit for the first few days while she went through detox. After that, the doctors moved her into the main treatment center, and Bob took us to visit her every Wednesday afternoon. It was clear from the start that she hated it there.

  “I don’t belong in this place,” she said the first time we came to visiting hours. She was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt, her ponytail still damp from a shower. She was sitting on the bottom bunk in a room full of bunk beds, like some sort of summer camp cabin for grown-up boozers. “Everyone in here is crazy!” The thing is, I think she was right. There were scary-looking people rocking back and forth in the hallways and mean-looking ladies with needle tracks all up and down their arms, their faces distorted from meth use. “I just got drunk a few times,” Mom pleaded with us. “But these people are hard-core drug addicts!”

  I felt bad for her, but Bob was adamant about her staying. “You need help. You need some time to do some work on yourself before you can come back and try to take care of Joey and Nicole.”

  She finally put her foot down after three weeks. No one could legally keep her in there, and she came back home. And things were great—for a while. She stayed sober for three months. It felt incredible to have my mom back. I’d missed her so much. The warm glow she carried inside her returned and made me feel happy and safe. It was also awesome to have Jonica over and not have to worry about Mom acting up. When she did start drinking again, she managed to keep it under control at first, and I still held out hope that maybe the worst was all behind us.

  But soon she began to come home paranoid and freaked out that people were coming to get her. When I’d ask her who was after her, she couldn’t say.

  A good example of just how bad she’d gotten was the night my friend Zak slept over. He was the son of a friend of my mom’s, and they lived three towns over, so we didn’t get to see each other very often. But I was always happy when I did. He was skinny with short blond hair, and we loved to play video games together. One night he was staying over when Mom started in about how a bunch of men were coming to get her. Zak and I got so freaked out that we barricaded ourselves in my room with my dog, Bailey, and slept with butcher knives under the pillows. I had always gotten the sense that Zak didn’t exactly come from the most stable household, so if he was scared too, I knew things must be pretty terrible.

  I realize now that no one was coming for her and she was just being delusional. But at the time it was terrifying, and I couldn’t figure out who this woman with the face of my mom was. I just wanted my old mom back.

  Whenever Nicole was home, she wasn’t having any of my mom’s behavior. The two of them began to fight with each other over the smallest little things. If Nicole left a dirty plate in the kitchen sink, Mom would start in on her hard, but Nicole didn’t take her seriously at all when she was drunk and so she’d ignore Mom, which just escalated Mom’s anger until Nicole had no choice but to start screaming back at her.

  My mom’s drinking and all of their fighting ended up driving Nicole out of the house. She couldn’t take it and moved in with my dad. I was devastated about losing Nicole. I felt abandoned, and while I entertained the thought of maybe asking if I could move in with Dad too, I couldn’t bring myself to leave Mom. I cared about her too much and felt that I needed to be there to take care of her. And it was a good thing I did, because a little less than a year after my mom got out of rehab, Bob moved out again. They fought constantly and couldn’t seem to make it work. So suddenly it was just my mom and me living together, and I felt more than ever that I had to be strong for her. But it was hard. All I wanted was to have a mother who could take care of me. It didn’t seem like things could get any worse. Until they did.

  Our year lease on the ranch house ran out, and one week while I was on vacation in Maine with my dad and his side of the family, my stepdad decided to help out by renting another apartment for my mom and me to live in. Although he was living in a new place, he still wanted to make sure we had a roof over our heads.

  The vacation was amazing. My dad and I were finally getting along great after a childhood of him not really knowing what to make of me. I spent the whole time building sand castles, and Dad helped me get the courage up to ride my first roller coaster at an amusement park. The whole time I knew that I had no idea what I’d be returning to when I went home, but I tried to push the thought out of my head and enjoy myself.

  It was bad enough coming home to a totally new place, but Mom and Bob did something truly unforgivable while I was away, something that I still have trouble reconciling today: they gave Bailey to an animal shelter because the apartment didn’t allow dogs. I was devastated. I’d gone from living in a beautiful house with an amazing dog and having my family together. Now I’d lost my furry best friend, my sister had moved out, my mom had split up with a stepdad I adored, and I was living in the tiniest two-bedroom apartment ever with zero privacy. When I returned home from vacation to this new life, I sobbed for a solid hour, wondering how everything had gotten so bad so fast. I just didn’t understand, and I felt totally alone, especially without Bailey to lick away my tears.

  I was too embarrassed to show the few friends I had at the time, like Zak and Jonica, where I was living now. Aside from the incidents they’d witnessed with my mom being drunk, they had otherwise known me as this fortunate kid who had an awesome life in a great house, but now I was in a bad part of town in a sketchy apartment. I didn’t know how to tell them we now had no money. I’d already gone through most of my school years feeling like less of a person than everyone else due to SPED classes and bullying, and this latest life development didn’t help things at all.

  Our new neighborhood was pretty run-down, and I was a little freaked out about walking to the bus stop alone. My mom was nice enough to drive me up the street to the pickup stop every morning, but she had a really old silver car with a broken muffler that was so loud it sounded like a military helicopter taking off. All the other kids walking to the bus stop would point and laugh as we drove by, so I quickly learned to shrink down in my seat as far as possible and then have Mom drop me off around the corner so that no one would see me.

  That car was a nightmare on wheels. One day when I stayed home sick from school and Mom took me to Dunkin’ Donuts to get a bagel, the car ran out of gas right at the drive-through window. Looking back at it now, it’s so hilarious and white trash, but I was beyond mortified at the time. A bunch of employees wearing brown aprons had to come out and push our busted old vehicle out of the way and into the parking lot. Worse, I then had to walk with Mom to the gas station—still in my pajamas—to get fuel.

  At the time, the only way I felt that I could escape all of my troubles was when I was playing RuneScape, a free online role-playing game. I could disappear into another world and pretend that I was someone else. One day I came home from school and switched on my computer as usual, with no clue that my life was about to hit an all-time low. Nobody was home, which wasn’t too unusual—Mom had been working a little later than in the past at the salon. But when I came out of my computer game reverie several hours later, there were shadows on the wall. I tried my mom’s cell phone, wondering if she’d stopped to get groceries, but there was no answer. I went back to my game, but I couldn’t get into it. I was nervous and distracted and had the distinct feeling that something was wrong.

  Suddenly the front door opened, and my mom fell into the house, calling out my name in her sing-songy drunk voice. I should have known. Then I heard a second voice. Amy, her drinking buddy.

  “Joey, where are
you?” my mom called out again, and I decided that I just couldn’t deal with this anymore. I’d been happily roaming through forests with my elf friends online, and the thought of being thrust into the harsh reality of my mom’s drunken antics was just too depressing. She wasn’t a mean and abusive drunk, but I couldn’t stand watching her become like a child who couldn’t take care of herself.

  On a normal day when she was drunk, she would just get very emotional and complain about everything that was wrong in her life, as if I were responsible for it. And it worked—she knew how to make me feel bad for her. But that day I wanted nothing to do with it. I quickly closed my laptop and hid under some clothes in the closet that connected our two bedrooms.

  I was just in time. My mom came stumbling into my room, followed by Amy. “Joey?” Mom yelled. “JOEY? WHERE ARE YOU?”

  “Shhhh,” I heard Amy say. “He’s probably at his dad’s house.”

  Mom ignored her. “Joey? Joey? Where are you?” I heard her leave my room and stomp through the apartment. I pulled more clothes up over me and buried my head in my knees to try to make myself even more invisible, but something sharp was digging its way into the side of my butt. I fished out one of Mom’s high heels and tossed it to the side.

  I heard Amy helping my mom into her room. The bedsprings squeaked, and I could picture Amy tucking her under the covers when suddenly I heard my mom burst into tears. She wasn’t just crying; she was out-and-out sobbing and taking huge gulps of air between choked wails.

  I started to panic. Was she hurt? But I could hear Amy asking her the same thing. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?” she kept repeating. So I knew there wasn’t any sort of physical injury. I stayed hidden in the closet, and prayed that Mom would stop crying and fall asleep and that Amy would leave. I blamed Amy for what was happening. Don’t you know she’s not supposed to drink? I thought. Why are you still hanging out with her and taking her to bars?

  Mom suddenly turned on Amy. “Get out of here!” she said. It was as if she had read my mind. “Get the hell out of my bedroom!”

  I heard a few muffled thumps and then the sound of Amy yelping in pain. I couldn’t take it anymore—I crawled out from underneath the clothes and peeked through the crack in the closet door. What I saw shocked me.

  Amy was on the bed straddling my mother, who was throwing punch after punch at her. Amy managed to restrain her wrists to avoid being hit most of the times, but a few times my mom clocked her pretty hard. Amy kept trying to calm Mom down by making soothing sounds and telling her to hush, that everything was going to be okay. I was seriously freaked out—Mom was acting like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. I half expected her head to start spinning around and spewing vomit.

  Suddenly she went completely limp. I could hear both her and Amy trying to catch their breaths, when a low moan escaped my mom’s lips. She mumbled something.

  “What?” Amy asked.

  “I want to die,” my mom said. “My life is horrible. Everything is terrible and I can’t take it anymore. Just . . . just please kill me.”

  Amy looked as shocked as I felt. How could she say something like that? If anyone should feel that way, it was me (although I never could). It seemed so selfish of her to even think her life was that bad when everything she was doing had made my life way worse than hers.

  “I want to die,” Mom repeated, louder this time and somewhat calmer. “I’m not joking. Please, just kill me. I know you can do it.”

  “I’m not going to kill you, Debbie,” Amy said. But she hadn’t moved from the bed; she was still pinning my mother down.

  “It would be so easy,” Mom said. “Just take the pillow and put it over my face. Suffocate me. It would be fast and painless. Please, just kill me.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I wanted to run into the bedroom and shove Amy off her. I kept thinking, What if she does it? Am I about to watch my mother die? I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t move a single muscle out of terror at the thought that I might be about to watch my mother’s life end. Why am I not getting up? I thought. I have to stop this madness.

  “Do it!” my mom screamed.

  “I’m not going to kill you, Debbie!” Amy repeated, louder this time. I felt my whole body relax and realized that I’d been holding my breath. I gulped in air and tried to get my heart to stop pounding out of my chest.

  Amy climbed off my mom and sat on the side of the bed while the sobs continued. My leg began to cramp up, but I didn’t want to move. I couldn’t let them know that I’d just witnessed such a dark moment. My mom rolled over onto her side, crying as Amy rubbed her shoulders. After around thirty minutes, my mom started snoring softly and Amy crept out of the room. When I heard the front door close gently, I stood up and opened the closet door a bit. Part of me wanted to crawl into bed with my mom, curl up beside her, and whisper that everything was going to be okay. The other part of me wanted to tear out of the house and start running until I couldn’t run any more.

  That’s what I did.

  I let the front door slam behind me and ran as fast and as far as my legs could take me. Before I knew it, I found myself shivering on a park bench, my heart beating so hard I thought it was going to explode out of my chest. I hadn’t stopped to grab a jacket, and it was already dark out. I felt better, though. I didn’t ever want to go back to that house. I started fantasizing about what it must be like to have a normal family, how lucky my friends were that they didn’t have to deal with this kind of stuff. I’d had a taste of a normal life once, and I prayed that someday things would return to the way they had been when I was younger.

  After a while, the cold settled in. I started to get a little creeped out, sitting by myself in the dark. And although going home was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, I knew I didn’t have the courage to do something drastic like run away. My version of running away had become my video games, the fantasy worlds I could disappear into as long as I kept my headphones on and my eyes focused on the screen.

  I felt my stomach rumble. I was starving. Feeling defeated, I got up and slowly made my way home. The house was quiet when I got there, except for the sound of soft snoring still coming from my mom’s room. I heated up some chicken nuggets and went into my room. I made sure that both of the closet doors connecting our spaces were shut tight and slipped back into my RuneScape game as if nothing had happened at all, my homework be damned.

  At the time, I didn’t tell anyone in my family what had happened. I think I was so afraid of losing my mom that I wanted to protect her. I knew that what I’d witnessed was disturbing enough that someone might take her away from me, and despite all the scary insanity she put me through, I still loved her so much.

  I realize now that I should have told someone, and my advice to anyone who is going through something even vaguely similar is to call an adult. No kid deserves to go through that sort of abuse. Because that is what it is—abuse. It might not seem like that while it’s happening, since it’s the parent who is experiencing something crazy, but that’s just the problem. The person is a PARENT. It’s the parent’s job to take care of the kids, and when they don’t, it’s abuse. You’ll be helping both yourself and your caretaker if you let someone know when things are spiraling out of control.

  Do You Think Your Parent Might Be an Alcoholic?

  If the answer is yes, the most important thing to remember is that it is not your fault. Alcoholism is a disease, and like any other disease, it can be treated. The National Association for Children of Alcoholics has a bunch of resources on its website, nacoa.org. Check them out, and also be sure to tell an adult you trust—another family member, a teacher, a guidance counselor—what you are going through. If you feel safe with your parent, try talking to him or her about your concerns while he or she is sober. Always remember that you aren’t alone, and there are people who can help you if you ask.

  Chapter 4

  Big Dreams and New Friends

  There were a few things that kept me from g
oing totally insane during those dark years with my mom: creating videos, acting, making some great new friends, and discovering music.

  By the time I hit fourth grade, I had been begging for a camcorder for Christmas for years. Once Bob came into our lives, I finally got one. I promptly made my first movie—an exhaustingly thorough tour of our house, from the attic to our basement. (It would have been riveting footage if I’d only remembered to hit Record. :-/)

  Over the next several years I made little adventure movies constantly, mostly starring my cousins and myself, because my early obsession with video wasn’t just about making up and directing stories. I loved being in front of the camera too. Being able to see something I’d envisioned inside of my head suddenly come to life on a screen blew my little Joey mind.

  But I wanted to do something bigger, something a larger audience than just my family would see. When I was in sixth grade, I heard that the seventh graders were putting on a production of The Wizard of Oz. I was determined to be a part of it but only seventh graders were allowed to audition. I went to the principal’s office and begged him to let me be a part of it anyway. But he wouldn’t budge, bringing out the old “If we made an exception for you we’d have to make an exception for everyone” line, one of the worst sentences in the English language.

  So I kissed my dreams of the yellow brick road good-bye.

  The following year’s performance was of a lesser-known play (as in, no one had ever heard of it). Dig It! A Musical Tale of Ancient Civilizations revolved around two archaeologists who discover the bones of Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton that comes back to life and gives a series of musical history lessons. There were no witches or flying monkeys or talking scarecrows, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to be on that stage.

  Kids who wanted to audition were given a copy of the script to rehearse, and I rushed home after school to study the lines with my mom. The scene was the play’s opening, which basically consists of the two archaeologists in a cave exclaiming things like, “Where are we?” and, “Wow, Ethiopia is scary in the dark!”