Late Night Maudlin Street- Part 6- How To Make Amends

The last we saw, our hero, the right bastard, had just left his poor mom high and dry after she had driven some 500 miles to see him after not having spoken to her son for over a year, of course the son never thought about how she felt he just hoped that it hurt and it did and she finished out her days at the beach and went back home to not hear from the boy for what could only be described as a very long time, in fact over the next 5 or 6 years the exchanges they had may have amounted to over an hour or so total, maybe a brief and tense phone call over Christmas, a quick happy birthday here and there but overall it wasn't much of a relationship to speak of, of course we must remember that this is also the part of our hero's life where he went into the wilderness, kept getting deeper and deeper into it, once he made a brief foray to the outskirts of it only to have his heart annihilated and at that point he said what the fuck and turned back from the light of civilization and headed straight back into the dark of the forest, he liked it there better, alone with his pain, a pain that kept him warm, a pain he felt inflicted on him by the women he loved most in his life but this of course is where we must leave an untold chapter and get on with the one we are dealing with now, that one is dear old mom and yes i was still being a right bastard....(i love switching tenses to spite every shit english teacher i ever had)

The background here is that dad and mom got married in the early 60's, dad was 20 and mom was 18 and mom was also pregnant and dad didn't find out until August and they were married in July and my sister was born in December, you can do the math, seems mom had forgot to tell him something, not that it would have made a difference cuz he would have married her anyway, i'd say some 18 years after the divorce was final he'd be hard pressed to say he didn't still love her but the old man is a realist and he knows that shit was never going to be the same, of course i digress here because there is more history to tell, it's been said that my sis was dad's choice and that i was my mother's, 6 years younger than my sis and abhorred by her since the day they brought me home i can't say i have a close relationship with my sister, she did turn me on to some good music but we've led completely different lives, she left home at damn near 28, i at 17, she and my mother have always had a strange and strained relationship and growing up i was my mom's boy, but let us get up of the couch now doctor shall we, my father and i have had many discussions about these events, he remembers when i was 4 and they sat on the front porch and she said she wasn't happy, my old man was working full time and putting himself through school and in a nutshell he said what the fuck else am i supposed to do, of course as a child i don't really know what went on in my parents marriage, i do know that sometimes their door was shut and locked on sunday mornings and it wasn't til i was older that i figured out why, the old man told me he almost left then, when i was 4, said he was glad he didn't cuz he would have missed an awful lot and he enjoyed his children immensely even when we were complete pains in the ass as us kids are known to be, in fact things seemed to sail along quite smoothly until he was one of the casualties of the middle management purge in the early 90's which in turn became the catalyst for my mothers emancipation so to speak. See my mother never really gave a concrete reason why she left the old man, the only thing she ever said that was if he hadn't lost his job she wouldn't have had the strength to do it, a comment she never should have let me hear because at one point i let loose with a rather pointed diatribe on what exactly that made her, but as i stated a child never really knows what goes on with their parents and mine had most likely grown apart, as i got older and further away i began to understand things and the last thing i wanted for my father was to go through his life being lied to, though i do think my mother loved him for a long time it's just that i've learned that it seems when women decide to move on they do where men tend to dilly dally and fuck around...

About 5 years after the divorce my parents had dinner one night and my mom said it might have been the biggest mistake she ever made, leaving my old man, she sat at the table and cried and when my old man told me i went ballistic and told him he better not be buying that shit she was shovelling and he said he wasn't but i could hear it in his voice that he might be and looking back now who was i to say that he shouldn't, my main concern was to make sure he didn't' get his heart yanked out again and after that conversation he heard nothing from her for about 6 months and then i got a wedding invitation in the mail from her, she had met some guy a few months back and they were getting married and they were wondering if i'd come and meet her soon to be new husband and attend the wedding, if at any point in my life i told my mother i was getting married to someone i met less than six months ago she would have had a fucking coronary and told me in no uncertain terms she thought it was a mistake, i of course got a chuckle from the invite, tossed it in the garbage and never responded, i didn't give a fuck and this is how it went, it was roughly 8 or 9 years until the thaw began to slowly take place and part of that started with my grand-mother's funeral, her mom, a woman who damn near dis-owned me after the divorce, not that it mattered much, i was to busy hustling weed and getting lap dances and eating drugs and living like a rock star, but i felt that i owed my mother this much so i went up and attended the funeral, hung out afterwards, talked with her and her husband and the religious nutjobs they hung out with, asked how many box tops it took to become a pastor in their church cuz it seemed everyone was pastor somebody, a comment which made my sister choke on her food she was trying so hard to stifle her laughter, but it was a start i guess and soon thereafter i was drunk in a hallway of an apartment building and agreed to make something legal...

In order to make shit legal now i had to get out of a certain business which was fine cuz i wanted to be like a serious writer and shit and selling pot to fucking idiots can take up an extraordinary amount of time, i began to talk to my mother a bit more, it was always a bit strained and i could tell she walked on ye olde eggshells around me and i still was a bit cold but i'm sure in her eyes it was better than nothing, so the big day arrived and my mom and her husband attended and she had a good time and i took pictures with her and she met a whole array of low-lives, petty criminals, drunks and drug addicts (my friends) and was basically thrilled that her wild eyed son seemed to be somewhat settling down, hell i was so drunk i even agreed to have dinner with her and her new husband, who seemed a nice enough guy, and well you could say the ball was rolling, Gulfboot of course pointed out that my mom was all nerves that day but i think i was to drunk to notice but he also pointed out that she smiled the whole time and even shed a few tears watching her big monkey walking around in a tux and drinking what amounted to an assload of booze...

Now you can refer back a few paragraphs about getting out of the wilderness and i thought i was almost there when something else happened but i won't go into that now i'll just say that it sent me straight back in, there's all kinds of things i could say but i'll just skip ahead and say that over the next few years i began to tentatively build a relationship with my mother, now if there was ever a champion of me doing this it was her ex-husband also known as the old man who over the years would tell me that i needed to have a relationship with her cuz we only get one mom and though we don't get to choose or may not like them much they are still our mother, the old man is a prince among men i tell you and so i tried and she tried and i'll admit she probably tried harder...

And then something strange happened, i began to be not so pissed at the universe, began to fully embrace the absurdity of existence and realize that people in general are fuck-ups and that if i held being a fuck-up against people i'd end up living on an island alone and to tell you the truth i was most likely the biggest fuck-up you could find, an always chronically under-employed criminal type with a penchant for loose women and hard drugs or any drugs for that matter and though i was trying to straighten my shit out i knew that if i looked in the mirror i'd have to go all Tyler Durden and punch myself for being such an asshole for most of my life and then something even stranger happened...

but i guess i'll get to that in what will now be part 7 vol. 3 of what is swiftly becoming the War and Fucking Peace of the blogosphere diatribes on mother/son relationships. Hope i didn't put you to sleep. To be Cont.