I promised Tex I would tell him everything. I said I needed to write it down because I can't say it out loud. He told me to take as long as I need.
I've been sitting here for twenty minutes, staring at the blank page. The pen is in my hand and my hand is steady, which surprises me. I thought it would shake. I thought the telling would be harder, but it turns out that writing is different from speaking. Writing lets you control the pace. Writing lets you say the things you could never say across a kitchen counter.
I take a deep breath and start writing.
Dear Tex,
My mama's name was Lorraine. She wasn't always bad. I need to say that first because if I don't, the rest of it makes her sound like a monster and she wasn't. She was sick. The drinking started before I was born. By the time I was old enough to understand what was happening, it was just the way things were.
There were good days. There were days she'd wake up and the fog would be gone and she'd be her, the real her, the one hiding underneath all of it. She'd make pancakes. Not good pancakes. She'd burn them every time and the kitchen would smell like smoke and she'd wave a dish towel at the smoke detector and laugh. On those days she'd look at me and she'd say "there's my boy" and I'd feel like maybe everything was going to be okay.
Those days got fewer. The gaps between them got longer. By the time I was eight or nine, the good days were so rare that I'd mark them in my head like holidays. I'd hold onto them and replay them at night when things got bad, like a movie I could rewind and watch again. Mama waving the dish towel. Mama laughing.
The men started before I can remember. They were just always there. Mama's boyfriends, Mama's friends, Mama's guys she met at the bar, or the liquor store or wherever she went when she left me alone at night. They came and went. Some lasted a few weeks. Some lasted a few months. A couple lasted a year.
Most of them ignored me. I was nothing. The kid in the other room, the thing that came with Lorraine that they had to tolerate if they wanted access to her. Those were the good ones. The ones who ignored me. I could work with being ignored. Being ignored meant being invisible and invisible meant safe.
The first one who wasn't like that was a man named Gary. I was ten.
I'm not going to tell you everything about Gary. I can't ever tell anyone and I'm sorry. What I'll tell you is that he was the first one who noticed my door. Who tested the lock. Who came in at night when Mama was passed out on the couchand sat on the edge of my bed and put his hand on me and told me this was normal, that this was what families did, that I was special and this was our secret and if I told Mama, it would break her heart and she'd send me away. I'd never see her again.
I believed him. I was ten. I believed every word he said.
Gary lasted several months. Long enough to teach me that a closed door isn't a wall and a lock isn't a guarantee and the sound of footsteps in a hallway at night means something terrible.
I started sleeping with a knife after Gary. A steak knife from the kitchen drawer. I was ten years old and I slept with a steak knife under my pillow and my hand wrapped around the handle and I stared at the door and I waited. Every night. For the next one.
There were others. Not all of them. Not even most. But enough. Enough that by the time I was twelve, I had a system. I knew which sounds meant danger. I knew which men to watch and which ones were safe to ignore. I knew how to wedge a chair under a doorknob and I knew how to make myself so small and so still that sometimes they'd open the door and look in and not even see me. I learned to be quiet. I learned to be nothing.
I learned when to steal Mama's car keys and sleep in the floorboard of the backseat with the doors locked and the windows rolled up.
I told Mama once. About Gary. I was eleven, maybe a year after he left, and she was having one of her good days and making pancakes like old times. I thought maybe on a good day she could hear it. Maybe on a good day she could be the kind of mother who hears my story and does something about it.
She stopped flipping the pancake. She stood there with the spatula in her hand and she didn't move and she didn't turn around and the pancake burned and the smoke detector went off and she didn't wave the dish towel. She just stood there.
Then she said I shouldn't make up stories for attention.
That was it. That was all she said. She scraped the burned pancake into the trash and she went to her room and she closed the door. I heard her open a bottle and that was the last good day for a very long time.
I learned a lesson that morning that I carried with me the rest of my life. Telling doesn't help. Telling makes it worse. If the person who is supposed to protect you won't protect you, then nobody will, and the only person who can keep you safe is you. A steak knife and a chair and your own two eyes in the dark. That's all you've got.
Mama died when I was fifteen. It was her liver. It had been coming for a long time and everybody who knew her knew it was coming and nobody did anything about it because nobody could. She went into the hospital and she didn't come out and the last time I saw her she was yellow and small. She looked at me and she said "there's my boy" and I held her hand. She died two days later and I wasn't there because visiting hours ended at eight and she died at three in the morning alone.
Nobody came for me. That's the part people don't understand about a life like mine. There's no system that catches you. We'd moved so many times. Six towns, maybe seven, following whatever man Mama was with at the time, that no school had me long enough to notice and no social worker had our address. Mama's family was gone or didn't want her. She never really said. My father was a name on abirth certificate that Mama said she wasn't sure about. There was nobody.
I was fifteen years old and I was alone. I had a duffel bag of clothes and fifty dollars from Mama's purse.
That's how living on the streets started.
I won't take you through all of it. I can't go back there. Five years, six years on the streets. You learn things. You learn where the shelters are and which ones are safe and which ones aren't. You learn the places that have bathrooms you can sleep in if you're quiet and clean up after yourself. You learn which restaurants throw out food at closing and which dumpsters are worth checking. You learn that "I can clean" is the most valuable sentence you own because it gets you through doors. Motel managers, restaurant owners, gym operators. Everyone needs someone to clean and nobody wants to pay real money for it. Twenty bucks here, forty bucks there, a meal and a place to sleep for a night in exchange for scrubbing floors and toilets and whatever else needs scrubbing.
You also learn which people are safe and which ones aren't. You'd think I'd be good at that by now. But the ones who are really dangerous don't look dangerous. The dangerous ones look like they want to help you.
I was twenty-one when I met Ron Jackson.
He found me behind a gas station. Sleeping, or trying to. It was November and the cold was the wet kind that gets into your bones even in Alabama. I was huddled against the back wall of the building with my jacket pulled up to my ears and my knife in my hand.
He came around the corner and I flinched. He stopped and held up his hands. He's a big man with thick arms, wideshoulders. He said he wasn't going to hurt me. He said I looked like I could use a hot meal. He said there was a Waffle House down the road and he was buying and I didn't owe him anything. He said he was a deacon at a local Baptist church and that he was always on the lookout for people who might need a hand. It was what God had put on his heart to do. To help people.
