A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [56]
Outside, there was a small shack at the end of the driveway that they called the smoking room. Instead of smoking in their home, they smoked in this shack. It was just large enough for a card table, some shelves filled with board games, a TV, and a boom box. One of Elinda and Chris’s friends was staying with them this same weekend and all three of them sat in the smoking room most of the night while Mom and Mark and I stayed in the trailer watching the Mariners get shellacked by the Baltimore Orioles. I looked through some photo albums that were out and kept asking Mom who people were when I didn’t recognize them.
There were a couple of photos of Mom and a pretty little girl that I wondered about. “That’s me with Elinda,” she said. I had to stare hard at them to recognize Elinda. She was thin and happy looking, a little glint of mischief in her eyes. Probably about thirteen years old. “That was before she left,” Mom said.
I turned the page and there was another picture of Elinda. In this one, she was much taller and bigger, but still young. Maybe about eighteen. She was slouched against a bench somewhere outside and her head was tilted. Her mouth was slack and open and her eyes looked faraway and helpless.
I put down the albums and went out to visit Elinda and Chris and their friend in the smoking room and noticed that there were no windows, no ventilation in the thing. At first I thought it was funny, but then I grew appalled. “You should get some windows put in this thing,” I told Elinda. I felt like I was lecturing them a bit. They puffed and coughed and nodded their heads like it was old news. “Or get an air purifier or something.” I could barely stand in the doorway without feeling sick. They sat in their own haze, playing cards.
That night, I slept on one of the couches in the front room. Mark slept on the other, snoring loudly. There were several lights on in the room that were keeping me awake, so I got up and turned them off. In the middle of the night, I was woken up by Elinda and her friend stumbling around and wondering if the electricity had gone out. They turned all the lights back on and went back to bed.
The next day we were at a Kmart and I looked at air purifiers, thinking I would get one for Elinda and her smoking room. Her birthday was two days away. I talked with the manager of the pharmacy area and discussed my concern with him. He told me that an air purifier would do very little to help. He said they should install some windows and fans to blow the smoke out, but even that was probably not enough. He asked how old Elinda and her husband were and I said, “About sixty.”
He shook his head and said, “The best thing for them to do, really, would be to quit smoking. If they don’t do that, you probably can’t be too much help.”
I knew he was right. I bought her oven mitts instead.
Farewell Tour
Right before Halloween 2008, I went back to Kennewick for maybe the last time in my life. Russell had convinced Mom that she should move out of the Tri-Cities finally. He was going to get her set up in San Antonio soon, near his daughter’s family and closer to Houston, where Matt lives. Russell and his wife were planning to come back to Texas as well, after he was done with his current job in Korea.
My girlfriend, Barb, took the trip with me. It was a short visit and we spent part of it just driving around, looking at places from my childhood. We parked and walked around my old neighborhood and along the ditches where the floons used to be. I pointed out Willie’s and Todd’s old houses. We walked slowly by the house I grew up in, the house that caught fire. A woman was in the yard playing with a dog and then noticed us looking at the house. I wanted to say, “I used to live here and I’m writing a book about it.” But I would have felt like a dork. Instead I just made it blatant that we were talking about their house by pointing to the window where my bedroom used to be.
We went to the Mayfair Market even though it’s now called the Red Apple. Even twenty years later,