It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [9]
It was becoming painfully apparent to me even at that young age that my parents’ marriage was an unhappy one. My dad always seemed agitated. I started to resent his anger and short temper. My mother was a saint in my eyes, and when I recognized pain in hers, I would become enraged.
My dad retired from the fire department when I was seven and soon found work as a fire inspector for an insurance company, a job that frequently sent him on the road. Or so the story went. I just remember being relieved when he was away. Our household returned to normal. All of us kids could stop walking on eggshells and could laugh and joke and play music.
Soon after my dad retired, my mom decided to take some vocational training at North Seattle Community College so that at the age of forty-five and after raising eight kids, she could finally join the workforce outside of the home.
Mom started working when I was nine. One of the first days she was at her new job, I came home from school and found my father—who was home that week—in bed with our next-door neighbor’s wife. The mother of my best friend. Oh sure, they pretended nothing unusual was going on, and I am sure they thought I was too young to figure out what was happening. But I figured it out all right: all at once, in that very instant, I understood what sex was, what cheating was, I understood that my dad’s seemingly heroic life was a deception, and I understood that I would have to hide all of this from my mom so that she would not get hurt. It was a harsh introduction to grown-up life.
From that day on I stopped talking to my dad. Not a word. Soon he and the woman next-door both left their spouses and moved into an apartment together. My parents got divorced. My best friend and I were put into the strangest of predicaments—was it his mom or my dad’s fault that both of our homes were now broken? We began to fight and he began to act out at home. For his father’s birthday a few years later, he presented his dad with the severed head of the family cat as a present. Gift-wrapped. He also took an axe to the outside wall of my bedroom one night while I was on the other side in my bed. All of this because my dad couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.
At that age I figured I must have had something to do with the problem. That is what we do when we aren’t old enough to see the bigger picture. Many of the things I soon grabbed onto in order to muddle through—things I’d call coping mechanisms now—would come back to bite me in the ass. When, a few years later, I started to get acute panic attacks, I learned to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs. Of course, we all have shitty stuff we have to deal with growing up. I cannot with a straight face blame my childhood for the drugs and alcohol that I would ingest later in life. More accurate, perhaps, would be to say that a perfect storm of factors began to whirl around me before I had a chance to address any of them: a predisposition to alcoholism, a family history of panic disorders, the need to hide a secret and protect my mom, and coming of age at a time when experimenting with drugs was much less frowned upon than it is today.
My mom was pretty much left to provide for the household on her own. This meant that she had no choice but to leave me with a lot of responsibility, and I just didn’t rise to the occasion right away. I wish I could’ve been a better son in those difficult transition years for my mother. I still kick myself for some of the hell that I put her through. I was trying to figure out my place in the world without a father to rely on as a role model.
After my dad left, my mom’s brother—a doctor—would let us spend summer vacations at a cabin he owned on a lake up in the mountains east of Seattle. While up there, one time between sixth and seventh grade, I went waterskiing with my brother Matt—out