The Fury - Jason Pinter [44]
creeping into her voice. "I answered your question. My
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mother and I were not close. Not even before I left the
city. Yes, she did try to reach out once or twice. I didn't
return her phone calls."
"Why not?"
"Perhaps you're too young to have experienced this,
but when someone hurts you so badly--I'm not talking
about a faulty relationship or bad argument--I'm
talking about hurts you in such a way that decimates
you, your confidence, your life in such a way that the
only chance you have to life is by cutting off a diseased
limb, you don't care or make an effort to reconnect. If
anything, you stay away from it."
"What did your mother do to you?" I asked. This
came out less incredulous than expected. If I didn't
grow up with a father whose mission in life seemed to
be to alienate his family, this kind of revelation from
Sheryl might have taken me aback. Instead, I under
stood, maybe even empathized with her.
"What didn't she do." Sheryl sighed.
"When you left," I asked, "was it one act that drove
you away, or did the camel's back suddenly give out?"
"A little of both," Sheryl said. We turned right on
Madison, began to walk uptown, my legs growing sore
with the exertion. I was in good shape, but Sheryl
Harrison looked like she was ready to compete in the
Olympics. "But if there was one thing that I could point
to that destroyed my relationship with my mother," she
continued, "it was the drugs."
I stopped for a moment. Sheryl did not stop with me,
so I had to jog back to keep pace.
"Drugs?" I said, surprised. "What do you mean?"
"Well, when I left it was still the crack," Sheryl said
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with the blank expression of a clinical diagnosis. "I'm
sure there were a few other things mixed in there--
meth, weed--but it was the crack that burned her
humanity from the inside out."
"She did this while she raised you," I said.
"I don't think she was as heavily into it while I was
a child, but by the time I got to high school it was like
coming home to a woman who'd turned into a funhouse mirror."
"Jesus," I said.
"I don't think Jesus smoked crack," Sheryl said. For
the first time, I heard a lightness in her voice, as though
she was amusing herself. "And all those people who
call you late at night to ask if God has a plan? I tell them
God didn't have a damn thing for me. He gave me a
treasure map to a pile of dog shit, and I had to clean up
after it myself. Finally I got tired and moved on."
"How long did your mother do drugs?" I asked. "Was
it something she picked up?" I felt slightly off kilter
with this line of questioning. Growing up, I'd experi
enced many forms of addiction of personal evils, both
in my family, my relationships and my friends. I'd lived
through Jack O'Donnell's alcoholism. I'd seen first
hand what external poisons could do to a person inter
nally. One thing I'd never been exposed to on a personal
level was a habitual drug user. Yet both of us had left
family behind to free ourselves from their trappings.
"Let's see...how long did my mother use? My whole
life," Sheryl said. "You know you can pretty much make
your own crack pipe using household materials. My
dad died when I was a baby. One of my first memories
was seeing all these pretty flowers my mother, Beth,
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used to keep around the house. Pretty flowers inside this
metal tubing. One day I brought one to school, and I got
a belt across the back because of it. Turns out those
little roses you buy at any gas station are actually crack
pipes in disguise. You just take off the foil and remove
the rose, stuff about an inch of Brillo pad into the tubing.
That's your filter. Take a rock and put it on the Brillo
pad, then run a lighter over it, constantly rolling the
tube between your fingers to make sure the rock burns
easily. Some kids learn how to build sand castles, braid
hair, make macaroni necklaces. I learned how to build
a crack pipe."
"Do you know if your mother was still smoking it
when she died?"
"I'd be shocked as hell if she wasn't,"