The drive up to Burbank, where my mother now lived, took more than two hours. It was beyond boring. There was no radio in the car. Most of the time, the two men in the car with me weren’t even speaking to each other, let alone to me. I watched as the blue sky of San Diego gradually gave way to the coffee-and-milk smog of Los Angeles. Soon my eyes started to burn. Everywhere was the smell of car exhaust and chemicals and manufacturing plants. Already I hated this place. I’d never seen so many cars, ever. It seemed impossible there was anybody in Los Angeles not driving a car on this freeway. I couldn’t understand why Mama would move here. It was so—dirty.
I was still confused about what had happened. What I knew was this: I hadn’t seen Larry for the past two or three days, and whenever I asked Charlotte where he was, all she’d said was that he was out running errands or over at his folks’ house or he had to work overtime down at the police station. Then she’d changed the subject. With so little to go on, troubling ideas came into my head to pick up the slack. Maybe Larry and Charlotte had finally got tired of my being around. Maybe they’d wanted to give Robert my room. That made sense: there was room enough for just two kids in the house; the third man out had to go. I figured there was no longer any reason to keep me around, Larry had had his fun with me; it was time for someone new. Ideas like these bounced around in my head like ricocheting bullets, tearing apart my brain. A burning heaviness, which I knew wasn’t from the smog, gathered behind my eyes. I didn’t want these strangers seeing it spill out. I tried thinking about other things, about where this was all going. I looked outside. It wasn’t much help: nothing seemed to be going anywhere I wanted to be.
I finally gathered up the courage to say to the man sitting in the passenger seat up front, “I don’t want to live here. It smells bad. Why do I have to go back with my Mom?”
The man shot a look at the driver for a second, which the driver seemed to ignore. He looked straight ahead again at the ocean of cars we seemed to be floating in. “Your mother moved up to Burbank,” he said curtly, “out of San Diego County jurisdiction.” I waited for more, but he’d evidently stopped talking.
I told him Mama had been in Burbank since way back in February, nearly a year. Even my probation officer, Mr. Kemp, knew about it. He’d never said anything about a problem with ‘jurisdiction’.
The man didn’t seem to hear anything I’d said. “You’re under Los Angeles County jurisdiction now,” he said. “There’s nothing anyone can do about it.” There was something final about the tone of his voice, as if he was really telling me, without actually saying the words: shut up, he was tired of trying to explain things to me, I was an idiot.
We arrived well before noon. Mama’s apartment was on Verdugo Street in Burbank, almost into Glendale. She had the upstairs half of a white stucco duplex with a large picture window looking down on the street. I sort of liked it, when I first saw it from the sidewalk below. But when we walked up the red brick steps and knocked on the front door and Mama opened it to let us in, I was suddenly hit with the smell of urine-ammonia from her cat box. It was suddenly all so familiar. Mama hugged me lightly and thanked the men for driving all the way to bring me there. One of them handed her an official-looking envelope and told her it was no problem, it was all just part of the job. Then they were gone. The white car pulled away, and Mama closed the door. We looked at each other for a long, awkward moment. “Well,” she said, finally, “I guess I should say ‘welcome to your new home’, shouldn’t I?” But she never did say it.
I got settled in, though there wasn’t much for me to unpack. Just the small box Charlotte had given me with my underwear and a couple pairs of pants and some shirts in it. Mama took the box and said I could have half of one of her dresser drawers until we figured out what was what with the stuff I’d left in San Diego.
There was only one bedroom. Karen wasn’t there: for the past year, she’d been living with Mama’s brother, our Uncle Jimmy, and his wife Marilyn back in Flint, Michigan. The only reason I could think of for Mama to send her there was that she’d just got tired of taking care of Karen. Debbie wasn’t there either, and I remembered Mama telling me when I’d called her over Thanksgiving that Debbie would be spending her Christmas vacation with Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Marilyn, too. For the first time in her life, Mama lived alone. I imagined she liked it that way, that she wasn’t particularly happy having me around spoiling her freedom. I wished I could tell her I wasn’t too happy about the situation, either.
Mama told me I’d have to sleep on the couch, which didn’t surprise me. She told me to put the hamster cage on one of the end tables in the living room, and said they’d better not be keeping her awake at night with their squeaking wheel. I told her they wouldn’t, though I was half afraid they would; sometimes they’d kept me awake until way after midnight. I didn’t mind it, though. The sound was kind of soothing. I told Mama Gwendolyn was pregnant, that she was going to have her babies any day now. Mama looked blankly at Gwendolyn and George in their cage and chewed the inside of her cheek. “What are you going to do with them when they’re born,” she asked. I told her I thought maybe I’d sell them to a pet shop, if I could find one that would take them, and she nodded.
In stark contrast with the bright, inviting white of the exterior walls, I was struck by how everything inside the apartment seemed dark: the doors and the wood trim, the plaid furniture and reddish-brown hardwood floors, the lamps with their thick cloth shades that blocked rather than softened the light. Even the flat-beige walls seemed to pull light from the room. The tiny, cramped kitchen had no window, and the bare-bulb fluorescent light, hung crookedly from the ceiling apparently as an afterthought, buzzed and blinked as if it was on its way out altogether. Mama of course had her black-and-white Magnavox television console, and ran the thing all day, every day, from the moment she stepped out of her bedroom until she was ready to go back in again, for no other apparent reason than to make background noise. She hardly paid any attention to it at all, but spent most of her time lying on the couch with her calloused feet stuffed behind the seat cushions, reading. I often thought reading was her one saving virtue. She loved books. And she hated throwing good (as in, still readable) books away. She had an old white-grain wood bookcase, sitting against the wall opposite the couch, whose legs had been missing ever since I could remember, having buckled, I was sure, under the weight of the hundreds of trashy paperback novels she’d crammed into it over the years, the kind of books you’d find on the rotating wire racks at the front of drug stores.
For the time being, we had a telephone. We had electricity and water and heat. But we were already running out of food. Mama had had a job when she first moved to Burbank earlier in the year, a secretarial position for a small company downtown. She’d walked the three or so blocks down Verdugo to the El Camino Real, and took a bus downtown from there. I was surprised when Mama told me Carol Joy—our former neighbor on Green Street in Ocean Beach—and her brood of delinquents lived up here, too, though they lived on the other side of Burbank. That had been the reason Mama’d moved up here in the first place: Carol had told her she could get a typing job in her company. Mama had been hired the day she arrived in Burbank. But over the next few months, business had slowed. They laid off Mama in early December, and it being a bad time of year, so close to Christmas, no one else was hiring. She hadn’t been working long enough to get unemployment; she’d been so long on welfare in San Diego. They’d given her a couple hundred bucks severance pay, but that was gone. And so she has to call the welfare people again.
They sent a woman out the following day. She’d brought a large box with her, filled with canned food and macaroni and Corn Flakes and other dry goods, and some powdered milk and beets and spinach and a few other things I didn’t like. But it was something to eat. I watched from the tree outside the window while Mama talked and the woman wrote the information down on the forms.
The woman left, and now Mama had a little money. She handed me five dollars and sent me to the store to get her a couple of bottles of Pepsi and a pack of Winstons. I told her George and Gwendolyn needed some food, too, and she frowned and said, alright, fine, although I could tell she was not at all happy about having to feed a couple of hamsters, too.
“Hurry it up,” she said sharply as I was leaving. “And you’d better be bringing back all the change!”
On Christmas day, I woke early, thinking it was overcast, with the light coming into the living room from behind the drawn shades gray and colorless, but it might just as easily have been the LA smog, extra thick. Anymore, I couldn’t tell. It was the first Christmas I could remember that there wasn’t a Christmas tree in the house. Or any presents. Mama’d told me last week, when I’d first come back, not to expect anything this year. She was sorry, but there just wasn’t any money. I told her it was okay, I understood, though I wasn’t sure I believed her, maybe she was pulling something on me the way Larry did—as a joke—when he’d given me shoelaces that one time for my birthday. But she wasn’t kidding. And I guess most of me did understand. Still, there was something a little empty-feeling in my gut, a kind of sadness, when Mama came out into the living room that morning and, noticing that I was already awake, said Merry Christmas. I told her Merry Christmas, too. I heard us saying the words, but somehow they’d seemed empty. We could have just as easily been saying to each other, happy Saturday. Even that might have had more meaning.
Mama puttered around in the little kitchen, and put some water on the stove to boil to make her coffee. From where I was, still lying on the couch, I watched as she took out the big red and white box of Carnation instant milk powder from the cupboard, which the welfare lady had brought for us, and began reading the directions. Already I was thinking of how much I hated the taste of the stuff, even in cereal—especially when it hadn’t had time to get cold in the refrigerator. I wondered what Charlotte and Larry and Butchie were doing just then. Maybe they’d gone over at Larry’s parents’ house, were sitting at their dining table having coffee and eating Bette’s homemade coffee cake, chatting while Butchie tore around the house with whatever new thing he’d got. I could imagine all their just-opened presents laid out under their huge Christmas tree, like they were sitting in a big circular display case, and I wondered if there wasn’t something still unopened under the tree there, something they might have got for me, something they’d soon be sending to me in the mail. Maybe they were just the tiniest bit sad that I wasn’t there, too. The thought cheered me some.
Mama brought her coffee cup and the box of corn flakes and the instant milk, which she’d mixed up in a plastic pitcher, out to the little dining table next to the couch. She told me to get up and eat. We each had a bowl of corn flakes, and I could tell she didn’t like the instant milk anymore than I did, though she’d never have said so. We ate, and said nothing. After we were done, Mama collected the bowls and piled them in the kitchen sink, and told me she wanted me to wash the dishes tonight after dinner. It was only fair, she said: she cooked, I cleaned. I wondered to myself just how much cooking had been involved in putting cereal bowls on the table. But I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t forgotten the way things were with Mama. I got dressed and went outside, and climbed the tree just below the picture window, up to the highest branches, and sat there, watching the kids up and down the block outside their houses playing with their new bicycles or skateboards or other neat toys.
Inside our apartment window, I saw Mama settle herself down on the couch and open a paperback book and begin reading.