Spaghetti Junction

Listening to a traffic report on the radio in Atlanta must be very strange to anybody who didn’t grow up there. The newsman in the helicopter is always speaking in some kind of code saying things like “Cobb Parkway northbound is sluggish from the perimeter all the way to the Big Chicken” or “The connecter is stopped in both directions due to an overturned tractor trailer at Spaghetti Junction”. The big chicken is the very first KFC restaurant and it has a gigantic mechanical chicken attached to it. The chicken’s eyes roll in circles and his beak opens and closes. Spaghetti Junction is an intersection of two major interstate highways as well as two smaller state highways. From a distance the mess of bridges and ramps all curving around each other looks very much like a plate of spaghetti.

            It was the summer of 1994 and I was 9 years old. My sister, Lindsey and I were in the back seat of my dad’s tan Ford Explorer. Lindsey was 10 and she was holding dad’s hand as he drove. He liked to do that. He held my hand sometimes when we were alone, but usually if both Lindsey and I were there, he would hold hers. My dad has never been very good at saying sentimental things. When the time comes to say them he tends to divert his eye contact and his shoulders tense up. He held our hands back then though, and it made me jealous that he usually chose her over me. Times like this I would ignore it, and stare out the window. Spaghetti Junction was just ahead and I imagined that it was a real plate of spaghetti. The car was a fork heading into the pile and all the other cars were meatballs or flakes of Parmesan cheese.

“Do you like being in school now, Pat?” dad asked, looking back at me through the rear view mirror.

“Yes,” I said, “I like it better than being home-schooled. Today they gave us pizza at lunch and this one boy, Joshua, he dropped his pizza on the ground and he was crying. I told him he could have my piece but our teacher got him a new one.”

“Mmm hmm,” dad said, no longer looking at me but focusing forward at the cars ahead. “Hey Pat, hold on okay? I gotta listen to this,” dad said, and he let go of Lindsey’s hand to lean forward and turn up the radio dial. He sat back and brought his arm to the back seat again to take my sisters fragile fingers in his giant palm. The sound of the Braves game on the radio drowned out my thoughts and the conversation was over just like that. We continued driving and I stared quietly out the window and imagined that I was a cheetah running beside the car, and every so often I would have to jump over a sign or a guardrail.

            We lived in the rural community of Suwanee, GA. The town lies about 40 miles northeast of Atlanta, and at the time it was specked with intermittent communities of old houses and small cornfields. It was a town where childhood summers were spent climbing through kudzu, throwing rocks at trains, and tiptoeing through abandoned graveyards where the names on the tombstones are eroded away and forgotten.

Our large green house was from the Victorian era, and had a gravel driveway and a large ominous oak tree that hung over the tin roof. Sometimes, when the sun was bright, that oak was a kind uncle, arms outstretched for an embrace. Other times, when those great southern thunderstorms would roll in, and the lightning would brighten the night sky as if it were day, that tree was a hangman.

In the early spring of 1994, shortly after my 9^th birthday, my dad took my sister and me out onto the front porch. He sat down with a plop on the porch-swing and set Lindsey in his lap and I sat beside them. I stared at the hundred-year-old carved wood pieces that made up the railing to our porch. One side was always leering at a strange angle and parts of the rail sagged. My father was speaking, and I heard and understood his words, but I took the information in the way somebody takes in a history lesson.

“Your mother and I are getting a divorce,” he said. Simple. Matter-of-fact. Lindsey began to cry, her shoulders heaving with each gigantic sob. I looked at her as if she were on the television, making mental notes of the actions before me, packing each part into the organized pockets of my brain.

            We decided we would walk a little bit. The gravel driveway did little to hinder my calloused bare feet as we approached the road and the railroad crossing there. My dad was still talking.

“I want you guys to know that this isn’t your fault. Your mom and I love each other very much and we love you guys too, that isn’t what this is about.” I wasn’t listening though. I heard it, but I was watching the flocks of birds that were gathering to head back north for the spring. They were swallows or maybe black birds. There were dozens of them all sitting on top of the large metal structures that made up the railroad crossing. I wondered if they knew each other, and if they had friends and enemies.

            We walked down Main Street and sat down at the picnic table just next to the old red caboose that had sat vacant there for much longer than I had been alive. I wandered off a bit as my sister and dad continued talking. When I came back around a minute later Linz was sitting in his lap and they were both crying. I began to feel jealous again. I sidled up next to my dad and put my arm around him, and I cried too. The tears came easily and the emotion wasn’t faked, but all the while my own voice rang out in my head. Why am I doing this? Do I really feel sad? Why doesn’t dad ever put me in his lap? Where will those birds go when they fly north? Will they go all the way to Canada?

            In those early years, when my parents were still married, my mother home-schooled my sisters and I and brought us up to memorize scripture verses, and eat organic vegetables. This changed almost immediately after the divorce. My mom had to find work- even though my dad always paid more than he owed for child support and alimony - she had a big house to pay for and three children to raise. She began working, enrolled us all in school, and for the first time a microwave and television became useful parenting tools.

            One day I heard my mom click-clack down the wood floors of the hall, with her bare feet in a pair of Swedish clogs that she ordered from a catalog. I hopped up from the old Apple computer that was set up near the front of the house and found her in the kitchen with her hands full of paper grocery bags.

“What’s for dinner?” I asked.

“Go get the rest of the groceries out of the car, Budman,” she said.

“Ok, but what are we having for dinner?” I asked again.

            “What?”

            “Dinner?” I asked more slowly.

            “Oh, sorry Patty. Um, it depends on what I bought at the store.”

            “You don’t remember?”

            “Will you please just go get the groceries out of the car like I asked?”

             When I arrived in the kitchen, my own arms full of groceries, I found my mom lying on the couch in the adjacent sunroom. She was on her back; her long flowing white skirt was tangled up in her crossed legs. Her right hand was hanging limp off the couch and Mollie, our loyal Boarder Collie, was licking her fingers. Her left arm was covering her eyes, with her palm facing up toward the ceiling.

“Are you okay mom?” I asked.

“I just have a headache,” she responded “I think I am getting a migraine. Why don’t you go watch TV ok? I’m going to sleep some. Will you put the groceries away?”

            This became a regular occurrence. My mom has been prone to debilitating migraines her whole life, but they were becoming more severe and more frequent, and everyone in the family noticed. We knew when mom was having a migraine we needed to be quiet; we had to step softly because noise hurt her head. In this task, because we loved her, it was never difficult to be obedient.

            By April of 1995, my mom had been asking her doctor about the headaches for months and he always blamed it on her depression over the divorce. He said it was normal. When she began losing her vision though, she knew she needed a second opinion. On the same weekend that my father was in Las Vegas marrying his new wife, Kimberly, my mom was at a doctor in North Carolina being diagnosed with a brain tumor.

            The pituitary tumor was rapidly increasing in size and pushing against her optic nerve, which is what was making her go blind. She found a specialist in Atlanta and they scheduled a surgery for the next month and sent her home with painkillers for the migraines. Several days later she took a nap on the couch and didn’t wake up for 13 hours. My 16-year-old sister, Sarah, drove her to the hospital and the doctors confirmed that the tumor had hemorrhaged. As it was described to me at the age of 9 “your mother’s tumor exploded in her head and sent tiny seeds of the tumor all over her brain”. The doctors gave her a 50/50 shot at waking up from the surgery.

My grandparents flew in from New Jersey and took over the job of parenting while this was happening.

“Your mother is very sick, you know that right Patrick?” granddad said. We called him the general behind his back. We still call him that.

“Its ok she won’t die,” I said “I prayed for her in my class today. My teacher asked us if anybody had a prayer request and I raised my hand and told her that my mom had a brain tumor and we all prayed.”

            “I’m glad you prayed,” he responded. “Its good to pray about things. We don’t know what will happen though, Pat. If something were to happen to your mother, we would make sure you and your sisters were always taken care of, ok? Your grandmother and I aren’t going anywhere.”

“Does that mean we would come live with you in New Jersey?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe we would move here. Lets not talk about it now though. I just want to make sure you understand what could happen, and that you’re prepared.”

            I wasn’t prepared though. I was 10 and I didn’t have the capacity to understand the implications of that conversation. Those words shook me with a kind of fear that was so deep down that it rooted itself in my core and I would never be able to let it out of me. I was a boy lost in my own world. My imagination was a place where I had control and if something wanted to hurt me, I could just run away from it, or turn it into something I liked.

I sat down in a wheel chair and Lindsey pushed me slowly through the brightly lit halls of the hospital. I pretended like I was one of the sick people. I put on a sullen face and avoided eye contact with everyone. I pretended I had a brain tumor and I thought about what it would be like to be wheeled into a hospital room and not know whether or not I would ever be wheeled out again.

It was 1996. I was 10 and Lindsey was 11. After a legal battle my mother had full custody of us and we would visit my father every other weekend at his home in Atlanta. He lived there with our step-mom, Kimberly. Their marriage lasted about 5 years. My dad was making good money at his job, and Kimberly was relatively successful in her own life as well. She was loving and sweet to us, youthful and fun. She always seemed to point out when she thought my dad was “being an asshole.” She said it in a lighthearted way so that we would see that she was putting him down to stay on our side. Patronizing as it was, as children we loved it.

“Dad, can we put the cart on the shopping cart escalator?” I asked one day while we were all shopping together at the Target outside of Lenox Mall

“Why don’t you and Kim go up there and Linz and I will stay down here and finish looking for the things on our list?” dad said.

“Ok, come on kiddo,” Kimberly said as she grabbed my hand and we walked away – cheerfully - smiling.

            I loved being at Target. This was the first Super Target in Atlanta, and it was like a Kroger and a Kmart in one. Kimberly let me put the shopping cart on the special cart escalator that went up to the second floor and we picked out a jigsaw puzzle in the toy section. Excited with my new puzzle, I raced back to dad to show him, Kimberly at my heals.

            “Dad look! Kim said we could get this puzzle! It’s a thousand pieces, see?” I said, holding the box above my head, my shaggy blond hair falling into my boyish blue eyes.

            “Wow Budman, that’s a good one,” dad said as he grabbed the box from my hands and placed it in the cart. “Did Kim help you pick it out?”

            “He picked it out himself,” Kimberly snapped back. Suddenly the joy had been sucked out of the room. Kimberly could go from a shining sun of kindness and love to a black hole in a single moment.

We spent the rest of the shopping trip in relative silence, everyone sizing up the situation based on sideways glances and forced smiles. On the way to the register dad picked up a 12 pack of Coors Light and my sister and I looked at each other with a familiar emotion in our eyes. There’s gonna be a fight tonight.

Dad and Kimberly fought a lot. My sister and I would go into our room and close the door. We didn’t talk about what was happening, but she would turn the television up loud and put her arm around me. One night we were in the room and we heard a loud crash from the bathroom. It sounded like glass breaking and small pieces of it scattering across the floor. Kimberly was crying and my dad’s terrifying anger was an evil sounding hiss that only made things worse because not only could we hear it, but we could tell he was trying to hide it, which insinuated that we were being exposed to something secret but we couldn’t turn our ears if we wanted to. We turned on the television and there was a car chase happening on the news. My sister turned it up to drown out the fighting but the cacophony of sirens from the television intensified the atmosphere. We should have changed the channel but we were both transfixed, unable to move or think. The news reporter was excitedly telling us that the car had just passed The Big Chicken on Cobb Parkway and the driver had a gun to his head as he was driving.

My dad entered the room suddenly, swinging the door hard so that it bounced off the rubber doorstopper and back into his arm. My sister and I both looked up and he had Kimberly by the elbow, her face was red and she wouldn’t look us in the eye.

“Kimberly has something she wants to say to you guys.” My dad said, pushing her toward us, his face hard as stone. She said nothing. “Kim you better apologize!” he roared.

“Apologize for what?” Lindsey asked.

“For making you guys listen to this!” He yelled into Kimberly’s face, “for being so fucking – irrational! - that she makes me so fucking upset! Now tell them you’re sorry for Christ’s sake, Kim! Do you even love them?”

“Okay, I’m sorry,” she said meekly, looking at the ground, and then finally looking up at us, “I’m sorry you guys, I love you so much, I’m so sorry,” and she wept.

My father pulled her back out of the room and into his where they continued on fighting loudly and trying in vain to hide it. My sister looked back at the television and said nothing. It seemed that the driver of the chase had been apprehended by the police, and didn’t blow his own brains out after all.

            I quietly snuck out of the house and into the front yard and climbed up the maple tree that grew there. I was a soldier in a war and the large buds that were still unflowered were grenades. Look out below! I’d yell, bite the stem off with my teeth, and throw the bomb down on my imaginary enemies. Eventually my dad came outside. It was quiet when he stepped out except for the occasional passing car and the chirping of the crickets and cicadas.

“Come on Patty,” he said “we’re going to a hotel tonight.”

            The next day my dad drove us back to our house in Suwanee.

“Hey guys, so listen,” he said. “I don’t think it would be a good idea for your mom to know that we stayed at a hotel - and about the fighting you know? With her condition she won’t be able to handle stress very well, it’ll only upset her, and this is something that should just be between us. Okay?”

            “Ok,” Lindsey said, and put her little hand in her father’s palm.

            “Ok Budman?” he asked, looking back at me in the rearview mirror. I felt warm and flushed all over.

“Ok,” I said. He turned the radio up and we listened to the Braves game for the rest of the ride home. I was staring out the window as we passed under Spaghetti Junction. The car was a piece of garlic bread, and the heaps of noodles were looming above us, tomato sauce raining down, and maybe we would all be buried beneath it.