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i was thinking about this yesterday on my way to work. Why? i asked myself. why was it that we couldn't sit still, that my family moved, uprooted, over and over again in most important years--those when you learn socialization and shared pasts and that it's not okay to share your boyfriend cause you got their too late? then i remembered. it's cause my father is an idiot who decided the DEA was his friend. NOTE: if you are a drug dealer, do NOT make friends with undercover agents. my father was the naive, washed-up sixties drug addict who assumed if you smoked his weed, you were down. if you shot is heroin, y'all were tight like that. if you sniffed his coke, dammit, bloodbrothers for life. in our apathetic, cynical, overexposed generation, we know better. so, my father, being the stupid kind of dealer who is hooked on his livelihood, was asking to get caught. here's a lil background (memory: joe hurka, mentee of big andre dubus, says, "the background should never be in the foreground"): my father was in the army for about four years right before we were born. at that time, the army didn't test for illegal substances, so he was right at home with all the other "i'm gonna use this to get clean" guys. but, there were (and still are, by many accounts) way too many ways to get high. so, ft bragg, where my pops was stationed, became known as the 'jumpin junkies'. when he was discharged (around age 22), he and mother moved in together (they met in rehab--she was his counselor, how romantic!). now, my moms used to pop down to atlanta all the time, maybe every other weekend, to party at atlanta underground (which is much different now than it was then). one night, about two years after i was born, she and her friends took a mini-vacation down to AU, leaving e with our aunt. moms parked in this way-too-convenient spot right on the street. turns out it was in front of a local radical black resistance group's headquarters. and not just any radical resistance group, it had to be the very same one that was being investigated by the fbi and was under constant surveillance. so, after that, the fbi started a file on my mother and staking out our family (all the way back in nc), which meant nothing for her (very very clean) but was the beginning of the end for my dad. the fbi watched our house off and on over the next couple years. in this time the traffic in and out of our home caused the fbi to alert the city-county drug unit. after their investigations, they decided to bring in the dea. so, these men started coming over to our house all the time. (yes, my father dealt out of the house!) my sister and i would bring them drinks and sit around listening to them talk. the men never actually partook of the drugs. it was about a week long process before anything even changed hands. but me and e were underfoot the whole time, admiring one man's really cool sunglass which had mirrors to see who and what was coming from behind, the other man's leather jacket and cool sundial watch. about two weeks after their daily visits, the men got down to business. they were after the coke and the heroin, couldn't care less about the weed. they tell my dad that they want to just do it at our house and they'll be gone before dinnertime. my dad's all for that cause it's him and his "buddies" and they'll be all stoned and he loved to be with other people when he was jacked up like that. e and i had learned a long time ago to fend for ourselves (we were five and four respectively). well, my dad starts doing his thing, and right when his needle is about to pierce the skin, BAM! agents everywhere and they're all over my dad and my sister and i are screaming and trying to hide and they've got my dad on the floor and he's trying to get away from them, but there are too many guns and muscles for that to happen. they hold him down with hands, feet, weapons, get the handcuffs on him and then they're out the door. my sis and i were scooped up by the original two men, who are trying to soothe us and calm us down, but wind up throwing us in the back seat of their car cause nothing's working. i remember riding on those dry leather seats, my sister and i crying and holding hands, the music getting louder and louder, the trees rolling by and then stoplights and then more trees. we were taken straight to dss. at about the same time that we were being put into custody, my mother was being arrested. now, my moms was clueless, really, she was. e and i kept our mouths shut. all those people that came to our house and all the stuff we saw, we never talked about. it was a little pact between us and my father. he loved us for it. we could tell. he never was harsh, never punished us, for anything. and nothing happened after my mother got home from work. none of the phone calls, the quick knocks, the car horns. so, my mother thought my father was clean and that we were safe with him. but, the dea didn't know it. the fbi didn't know it. and in order to come into our home initially, they had to have her name on the documents. she paid the bills, the trailer was in her name, everything they needed they had to get to through her. at that time my mother was a reading teacher for the special education division of the public school system. getting arrested for trafficking and having that info spread across every newspaper within three counties is not good if you want to work with children. it's really not good to be arrested in your classroom, in front of your students, and then led out of the school by a team of officers. the hundreds of character witnesses that came forth to testify that my mother had no knowledge of the illegal activity was enough to place us back in her custody and unfreeze her accounts. my daddy went to prison. we stayed in foster care for about a month. when we finally got back to our house, my mother had been fired from both her jobs and couldn't get hired anywhere in her field (aa in psychology, certificate for teaching). we moved to a dumpy little trailer and she worked in a textiles factory, then we moved to the back of an old woman's house and moms worked at a convenience store at night, a different factory during the day. it went like this for years. every time my mom starting catching up, started breathing normally and not double-timing it, her reputation would catch up to her and she'd be fired, or she'd be reminded of her "record" as a way to blackmail her into working cheaper or harder or whatever. so, eventually, we moved far enough away and my mother had time to prove herself to enough people, that she was able to go back to school. that's when we stopped moving. my mother worked three jobs and was a full time student with three kids, but she found a way to get us into a house and a school system and a life that had nothing to do with drugs and addiction--unless you count those weeks every few years when she had to help my father hide from the law. my father was addiction, my mother was stability. when he showed up, the past was sure to follow. i can't explain how my mother found it okay to have another of his children, but i'll chalk that up to trust and naivety. so, i lived in the same place for about 5 years before i left for college and i've been moving ever since. my mother loves having found her home, her space, her life that won't betray her. i can't seem to get the hang of it. the idea of being Here forever gives me the shakes. i NEED to move. i NEED the idea of moving, of not settling, of not being trapped by your material possession. but, i think migration is now in my blood. i come from a long line of migrants, so it might just be genetic. my great-great grandfather was 'gypsy' who married a spaniard and begat a family that travelled EVERYWHERE. my great grandfather brought his family to the New World (central america) and that family spread out across the region. my grandfather then brought his family to america where we are now spead out all over. i hope to instill in my son an appreciation for roots and identity, but how do you do that without Place? this entry has worked it's way across the map. perhaps it's the literal example of movement... me starting one place and streaking and zig-zagging around to arive at some Other.
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this is today's entry
playing:
reading: White Teeth
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