The Phone Call

I always knew that thing would be the end of him. His motorcycle. Not a bike, not a cycle, but a motorcycle. Like Marlon Brando in The Wild Bunch. Which makes me wonder why a Millennial like him would ever care about some old movie stars who rode around on noisy ‘choppers.’ For us, sure - back when the world was simpler and the pool of iconography was shallower it made sense that all the kids wanted to be like Steve McQueen or Dennis Hopper. 

But for him? A 90s baby? That fucking thing. I don’t know why it came to be, but I sure do know how it came to be. Like most devotions, his obsession began small with Harley Davidson and Sons of Anarchy. Understandable, but the missing context here is my divorce. It wasn’t pretty but none are, and it served as proof that money isn’t a panacea for marital strife. Even intelligence, the next most logical requirement for marriage, isn’t enough sometimes. 

Okay, right, let me get back on track. It wasn’t too long ago now that the phone rang. It was late, one of those calls that have a different sound. Trust me, I’m the least superstitious person you’ll meet - I wish it were all true. Dracula, ghosts, saying Macbeth in a theater - all of that. The call just sounded different and there is no other way to put it. When I lifted the receiver to my ear, the voice on the other end sounded muffled, like they had reception all the way up on a cloud.

Except this was the winter and the middle of the night. I hung up the phone and took a seat on the bed. The words rang around my head but were hollow vessels without anything in them to define meaning. 

I got a bit ahead of myself there. The Bike. And when he got it. Right after the divorce - he was 17 when he got serious about it - and already a bit of a rebel. Kids can sense the roots of decay set in when a marriage starts to go south. Everyone thinks it’s the big dust ups and shouting matches that do the most damage, but in reality, it’s probably the slow erosion of communication, the stale silences and the monosyllabic responses. Those are the things that seep in there and poison the well - and if you think that poison is too strong a word, you’re wrong. It isn’t strong enough. 

So he wanted a ‘chopper’, as they say. His father assented, said it would help him with the transition and he would only ride during the day and with a helmet. Like as if our son’s life was part of a fucking negotiation tactic. He was the exact same way in the actual negotiations; he was petty and exacting, just like he’d always been but sometimes, the heart is just a little blind to the reality of a person. I guess the real shame is that you can never really know. You just have to dive in with who you think is the right one and if you drown, you drown. 

I agreed on the bike. So is it partially my fault? Possibly. Should I have put on a last stand, going over my dead body to try and ultimatum him? Maybe. But I did what I did. And as soon as he passed the lessons and was 18, he was almost there as he had been saving pocket money. But alongside the distance of comfort between loving motorcycle lore and the prospect of actually driving them, there was his rebellion. A newfound, long simmering (just think of the decay) anger towards everyone and everything, especially his parents. It mostly just manifested itself through some fights and a few suspensions for skipping school, a bit of pot and some drinking. But anger like that isn’t inert - it evolves over time, growing more determined and brazen. And what about that famous antidote, love? It wasn’t for lack of trying. I thought there was love - I know there was love - but what if love isn’t enough?

*

People are always speaking colloquially about teenagers, saying things like whiny or angsty. But sometimes, fighting back is the only thing they know how to do. 

Soon, I realised it was inevitable. That if someone wanted to be a part of something that badly - the shirts and the posters and the gear and the magazines - it was unstoppable. That type of dogmatism results in the creation of a new God, a modern deity that is tactile and a part of the real world, that bites and breathes and fucks and is dirty and real - that was his new God. It wasn’t a person or even a thing but more like a set of ideals. Promises of empty highways and endless blue skies. 

*

He got a job at a tattoo parlour. But he was always good at art so it made sense. Financially, it might make sense, too, if he could have held on long enough to get his own book or chair. And he worked at it, bless him he did. Eventually, he could afford a used ‘chopper’ and it was his everything. He moved out to a greasy apartment somewhere down town and spent most of his time tinkering with that thing, those two wheels and some metal and whatever the hell else is in there. Those days weren’t too bad, though I didn’t see him very often. Professorship is always busy and I didn’t have the added fallback of him living with me and relying on me for food. Instead, I saw him once or twice a month and even occasionally, as a family. It’s hard to narrow it down to one moment or situation that is the culprit for how it all turned out - life rarely works that cleanly to produce a clear scapegoat. However, there are certain singular moments - memories that stand out like points of light in the night sky of the past. 

It was Christmas and my parents were over. I was on better terms with my ex-husband by that point, so we could at least be in the same room. My son had just gotten a tattoo from another apprentice at the parlour that started on his collar bone and went around his chest, ending just under his neck. It was meant to be something tribal but it kind of seemed globular. As apprentices, they would all sort of indelibly experiment on each other. The wine was flowing and the deep seeded issues were hidden under frivolity and the holiday season. It happened after dinner when there were more than a few empty bottles of red on the table and his father had been asking him about what his plans were. He responded that he was doing what he loved and why the fuck can’t you just be happy for me? This type of explosion was commonplace at the time and my parents just shrugged and looked away and his father drank another glass of red and shook his head. Another one from the teenaged James Dean: I hate this family! You’re all so full of shit. Couldn’t even make your own stupid marriage work. 

I remember finishing a glass, setting it on the table and looking at him. From somewhere deep inside, a torrent was unleashed and it didn’t finish until all of the anger had been released from the depths of my pain. I can’t tell you exactly what I said but the gist of it was that he wasn’t the only kid who had ever gone through this situation and he needed to toughen up and stop freaking out all the time. It ended with a statement that caused him to get up and leave, and as ashamed as I am to admit it, had to do with how much of a waste his life had become - how he had thrown away all of his promise and potential and for what? For that stupid motorcycle. 

Things cooled after that. I would see him for the odd dinner and he would be sure to get a little pity cash on the way out - it was the least I could do. We would still talk in those days, but after that blowup at Christmas, he seemed to be always at a distance, his eyes always moving around the room, afraid to make contact with mine. Should I have tried harder? Would that have made him happier? Look at me, apostrophizing him as if he could hear me, as if he would have even listened if I had tried harder. I didn’t even know the full extent of what he was doing to himself, the cheap booze bottles we found in his apartment once it was all over, bags of them under the sink saved like trophies of self-destruction. 

There were some happier times, as well. The summer before it happened I took him out for lunch and apologized. Laid all of my cards out on the table. I know you are wondering why it took me so long to do this, but it isn’t as simple as it sounds. Apologizing would mean that I was entirely wrong and he was free of fault, which he wasn’t. You can blame us for how we went about it, but you can’t fault the message; a parent wanting more for their child than the child wants for themselves is one of life’s most damning dilemmas. But eventually, I swallowed my pride and said I was sorry for everything - for the divorce, for working too much, for what I said at Christmas, for not checking in on him more and I broke down and wept in a crowded East Side Mario’s. He put his hand on my shoulder and told me it was fine and I raised my head and looked into his eyes and thought that at least part of the old him was there. 

We even went to the cottage that summer. It was something we used to do as a family before the great fissure and we would go up north with a bunch of family friends and drink and sing and dance. I saw him smile after he jumped into the lake, the sun beaming down and filling him with light.

Maybe I should have known that it was only temporary. I started working on research for a paper and over the next few months, we only had brief communications online. I figured he was absorbed in his work and after all, it was what he wanted, so I tried not to bug him too much. I knew he was out there riding his ‘chopper’ around because I saw him once when I was coming back from the gym. He was heading out to the country and he wasn’t wearing a helmet. I sent him a message just to remind him to be safe and got a response that said: Okay. 

Message received, stay out of it. So I did. And a few days later, the phone call. I guess there are no stones left to turn except this one. I am aware of the futility of writing all of this down - I know there isn’t some magical power of language to turn back time. That somehow, if I owned up to everything I did wrong, admitted all of the things I should have done, that I would be absolved of sin. Instead, there are just words - vacant words that float around and crash into me, leaving streaks of blood, of despair, of hatred, of sadness, of apathy, of everything except absolution. 

*

I vacillate between two feelings, these days: the first is that it was a mistake. There is no metric for how consequences to mistakes are meted out and I know that fairness is a human-made concept, but he was still my boy. My baby boy and just because he made a few wrong choices with dire consequences doesn’t mean he needed to pay like that. Paying in guilt is worse than paying in blood.

But then, there is the other feeling. It’s a little more complicated and takes a bit longer to explain. The feeling that was delayed because after the phone call I rushed to the hospital and if you’ve ever had to follow an emergency to see if someone you love is okay you’ll know that there are no other thoughts that exist in that moment, that you become alive in a vacuum and you tunnel vision on that one person and place where the answer will be waiting, it’s all very Schrödinger’s cat because on that drive over he was both alive and dead. I got to the hospital and found him in a bed with tubes all around and a cast over his leg but there was no frenetic activity. It was pretty calm and he was awake. There were tears in his eyes but he couldn’t talk to me. In the hallway, I saw two police officers make their way towards us. They stopped and conferred with each other, then found me and asked if I was his next of kin. I nodded and they explained. 

As they were talking, I saw behind them and the rushing of nurses and doctors and I could hear the beeping machines and I knew that something was wrong. The taller police officer looked at me and said Ma’am, did you hear what we just told you? They must be used to people spacing out. I shook my head and he tried again. I can only remember snippets even still - it’s like my brain won’t allow me to retain whole sentences, as if they would be poisonous, so my body expels them, keeping only what it can so it continues to survive. 

I’ll just say it, okay? His BAC was skyhigh - something like double the legal limit. And he had swerved into oncoming traffic, causing a multi-car collision. The car in front had swerved to avoid him, going into the lane beside it and causing the car in that lane to slam on the brakes, causing the cars behind it to collide and the car that had swerved somehow missed all of that and ended up off the road and down a ditch and into a tree.

Most of the passengers in the other cars had minor injuries except for the one that swerved. They were in critical condition, those passengers, and there was a woman and two… well, two children. Let me cut through the shit, okay? They died. All three of them. And it was my son’s fault. He was drunk and decided to go for a little joyride and now a father has to go through the rest of his life as a broken man. I saw him that night, in the hospital. He was standing in the waiting room and staring at the wall, all of the colour drained from his face. At one point, he looked at the clock and fainted. 

So that’s it. The truth to this little confessional. And that other feeling I mentioned a while ago? That feeling is hatred. I hate him for this. There are times, and there are voices that speak to me in those times that say it should have been him. That he doesn’t deserve to live. And I can’t argue with them. I don’t even know how to love him anymore. What he did took something from that poor man who will be alone for the rest of the days even if he finds another person to fill the void, he will always be alone - but he also took something from the world. He took good from the world and it doesn’t matter if it was a mistake because there are no accidents in the cosmic sense, only decisions and consequences, movement of matter and particles.

I haven’t visited him yet and he hasn’t written. His father went to visit - I know because I was told that I was being a shitty mother by not visiting. But I don’t know if I will ever be able to see his face again. Does that make me a bad person? Maybe it would make a bad person to go and see him. For whatever is remaining of my soul, would it make more sense to keep the rest of it clean? To not tarnish it with the sin that will be forever attached to him? 

He’s not a monster; he didn’t mean to do it. But what is done cannot be undone. That mother, those little girls, they will never see the sun. My heart will never be whole. My son will never be good, no matter how hard he tries to be good. How am I supposed to compete with odds like that? I guess the answer would be love. It’s not an entirely novel approach but it’s damn hard. To think that somewhere deep inside of me is a place that love still resides for my son the murderer, and I believe me, I don’t call him that lightly but what am I supposed to say - my son, the vehicular manslaughterer? How can you call it manslaughter when it was children? How can any of this even be real? 

I know I need to go there to visit him - that he has nobody except us, nobody in the world who cares about him, who will show him love. I know what I need to do. If I can forgive him, maybe that is a start. But what does forgiveness actually accomplish except for making it easier to live with what has been done? 

I know what I need to do. I just don’t even know if I can look at him. 

Most of the time I can barely even look at myself.