I moved out of my parent’s in 1990 when I was 25. I mean “moved out” figuratively. My weights remained in their garage and since I only lived 5 miles away, I found myself back home 3 days per week so I could weight train, and since I was there, eat dinner too. Oh…and why not do laundry as well? I would save some money and it would be lazily convenient as I was quickly learning that laundromats sucked. I could do laundry while I lifted and ate dinner. It was a glorious arrangement for someone pretending to live on their own such as I.
It was like I lived on my own 4 days per week at my own leisure. It was half-assed independence. Living on “my own” then was a weaning period where I learned what it was like while enjoying my parental safety net. I had been asked by a Columbian girl at work if I would like to room with her. Since I had the lukewarm hots for her, I willingly obliged, not realizing what a group of misfits her live-in family was.
The family I would be sharing an apartment with included:
Her mom, a skank who wore old whore’s makeup as hesitant as the faded beauty of her face. Sometimes when she used the bathroom, she left it smelling like a swampy fish market. Her boyfriend was a spiritual counterpart, some crazy old guy, I forget his name, a real low-life degenerate who once boasted of banging a post-op transexual. After a party (there were always parties), everyone was passed out and she made eyes at me and patted the couch for me to sit next to her. I was not one to refuse overt offerings of sex, but this one needed to be.
Her three brothers.
One was Robert, the only name of that sad bunch of sacks I remember. He had a horrible limp but he was a good guy. He would get loaded and start rapping and dancing, limp and all. They were New Yorkers by way of Columbia, so they had that Bronx-accented swag. Robert liked guns. No, he loved guns. He had guns and took me to the shooting range a few times, but not a real firing range, more like an open field in the mountains that was unregulated and full of other people with their high-powered military gear.
Her other two brothers were scum. The younger was in high school and he used the winnings from a lawsuit he received from an escalator accident to buy a Honda Civic which he loaded up with aftermarket goodies and then promptly wrecked one rainy night. He stole a shirt from my closet and was so bold as to openly wear it one night, but I was a pushover and didn’t utter a peep. It was a great shirt, I loved it. It was a black button-up with a faded paisley pattern and a real party shirt which was great for clubbing.
Gone.
The other brother was even worse. He was in his 20s and shared our apartment with an underaged New Yorker hoochie mama he knocked up. He was a big ingrate and the most dangerous of the unsavory group. He was the cause for the police to visit our apartment a few times and he once implied he would theoretically shoot them so they stormed the house and took almost the entire crew to jail. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever looked down the barrel of a loaded gun and that is no fun.
This is the crowd Julie sentenced me to live with. I was young, wild, and free, and had many less fucks to give than I do now. Remarkably, those were some of the happiest days of my life. Her younger brother even stole a burrito I brought from my parent’s that I had stored in the fridge. I went to pull it out for lunch one morning and the miserable moron had taken it. I have no proof it was him but he had proven to be the king of thieves in that miserable den so I chose to blame him.
Still, I didn’t miss home at all. I didn’t miss my parents, but I did have a curious dream that, in retrospect, might rebut my bravado.
I don’t recall how long I had lived out, but one night as I slept in my new room, among sketchy South Americans, away from the familiarity of my peaceful family home, I dreamt of a bright white light.
The dream began in a vast unlit room, a space that might have stretched an eternity but I wouldn’t know because there was no way to see. I couldn’t say it was a room, but I felt so due to the echoey sense of hardness surrounding me. It was only a dark featureless room and me, enveloped in the hollow sound of absence.
There was the blind sensation of barrenness. And as happens in dreams, a sudden, imperceptible shift, a change in stage scenery, then suddenly one reality blurs into another. Because it’s a dream, we don’t quarrel with the surreal.
Suddenly, piercing the blackness was a diffuse light glow, very bright but failing to illuminate. It was like an amorphous lamp, a source of warmth that did not combat the darkness. The light was self-contained, not of the darkness. It emanated a brilliance and a suffusing warmth that was unmistakably “human” - if a source of light could wilt your heart with kindness, this one did. The light drew me, encapsulated me in an eery serenity and I realized that the light was my mother. I just knew this. The strange light in this alien world was my mother.
The next day, the ethereal weight of the dream lingered in my mind. That night was my scheduled workout and when I visited my parents after work, I ate dinner and we chatted a bit at the dinner table. I prepared to head to the garage and remembered.
“Last night I had an odd dream. I was in a really big dark room and there was a white light above me. The weird thing is that in the dream, I knew it was you. The light was you,” I told my mom.
She looked at me with a strange look, maybe a tinge of curiosity. It wasn’t the overly dramatic HER FACE WENT WHITE!!! trope that some drum up. My mom just looked taken aback and she replied, “You know what, last night I woke up and I could have sworn I heard your voice.”
She said my voice seemed to have come from their bedroom and it roused her from her sleep.
I felt a chill run down my spine, and this is not hyperbole. I really did feel a chill, the first time I ever experienced that tired trope.
The interconnectedness of human consciousness is natural but spooky because we can’t control it.
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