The 1988 Chevrolet Caprice

My mom and dad had separated since my last week of 6th grade. I remember a vague set of memories from that time, like being dragged outside by my mom in the middle of the night, in my underwear and with two left shoes on, because she felt unsafe in that relationship. With both her and my dad grabbing each one of my arms, sliding me around on the gray leather seats of her 1988 Chevy Caprice Classic. One arm trying to pull me from the vehicle and the other flipping the hell out trying to get me into the car so we could get out of immediate danger. I lost it and crumpled into a tight ball in the drive, shouting that they were ripping me apart. I think that snapped my Dad into thinking with a cooler head and letting my arm go. My mother took me to her workplace, a Merle Norman Cosmetics studio, where we slept on the floor that night amongst the cases of red and pink lacquered paints and the sweet smell of acetone and acrylic nail dust. She slapped me in the face hard, telling me never to put her into that position again.

I didn't know what was going on until much later. Two days later, I was fishing down the street in a creek that was in a wooded area a half mile from the property where we were living. My brother came up, telling me we had to get out of there right away. I kept asking why, never getting a direct answer.

We walked a trail for about a mile, which circled in the woods around a shopping plaza and water treatment plant back to the property where we stayed. This was a two-acre plot of undeveloped land where my dad's cabinet shop rested, along with the trailer we had lived in for four years. Mom was done with it.

I came back to my mom collecting her things, while some family friends waited around for protection. The two friends were a married couple who were her colleagues in her work at a real estate agency. When I had arrived, the husband was saying that if my dad kept on, he was going to punch him in the face. Nobody explained what had happened to me, but I could see remnants of my dad's rage strewn across the front yard. My mom's clothes were scattered all over the lush half acre that lay in front of the trailer. Her clothes were run over, mashed into the dirt, with grass stains all over them. The air smelled like burnt rubber, and smoke was still pouring from the engine compartment of my Mom's Chevy Caprice. He tried to ruin the engine to keep her from walking out on him.

Mom later told me her side of the story. She told me that Dad had his brother, who worked for AT&T, install a phone line that spliced from our telephone line in the trailer 200 feet to a dedicated phone in his construction business office. There was a khaki colored table top telephone with a red light on the top edge of the unit that appeared in the office one day. Dad would yell like crazy at me if I even looked at that phone. When he wasn't around one day I decided to play with the phone. I picked the phone up and there was no dial but a harsh crackle in the receiver. I hung the phone up and picked up the entire body and felt how much lighter the unit was compared to a similar telephone we used in the trailer.

Mom asked me if I remembered that phone.

I said yes.

"Well," she said, "your Dad had your uncle Tommy install that phone in the office to listen in on my phone conversations. He was afraid that I was going to leave him, which I was."

Dad had come into the house drinking and was paranoid about my mom hurting him, so he went to bed with a kitchen knife. Mom had let him know that she had saved up money on her own for a down payment for an apartment and was leaving. She informed him that she had cheated on him with a colleague from her real estate office a few years prior.

Dad erupted in a drunken rage, with mom waking me up to flee the trailer. I found that immediately strange because my parents never drank. A few days later my brother had come to get me because, during the second altercation, my dad flipped out and began trying to ruin her clothes and car in an effort to keep her from leaving. After being chased away by her friends, he retreated to look for me, threatening to take me back to his childhood home in rural Arkansas. He had done the same with our half brother from another wife that we hardly visited.

1987-1993 were especially rough for my family. Bad business led our family to foreclose on our house and get evicted from a rental home. An argument between the two never stopped over the next thirty years.

Mom says Dad lost the house and was not business savvy enough to keep income coming in during the worst of the Houston Oil Crash. Her role as office manager was unpaid, she wasn't able to sway Dad's decisions despite pleas from her and their accountant looking over the books. As from what my Mom said, Dad partnered himself with men who didn't appreciate opinions from women. She was pushed out of her role and asked to go home and take care of the kids. Dad quickly fired his accountant and by the next year was in trouble from the IRS over employee tax withholding errors

Dad only had one point in the argument. "All I ever heard from her was," he would say, "'if we don't buy this house, we will never own one.' She couldn't handle the reality that we made a terrible decision, and we had to live through some pain to fix." They both had their points. I don't know how many conversations I've had with both of them regarding the house and their marriage. The problem lies in the lengths dad took in taking out his frustration in the world he attempted to control. I left with Mom and we became roommates. We moved to an apartment complex where we rented a 2 bedroom apartment. A few months later when the school year started for me in the 7th grade, I came home to my Mom crying at the dining table. I walked closer, until I saw my dad who was getting coffee, slightly hidden in the kitchen darkness.

"You are going to stay with dad now," she said. "Go get your things."

I don't remember much else other than saying "No, I won't," until he left. We were relatively left alone for Mom to figure out what had happened.

The Caprice faded in the Texas Sun like my mom's mood. She struggled as a nail tech for a number of years and fell into smoking. The once smooth leather seats of the caprice cracked and flaked. Nicotine tar built up on the seats and left them slightly sticky and oily. I remember how I would get called out by classmates and teachers for smelling like smoke. Later when a routine had been settled, Dad would take me to school and would complain that I smelt like a chimney when I got into his truck in the morning. It went that way until I turned 16 and started to use the Caprice as my vehicle to get around in. It sounded like a lawnmower by that point. A few years prior, my brother had borrowed it from my mom and had quickly outdriven the cops in it and had accidentally ran over median curb in it next to our house. After that episode mom kept asking why the car felt different. My brother didn't say a word. Shortly after that, he was arrested with some of his other friends for stealing a car and evading arrest by the police. He went to jail for six months. When it became my car, I would take it to a self serve car wash and try to remove the tar from the seats. I shared that car with my mom for six months and by the time I stopped driving it I still was removing the brown tar from the seats.