Timothy Bell - The Bogeyman

 

So, it's the middle of a bright, sunny Seattle day, and I'm clicking away on my computer and I'm planning a vacation and I get a call from my brother. And from the other end of the line, I hear, "She's gone, dude." It takes me a second to figure out what he's talking about, but he's talking about our mom. Our mom has passed away. I get off the phone with him and I finish planning my vacation. 

 

Things were always pretty complicated between me and my mom. I remember a time when I was 12 years old and I was sitting in a department store toy aisle, just sitting on the tile floor there. I was playing with some action figures. I think I was testing their hip strength or something, ringing on their legs. I was humming to myself and I was singing songs that I had learned in school and all of a sudden, I feel this presence come up behind me, and I feel this pain in my arm. And it's her, and she's grabbed me from behind so hard that it leaves marks. All of a sudden, she bends over and whispers into my ear, "When we get home, I'm going to hit you for drawing attention to us." 

 

This is just how it had always been with us. I grew up absolutely terrified of her, like she was the boogeyman, Just absolutely terrified throughout all of my childhood that I had done something wrong, that she was going to hit me again. And so, in this moment, I say, "You're not going to hit me. I'm going to knock you down and I'm going to burn the store down around you." She looks at me surprised, and takes a step back, and walks away and starts mumbling something about going to get security. I knew in that moment I had lost that battle. This was just one of her moves, to always get authority figures, adults on her side, and then turn them against me, and threaten me with juvie, or say that they're going to take me to jail or something like that. And in this moment, I just knew I had to go. I knew I had to be gone. I knew I had lost, and so I ran.

 

I ran out the front door of that department store, and I hopped on the first bike I could see. This was not my bike. This was just somebody's bike, just the first one I thought I could pedal off on. I'm pedaling just as fast as I can, because I know I have to make it home before her, and I know that I have to be able to get all of my stuff and go before she gets home, before, who knows, before the police arrive. 

 

At this point, I should mention that we had been homeless before. And so, packing all of this stuff together in kind of a go bag, that was no problem for me. I knew how to do that. I had what I like to think of as perverted Boy Scout skills and I knew how to live on the streets. I knew what I had to do to survive and I knew what I had to grab and go. And so, that's what I did. I spent the next three months of my life homeless as a 12-year-old, before I was eventually picked up and put into foster care. 

 

So, I can imagine you're surprised to find out that I canceled my vacation, to find out that I am driving to her apartment, that I walk into the front office of the apartment manager and I ask for the key. I'm a little surprised at myself that I care this much, because up until this point, we had almost no contact with one another. I might see her once, maybe twice a year, just to check in on her. I don't know why I continued to check in on her, but I guess I looked in on her like she's the little old lady next door, the one you're worried is lifting boxes that are too heavy for her. And so, that's our relationship at this point for many years.

 

I get the key from the apartment manager. I'm not quite sure what to expect. I haven't seen her in maybe over a year. Whatever I was expecting, that's not what was there.

When I walk in the front door, I'm just horrified. There is just stuff. There is stuff on top of stuff. There is furniture on furniture, and there are papers, newspapers and printouts stacked on top of one another. There's just stuff from floor to ceiling in piles with seemingly no order to them. I'm just a little bit horrified by all this, because this is going to be days of work for me.

 

Another thing I find, is that there are these narrow pathways around her apartment to get from room to room, so you can shuffle your way through all this stuff. I make my way to her bedroom, and that's where there's this bare patch of floor that I'm able to work from. The reason there's this bare patch of floor, is that they had to cut out and they-- I mean, the coroner's office, they had to cut out the carpet around her body, so that they could take her away.

 

You see, she had been in her apartment and no one had noticed that she had passed away for several weeks, and so they had to cut the carpet out just so they could perform a proper autopsy and take her away. This space was the only place you could really get anything done, that there was any way that you could sort through anything.

And so, I'm in this space. I'm getting a little bit pissed here, because I'm here for days. My keep pile of stuff is it's not growing very fast. My throwaway pile, that's growing pretty darn fast. I'm starting to throw more and more stuff away, when I come across this pile. This is my pile. This is my stuff. And so, I take a little bit more notice of this stuff. 

 

I start to open boxes, and there's my baby teeth, there's my baby blanket and there are these Valentine's Day cards that I had written to her that say, "Mommy, I love you." That was the first time, I think, in my entire adult life that I realized our relationship, as I remember it, hadn't been the way it always was, that at some point, I loved her and that she loved me. And then, I find another note, and this note says simply, "I'm bad. I'm alone. I'm so sad. I wish I were dead." And this was the first time I had ever thought about my mom as an adult in any way other than that boogeyman, something to be terrified by. And so, in this bare patch, in this increasingly empty apartment, that's where I started to find home again.