When the Holiday season starts rolling into everyone’s consciousness, inevitably thoughts come around to ones family, memories, possible pilgrimages home, sentimental gift giving, all that lovey-dovey warm and fuzzy stuff. I know that these holiday feelings aren’t the ones particularly associated with me and my own general take on the season, but at times they have been and it was wonderful. But Christmas comes but once a year, and families go through a lot of other things on those other 364 days of the year, so I decided to deck the halls with a brief summary of my family’s not so boughs-of-holly, not so quick to give thanks for, day to day trials and tribulations of the year. This is the stuff that nice soap on a rope or Fruit-of-the-Month gift certificate isn’t really gonna make any better in the long run. It’s rich though, indeed.
I recently got a letter in the mail from my sister, who is ten years my senior and probably the only one of my three siblings I really care enough about to keep in touch with. She’s the oldest and I’m the youngest and my two brothers in between have sort have always been on the outs with us, and in and out of jail, loveless marriages, mental institutions, custody battles, more marriages, failed business ventures like panning for gold with a dredge, and even Field and Stream magazines year end hunting records, but in the eyes of my sister and I, they’ve caused my mother far too much grief with their ongoing white-trash high drama episodes of catastrophic situations ranging from re-possessed cars, posting bail, domestic violence, and quitting the best mill jobs they’ll ever get just to make opening day of deer season, not to mention stealing my mom’s jewelry and some of my late stepfathers guns and pawning them, or ending up in jail for poaching deer outside of the boundaries of the Indian reservation where his full-blooded girlfriend lived, or stealing and wrecking mom’s car, or the trail of illegitimate babies in the tri
-state pacific northwest area they left along the way, and I could go on. At any rate, one of my brothers, in his fifth marriage, seems to have shaped up a bit, just in time to get lung cancer, the other is no longer allowed around the family whatsoever because of his habitual thievery and his manic-depressive diagnosis made by a shrink in an institution that prompted him to fully believe and tell everyone that his condition “…..is all Mom’s fault, doctor told me.”
Well anyway, by way of my mothers occasional letters, I had learned that my sisters two youngest children were giving her some unbelievable disciplinary problems kind of out of the blue, kind of mirroring behaviors of their bad uncles. The last time I had seen them was on an idyllic little Christmas at home, all of us siblings together for the first time in years, a visit that went very well and was quite nurturing and positive and upbeat, no fights, no one grabbing the baby, or a gun from behind the front door and jumping in the car, no tears, no digging up any buried axes for a rehashing, and lord there were many, just a good old fashioned Walton-like family Christmas, commanded by my mother, whose widow status of four years since the death of my wicked stepfather, gave her request for such an assemblage a rather imperious tone. It was like Victoria Barkley had called all of her sons back to The Big Valley , even Heath, and everyone had better show up.
In tow were all my nieces and nephews, of course, and there were many, and yet still more who were not present due to bitter custody battles, restraining orders, and unknown teenage runaway status. My sisters boys were 11 and 13 and they were really a lot of fun. They seemed polite for the most part and quite bright and properly worshipful of the only person there with a leather motorcycle jacket—an article of clothing that intrigues kids from toddlers to teens, really. I left the reunion thinking my sisters kids were just fine, soon to be fine young men, educated, well-bred, etc., breaking the odd jailbird legacy that I so tried to eradicate throughout grade school, Junior high and Highschool, following my two older brothers bad reputations and the other ugly fact that my father was the janitor at two of those schools while I attended, and I was the product of a (gasp) broken home—my parents were divorced, and right about that time my home town had the highest divorce rate in the entire nation. I tell you, Oregon is a truly weird place in so many ways.
Well, not long after that trip home, my mother started sending me letters with some very shocking news about my sisters two boys. It seemed like merely days had passed before my mother was telling me that those well-behaved, respectful, good egg nephews of mine had plunged head first into essentially every imaginable bad boy behavior known to teenage-dom. In that certain way that my mom has of making things sound upon retelling, she proceeded to list the offensive behaviors of the kids, how she just wouldn’t take it, and what she’d do if they were her kids, the horrible time they were inflicting on my sister, and the inevitable question, where did my sister and her husband go wrong in bringing those kids up. I was shocked speechless as I learned that the 11 year old was found to be having sex with a girl age 16, both kids had fully embraced the dark world of drug use and were declared addicts, their schools didn’t want them due to their disrespectful behavior, soon enough the police were involved almost daily with visits to their home, they apparently had started dealing all sorts of drugs, (they were caught growing poppies and splicing them for the opiated sap, which is really quite advanced for 12 and 14 year olds, if you’re into that sort of thing, but I was more likely to be found trying to cook up a crank-y concoction with Vicks nasal inhalers and other things at that age) the 11 year old had bouts of anxiety, depression and was at times suicidal, they ran away, and then the real clincher was the older boy 13, was found guilty of child molestation or sexual abuse of a neighbor boy age 6. My mom didn’t go into very much detail on that one but went on to say that the boys were making my sister unable to work and utilize her recently earned Beautician License because she had to constantly supervise the kids—by law—taking them to their AA meetings, sexual offender counseling, probation and parole meetings, etc. My mom had decided that she just plain didn’t like her bad seed grandsons for all the hell they were putting my sister through, because as she put it, “…I’m not going to like anyone if they hurt her because she’s my baby.” In her advanced years my mother has grown very cut and dry regarding where she places her attentions and affections—she’s gotten tough and a bit ice-y but I like that. She is Victoria Barkley, I can see her picking people off with a rifle, white-haired, wearing gauchos and a little vest if any threat came to hers and her own. Yet come supper time, she’d still be elegant. But anyway, these second hand reports had really got me wondering so I wrote my sister a letter, first time in several years, asking what the hell was going on. Finally she responded and it was epic—15 pages, but I finally got the real story—which I’ll condense and summarize briefly.
Like so many of this worlds problems, my sisters family’s odyssey of problems began at Church—a kids night of games, refreshments and bible activities that any parent would be glad to know their children were attending. Later that night the older boy Cole, phoned home and said Austin, his younger brother had flipped out and ran away from the church. As it turns out, someone had slipped him some LSD in his punch. They eventually found him curled up into a ball in a cardboard box behind the QFC market. He wouldn’t let them near him and it took several days before he calmed down. My sister and her husband both claim they never did LSD so they didn’t know the experience, but I remember my sister dating a guy when she moved back home after her first marriage ended, teased her hair real big, wore tight jumpsuits, and dated a guy who was busted for dealing LSD in my home town. Hmmmmmm. Anyway, after this incident they noticed a steady deterioration in both the boys behavior. They knew something was wrong but couldn’t figure it out. As it turned out, a 16 year old girl Austin saw a fair amount of, a friend he visited regularly, supposedly supervised by her parents, was the one who slipped him the LSD and subsequently would get him high when he visited, and have sex with him. This happened four different times. The situation led them to the courtroom where it all unfolded in ugly full nitty-gritty details, leading to the girl being charged with four counts of Childrape, incarceration, probation and sexual offender counseling. After the fact, four other blonde blue-eyed little boys came forward with the same stories. She later became pregnant and tried pulling a paternity claim on my nephew.
By this time the brothers seemed to band together in the face of this crisis and turned to drugs and major badboy behaviors. Suddenly there were suspicious phone calls from strange men and with a bit of parental phone snooping, my sister learned that the boys were buying, selling, making and using literally every type of recreational drug, and dealing with connections as far away as Portland, Yakima, and Seattle, with grown men, not other kids. Eventually this started to get out of hand and the phone calls became threatening. One night a woman drove up to their house and warned them to stay off the street or they would be killed, then another night a man called and said they had better not get too comfortable because they were going to torch the house and make sure everyone was inside. Subsequently the boys were run off the road by a car and injured falling into a berry bush covered ravine. Once on their way to an AA meeting, one of the only things they were allowed to leave the house for, some one drove by and doused them with vodka. The police were at my sisters home almost everyday for some new offense. They ran away once and said they were going to SF to stay with me. My sister said, “I bet you’re glad they didn’t.” I bet some of my friends would have been more than happy with their arrival.
Then came the real clincher. Some new family moved in to their neighborhood with a pair of kids, a 12 year old girl and a six year old boy, and the kids became friendly and were often over at each others houses. My sister had not met the kids mother face to face, only over the telephone, but she seemed nice and said the boys were always welcome to visit their house etc. One night the boys were over and the woman of the house had a migraine and cajoled a neck and back massage out of Cole the oldest boy, on her bed and all which was highly inappropriate. Returning suddenly from Mrs. Robinson territory to child’s play, the kids were playing hide and seek and it was Cole’s turn to seek. While the others hid he went to the bathroom to take a piss and while doing so the six year old jumped out of his hiding place and came up and touched Cole’s
private parts as it were. He told him to knock it off and zipped up and left the bathroom. The boys returned home and went to bed and two hours later the police came, saying they had just been to the house the kids had visited filing a report against Cole for sexually abusing their six year old boy.
After a full year of constant horrible court dates and many times when Cole was taken away from them and held in Juvenile Detention for a total of 4 months, he was found guilty of Child Molestation. He had to be legally registered as a sexual offender, the police delivered flyers with his picture and described offense to the entire local area, my sisters entire family was shunned by the small town they live in, people would grab their children and run indoors, no more invites to family barbecues and coffee klatches, etc. Not that they would have had time what with parole and probation meetings, trackers checking up on them, personal counseling, family counseling, drug and alcohol classes, sex offender classes, parents of sex offenders classes, the works, essentially still keep them all pretty controlled but things are finally returning to normal. An additional footnote on the family that filed charges, the man and wife filed for divorce and blamed it all on Cole. They also let the kids have beer and watch porn videos and look at dirty magazines while visiting, all points that didn’t seem to matter in a court of law.
My sister finally maintains that through all of this her family has stuck together and gotten through it okay by the grace of God. She says they’ve learned to trust no one, have gone full circle and feel no shame, and only hope that they might be able to help others who like themselves thought, this could never happen to my family. She’s finally started her own business, a Mobile Hair Care Service and is confident that it will take off soon. The end. I don’t really know why I wrote all about this—something about the season, something about what’s real, something about where I’m from. I think I’ll write my sister more often.