A bonus thing I put together for you all today.

So, this ends chapter two. We’re 61 pages into ORIGIN. First, thanks for reading, and thanks for all the positive feedback, it’s inspiring and energizing.

Pretty much my overall outline I wrote back in June for how I wanted “ORIGIN” to work has come together nicely here. I knew that in order to get to Drew, it would be necessary to understood where he came from in the first place, and even then I wasn’t satisfied with just showing you two adults, I wanted the reader to know a little bit about who THEY are. Mostly because I believe that we pretty much are shades of the two people who made us, not just the looks, but things that made them up inside, and we can learn about ourselves by listening to their stories.

As I posted notes about my Dad in that closing chapter I thought I’d say a little bit about my Mom here in the closing to Chapter two. So here we go. If you don’t want a long drawn out explaination, then don’t hit the MORE tag….

I went to live with my Dad when I was 6 years old. My mother and father had been split up for awhile and I had been on the “every other weekend” visits with my Dad thing. Before I went to live with my Dad, my last memory of my Mom was this. I had just been dropped off by my Dad on a Sunday, walked in the door and my Mother was falling down the stairs and there was chaos with my older sisters yelling for me to run out and get my Dad and catch him. I remember running down the road with my sister waving for my Dad’s car as it drove off and he didn’t see us. They pretty much kept me sheltered from what was going on until they could get ahold of my Dad to come back and pick me up so I could go stay with him….. but my Mom had taken a bunch of pills and chased them down with alcohol and took a mean fall down the stairs and was laying lifeless at the bottom. That’s what I walked into that day. 6 years old. I might have been 5 actually?

My brain seems to take “pictures” of moments in time that I can vividly recall. I’m sure just about everyone can do that, it’s nothing special, but I seemed to have collected an awful lot of these brain photos that made me question things later in life and ask what had happened and then later be filled in on the details.

Anyway, I wouldn’t see my Mom again until I was 11 years old. My older brother’s woman was a South Korean woman named Judy who was pretty traditional when it came to family stuff, or so i was told, and she loved my Mom and got along with her really well, so when she heard about the situation with me, she was a driving force in getting me to have visits with my Mom at 11. I remember being a bit nervous at first, but it was fine. My Mom was kinda cool, very talented. I learned most of her history in that period. How she was supposedly a prodigy in school, but fell into bad things later on or sort of rebeled against the machine. She told me all the stories about witchcraft in the family, most of which I just didn’t believe. She taught me some Tarot, how to play chess and a few other things. This was the first time I remember seeing Bob Ross and his afro. She had a library of taped shows on VHS, she loved that Bob Ross guy. She would paint portraits, but they were of Alien worlds. She pointed to one once and told me it was how she envisioned Spock’s homeworld from a description she read in a Star Trek novel. — (later in life, I think they showed the planet Vulcan and it was all volcanic just like she painted it) — yeah, she was a big sci-fi nerd, which was kinda cool.

But there was something else. You could see it creep in from time to time. A darkness. Almost a selfishness, stubborness….meaness. She was very arrogant, egotistical and very full of herself…. but it all wore just like a mask you could pull off at any time. She tried to teach me the guitar once on one of my weekend visits. My hands weren’t big enough or use to making the chord shapes and I just couldn’t grasp the idea of “chords” or “melodies” or strumming a rhythm. She grew really frustrated with me about that, and almost angry, and it was a weird moment.

I moved away shortly after that time. The Volkswagen plant had closed here in Southwestern PA, and my Dad took our family to Southern California where I would do all of my junior high and high schooling stuff. I visited my Mom on one vacation back, and it always felt like she put on the “mask” of entertainment. Her stories were great, but as I was an older age, I just saw a flakey woman at that time. There were times I’d ask myself, or tell myself…. I’m this woman’s son, but she never once sent a birthday card, christmas card… nothing. She didn’t feel like my MOM at all. I never expected her to be. It was merely biological, and hey, this was no SOB story either. It’s just how things were for me, and MANY other families out there from broken homes. It really is NO big deal emotionally or anything like that. It’s just how it was. My stepmother, I called MOM, and for all intents and purposes she totally was my mother. That was a fact my biological mother didn’t like too much.

Keeping in mind this… probably all through my life i heard stories about my Mom. Mostly evil, bad things. Wicked crap. And here were grown adults telling me these things. My Dad always tried to be kind about it when I asked, but there were some times I’d catch him with a few beers in him and get THE TRUTH out. They had a ROCKY relationship together, something that will be chronicled in Chapter Three later– and the tales are truly entertaining and stuff he laughs about now.

I moved back to PA in 1994. I didn’t really ever desire to contact my mother, I had sort of put it all out of my mind being an “adult” now and just living in the real world and trying to get by on my own. There was one really weird run in with my mother at my Dad’s comic book shop once… she came in out of the blue, unexpected, walked in with her head high all sort of prissy and walked over to this little wall I had of my art for sale and she acted impressed, but then she came up to me and took one of the pictures and critiqued me and was tearing it apart and saying things to me like “these bats in the picture, if they ARE bats, because I can’t tell, they’re making this all too busy here…” — then she pretty much walked out. My Dad and i just looked at each other kinda stunned and thought… WOW, that was weird. I also let out an astounding “Fuck that crazy bitch” in front of my Dad, and we laughed about it.

The First Call– About a year went by, 1995 or so… and I got this phone call, spontaneously from my sisters I barely spoke to for years at time. The first told me that Mom’s liver was failing and she didn’t have long to live. I felt apathetic. Big deal. A girl I knew at the time, who knew nothing of my past, made me feel guilty about it and convinced me that I should go to the hospital to see her on her deathbed. It was BLEAK. I remember my older brother and sisters being there, and other family members I hadnt seen in AGES, and when I walked in, everyone was shocked to see me. I wondered if they could see my apathy, oozing from inside my own darkened heart? I know I had these thoughts in my head like “Geez, someone pull the plug already.” — My mom was YELLOW. A bad yellow I had never seen before. I’d learn that was serious jondice and usually from drinking or some sort of poisoning. Someone had told her I was there…. “DJ is here, Mom” — and she started crying. It was the first time I ever actually SAW regret on a person. She seemed to perk up a little and reached out to me and I think she was mumbling “My baby… my baby…” over and over. I cried. It was a really sad scene. I couldn’t help but think inside “Wow, Mom. Great time to realize you had a son!” — I left.

She had lived though. She somehow made it out of that death bed. And I never heard from her again. I did however hear from my sisters more, and we became drinking buddies. Every friday night we’d meet up at a bar in their town and drink and then eat breakfast. It was fun. I would introduce my best friend at the time, Cliff to my sister Kelly. They hit it off and well, long story short, they got married! We were all kinda tight at that time. But still, no Mom around. My sister Kelly visited her regularly, but my other sister, Kassandra, and my Mother had had a falling out and weren’t speaking. I had been told my sister Kassy was a lot like me, in the laid back, “slacker” way. But i constantly had to hear how I looked like my mother. Or sometimes they’d look at me and say… “Man, you look like Mom when you do that.” — and it wasn’t in a nice way they’d say it.. almost in an afraid way. Which was weird.

Anyway… my first date with my wife, Calista, was taking her to Cliff and Kelly’s wedding. I was the BEST MAN. Not supposed to bring a date, but WOW was I smitten with Calista. I did everything I could to get her to go with me to the wedding and I’m glad I did, because after that, our relationship was pretty much a done deal, and I was a changed man.

At my sister’s wedding rehearsal was the last time I would see my Mother alive. It was the only time Calista would ever meet my mother, (and she too was shocked that we looked alike)- My Mom did her usual swooping in and being obnoxious thing, over the top and with a slightly weird irish accent.

Two years later I’d get another call. This time from Kassy. Urging me to go to the hospital because this was the last time I was going to see Mom alive. I didn’t want to go, and Kassy knew it. She told me if I had anything to say to Mom, now would be the time to do it. I had nothing to say. In fact, I didn’t believe it. But i knew it must be serious if Kassy called. A few hours later, they called me to tell me Mom was dead. I wasn’t sad at all. I felt apathy again wash over me. Why did this matter to me? I didn’t REALLY care or give a shit. I just wanted to go live my life with my kids and my family… and…..

My kids. They were really little, but asking questions. They had never met my Mom. Their grandma. Was she even WORTH knowing? I mean, the lady melted my TOYS!!!! That was all I ever told them of my Mom… when the kids were bad, I’d say that when I was little, my Mom melted my toys and… yeah! My Mom was MEAN!!!

How did she die? No one could say. My sisters insisted it was just my mother’s liver finally giving out, and I accepted that. But, I got a call that night from my brother in law Cliff, asking how I was doing. He was there in her apartment when they found her I guess. And he asked me if I knew what had happened, and I said no. You can hear a reluctance in his voice to tell me, but he began to say that when they found my Mom, she was practically buried in empty bottles and near her they found an EMPTY bottle of Antifreeze…. but just as he got to that point, I heard Kelly’s dad (Tony Kolatch from this week’s ORIGIN) in the background saying not to say anything to me. They were covering it up. Maybe ashamed of it? I asked Kelly and Kassy once if they knew anything about it, and they said it was just her liver. What were they protecting me from? The fact my Mom committed suicide? Didn’t I at least deserve to know the truth?

But I always believed that that was what happened. She drank the antifreeze like Cliff said. I never had any PROOF though, and it was something I wanted to know for some reason, and it cropped up when I started this chapter of ORIGIN. It hit me… I’d order a death record online if I could. And sure enough, 15 bucks and two weeks later, it came. Dated September 11th on the request date…. cause of death…. “Ethylene Glycol Poisoning” - “Self Ingested”. A line next to it as a contributing factor in the death was “Chronic Alcoholism”. The manner of death wasn’t listed as suicide, but instead “Could Not Be Determined”.

So, it’s been 7 years and I finally knew the truth, even after I had drawn it. What I was told and what I believed was the truth, was indeed the truth. I was never told of will, or anything like that, never given any personal items, even though I had requested the Guitar, but told No. And frankly, I didn’t want anything. The only thing they did give me, was a link written down to a website my Mom had made. It’s ironicallyh still live on Tripod today and you can actually access it here. It actually adds some depth to the this chapter if you explore around, if you’re so inclined. And if you ever wondered what “D.J.” stood for, or you didn’t know already, the answer is there somewhere.

For what it’s worth, I quietly forgave my Mom at her funeral service. I hold know grudges or ill will against her soul or memory. It’s just how it was. It’s who she was, and that’s how it is. That’s life. That’s death.

But this story…. it’s just a story to me. A story that makes me question how someone who was so good, could have went so wrong and had such an ending to their story. It’s sad. It’s a tragedy. In a way, it’s almost like a Darth Vader story. I’m sure there was still good left in her somewhere. And now, my sons are old enough that they ask about her. And I’m haunted by her now. My son Dillon has her face. You can see it in my mother’s graduation photo on the bonus page posted today.

In a way, ORIGIN was inspired by my past broken home. My wife and I have a pretty solid home. I’m proud we’re together, and I’m proud “Mom and Dad” are here for them. They don’t understand really, my past, or where I came from. It’s hard to explain to them. I thought, one day it would be cool if I could hand them a book that was all about my life as a kid, teenager– they’re grandparents. Even though some stories embellished a bit or with a dash of overactive imagination, what a neat thing to behold that would be. And then maybe passed down. Maybe OTHER stories to be told… and told again.

These are all just stories to me, that I’m happy to share with all of you. I had no idea if they would entertain, or say anything to the readers, but the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.

tune in Monday for all the news on this that’s fit to print and my plan for future installments and where we’re at. Thanks for reading.

Make Mine Yirmumah.

Recent Topics: beer, pizza, bible, deacon, deacon returns, drew’s parents, alcoholism, alcoholic, alcohol, vodka, Kathleen Coffman

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