A Knock at Midnight(9)

    I didn’t know it then, but my father, so young and surrounded by death and destruction, believed he was next. He wrote poems furiously into the night and illustrated them with pencil sketches, the best of which he did with his eyes closed, completely by internal vision. I’d wake in the mornings in Campbell to find pages taped to my bathroom mirror, filled with poems dedicated to me, the messages he wanted me to carry if he himself didn’t make it out of the struggle.

I was fourteen by then and full of myself—I wanted to apply lip gloss in the mirror, not read my father’s soul on the page—and I sometimes found the poems annoying, as all things parental can seem at that age. But somehow I had the wherewithal to hold on to them, and they remain among my most cherished possessions. They were full of gems, I recall to this day: “Brittany, remember your happiness and well-being are not open for debate,” and “Sweetheart, whatever you want in life, put and keep God first and go and get it,” and

    May God enhance all positive abilities in my lovely daughter

may she not forget the lessons her daddy taught her

Let her know her daddy will always love her and care

Her daddy will always be there

if not in the flesh

eternally in spirit.



    When I got older, I could read his own internal struggles between the lines. But at the time, all I saw was my dad’s unwavering support and encouragement. From the beginning, he drilled into me that I could do anything in this world I set my mind to, and reminded me constantly that I held all that I needed to succeed within myself—that my future was whatever I imagined it to be.

When finally Daddy decided enough was enough—that he wished to live, and to live he had to leave the drugs—he got himself sober. While he waited to shake the chemicals’ hold on his body, he studied my grandfather’s contracting blueprints and began to envision a new life for himself as a cement contractor as successful as his own father had been. “If you can build a sidewalk, you can build a stadium,” my grandfather told his son. With the evidence of his own father’s achievements in front of him, my daddy knew that despite being at the lowest point of his life, his success as an entrepreneur depended only upon his own dedication and belief. He studied the Bible, he studied his blueprints, and he began rebuilding his life.

While my daddy taught himself about cement, sitting in his armchair color-coding blueprints, I sat beside him with my own pen, and my own dreams. “What college do you want to get into, BK?” he’d ask. At thirty, he had abandoned his Michael Jackson jackets for a collection of suave leather vests and trousers that he wore with turtlenecks of the same color. He peered at me seriously from behind his round glasses.

“I don’t know, maybe University of Texas,” I said. He found me a picture of their logo in a magazine and had me cut it out and hang it on my bedroom wall.

“How are you gonna make that happen?” Daddy would ask. “You gotta set your intentions, BK. You got to know what you want and believe in it. Speak it into being.”

Way before tech-age gurus were making millions for TED talks speaking the same truth, my father taught me the power of intention: You can’t be it unless you can believe it.





Chapter 3


THE HOLE


My sister, Jazz, is the opposite of me and always has been. Carefree, laughing, entirely free with herself, her words, her emotions. She lives her life fully, without layers—always bringing all parts of herself to the table, regardless of the table—and I envy her that poise and conviction. In our relationship I’ve always been the guardian, but even when I give her a hard time for her free-spirited ways, I’ve always admired her ability to be one hundred percent herself at all times. I look up to her for this quality, and always have. With Jazz I can be totally free—free to be silly, to cuss, to act ratchet Brittany, to live life without any masks. I’m so grateful for that—and I don’t know where I’d be without having Jazz to laugh and feel whole with.

Which makes it harder, I guess, when I think of how I abandoned her to move to Campbell.

I was only in the ninth grade. Objectively, I know it wasn’t my responsibility to stay in Bogata and take care of Jazz, take care of my mom. But I also know that Jazz saw a lot of things I never had to. And if I had stayed, she and Mama wouldn’t have ultimately followed me to Commerce, where drugs were plentiful and Mama got worse. But at the time, I wasn’t thinking about all that. All I wanted was to get away.

    Life with my mother had become intolerable. Her functional time between binges was shortening by the week. We couldn’t pretend we were normal anymore, not by a long shot. I was fourteen years old and full of anxious worry and confusion, which sometimes gave way to resentment and anger at what my mother was doing to us, to Billy, to our life as a family. I had no real understanding or empathy for what the disease of drug addiction was doing to her, the ravaging. I coped by doing what I did best—taking responsibility. I made sure we stayed out of her way, made sure we ate when Billy was on his shift and Mama had disappeared for a couple of days.

At first I thought that if I did these things, made it easier at home, I could help cure what ailed her, could bring her back to us. But by 1998, I’d lost faith in that. At school, the DARE program brought friendly police officers into our classrooms to convince us that drug abuse was everywhere, a mortal threat, and that only the weakest, most morally bankrupt individuals would succumb to it—the losers, those who didn’t love themselves enough or weren’t strong enough. I loved Mama through and through, but it was hard not to internalize that message, not to view Mama’s habit as the worst kind of moral failure. My experience with my mom collided with the conflicting realities of what people said about people on drugs and the people I knew who were on drugs to create a painful double consciousness. I was sad, deeply disappointed, and wounded, but in a teenager this all comes out most easily as hostility. Mine was the blind, vindictive rage of an adolescent girl who was growing up too soon and savvy enough to know the cause—or to think I knew, at least. It was as if the drug controlled all of us, and I didn’t want to be controlled.