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Heather Bause
Houston, Texas USA
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I was born on Wednesday, September 17, 1975 in Englewood, New Jersey. My mother is Catholic/Irish, my birth father Catholic/Italian. They had met 7 years earlier when my mother was working as a counter girl at a fast food place just outside of Pontiac, Michigan. My father at the time was the store manager and my mom had just turned 16. It had been a rough summer for her; she had lost 30 pounds and her best friend from childhood and fiancé died from open-heart surgery. His doctors said he had a weak heart -which had gone unnoticed over the years; they claimed his death was a freak accident. A week after meeting my father, she lost her virginity and got pregnant with my older brother, Creighton. She dropped out of high school and spent the next ten years following my father from job to job around the US northeast.
Some people say they remember formative events from their childhood. Some say they can even remember happy ones as far back as two or three years old. I have none of these formative kinds of memories, and the ones that I do have are all very uncomfortable.
When I was three my mom didn't come home from work at her usual time. She was working as a secretary at some shit job; making ends meet with her paltry salary, getting out of the house and away from my bullying father. He was the general manager of several Pizza Inns; we lived on the north side of Houston on the wrong side of the freeway. My brother Creighton and I were sitting on the floor in front of the TV when our drunken father stumbled home. It was well after dinnertime and mom still wasn't home. He slurred his way into the kitchen, making all kinds of noises, interrupting our TV show, opening and slamming kitchen cabinets, yelling at us to go to our rooms. By the time my mother walked in through the front door, it was well past midnight. I remember the two of them screaming and Creighton and I worrying that he would hurt her again. Creighton took his baseball bat and we crept downstairs to the living room. The rest of my memory is fuzzy, though I distinctly remember my father swinging Creighton's baseball bat at my mother's face. Creighton then jumped up onto our father and slugged the bat into our father's stomach.
The next morning father got out of jail, came in and woke me up, apologizing for hurting mom the night before. She got fired from her secretarial job for missing work, got thirteen stitches and had a swollen face for three weeks. It was great after that though, all of our Aunts and Uncles moved down from Michigan and we all lived as one happy family for the next six months. Creighton and I got to share the master bedroom with both our beds shoved together in the middle of the room, my princess pink canopy bed next to his Star Wars bunk beds.
About a year later mom decided to move in with this loud and unconventional salesman from Avis. The story goes that they worked in the same office building, and they met on her first day when he came in to flirt with the secretaries and he commented on how short her skirt was. She told him to go fuck himself and it was love at first sight. I suppose she thought he was different from our father - but he wasn't that much different. He was a loud, dominating bully, who drank on a regular basis, though the most noticeable differences were his large checkbook and fast car. I refused to call him anything but Mike and hated him everyday. I was still waiting for our father to come and rescue us. Mike made jokes about the little Christmas tree I put together in our upstairs family room. I thought he was loud, rude, made me eat vegetables with every meal and always said nasty things about my birth father. Luckily, I was too young to realize they were all true. One evening he made squash with our dinners and I did not want to eat it. He said I couldn't leave the dinner table until I ate my squash. I guess I fell asleep at the table because the next morning I woke up in my room. After playing in the kitchen with a box of tissues - I was building a nest for one of my stuffed animals, I went into their bedroom to ask permission to eat breakfast. I was told I had to eat the leftover squash sitting in Tupperware in the refrigerator. I said okay and stuffed the squash into some of the tissues I had in the trashcan. My brother ratted me out and Mike made me eat the squash out of the trash. I sat there with tears streaming down my face while gulping down four pieces of wet, cold squash.
Shortly after that we were sent to visit our birth father in Ohio for Christmas. My mother cried the whole walk into the plane and continued crying as she walked back out of the plane. That was the first time I had seen her cry outside of the house. It seemed so dramatic to me and I fidgeted thinking we were going to die in a plane crash. Why else was she crying? My brother and I got special attention and all the stewardesses were really nice to us and let us drink as much pop as we wanted. Unfortunately, I was so excited to finally see my father that I threw up all over the seat and myself in between my brother and I on the plane. My brother started to laugh hysterically at me, calling me mean names and rolling around in his seat. The lady across the row from us was nice enough to take me into the bathroom and clean me up. I was so embarrassed and felt like such a lightweight. It was my first time in an airplane.
When we arrived in the airport, we learned our connecting flight was cancelled. It had snowed too much before we landed and we had to stay the night at a local hotel. There was a lot of discussion about how this would work, since I was 5 and Creighton was 11. Neither of us remembered Mike's phone number, so there was some panic about how the airline would contact our parents. I guess there was a phone number in the flight records, so an airline employee got my mom on the phone, she called my father, he was walking out the door to go to his girlfriend's office party, so he said he couldn't be bothered to drive the three hours to the airport to pick us up, so our grandparents came and visited us from nearby Michigan. I was so relieved to see them! A few hours later our father showed up and drove us back to his house. I was so happy to see him I threw up in his new car, all down the back of his seat and on the floorboards. I remember standing on the side of the highway in the cold and snow, crying because he was mad at me.
Our trip turned out to be a complete disaster. After the first day my brother got into trouble for fighting at the playground. He opened all our gifts up before Christmas day and we both got into trouble. By the time we returned Mike had bought my mom a new house, in a nice, new area, that they couldn't afford. I was so ashamed of what happened during our visit with our father, I didn't open or even play with my new gifts when we got back home. I threw them into the closet and hid them under extra blankets in the back. Our birth father didn't come around after that and I only heard from him one more time, when I received a birthday card on my 13th birthday, stuffed with a fifty-dollar bill.
After Mike bought the house, mom was completely smitten and finished her conversion course in Judaism just days before the wedding. A few months after the wedding my brother started to get into trouble at school. The first few years it was mostly fights and skipping class, in the months to come he would spend almost two years of his early adolescence in a psych ward of a downtown Houston hospital, slowly draining available funds on our new dad's health insurance policy, robbing the weekends from all of us. Before he was released, my parents managed to have another baby - we named her Amanda. When Creighton got home from the hospital he advanced rather quickly to dealing coke and marijuana out of our kitchen, stealing cars, robbing our friends and neighbors' houses. I thought it was all completely normal and often times, skipped swim practice so I could help count the money. I tried coke for the first time when I was 8 and had been smoking for a few months. It wasn't much later when the cops arrested him in our front yard. Susie Patterson was over playing Barbie's when the cops showed up, handcuffing him on top of Officer Prices' police cruiser. Needless, Susie Patterson's mom wouldn't let her come over to play after that day.
After Creighton was kicked out of the house, we concentrated on the new baby, I, memorizing her every moment, her first word, her first walk. I started calling Mike, "daddy" and even though it felt weird, it felt less weird than calling him Mike. As a family we ignored my brother, pretended he didn't exist. We even lied to all the new families we met at the synagogue we had just joined. In our minds, there were only two children fathered in the Golden family. My mother's first marriage was a shameful event only I was the proof of. I suppose that is when my mother began to ignore me. My therapist once told me its called disassociative effect, when someone or something reminds you of something awful that has happened, you tend to block it out, or disassociate with it. For my mother, I was a constant reminder of her previous life. For me, my last name was a constant reminder of my brother and my father.
My middle school years were a total blur, highlighted with good grades, numerous embarrassments and school disasters. I was never a cool kid and was almost always seen wearing my coke-bottle-thick glasses. Fortunately after months of begging and whining my parents broke down and bought me a pair of hard contacts in the 8th grade. I had my first boyfriend three days after I returned from Christmas break. Those years passed with few memories for me today; though a few formative lessons are still on the list: discovering Depeche Mode and The Cure; penning a "6" into an "8" on my report card, obsessing about it for the next six weeks, though never being found out; mastering the art of forging my mother's signature for progress reports; trying out for cheerleader and being humiliated in front of the entire school; winning my first art awards for drawing and painting; learning how to give a blow job; beating up a girl who made fun of my first boyfriend; cheating on him nine months later with a boy who was hotter and rode a bmx bike.
By high school I was a complete wreck, my life filled with shameful acts of idiocy and violence. With no word from my estranged brother, our family was still in total harmony, though by now I had discovered sex and dreamt of being a famous painter. I made Bob Ross copies from memory and watched his show on PBS religiously. I experimented in lighting candles on the floor in my closet and praying to various gods to come and take me away. My parents focused most of their attention on my younger sister, I ended up watching her most weeknights, by then mom had gone back to night school to get a college degree and our father was never seen before 9pm. Amanda and I had a lot of fun together, I always had the TV as company when music offered no solace.
In the ninth grade I got pregnant the first time I had sex, and unlike my mother's first time, I was afforded an abortion. I stayed fairly depressed for the rest of the year, winning fights with girls through pure intimidation Tenth grade was my first real fight though, I broke a girl's jaw in the locker room during PE for sleeping with my boyfriend. Later that same day I found out he'd also been sleeping with two other girls. I beat one of them up after school and the other one the next weekend. By the time I got out of in-school-suspension I had made friends with the girls, swearing off boys until I was old enough to meet a nice one. I stayed pretty traumatized for the rest of my tenth and eleventh grade years, giving confrontation a break and trying to make good grades. It was the only thing I could do for my parents as retribution for my bad behavior. I even made it into honors English when one of my teachers realized I had a brain.
The summer before I started my senior year I convinced my parents to send me to Europe for the summer. There I met and fell wildly in love with my now husband. Though back then, we had no idea we'd be married almost ten years later. It was a short and dramatic three months before I had to return to the US, however it took me much longer to forget him. I dreamt the same dream many years after our romance. It was especially unforgiving all those years in college when I would get high with David after working long shifts as a waitress and would pass out on the sofa. My then, college boyfriend Jose would gently carry me in his arms into bed, all the while my dreaming of flying to Germany and ringing the door in my husband's tiny village.
When I returned home from that summer abroad, I was heartbroken and found comfort in my painting, concentrating that year on creating a portfolio for art school. By the spring my parents vetoed the idea and I ended up accepting the awful truth that I had to go to the University of Houston. Graduation came and went and I started school in the fall. To my parent's annoyance, I changed my major from pre-med to painting after my first semester in school. I did a lot of drugs and passed all of my classes. I worked two jobs most of the time while in college to support my drinking and drug habits, and am amazed today that nothing bad ever happened while I was so fucked up. Therapy didn't seem to help and I was finally diagnosed as manic, and then chronically depressed. My doctors said it was because of the formative events from my childhood.
The semester before I was supposed to graduate I found a black lab on the side of a freeway. I named her Stella after Frank Stella's early black stripe paintings. That summer I had a mental breakdown and quit school, quit my meds, quit Houston. That July I tried to commit suicide by swallowing a bottle full of sleeping pills. I had a dream that seemed to last forever and could swear today that my grandfather came to me in the dream and told me it wasn't my time yet. After that I moved in with Eric out in the country in Indiana, suffered through poverty and self-loathing before coming back to Houston, sober and drug-free. I guess Indiana became my rehab, though I didn't really work the steps or reconcile or change any of my bad habits. I hated Eric so much that thankfully, Indiana worked for long enough, and I graduated the next spring, while working full-time at an upscale Houston Ad agency.
The drinking and drug abuse came back shortly after graduation though; I couldn't seem to handle the demands of working under so much stress. My boss was a bitch and reminded me of my mother. It was like having all my family shit spread out over the design department floor. Everyday she would say something mean, or be hurtful, demanding or rude, and everyday I would be the victimized child. It was awful and left me leaving work feeling drained, and like I just wanted to go home and drink it all away. The boyfriend I shacked up with wasn't much help either. He refused to get a job and was a chronic thief. He was so cheap he wouldn't even pay for deodorant from the grocery store. Instead of paying he would slide his toiletries into a backpack or into a front jean pocket. He only liked to use his dollars and cents for beer and pot. I should have known better, but let it slide for a good year and a half. It wasn't until New Years 2000 that he beat me up in San Francisco - the sad thing is that he was having a blackout, so he didn't remember any of it and his two sisters we were visiting accused me of making it all up. I flew home alone the next morning and made him move out - by summer I moved into a nice one bedroom duplex in the Heights. On my salary and debt I could no longer afford the Montrose.
By the fall I was 25 and working for a very successful Mutual Fund company. I was painting a lot and trying to get into grad school. I did get accepted to a school in Michigan called Cranbrook, but after careful review decided I couldn't afford it. I asked my parent's to help, but my mother's only response was that I "need to get my head out of the clouds and grow the fuck up. Graduate school is a pipe dream Heather, get a real job." I didn't go to grad school and instead was one of 35 designers in the world, lucky enough to be chosen to attend an all-paid, two-week, 14-hour-a-day intensive web design course out in Oaji, CA. The course was taught by some very famous, award-winning designer who thought she witnessed the birth of the Internet. When I came home I got a nice cushy job making 90k a year as a creative director for Enron, then for Chevron. I was so depressed about not going to grad school that started up therapy again, refused to paint anymore, started making collage art books, became a chronic insomniac and resumed my drinking and drug abuse. It was one of the lowest points in my life, though at least then I could get high on my own meds, and could squander away all of my income on clothes, house decor and luxury vacations to Costa Rica. I drove my car into the ocean after drinking four bottles of champagne. The first night after I bought my new Jetta, I went out to a disco with a friend and all I remember is stopping at a stoplight and opening my door to vomit. I bought a pound of marijuana off a co-worker who lived twenty minutes away, smoked a swisher with two others, then drove 50 miles an hour home on I-45 with my pound tucked into my socks.
This last Christmas my husband and I went to Europe for a few weeks. We visited his mother for Christmas and partied for New Years with his best friend Mark. It was the best time I've had in a long time; I've resumed painting and we live in a house in the Heights and life slowly continues. The last few years with him have been both difficult and amazing, dotted with many trips to Europe, three humble and well-behaved dogs, a successful web design business I run out of our home, and a masterplan in the works for us to move back to Europe. Today while I was at the Y up the street from our house, I was running in place, sweating profusely, cursing myself to keep going, when an older woman in her 70s named Barbara came into the weight room. She and another older woman got caught up in conversation about Mardi Gras and how fabulous it was last year for Barbara and all the other seniors from the Y who went to Louisiana to celebrate. There I was, by far the youngest in the room, running in place, always trying to get somewhere but getting nowhere, and I thought to myself, listening to them chatter, how beautiful things can be in this life.
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