Angelhead by Greg Bottoms

Author:Greg Bottoms
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780676806540
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-14T08:00:00+00:00

Michael told my parents, in one of his moments of psychotropic lucidity, that he had met two friends at the mall. He wanted to move out, to move in with them. He hated my parents now, he decided, wished them dead. Sorry, I love you, he said.

My mother often dropped Michael off at the mall like a teenager, the only way she could get him out of the house now that even Bill, the speed freak, the collector of porn and continuous enrollee in junior-college business courses, had abandoned him. Mall security guards had called my parents several times. They'd call to say that Michael stalked women, made lewd gestures to kids, told a woman he wanted to baptize her baby.

My mother took him back, again and again. That’s where he wanted to be, smoking on a bench in the mall, staring at all those people with their secrets. And what else was there to do? She couldn’t find anywhere else to put him.

Dealing with insanity became about improvisation and compromise, figuring out minor solutions while looking for a big solution. The hospitals she'd contacted about Michael were taking months to get back to her. Her job became putting out emotional fires around the house. Michael would get angry—she'd distract him with a promised trip to the mall. He'd start chanting and rocking—she'd ask if he wanted to go to McDonald’s for a shake or a sundae; he'd look up and smile like a five-year-old. Bargaining became her way of dealing.

Frazzled, depressed, stressed beyond what is tolerable by Michael’s presence at home, she told him he could move in with the “two friends.”

He was an adult. Wasn’t he?

My mother and father were relieved and didn’t think to meet the two men with whom Michael was moving in. They were two guys who had an extra room, nothing more. And what if my parents found out the two men were dangerous, mentally handicapped ex-cons or totally imaginary? Michael would have to keep living at home. And any questions would have brought on a violent tantrum, anyway. In many ways my brother was like a child you could never discipline.

They figured as long as he took his medication every day he could function. The one constant about my family was our ability to downplay all the negative possibilities, to pretend, to go from small trauma to small trauma, somehow hoping that tomorrow, or the day after, things would start to get better.

At about this time, my parents’ request to put him on social security for a disability came through. He could pay the rent himself. They weren’t kicking him out, not like before; he wanted to go, to get out into the world, to try to live a normal life. Even Dr. Smith agreed it could be a good thing for him.

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