The Eagle and the Dragon by Chris Duffin

Author:Chris Duffin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2019-06-11T14:56:14+00:00

Life at Home Begins to Deteriorate

With no classes in my morning block, I often worked as a busboy or a dishwasher late into the night. When I awoke early in the morning, it was common to see Pat or my mom digging through my pants in the half-light, pulling out cash so that they could purchase food, supplies, or beer from the local store. They always framed this as borrowing money, although I never saw most of that money again.

I wrote off what they took and accepted it as my contribution to the household. Over time, however, my parents began to drink more and more. At this point in his life, Pat was quite incapacitated. With a broken arm and weakened lungs, he couldn’t work, and winning his disability settlement meant that he no longer needed to. Perhaps unsure what else to do with himself, he spent most of his time sitting around the house, watching television, and drinking.

When Pat sat in front of the television and drank, he became obsessed with the news. The news was his world. While this was happening, O.J. Simpson went on trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Pat watched the whole trial, all day, every day. When my mom arrived home from work, he started talking to her about developments in the trial.

It was a long trial and, after several months, my mom flipped. She got home, Pat started telling her about the O.J. Simpson trial, and she yelled, “I don’t want to hear it. Don’t tell me another fucking word about the O.J. Simpson trial. I don’t want to hear about it anymore.” The following day, she arrived home and he jumped up, ran over to her, and started telling her about the latest developments in the O.J. Simpson trial. She was at the fridge door, getting something out of the fridge, and she said, “I told you I don’t want to hear it.” Then she swung the fridge door at him, hitting him full in the face. He was knocked out cold and lost two front teeth, which he replaced with fake teeth. After that, he never said another word about the O.J. Simpson trial.

My mom, meanwhile, began getting into scrapes caused by alcohol consumption. In Oregon, there’s a single highway that connects Bend, La Pine, and numerous other towns and cities, all the way down to Klamath Falls, where my future college was located. At one stage, this highway connects to I-97 via a T-junction. As an interstate highway, I-97 is a busy road, at least two and, in some places, four lanes wide. My mom got drunk one night and drove through the intersection at full speed, somehow missing the traffic barreling along I-97, and launching the car into the forest on the other side of the highway. To avoid getting a DUI, she ran away before the police arrived. She was lucky to escape with her life.

On another occasion, she climbed a barbed wire fence as she ran away from another drunken incident.

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