I'm Down: A Memoir by Wolff Mishna

Author:Wolff, Mishna [Wolff, Mishna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312378554
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2009-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

That night when everyone was upstairs watching TV, I said I needed to put wash in the dryer and crept down stairs to Dad’s basement office, convinced that’s where the shopping bags had gone. Dad spent a certain amount of time in his office, but we were strictly forbidden to enter. He said he had some very sensitive projects going on and that he needed us not to be fucking shit up in there. But seeing Christmas bags from real stores come into our house was too much for me. If I got punished for the rest of my life, it would be better than not knowing what was in that Toys “R” Us bag. I knew I had to be quick, and I past the washer and dryer to the pressboard door of the makeshift office that my dad spent so much time in.

As I cracked open the door, I was immediately blinded by bright light. And when my eyes adjusted I saw that the floor of the “office” was a forest of marijuana plants. Thirty or more marijuana plants in perfect rows with grow lights poised over them like it was time for their close-up. Whatever I thought of my dad’s parenting abilities with us, he certainly knew how to daddy some weed.

So that’s why Dad’s so happy and everything is taken care of, I thought. It wasn’t because Dad had gotten his shit together at all. He’d just gotten better at selling drugs. I thought about a series of items that had been around the house for as long as I could remember. The scale in Dad’s bedroom. The plastic baggies everywhere. The fact that we always had extra electronic equipment lying around that people had brought over. How many people had a Betamax, a VCR, two Walkmen, and three stereo receivers? God, I felt so stupid. The anger welled up in my feet and worked its way up to my head, which I thought might pop off. And I started to cry. I stood there crying for a minute.

And then suddenly I stopped. It was as though I realized I wasn’t really sad, I was fake sad. I didn’t really care where the cold cuts and the lift tickets came from. I cared because I was supposed to, but I didn’t actually care. I was glad there was heat and food and Christmas. And I wiped my eyes on my sleeve, walked out of the grow-op and closed the door. It was then I decided to forget I had ever been in that room and I went back upstairs and sat on the couch, cuddled up with Dad and Anora and watched the end of The Cosby Show.

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