Heather in Paradise

I’ve been thinking lately about my concept of “home.” Really what I’ve been thinking is about my lack of a concept of “home.” While I have the normal human ties to and cannot escape “that from which I’ve come,” from my earliest memories I can recall a desire to go away, to experience something else. As early as I can remember, I have wanted to be somewhere else, to be someone different. Thinking about this late last night when I wished I was sleeping led me to this list of every single place I have ever lived. At least, as much as I can remember.

Crappy Apartment complex on Sheridan Road and 6th st. in Winthrop Harbor, IL.
Age, about 2.5 or 3 years to about 6 years old. (And mom, my memory is not without its wormholes from this time, so correct me at any time)

After my dad died, my mom lived here with me and her boyfriend Danny in a small, 2 bedroom apartment. It was a red brick, two-building apartment complex on the busiest street in a small village, the kind of place that is a step above an SRO and a step below nearly anything else in the First World. The kind of place that, when driving by it, you feel a little sorry for the people who live there. Me, I was young, so it didn’t matter where I lived. There was a big group of kids who lived there with whom I played, but I only remember two names: Spanky and Claudia. I assume that Spanky was a pseudonym, but I cannot be sure.

Claudia is the one who figures most prominently in my memory. She was four years older than me and had profound mental and emotional incapacities that made her both dangerous and exciting to be around. I can remember, even at my young age, being in absolute awe of her total absence of sense, of her capacity for mindless, terrifying actions. She once dared me to sit in Sheridan Road for one full minute. Sheridan Road was a four lane street with the most traffic you could encounter in our small town. Never one to admit a weakness or back down (even when challenged by the mentally disabled, apparently), I got off the curb and sat in the middle of the far west lane for what seemed an eternity while cars slowed and swerved around me. Thankfully soon (or else this might be a different story altogether), a Winthrop Harbor police car swerved around me and pulled into the complex’s parking lot. The cop got out of his car while I, scared, scrambled to my feet. He yelled at me, “WHERE IS YOUR MOM?!” I shakingly answered, “She’s not home” (total bald-faced lie, even at 5 years old. I was made for this shit). He glowered at me, pointed his finger and said ominously, “Well, Missy, you better NEVER sit in the street again, and I am coming back later to tell your mom what you did.” Then he left. And I spent the next 13 years nervously awaiting his return, always pressing my arms tighter to my side and looking away as police cars passed me in town, waiting for the bust that would never come. But I never sat in the street again, did I?

My mom was very young when she had me, just 19, and when we lived here she still occasionally partied and had a good time the way a young person should. My mom took baths every night and I would sit and chat with her as she bathed. When she was finished, she would sometimes pull the plug out of the drain, stick her big toe in and frantically yell to me, “Heather, oh no, I’m going down the drain…help me, hurry, go get Danny!” Without fail, I would tear into the living room to scream at Danny lying on the couch, “DANNY! HELP!! HELP!! Mommy’s going down the drain!! Mommy’s going down the drain!!” He would just shrug me off and ignore me. Seeing no help from him, I would run back into the bathroom with my little heart in my throat and find, to my horror, the tub completely drained and my mother nowhere in sight. “NO, MOMMY, NO,” I would scream, while my mom snickered to herself with laughter from her hiding spot behind the bathroom door. I’m not proud to say that I fell for this on multiple occasions.

This picture was taken inside the crappy apartment on Sheridan Road. I was getting dressed and my mom grabbed the camera to take a picture of me in my underpants. Since I was and am a modest girl, I screamed bloody murder and ran around the apartment trying to escape her. When I finally realized resistance was futile, I jumped onto the couch. I love how I’m covering my “boobs,” as if there is anything to see.

Next door to this apartment building was a barber shop that had a striped, electric barber pole encased in glass, that moved as if it was twisting up to the top and coming up from the bottom. My sneaking suspicion/hope that it was made of peppermint was cruelly dashed one fine day when I licked it and came up with no more than the taste of stale parking lot dust.

I learned to ride a bike without training wheels in this very dusty parking lot the day before I went to kindergarten for the first time. Danny pretended he was still holding the back of my seat as I peddled wobbily, shaking left and right. When I finally realized he had let go and I was actually a big girl riding a bike with two wheels, I looked behind me and the distance between myself and the people I loved was so scary, I fell immediately and scraped both my knees. Once I got over the indignity of his betrayal, I realized that I loved that strange feeling of fear mixed with exhilaration, so I got right back on and tried again.

More places to come, y’all.