a nervous condition

I was eating French fries while my mother died. I know this for a fact 'cause they told me the exact time she croaked the next day. 7:47, I think. Anyways, I was at McDonalds pumping out a ketchup refill while the blood froze in her veins and her body shriveled up so brittle you could snap her pinkies like Slim Jims. That's the line I use when nosy people ask me why I wasn't there at the foot of her bed, weeping and wailing and what not. The conversation almost always ends there, but I don't feel like it was worth it unless they never come within ten feet of me again. 'Cause you're never freer than when you know everybody hates you. And I was thinking just that when I walked into the room full of mourners in pajama pants stained with special sauce, turds of ground beef on my sweatshirt, greasy fingers and onion breath. I weighed about 200 pounds at the time so I doubt anyone needed much convincing that I was a pig, but tonight I was going for the jugular.

"Hey! Want some coffee?" I asked a puffy-eyed cousin. 

By the end of the night I had nothing to lose and I felt it harder than I'd ever felt anything. There soon would be freedom in black and white but even then it would never distill the loss that hung in the air around me like thunderclouds refusing to rain.

But I'm not sorry. And I'm not sorry for being a cold bitch about it or whatever you assholes wanna call me for drowning my screams in a deep fryer. I'd been doing that for years during better times anyway, and anyway this isn't about her. Yeah, I knew from the moment I saw the corpse that I was finally free, but that's just where shit got started. My story isn't about some poor bastard dying before their time, but about my escape. And his.

That night, after the weepies finally left and the EMTs took the Missus for her final stroll out the door, I went to the beach. I broke down and slept in the sand. The next morning I was delighted to discover that I hadn't been murdered, raped or even mugged.

I was 18 when my mother died. This was in 2003. She had been diagnosed with cancer of the whatever a few months before and she was already a foul smelling walking skeleton. I stayed out of the house as much as I could and went as far as my flabby legs took me. Unfortunately for my fat ass it wasn't that often or that far that I could. Even though I was now technically an adult I was still in high school and living off Mom's unemployment checks. Being as she looked like a postcard from Auschwitz with the strength and authority of a titmouse, Mom was smart enough to abandon intimidation tactics and cleverly wielded her financial control over me in a passive-aggressive manner that succeeded in keeping me in line. And she maintained her grip even towards the end. Even so, there were times when her efforts were rendered futile, such as the commemoration of the day St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, which, in our town, is also the commemoration of the day we drove the British out of America (pardon my redudancy) and a day off from school. This year, she spent that day at the treatment center. I went to the library, walked around the park and finally gave into my daily ritual of McDonald's, while the rest of the city drank itself into the gutter. Mom might have had a beer had she been able to keep it down and I might have had some had I any friends to drink it with. The latter was an issue, despite the poison seething in her veins, that she always had the energy to harass me about despite the fact that she herself hadn't spoken to another soul other than me on a regular basis for over a year.

But even if I had been class president, I doubt that my mother's aspirations for my public life would have been satiated. "You look like shit," she pronounced one morning over breakfast like Newton under the apple tree. She had been studying me for a long time, but hadn't figured out what it was about me that made her feel so uneasy. True, my personality left much to be desired, I was failing most of my classes and possessed no recognizable talent--all in all she was stuck with a daughter with the potential and promise of an earthworm to carry on her legacy. Still, there was an additional ephemeral quality of fuckedupness, that prior to that moment she had been unable to articulate.