Child of an Alchoholic
Lost in the Coppola
The year before I got married, I received a small grant to visit Florence and write about and from the paintings of the Renaissance. I was interested in the depiction of devils and organized two months to wander and write strange and dark little prose poems after Giotto and Botticelli, Lippi and especially Caravaggio. I remember walking to the top of the Duomo, spiraling and spiraling up the Coppola on narrow, plastered stairs, feeling lost and feeling that like Caravaggio’s Medusa— I held a private persona that lived inside— afraid, spinning off her body, hair full of snakes. I remember the wind on the top and the little windows, I remember a bridge, a red mask, raw octopus in the sink of the apartment where I was staying, a heavy black telephone, a plastic basin with clothing soaking on cold tiles, I remember not understanding how to convert the time in order to call my then fiancé, or what the country code was or how to use a calling card.
I remember as a sophomore, losing my locker at school and never finding it again, concrete facts like this (location, dates, numbers) spinning out and somehow slipping through my fingers as peers seemed to easily hold these details. Earlier, I remember getting on the wrong bus after school and being routed to an entirely different part of town and walking till it was dark and I recognized something, a mailbox, a fence post, a house to point my way home. This is how I have lived much of my life, wandering and retracing, extending my hand to feel along the hallways in the dark. This being lost and spinning was also an introduction to poetry, to thinking like a poem, to reading into the subtle unseen material of life. This is why artists and poets are often born in fractured families, its one gift of trauma, sensitivity. It helps you see in the dark.
In order to navigate her way to the grocery store or to visit a friend my mother would drive back to houses we used to occupy in neighboring towns, like a salmon or homing pigeon, her compass always rerouted back to well tread pathways, she didn’t mind if it took hours to get home. I'm not sure she knew how to read a map, or if she was too drunk to be driving, but she never knew where she was going. Once we drove through seven states to get to my uncle's house in upstate New York. Her thoughts were looping, loose garments around the present moment and she seemed to slip out of life and through the cracks of responsibility to spend months in bed reading and smoking, reading and smoking.
My response was to corset tightly, to grip and to remain vigilant and awake, my teeth clenching and grinding down my molars through the night. I see now how this pattern of recapitulation and retracing relates to the panic surrounding getting lost. I’m terrified to let go, to orgasm, to journey, to explore, to divert into the woods, or across a field. When I imagine walking through a meadow, I see ticks all over my legs, often I am wound tight like a mummy from the sensual pleasures of life. This is a counterbalance to my mothers spin.
My mother was addicted to alcohol and because of this I grip to the seat of car, perpetually afraid I am going to tumble down the cliffs in Amalfi where my family is from. I still find myself tilting my weight in the family car to keep us from rolling off the mountain when my partner is driving, I feel in my body like I’m being blown off the precarious edge of very small window on top of Coppola. Always lost in the belly of something holy, and yet un- navigable, being the child of an alcoholic was for me like being smothered by a blanket soaked in fermented apple juice and also like being pushed out a window with this wet blanket as a cape.
I still feel the disorientation of my childhood, I see it repeating in my now adolescent children, this legacy that shows up and is named now as executive functioning disorders seems to me connected to this lost rootless child that mothered them and mothered me. I can’t imagine how far back it goes, this centrifuge.
HK