An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 8)
originally written on September 18, 1995
Slightly revised on August 27, 2021
(This is the final page of the handwritten original manuscript)
She's been gone a long, long time and I can't even imagine if things would have been better or worse had she stayed. Different, probably. I know I'll regret the time not spent with her when she passes away (god forbid that happen soon). I've had dreams of her dying and me getting upset for not being closer to her. The guilty feelings and the dreams still don't push me to make amends, though. I don't understand because the love between the mother and her child is supposed to be something transcendent, special, the most important love one should cultivate while still living. I think I'm ready for that level but I don't even know if she's capable of that. To be honest I have let things get so bad that I don't even really know if she's still alive. (this sentence is from the revision, written in August 2021)
I lived with her in Oklahoma City on two different occasions. Both were disastrous. Her old man and I were of a different species and I'm sorry too say but I hated that man, not just for what he represented (whatever that means).
It was a rare occasion when I saw her after the last eviction from his house. I remember that one well. I had spent the whole day walking around the streets of Southwest Oklahoma City, ostensibly looking for a job. No one was hiring though during this time, nothing like it is now where you can find employment everywhere you look around. Furthermore I was still reeling from my experience with the Navy. I haven't written about that particular Naval Experience in this autobiography because the memories are still too intense. (a lengthy piece about that span of time can be found on one of my blogs, though you may have to do some hunting to find it, I don't see myself posting it on Facebook soon. - JAC) I would sometimes stop at libraries and stay there until I felt comfortable going home. One day I guess my mom's second husband must have followed me to one of the library branches close to "our" house and he walked right in dressed in work clothes covered with paint and laid it on the line. He wanted me out of the house and he didn't care the means I had or didn't have to make it happen. I wound up asking my brother if he would keep my stuff while I tried to make it happen, and he let me stay at his house for a few days. I have this weird memory of watching Trinity Broadcasting Network (the wacko 24 hour a day religious channel that thrived on money donated to ministries who in turn would buy airtime to appear daily on their own shows or as guests in the flagship Praise the Lord program...not to be convinced with Jim Bakker's similar Praise The Lord program on HIS satellite channel (he was from the cable TV generation while his doppelganger Paul Crouch tapped into satellite networks to do basically the same thing). Anyway this particular evening when I was once again homeless, living on a few days of charity, there was a program that featured some dude who did actual exorcisms. It looked real to a person who had seen The Exorcist in a drive-in theater as a teenager having snuck past any age restrictions and no previous knowledge of the Catholic Church. That movie had been the equivalent to The Passion of the Christ in terms of how much "buzz" was generated by people who had already seen it.
So I'm watching this wacky tv preacher (they're all wacky) and he's knocking people down by touching them with a bible...he's casting out Satan in the name of the Lord Jesus. He's doing the same thing that Bob Larson is currently doing only he's not trying to look like a priest like Larson does with his silly collar. I don't think this was Larson doing it back on that day when I saw this unknown preacher casting out demons "in the name of the Lord Jesus". I knew it was pure crap constructed and probably rehearsed but I think I may have been vulnerable because of my new homeless stature and knowing I couldn't just up and expect my brother and his wife to let me move right in... I was primed to be a bit worried and scared of the future, my subconscious probably screaming "Let Me Out!"
I moved on. There was no way I was going to go back to her husband's charity and it would have been a fool move because his charity had run dry for me laying in the bedroom doing nothing but reading and listening to music "all day" (Jim Ed Brown's "Pop a Top", the Psychedelic Furs "Heartbreak Beat", Public Image Ltd.'s Album and of course R.E.M.s new masterpiece Fables of the Reconstruction. Such a work of genius right down to the album cover and the back side which completely changed the name of the record to Reconstruction of the Fables. I played that album at least as often as I'd played Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols in my younger, more rebellious years. The R.E.M. album had become a symbol of me making it through what little career I had in the Navy and of how I was embarking upon a journey of life without my ex-wife Barbara. This getting over her became the next thorn in my side. The pain lasted a long, long time but I eventually did get over it, with the help of nature and the love of another woman who was willing to take me with all my damage and love me through it. A woman who knew how hard it hit me to have gone through a divorce, a woman who even after I told her I had bipolar disorder was willing to "pick up her cross" to do the hard work of getting me back to a place in my world that is more like the real world, I had started to slip away and even now, with all the stress of 2020-2021, can still make me smile and think of holding on, if I ever had in my life thougnt that I was serious about taking my own life, I would, by the grace of God, not do it because I know how it would it would affect her. Of course I'm not going to join Swingin' Ian with the World's Famous Auto Asphyxiation Club in his honor, I have something and someone to live for and this person thinks I post weird shit on the Internet and this person refuses to budge on her stand that marijuana, even medical marijuana, is detrimental to my mindset (although we both agree that it may well work for other people)...I'm not going anywhere without her. She doesn't even like most of the music I like (she actively dislikes the Christian music that I find a lot of comfort in but hey, so what? In the long run I understand it's JUST music).
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[I've drifted from the original manuscript, but there is very little left of it so I'll try not to drift far away so I can "put this to bed", as they say in newspaper journalism)
The way I understand it my mom's second husband learned that he had a brain tumor or some untreatable malaise and when he found out he only had like a couple more months to live he went berserk and walked to a neighbor's house (I think it was a neighbor, it could have been someone else and for all I know he had his own gun) and procured a gun...he'd told my mother if he had to die then so should she and their young daughter.
She may have been a dummy for getting involved with this loser (IMO) but this wizened her up quite a bit and immediately. She grabbed her daughter, hurried to the car and got the hell out of Dodge and moved back in with her sister, my aunt Wanda where I assume she hid out until news arrived of her second husband's demise. The doctors were apparently correct because it was only a month or two before he passed away...on the other hand I have that on second hand nature, he may have killed himself. One thing seemed for sure: the old fucker left this world alone, contrary to his psychotic notion of taking his whole family with him. My mother dodged a bullet, I suppose it could be said. Her daughther, who I have always had an aversion to calling a "stepsister" because of my disdain for her father, has grown to be married and now works in a bank where she's been for several years. I've been hesitant to get in touch with her because I have so much guilt for not paying attention to OUR mother, she's been there to take care of her all of these years and I have gone off to do my own thing... but I hope she knows that I still love my mother despite what I percieve her as being, the mother who walked away. I wish I could see her for more but it's a two way street and my mother, if she's still alive, has done zilch to get back in touch with me and my family. The onus has been on me all this time and maybe she's made my brother feel the same way...
That's basically how it feels but I have it on good authority that she is still with us. I went to the Library book sale the other day and bought at least 20 of the Harlequin Romance novels she reads, I'd love to be the one to give them to her because you gotta know I forgave her a long time ago for any and everything that I've written about here. I've, as they say in the south, "put it in the hands of Jesus".
Where it belongs.
-30-
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