Sh!thouse: A Memoir

SHITHOUSE:

A Memoir

© 2022. Lauren Dollie Duke. All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by The Unapologetic Voice House.

No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other— except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021906789

ISBN: 9781955090018

E-ISBN: 9781955090025

Cover design by: Daniella Manini

Authors Notes:

Someone once told me that memoir is the intersection between memory and story. Our job as memoirists is to discover the story and translate it the best we can recall. But memory is tricky, and our stories are subjective, oftentimes leaving us to fill in the blanks of events that still seem blurry. To the best of my ability and memory, I did just that. But each time we recall an event, we edit it, and we continue to do that over time. As we change and grow, so do our stories. The contents of this book are my own recollection of important scenes from my life. Scenes that made me who I am. The dialogue is not verbatim. I have edited and modified events, and the names of people and places, to protect the privacy of the characters and of my family.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I want to thank my husband, Chris. Having the safety, love, and support from someone is what allowed me to write and complete this book. I love you forever. Thank you to my mother, who gave me this life. I’m sorry it took me so long to be grateful. I know you did the best you could. I deeply appreciate that. Thank you to my family, specifically my sister and brother for living this alongside me. Thank you to my father for passing on your writing bug and your wild, untamable spirit. RIP. To my grandmother for always encouraging me to reach for the moon. Thank you to my editor and writing mentor, Amy Wallen, for being my scaffolding through this entire project. Thank you to my publisher, The Unapologetic Voice House, for believing in my story and helping me birth it. To my copy editor, Laura Brittain, for seeing everything I couldn’t. To my besties Daniella D., Verity H., and Libby C. for listening to the never-ending harping for the last five years (also, thanks for the Chardonnay). To Daniella Manini, my creative partner, inspiration, and cover designer. You give me fuel to keep going. To my beta-readers and trusted comrades: Stephanie Plomarity, Julie Martin, Nina Polo, Oceane Mccord, Lauren Miralle, and Sarah Dietsche. Thank you for the support and feedback, and for the vision of the bigger picture, which helped translate this into an archetypal tale, rather than just a personal story. In some way, shape, or form, this is all of our stories. This is about being human. Thank you to my entire community. I could not have done this without each and every one of you. It really does take a village. Shithouse is living proof.

SHITHOUSE:

A Memoir

Part One

It is the night sea journey that allows us to free the energy trapped in these cast-off parts—trapped in what Marion would call the shadow. The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.

—Stephen Cope,

The Great Work of Your Life:

A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

1. Dead Man Walking, 1997

Dad and I were on our way to Upland, a town he used to live in before he did time in Leavenworth for robbing a bank. It’s in Southern California and was seven hours from our house in Moss Beach. Looking back in the rearview mirror, I could see my reflection in the tinted lens of his round Ray-Ban sunglasses.

He looked like Pablo Picasso back there, with his feet propped up on the dirty flaxen upholstery. The tip of his ivy-embroidered cap descended toward the left side of his face. A smoldering cig hung from his lips. It was just before my fifteenth birthday, but I was up front in the driver’s seat, clinging to the steering wheel for dear life.

The last few weeks Dad had turned into a real vampire. The door to his basement bedroom was always locked—never any light spilling in from the tiny window above his bed. I only knew when he was home because of the smoke that crawled up the heating vent and quietly walked me around the house. He’d become distant, but I was grateful to still have that. I’d gotten so used to people disappearing.

There were new sounds and smells from the basement too. The echo of clinking glass and crinkling of tinfoil. Sounds that weren’t part of his psychedelic symphony before. The smell of burned metal seemed to always float up around nine p.m. Then one night, he smashed through the back door from the porch. The copper handle chipped the paint on the kitchen wall from whacking it so dang hard.

We are going for a ride, darling. Pack your shit up. We leave in the morning, he’d said.

He didn’t give me time to ask any questions before he went outside and slammed the door. He anchored himself tightly to the railing and barely made it down the back stairs toward the bricks of neighboring Dan’s Place Restaurant. I watched him stumble against the exterior wall, then step on the thimbleberry petals growing out of the concrete next to the garbage cans. He pulled his Levi’s down, swayed with the wind, and peed all over the sprouts of grass at the base of the building.

That night in bed, I wondered if he’d asked Mom for permission to take me on one of his weekend romps. She wasn’t around much anymore and spent most of her time at her new boyfriend, Chuck’s, house. He lived in Pacifica, the next town over. I was sure she wasn’t worried about me anyhow, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wished she was.

The next morning, after leaving home, I drove with Dad past fields of Holstein cows on the Grapevine, the section of Interstate 5 that climbs over the San Gabriel mountains. It twists and turns to such an extreme that the northbound and southbound traffic lanes seem to weave right into each other. He was repeating Holsteinnnnnnn cowwwwwws to himself over and over again. He said he liked the way it rolled off his lips.

Dad slid his glasses off and dropped them down onto his lap. He leaned the deep lines of his forehead into the window, against the hot glass—orbs of heat sailed by in the distance. Green and black signs passed like the pigeons and concrete truck stops. Besides talking about the cows, he hadn’t said more than a few words since we’d gotten into the car and he told me I was the one driving us to Upland.

Where is Upland? I asked him.

Up, daughter. That’s where, he said.

He was irritated. I was too, I just wasn’t allowed to admit it.

He kept smashing his seat belt into the leather below, looking for the tongue to latch it into, while taking sips of coffee from a Styrofoam cup. I tried not to ask too many questions. It had been modeled to me that my job was to be brave and to shut the intelligence of my nervous system down like it was midnight and the party was over. But I already knew what I didn’t want to know about him—he was up to no good. And I was his daughter, which meant I wasn’t far behind.

It was hotter than Venus inside that car with no air conditioning. Dad smoked up a storm with the windows sealed tight. I tried to breathe slowly and focus on the road. I’d never driven on a freeway before, let alone doing seventy in the fast lane.

We inched our way up the Grapevine in silence. My hands shook as I gripped the boiling steering wheel. I didn’t want to glide across the grooves on the side of the road or the dotted yellow lines down the middle of the highway. Faces kept passing by in big Ford trucks. Old men with red, white, and blue bumper stickers stared at me like I was too young to drive.

I pushed the button to lower the window. My eyes burned from the smoke, but Dad told me he didn’t like the smell of cow shit from the manure fields. I cracked the glass anyhow and looked at him in the mirror. He didn’t look back at me.

His face was gaunt and silver. For a moment it disappeared completely from the rearview. I didn’t want to turn around and steer that time machine off the road, and my neck didn’t twist around like an owl’s. So I listened instead.

I heard a bag crumbling, then the folding of tinfoil and the fumbling around of plastic. Then there was the smell of gas. I heard the click of a Zippo and felt the heat of fire from the backseat. I heard whistling and coughing and smelled rubbing alcohol. Then all of it together, all at once. A quiet explosion happened behind me. It happened inside of me too.

I’d been there before, just like that with him, when I was a child. Dad and I had been laid up in some dingy motel room the night before he robbed a bank in Vallejo. Now, years later, I traveled along the edges of the road, trying to keep the car going straight. But I traveled inside the edges of myself, trying to keep my mind straight too. It’s funny how easily we mix things up.

The year may have been different, but I felt the same as I had outside the hotel bathroom door seven years ago. I was scared, but I knew there was no one coming to save me. I knew it then and I know it now. Our parents aren’t superheroes. They damage us as much as they love us. And Dad may have been the adult there, but he was also the one splayed out across the floor of the backseat.

It always seemed to end up like that, with one of my parents on the ground and me trying to hold it together. But everything was already apart. I often wondered what this would do to me later. Would I end up just like them? Or could I be one of those rare statistics that didn’t strap on the same shoes as their parents and walk the same road?

Thirty seconds or so passed before Dad grumbled and moaned, then kicked the back of my seat and jumped up. A stream of sweat formed a little river through the middle of his forehead. I watched again in the rearview as he dragged a handkerchief across his face. He blotted the little pockmarks around his nose, then leaned his head into the blazing, hot glass and fell asleep. I didn’t see the events with my own eyes, but I couldn’t erase what my mind had already told me was true. History was in the backseat repeating itself.

I knew I could steer that spaceship back toward the Bay Area and let my alien-junkie Dad sleep it off. But I didn’t. I kept heading south, even though deep down I wanted to pull over and run like a motherfucker. The truth was, I was hardwired to head south. I’d soon know that breaking that pattern would be one of the most difficult things I’d ever have to do. You know that saying old habits die hard? Well, it’s true.

Dad woke up somewhere in the Valley. I switched on the radio to a Stealers Wheel song. It was our anthem together. He bobbed his head up and down while singing along to the words, Stuck in the Middle with You.

"Well, I don’t know why I came here tonight.

I got the feeling that something ain’t right.

I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair,

And I’m wondering how I’ll get down those stairs.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,

Here I am, stuck in the middle with you."

No matter what, that’s exactly how I always felt—stuck in the middle of my family’s nonsense. But I was also determined to find my way out of it.

In Upland, we stopped on a street where palm trees and sherbet mountains perched in the distance. Dad directed me to pull into the driveway of a blue house. A woman with dark hair and rimless glasses came out to greet us. She held a carafe of sweet tea and a manila envelope the size of an encyclopedia for Dad.

He proceeded as if nothing weird had just happened in the backseat of the car, while I drove us seven hours to get there. It was like he’d woken up, put on a new outfit, and become someone else, not the man I’d been in the car with. He played double Dutch with his personalities on a daily basis. But I already understood that drugs had a million moods, and that they were just as temporary as love was.

That night, I slept on a screened-in porch room next to a big, old oak tree. I listened partly to the snorting of a black lab, but also to the conversation between Dad and the woman whose name I didn’t even know. I stitched the bits of it together, piece by piece like a patchwork quilt. I heard the words hepatitis, cancer, liver disease, and a few dozen other zingers that didn’t seem like they could be all that good.

They laughed and clanked cocktail glasses in the next room, making my ears ring. Their voices fluctuated between colorless and colorful—serious and celebratory. I was ordered to stay away, and I heard them walking back and forth from the kitchen several times. There were long moments of quiet following waves of laughter. I peeked through the crack of the door and saw them sitting on the couch in front of the TV next to one another.

The next day on the way home, I asked him if his friend was sick. He was in the driver’s seat that time, trying to find the smooth jazz station on the radio, which whistled a slow static hum. We passed a hundred strip malls full of parking lots lined with white minivans. I wished I was inside one of them with a parent who wasn’t fucked up on drugs or booze. I would have rather been anywhere else besides that car. But do we really have a choice when it comes to our parents?

No, darling, I am.

He tossed the manila envelope onto my lap, then lit up a cigarette with the car lighter. The little metal bullet of the lighter hurled itself out from the blanched carriage, the same way I wanted to launch myself from that vehicle. The car was always the impact zone.

It’s all there for you, Sticks. He said it like it was mine to hold.

The envelope was heavy, and I didn’t want to unseal its edges because I was already carrying more weight than a donkey. The documents looked official and were stamped with a hospital’s name I didn’t recognize. It had as many pages as a Charles Dickens novel and contained a mishmash of complicated words I couldn’t pronounce.

It’s a shitshow in there, huh? he asked.

He seemed proud. I’d later realize it was just another excuse for him to leave me.

He smiled and let out a big balloon of smoke. It rolled like a conveyor belt in my direction. I flipped through a few dozen pages before stopping at the word terminal, then pushed the papers back together and slid it into its grave, away from me. They were medical records diagnosing him with end-stage liver disease and hepatitis. He told me the lady whose house we’d stayed at was a good friend who’d kept his documents safe while he was in prison.

What does this all mean? I asked him.

Deep down, I already knew what it meant. I just desperately needed to fill that car with language so it didn’t feel so much like pins and needles.

It means I’m a dead man walking, he said. But I had a feeling he wouldn’t ever actually be dead. I’d soon find out that parents don’t really die. They just disappear and moonlight later as tap dancers inside our bodies, affecting every move we ever make.

2. Fight Club, 1989

I was six. In one of my earliest memories, Mom was pacing back and forth in front of the bathroom door like a wolf. She huffed and puffed obscenities loud enough that everyone in Pacifica could hear her. Her Cypress-tree arms swung through the dimness of our hall. She punched the door over and over again, fuming relentlessly about assholes, booze, and all the town sluts.

I was across from Mom, sitting in the living room on the cat-piss smelling carpet, close enough to the television screen that everything blurred together. I kept trying to turn my fairytale up, but it was smothered beneath the pungent stench of that rug and Mom’s rant of what a bunch of lying sacks of shit men were. I knew men were liars before I knew how to tie my own shoes.

There was a lying sack of shit on the other side of the bathroom door. It was my stepfather, Kenny. He was the cat’s pajamas, as far as I was concerned. Dad had already been gone for the last few years. Mom loved Kenny too, but sometimes it just depended on what day of the week it was. The closer to Friday, the more she seemed to hate him.

She headed to the kitchen and returned a few seconds later, death-gripping a cleaver in one hand and a cast-iron frying pan in the other. Even from the other side of the room, with Cinderella dancing around with men and pearly doves on TV, I could see Mom’s white-knuckle grip wrapped around the handles of heavy things—things she would soon use to put holes into every surface of that luckless house.

She smashed the pan into the bathroom door over and over again. Once never seemed to be enough for her. The clamor of noise should have made me want to cover my ears, but I already knew those loud thuds and piercing screams all too well. I just stuffed it down wherever the ugly things went and watched Cinderella’s dress dance in the wind. Prince Charming grabbed her by her fist-sized waist and twirled her off into the pink horizon.

I heard the seductive tone of Kenny’s voice floating calmly through the crack of the locked bathroom door. He was used to Mom and her trusty cleaver. Everything inside that place had been used as a weapon in at least one of their battles. I was the picker-upper of their leftovers, sweeping up shattered glass and replacing broken light bulbs. The house we lived in felt more like an armory than an actual home.

Mom mumbled something about the show I was watching being a tragedy. She thought it was pathetic that people believed in fairytales. But I wanted to believe in happy endings so badly. If it could happen to the characters on TV, it could happen to me too, right?

I heard Kenny’s muffled voice through the door again.

I’ll come out when you put the dagger and pan back in the kitchen, babe.

He said it cavalierly. It was the way he sang the lullaby of everything. Like none of this was a big deal. But an angry, red-headed gargoyle in a long jean skirt frothed a few feet from him. She kicked her sandalwood-colored cowboy boots into the door a few times.

I heard him laughing loudly and knew he was flipping through the pages of his favorite magazine, Fish and Game. A stack of them always sat on the shelf above the toilet. He’d often stay in there for hours reading them. Kenny chuckled every few seconds inside his tile maze, while Mom slapped the wooden door with her cast-iron pan.

Besides alcohol, Kenny’s number one love was fishing. Mom came after that, and I think my older sister, Della, and I were at the bottom of both their lists. The more he kept Mom away, locked her out, the more she wanted to skin him and hang him like a trophy on the mantel. At least she could control him from that position. Kenny always called her the commander in chief, even though she hated it.

I walked toward the front door and wrapped my fuchsia fingernails around the silver doorknob. I saw our neighbor, Jane, trying to peek through the frosted glass at the top of the frame. It had been a noisy zoo in there for at least an hour, with all Mom’s hooting and hollering at Kenny. Jane always came over to find out what was going on. When Mom wasn’t around, Jane told me she worried about us.

Mom called Jane a busybody. But she was just concerned about the things happening inside our house in front of two little kids. Mom didn’t want anyone to know what actually went on in there. She always told me, nobody needs to know our damn business! I once asked her if the family business could be less war and more Walt Disney. She shook her head at me and laughed. She was quite pretty when she wasn’t trying to smack someone upside the head with a frying pan.

I pulled the door open just enough to get Mom to loosen her grip on the meat cleaver, but not so much that Jane became totally aware of the bedlam. Social services had been called at least a dozen times, and we participated in the theatre of okayness every time they showed up. It made them leave faster.

Jane’s bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows came zooming toward me through the narrow opening.

Is everything okay inside there? she asked, while trying to push her face in between the edge of the door and the white wooden frame.

I saw her short fingernails creeping in around the shiny, black door bumper. I hovered tightly on the other side, shutting the edge on her wrinkled fingers just a little. I didn’t really want her to come all the way inside, just enough so Mom would let up on trying to kill the asshole on the other side of the bathroom door.

Get out of here, Jane! We don’t need your help! Mom yelled it from the hallway.

She always told us that help was for crybabies. I never once saw her ask for it. For the life of me,