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Structure | Jul 16 2003

Spoke with my mom last night. We ended up trying to figure what happened in 1979, in what order. I hadn’t realized how much happened in 1979. It must have been some year.

For one thing I dropped out of high school. This came first, we decided, because I was definitely living at home when it happened, which means that my mother still had the house then, which means that my girlfriend hadn’t broken up with me yet and my grandfather was still alive.

The reason I know I was living at home is because that’s when my father kicked me out of the house, when I dropped out of high school. No house, nothing to be kicked out of. So the house was definitely still there, which means that my grandfather was still there, as my grandfather didn’t die until after the house was gone. I know this because my mother said that she would visit him in the hospital while she was living on South Street, and my mother didn’t move to South Street until after she had lost the house.

So the order of events is: leave high school, booted from house, mother loses house, grandfather dies.

Somewhere in there Alana breaks up with me. This is where things get complicated because my mother and I both remember that Alana and I had sex in my mother’s South Street apartment. Well, my mother doesn’t remember the sex exactly, but rather the fact that she allowed Alana and me to use her apartment for a few days, which naturally led to me and Alana having sex there. This means, among other things, that Alana and I were still together after my mother lost the house, which means that Alana broke up with me sometime between the time the house was lost and my grandfather died.

The way I remember it (and this is what I told my mother last night), Alana broke up with me in April of that year, just a few months before she finished high school and moved to Mississippi (just a few months, that is, before our scheduled break-up). If this is accurate, it means that the house was lost sometime before April, as the house was definitely gone when Alana broke up with me, witness the fact that Alana and I had sex in my mother’s South Street apartment, an apartment my mother didn’t have, nor have any reason to have, until after she had lost the house.

To confirm all this, my mother went to look for her divorce papers, having remembered that the house was lost (stolen, as she put it) when the divorce papers came through. If my logic was correct, my parents’ divorce must have been finalized in early 1979, soon after I dropped out of high school and just before Alana broke up with me, though not before Alana had sex with me (for the last time?) on the black fold-out couch in my mother’s South Street apartment.

Unfortunately my mother couldn’t find her divorce papers (she said she had probably thrown them out), so we switched to the question of which one of us was living with my grandparents when my grandfather first got sick. My mother eventually convinced me that it must have been her, which felt strange at first because I’ve always believed it was me, despite the fact that I don’t have any actual memories of it. I realize that sounds odd—to believe something you don’t remember—but what I’ve always assumed is that I’ve blocked out all memory of the experience because of how traumatic it was. As it turns out, though, I was in New York at the time (my mother helped me remember this), living in a dingy sublet I almost never left and writing a depressing, lovelorn play about Alana. This means, among other things, that someone, probably my mother, called me in New York to tell me that my grandfather was either dead or dying, which means that I then took the bus to Philadelphia for my grandfather’s funeral—something I have no memory of doing, although I do remember reading several poems by e.e. cummings to my mother in the synagogue as the two us held each other and cried. This means, again among other things, that I somehow managed to get to that synagogue from New York, assuming I was in New York when my grandfather died, which at this point I have no choice but to assume, otherwise the whole structure comes crashing down like a proverbial house of cards, each floor collapsing onto the next.