(Dedicated to the late Hunter S. Thompson, on his 88th birthday)

29 May 1975

Nora had a thing about trains. Sometimes she’d have me and Tess walk with her to where we could see the freighters enter and leave the shipyard. Often she would go alone. Mom never went with her on these trips, even though they did most everything together.

“The Choctaw had a saying,” Nora told me. It was just her and me at the train watching spot. “‘Then the railroad came.’”

“What does it mean?”

“Meaning goes two ways, like those trains. For the Indians, it meant whitey was coming to take everything. But it also meant that you could go away too—at least that’s what I thought threshing in the field, when I heard a whistle blow.”

That has stuck with me through the years. Then the railroad came. For the Natives, it brought smallpox, alcoholism, law, jail, and reservations. But even after the tribes had been wiped out, the railroad never stopped coming. It comes to this very day, obliterating current old ways and bringing back other old ways. In the larger sense, the railroad never brings anything new.

The railroad came for Nora late in 1974.

Mom seldom spoke directly to me when I was a teen. That began when I was twelve or so. But none of that mattered when Nora got sick. For a while, a truce was in order.

Tess and I were in the kitchen playing hearts. Mom was at the hospital. We were waiting for a call. We played a lot of cards during the death watch. Mom didn’t want us hanging around the hospital; we tended to get on her nerves.

The phone finally rang. It was Mom. Nora had named death Roy and she had told Mom that Roy was coming soon. She wanted all of us to be together one last time.

The hospital was about a mile and a half across town. The bus system was a joke, and we would have walked if it hadn’t been raining. Nora wanted rain on the day she died, she got that much. The dope that made her uterine cancer bearable often caused her to share such things. We decided to get fancy and use three of my vast fortune of eight bucks on a cab.

I’ve come to an understanding with hospitals and rehab centers and hospices. I quit being artificially cheerful while in them, and they no longer close in on me like one of those squishing rooms used by silly-assed villains on Batman or The Man From Uncle. Still, their ceilings remain too close to my head.

At sixteen, I’d yet to make the deal, and I felt like I was suffocating. Tess was drawn to places of pain because of that fucking dreampurple light; in her mind, faces that absorbed suffering and kept coming back for more were the only beautiful things.

I never experienced dreampurple. Tried once. Tess gave me a swallow of methadone, which tasted like poison. And for a glittering moment, I felt lifted and expanded. Everything I so worried over meant nothing, and there was a sense of well-being utterly alien to me. Then I got sick, everywhere, and for long enough that a trip to the hospital was looking to be in order. It was like a door had shut in my face. When reality came slinking back, I met it with scorn. I couldn’t believe that the physical universe could be so easily swept aside by a teaspoon of a substance that tastes like cherry-flavored Clorox.

At fourteen, Tess was nearing the end of her free-range dreampurple experience. When we arrived at the hospital, it was on her. She was excited, and her pupils were blasted open despite the harsh lighting. She was connected to every atom of electricity. Only I noticed. She was otherworldly and utterly amoral; something in her sought the dreampurple beauty in dying. I wanted to slap it out of her. It was Nora’s hour and not something to be greedily sucked up.

It never felt possible, yet Nora was going away. I had hung onto false hope much longer than I should have. The last of it vanished when Tess and I entered her room. It seemed impossible that a person could still be alive in her condition. She had gone from one-twenty to under seventy pounds in less than six months. Uterine cancer. Mom was holding a cigarette for Nora, and when she saw us, I caught a glimpse of her shoving something that glinted into her purse with her other hand. Mom usually didn’t give a fuck about such things; and maybe I shouldn’t have, given the situation.

“Hi, Kid. Hey, Sister,” Nora whispered, with an underwater voice. Her skin was the color of old paper, and her eyes were yellow.

I mumbled something and smiled.

I wanted to smack Tess (a long running theme in my life). Her ravenous eyes were sopping up every detail. But that gave over to tears and she sat down and lay her head on Nora’s shoulder.

After a few moments of just standing there, Mom glared at me and nodded at Tess. Nora was increasingly in and out of it, and it was clear that Mom wanted the final moments to herself. So I peeled Tess off Nora. I didn’t know what to do. I kissed Nora on the cheek and hustled Tess out of the room. Without speaking, we left the hospital.

Tess and I walked home. The rain had backed off, which made a taxi unnecessary. Even if it was still raining, we would have walked. That’s the way, we tend to huddle away during the truly big bad times; nobody wants to make small talk with a cabbie after they have seen the face of death.

“Mom hid a spoon,” Tess said.

“A spoon?” I recalled the quick furtive gesture.

“You saw. Bet it had something in it; something for the pain.”

Tess was uncanny. She often had impossible insights when the dreampurple was in her; in her way she was holy.

“But we won’t talk about it,” she said, smiling.

“No, I don’t think we will.”

The world was in black and white that day. The fuzziness of the pollen season had been washed clean by the rain. It all lay in ruins, and yet even there, the railroad had yet to come.

I later dismissed the poison spoon theory. I poured specious logic all over it and locked it in the place I used to stick the things I did not want to think about. I convinced myself that Mom hadn’t helped Nora out the door, even though such potions have always been extremely easy to get in our neighborhood. Still, Nora was as good as gone, why hasten it by what—an hour—and risk a murder charge? (No one noticed anything untoward, it’s unlikely they explored Nora’s cause of death with much of a fine-toothed comb attitude; I doubt there was an autopsy.)

But that only made sense when placed against the ways of regular people. Lovers have their secret expressions, and maybe what had transpired between Mom and Nora was as much none of anybody’s goddamn business as a thing gets.

Tess died in May 2004, not long after her forty-third birthday. I was not in the room because her death was sudden (although never wholly unexpected), but I had been there every inch of the way. Heroin was not the direct cause; years of speedballs had reduced her heart’s ability to withstand stress. Could say she died of a chronic case of being Tess. Now, she was just as loaded as ever, but legally, on methadone, the authorized party plan. Tess had reached the point of gaining weekly carries on Saturdays. Naturally, she had chipped into the next day’s dose (which always meant that a relapse was coming soon), and her turbulent existence ended quietly in her sleep.

So, whenever I’m not quite depressed enough to suit me, I like to look through her things. And as I sat at home, tired of the hand poker game, I looked through her stuff and found the suicide spoon. I’d seen it a bunch of times but always ignored it because it represented the cheap, dirty side of dreampurple. Is the world such an awful place that a person needs to poison herself to find beauty in it, to coexist with it? Yes, yes it is. But this time I picked it up and examined it. I was pleased to see that there were no tell-tale scorch marks on it. She never tried to bail, no matter how bad things got. That made me proud.

It also gave me an idea that would make sense if our lives were a story that followed a plan of some sort. Still, although unlikely and insincere on most levels, the idea gave me something semi-positive to hold onto that particularly long night.

The End of the Mess, 2019

My mother, Kaaren Patricia Johnston Spahr, died at either the age of seventy-nine or eighty-one on 20 April 2019, a Saturday. In a state of delirium that the morphine drip finally brought peace to.

We were outside the evening before, and I went through the motion of lighting a cigarette, ostensibly for myself, but handing it to Mom. The doctors and admin would have gone crazy if they had seen us; but the CNAs, mostly Filipino nationals, the people who do the real work, the human work at hospitals, hospices, and long term care centers, know when to look the other way.

Mom was very high on morphine, and we had to bring her drip along; in America, we all get high in the end. But she was mostly coherent, and kept breathing and producing just enough urine to remain alive.

Mom didn’t say much toward the close. She appeared content, like a person awaiting a bus she knew would come by and by.

She used to love Friday night. And it was a Friday; I remember her and Nora getting ready to go out to the Sportsman or White Pig Tavern, the apartment reeking of hairspray and cigarette smoke, everyone talking at once. The radio on. The energy was exciting even though I was not in on it.

But the railroad came.

“I can do for you what you did for Nora, if you want,” I said. It would have been easy. And I would have done it if she wanted me to. I figured God might be watching again, maybe giving me a second chance in case I had blown the first.

Mom looked at me, skin the color of old paper, the whites of her eyes yellow, just like Nora’s. “I knew you knew … straight morphine … got it from some guy at the Pig,” she said with a feeble laugh. “It was all over Tessie’s face.”

“I can, if you want.” I knew where to get it, but I also knew her answer, which is why I hadn’t bothered. And I couldn’t shake the ridiculous notion that I’d made a polite offer of euthanasia, like offering coffee to a guest.

“No, Sarah,” she said, savoring the final drag off her last cigarette. “Hell ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

The End