Inventing Sammy Picow

When I am eleven I finally get to live with my mother. The dreamlike, momentous event, the holy grail, the miracle of all miracles starts with a collapsing ranch.

My grandfather, Zadie, has his third heart attack. Adam, the Naked Father, takes over the cheese business during Zadie's illness, and quickly branches out, opening a classic motor car company and building a huge dream-ranch with an elaborate plan for an indoor/outdoor pool.

This is about two years after running away and after learning that my mother is mine alone (see January 17 "Inner Child/Inner Oedipus" and January 18 "Bernstein Hot in Fem Bowling"). I am in the midst of my overly complicated, mechanically unmanageable plans to fake my own suicide. I start making my feelings more pointedly known. Over and over, like a daily mantra, I tell Adam I hate him. That the only thing I care about is being with my mother.

There are so many allegations about what happens business-wise around this time, and years later the whole troupe will end up in court bickering over it all, but what is unimpeachably clear is that in short order the cheese company is out of money, the car company goes out of business, and a rain storm makes the ranch construction site at the house and pool collapse into a sea of mud.

For the 26,469,328th time I tell Adam I want to live with my mother. He is so stressed out he finally says yes. Just like that. Magic. I pack everything, Mom and her new boyfriend, soon to be husband, David are there by that night to pick me up, though they have to wait because my father, bizarrely, insists that I pick tomatoes before being allowed to leave. (Yeah? Well, better than stripping cedar posts.) I pick a couple of tomatoes, throw a bunch of them on the ground, smash them into bits, and tell him I'm done. Completely, irrevocably done. One of my older half-brothers, Aaron, decides to come with me after Adam opens up the situation by turning to him and my other half-brother, Gary, and sneeringly asking if either of them wants to abandon him as well. Aaron votes himself off the mud island. Gary stays. I don't really know exactly why either one of them make the choices they do. Aaron still doesn't know. I will never find out with Gary since he's dead now.

But as I pack to leave I am uncurious about them, about anyone, about everyone except my mother. All the years of wanting her have by then confused the issue. I don't want to be with her so much as I want to become her.

Before we leave the ranch, David, Mom's new main squeeze, gives me a t-shirt from his new clothing store, David's Station. I put it on with pride. I'm already starting to imagine myself taking his last name. Picow. I will be Sammy Picow. I have no middle name so I add one: Samuel Leonard Picow. Jordan Samuel Picow. Putting on the t-shirt is a direct salvo at my father. I want him to see the new man in my life. I don't remember saying good-bye to anyone. We just drive off.

I am free. From and for what I'm not sure. My double life, the fantasies, the autistic-like breaks from reality; these are what I know, and I hold fast to them, in retrospect, blowing the opportunity to truly experience living with my mother.

Once I get what it is I want, Mom, it all becomes about escape from Adam rather than a return to her. I know the double life so completely that I don't know how to open myself to living just one life, where it is safe to love and be loved.

Mom and I certainly get on all right, and I love the routine and relative quiet of life with her and David. We just don't become very intimate. She is busy, working six days a week at Dillard's department store, and David is involved with his store, and they are newly in love with each other, building a life together.

There is a lot of fun in the house; Neil Diamond on Sunday mornings while Mom makes hot sauce; spaghetti dinners; the continued ritual of eating on the bed together.

I use her curling iron and cut my bangs when she is at work one day. She came home and is furious to discover bits of my hair throughout her make-up drawer. She yells at me that if I want to be a woman I should go have a sex change operation. Then later she tells the story in my hearing, leaving out the part about the curls and the sex change, laughing at how I give myself a haircut and there is hair everywhere. She has two faces too. Like me. The thing is, no one really knows about my two personalities. My thoughts, dreams, and hopes have been volatile and often ugly, monstrous even, for so long, but people see me as sweetness itself. I have an easy manner. Dimples. My brothers and I are alarmingly polite. ("Because they’re scared to death, my cousin Edy tells her husband Bernie when he comments on how fabulously well-behaved we are.)

My evil twin carries a full plate, what with the long cold war against my father, my recognizance missions for information to use against him, my fantasy life as a murderer, and my fantasy life with my mother.

Which is probably why people don't notice my becoming a pre-teen sex addict at the age of ten when I am nearly done living with Adam and Laura, still hating my life, and still maintaining the visage of a little gentleman. Living with Mom doesn't change that part of my life a bit. I just find new partners.