“Bad Buddy”
“The evil men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”
425 Shirley Place, Beverly Hills, CA
The year Buddy appeared at the door to our apartment, we lived in Beverly Hills. Recently released from San Quentin, he weaseled his way into our lives, changing forever directions, destinations, and mine and mom’s destinies. Mom could have known then, “Once a cat burglar, always a cat burglar.” Like Vernon, Buddy was my mother’s first cousin. Their fathers were brothers. We were doomed.
Buddy showed up unannounced. Mom wondered how he found out where we lived. We did not have a phone, but he wouldn’t have called anyway. My mom looked through the peephole, hesitated when she saw it was her cousin Buddy, yet reluctantly she opened the door.
Like the salesman who knows if he can just get his foot in the door, Buddy was a charmer, a butter-smooth talker who flashed a toothy smile so big that it distracted from his pockmarked complexion––mute testimony to his tormented teen years.
“Bad Buddy” is how my mom referred to him after their divorce. Only why did Mom have to marry him before she reached that conclusion? Countless times she recalled that instant when she looked through the peephole, wishing she had not opened the door.
Not actual door to our apartment
Hindsight and Life Lessons
When a person puts down enough tracks, you can start to see a pattern. I started to see some of my mom’s patterns. Besides moving when she encountered obstacles and problems, it looked to me like Mom had a pattern of marrying her first cousins. It took my mother three husbands before her maiden name (Reeves) changed her last name.
Musing, Does a second marriage to another first cousin make him your second cousin? I laughed, my own attempt to make this situation seem funny. Only nothing funny lay ahead. I constantly found myself trying to figure out how my mom got herself into such messes.
When the TV series, Mad Men aired, like a retro-zoom lens, it gave me a glimpse into life for women like my mom during the early sixties. Working women were second class and most women were expected to marry. Women who did not have a career could barely support themselves. And financially, if women had children, the problems and complications for them multiplied.
Men were the illusory answer to women’s needs. I can imagine my mom thinking marriage might, in her early 30’s make her life easier. And maybe, mine too. For all I knew, the seeds of my mother’s relationship with Buddy were sown during that Thanksgiving trip to Santa Maria. Maybe the angel, or the vision she had had, which she believed was Vernon warning her about something, was meant to warn Mom to stay away from Buddy. Foreshadowing seldom appears obvious when a scene requires prescience.
Whatever Buddy did in prison, which is where he had been since that fateful Thanksgiving trip, well, Mom and I had to pretend as if he had never gone to prison. Buddy had reappeared in our lives soon after he got out.
Had she convinced herself that Buddy was a good guy? Did she trust him? Did she feel sorry for him for whatever he had lived through as a child? Only it wasn’t that simple. Eventually my mother would admit why she married Buddy. Before the end of my school year, Mom left her job at the law firm because, as she put it, “Coleen was on the way.” Hearing this jaw-dropping confession, I could not imagine Mom marrying him, much less having a baby!
Just before my 8th grade graduation, before we moved from Beverly Hills, a balancing act started when I stepped into another of Mom’s traps. Ever suspicious of Buddy, even before she married him, she hid behind a folding screen in the living room that concealed a large alcove that served as a closet. She sat there, as Mammy said to Scarlet, “like a spider,” expecting to catch him molesting me.
She knew Buddy would think she wasn’t home from work yet. Her own carefully concealed secrets, I would one day learn, accounted for her suspicions. But by the time I understood what she believed he was capable of—a year later—I had become as afraid of telling her what he was up to as I was of him.
My mother’s marriage to Buddy placed me in the sights of this sexual predator. Unlike those ominous notes in the movie Jaws, no music played to warn me. It turned out Buddy was like one of Aunt Bessie’s many husbands, John Pennington, my mother’s childhood nemesis when she was only ten years old!
Darkness Closes In
When I was in the 9th grade, my mother called me a tramp. At least that’s what it felt like. I had walked from my room to the kitchen wearing flannel pajamas. Frank Sinatra was on TV singing, “That’s Why the Lady is a Tramp.” I paused to listen and remarked, “I like that song.”
“Because you can identify with it, no doubt,” Mom said.
She had been drinking. Without moving from her spot on the couch, she stared at Buddy seated in his chair. Dumbstruck, I looked at her, went back into my bedroom and closed the door.
I don’t know when I first realized that Buddy was after me, but my mother sensed this long before I did. She drank more to drown her suspicions and only said something aloud when she had been drinking. It hurt me to think that my mother believed either I wanted his attention or else I was already involved with him in some way.
Why didn’t she ask me? Why didn’t she want to know if I was afraid of him? Why didn’t she protect me?
I knew nothing about men or boys, or even how my own body was changing. My mother could never talk to me about the facts of life. Instead, I got what I knew about puberty from a film shown to girls in fifth grade. The boys got an extra recess.
The change in my body I was warned to expect came that year we lived in Beverly Hills, of all times, while my aunt, uncle and two boy cousins visited us at Christmas. I can still see my mother’s forearm reach around the bathroom door to hand me a box of Kotex and a belt. My youngest cousin intruded on this solemn occasion when he had to barf in the bathtub.
I felt like a freak.
No explanations. No questions asked or answered. No reason to think I was dying or perhaps Mom might have shown a bit more interest. My questions went unasked and unanswered. Who could I tell?
From the time that Buddy had presented himself as if we should be happy to see him, things went from bad to worse.
An oft repeated East Texas expression, “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” described my mom’s entire life from then on.
