CHAPTER 5
When I was growing up, I never had the sense that someone had my back, because I never knew what it was like when someone didn’t. It would never have occurred to me that I could end up alone and vulnerable, since in those days, my family was the best, the coolest, the tightest.
My parents met at a U2 concert. Dad was working as a roadie, and Bono pulled my mom onstage to dance. He used to do that at every concert. Every girl in the audience probably thought she was worthy, but Mom really was. She had this thing about her, this light—an energy that made you want to be around her because when you were, life was giddy. Free spirit is such a clichéd term, but it totally fit my mom. When she went floating backstage that night, she looked up at Dad in her post-Bono ecstasy and kissed him. He was probably a goner right there and then.
After that, it was like some bohemian fairy tale. They tromped around Europe and Africa together, with Mom selling her paintings to earn money. They got married on a cliff top in Morocco, and she got pregnant with me in a Portobello Road hotel in London—hence my name, Brit (middle name is Paula for Bono, whose real name is Paul). Then they moved to Portland and bought a ramshackle house on Salmon Street and started CoffeeNation, a coffeehouse/art gallery/club.
I don’t know how many kids can say that they once crayoned in a Muppets coloring book with Kurt Cobain, but I can. Tons of musicians and artists hung around CoffeeNation, which was funny because neither Mom nor Dad knew an A from an A minor. But they had a weekly open-mic night, and a lot of bands got their start there, and I think the place just got a reputation as a music haven.
We pretty much lived at CoffeeNation. After school, I’d sit down at my own reserved table, and Dad would fix me a hot chocolate before I started my homework. It never took me long because I had like forty pseudo big brothers and sisters there to help me—musicians are weirdly good at math, which is probably one reason that back in my own school, I would’ve been taking calculus in my junior year. My favorite customer was Reggie, a tattoo artist whose arms, legs, and torso were like a mosaic. A lot of people probably thought he looked like a thug, but he was the nicest guy ever. He loved to read almost as much as he liked to talk, and he used to check out a copy of whatever book I was reading for school, so we could have literary discussions together. I was only eight when we met, and Reggie and I read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. together.
When my friends complained about their parents, I didn’t even pretend to agree. I hung out with my parents most afternoons at the café until Mom and I went home to cook up these wild dinners—like the night she decided everything had to be purple (eggplant stew with beets and grapes isn’t half bad, by the way). We’d eat late when Dad got home, and I never got sick of being around them.
Just before seventh-grade winter break, Mom got it in her head that we should escape the gray and go live on the beach in Mexico for a month. She whispered her idea into Dad’s ear, and next thing you know, Grandma is running CoffeeNation, and we’re living in huts on the Yucatan Peninsula, eating fish tacos for breakfast. What kind of parents let their kids do something like that, even if it means missing a couple weeks of school?
Looking back, to tell the truth, I guess Mom didn’t care quite enough about stuff like school, but Dad did. Where she was like a rainbow after a storm, he was like the umbrella during it—the solid one keeping us dry: the doctor-appointment maker, the lunch packer, the worrier. Dad was the parent, and Mom was more like another kid. So maybe that’s why when she started to change, no one noticed at first. She’d do odd things, like insist that we unplug all the phones and leave on the downstairs lights at night—to prevent spies from watching us, she’d say. Or she’d leave for work and show up at CoffeeNation four hours later, with no memory of where she’d been. When she took a knife to her paintings because “the voices told me to,” we started with all the doctors and their diagnoses. First “borderline personality disorder.” Then “paranoia.” And finally “paranoid schizophrenia.” But Mom refused to admit anything was wrong and refused any treatment. My grandma moved up from California to take care of us and begged Dad to have Mom committed to a mental hospital, but Dad just kept saying, “Not yet; she might get better.” I think he really believed that. Until the day she left us.
After that, Dad had to close down CoffeeNation and go to work at a software company, which is where he met Stepmonster, who’s the kind of woman who freaks out if her handbag doesn’t match her shoes perfectly. Within a year they were married, and my wonderful family was history. Then I understood that having someone watch your back isn’t automatic. It’s special—and it can be taken away from you.