Rock Bottom Was Only The Lobby

Author: Sarah Jones

  • Pipe Bombs, Tail-less Hamsters, & No Leg Steve: Mom Bartending Through Hell

    Pipe Bombs, Tail-less Hamsters, & No Leg Steve: Mom Bartending Through Hell

    (Me & my cousin Shonna on a float trip down Illinois River)

    Spring was a blur after my stepdad Richard died in what I can only describe as the world’s most inconvenient garage explosion. One minute we’re a normal(ish) family, the next there’s a hole in the deep freezer patched with duct tape like some redneck war wound. I avoided that garage like I owed it money. The air felt heavy, cursed, haunted by whatever the fuck Richard had been up to. Running in for frozen meat or ketchup? I sprinted like the devil himself was chasing me with a lit fuse. Silly? Maybe. But trauma makes you superstitious.

    The FBI hung around for months afterward, asking questions we couldn’t answer and parking unmarked cars nearby to watch who came and went. Eventually they ghosted, leaving the pipe bomb mystery as our family’s favorite unsolved true-crime podcast episode that actually happened in our garage.

    Plot twist (you’re welcome, I won’t make you wait 20 years like I did): While staying at a surrogate “uncle’s” house visiting, (actually an old client from my mom’s secret double-life days) I casually mentioned what a fucking weirdo Richard was. Then I dropped the gem: “And who keeps pipe bombs when the whole family is home?!” Uncle calmly informed me that Richard had been selling explosives to the Mexican Mafia. Oh, and my dads brother once middle-manned a deal for a live claymore mine. A claymore. For the Mafia. In suburban Oklahoma. My jaw is still on the floor somewhere in 2002.

    Important note: The people who knew those details are all dead now. If they weren’t, I wouldn’t be telling you shit. I’m no snitch.

    Suddenly a lot of things clicked. Like how we always had money even though Richard wasn’t a doctor yet. And why Mom came flying down the stairs after the blast, told me to grab my sister Rachel and the neighbor girls, and run next door, because she knew exactly what that sound meant. She wasn’t going back to sex work (Richard wouldn’t allow it), so apparently blowing shit up for cartels was the family business plan. Cool. Normal.

    A couple months later, around May, we got a frantic late-night call from my Uncle Johnny (Moms brother). Aunt Susan needed the hospital, something was very wrong, and he’d been drinking so he couldn’t drive. (Why no ambulance? Still a mystery. Oklahoma logic.) Mom & a friend hauled ass in her Isuzu Trooper from Broken Arrow to Bixby, they carried my gray-looking aunt into the car, and drove like bats out of hell to Saint Francis. Miraculously, no red lights the entire way. She made it, slipped into a coma, and we were left wondering what fresh hell this was.

    I was 13. My cousins came to live with us while Aunt Susan was out cold. By then Richard had been dead about six weeks. Mom was still mostly in bed, Grandma was working in-home health and gone for days, and suddenly my mom had five girls under one roof. Enter my dad, the bartender/manager at The Bottom Line in Broken Arrow, who showed up one evening, marched upstairs, and told Mom to get her ass out of bed, shower, put on something cute, and meet him at the bar.

    She laughed. He wasn’t joking.

    “You’re gonna learn to bartend,” he said. “You need a real job. You can’t go back to the industry now, the girls are getting older and starting to notice.”

    Mom, being the fast-learning people-magnet she was, dove in. She was gorgeous, hilarious, and could make the phone book sound like a stand-up routine. People loved her. Before long she was working nights at The Bottom Line, and later at C.J. Moloney’s, selling personality and shots instead of her body, and actually making it work.

    That summer turned weirdly awesome. Mom would take all five of us to Albertsons and we had two buggies again, one for her, one for us kids, and basically say “get whatever you want.” Just like the old days. Grandma hooked us up with pool membership (including the cousins). We lived on MTV, BET, junk food, and chlorine. It was the best summer ever, which is insane considering the spring had featured a mafia-adjacent explosion and a coma. But when you’re all drowning in the same shit storm together, you somehow float.

    During that same coma summer, Mom started dating Jimmy. He had two little hellions under seven that I got stuck babysitting way too often. Those kids were absolute freaks, they once cut the tails off Rachel’s hamsters. Like, snip-snip, no tails, just because they could. Ewww. Little psychopaths in training. Weirdly, I’d still pick babysitting them over dealing with Rachel any day. I no longer have a relationship with my sister, and stay tuned, you’ll get that story one day.

    I actually liked Jimmy. He had full custody, a good job, his own house with a pool (which I loved), and he was good to my mom. He just didn’t like Rachel (the one Richard had spoiled like a princess). Fair, she’s… a lot. Still is. Jimmy also drank too much. They lasted about a year and a half, including a memorable Ohio Christmas trip. I was genuinely sad when it ended.

    Then came the parade of not-so-serious guys, including one who tried to impress Mom by buying me an expensive watch and this giant hot air balloon/gift basket for my 16th birthday. Dude, gift the woman you’re sleeping with, not her teenager. Weird.

    Freshman year brought Steve. Steve was 25 (only nine years older than me, ew), had no legs (train accident as a teen), and got around fine on prosthetics. He also sat around doing nothing while Mom supported him, then tried to play stepdad and boss me around. He even coached my little sister’s basketball team. A guy with no legs. Coaching basketball. I affectionately called him No-Leg Steve. (Yeah, I was a bitter little shit. Still kinda am.)

    They dated about a year and a half. Shortly after the breakup, when I was 17, Mom went missing for five days. No one had seen her. Work hadn’t heard from her. I was losing my mind but knew better than to call the cops, our family doesn’t do that. Right as I was about to break the rule, she called. Steve had kidnapped her, held her hostage in a hotel, and repeatedly raped her in a fit of rage and desperation.

    I wanted to call the police. We didn’t.

    Recently I saw No-Leg Steve’s obituary. Everyone described this beloved, wonderful man who died of cancer. Not the arrogant, bossy rapist I remembered. Karma’s a bitch, I guess. He deserved it.

    The biggest lesson from those middle-school-to-early-high-school years wasn’t the explosions, the mafia side hustle, the coma, the hamster mutilation, or the kidnapping. It was watching my mom’s insane resilience. She fell apart after Richard died, bed-bound, depressed, barely functioning. Then my dad dragged her up, taught her to bartend, and she ran with it. She provided. She bought name-brand consignment clothes, let us have grocery cart freedom, and she was always there for us, even if it wasn’t always the healthiest way. The Xanax and Arby’s came when we were dealing with stressful or upsetting situations like a breakup or fight with a friend. Again, not healthy but she was doing her best. She did it all with a smile, cracking jokes, and loving us unconditionally.

    It’s okay to fall apart. It’s okay to break down. But my mom showed me what surviving, and then thriving, actually looks like. She did the damn thing, every time.

    Thanks for coming to my Oklahoma trauma dump. Pass the Arby’s.

  • The Lion King Tie and the Pipe Bomb: A 6th Grade Memoir

    The Lion King Tie and the Pipe Bomb: A 6th Grade Memoir

    I was in the sixth grade when my mother decided to go for the hat trick and get married for the third time. To be honest, I was pissed. I’d only met Richard a handful of times. One of those times was a high-stakes cultural exchange to see The Lion King in theaters, so we weren’t exactly soulmates. Richard was finishing medical school and planned to be an OB/GYN, which, given what I found out later, is a terrifying career choice for a man with a “meat hook” hobby.

    The first time he stayed over, I threw a literal tantrum about him sleeping in my mom’s room. I’m not sure why I cared, maybe it was the exhaustion of my mother’s dating history keeping my life in a state of permanent “Loading…” status. I told them I wouldn’t tolerate them sleeping together unless they were married. I thought I was being a strategic mastermind; instead, I accidentally fast-tracked the nuptials.

    They eloped in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. They didn’t even tell us. I caught Richard sneaking upstairs for bed and, right as I prepared my best 13-year-old verbal hand grenade, he smirked and said, “We can… because we’re married!”

    It gets worse. I found out the witnesses were Mom’s friend Gabriella, a feisty, older German sex worker, and her brother, Alfred. So, the local sex work industry was in the loop, but the kids were on a “need to know” basis? Also, Eureka Springs? I loved pink doilies and Victorian houses! I would have been the perfect chaperone, but no, I was replaced by a German lady with a thick accent.

    As I got to know Richard, the vibe went from “annoying stepdad” to “clinical micromanager.” He was obsessed with my grades and, weirder yet, my skeletal structure. He actually measured my bones to see if I was “meant” to be skinny like the rest of the women in my family. The verdict? I was “medium-boned.” It felt like he was checking my factory specs to see how much body fat I was legally allowed to carry. He told me to watch my diet, despite the fact that I was in dance three days a week and taking gym. Apparently, unless I was actively vibrating from physical exertion, I wasn’t doing enough.

    Then there was the favoritism. Richard treated my younger sister, Rachel, like a Disney Princess. Rachel was a difficult child who blossomed into an even more difficult adult, but to Richard, she was a literal saint. It was enough to make me puke.

    One day, fueled by spite and boredom, I went snooping. I found meat hooks. Not like, “I’m starting a butcher shop” hooks, but “I have a dark secret” hooks. I also found photos of my mother tied up in doorways with expertly looped ropes, surrounded by more hooks, wearing a big, stupid, “I’m in love” grin. My beautiful, dumb mother. It was gross. It was “I need to go live with my Dad for a month” gross.

    I eventually moved back home because I missed my own bed. By Spring Break 1995, they had been married six months. March 25th was a Saturday. We were hosting a dinner party for Richard’s medical school friends. My mom was upstairs “getting ready” (which usually took three business days), my sister was playing with neighbors, and Richard was in the garage.

    I was in the backyard on the swing, criss-cross-apple-sauce, blasting Green Day and Nirvana on my Walkman, trying to transcend my existence. Suddenly, over Billie Joe Armstrong’s voice, I heard the loudest BOOM of my life. I didn’t just hear it; I felt it in my marrow. I assumed a house across the street had simply decided to stop existing.

    I ran inside. My mom came flying down the stairs, screaming for me to grab my sister and the neighbor kids and get out. As we ran across the yard, I thought I saw Richard walking toward us. I felt a brief moment of relief, Oh, he’s fine. Then he vanished. It was a ghost, or a trick of the light, or my brain refusing to accept the physics of a pipe bomb.

    Thick black smoke began billowing from the garage. We huddled at the neighbor’s house, watching the street fill with fire trucks and ambulances. After what felt like several lifetimes, Mom walked in with a cop.

    “Girls,” she said quietly. “There was an accident. Richard is dead.”

    My sister basically levitated off Mom’s lap in a fit of inconsolable grief. I just sat there, buffering.

    The aftermath was a fever dream. Because Richard was a “wealthy” med student, the FBI and the bomb squad descended on our pink house in Broken Arrow. They found another pipe bomb in the house and a storage unit filled with explosive ingredients and automatic weapons. My stepdad wasn’t just a bone-measuring weirdo; he was a domestic insurgent in training.

    Then came the “charity” of Richard’s biological father, Millard. He showed up in a private jet with a wife who looked like the Wicked Stepmother from Cinderella. He told my mom he’d pay for the funeral, but since they were only married six months, he was cutting us off forever immediately after. Total dick move.

    Mom took him for every cent she could. She picked the most expensive casket, the fanciest double headstone, and even made him prepay to have her name engraved on it for the future. It was her final “screw you” to his estate. (Side note: In 2012, the IRS called my sister looking for Millard for tax evasion. I hope he’s wearing a jump suit that matches his cold, dead heart.)

    At the funeral, I got my first and only limo ride. When they opened the casket, I didn’t recognize him. His head was too large; it looked like he was wearing a Richard-themed mask. Mom whispered, “That’s not him, it’s just his shell.” He was wearing the Lion King tie we gave him for Christmas. I wanted to snatch it back, why waste a perfectly good Simba tie on a guy who blew himself up in our garage?

    The house was a wreck. Pro tip: The police don’t clean up “biological matter.” My Aunt Susan and my mom spent an entire day scrubbing what was left of Richard off the garage walls because we couldn’t afford a biohazard team.

    The first day back to school, some “fuck-face” kid on the bus asked if my dad was trying to kill us with bombs under our beds. I lost it. My mom, meanwhile, had retreated to her bed, smoking a truly heroic amount of weed. Sometimes she’d try to pass the joint to me, and I’d just stare at her until she remembered I was still in middle school.

    I just wanted someone to tell me we were going to be okay. But in our house, “okay” was a relative term, and things were about to get a whole lot crazier.