You Can Call Me Joe…
When we went to live with my Dad, we threw a mishmash of clothes together into some shopping bags and suitcases, and ran out the door. We were already poor, so leaving a whole lot of nothing behind wasn’t really a big deal. What was really tough though, was that I wasn’t used to being without my Mom. Yeah, she’d left before for days at a time, but this time it was for months, and it was weird not to see her or hear from her. It’s weird to think about the things that I remembered about her. It was the smell of cigarette smoke and makeup that stuck most in my mind. What a weird thing - cigarettes and makeup. When I think about it now, I can still remember the scent vividly in my mind.
Along with being incredibly confused by what was going on, months away from my Mom had made me really angry. I didn’t understand why she left, why she had decided to go away from me, and why I had to live in another stupid apartment in a city I didn’t know, at a school where I had to start over again. But, I did like I always had, and tried to make the best of things. Even with all of the insanity surrounding me, I was still a pretty happy kid. I smiled and laughed alot, I’d always make some kind of friends at whatever school I went to, and I never struggled with the academic side of things, so in some ways that made things easy on me. I can’t remember why, but I also decided to change my name from “Joey” to “Joe”. Later in life, my Mom would accuse my Dad of trying to hide me by changing my name when he registered me for school, but it was 100% me who made the decision to do this. My Mom had convinced herself that she was actually planning on coming back to us and that my Dad had somehow stolen us from her - but that is so fucking ludicrous. She was gone. Adios, muchacho. Hasta la vista, baby. She and that cunt Dale had left us behind, while they tried to outrun imaginary police, and my Dad reluctantly came to get us. It’s hilarious if you think about how stupid my Dad would have had to be if this was his big coverup - remove the letter “y” from my name and that’s going to throw everyone off of our trail. Give me a fucking break. Ugh - but I digress.
It turns out that my Mom and Dale had taken off to Edmonton, Alberta - about 1000 kilometers from where we were living in Quesnel at the time. She had gone to work in a meat packing plant, and Dale had started working at an auto bodyshop. They had started a new life, and now they were trying to get us back - but my Dad wasn’t having it. He was pissed off, and rightly so. Again and again, my Mom had tiptoed around responsibility and ran out the door when things got tough. Now, with some meat packing money in her pockets, she figured she could just walk back into our lives, but that was met with a big “fuck you” from my Dad. She called him and wanted to take us back, and he said forget it. He wouldn’t tell her where we were, and because she had abandoned us in the first place, there was nothing she could really do about it.
Let me be clear - this whole situation was pretty fucked up. Both of them are morons for how they dealt with things. But, since my Dad wouldn’t tell her where we were, she just started calling everyone and somehow found out the school we were at. She pleaded with the teachers to let her talk to her son Joey Case, and that’s where it gets super hilarious because they said “We don’t have a Joey here - we have a Joe Case though!”. Holy fuck, you would have thought that the mystery of the century had been solved because my Mom screamed out “His name is Joey and that’s my son!”. So, me deciding to go by Joe put everyone into a frenzy because it seemed like my Dad had changed my name in an effort to hide me. Maybe she should have called the imaginary police that she and Dale were on the run from to report the crime. That’s when they got me on the phone with her, and I gotta tell you, I was pretty reluctant to go through with that call. The woman who had put me in harm’s way repeatedly, who had let that evil nut Dale torture me, who had manipulated me and subjected me to a lifetime’s worth of trauma by the age of eight, now wanted me to come back to her.
That’s why when they handed me the phone, I hung it up and walked away.
