When Jason Brown’s mother is arrested for stealing $38,000, he agrees to serve as a character witness for her, hoping to keep her out of prison.
Thus begins Character Witness, a memoir, a chronicle of a mother’s struggle with mental illness, addiction, and poverty, and an inquiry into whether we can escape the legacy of the past. Brown realizes that his troubles as a young man mirrored his mother’s, and as he chronicles how sexual abuse can pass down through generations — from father to daughter, and later from mother to son —he begins to look for answers about whether people can change.
Brown and his mother share a difficult history, but they also share a common sense of humor and a sense of the absurd. More than simply a recovery narrative, Character Witness centers the necessity of staying with loved ones even in their worst moments.
Here’s an exclusive excerpt! — AJD
“My mother knew a lot of people who’d been something or other and, for reasons that were not always clear, they now found themselves in the business of fixing anything for a small fee or permission to sleep in the garage. I seemed to be headed in that direction myself.”
by Jason Brown
I considered my mother remarkably fortunate, especially in tough-on-crime Arizona, to get away with probation after stealing $38,000 in jewelry. In the months after her appearance before the judge, she started driving north from Green Valley to Tucson to see her probation officer. Whenever she could catch me at home, she wanted to talk about “the situation,” which at first I took to mean her felony. But no. Apparently, she and Daryl were having trouble, and she wanted to know when I would stop trying to control his mind.
“You don’t want the two of us to be together,” she told me one hot day while we stood next to the lemon tree I’d planted. I was feeding the tree water through a slow-drip hose. I had devoted a disproportionate amount of energy to cultivating the tree. Much like me, it was not meant to survive in this climate, and particularly where I’d planted it, in a slab of caliche soil as solid as airport tarmac. I had used an electric jackhammer to excavate a four-foot-deep, four-foot-wide hole, inserted a pvc pipe to feed water to the bottom, and bedded the tree in organic planting soil. On cold nights in the winter, I lay a little tree blanket over the branches. The tree and I were conducting an experiment in desert survival; the browning leaves did not bode well for either one of us.
“You’re destroying my relationship,” my mother said as I picked at the leaves.
“You can go out with whomever you want to,” I said in a calm voice I’d rehearsed. “But Daryl did a terrible job on my roof. I don’t want to speak to him.”
“He worked very hard on that roof.”
“I didn’t pay him to work hard; I paid him to fix it.”
My attitude, my mother explained, was the problem here. My attitude was not conducive to her happiness. She didn’t see why she shouldn’t be happy, just like everyone else.
I said I wasn’t so sure “everyone else” was all that happy.
She nodded, seeming to take this point into consideration.
Two weeks later, I heard someone shouting my name from outside my front gate. I was in the kitchen, trying to summon the energy to boil a pot of pasta. Outside, my mother stood on the other side of the gate pointing at the lock. I could tell she’d been crying and worried that something had happened with the police or her parole officer. I looked over her shoulder at her car full of trash bags, a lamp, and what looked like a suitcase. Also, there was a cat in the front seat. Attila the Hun II. The passenger seat was leaned all the way back and covered with a sleeping bag and a pillow.
“Have you been sleeping in the car?” I already knew the answer to this question. The real question was how long had she been sleeping in her car? I didn’t really want to know.
“I know how busy you are. But I need a place to stay,” she said. “Daryl took off in his Airstream.”
“How long ago?”
“A while.”
I wanted a bit more clarification before unlocking the gate. After my mother had first moved to Arizona, she had lived with an older guy who had died and left her without a cent. Since then, she had pieced together temporary jobs and places to live, but she had always been on the verge of having no money and nowhere to live. Recently, she had convinced her lawyer Greg Berger and ultimately the court that she’d had some bad luck financially and had suffered from a temporary lapse of judgment when she stole $38,000 of jewelry from an “old woman” a few years her junior. In my lifetime, though, she’d never been able to sustain full-time employment for long. Ever since she had left my father and exhausted the alimony he owed her, she had been in danger of becoming permanently homeless.
While I wondered if I couldn’t just say no, you can’t come in, another part of me felt exhilarated by the idea of crashing headlong into the tangled chaos of her life. I knew that I couldn’t reach out and help her up without tumbling forward myself, but I told myself I had no choice. I had to help her because she was my mother, and because the men in her life had always failed her, particularly her father and stepfather. My father had been remote to her, it seemed. I’d always felt I had to compensate for these men, no matter the cost to myself, and even as the effort to do so pushed me toward becoming the kind of man I had promised myself I would never be. Angry, self-pitying, trapped.
I carried her things into the house, piled them in the front room, and asked her how long she thought she would be visiting. She sat on my sofa and sighed.
“I’m not visiting,” she said.
*****
A week after my mother moved in, I found a man standing on the other side of my metal fence looking at the padlock on the gate. He had left the engine of his Nissan running and stood, arms akimbo, in golf shirt and iron-free slacks. Shoes that shone without having to be shined. He held a piece of paper in his hand. I walked out to the front porch but didn’t introduce myself.
“Do you live here?” he asked. I was back in one of my mother’s stories. Even if I sometimes resisted playing my role, my mother had the uncanny ability to make me feel the exhilarating rush of being caught up in the rip current of her narrative: She could not be bothered by domestic concerns, she would not be troubled by details. Who wants to go to work every morning? Who wants to pay the bills and clean out the lint trap in the dryer? Not me! I thought. We do these things so we don’t drive off the edge of a cliff. But the cliff did not trouble my mother. My mother preferred the cliff. Through the window of the front door, I saw her head bobbing around the kitchen.
“Does Susan Wende live here?” the guy on the other side of the fence asked. Clearly, he was the new owner of my mother’s debt.
“Nope,” I said. “I’m the only one who lives here.”
“It says here that she reported this as her residence.” He narrowed his eyes.
“Don’t think so,” I said.
“Do you know Susan Wende?”
“Never heard of her.”
“She owes a lot of money, you know.”
“It’s America,” I said.
He furrowed his brow, which made him look younger, not older.
“Who are you?” the guy asked.
“Who are you?” I said, and we left it at that. He got in his Nissan and drove off.
And here we go, I thought.
It was my thirty-ninth birthday. That evening I was planning to celebrate the end of my youth by having supper with myself and later talking to my estranged wife on the phone.
My mother came onto the porch with the last of my cereal, and we fell into an argument about the absence of a washing machine. As the “landlord of this establishment,” she felt I should buy a new machine, which was not really in my budget. And also, I told her, this was not an “establishment,” and I was not a “landlord.” She was a guest, not a tenant. I pointed to the building. “This,” I said, “is my house and you are staying with me. If you were not staying with me, you would be unhoused.”
“Aren’t you fun?” she said. “I have plenty of places I could go.”
“Where?” I said cruelly. “You have no money in the bank, a negative credit history. There’s a man driving around in a Nissan right now looking to extract money from you.”
“Good luck with that,” she said and looked at the porch floor.
“You have a felony conviction — no one is going to rent to you in this town.”
She winced.
“You’re always right, aren’t you? Are you pleased with yourself right now?”
I was restraining myself from starting the conversation we’d been having on and off for years — the subject of why she was here living with me in the first place. She refused to seek any kind of assistance or help and adamantly refused to discuss mental illness, at least in her own case. Other people’s problems were fair game. She frequently speculated on my wife Amy’s sanity. Whenever I brought up her own struggles, she admitted that she had sought psychiatric help when she was younger, after my sister was born, but she hadn’t needed it since. In essence, she believed the narrative she had provided to the court: She was going through a rough time right now and just needed to get on her feet. I had offered to go with her to see a social worker, but the answer was no. She did offer to accompany Amy to a social worker because, in her mind, if anyone needed help it was Amy.
Much of the time my mother was coherent. One might think she was a little “off” after first meeting her. Then the delusions, paranoias, and magical thinking poked their heads out like gophers from their burrows. Many people who don’t have family members or community members to help them seem to fall into a system that isn’t designed to help them.
One old AA friend who had lived on the street or in prison in California for the last ten years had reported, in a moment of lucidity, that my offer of help would be wasted on him. He’d done too many drugs and lived with his voices and delusions for too long — he would never “make it back to the surface.” It was just “too far to go.” I was convinced that this would be true of my mother.
As a pair, my mother and I could not see beyond our history, our inherited and created roles as mother and son, female and male, victim and savior, savior and victim. I had assumed that if I just kept the outside of my life glued together, at any cost, the inside would follow. In the process I had created artificial bifurcations — outside vs. inside, he vs. she, my father’s world vs. my mother’s. To achieve the kind of outward success that would protect me from the chaos I associated with my mother and her family, I felt I had to avoid her and suppress anything that I associated with her. Now I had let her into my house, and she had nowhere to go.
I decided I needed to perform manly labor and took out my step ladder so I could rewire the porch light. My mother rested a hand on the ladder, either to steady it or push it over. The heat of the sun was like a tiny, soft jackhammer tapping my skull with a rubber point.
“Have you heard from your wife?’” she said with air quotes around the word “wife.”
“She’s not my wife in quotes,” I said. “Someday she’s going to move back here.”
“Good luck with that. Your wife doesn’t need a place to live. I need a place to live.”
“Jesus, she’s in grad school. She’ll be back,” I said even though both my mother and I knew this wasn’t true. I was trying to strip the ground wire with a Leatherman so I could hook up the new light fixture.
“She should stay where she is,” my mother said, “and I can stay here. You can, you know, visit prostitutes or whatever for your needs.”
My hand slipped and the knife sliced through my thumb. I knew it was bad because it didn’t hurt. By the time I reached the bottom step of the ladder, the blood was pouring down my arm onto my leg. My mother seemed to be delighted, not that I’d hurt myself, but that I had stopped working. She found it dull to watch me work and would rather we do something fun, like drive to the ER.
“That doesn’t look good,” she said, pointing at my hand. “Maybe I should call my friend JJ.”
“Who’s that? No, don’t call JJ.” I stared at the wound, feeling dizzy. I had no idea who JJ was, but my mother didn’t hang out with healthcare professionals.
“He was a mechanic, before . . . but he can fix anything.”
My mother knew a lot of people who’d been something or other and, for reasons that were not always clear, they now found themselves in the business of fixing anything for a small fee or permission to sleep in the garage. I seemed to be headed in that direction myself.
“I need to go to urgent care,” I said. “And you’re going to drive.”
“I need to shower first. I can’t go out like this.” She pointed at her face.
I said she was not going to shower first, which led to a discussion of my telling her what to do. How I was just like my father. Always telling her what to do. Our argument continued into my car, where I gave her the keys, now covered in blood. I told her to hurry, and she told me that I’d always hated her. From the very beginning. Just like my sister.
As she drove us down Seventeenth Street to Third Avenue and took a right, headed north, she gestured toward various houses and the local homeless shelter. I told her to shut the fuck up, which didn’t help things at all. She couldn’t believe and was sure none of my so-called “friends” (air quotes with both hands off the wheel), and especially my “wife” (again in air quotes), who all thought I was such a great guy, would be able to believe that I used that kind of language with my mother. Midway down the block, just past the army surplus store, I opened the door and rolled out of the car onto the pavement. I tumbled several times with my hands wrapped around my head and my elbows and knees scraping until I stopped against the curb. We’d been traveling less than ten miles an hour, but still. . . . Everything hurt — my head, my elbows, my shoulders, my knees, and, of course, my thumb. At least it was now quiet.
She must not have noticed my absence, at least not right away, because she kept driving with the passenger door wide open until she reached the stop sign. At this point I could easily imagine her wrestling the gearshift with two hands. One minute passed, two minutes. She was the worst driver I’d ever met. Reluctant to discover that I’d broken bones or worse, I didn’t budge until I saw the reverse lights appear and the car start to move backwards toward my head.
Jason Brown is a fiction and nonfiction writer who teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is a professor and the Director of the MFA Program. His memoir Character Witness is his most recent book. Buy Character Witness here.
All Illustrations by Edith Zimmerman
