My Mom Got Me the Job

I grew up in suburbia. My mom stayed home. By every measure anybody uses, I had it.

I was a shithead to my parents, and I turned out to be a drug addict.

The part people want

There is a version of the addiction story that everyone finds easier, and it requires a reason. Something that happened. Something that was done to you.

I do not have one. I had a stay-at-home mother in a quiet neighbourhood and I went and did it anyway.

That is a harder story to tell because it removes the explanation, and without the explanation people start reaching for character, which is worse and also not right. It was not a moral failure and it was not a tragedy with a cause. It was a thing that happened to someone it was not supposed to happen to, which is most people it happens to.

And then she got me the job

After I got thrown out of the house I was living in, my mother got me a job at a bowling alley.

Sit with the sequence. Her son had been a shithead to her for years, had moved out to go be a musician in a closet, had been removed from that closet under a cloud, and had nowhere to go. And she went and found him work.

I was not grateful at the time in any way she would have been able to detect.

That job turned into six years. It is where I made beats on an iPad, where we filmed sketches, where most of what I can do now got started. Every good thing in the next decade of my life traces back to a phone call my mother made on behalf of somebody who had given her very little reason to make it.

It is also where it got worse. Both of those are the same building and the same years, and I am not going to separate them to make the story tidier.

What I owe her

I am not going to perform this. She does not need a paragraph from me where I sound redeemed.

What I will say is that the standard narrative of an addict getting clean has a hero in it, and the hero is usually the addict. In mine there are several people who kept showing up for somebody who was not worth showing up for yet, and my mother is the first of them.

She got me the job. I did not deserve it. I took it anyway, and everything came from it.