I’ve said before and I’ll say it again– Reno is a hellish hole of a place to grow up. Drugs (mostly speed), alcohol, and gambling are rampant among the locals, as if trying to live a sort of pseudo-adolescence. This leaves the being adults to the youth, who suffer under the punishment of being to young to do ANYTHING. Reno doesn’t like to acknowledge that it has citizens under 21. I was 15, and my mother had come home 4 hours late from her shift cocktailing at one of the amorphous casinos downtown. She had a big grin on her face, as she produced an envelope from her bag. I knew what this meant. This means restaurants and food courts for the rest of the week. This means a spree at Longs for makeup and hair things and other frivolous items. This means a royal flush. My mother is fairly lucky, she gets about 2 or 3 of them a year.
She smiled, and in a manic rush to get out again, dropped the envelope into a large Ziploc bag. She wound this up and taped it around and then put that into a grocery bag. This she wrapped tightly, over and over, and stuck tape through the tiny loop. I and my 12 year old sister and 5 year old brother followed her into the bathroom, but she pulled me alone in and closed the door. Opening the toilet tank, she flushed, and then taped the baggie to the inside of the toilet. “Just in case, ” she said. But she followed it up with, “do not tell ANYONE. You never saw this, you don’t even know what it is. I’m not saying anything will happen, but this kinda money attracts bad people sometimes, and I want to keep you safe. Okay?”
“Okay.” I answered, following along without really knowing why.
She got dressed, and soon was out again, after giving me permission to have my best friend Sarah spend the night. Because the children are the adults and the adults the teenagers, there is no need to tell Sarah’s mom that mine will not be there, as happens in other homes. It is well known that we can take care of ourselves.
Sarah comes over and we exert our power over my littler siblings, forcing them to watch bad local music videos and ordering them a pizza with the money I personally was left. They eventually mutiny and run off to play in the bedroom of our apartment, free from our rule. We chat about how we hate school, how the boys we like never notice us (and the boys that creep us out always do), and how No Doubt’s Trapped In A Box has got to be the single weirdest thing we’d ever heard.
That’s when the phone rings. And a male voice on the other end says upon answering, “Is your mother home?”
Well trained, I answer, “She’s in the shower, can I take message?”
“She’s not there, is she?”
“Yes she is! She’s just in the shower!”
“I can tell you’re lying. I know what’s there, and in a few hours, I’m going to come by and take it.”
My blood runs cold and I’m certain he can hear my heart beating over the line.
“I have no idea what you are talking about.” I reply and then hang up.
I brief Sarah that we are now in crisis-mode. We sit and wonder which of my mom’s most unpredictable associates were coming to torture us until we spilled about the contents of the tank. I resolved that I would never tell.
I then pulled out the address book my mom had given me. She had made it on a meth-binge, staying up all night to collage the front, and color coding the entries. In it was a brief family tree with birthdays, phone numbers for our relatives, how to make a collect call, and the numbers of all the local casinos and emergency services. Thumbing through, I found the casinos page, and tried her top three favorites. I had the operator page her overhead under her own name, and then my grandmothers. Sometimes when she was being covert, she used the Nana’s name instead. No answer. We sat, wringing our hands in terror, knowing that hours had brought us closer to the time when the guy would “come get what we had.”
We pondered whether he knew about the money at all, or maybe was just gonna violate us. It seemed too coincidental though that on the very day my mom wins a bunch and hides it a guy would be calling for any other purpose than the cash.
It was then that my mom came home. I told her the story, and she thought for a second. She decided to stay in for the night, and about 30 minutes later the phone rang, this time, with my mother answering it.
“Hello”
“Yes this is her.”
“Oh really.”
“John, is that you?”
Much laughing follows from both sides of the phone.
“You nearly scared the girls half to death.”
“Okay, well don’t do it again.”
That’s right folks. My 19 year old cousin chose to prank me on the ONLY day I would’ve fell for it.
