Bill Webb, Jr.

Tag: Drug Addiction

  • Wildwood. Growing and sinking.

    Wildwood. Growing and sinking.

    Jenny lived across the street with her sister and her parents. They were super nice people. Jenny was a few years older than me and for some reason she didn’t play outside with us. Even though she was a kid, she was also friends with my mother.  One day we were at her house, and we played hide and seek. I hid in the bathtub with the shower curtain closed. Jenny called time out because she had to use the bathroom. As fate would have it, she went into the bathroom where I was hiding and closed the door. I heard her sit on the toilet and in a panic, I said her name. She told me it was too late, and she relieved herself. She had diarrhea. She finished, washed her hands and left the room. She did not flush the toilet. I peeped into the toilet, and it embarrassed me. I felt sorry for her.

    There was another kid on the street named Sterling. He wasn’t allowed to play with us. He was very polite and wore a CPO jacket very similar to the one Eb wore on Green Acres. He had the whitest complexion and for some reason I remember his parents looked older than my grandparents. And further down the street was Mandy. Mandy’s parents seemed like my parents except they had their shit together. I remember walking to her house one day. I was excited that I was going into the third grade the next school year. I was going to carry a briefcase to school, do homework and ask Mandy if she would be my girlfriend. I was so excited. But life had other plans. My dad was advancing in his career, and my mother was sinking into her addiction. Life on Wildwood would change.

  • Wildwood. One tree.

    Fred’s dad was drunk. I really shouldn’t know this, but my mother talked about him. She loved to talk about him. She would ask me to fetch the cookies from beneath her bed and talk about him. She kept a steady supply of Danish Wedding cookies under her bed along with potato chips and some chocolate weight loss candies called Ayds. I remember one day I was in the front yard playing with Percy the monkey and my mother came outside, which was unusual. She was not an outside person. It was late afternoon, maybe 4PM. She said she came to get me because Fred’s dad should be driving down the street soon and he would be drunk. Of course, she was in a nightgown and wearing a wig. Our mother had naturally dark hair and the wig was blonde, which I think upset Percy. He leaped on top of her and snatched the wig from her head and instantly climbed the tree in his yard. And sure enough, Fred’s dad rounded the corner in his old red pickup truck, driving slowly and swerving. He made it home safely. She glared at him as he drove, and she seemed to get angry that he made it home.

    Distraught over her wig, she went inside screaming about Fred’s dad and Percy and how they ruined her day. I went to the tree and begged Percy to come down with the wig, but he didn’t. Aunt Miriam even came out and pleaded with him. But he ignored us and sat on a branch and tore the wig to shreds.

  • Wildwood


    My birthday is in October. I don’t know what it’s like now, but when I was a child, October birthdays were taboo or something. It really messed up the school year. I remember it so well. One day, Sherwood Elementary, I was sitting in 3rd grade, and they came and got me and put me right back in the 2nd grade. I went home and told my mother, and she just shrugged. My mother was a drug addict. She forged prescriptions and had doctors all over town writing prescriptions for little blue pills with OP printed on them. I remember her also eating green capsules with little white beads in them. The green capsules were so pretty. I learned later that the pills were speed, but my mother never got out of bed. I helped her from time to time by lighting cigarettes for her on the gas stove. I puffed on them sometimes when I walked back down the hall but never inhaled. Salem’s.


    One day I walked home from school. My mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway, so I went to open the door, and it was locked. I peered through the front window and the house was empty. Everything was gone except for the ironing board. It was in the kitchenette. I remember the sun shining into the house from the back windows, everything looked yellow. The ironing board looked so lonely. I remember feeling so horrible about the ironing board. The fact that my parents and sisters were gone didn’t occur to me. Why did they leave the ironing board? That did not make sense! My dad used that ironing board all the time!

    The best I remember is I walked next door to Aunt Miriam’s. Aunt Miriam wasn’t related to us. But she had a niece and nephew who she kept all the time, Chris and Sheryl. We were friends. She also had a monkey named Percy. Percy was also our friend. Aunt Miriam’s house was always dark and smelled of animal urine and cigarette smoke. I spent the night there one night and everyone woke up in the middle of the night because Jewel Dawn was home and Aunt Miriam was making fried squash. Jewel Dawn was Chris and Sheryl’s mom. She was an overnight telephone operator. It gets kind of blurry, but I am sure that Miriam found my dad and he picked me up.

    The day I came home to an empty house, our mother was gone.

     And so it was just my dad, my sisters and me. Seemingly overnight, we had a new house, a new school and a new life. I remember missing my mother because I thought I was supposed to, but the truth is that I didn’t. I woke up one morning in our new home to the sound of my dad unfolding the ironing board. Seals and Crofts were playing on the stereo. Summer Breeze. I was home.