He had a horrible voice, and you clapped as loud as you could. You wanted to learn guitar and he’d broken the last one because YOU DID NOT APPRECIATE HIM. Didn’t clap. Now you couldn’t clap enough.

“I do not just write song lyrics, I write poetry.” Tonk dared anybody to say otherwise. You pretended he was on TV. “I liked it,” you said, like you were talking into a box. But your face was your face. Tonk said you had “snitch tic.” “I don’t have to dignify that from you, Snitch Tic. You gotta face people just wanna smack. I’m tellin’ you because I care about you, babe. You’re a lying kinda girl. People know.”

Why couldn’t you make your voice sound real? Tonk always said you were lying. Until you wondered yourself: maybe you were. Maybe there was a kind of lying where you didn’t know you were lying. Mostly you were trying not to let on how high you were. They were always talking about Social Services snatching you away. You were worth a check, you knew that much. If the lady from the SS came and tested you for meth, and you were positive, they wouldn’t just lose you—and that $435 a month—they might go to jail. You watched Fishoil. How he handled himself. Tonk never accused him of “fabricatizing.” Like he accused you of. All Fishoil thought about were drugs. He didn’t say anything about it, but he didn’t say anything at all. So you started staring at the white chunks on the table—the dust and crumble—just like him. Ignoring everything that was not drugs.

“See that?” Tonk shook his head at Fishoil but he was talking to you. “See what she’s doing?” Fishoil didn’t answer. You didn’t breathe. Mommy was white zombied. Tonk talked into Fishoil’s scuzzy ear. “You see what I’m saying?” Fishoil stared at the drugs. Showing nothing. But Tonk plowed right on, as though his buddy, who you doubted was his buddy, had indicated he gave a shit. Which he plainly didn’t. But this only got Tonk more worked up, made his voice more quivery-intense. “YOU KNOW WHO YOU TALK TO LIKE THAT? SOMEBODY YOU THINK IS A FAGGOT, THAT’S WHO! You talk to me like that, you might as well just say, ‘Hey Tonk, you like to suck cocks, don’t you? You like to smell balls.’” Even when Tonk whacked Fishoil on the shoulder, Fishoil didn’t react. “That’s what that kid thinks I am. A ball-smelling turd-burglar.”

My mother, somewhere in her head, was still an English major. Capable of being offended, after the monstrosities Tonk inflicted, by what she called his crudité. Which, you can still hear, is what she called his ignorance when he wasn’t around to argue about it. His crudité, rolling her R’s and stretching and AY around the chipped-to-shit pipe, now an inch long, so hot she needed an oven mitt to hold it. When that was too clumsy, she wrapped her hand in wet bread, which sometimes burned up brown and nice: Look, honey, I made hand toast. She’d pretend she did it on purpose. And you never argued. Food was food. She wanted you to know things. About him. But even then you sensed, the way you sense Mommy needed a Mommy, you sensed that she wanted you to see what she loved. But it was really an excuse to talk to herself. She wanted you to see what she loved—even if it was nowhere in sight—to share her delusion. To remind herself. “Tonk doesn’t even speak like that, baby,” she’d say when he wasn’t around. “He’s really a sensitive man. He only uses that jailhouse crass language when that ex-con Fishoil comes by.”