There’s No Place Like Home

By Casey Dooley, 2021

A black-and-white photo of a two-story home with a dormer window at the attic level. An awning hangs over the doorstep, and a young tree is staked at the front-right sidewalk.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Interviewer:
What’s a memory you have of the house in Rahway?

Narrator:
I remember my brother being little and growing up with him—see, this is getting like, not emotional, but I’m getting all “me and my brother” and I feel like you want to hear like, “Oh, the wallpaper was pink or my mother…” So my mother did paint the walls like Pepto-Bismol pink. She had this thing that she liked wicker furniture with like Floridian patterns, like the pink and green pastel-y—very weird. She had fake trees in the house. I don’t, I don’t know what her aesthetic was supposed to be, but it just seemed like “desperate for Florida.” Uh, I remember, like my mother would work at night, so my brother would sometimes sleep with me. You know, when he was like, kind of like my kids’ ages now—four, five, six, and, um, scaring him by telling him that I turned into a monster at night.

I remember Bob the Lawyer, our family friend coming over a lot. I remember—I mean, that was where most of my, you know, my 12-to-21 life was. You know, I moved out at 21 because, my brother was there and it was like, “Ah…I don’t want to leave him alone with her.” Not that she would do anything bad, but she was pretty neglectful. She was the kind of person that when I was a kid, she’d be gone for days. So I never wanted him to be left home alone in the event she went off on a three, four-day bender, whatever she would do when she was gone. She was always like a party girl. She wanted to be like, I think that was like—she felt like she missed out on that. She had me really young, but, um, and she was lucky—between 15 and 21 she didn’t—she didn’t have me. And then once she was 21, it’s like, well, here’s your kid. And I think that kinda, you know, bummed her out. So I stayed home ‘cause my brother.

You know, what is it? “One man’s trash, another man’s treasure.” You know, New Jersey’s one man’s treasure. It’s not mine. I mean, that was not a good place to grow up. I wouldn’t want my kids growing up there, but looking back, I kind of—I have fond memories of that. I have fond memories of—I wouldn’t say fond, it’s a quaint memory. There was a time my mother and her boyfriend went to score some drugs in a building somewhere down on the Bowery and left me in the car. And it was like, “All right, you guys have been gone a long time.” I need to figure out where—so I went into the building and I got shooed out. I don’t remember what happened, I just remember trying to get in. And they were like, NO. But yeah, you’re not going to have that in Kansas. [Laughs.] You’re not gonna, you’re not gonna hang out in a, in a crack house. 

I don’t want my girls—I don’t want them to have to deal with that. I don’t want them to—I want them to live a—I don’t want them in New Jersey. I don’t want them to feel that their parents are never around for them. I don’t want them to feel that they’re a burden on me. I don’t want my kids ever thinking, feeling the way I did. And maybe the way I was grown up tarnishes how I see New Jersey and maybe the way I am mentally now, is why I see Kansas through these rose-tinted glasses. I don’t know, but now I’m just in a better place, and it happens to be Kansas.