Committing Statuscide - 4

Final The Crown’s Debt - Chapter 2 - Intro - Memoir of Bryton Gore

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The Crown’s Debt

(Excerpt from the memoir of Bryton Gore)

CH.2 Intro

The sterile hum of the ICU was the cruellest melody; its beeping jarring the thick stillness like having your body dumped into an ice tank while breathing machines whoosh methodically, singing a sick lullaby for the half dead to finally rest. I still see the cold, lifeless form of my mother sprawled across the bed, tubes dangling from her yellowed mouth like a twisted H.R. Giger painting. Her eyes lay half-open, glistening with thick, teared gel. To the nurses it’s just another soon to be funeral but loved ones observing are gagged by the thickness of mourning lingering in the air, all of us animated only by the mechanical chest compressions listening for an irregularity signalling when they might stop. The ICU was a sterile stage: a blinding white spotlight illuminating a chrome bed in the center, starring my mother and her final purgatory; an empty testament to a life spent for appearances.

I stood there, the sharp tang of antiseptic mixing with the metallic taste of grief. You’d think the weight of my new reality would have crashed down on me, but I remained numb like the nurses. Across the room, behind a glass pane, my sister’s smirk cut deeper than any knife, a wicked, detached smile shared with a ragtag group of friends who reveled in the spectacle. The problem is, people don’t want to see your normal neighbor Greg on stage; they want to see something unnatural, ethereal, and new. In that moment, the room transformed into a macabre theater where empathy was absent and I was left with nothing but unanswered questions and a future built on paper-thin promises.

Before the fortnight of her death, when  she was in her prime, my mother reigned as the queen of a glittering kingdom, a living embodiment of allure and sophistication. Her love story with my father was once the stuff of whispered legends: a romance fueled by ambition and the relentless pursuit of an unattainable ideal. She transformed everything into a stepping stone toward a meticulously crafted image, a façade that demanded sacrifice. In her relentless quest to shine, she burned through her health, her authenticity, and ultimately, her life. Every drink, every late night, every risky gamble was a stitch in the fabric of her grand illusion, a sacrifice for the crown of glamour that she believed was her birthright, and that was now exacting its debt.

“At least it wasn’t something like heroin,” one of Ashley’s friends slurred, as teenagers do, trying to ease their own discomfort at the sight of my mother’s rotting body. It was a response not just to my shock at watching my 17-year-old self witness my mother die, but also (perhaps) a reaction to my sister’s performance as a blubbering mess in front of her friends. I was about to be dumped with paperwork up to my ears while juggling care for a new baby, and I didn’t have time for the spectacle of enablers pretending to care about a situation I’d seen coming for years. How ignorant they all were. It takes at least a decade to kill your liver with alcohol. By the end, she was crawling under the sink, drinking mouthwash, sipping methylated spirits, and even vanilla essence; but that wasn’t what did her in. She was drinking heavily throughout my childhood; in fact, I barely remember her sober.

The nurse looked at me, concerned. “Is there someone in your family over the age of 18 I can talk to?” She glanced over my shoulder toward my sister’s group of friends, searching for an adult, and failing. I replied, “No, everyone is dead or living in America…” She shifted uncomfortably, her eyes darting, and I could tell she was nervous. One of the powers gifted by a childhood of destruction is the sensitivity to read everyone’s behaviors and emotions; mastering that as an adult means balancing it so it doesn’t turn into a tool for control. I wanted to scream at her, “Spit it the fuck out!” but I already knew the answer. Mom was dead, and they needed someone to sign off on cutting her life support. I asked, giving her verbal charity, “Should I call someone?” Under her breath she replied “yes,” knowing that giving me information as a minor was illegal but, seeing the direness of the situation, she buckled and whispered the answer before walking off. Eventually, I found a payphone, a direct line to my Oma; and left a voicemail: her daughter was dying, and she needed to fly to Australia to say goodbye.

My mother knew the truth: people don’t want to see your normal everyday person on stage, they want to see something unnatural, ethereal, and new. Destroying my own happiness was as deeply somatic for me as being center stage was for her. Her self-destruction became a method of preserving that ideal, the need to be something from another planet. And when reality came knocking, reminding her she wasn’t, the bottle replaced it. That is why she spent most of my childhood wailing for her soulmate… my father.

When they first met, my mother was a young sports instructor at a luxury hotel in California. A blend of ambition and promise. One fateful night, as if scripted by destiny, she crossed paths with a man whose life was galaxies apart from hers. My father was a business mogul, a burly, loud-mouthed titan whose presence commanded rooms and whose fortune was the stuff of legends: racecar driving, helicopters, luxury resorts. He wielded the media with cunning; hated for his ideas yet adored for pulling them off with style. They met in a haze of neon and smoke at a bustling bar, where sophisticated men and high-stakes wagers were as common as laughter. I remember her recounting the whispers the bartenders repeated after her shift: “Mike, you couldn’t get her, I bet $10k on it.” My father, with a swagger that belied his habit of missed appointments and broken promises, was the subject of that bet.

But fate had its own plans. When my mother discovered the wager, she gathered a fierce determination and stormed over to his room. Instead of a confrontation, a conversation unfolded, a night that lasted until sunrise, heavy with confessions and unexpected tenderness. Or maybe the man just had game. Against a backdrop of wealth and reckless wagers, they fell in love. Yet, the romance was as tragic as it was passionate. To the world, it was the unlikely union of a fat, rich guy and a young woman soon nicknamed in the paper as “the leggy blonde mistress.” But in the whispered secrets of those late hours, my mother never stopped singing his praises. I remember, as a child, clinging to the belief that they were soulmates, two star-crossed lovers fated to be together. That fragile fantasy was all I had to hold onto when reality revealed its cruelty: he died of a heart attack when I was two, leaving her to drown her grief in a ceaseless cycle of drinking and tears.

I was forced to swallow that tragic love story, a myth spun to soothe the scars of loss. For my young mind, it was a lifeline, a beautiful lie to cope with a mother whose heart was broken not just by death, but by the relentless pursuit of an image that cost her everything. She had needed him, not for love, but for the luxury he had promised that she failed to build herself. How ironic this childhood fantasy, this delusion she crafted around a soulmate story, drilled into my head until it became my truth. If there is a god, he must be a coked-out Shakespearean dictator; because my mother would end up dying on the exact same day as my father, exactly 15 years apart.

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The sacrifices she made for image were always at my expense. I was a weird little kid, protesting velvet dresses, looking grumpy in the media shots she set up, hiding under the table playing my Gameboy at her socialite gatherings, or sneaking lizards and spiders into my pocket at her art gallery showings, telling other kids the food they were served was wolf meat. I hated being forced into her socialite life, and I made sure she knew it. You could call me a spoiled brat. The reason I acted out was that this performance she forced me into, this spectacle of a childhood, was paid for by her amassing a huge credit card debt that would eventually fall on me when her life support was cut off… though I didn’t know that yet.