I’m a worrier, that’s what I am. If there’s something to worry about, I’ll find it and worry the shit out of it. It will nearly incapacitate me. At least for a while.
I’m a liver in the past. I’m not talking about an internal organ living in the Dark Ages in Hungary. I’m saying I live in the past. I’m one of those folks who provide that service so others may listen to reggae and have dogs even though they seem to live out of a van. It's my niche.
I live in the past; I remember things and I write them down. If I don’t, they’ll be lost forever. So many things are lost, partly because people lose them. I just decided to collect a few memories here and there. Memories - for lack of a better word. There must be a better one. Chunks of time. Vignettes of reality. Traumas of existence.
I’ve been maligned for living in the past. Mind you, I support myself; I’m a fully functional person, apparently; I put food on the table. I’m here, mostly. But I have come to a point where I believe it’s time to empty out what I’ve been carrying around. With time and reason, it doesn’t seem so bad anymore; it seems like a really bad dramedy. Or perhaps it would be a riveting reality show - gritty, intense and GLORIOUS!
Now everyone will want a gritty, intense and glorious dysfunctional family. Sounds so fun!
Then you’ve got your people saying, “Well we all grew up in dysfunctional families. BFD. Get over yourself!” And to them I say touché! Yes I am being a whiney bitch, but that’s kinda my shtick. Get it? I understand I could be living high in the Andean mountains carding llama wool all day and eating yucca. Or taro. Or whatever they eat there. I know I’m totally complaining. But I’m complaining with style. So go with me brother. Also there is the option of not reading it at all and going back to whatever it is that gives you pleasure and not the compulsion to ridicule. Which is kinda what I’m doing too. See? We’re the same, you and me.
It is not easy doing what I do. I weigh 140 pounds; what I carry is weightless, but is not without weight. Having to maintain this separate reel running all the time is exhausting. I don’t feel I belong back there - I don’t feel I belong here. I’m perpetually stuck between now and what happened. Makes life a little cloudy. Muddled. Underwater.
It’s somewhere along the lines of “The Dude abides,” but in reverse.
I feel suffering. I feel anguish and regret. And a great loneliness (say that like Troi from TNG.) So let me do my thing so there can be reggae and frisbees and post office boxes. You should actually thank me.
You’re welcome.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Upstaged
“Sometimes a man must awake to find that really, he has no one.” ~ Jeff Buckley
My dad had a heart attack, a big one, when I was about 10 years old. I was at ballet/tap class, my mother looking on, when a phone call came in to the studio - mind you, this was before mobile phones. My mother took the call and turned pale; I could see through the glass that separated the dancers from their onlookers. I imagine a ‘normal’ mom would try to keep the emotion to a minimum as not to frighten the children, but subtlety was not in my mother’s playbook. She looked at these moments as her time in the spotlight, her moment to shine. She hung up the phone, cupped her hand over her mouth and half staggered into the studio, “Your father had a heart attack!” She broke into sobs more for herself than for my dad or for me for that matter.
Heart attack? What did that mean? Was he dead? Was that him on the phone? Do people always die from those? It may sound sinister to say, but if he were dead, it would be a prescription for my chronic despair. So I calmly watched the show: my mother throwing herself into Teacher Carole’s arms, going on about how my dad’s drinking and smoking had finally caught up to him and how she just knew this was going to happen sooner or later. On and on it went. I was a smart girl; I figured my lesson was over and we would be heading out as soon as my mother felt sufficiently recognized for her performance. I packed my things.
My mother finally remembered that the heart attack victim’s daughter was standing there in a black unitard and a red satin wrap around skirt. I already had my street shoes on. “Oh sweetheart! Your father!”
Oh yes. My father.
What did he expect? What did any of us expect? He was a stressed out 25 year veteran of the Air Force. He smoked two to three packs of Lucky Strike Straights a day - Camel Straights in a pinch; who knows how much he drank? He was pretty good at keeping that a secret. He’d been in and out of rehab centers, saved by the elders of the Mormon church a dozen and a half times, and had a nasty case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Well, we didn’t know that’s what it was called until years later. My mother would roll her eyes and smirk whenever he checked the faucet 50 times. “It’s off, David!” she would spit sarcastically. We all got a kick out of watching him walk back and forth in and out of a room before he vacated it - turning the light on and off with each exit and re-entry. Then there was the sock thing. He would shake his socks out 20-30 times before he put them on. Then after he got them half-way on, he’d shake them out a couple dozen more times before he’d finally commit to socking up entirely. He told me once he found a scorpion in his sock when he served in Saudi Arabia during the Korean War. What the fuck was he doing in Saudi Arabia if the war was in Korea? To me, Saudi Arabia looked like a huge boot for someone with elephantiasis and was no where near Korea. I wasn’t yet old enough to be cynical about oil and royal families. So what did I know...
I know that as we sped home to figure out what had happened to my father, I secretly hoped he was dead. These were private thoughts so I didn’t feel at all horrible for having them. This was the man I fantasized about “accidently” chopping his head off with the paper cutter in my fourth grade open house. He made our lives unpredictable and wholly wretched. Oh, he had his moments. Yes, he did have the capacity to be charming, but he doled those memories out like golden tickets. As I got older and older, his delightful moments of frivolity and wit no longer overshadowed the months of cruelty and malice. I thought how much happier we would all be to be free of creeping around his laundry list of unwritten, ever-changing rules if he were finally gone. Who knew what was going to set him off? Leaving shoes in the living room warranted an hour lecture about “What I was going to do with my life.” Jesus. I was supposed to miss this man? They’re fucking shoes.
He made my mother’s life agony too. All I can say is she liked it in some twisted awful way. And now, to look at her in the driver’s seat - sobbing, mascara running down her cheeks, hardly able to make sense as she lamented her fate was fully pathetic. The thing was, it really wasn’t about my dad; it was about her suffering. My mother needed her undeserved torment to justify her existence. If my dad died, she would lose her ever plenished larder of anguish and self-loathing. It could take her quite a while to find someone as vile as he who would put up with her self-righteous bullshit as long as he had. I guess I could understand why she was so upset. My father would be difficult to replace.
The sight of my father’s car in the driveway elicited more weeping from my mother. I guess she had been told the ambulance came to the house, so I don’t know what the big surprise was. Sitting in the driveway, there was a long moment before either of us exited the car. I didn’t know about my mother - she grew up in the South - but this was new territory for me. Entering the house was surreal. I would experience this same feeling eight years later when he finally stroked out in his one bedroom apartment: the feeling that he was still there even though I knew he wasn’t. My mother and I actually tip-toed into the house, as if we were going to catch him in the throes of clutching his chest and groping for the phone to dial 9-1-1; an encore matinee for close family of the actor only. But he wasn’t there. We knew that. Just a towel in the middle of the kitchen floor, sopping wet. Later we would learn it was drenched with his sweat. I guess heart attacks do that.
I’m pretty sure this incident kept my parents together for another two years - oh glory be for that! This was my mother’s chance to really be the martyr she had always dreamt of being - her moment in the sun. Managing his salt intake was a burden only she could bear. No more smoking! Finally, vindication for years of bitching about how those things were killing him. And no more drinking, no sir! No more of that if we were going to pull him through. My father actually played along for about six months, until the full trauma of the acute myocardial infarction and hospital-stay-detox faded. Drunks have very short memories and it was no different for my father. He was up and smoking and drinking and eating heavily salted meat in no time, by golly! My mother was either in love, desperate or just plain stupid. Even I knew at five years old this man’s spots were permanent. But she just wouldn’t give up. I can almost hear her saying it wouldn’t be Christian to do so. “I’m praying. The Lord will help us through.”
I hated waiting for the Lord. Even though I doubted His existence since I could form a sentence, I had to admit He does work in mysterious ways. Amen.
Those magical two years came and went. More weekend binges; lectures about my fate due to the fact I didn’t practice my piano; enough “What are you going to do with your life”s to fill an aluminum backyard pool. Then one day I unceremoniously learned quite by accident from the metal shop teacher at my middle school that my father was dating Mr. Johnston's sister. I went to his room to buy pencils because he sold them .05 cheaper than the school store. Boy did I get my money’s worth that day. “That’s odd, he’s still married to my mother,” I blankly stated as Mr. Johnston stood there in horror to be sure.
I was older then - moodier. At ten I don’t think I would have given a shit, but the dramatic twelve year old felt like she’d been punched in the gut. I turned and as if on a conveyor belt moved out into the hallway - a bustling freeway of pubescence and Drakkar Noir in the moments before the first bell rang. I was taller than everyone at that age; as tall as I am now. I could see just above everyone’s head, clearance enough to target my destination: the office. I wanted to go home. I wanted to tell my mother. It was urgent. A Napoleon Dynamitesque response to the office lady’s inquiry as to why I wanted to call my mom: “I don’t feel very good.”
My father moved out shortly thereafter. This is what it finally took. Not the drunken tirades about “how things were going to change around here;” not the bruises on my mother’s arms; not the bed wetting; not the unannounced returns in the middle-of-the-night that resulted in him bashing in the garage door with his car. Nope. My mother was up for all of that. But she would not share her man. I just laughed a little as I typed that. He certainly was a catch.
He only had eight years of his life left to live after that. He was slated for a massive stroke when I was nineteen, he fifty-eight. I was working the lunch shift at a local seafood restaurant when I got word. My sister showed up after my boss acted all mysterious as he pulled me off the floor just as the lunch crowd shuffled in, but he refused to give me details. I understand; who wants to tell someone their dad was found dead in his bed? Not in a restaurant assistant manager’s job description. I met Beth, my sister, on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant and she told me what had happened; stroke in his sleep; he was gone. We were to meet at mother’s duplex. I remember her searching my face for a reaction. There was a garage sale sign on the telephone pole directly behind my sister. I didn’t cry. I walked to my car and drove North toward my mother’s place, passing my dad’s apartment on the way. I couldn’t help myself; I had to pull in and knock on his door. It just didn’t seem real. How could this guy die when three wars had been previously unsuccessful? And why now? I had just broken the shackles of the Mormon church and was actually coming to a place where I could forgive the son-of-a-bitch for being such a son-of-a-bitch. I was learning with relief coupled with dis-ease that I was my father’s child.
I knocked on the door; I put my ear up to the cool metal surface - listening. I rang the doorbell. Hearing its sound inside his apartment made me feel like I was doing something wrong, like posing for a picture with my hand on the virgin Mary’s breast. I felt I was being irreverent. I ran back to my car, startled, but still no real emotion. Just sweat beading up between my own breasts and rolling down my belly making me tickle and wipe it away.
I beat my mom and my sister home. I was sitting calmly on my mother’s couch as she burst into the room and into tears bawling, “I can’t believe he’s dead!” Bravo! The show must go on! I did tell you these two were divorced for eight years, right? My mother’s arms flailing as she sobbed elicited no emotion in me whatsoever. What in the hell was she crying about? This man had made our lives miserable. Miserable. And as far as I saw things, this crazy woman allowed it. She was his accomplice. But then again, this was a spotlight moment for my mother. Her swan song. Might as well let her have it because I couldn’t have cared less. How was I to know of the performance she had booked for his funeral?
This is what shot through my mind as I lay on my kitchen floor clutching my chest, wondering if I were dying. Realizing, like my father, I really have no one. Cliche, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
My dad had a heart attack, a big one, when I was about 10 years old. I was at ballet/tap class, my mother looking on, when a phone call came in to the studio - mind you, this was before mobile phones. My mother took the call and turned pale; I could see through the glass that separated the dancers from their onlookers. I imagine a ‘normal’ mom would try to keep the emotion to a minimum as not to frighten the children, but subtlety was not in my mother’s playbook. She looked at these moments as her time in the spotlight, her moment to shine. She hung up the phone, cupped her hand over her mouth and half staggered into the studio, “Your father had a heart attack!” She broke into sobs more for herself than for my dad or for me for that matter.
Heart attack? What did that mean? Was he dead? Was that him on the phone? Do people always die from those? It may sound sinister to say, but if he were dead, it would be a prescription for my chronic despair. So I calmly watched the show: my mother throwing herself into Teacher Carole’s arms, going on about how my dad’s drinking and smoking had finally caught up to him and how she just knew this was going to happen sooner or later. On and on it went. I was a smart girl; I figured my lesson was over and we would be heading out as soon as my mother felt sufficiently recognized for her performance. I packed my things.
My mother finally remembered that the heart attack victim’s daughter was standing there in a black unitard and a red satin wrap around skirt. I already had my street shoes on. “Oh sweetheart! Your father!”
Oh yes. My father.
What did he expect? What did any of us expect? He was a stressed out 25 year veteran of the Air Force. He smoked two to three packs of Lucky Strike Straights a day - Camel Straights in a pinch; who knows how much he drank? He was pretty good at keeping that a secret. He’d been in and out of rehab centers, saved by the elders of the Mormon church a dozen and a half times, and had a nasty case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Well, we didn’t know that’s what it was called until years later. My mother would roll her eyes and smirk whenever he checked the faucet 50 times. “It’s off, David!” she would spit sarcastically. We all got a kick out of watching him walk back and forth in and out of a room before he vacated it - turning the light on and off with each exit and re-entry. Then there was the sock thing. He would shake his socks out 20-30 times before he put them on. Then after he got them half-way on, he’d shake them out a couple dozen more times before he’d finally commit to socking up entirely. He told me once he found a scorpion in his sock when he served in Saudi Arabia during the Korean War. What the fuck was he doing in Saudi Arabia if the war was in Korea? To me, Saudi Arabia looked like a huge boot for someone with elephantiasis and was no where near Korea. I wasn’t yet old enough to be cynical about oil and royal families. So what did I know...
I know that as we sped home to figure out what had happened to my father, I secretly hoped he was dead. These were private thoughts so I didn’t feel at all horrible for having them. This was the man I fantasized about “accidently” chopping his head off with the paper cutter in my fourth grade open house. He made our lives unpredictable and wholly wretched. Oh, he had his moments. Yes, he did have the capacity to be charming, but he doled those memories out like golden tickets. As I got older and older, his delightful moments of frivolity and wit no longer overshadowed the months of cruelty and malice. I thought how much happier we would all be to be free of creeping around his laundry list of unwritten, ever-changing rules if he were finally gone. Who knew what was going to set him off? Leaving shoes in the living room warranted an hour lecture about “What I was going to do with my life.” Jesus. I was supposed to miss this man? They’re fucking shoes.
He made my mother’s life agony too. All I can say is she liked it in some twisted awful way. And now, to look at her in the driver’s seat - sobbing, mascara running down her cheeks, hardly able to make sense as she lamented her fate was fully pathetic. The thing was, it really wasn’t about my dad; it was about her suffering. My mother needed her undeserved torment to justify her existence. If my dad died, she would lose her ever plenished larder of anguish and self-loathing. It could take her quite a while to find someone as vile as he who would put up with her self-righteous bullshit as long as he had. I guess I could understand why she was so upset. My father would be difficult to replace.
The sight of my father’s car in the driveway elicited more weeping from my mother. I guess she had been told the ambulance came to the house, so I don’t know what the big surprise was. Sitting in the driveway, there was a long moment before either of us exited the car. I didn’t know about my mother - she grew up in the South - but this was new territory for me. Entering the house was surreal. I would experience this same feeling eight years later when he finally stroked out in his one bedroom apartment: the feeling that he was still there even though I knew he wasn’t. My mother and I actually tip-toed into the house, as if we were going to catch him in the throes of clutching his chest and groping for the phone to dial 9-1-1; an encore matinee for close family of the actor only. But he wasn’t there. We knew that. Just a towel in the middle of the kitchen floor, sopping wet. Later we would learn it was drenched with his sweat. I guess heart attacks do that.
I’m pretty sure this incident kept my parents together for another two years - oh glory be for that! This was my mother’s chance to really be the martyr she had always dreamt of being - her moment in the sun. Managing his salt intake was a burden only she could bear. No more smoking! Finally, vindication for years of bitching about how those things were killing him. And no more drinking, no sir! No more of that if we were going to pull him through. My father actually played along for about six months, until the full trauma of the acute myocardial infarction and hospital-stay-detox faded. Drunks have very short memories and it was no different for my father. He was up and smoking and drinking and eating heavily salted meat in no time, by golly! My mother was either in love, desperate or just plain stupid. Even I knew at five years old this man’s spots were permanent. But she just wouldn’t give up. I can almost hear her saying it wouldn’t be Christian to do so. “I’m praying. The Lord will help us through.”
I hated waiting for the Lord. Even though I doubted His existence since I could form a sentence, I had to admit He does work in mysterious ways. Amen.
Those magical two years came and went. More weekend binges; lectures about my fate due to the fact I didn’t practice my piano; enough “What are you going to do with your life”s to fill an aluminum backyard pool. Then one day I unceremoniously learned quite by accident from the metal shop teacher at my middle school that my father was dating Mr. Johnston's sister. I went to his room to buy pencils because he sold them .05 cheaper than the school store. Boy did I get my money’s worth that day. “That’s odd, he’s still married to my mother,” I blankly stated as Mr. Johnston stood there in horror to be sure.
I was older then - moodier. At ten I don’t think I would have given a shit, but the dramatic twelve year old felt like she’d been punched in the gut. I turned and as if on a conveyor belt moved out into the hallway - a bustling freeway of pubescence and Drakkar Noir in the moments before the first bell rang. I was taller than everyone at that age; as tall as I am now. I could see just above everyone’s head, clearance enough to target my destination: the office. I wanted to go home. I wanted to tell my mother. It was urgent. A Napoleon Dynamitesque response to the office lady’s inquiry as to why I wanted to call my mom: “I don’t feel very good.”
My father moved out shortly thereafter. This is what it finally took. Not the drunken tirades about “how things were going to change around here;” not the bruises on my mother’s arms; not the bed wetting; not the unannounced returns in the middle-of-the-night that resulted in him bashing in the garage door with his car. Nope. My mother was up for all of that. But she would not share her man. I just laughed a little as I typed that. He certainly was a catch.
He only had eight years of his life left to live after that. He was slated for a massive stroke when I was nineteen, he fifty-eight. I was working the lunch shift at a local seafood restaurant when I got word. My sister showed up after my boss acted all mysterious as he pulled me off the floor just as the lunch crowd shuffled in, but he refused to give me details. I understand; who wants to tell someone their dad was found dead in his bed? Not in a restaurant assistant manager’s job description. I met Beth, my sister, on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant and she told me what had happened; stroke in his sleep; he was gone. We were to meet at mother’s duplex. I remember her searching my face for a reaction. There was a garage sale sign on the telephone pole directly behind my sister. I didn’t cry. I walked to my car and drove North toward my mother’s place, passing my dad’s apartment on the way. I couldn’t help myself; I had to pull in and knock on his door. It just didn’t seem real. How could this guy die when three wars had been previously unsuccessful? And why now? I had just broken the shackles of the Mormon church and was actually coming to a place where I could forgive the son-of-a-bitch for being such a son-of-a-bitch. I was learning with relief coupled with dis-ease that I was my father’s child.
I knocked on the door; I put my ear up to the cool metal surface - listening. I rang the doorbell. Hearing its sound inside his apartment made me feel like I was doing something wrong, like posing for a picture with my hand on the virgin Mary’s breast. I felt I was being irreverent. I ran back to my car, startled, but still no real emotion. Just sweat beading up between my own breasts and rolling down my belly making me tickle and wipe it away.
I beat my mom and my sister home. I was sitting calmly on my mother’s couch as she burst into the room and into tears bawling, “I can’t believe he’s dead!” Bravo! The show must go on! I did tell you these two were divorced for eight years, right? My mother’s arms flailing as she sobbed elicited no emotion in me whatsoever. What in the hell was she crying about? This man had made our lives miserable. Miserable. And as far as I saw things, this crazy woman allowed it. She was his accomplice. But then again, this was a spotlight moment for my mother. Her swan song. Might as well let her have it because I couldn’t have cared less. How was I to know of the performance she had booked for his funeral?
This is what shot through my mind as I lay on my kitchen floor clutching my chest, wondering if I were dying. Realizing, like my father, I really have no one. Cliche, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
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