22 December 2006

If I hang them, he will come.

My dad, that is.

I'm realizing that my obsession with christmas trappings is generational, that my dad actually planted this particular seed. I think that when one grows up in poverty and is keen enough to be aware of it but too young or small to relieve it, even just a bit, that one is forced to find pleasure in the mundane, strange or temporary.

I, for instance, carry to this day a fascination with extreme violence and gore, with horror and terror and supernaturalism; I might clarify by saying that when I was younger, I grew to believe that extreme poverty, genocide, birth defects, Arbussian imagery and general human suffering that was worse than my own negated my personal qualifications of suffering and I could feel better about my circumstances by immersing myself in the facts and images of others'. In adulthood, just before my son was born, I was implored by a friend to stop qualifying my own pain and suffering with expressions like, "well, at least I'm not as bad off as ---," that my experiences were valid and painful and sometimes horrific, even, that they needn't be trumped by the worseness of others'. So I do my best to never utter, "at least I have my health," because I really don't, not entirely. Part of my numbness over the years to "political incorrectness," which I will gladly address at a later time, has come from my insanely high threshhold for images, both literary and visual, of human suffering -- I lost my compassion at some point and came to view a good deal of what compelled me as clinical.

My father loved shock, as well, but took his in the form of vinyl comedy: Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Cheech & Chong and later, Robin Williams in their raw, profane, politically and societally challenging and, for the times, teeteringly unlawful in their confessions and assertations. He would invite a friend over where they would gather around the table, smoke and drink and listen to records; I was never asked to leave the room nor was I shielded from anything coming out of that record player: I grew up in profanity, I was born into a veil of subjective truth that I would later mostly embrace as my own, with some alterations here and there. If one were to listen to an early Richard Pryor recording, for instance, one could call his [comedic, yet not terribly funny in truth] statements subjectively truthful but one would know in one's heart that the truth were spoken, that this man killed himself (he did kill himself, make no mistake: it just took him a long-ass time to die) on a mission to deliver truth with his brutal and painful and painfully funny tangents of fact and sadness. My father, I believe, hoped that he would succeed; I believe, because I live in this world and see the social construct and it's perpetual stagnancy, that he was only marginally successful. I live in this world, I see how it is. I wish we had better messengers...no, wait, I wish we had better recipients, ones who don't qualify, sigh and dispose before getting back to life and privelege.

Wish in one hand, shit in the other: See which one fills up first.

Aside from this tangent (which is an aside from its original intent): My friend Rachel and I agree that societal objection to profanity is compulsive and ever-changing; if one were to survey a random cross-section of population, one would find a wide range of answers to the question, "why do you object to profanity?" Most people would claim that they were raised to know that certain words are inappropriate, whether this knowledge came from a parent or a teacher or a member of the clergy; no one really understands etimology or its sources or its constantly shifting laws, if you will, they only don't do what they're told. Or they do it and giggle, or apologize, or shield their speech from children -- no one speaks profanely in front of children and folks are always apologizing for "cursing" in front of my son and to them I say: I couldn't fucking care less. This is the way adults talk.

Whew. Okay, so my dad loved Christmas lights, particularly plain white ones with a bit of color thrown in and if there were those bubble lights, the kind that were as big as a pinky finger, filled with a mysterious liquid that boiled and bubbled and looked really cool but could potentially burn down a large rancher -- all the better! People must have thought we were nuts, pulling up in front of their homes and parking just to get a good look at their trees displayed in their front windows...this was decades before people really went crazy decorating the outside of the house: A tree, a simple wreath on the door and an electric candle in every window was pretty standard. Dad had one rule, though, about which he was particularly adamant and a bit, um, angry, in retrospect: No blue lights.

I understand now that blue lights frequently represent a Jewish home, that blue is the color of Chanukah but I honestly don't know that my dad knew this -- I choose to believe that he really didn't like blue lights, period. I don't recall my dad ever saying anything racist or anti-Semetic (which doesn't mean that it didn't happen, it just means that I didn't hear it -- the man was far from perfect) but those blue lights could trigger chain smoking and a palpable mood change in the car that would send us right home to look at our own tree that had thankfully not burned down while we were out stalking the neighborhood.

So I'm at T*rg*t yesterday, holding a box of those icicle lights in my hand and they've got multi-colored ones and blue ones and I'm thinking, "if I hang up these blue lights, maybe he'll bang on the door and scream at me to take them down." I put them in the cart, got to the checkout, then mis-shelved my fantasy with the Goldfish crackers and went home to light my own, red-and-white bulbed tree. Hey, there's still 48 hours left to piss off the old man.

Later Day, 20 December 2006

Why I Do What I Do...

...when it comes to this holiday, this birth of Christ, for crying out loud, this event that is not only erroneously dated but, in accordance with my beliefs is a fairy tale. I mean no disrespect, honestly, I just want to get that out of the way before I start getting hypocritical, if only with the best of intentions and for the purposes of reinvention.

In a nutshell, I had a shitty childhood. I go on and on here, detailing and documenting and reliving for therapeutic purposes so that I might remember properly and consequently heal from the damage I've accrued, so that I might unlearn all the things that were taught and have made me compulsive in my behavior and thinking and just plain being...I've tried going to therapy, I've paid people to listen to me and I must admit that the feedback of parental-type strangers (even when they're close to my age: at almost 36, I am emotionally about 14) is only guilt-making and money-sucking and inconvenient, so I give up. This is how I'm going to make it better, by remembering and reinventing, not by feeding the so-called mental health system and becoming another case study. My doctor, the one who gives me the drugs that I know I need, takes no notes and charges no money and believes what I tell him. Good enough.

Anyway, about this christmas thing: I dig it. I dig lights and songs about snow and reindeer, I dig going out with my family and picking out a tree, I dig being in charge of its decoration and lighting and being covered with sap and the needles that get stuck in my socks, I dig smelly candles and Heavenly Hams and baking cookies and opening presents and getting all kid-like when it comes to giving-giving-giving, because the gifts I gave when I was growing up I've forgotten or got thrown out the sliding-glass door onto the deck in one of my mother's fits of steroidal anger.

So we have a tree, a real tree, a Douglas fir this year that sheds too much and smells too little but is still real, something that we didn't have growing up on account of my mother's dubious allergy to evergreens. I am in charge of stringing the lights: Three strands of plain white lights, followed by two strands of small red lights, all tangled up and waiting for the middle of January when I can muster the strength and will to take them down. On top of these lights goes an assortment of strange German ornaments that my mother insisted I take (or they would meet their fate at the city dump), ornaments that Brian and I have collected over the past five years and my favorite collection of frosted glass vegetables: a clove of garlic, a red pepper, a tomato, an eggplant and a pickle. There was a beautiful mushroom that was broken last year, there is a heavy wooden acorn and a featherweight glass one, there is a six-pack of beer and a mug of beer and if they made a bottle of vodka I'd hang that one up, too. Fergus is in charge of the bottom third of the tree where the kid's ornaments hang: the Cat in the Hat, strange plush snowmen, a Pillsbury doughboy, some hammered tin Santas and snowmen and various detrital (read: disposable) trinkets that can die with no remorse. There is a patchwork velvet skirt and there are three stockings, each filled only partway with random toys and candies but which are secretly my favorite part of the day.

So there was the violent disposal of gifts well-intended to taint the memory of something meant to be joyful, there was the inevitable disappointment that we got exactly what we asked for, that there were no surprises like our parents were paying attention to us and understood us and got us something just right but totally unexpected, and there was the inevitable inappropriateness of one specific gift that we got every year: Underwear. PS would always claim responsibility for this gift, with great pride; "I picked these out," he would say; we would smile awkwardly and quickly put the lid back on while avoiding eye contact and grasping for the next box. That was it, but it was enough; then there was the year that I understood that things were out of hand, so to speak: Thongs.

I have an ass that eats underwear, so thongs were a great invention for me because since it winds up there anyway, I figure why not put a piece of floss there to begin with instead of waiting for a bolt of flannel (or so it felt like) to creep up there, subjecting me to a day of extraction and ass picking? I discussed this with my mother (not considering that she and PS would make this a project) and since this was yet to be a mainstream item (1986: Thongs were available to whores. Period.) it required a bit of investigation on her [their] part, calling Victoria's Secret and Frederick's of Hollywood and requesting catalogues, but she [they] were finally successful and thus was born my most embarrassing christmas morning ever, the one that would burn me first but would burn me again and again in memory and would be joined, eventually, by other revelations and suggestions and inappropriate remarks that would finally sever my relationship with PS forever.

"Try them on -- I want to see what these things look like on you."

So I did. I tried them on, pulling them on under my flannel nightgown, then hiking up my nightgown in front of my mother, my sister, my stepsisters and PS, who implored me to "turn around," declared them "sexy" and "a perfect fit" and I don't recall feeling embarrassed or understanding, one bit, the impropriety of the incident -- when one grows up in a house of events like that, of continual sexual commentary, of a numbing and consequent erosion of all sexual innocence and precociousness, one stops trying to see over the wall being constructed between oneself and normal, virginal peer behavior and experiences. I was less than 16 on that christmas, but I'd unfortunately been changed dramatically years before, which is why it is only in retrospect that I can see the fucked-upness of that particular incident.

This year, and for all the years to come, there will be no modeling of undergarments in this house, sexuality will be protected and my children will grow up remembering happiness, gratitude, cookies, smelly candles and prickly needles in their socks.

No one will be hiking up anything over here this year or any other year.

Early, 20 December 2006

I am a scientist, I seek to understand me.

I never did my homework. Ever. I remember having a project due, one of those poster-boards-with-glue-sticked-images-and-thought-bubbles kind of things, and for some odd reason I chose Henry Ford as the subject; I believe there was to be an essay accompanying the poster and the night before I stared blankly at the stiff red paper, my markers and the carpet for I'd accrued no images and, additionally, no information about Henry Ford himself. I'm not even embarrassed to say that I simply made up that he'd invented the automobile, made up the year that he did so and pieced together a few random images cut from our dusty collection of Funk & Wagnell encyclopedias purchased with stamps from the Pantry Pride twelve years previously. Just cut them right out of the encyclopedia, I did, and I didn't even bother to read the text -- I simply scanned it and plagiarized some blurbs that I thought sounded good together, wrote a half-assed essay and called it a night.

I didn't even make it past third period before I was called to the guidance office where Dr. Geuder had the pile of stiff red bullshit sitting on his desk and his hand on the phone. The best part of the day was my mother saying, "well, Henry Ford did invent the automobile, so it's not all wrong, right?" but rest assurred that I still got a beating, still got screamed at and punished not with grounding or withholding of stuff, per se, but with the silent treatment from my mother and an occasional, "You have no idea how much you embarrass me," which would have been as painful on its own without the accompanying physical abuse.

At school, I relished lunch and recess more than the average person because it was when I could sit with Harry and talk about music and Ingmar Bergman films, with which I would become increasingly familiar over the course of our relationship. Incidentally, our relationship was long and strange: We started out as friends, but not surprisingly Harry was removed from public education after middle school and placed in an all-male, Catholic high school which would separate us for a good year (an eternity in adolescence) before I yearned for his company again and contacted him; we began a romantic relationship that would be on and off for approximately four years before separating permanently after high school. During our on-time, we would obsess over REM lyrics (which were indecipherable on a tape deck), drive around in his powder blue Volkswagen Rabbit -- diesel, naturally -- blaring the Replacements, fall in love with bands like the Hoodoo Gurus and Jesus & Mary Chain and in and out of love with each other.

Harry, like my husband now, suffered greatly my unfortunate-but-inherited tendency to commitment phobia; unlike now, I would break up with him, quarterly, in a fit of stifling emotional claustrophobia and routinely chip away at his psyche and trust of me and simultaneously pushing him further to the fringes. During these breaks, I would attempt popularity with the so-called In Crowd, the crowd with whom Same Age was affiliated and although I don't recall any direct rejection I do know that these were not my people. I only ever lasted a few weeks before running back to Harry and being mysteriously accepted without question. Like my husband now, Harry now exists as the only other man from whom I experienced unconditional love and unfailing support, regardless of my emotional instability.

Oddly, my mother and PS loved him as much as I did, in a way that they never loved anyone else I brought home (except my husband, of course); my mother loved that he had a voracious appetite and would eat seconds or thirds of anything put on the table and PS loved that he would enthusiastically eat whatever culinary experiment [disaster] he was currently testing. I admit to contributing to these gastrocities: Being a teenage Europhile, I subscribed to Elle magazine and although it was primarily devoted to fashion, each month -- and they may still do this, I haven't seen a copy in years -- would feature two recipes, presumably to encourage creative entertainment in the realm of East Village dinner parties but their influences were farther reaching and thus was born Chicken and Apples. Probably German in its inception, this dish was modified by PS to accomodate our '80s dietary healthfulness of boneless, skinless and flavorless white breast of chicken; the cream sauce that was supposed to be so decadent with its creme fraiche and nutmeg was altered with half-n-half and cinnamon and I know that if it were made correctly, this is something that I would prepare now and eat with abandon, all by myself, because my husband wouldn't touch it...Harry, though, ate it over Minute Rice with great enthusiasm and verbally praised its uniqueness without ever complaining, although I know it was terrible and on par with most kitchen experiments inflicted upon us by PS.

If Harry came for dinner tonight (with whom I assume is a fabulous partner that doesn't chip away at his soul on a regular basis) I would properly make him this dish, with fatty dark meat chicken, creme fraiche and nutmeg and I would serve egg noodles, not Minute Rice, and I'd spare no expense in the beverage department...Brian will probably have to eat pizza.

5 December 2006

Not that Notebook...

There were minor signs, smaller indications that things might be unstable in our home -- although my maturity at 13, great as it was, wasn't honed enough to recognize it so broadly -- that should have signalled an adult in my general vicinity that rescue would have been in order.

When I was in middle school, I began to falter; I'd been advanced a grade, from 4th to 5th, only to have my mother (again: No Expert On Nothing) decide at the end of that first 5th-grade year that I would not advance to 6th but stay and repeat the 5th: I was not mature enough to handle the social climate of middle school. During my second 5th grade year, I recall wondering if the 6th graders down the street got to watch the hostages freed from Iran in January of 1981 from their classrooms or if there might have been an actual assembly, complete with explanations of "why," which weren't given to 5th graders, which I was not in my head or my heart. Just a month previously, I'd found myself unexpectedly affected by the death of John Lennon; not having been a huge Beatles fan (nor do I come from a "Beatles family," if you will) and knowing little or nothing about the man, I was particularly struck by the international sorrow resonating from every television and radio I passed for at least a month, at which time the event was overshadowed by the Reagan inauguration and the consequent release of the 52 remaining hostages. It was during this two-month period that I became socially conscious and understood that my insular existence was, in fact, just that.

So, middle school: I couldn't have cared less about my studies, I was in and out of the guidance office so many times a month that I think the guy started rolling his eyes when I'd walk in the room. As I stated before, I would beg him not to call my mother; I would cry and recall for him the beatings I'd gotten in the previous days and weeks, at the time mostly related to schoolwork but he'd just sigh and pick up the phone. Whether he thought I was lying, whether he just didn't care, I remember also feeling marginalized for the first time: Here I was, a poor girl living in an upper-middle class town that offerred charity Section-8 to keep up appearances but simply let us live there -- as we were. The charity ran out with the real estate: Nobody actually cared, which seems melodramatic in statement but was obviously the true case as I never saw a social worker, I was never given an empathetic shoulder or ear, I was merely given a notebook that I was to have signed by my teachers at the end of each class, stating that I'd completed that days' assignments -- the notebook remained empty, I kept hanging out in the guidance office, and the beatings continued.

The only other person I knew with a notebook was Harry; he was full of anger, wore his hair in a blonde buzz cut and came from an educated, European-style family where bathing was apparently optional because I remember him smelling, um, ripe a good deal of the time...his parents were older -- like, in their 60s older -- and he was a much-younger-than-his-siblings accident that was left frequently unattended by a mother who loved him but who had clearly not planned to raise another child through retirement. As a result, he was much different than the rest of the nuclear, cookie-cutter suitors that hormonally present themselves around 13: He wore the same Combat Rock t-shirt at least three times a week, he wrote Springsteen lyrics all over his blue canvas binder, his name was Harry, for crying out loud (think: All Jason, all the time, 1982ish), and he had a notebook that was as blank and pure as my own.