Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  In spite of all that, the island was lovely, as untainted and lush and picturesque as a collective billion dollars could make it. My grandparents’ house was built on two acres of the most overcultivated land this side of England. The house faced west over the Intracoastal Waterway with a view of spectacular sunsets that became positively trippy after a couple of Juan’s famous daiquiris. Everywhere orchids cascaded from the trees, and near the pool an aviary housed my grandmother’s hyacinth macaws and leadbeater cockatoos. (They tried flamingos one year, but they kept flying away.) The house was large and vaguely tropical, with lots of French doors and louvered windows. There was a courtyard on the west side, with a tree topiaried to look like a giant aspirin tablet, and a pool and guesthouse on the east. The lawn that ran down to the Intracoastal had towering, root-strung mangrove trees that made my macabre heart go pit-a-pat when I saw them in the moonlight.

  Mr. Opie, the caretaker, picked me up from the West Palm Beach airport in my grandfather’s 6.3, which was surprisingly intact. Mr. Opie was eighty-nine, and a dwarf, which made him more suited to piloting a roller skate. He had to drive with the front seat all the way forward and extenders on the pedals. Mr. Opie never stopped talking. He lived in a cottage on the property with his four-hundred-pound wife, several macaws, and an organ, which husband and wife both loved to play, often in the middle of the night. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who belonged to the tiny shadow lurking in the potted gardenias and kumquat bushes whenever anyone went skinny-dipping in the pool at night.

  Dan Rather was hosting the cocktail hour when I arrived, and I expressed gratitude for it as, gin and tonic in hand, I surveyed the situation in the light of the CBS Evening News. My grandmother was sitting in a bright yellow armchair. She was dressed in a hostess skirt that mimicked the Matisse cutouts on the walls, and her arm was in a sling fashioned from a matching scarf. She had recently taken one of her late night spills during a rendezvous with a bottle of grenadine in the pantry. An algae-colored bruise was yellowing over her left temple, and she had made an attempt to camouflage it with a heavy dusting of powder. Her head was coiffed, but it was lolling a bit as she munched on Finn Crisps and Brie that could have been riper. Poodle A was alternately clawing its way up and then slipping off her lap; Poodle B lay curled like a fossil at her feet.

  My grandfather, who had recently suffered another stroke, was seated an arm’s length away, on a large pillow in his Harvard “University” chair. He was dressed in adult diapers and a pair of blue Turnbull and Asser pajamas.

  Jesus, I thought, has the cypress paneling always been that screaming-loud turquoise? And what’s with all the Matisse paper collages? There must have been a dozen of them struggling for exhibition space amid the jumble of aeronautic prints and autographed headshots of Gemini and Apollo mission astronauts. Potted orchids arced from every horizontal surface, lending the place an air of inconceivable sexuality.

  “Will you be in for lunch, dearie?” my grandmother asked.

  “Uh, sure,” I answered automatically.

  “And will you be in for dinner?”

  “I don’t know yet, Gaga, could I let you know in the morning?”

  “Yes, of course. Just let me know if you’ll be in for lunch, dearie.”

  “Yes, I will be. I said I’d be in for lunch, and that I would let you know about dinner.”

  “Right-o, then it will be the four of us for dinner.”

  “Phoo-ey,” my grandfather corrected.

  But his wife had turned her attention back to the television. “She died of what? What’s this amahexia? Why would that poor thing starve herself?”

  To banish the television image of an emaciated fashion model, my grandmother helped herself to some more cheese from the hors d’oeuvres tray. In the process she dropped the gooey bamboo-handled knife, and the dead poodle shot after it like the tongue of a frog.

  “Anorexia nervosa,” I said. “It’s an eating disorder where you think you’re fat when you’re not.”

  “Phooey!” my grandfather scoffed, and doused himself with Wild Turkey as he tried to get the glass to his lips.

  More often than not now, dinner was served on trays in front of the television, and tonight was no exception. Juan and Selma brought in the first course, a cream of sorrel soup. My grandfather gave Juan a meaningful stare and pointed at his wineglass. He needed it now, not after the main course was served. Juan dipped his head in recognition and quickly returned with a bottle of Meursault. He poured a half inch into the glass for my grandfather to taste.

  “Phoo-ey!” demanded my grandfather, tapping the top of his wineglass. Juan complied and filled ’er up. My grandfather could hardly grip anything with his half-frozen hand, but he managed to get the glass to his dry lips, and drank it off in one long guzzle before signaling for a refill. Juan complied, and then used the remote to switch to The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.

  My grandmother overshot her mark and spooned green soup down her front. She dabbed at it absently, eyes on the television. She got the next one into her mouth. My grandfather wasn’t faring much better, but at least Juan had taken the usual precaution of tucking a jib-sized napkin in at his throat. I watched him eating and wondered how he could stand having no sense of taste. They say 50 percent of it is from stockpiled memory, which would explain why he didn’t seem affected by his lack of buds, as long as he kept to his favorite diet of haute cuisine and alcohol. A month before, I’d seen his insular cortex light up like Las Vegas when a waiter put a dish of flaming woodcock in front of him.

  The soup bowls were cleared, a second bottle of wine was started, and now Juan approached Madame with a large platter draped in halibut. Oh God. I closed my eyes. Disassembling a large fish is tricky enough when one is sober. After several attempts to pick up the serving utensils, and then a few more to snag some of the fish, she succeeded in getting a piece in the clutches of the fork and spoon. Juan stood unflinchingly, as he had been trained. Whoops—she dropped it. There was another tussle, and my grandmother finally had a sizeable chunk and was half scraping, half lifting it off the platter when, instead of getting the fish onto her plate, she succeeded in depositing it right down—as in all the way down—the considerable depths of her bosom. Smiling, my grandmother replaced the serving fork and spoon carefully on the platter, mission accomplished.

  My grandfather signaled for more wine, and my grandmother began stabbing at her empty plate. I gaped at Juan. A bead of sweat stood out on his imperturbable brow. After a few seconds, he took off for the kitchen and returned with a tea towel. Hands in front, as if he were approaching a wild animal, he attempted to remove the fish with the towel, but only succeeded in driving it further between my grandmother’s sizeable breasts. Juan stood back and for once looked utterly helpless.

  “Delishosh fish,” pronounced my grandmother, and sucked at her empty glass.

  “Phooey!” cried my grandfather.

  “I’ll get the nurse!” I cried back, and bolted for the kitchen. The situation called for a professional.

  I returned with the nurse, a heavily built and heavily mustachioed Florida temp with about as much command of language as her patient. “Well, well, well,” she said in a bass voice. My grandmother rolled her head backwards and beamed at her. The nurse plunged her hand so far down my grandmother’s front she could have wiped her, and scraped out the fish.

  “Phooey! Phooey! Phooey!” Bits of food flew out of my grandfather’s mouth. One of them landed on a nearby sea urchin arrangement. Another struck a poodle in the eye.

  I drained my own glass.

  My grandmother was borne away by the capable arms of the nurse, and my grandfather and I, in our first and last act of unity, watched Dynasty in a dazed silence.

  The next morning was as bright and shiny as a gardening staff and their hoses can make it. When I came over from the guesthouse to get breakfast, the evening’s events had been washed as clean as the grounds and patio. My grandmother crept into the living room, where I wa
s having a cursory look at the obits. She eased herself into a chair next to the sofa, where I was stretched out amid the papers.

  “Good morning,” I said, trying to be cool. “Feeling okay?”

  She managed a rueful smile and handed me an envelope. She had written my name on the front in a very shaky hand. Then she struggled to her feet and made her way out to the pool to go talk to her crazy birds.

  It was hard to read my grandmother’s sorry note because it was as legible as Sanskrit. The gist of it was that she was appalled at her behavior and deeply embarrassed. She promised, swore even, that it would never happen again. She was vowing off drink for good.

  My grandmother had been raised a Christian Scientist. It was ingrained in her to disregard in life whatever she found too distressing to handle. Thus, she maintained that Popsie didn’t smoke despite his two-pack-a-day habit; that her eldest son hadn’t shot himself—it had been an accident; and that her sweet grandsons, young Will and little Edward, never touched even an aspirin, much less pot and hard drugs. Her note to me was a bombshell. I knew she had a problem, and I knew she knew I knew, but to admit it was so bleakly out of character, I wanted to vaporize. What the hell was happening to everyone? My grandfather was in diapers and couldn’t speak, my grandmother was becoming a caricature of a drunk, my mother was getting fat and trying to please me, Will was holed up in an un-winterized cabin in Maine and drinking himself stupid, and Edward was stealing the Percodans and Darvon and Valium from his grandparents’ medicine cabinets and making a fortune selling them at his new school.

  My grandmother stuck to her guns all day, but by evening she couldn’t hold out any longer and was at it again, accepting her six o’clock cocktail from Juan and sneaking from the bottles she kept hidden all over the house. I was out of there by the time she woke up the next morning.

  Checkout Time

  SURPRISINGLY, NO ONE in the family died that year, not that they didn’t try. Will dove headfirst into the empty indoor pool in Maine one night, and it was a big fat wake-up call. As in, time to get sober. At the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, my brother bunked down with the kind of die-hard alcoholics and addicts that only a state with Siberian winters could produce. I drove up for the requisite family confessional-slash-shaming session near the end, where those who were wronged get to publicly voice off at the recovering patient, who is now deemed strong enough to take it. It was the first time I’d been Downeast in the winter, and I really got a feel for why Maine has the highest rate of alcoholism and child pornography in the country. At the hospital, my mother and younger brother and I sat with a bunch of raggle-taggle, very local families, in an increasingly odorous room that had speckled blue industrial carpeting and bulletproof plastic seating lined along its perimeters. In the center of the room a single chair faced a small row of others. Each patient took a turn in it and was confronted by his or her family, who blasted the patient with their declarations of pain. How the guilty ones (now costing the state thousands of dollars to eat four meals a day, sleep in clean sheets, and spend the bulk of their time doing what others merely dreamed of—talking about themselves endlessly to professional listeners) had hurt them with their drug-ery, or thievery, or drunken fits of rage. The stories revealed in that circle, told by people dressed in an assortment of stretchy clothes and lumber jackets, had a harsh, native reality that contrasted sharply with my brother’s entitled misdemeanors. A seventeen-year-old mother told her husband that she could forgive him for not coming home every night, or even for beating her up, but when he got drunk and set fire to their trailer, well that was bad because now they didn’t have any place to sleep. But what really pissed her off was that he had traded the food stamps for drugs and now there was no money to feed the two babies.

  When it was our turn, our nervous little group took our seats across from my brother, who bowed his head and seemed to excitedly await abuse as a monk awaits flagellation. There was an awkward silence, because no one could come even close to respectably matching the previous litanies. After a long interval, during which several of the audience members hawked and spat, I managed to timidly say, “Well I guess it was sort of irresponsible that you left your BMW where it could get stolen, and that you spent the insurance money on cocaine . . . um”—I looked around at the slack jaws of the audience, and, even though I knew I sounded like the worst spoiled princess on the planet, I forged ahead anyway—“and you really scared us when you dove into the indoor pool!” Mouths were dropping. “Yeah. And I can’t believe you slept with your girlfriend in front of the living room fireplace last summer, and that the butler walked in on you doing it.”

  There might have been a round of very sarcastic applause but I couldn’t swear to it.

  The following year Will was at the Johnson Institute, trading Hallmark cards and crying buckets and hugging big black football players and anorexic girls, and I did not go to family weekend; nor did I go to the one at Sierra Tucson. Or was that Hazelden? Maybe that was Edward—Lord knows he has a few treatment programs under his belt too. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Anyway, throughout his long, but ultimately successful, recovery process, Will found God—in the form of an Indian guru with a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation—and married his four-hundred-pound therapist.

  Edward scraped through a series of high schools, at one point living in a foster situation in Boston and, when that didn’t work out, in Marblehead with my mother and the contractor (nightmare), and eventually coming to rest at the apartment on Fifth Avenue and living with our grandparents, where he was pretty much—no, make that absolutely—left to his own devices. Those included an unlocked wine cellar and a readily available supply of heavy-duty prescription drugs.

  Edward had been smoking pot for years, but in New York he was turned on to coke, and then heroin. He claimed he didn’t have a habit because he snorted his drugs instead of mainlining them. His VanderBurden nose was perpetually scarlet and his hair was greasy and he hung out with people much older than he was. He was particularly close to a family that had a house near us in Maine. So close, in fact, that he was sleeping with the chatelaine, a wonderfully effusive and insouciant fifty-something-year-old free spirit who claimed to be a white witch. When I found out about it, it absolutely enraged me, and I felt guilty that I hadn’t been looking out for my very wayward baby brother. It was summer, and I was in Maine, so I marched next door to lambaste the cradle-robbing, pot-dealing sex maniac; but within five minutes, she got me to forget what I was there for. She had me drinking white wine with her (which her adorable husband brought us) and laughing cozily away in her hippie, crystal-strung bedroom that looked out past pine trees and flapping Tibetan prayer flags to the brilliantly blue ocean, and I swear if I had it in me to do it with women, I would have slept with her too. I was glad in a perverse way that my little brother had found someone to mother him, even if it wasn’t the generally accepted notion of mothering. In fact, I was jealous.

  As for the real mother, she got fatter, and more into her Greek coins, and was asked to lecture at Harvard, which she never let us forget.

  Me, I transferred from freezing cold Cornell, to Parsons School for Design in the city. Instead of drunken frat boys everywhere, boys in dresses were now the norm in my classrooms. I graduated, and started looking for a job. What I wanted more than anything was to work at Mad magazine. (CREEPY was long gone.) Flattered by my adulation for Alfred E. Neuman, the editor took pity and put me on the wait list, but it was like trying to get into the River Club; someone had to die first. I gave up and went to work at National Lampoon, though I considered it sloppy seconds. I was given the scarred desk belonging to the previous year’s art department grunt, who bequeathed me her gallon of Duco rubber cement.

  My job basically consisted of gluing copy and photostats of photographs onto Bristol boards, hand-lettering the Foto Funnies and comics, and getting chased around the art director’s desk, which didn’t bother me in the slightest because sexual harassment was fun back then.
>
  All of the articles in the once cool Lampoon dribbled with campy satire. Almost all of them were about sex—sex from a guy’s point of view, that is. The editor, then P. J. O’Rourke, would climb on top of his desk and yell, “I need big tits! Somebody find me some BIG TITS!” I couldn’t figure out if he needed them for personal use, or for business.

  The most important thing I learned at National Lampoon, other than perfect block letter penmanship, was how to snort cocaine. I say important, because the eighties were only a sniff away. On Friday afternoons someone would go around the various departments collecting money in a hat. At five we’d assemble in the editor’s office to drink beer and snorkel up the thirty or so chalky white lines laid out on his desk. Then we’d go back to work, wonderfully invigorated. Sometimes we’d use all that energy to pose for stupid pictures. As in no, that’s not really Jon Voight on page fifty-six of the October 1978 issue; it’s me.

  It was fun for a while, but fun for minimum wage gets old fast, and besides, I don’t particularly enjoy drugs.

  It figures I’d end up working in the porn industry.

  At that time it didn’t matter where you got your design experience—Soldier of Fortune, Crochet! magazine, News of the World—only that you got it. A friend of mine was working at a downtown head-shop publication called the Daily Dope, and they needed a design assistant. I gratefully left the boy’s club of soft porn and anatomical jokes, only to discover more of the same at my new job. Except now all the naked, large-breasted women were having real sex, often with aliens.