Roseannearchy

by Roseanne Barr

  Of course, I could never keep my mouth shut or stay out of trouble even then, due to my Tourette’s syndrome. I asked the rabbi why we Jews didn’t accept Jesus as our savior, and that pretty much put a damper on the whole back-to-synagogue experience. The rabbi did not even want to hear the word Jesus, and freaked out, calling my mother in to ask her where I heard such things. (Sometime in the early ’70s, things changed, and a Jewish kid could safely mention the guy’s name around a rabbi and receive an almost intelligent answer in response.)

  Then I asked my Mormon bishop if I could ask him some questions about the Book of Mormon, which, of course, I had read cover to cover more than once. I said, “So, the Native Americans are the new Jews then?” And he told me, “Those were the old Jews of the Old Testament. The saints are now the new Jews, and Salt Lake City is the city of Zion. And here in Zion, all of you ‘Jews’ are ‘gentiles.’” I remember thinking, I am a Jew and a gentile, therefore I am chosen, special, different, and saved!

  I knew that none of the people around me knew God as well as I did. They pretended to believe, which I knew was just another way of lying. I knew that God talked to me and I answered Her, and that She listened to me and answered me back—not in my mind, like a lot of crazies, but right there in front of me in the mirror. She told me that would be the way we would communicate for a while, and it was kosher for me to see myself in Her, as I was made in Her image anyway. She would say to me, “Roseanne, let’s Me and you figure out a way to help this world be a better place.”

  Looking back, I cannot believe how brazen I was as a young girl to actually reply, “Your books tell children to pray, and that You will answer their prayers. But many do pray and you don’t answer their prayers. Now, how can You tell children that You hear their prayers, when You are not lifting a finger to stop the bad things?”

  God answered, “I do not have fingers, Roseanne. I am an idea in people’s heads only! You guys have the power to make good things happen. You must tell kids out there that they have four fingers to help them get things done, and one thumb to help the four fingers do it. None of my other animals were given that special tool—use it!”

  I fell asleep thinking about the good that one person can do. The Lord was my shepherd, and I did not fear death, because I had the magic words. Not the ones every other child I knew said at bedtime—“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take” (ghouls!), but these magic words instead: “Good night, God/Mother.”

  It was She who came up with the idea that I would become a storyteller in my old age. I discussed with Her for decades what that story would say, how we would tell it.

  Chapter 2

  Borderline, Bipolar, Paranoid, Obsessive-Compulsive, Jewish, and Mormon

  I trusted my intuition and my feelings—until I started seeing a headshrinker at age eight because my intense mental labors to save the world included forgetting what time it was and peeing my pants in school a lot. I should never have been forced to mix with gen pop, as I was too “out there.” I had some pretty paralyzing fears, one of which was that something terrible would happen to my parents while they were out on their nightly walk. Singing in my room along with James Brown records (Mr. Brown had replaced Ms. Temple in my fantasies as the Idol that I most wanted to emulate by age eight) was one of the only manageable antidotes to controlling my escalating panic attacks.

  I began to work hard to attempt to re-create his dance steps, his voice, and his soulful attitude, even though I knew I was not a black male Christian, I wanted to be.

  I also found that doing everything five times was an effective way of handling stress. While my parents were getting ready to leave, I would have the compulsion to ask them five times when they would return. That would be exhausting because they would answer “About an hour” once or twice, and around the third time I asked, they would tell me “Never mind” or “Stop asking the same question over and over,” not understanding that I had to do things five times or I would be powerless to prevent the horrific tragedy that could befall all who ignored the Five Rule. My heart would pound in my ears about the fourth time I asked and they refused to answer, so I would open the door as they walked toward the corner and yell it at them again. Sometimes they would say, “We will be right back!” and then I could relax. However, “Get back in there and shut up and close the door!” did not rightly count as one of the five required answers, so I would have to keep asking the question as they rounded the corner and disappeared out of sight.

  If they answered five times, I would meld with James Brown’s records until they returned: I would go to my room, scarf tied around my neck and sunglasses tilted at a jaunty angle, and sing for about ten minutes over the scratchy records. If the five answers had been mined out of the parents, I could thereafter move on to the next step in my fantasy, talking into my hairbrush microphone, as I interviewed myself in the mirror as Johnny Carson, whom I imitated and idolized. I (as Johnny Carson) would ask myself: “Well, Miss Barr” (he always called me that in my fantasies; but in real life, when I was later a guest on his show, he called me “dear”), “tell the folks at home how you learned to sing, dance, tell jokes, and act so damn well, won’t you please?”

  If the Five Rule had not been followed, after a few minutes of the James Brown sing-along, I would end up running downstairs, plugging in the iron, and sitting inside the bathroom with the door locked, holding the iron in front of me for protection from the intruders who had killed my parents and would next come in the house and kill me if I didn’t have a hot iron as a weapon to keep them from doing so. When my parents inevitably returned from their walk, whether I had received five answers or not, it never occurred to me that I was mistaken in any way; I just thought the inevitable had been delayed till another time. I always had morbid fears, as far back as I could remember.

  My fears would paralyze me, and sometimes I would just stand there looking stupid and pee my pants. It was so humiliating.

  When they made me start seeing the school shrink about all the pants-peeing stuff, the shrink said my obsessive fears were probably the guilt I had for always wishing that my parents would get hit by a car or killed on their nightly walks. I said I did not want that to happen at all, and that is what I was so afraid would happen. She told me that Freud said, “Where there is a fear, there is also a wish,” and so I was actually wishing for my parents to be killed! An extra layer of nuts was added to my crazy salad by that goddamn shrink. So, on top of the fear that my parents would be killed, I then had to think that it would be all my fault for fearing/wishing it so! But my parents were never killed by anyone on their nightly walks, thank God! Had they been killed, I would have even more emotional problems than I have as a result of their not being killed on their nightly walk.

  I admit now that the thought of them getting killed appealed to me a tad because I thought that if I were grief-stricken enough, I might be unable to eat anything, and therefore get thin and become a star. I was screwed too tight for my own good. Falling into the deep end was a comfortably familiar act for me.

  Later on, my condition had a name, some obsessive-compulsive disorder Tourette’s–type thing about being stuck in a loop of weird thoughts, like many Jewish people are, especially those born and raised in Utah. I had incredible happiness with the magical thinking, and misery with reality, so I hardly bothered with it at all.

  At one time, as a young mother, I started to think that I could lose weight and subsequently perform in public by combining my eating disorder with my obsession for doing everything five times. By devising and following a very simple formula that I had worked out over several hundred failed attempts at successful dieting, I would diet my way to stardom and happiness this way: I could never cheat, not even once, and I had to walk, dance, exercise for five hours a day. My menu consisted of one German chocolate sweet roll for breakfast, with black coffee, and one scoop of Dairy Queen ice cream on a regular cone
for lunch, and a bowl of lettuce with lemon juice for dinner (five items at five hundred calories). I also smoked five thousand cigarettes a day, but I somehow managed to lose 122 pounds and to keep it off for several years.

  I exchanged my compulsion for overeating for a new compulsion of seeking the attention and admiration of men for being thin. I found that when I was thin, men thought I was witty instead of loud, and adorable instead of a bitch. After losing the weight, I really wanted to get out there and become a famous star. I still believed that I was a good singer and dancer, but it was starting to become apparent to me that the real talent I had was in being funny. If I hadn’t been thin when I first stepped on a comedy stage, all the fame and fortune which allowed me to buy my own nut farm in Hawaii and drive all over it in my fabulous Kawasaki Mule with my little grandsons never would have happened. We couldn’t communicate with turkeys by gobbling over and over, oinking at pigs, meowing at wild cats, harvesting coffee beans, building domes out of macadamia nuts, and growing majestic white pineapple, and believe me, I wouldn’t have missed all that for the world! (Note to Kawasaki: Yes, I would appreciate a new, fabulous Kawasaki Mule when my current fabulous Kawasaki Mule wears out!)

  Chapter 3

  Antisocial or Allergic?

  I used to think I was antisocial, but it turns out that I was just allergic.

  Note to women: Perfume is something you don for your boyfriend to discover as he disrobes you and draws you near. It is a very intimate thing and not to be used as a way to biologically poison an entire area.

  I hate women who wear too much perfume. I think PETA should adopt it as one of their causes. Come to think of it, so should the chemtrail conspiracy folks.

  Many of us have a strong negative reaction to perfume. It causes instant migraine headaches in people who are allergic to it, as I am, along with my two sisters, my daughter, and my grandson. I have developed a bit of an immunity over the years, but anything syrupy, flowery, or with a slight aluminum/metal smell makes my head pound like a drum. When I see a woman who is over age sixty approaching, I steer clear of her, particularly if she’s wearing a matchy-matchy outfit. Invariably, her scent will be too aggressive for my sensitive nasal apparatus. If I see one of these types approaching the elevator I am standing in, I will panic and hold my nose and vacate like the plague is coming at me. I always say something as I depart, too, because I consider it a kind of moral obligation to let these women know that they are making offensive choices. I usually mutter: “Good God, did you have to soak in that cheap cologne to cover up your heinous personal odor or what?” as I leave.

  So much about women infuriates me, but nothing as strongly as the grotesque stinking up of oneself by one’s own goddamned hand at the behest of Madison Avenue’s conspiracy in feminine mind control. Call me crazy, and say I smoke too much medical marijuana and have gone paranoid if you must, but if Madison Avenue can get all these skanky celebs to convince women that covering themselves in stink water makes them sexy and desirable, then they can pretty much control everything that women do and say and think.

  Young girls in cheap shoes and short dresses on dates are terrible offenders as well. I got so mad last night at dinner—a good two tables away from the perfumed predator who was causing my temples to pound at ten yards! Keep your stink within a reasonable radius, for Christ’s sake! I wanted to stand up in the restaurant and approach the girl and throw my glass of water in her face and tell her that she stunk so badly that I was getting ready to faint. Instead, I ordered another glass of ruby port to calm my fraying nerves and developing headache.

  I have nearly attacked many unconscious gay men and overly made-up Jewish women with overly large buttocks balanced on six-inch heels at better stores everywhere who approach me and try to spray fragrance on me when I’m shopping. I have yelled, “I do not want to smell like Britney Spears, okay?” or “Musk scent is taken from the whale’s asshole—wake up, idiot!” or something to that effect when out trying to help our economy by innocently perusing handbags and shoe sales, my shopping passion. If they assault and spray/mark me from the side or behind, I must run to the lav and wash, wash, wash it off, and then run to the nearest bar and drink, drink, drink away the headache (a cure I devised while quite young).

  As a child, I used to immediately see double and get the urge to vomit whenever I smelled my grandmother getting ready for Saturday synagogue. The rest of the time I loved being around her, unperfumed at her home, where she taught me how to cheat at gin rummy, fixed me snacks featuring mayo, and tried to get me hooked on Perry Mason reruns. While she was entranced in Perry Mason, I would gleefully sneak into her bedroom and snoop through all her things. She always had green Doublemint gum in her purse, which she kept in the third drawer of her bureau. I would yell, “Can I get some gum out of your purse?”

  She would yell back, “Vut?” and I would ask again. She would say, “Go ahid, but leaf mine uzzer tings alone in dere.”

  “Okay,” I would yell again.

  “Huddy up and come out heuh, ve ard gittink veady fur da trial now!”

  “Coming!” I would yell again as I stuck four pieces of gum in my mouth and snapped up the purse, covered it back up with the linens, and closed the drawer. I learned early on, while gleefully snooping through her stuff, to avoid her perfumes because as soon as I touched them, I would get a bad headache, and then I would go lie down on the floor of her closet, because it was dark and cool in there, and just ten minutes of that would alleviate the pulsing in my temples.

  Once when lying in her closet recovering from the fragrance, I found homemade wine in a jar next to the box containing my dead grandpa’s old shoes. I began to take little nips of it, and found it to be simply dee-lish. It actually helped with the headaches caused by smelling the fragrances on her vanity! Another few minutes would pass, and then she would yell for me: “Shana!” (This is one of my Hebrew names and what she called me.) Off I would run to hear her explain how Perry Mason really mattered almost as much as the Law of Moses.

  Later, around age eight, when I could finally read, I more closely examined the bottles that she kept on her vanity table for synagogue, turned over on her gloved index finger and then dabbed behind her ears and wrists before grabbing her matching purse and hat. I saw that the stuff was called “toilet water.” I was dumbfounded. I remember thinking, Who in their right mind would dab water from the toilet on themselves after they had just bathed and put on clean clothes? It was just one more thing about the world that made no sense at all! I figured then that dousing yourself with toilet water must be pleasing to God in some way, and the resulting migraine seemed to fit in with the whole “God is wrathful” thing that Rabbi Cardin was fond of pushing weekend after weekend.

  Yom Kippur was actually my favorite Jewish holiday. I liked it, I figure now, because no perfume was worn in synagogue on this most High Holy Day, because no vulgar display of wealth or status was allowed, so that the community could enjoy a day of mourning to the fullest. Rabbi Cardin explained that by getting women to wear signs of wealth and status, Satan was encouraging them to covet their neighbor’s wealth, thereby tempting the Evil Eye. As everybody in the know knows, you do not want to activate the Evil Eye of a bunch of Jewish women if you fear the shame of hell at all! Of course, on all the other days of the year, coveting wealth and tempting the Evil Eye were all but ignored. But on this one day, we could wipe out a year’s worth of bad karma from having done those things, so there was no perfuming and no fucking around at all!

  No one wore perfume to services on Yom Kippur, so it became the most tolerable Jewish holiday. There was no headache, but there was the usual weeping, gnashing of teeth, beating on the breast, and tearing the clothing over your heart kind of holiday celebration of groveling and begging God to stop bothering the Jewish people. All of the holidays were about who killed our people, when and where, and what kind of food goes with each of those massacres. I hated the whole religious kit and caboodle at such a young age, and still
often wonder where the line of demarcation is between suffering from regular mental illness and just being Jewish.

  But, truth be told, they always served hotcakes to break the fast afterward, and no migraine or jealous Jehovah could hope to ever dissuade me from my appreciation and dedication to those! Free pancakes are worth everything to me to this day, and are the final irrefutable proof that there is a God indeed, and that She is just! (The only good part of getting old, by the way, is the half-off offer of pancakes to seniors from the International House of Pancakes.) I see now that as a girl, in many ways, I mistakenly confused God’s doings for my own allergic reactions. Whoa! Sorry about that! Now I realize that God is good and has nothing to do with suffering or with humanity at all in any way. She lives inside of the wind and the trees, especially the cacao tree (chocolate), and doesn’t really feel all that flattered when people insist on tormenting themselves and others to impress Her.

  The Shabbat headaches began to show up daily around the time that my mother started working at the Fort Douglas PX in Salt Lake City. There she would spray every kind of scent in the world on herself on her breaks. She was able to buy many things at a great discount as an employee there, and most of the things she bought were perfume and scarves and lipsticks to wear to work, and some household items to help me keep a clean and proper house as her homemaking protégée, since I was the oldest daughter. Before my mother had to get a job, she just smelled nice like Pine Sol and my dad’s Old Gold unfiltered cigarettes that he smoked sixty of per day.

  When Mama went to work, all hell began to break loose at our house. I had to pick up all the slack, cooking and cleaning and beating Mama’s kids for her, as well as waiting on my dad in her place. My mother accused me of faking the headaches I would get when she came home after work smelling of Tabu/Jungle Gardenia/Evening in Paris to get out of washing the dishes. The nose knows, though, and throughout the entire process of making the conscious connection between migraines, scent allergies, and overly sweetened wine, I have learned to classify people on smell alone. Here is a list I compiled for your reading pleasure: