So now that’s my biggest fear: to be unredeemed because I spent most of my life whoring away my quality time. Like I’ve always worked a plethora of pointless part-time jobs for money because I’m used to thinking that if it were up to my writing income alone, I’d be living in a house that I built myself out of four sticks and a stained tablecloth. Because writing is not what I do for money. Writing is what I do because I’m cursed and can’t help it. There are other things I do for money.
Like the time I was a copy editor for that city magazine. My job was to pasteurize the creativity out of every article that came across my desk so they’d all sound the same by the time they went to print. I was fired because, among other things, the concentration level of my coworkers was lowered by my loud laughter. Then I worked as a managing editor at an art publication, which wouldn’t have been so bad if my boss hadn’t been such a volcanic bitch. She funded the magazine with her father’s money and her own savings culled from her former job selling piece-of-crap Peter Max lithographs out of, I think, the trunk of her car. She used to answer her own phone with three different accents so callers would think they were being threaded through a bevy of receptionists. After six months she fired me because she stopped by the office at ten o’clock one Sunday night and saw that I wasn’t there.
After that I applied for, and was offered, a job as a skycap at the San Diego airport. I regret turning it down. But it’s not the money I miss (skycaps make a ton), I regret my pride. I didn’t want to encounter past enemies or old flames at the airport on their way somewhere exciting, while I, in my belted uniform, lugged their bags. I wish I weren’t so proud. It would make life a lot easier. I could just work my blue-collar job and not long for something better. I could look at the sky and just see the stars, not be begging the heavens for a break.
But as I said before, I am cursed. It runs in the family. My father used to come home drunk and blather to my mother about making it big. “I can do it,” he’d slur. He was gonna open a hot dog joint called the Frank ’n’ Stein, or he was gonna patent the world’s most wondrous key chain design, or he was gonna write a bestseller about being a used-car salesman. “I can,” he’d mumble before passing out in his cigarette-burned La-Z-Boy. “I know,” my mother would answer, and in the morning she’d head to work and he’d nurse his hangover.
I still wonder what that taught me, other than to feel oddly ashamed that I want to be better than I am, that I want to stop being suffocated by my safety nets and finally reach for what I’ve dreamed about. I want to stop fearing there’s some kind of cosmic Carol Merrill about to show me I traded everything for what’s behind curtain number 3, and when the curtain opens years from now, there I’ll be—a failed drunk in a La-Z-Boy lamenting about how I could’ve become a skycap. God, that’s scary, but if that’s what the future holds—me in a La-Z-Boy—then I hope I’m sitting there content with having tried. I just want to have tried. What’s worse, after all, a dream that never comes true or never admitting you dream at all?
Everybody’s Mother
When I was a kid, I thought everybody’s mother made bombs. I thought everybody’s mother left in the morning before the rest of the house was awake, then came home at night with a government badge clipped to their lapel with “Top Security Clearance” printed above their picture. I thought everybody’s mother walked through the door when the day was done, collapsed on a Herculon-upholstered recliner, and smoked Salem menthols with her wig askew while her kids melted down an entire stick of butter to pour over the popcorn they made themselves for dinner. I was nine when I realized my mother was literally the only one like her.
But I didn’t brag about it or anything, even though her job would have carried some major weight on the playground. “My mother has probably killed thousands of people,” I could have boasted, though it probably wouldn’t have been true, because the only thing I remember my mother saying about the weapons she made was how poorly they performed at the missile-testing site, but it’s not like anyone could have proven me wrong. Plus, even a bad weapon—especially a bad bomb—can wreak a lot of havoc.
My mother was always careful to clarify that she didn’t make nuclear bombs, rather she designed conventional defense bombs, trying to drill home the notion that if people were killed with one of her bombs, it was because they deserved it. She never said those very words, but I got the idea it was important to her that people not view her as a mad missile scientist, but rather as a passive one, a just-a-Joe-with-a-job-to-do kind of missile scientist.
She was happiest when she was working on rockets, probably because rockets usually don’t kill people unless by accident. When we moved to Melbourne Beach, Florida, when I was nine, it was so she could work on the last Apollo moon launch. My father was employed then, selling trailers, and our other family car was a massive motor home called the “Amigo.” On the night of the last launch, we drove it to the beach and parked there, waiting with the rest of the citizens in what appeared to be a townwide tailgate party.
The rocket was supposed to take off in the late afternoon, but didn’t until nearly midnight. My mother was not at all surprised. At that time, my older brother, a budding tennis prodigy, had been left behind in California to live with another family in an attempt on my parents’ part to provide him a sense of continuity as he finished high school and, hopefully, earned a full college scholarship. My two sisters and I had yet to show any such promise, and that night we were sleeping in the motor home when my father finally rousted us to view the launch. Until then my parents had been sitting in lawn chairs on the shore the whole time, drinking cans of Budweiser with our neighbors. “This is a historic occasion, aren’t you excited?” a lady asked me, her hooch breath just about cremating my corneas. I recognized her as someone else’s mother, a neighbor who once knocked on our door to complain about my habit of decorating the pointy cactus-like plant in her front yard with wads of used chewing gum. But tonight all was forgiven in this booze-induced benevolence.
Drunk parents were no novelty to me, and so it wasn’t enough to keep me awake. My father did though. “Goddammit!” he hollered. “This is an important goddamn moment and I’ll be goddamned if you worthless goddamn ungrateful brats sleep through it!” Then he flicked each of us in the head with his middle finger, which was heavy as lead, so the effect was like getting hit in the skull with a roll of quarters.
I stared sullenly at the dark horizon. The crowd quieted, and soon a flame flickered far off in the darkness, and from that another flame broke free and rose into the sky like a falling star in reverse, then it disappeared behind clouds. The spectacle lasted perhaps thirty seconds and then it was over, signifying the end of my mother’s foray into designing instruments of discovery rather than destruction. Soon she would have to return to making bombs. That night, however, the crowd around me was still gasping with wonder when I asked to go back to sleep.
My father, angered by his children’s lack of awe, ordered everyone back into the cavernous motor home, threw the lawn chairs in after us, and popped another Budweiser before getting behind the wheel. On the way home, I dozed in the back as the Amigo lurched unsteadily along at high speed. I remember thinking we would be fine if we crashed, because this was a very big motor home, much bigger than the other vehicles on the road. Nothing we hit could hurt us, not even a house. Yes, we were fine. It was everyone else who was in danger.
I suppose it was an expected mind-set for a child whose mother made bombs, but I’m almost ashamed to admit how long I used that kind of reasoning in my life.
As we lurched along, my mother did not seem to mind being lost—not that time anyway. I remember seeing my parents, two lone figures each in a big bucket seat, separated by a massive Naugahyde console. My father must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. “Where am I?” he muttered to himself as my mother sat oblivious beside him.
Years later, it would be the other way around: One morning, as he lay oblivious in bed, she stood in the bathroom and looked in the
mirror, searching for a trace of the woman she had once been. When she was younger, she had wanted to be a beautician but had become a weapons designer instead. She was woefully bad at cosmetology—when she used to practice on my sisters and me, we would always end up looking like open-casket cadavers in a group funeral—whereas she excelled at math, which was hard for her to admit. When it fell to her to earn a living once my father’s aversion to employment became obvious, she reluctantly relied on her un–hoped for talent and went to work for IBM, falling into the job like other mothers fall into cashiering at coffee shops. From there she learned to build computers and then to build bombs for the government.
My mother had been designing missiles for a few decades until that morning when she awoke and could no longer recognize herself. She had started out so long ago with the simple dream of making people beautiful, and here she was, making bombs instead. We were living back in California then, though we moved so often it’s hard to keep track of which house it was. I do remember the lone figure of my father, asleep in their king-sized bed, blind to the lone figure of my forty-six-year-old mother crying in the bathroom over their double vanity. “Where did I go?” she sobbed, her hand flat against the glass. “Where am I?” Watching her, I wanted to tell her I could see her just fine, but even then I knew that was not the answer she needed.
Changing Values
Last week I lucked into a truckload of German Easter eggs. Their value is immeasurable because I use them to bribe Lary into fixing the odyssey of exposed wires and dislodged plaster that passes for my apartment. Normally Lary can’t resist these eggs, because they come with a plastic capsule in the center that contains an intricate toy, proof that Lary is really nothing but a fermented adolescent under all that irritable exterior, but unfortunately for me he’s in hiding lately on account of his stalker. That says a lot about this person, his stalker, because not many people have the power to diminish the value of German Easter eggs in Lary’s eyes.
Even though I personally have never seen Lary’s stalker, I hear accounts from those who have (“She has fake tits as big as Liberty Bells!”), so I believe it when he says she exists. He leaves town for weeks at a time these days, and when he does come home he stays at a friend’s until it’s time to take another job and then he’s gone again. He tells me to “be really careful” when I go feed his cat. Now I figure something’s got to be wrong because the two things Lary truly values are his cat and his solitude, and something is keeping him from both. So I have to commend this stalker’s technique, because Lary’s desire to avoid her is greater than his longing for either his pet or his privacy. When you think about it, it’s a very effective method of exerting power over a person—to find out what they value and devise a way to deprive them of it.
It doesn’t always work. Take my father and his designer shoes, for example. Though he was largely jobless, my father nonetheless would not have been caught without his designer shoes, which he buffed and cared for like two prized Pekingese. They made his stride purposeful, so that when he walked into his favorite bar, his friends would take him for a man of standing. This image of himself became endangered when my mother left us and took her income with her. His attempt to gain some power during the divorce was to threaten to sue for custody of me and my sisters, assuming that—faced with the possible loss of something she really valued—my mother would instantly acquiesce and return home. He was wrong.
“You want the kids? Take them,” she said, forcing my father to acknowledge that he couldn’t. He backed down, and the divorce concluded with my father cutting his children loose and my mother cutting him a check that promised to keep him in modest supply of designer shoes for a few years yet.
Ever since then I’ve marveled at what an effective method of self-protection it is to divest yourself of the things that matter to you. If you can’t control your need to cling to these things, you’ll be controlled by the threat of losing them. Lary put the things he values on hiatus in order to bore his stalker into not bothering him. She’s already moved to another state, and I hear she’s reduced her harassments to intermittent episodes in which she spends the night in a rental car in his driveway. My guess is she’ll soon quit altogether, because Lary’s devaluation of the things he normally holds dear effectively took her weapon away.
My father died soon after the divorce. I attended his funeral with my mother, and as my father lay in state, she noticed immediately that his shoes were ugly and not name brand, so she accused the funeral director of stealing his real pair. My father had been working a new job selling used cars, and his coworkers in attendance insisted those were the shoes he always wore. They said he’d been saving money for a deposit on a bigger apartment, so when his daughters visited they wouldn’t have to sleep on a trundle bed in his living room.
My mother excused herself. The rest of the funeral she spent in the ladies’ lounge, where she might not have sobbed so loudly if she’d known we could hear her through the wall. I think she was remembering that aborted custody battle and how they both had been wrong regarding what the other most valued.
Poisoned Fish
I’d just like to state for the record that I didn’t deliberately try to poison my mother when I was six. God, if you believed my siblings, sometimes you’d think I was Lucifer’s little minion growing up, what with the fact that I had a pack-a-day smoking habit by the time I was twelve and that once, when I was very young, like five, I killed a puppy with a tennis racket, but you have to let me explain this stuff. For example, the cigarette addiction was just a natural extension of my heritage, since both my parents puffed like living chimneys and by the time I was a year old I already had lungs that looked like two used tea bags. I remember once my brother accidentally ate a cigarette ash and spent the rest of the afternoon rubbing his tongue on the carpet under the coffee table to get the taste out of his mouth. That’s just how our house was: so steeped in smoke you could send signals. I didn’t even have to buy my own cigarettes, I just kyped them from the cartons my parents kept strewn about the house. That my parents didn’t notice packs at a time were missing is just testimony to the hugeness of their own habit (I myself quit at thirteen). That they died young should not have been a shock—it was anyway, of course, but it shouldn’t have been. For the record, I didn’t have anything to do with it.
Kim, Cheryl, Jim, and me with Echo
And the puppy. It’s not like I hacked it to death. Jesus God, get that out of your mind. The puppy was from a litter our dog Echo birthed under the big wooden desk in my brother’s bedroom. One day I thought it would be fun to place one of them on the end of a tennis racket and flip it around, but I stopped as soon as my brother demonstrated to me how the puppy wasn’t enjoying it by beating me over the head with a can of artificial snow. “When puppies whine that means they’re crying,” he said, “like how you cry when I do this”: thwack. Weeks later the guy who adopted the puppy came back and demanded another one because the first one was faulty on account of how it died days after he brought it home. I always blamed myself, thinking it never fully recovered from the flipping, though for all we knew the man was taking the puppies straight from our house to a cosmetics testing facility. So it’s possible I had nothing to do with that death either.
You could almost talk yourself into believing that I was an ideal child, if not for the time when I was six and gave my mother, as a present, poisoned fish wrapped in toilet paper. That my intentions were good is only slightly less incredible than the fact that my mother understood them to be so, and therefore didn’t mete out her harshest punishment, which was to shove my whole head into a kitchen sink full of soapy dishwater until I coughed for air. I had collected the fish, dead and floating, from a polluted tributary behind the park after I overheard my parents arguing about money. At the time, my father had quit his job again, and my mother was between contracts, and there was no money to put food on the table, she said. Later I presented the fish, wrapped in paper from the public toilet, to my moth
er. “Food for the table,” I said proudly.
My mother was never one to cry much—except once when I returned home after she had officially reported me missing when I had stopped at the cinema on my way home to watch My Fair Lady, a movie that lasts about five days in duration. But she didn’t this time, though I was worried she would when I saw her face as I handed her the dead fish. Instead, she gently took the fish straight from my hands to the trash pail and thanked me graciously as she washed my palms. Absent any alcohol to kill the germs, she opted to rinse my hands with warm water and lighter fluid. I swelled with self-importance at the officious undertaking, as I noticed that she took extreme care to first extinguish her cigarette.
One Word
My friends and I are making our movie debut in a film called Fuck Fight Pray, or, to put it in the words of the independent director here filming all day, “F-U-C-K! Action!” His name is Darren, and every time he spells out that one word I wonder if I should even bother trying to calm our neighbors by noting that we’re not making porno, and that this is an “art” film slated to be entered in Sundance (or at least in the annual Musical-Spoons Jamboree—probably). The movie is being crafted by creative young visualists with dreams and stuff. But why bother, when Daniel is out back bragging to the neighbors that he has a nude scene, and they believe him.
Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch Page 2