My father was worse in a way, because he occasionally fancied himself a cook, and would therefore experiment, as he did during his bread-baking binge, when the loaves came out dense as boulders and tasting like beer. The week he got his first food processor he made us a different type of homemade relish every night. That was it though—just a bowl of relish every night for dinner. “Shouldn’t we be putting this on something?” we asked after a few spoonfuls.
“It’s gourmet cuisine, goddammit,” he shouted from his corner in the kitchen. For some reason he never joined us at the table but stood in the corner where the counters met, with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, occasionally roaring at us for not appreciating the finer arts of food preparation. “Worthless, ungrateful brats,” he’d grumble as he watched us pick shredded rind of some kind from our teeth.
So just imagine Thanksgiving in this household. To start the day, we put out platters of fudge. Yes, fudge. The reckoning of fudge as an appetizer is lost on me now, but at the time it was my favorite Thanksgiving Day treat. We made it by melting marshmallow creme and Hershey’s chocolate chips together in a big pot. By the time dinner rolled around, we were all shaking from a sugar buzz big enough to set off car alarms across the street. Every year my father insisted the meal include cranberry sauce, which nobody ate. It was the kind that keeps the shape of a can—all grooved like it’s wrapped in a ribbed condom—and it sat there through dinner quivering like a kidney waiting for a transplant, totally untouched. Sometimes I’d find it in the refrigerator weeks later, all dried up and looking like a tongue.
It fell to my mother to cook the turkey after the famous barbecue fiasco of the late seventies, which was the result of another of my father’s experiments. That one ended with a cluster of his bar buddies passed out on our patio one Thanksgiving, a result of foodless boozing throughout the night because the Thanksgiving turkey my father had promised them was still nearly raw after rotating on a spit over coals for eleven hours. We had to wake them all the next morning, not to send them on their way but because dinner was ready, and that was only because my mother finally took the bird off the spit with her bare hands and threw it into the oven.
After that year my mother always cooked the turkey herself, a task she figured she could handle, because how many ingredients does a turkey have after all? Just one, and that’s even if you count the gizzards, which I never really understood. For example, why do the entrails come in a little separate sack? The gizzards were always treated like a big biohazard, sitting in a bowl far away from everything. “Guts!” I squealed happily one year, preparing to plunder them for the sake of some really great practical jokes I had planned.
“Don’t touch the gizzards!” my mother shrieked. The gizzards, I vaguely remember her explaining, had to stay far away from the turkey as it cooks, otherwise there’d be food poisoning. Upon hearing that, I was certain the turkey was deadly. This was my mother after all, and the only recipes I trusted her to follow were the ones on the backs of boxes that required you to add water and let the chemicals do the cooking. Our kitchen cupboards were stocked with food like Kraft macaroni and cheese, which sold four boxes to the buck at Pic ’n’ Save, a local surplus store that offered old dry goods on the same shelf as motor oil. The directions called for butter as well as milk, but you could do without the butter in a pinch. The finished product was a bowl of noodles so bright orange you could use it to flag down passing aircraft.
It goes without saying that my family was not a family of chefs. Other holiday meals suffered as well: Take our traditional Fourth of July family barbecue, for instance, where my father used everything from paint thinner to hair spray to fuel a grill fire so huge it could cause traffic copters to fall smoldering from the sky. There’s still a patch on my brother’s scalp where the hair won’t grow back, thanks to my father’s infamous homemade “honey glaze” sauce that contained melted pure-cane sugar. It might as well have been a big bowl of boiling magma. It melted my father’s favorite rubber spatula, but not before a drop flicked onto my brother’s head. Screaming and clawing at his skull, my brother zigzagged all over the backyard before my mother was able to tackle him and pour beer on his head to keep my father’s lava from boring into his brain.
Though she was deft and quick thinking in that situation, I still didn’t trust my mother to follow directions closely enough to keep the turkey from turning into a big teeming ball of Ebola bacteria. They say a diet of chemicals and preservatives can kill you—and it can, because lots of my family members croaked because of the life-load of crappy food they ate—but it took decades for that poison to work.
A turkey gizzard is a totally different story. One wrong bite of a turkey gizzard and you’re dead before your face hits the plate. It got so I had a gizzard phobia, and every year I begged my mother to banish them from the house. “All right, all right,” she finally agreed one year, dropping the little gizzard sack into the trash. “I don’t want to poison my family,” she finished. Satisfied, I bounded away, clutching a cupcake topped with enough red-tinted frosting to kill a cage of laboratory rats.
But back to the Thanksgiving barbecue calamity. That year, the resulting turkey had blackened skin and a pink interior, and anyone approaching it should have been waved away with lit flares. Among our guests that night was Rosie, my father’s skinny-legged alcoholic friend who was known to ball any man who happened to still be standing after the bars closed. She had a teased beehive and a tobacco-shredded laugh, and she kept cupping all the men’s crotches that night. This was less appreciated than you might expect. In the end, though, they all dissolved into the customary blubberings of drunk people. “I’m thankful for you, you know that?”
And I’m thankful that Rosie, who, swatted away by all the other guests, took to petting my adolescent head instead. Sitting there with this tearful woman was the first time I recall soaking up a sense of true desperation borne of loneliness. “You’re beautiful, and you’re smart too. I can tell,” she’d blubber, stroking my hair. “Beautiful and smart, don’t let anyone tell you different.” Since people had been telling me different all my life, I endured her attention. She passed out on our Herculon couch with a lit cigarette in her hand, a fire hazard if ever there was one, since the Herculon fabric of the seventies was, as far as I could tell, nothing more than woven dynamite wicks.
Rather than finish the smoke for her (I’d given up my pack-a-day habit the year before at the age of thirteen), I plucked the cigarette from her fingers and flicked it into our backyard. Inside, the guests continued to recount the things they were thankful for, even though technically it was the day after Thanksgiving. “I’m thankful I’m not Rosie,” laughed one. At the sound of her name, Rosie awakened, which prompted more laughter from her friends. “Rosie, what are you thankful for?” asked my father. But Rosie simply sat there, looking into the distance with welled-up eyes. “Rosie?” my father implored. She stared vacantly for a few more moments, then finally shook her head. “I’ll tell you what I’d be thankful for,” she said with her booze-beleaguered voice. “I’d be thankful for my goddamn cigarette. Where the hell is it?”
A Land That No Longer Exists
My sister Cheryl called and asked me to visit over the holidays. It was seven in the morning her time, and she was drunk. But I can respect that. She’s a cocktail waitress in Las Vegas, her shift ended at 3 A.M., so she was four hours into a hard-ass happy hour, and she missed me. Only it’s not the me me she misses—not the struggling homeowner-wannabe me, the working Joe with no money me. No, she misses the old me.
“Holly, what happened to you?” she slurs. “You used to go to nightclubs half naked, stay up all night dancing. You used to be so wild.”
“Cher,” I sigh, “I used to shit in my diapers too, and I don’t do that anymore either.”
Las Vegas holds fond memories for us. Our mother was a “junket” junkie, and she’d take us out of school to accompany her on eight-hour bus rides to Binion’s Horseshoe al
ong with fifty or so other booze-addled revelers, each with a fistful of coupons and endless buckets of nickels dancing in their dreams.
Cheryl, in particular, loves the way it was back then, back when she and I were best friends because we moved so much we were unable to get to know anyone else. In grade school we played “Puff, the Magic Dragon” so many times that our father’s portable stereo practically imploded under the strain. We thought we knew the words too. “Puff, the magic dragon, lived by the sea, and frolicked in the Ottomiss…” we sang.
Later we realized Puff actually frolicked in the “autumn mist,” but by then “Ottomiss” had morphed in our minds into an actual place like the Emerald City or Cinderella’s palace. To us, in Ottomiss, big luminous castles beckoned in a landscape that looked like a giant unearthed chest of treasure, with sparkling jewels spilling over the side, where you could bound through fields of marigolds as soft as the eyelashes of a million angels with your best friend by your side. It was a place where big dreams came true.
But then I figured out what the song was really saying, especially that whole crappy part where Jackie Paper grows up and dumps poor Puff, who then spends eternity in an empty paradise wailing for his lifelong friend. I hate that part. I mean, how hard would it be for Jackie to go back? Just for a visit, just to press his head against Puff’s sweet scaly brow and, for a day, frolic in the Ottomiss again? How hard is that? But Jackie never goes back, and Puff remains trapped in a land that no longer exists.
“Fuck this,” I said, and never played the song again.
Sometime after that, Cheryl and I grew apart. Later, I realized it occurred when my parents separated. Cheryl was eighteen, and she used that opportunity to move in with her boyfriend. My brother had long moved out on his own, leaving my younger sister and me, both minors, to live by ourselves for a while in a beachside apartment that both our parents had temporarily vacated, not that they didn’t check in on us occasionally. This kind of left us feeling like we had little to rely on.
Cheryl especially, because she’d always been somewhat of a tortured sentimentalist. She still talks about her beloved cat, Casey, who for years used to meet her at her car door when she parked across the street after returning home late at night. Back then she was known for her beaming beauty fetchingly coupled with her penchant for hard partying. She still talks about Casey because she couldn’t rely on much. She couldn’t rely on me not to move across the country, she couldn’t rely on her parents, she couldn’t rely on her boyfriends not to abuse her, she couldn’t even rely on herself, really, not to keep making bad decisions in her life. But at least she could rely on her cat to meet her at her car door when she parked across the street. But Casey got old, and one night he was killed by a car right there on the street as he crossed it to meet her.
At nine in front of the famous Binion’s Horseshoe $1 million display
I wish I could say Cheryl has never been the same since, but she has been exactly the same—the same crazy behavior, the same wild nights, the same fantasy of eternal youth. I know she’s simply grasping for some purpose to lend to her passing years, and I know we’re alike. I just hide my panic better than she does is all.
“Can’t you come visit?” she asked, pausing to puff on her cigarette. “Just for a day?”
I said I’d come because, all around her, even at that early hour, I know the skyline is awash in flashing lights, the Strip is laid out like a magic miniature golf park for massive giants, and there are bright marquees depicting buckets of riches and the promise of dreams granted, and in the middle of it all is my sister, Cheryl, and I don’t want her to be trapped in a land that no longer exists.
Letting Go in Las Vegas
I’d had two cocktails and it wasn’t even 10 A.M., which led me to conclude that I loved Las Vegas. How could anybody not love it? It’s so radiantly cheap and impure. Right then I was in the Venetian Hotel on the Strip, a hotel that is the total ass end of tacky, and as much as I would have loved to wallow in the chlorinated canals of the replicated Italian village upstairs, I preferred the casino on the ground floor even better because I liked the noise.
“One more,” I told the bartender.
He asked me where I’m from. I told him Atlanta, even though that’s not entirely true. I was born in Burbank but haven’t been back since, so I’ve learned not to take the question too literally. People are too attached to hometowns, I think, so I let mine go and just pick a city, and I would pick Las Vegas, only I tend to confine my answers to places I’ve actually lived.
The bartender, who is from Denver, notices that I’m one-handed today, because the other is clutching my backpack with a lobster-like grip. I might love Vegas, but I still don’t trust the crusty pocket-picking flotsam who live here. “Here’s some advice,” said the bartender. “If someone tries to steal your purse, let go.” It turned out his friend’s daughter was knifed in downtown Vegas by a purse snatcher because she wouldn’t let go.
My parents’ wedding chapel in Las Vegas, behind the Frontier Hotel
“Let go,” he repeated.
I was eight when I first came to Vegas. For us, it was a family vacation spot before the city figured out it was profitable to bill itself that way. For my mother, who was uncomfortable with conventional displays of parental endearment, gambling became the perfect conduit for family bonding. “Don’t get suffocated by your safety net, kid,” she’d narrate as she played. “Let go of your chips and go for it.”
On one of these family outings, I found a menu of services from the notorious Chicken Ranch whorehouse and learned that in the market of legalized prostitution the going rate for a tongue bath was only $95. Is that all? I thought, and to this day I can’t think of a harder job than being a whore.
“Give me that!” my mother shrieked, trying to snatch the menu from my hand. “I said let go!”
I let go of it, but she didn’t. Years later I found the menu again in a box of her possessions, along with her wedding bouquet. The fragile rosebuds were browned and curled like the little fists of a half a dozen mummified babies. It was hardly recognizable from the day my parents got married thirty-seven years earlier at the Little Church of the West behind the Frontier Hotel on the Vegas Strip. Their wedding picture shows my father looking dapper, like Desi Arnaz, and my mother looking like she had no idea what’s in store for her. In the picture they were holding hands, but eventually they let go, and I mean that more than in the literal sense.
During the famous MGM Grand Hotel fire twenty-six years later, which killed eighty-four people, heat and smoke had trapped people and pushed others to the outer ledges of the upper floors, where news cameras were trained on them as they clung, dangling, from their useless skytop perches. I hoped the people would hang on, but they didn’t. One woman’s skirt bellowed above her head as she fell. “No, no, no, no!” onlookers cried in anguish. Another group of victims was found in an elevator lobby. They died clutching the suitcases they refused to let go, having wasted valuable time packing them before attempting to evacuate.
Still other victims were found in one of the hotel rooms, five of them holding hands and looking like they were asleep, except for the shadows of soot around their nostrils and mouths. They had let go, but not of each other. My guess is that they ventured as far as they could, then, upon realizing the inevitability of their predicament, decided not to cling to things like frantically packed suitcases or the hotel’s unforgiving exterior ridge but instead spent their final moments in the simple comfort of human contact.
Parents’ wedding
So there you have it: perfect examples of the importance of knowing when to let go, and when not to. It’s like gambling, I guess. Back before my mother had gotten good at gambling, she used to play the nickel slot machines at Circus Circus, while trapeze artists performed without a net in the atrium above the casino floor. When she won her first twenty-dollar jackpot, my mother, uncomfortable with most human contact, surprised me by hugging me tightly in her excitement.
It’s no wonder I love Vegas, because it takes a long time for four hundred nickels to fall out of a slot machine.
My Mother and the History of Pornography
I’m almost positive not many people have been forced to look at porno with one of their parents, so I consider myself unique in that way. It happened years ago, when my mother and siblings and I got lost in Amsterdam on our way to the Anne Frank House and ended up in the Red Light District instead. It’s not that we wouldn’t each have ambled there on purpose eventually, just not together as a unit, because Amsterdam’s Red Light District is probably the worst place on the planet for a family outing. At one point, we passed a movie bill picturing a man in a rubber suit wallowing in his own shit—and I’m just assuming it was his own, because even now my brain wants to make the best of it. For all I know it could have been a crap collective, which is an adequate metaphor given the situation.
“Look,” hollered my brother, Jim, “that theater across the street has a ‘Live Vibrator’ show!” My sister Cheryl was unimpressed. “Live vibrator?” she mumbled. “In the States, we call that a penis.”
Christ, I thought to myself, clutching my eyes. Where am I?
If my father had been alive he would have pulled us out of there by our hair. Let me tell you, it’s really embarrassing to walk around with your father’s fist ensnared in your hair. So it was a good thing he was not there with us in Amsterdam, because if he had been he would have burst into flames, and left my siblings and me with our scalps blistered where his fingers had once clutched our hair. Even that would probably not have kept Jim from the “Live Vibrator” show.
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