And my father fooled me in other ways as well. He had me thinking that he wrote all the words to “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” that he could speak fluent German when all he could say was “eins, zwei, drei,” that he was brilliant, and tall as a tree. I’d run across the yard and meet his car when he came home bleary-eyed and smiling. He’d carry me back into the house under his arm, talking about all the trailers he sold that day when really he hadn’t worked in months. I hugged his neck and looked up at him with gleaming young eyes of admiration.
My father
Then one day the school nurse discovered I had strep throat and needed to reach one of my parents to drive me to the doctor. If she was surprised that I gave her the number of my father’s favorite bar she didn’t show it, but when he arrived I guess he’d forgotten his peanut remedy because his breath was like a blowtorch and she refused to release me to him. Unable to charm her, my father unsuccessfully tried intimidation instead. It fell upon our big biology teacher, who had once fed a bunny to a boa constrictor, to order my father off the property. He was about to argue, but then he saw my face, and right then he knew he couldn’t fool me anymore.
Looking back at the sad man he became after that, I remember, instead of coming home smiling, he came home searching because I had taken to hiding when I heard his car pull into the driveway. He died young in a one-room apartment soon after his family left him, and I realize how desperately he needed his children’s gleaming eyes of admiration to fool the most important person of all: himself. Looking back, I wish I had known to let him keep his illusions, but I was young, and had yet to learn the art of fooling people.
Inner Evil
I have horns. This fact confirms Lary’s view of me, as he has been calling me a demon almost since we met. “If I’m a demon then what the hell does that make you, nuclear Satan or something?” I ask, but he doesn’t even have to answer. He is Lary, and Satan can only aspire.
I found my horns in Grant’s kitchen and I’ve been wearing them ever since. They are red and glittery, sculpted from clay, and Daniel says they are quite a nice accessory to my daily attire. Grant will probably want them back, but they’ve grown on me. They are mine now, a glorious testimony to my inner evil. Years from now, when I’m super old and sitting in the carport next to my trailer, with my tiny dusty horns on my head, with half my face drooping southward like a mud slide in front of a Malibu beach house, I wonder if Grant, Daniel, and Lary will be there to hear me sputter, “You bastards, you made me what I am.”
That’s another one of my big fears, to end up alone in a trailer park in Arizona, trying to fire up my Hibachi with arthritic fingers. I drove across country twice with my father in the Fairlane, through expansive, desolate stretches of total nowhere, dotted with lonely homesteads and occupied by ghosts who are not really ghosts, just people who might as well be. I wondered what happened to drive those people out there. Did they get there because they couldn’t contain their inner evil? Did evil sprout out of them like horns, repelling their friends? Were they banished to these desolate outposts because they couldn’t cope with regular people? Normal society?
Route 66
These people could be me, I was sure. They could easily be me. When I was six I took a standardized intelligence test along with the other kids in my school, and my results were not normal. Far from it. My mother made my father promise not to tell me, a promise he kind of kept. In looking back at my childhood, I’m totally surprised I endured. Let’s not forget while my mother made bombs and could design complicated weapons, she couldn’t follow a recipe more complex than “just add water.” As a result, she fed me so much junk food, I’m surprised I’m not sitting here right now with a tumor the size of a second head.
And my father, now, he’s a whole other sack of bats. For family entertainment he used to like to get drunk and pile us all in the car to cruise through the cemetery and watch the deer eat flowers off fresh graves. I had no idea this wasn’t normal.
One Halloween, at my seventh birthday party, I was dressed as a little devil, complete with horns and pitchfork, and my father decided he had a way to tell me but not “tell me” what he and my mother knew about my brain. He took me aside and whispered fiercely, “Never forget this: You are not normal, you are more than that. You are smarter than me, smarter than your mother, smarter than anyone you know.”
I laughed, because it was so seldom that he was serious with me, and I had no idea what he meant. I tried to turn away to resume my party, but he had me by the upper arms. “Dad,” I said nervously, “I’m not smarter than you.”
“You are,” he said solemnly. “You are better than me. Never forget that. Be better than me,” and with that he was back to his old self, drinking Buds and making the other parents laugh.
But they didn’t buy his act. By that time nobody did. He ended up alone, like those people in the Arizona desert, with nobody to help him come to terms with his inner evil. He died suddenly one day in a furnished studio apartment next to the Los Angeles airport, as planes packed with strangers roared overhead. “Be better than me,” he’d said. But why? He wasn’t so bad.
Part of me longs to hang out at those homesteads in the middle of nowhere. I guess it’s because I want to know it’s really not that awful to be cut off from almost everyone. Maybe you could watch the sunset every night from a lawn chair on your carport, and you could have three crusty old coots for friends, who shuffle over occasionally with boxes of bad wine and a dozen doughnuts. They could help you light your Hibachi. They could help you with the hope that maybe you were wrong about your father. Maybe he wasn’t alone after all. Maybe he had friends he could show his horns to, friends like Daniel, Lary, and Grant, who could look at his inner evil and make him realize he wasn’t so evil after all.
My parents at the Grand Canyon, 1975
Rock Bottom
Not that this matters at all, but Lary finally found the acid tabs he had accused me of stealing. He had been away on a nine-day excursion to Cancún, the Mexican sleaze pit some people sadly mistake for a resort (he was there on a job, mind you), and during that time he had let me stay at his place so I could deal with the fallout of a failed relationship. His place is a fortress, after all. It’s a concrete-and-steel former candy factory down by the stadium, where, on the back of his TV, he had duct-taped a handgun, and he instructed me to wave it around in front of the windows intermittently in order to keep the criminals away. When he returned he eventually made it to his kitchen and noticed the missing LSD buttons.
Ever since college, I’d bypassed heroin and acid, and gone straight to cocaine, because with cocaine you hit rock bottom quickly—unless you’re made out of money, in which case you can buy yourself ten extra minutes. My own personal rock bottom came one day in college, when I took stock of my life and saw that I came home every evening to a house full of unfaithful friends and impolite strangers passing a plate of blow around, and realized that I was sick of this crowd with their tight lips, limp dicks, and bloviating drug-induced benevolence (“I know I don’t know you that well, but goddamn you are beautiful”). And I was sick of myself, since I was the worst offender. Fuck this, I thought, and moved out the next day.
But my former friend Gina has never not been a heroin addict, ever since she was sixteen. She attended the same drug-awareness scare fest I had, but for some reason she was unaffected by the prospect of waking up in a nest of her own filth, jonesing for a fix. She had curly blond hair and long legs, and we used to make pot holders together in home ec. Now she was rheumy-eyed and absent, with a Rorschach pattern of ruined veins covering her broken body. A veteran of dozens of government-funded rehab programs, she had yet to reach her rock bottom, and it’s possible she never will, proving again and again the new depths to which she can fall. A day rarely goes by that I don’t recall the former luster of her hair, and wonder why, with our identical backgrounds, she grew up to face a tormented existence in which it’s a burden every day to wake up and find herself still
alive and I…well, I did not.
So back to the missing acid: Lary found it where he put it, in his freezer. It was stuck to the back of a Precambrian potpie or something, and therefore well hidden throughout the years, so I was off the hook. “Did you eat it? Are you, like, tripping right now or something?” I asked when he told me the news, looking to see if his pupils had assumed a gyrating spiral pattern.
“Don’t worry, I’m throwing it away,” he said. “It’s old.”
Yes, I nodded, it is most definitely old.
Other People’s Blood
I dislike being bled on. I once made Lary drive by the neighborhood in Atlanta where I’d seen my second corpse. I’d seen it earlier that same day, and there was still a puddle of blood on the sidewalk in the shape of Australia. Lary, peering out the driver’s side window, said it was a melted Popsicle and wouldn’t believe it was blood until I got out, stuck my finger in it, and came back inside the car to give him a closer look.
“Are you insane? I’m not gonna get it on me!” I shrieked. God! You’d think that Lary, more than anyone, would recognize actual blood when he saw it. He goes to the damn emergency room just about a hundred times a month. The most recent was necessitated by injuries sustained after he took acid and dove headfirst off some scaffolding in his living room. That he has scaffolding in his living room should tell you something about him. But I think he was kind of unsettled about the puddle that day. He probably dislikes being bled on as much as I do.
It’s a good thing he missed the soccer hooligans in Dublin last month. I’d never been to Dublin before, and at the time I was just hanging around loving the hell out of the place, because what’s not to love? There are cobblestone walkways and old pubs everywhere, shrimp-flavored potato chips, eight-hundred-year-old brass accents still shiny from daily polishing, and people tip their hats to you. It’s so damn finished and seemingly civilized in downtown Dublin that the men even wear pocket watches, for chrissakes, and every other café has curtains made of white lace. It’s lovely there, I swear, and it’s really the last place you’d expect to encounter other people’s blood.
It all happened while I was admiring some silver trinkets jangling from a street vendor’s pushcart, when suddenly the air became instilled with a different sort of loudness than before, something more frenetic than the normal business bustle of the day. The onset was all pretty subtle, actually, because the Irish are studied in the art of sustaining tirades. There was no war-whoop, no running for cover, no shouting of warnings. Nobody froze in their steps or crapped in their pants. The only omen of what was about to happen, the only thing that warned of an oncoming menace, was that everyone around me suddenly became extremely intent upon some menial task at hand. The change was immediate. One moment everybody was interacting with one another—commenting on the big soccer match, laughing at jokes—and the next they were rummaging grim-faced through a pocketbook, mindfully picking lint off a lapel, closely inspecting the incisors of an ancient lapdog. Even the pushcart vendor stopped talking to me midsentence to intently study a pebble caught in a crease of his sole. All this alerted me to switch myself to survival mode.
There was no big trick to it. I just adapted the demeanor of the people around me, which basically entailed making myself as boring as possible, thus enabling the hooligans to ignore me and move on to other potential victims, which they did. They chose a hapless, long-haired young man not far from me and descended on him like piranhas on a pork chop. They were so thick on him he was invisible under the pile. It was over quickly too; the thugs lifted like mosquitoes swarming for fresh blood, and they were gone. This is when my instincts failed me.
“Do you think that guy’s okay?” I gasped to the pushcart vendor, who looked at me like I’d stepped on a twig and alerted the enemy to our hiding place. The hooligans were gone, but the injured guy, who was being helped to his feet by his friends, was near enough to hear me. Bloody-faced, he was no longer hapless; on the contrary, he was full of hate and pain right then, which he bore on me with the intensity of a hundred suns.
“Leave me alone, you stupid bitch,” he shouted, coming closer. Fucking bitch!” he hissed into my face. I looked around to see if anyone would intervene, but they were busy brushing dust off their coats or inspecting their watchbands or whatever. Luckily, I’m obviously too pathetic to serve as much of a trophy, even for a guy looking to reclaim his ego after having the shit kicked out of him in public, so he simply called me a bitch a few more times and then limped away, leaving me standing there, blinking. The pushcart vendor handed me a tissue.
“I’m not crying,” I snapped at him, angry that he hadn’t interceded on my behalf.
“Your face,” he said, and I looked in the mirror attached to the cart’s ballast and saw that my face was flecked with blood, which the injured guy had spewed on me while calling me a bitch. God, I thought as I wiped it off, nothing like being bled on to dick up your day. After that I stormed away, fuming so heavily that people began to cross the street to get away from me, and not another person tipped his hat to me for the rest of my stay.
The Dutiful Sister
Last weekend my little sister, Kimberly, renewed her vows with her Swiss husband, Eddie. They wouldn’t have met if not for me, as I’m reminded often. They live in a tiny homestead in Arizona, and to attend the ceremony I had to fly to New Mexico and then drive through four hours of nothing to get to nowhere, which is where they live with their three-year-old daughter in a baby-blue mobile home, with a “For Sale” sign on the empty lot next door that touts an installed septic tank. There are some other mobile homes dotting the barren landscape nearby, but none as nice as theirs, which has a wood-paneled front door and an improvised canopy over the carport to protect their truck from the weather. Eddie painted the truck himself, in a camouflage pattern, and it’s quite the object of admiration among their neighbors, as is their video collection, which includes the entire Die Hard series.
They met in Zurich, Switzerland, when Kim was visiting me after graduating from college. I’d had too much to drink in a pub one night, and Eddie offered to help Kim escort me home, and they haven’t spent a night apart since. She remained in Zurich after I moved back to the States, and married Eddie despite my very vocal objections, which included, but were not limited to, the fact that he was old enough to be her father, that he almost burned down our house after leaving a lit cigarette on a mattress, and that during drunken sprees he would show up at our door waving a gun. What I didn’t realize was that my sister truly loved Eddie, and that every word I said, instead of driving her from him, was serving to cement our own separation. And even if over the years Kim would eventually forgive these words, Eddie might not.
They moved to the States after their wedding, and for a while depended on my mother for housing and money. Eddie was always full of ideas—he was going to make a fortune by breeding rare cats, by teaching self-defense, by selling sandwiches—but drank himself stupid almost every night, which sparked my scorn and a fresh slew of appeals to my sister to reconsider her attachment to him. It’s easier for me to fly to Moscow than to reach them on that stark dot in the Arizona desert. Eddie quit drinking and now holds a job as a security guard, and my sister has an administrative position with the county. There are no relatives within thousands of miles of them, and I guess that’s the point. When I visit, I’m as docile as a circus animal, eager to please the ringmaster in order to be tossed the treasure of time spent with my sister and niece. During these visits, Eddie will commonly lead me out on his porch, gesture to the horizon, and say things like, “We’re going to buy three more acres and raise Korean pigs. Isn’t that a wonderful idea?” and I’ll look at the expanse of emptiness before us and nod, saying, “Yes, that’s a wonderful idea.”
The Pie Approach
My mother was always enthusiastic about Christmas, which was odd for an atheist. “Stop that,” she would exclaim in response to my skeptical expression as she decorated the Christmas tree one year. She
knew I was in my own atheism phase, and that I faulted her lack of commitment to the club. But she knew that my flirtation with atheism wouldn’t take, since her own beliefs had been formed with quiet resolve over the years. Mine, on the other hand, had formed instantly, after a failed affair with an asshole member of the God squad.
“Lighten up,” she said in response to my Christmas cynicism. “Did the Bible say Christ had this…” she shook a handful of aluminum tinsel in my direction, “…lining his little manger?” As a joke I later presented her with a stuffed Santa Claus nailed to a cross, but she failed to see the humor in that. So I concluded it was a bad joke, since my mother never failed to see humor if it was actually there.
The affair I had with the Jesus freak my senior year in college was almost embarrassingly clichéd. He’d made it his mission to save my soul because I kept showing up for class dressed like a hooker. He said he didn’t even have to be looking at the door to know when I walked in, because he could tell by the lascivious looks coming from the other guys that I’d arrived. “I can see your breasts,” he would hiss. “Johnny,” I laughed, “my tits are tiny, so you really must be looking for them.”
His seduction took a roundabout route: First he greased his way into becoming my friend, then he heaped love, salvation, and manifest fate into the fray. It was an effective ploy, and in the end I didn’t just take the bait, I swallowed the whole boat. When he inevitably dropped me, I hit the ground like a safe. I placed a call, sobbing, to my mother. She left work immediately to meet me at a coffee shop. (It would be years before I learned that, at the time, my mother faced a looming deadline for a project involving sensitive defense technology. One of her coworkers later told me that my mother breezed by their objections to her departure with, “My daughter’s been dumped by some dick Bible thumper. Gotta go.”)
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