So here is my message, which I give to you as the survivor of this unspeakable trauma: Do not trust dentists. Do not trust orthodontists. Do not trust anybody who dares insert into your mouth a tiny tray of butthole putty, or a steel torture device, or a string of jagged metal braces. They are designed to turn you against the only thing you will ever love. And if you let them, they will succeed.
A BRIEF LIST OF THINGS THAT I DON’T KNOW
1. I have never once successfully folded any type of bed linen, fitted or otherwise, which is why I tend to avoid washing my sheets altogether, and also why my bedroom constantly smells like someone just microwaved a bag of popcorn.
2. I don’t know what a retirement plan is. I don’t know what 401(k) means or why the k is always hiding in those parentheses. I don’t know what “escrow” is, or if that has anything to do with retirement, but I feel like it does because adults are always using these words together. I don’t know what a certified public accountant is supposed to do besides wear short-sleeve button-downs and wire-rimmed glasses. I don’t know anything about the national debt. And I don’t get why so many elderly people in Florida are allowed to vote.
3. I order food for delivery every single day of the week, sometimes twice in one day if it’s a special occasion, like Thanksgiving or a Saturday, and more often than not, it’s only because I want a slice of chocolate fudge layer cake and I have to pretend like I’m ordering a full meal around it and not just paying for someone to bring me a single container of frosted sugar.
4. I don’t think I could keep a baby alive by myself for more than maybe forty minutes, mostly because I know you’re supposed to rock babies back and forth, but I don’t know how hard to rock them before the rocking would be considered violent shaking and I know that’s how Lenny killed that woman in the book about the rabbits.
5. I’ve only really cleaned my bathroom once in the last year, mostly because I don’t know how often you’re supposed to clean a bathroom, since once a week seems like too often, and so does once every two weeks. By the third week it’s too disgusting to even look at, and if I tried to clean it, I’d probably just throw up and make it all worse anyway, so might as well just wait until I move out or the entire apartment building burns down.
6. I don’t know how to butter toast without ripping a ragged hole through the center of the slice every single time, and then all I have for breakfast is a hot piece of bread with a giant butter hole in the middle, which is generally why I avoid attempting to prepare food for myself at all costs.
7. I’m terrible at gift-giving, which is sort of a test of how good you are at being a competent adult sufficient in sustaining relationships with other competent adults. I mean, even cats give gifts, even though their gifts are usually mouse carcasses, but at least they put some thought into it. The best I can do is an Applebee’s gift card I bought at CVS.
8. I’m fairly certain that there’s a dead mouse behind my bed, but I’m too afraid to move my mattress and confirm it, because as long as it’s not confirmed there’s at least a possibility that there isn’t a dead mouse lying inches away from my face while I sleep.
9. I’m self-destructive, but not in the dramatic way that drug addicts on CSI are. Like, I’ve never snorted cocaine off a stripper’s dick before, or any other body part for that matter. But I’m still slowly destroying myself. I routinely finish an entire box of soft-baked chocolate chip cookies in one sitting, and I haven’t exercised since one of the Bushes was president.
10. I don’t know what my bra size is.
ON MICHIGAN
My family was never a Disneyland family.
I always resented my classmates who belonged to Disneyland families, the haughty children who walked into class halfway through October and announced that they’d be missing school for an entire week while they gallivanted down to Florida to visit Cinderella and her whore sisters. “Have fun catching syphilis from Mickey Mouse,” I’d sneer under my breath, or at least that’s what I would have sneered if I’d known what syphilis was back then. To make it worse, those kids would always come back with Mickey Mouse–shaped water bottles and a week’s worth of gaudy themed T-shirts, just to remind everybody that going to Disneyland was not a onetime luxury, but a permanent promotion in status, lest anybody should forget.
My parents always gave my brother and me a litany of excuses as to why we’d never go to Disneyland, chief among them being that my mother refused to get on an airplane (and driving together for anything longer than a couple of hours at most was out of the question). I always found this excuse insufficient, considering that my mother had flown on airplanes before—twice, in fact—most recently to Hawaii, some twenty years earlier on her and my father’s honeymoon, and before then, as a haughty child herself, to none other than Disneyland. Perhaps she’d caught syphilis from Mickey Mouse, I thought. But more than likely she was simply a hypocrite.
The real excuse, or at least the one that was supposed to keep us from rioting, was that our very own Disneyland—basically just as good, but without all those pesky lines and stifling crowds and uninhibited fun—was just a two-hour drive away in sunny, breezy, coastal southern Michigan, home of the crumbling American auto industry and boundless amusement for children of all ages.
When you live in “the greater Chicagoland area”—a bullshit name for those parts of Indiana, Wisconsin, and suburban Illinois that have absolutely no right referring to themselves as Chicago but need some semblance of an identity to cling to, God bless them—you are fed a constant onslaught of commercials on television advertising the majestic forested hills of Michigan as the one true vacation destination. This is, of course, entirely absurd. Not to shit on Michigan, but there are far better vacation spots in the Midwest alone. And sure, Michigan’s got gurgling brooks and crisp lakes full of fish bigger than grown men and miles upon miles of fresh forests, or some garbage like that. But Wisconsin’s got the Wisconsin Dells, the water-park capital of the world, according to the brochure, and no child wants to hang out around a babbling river—unless you’re a character in Bridge to Terabithia and you wanna die—especially not when that babbling river is one state away from the largest indoor water park in the United States.
But my uncle’s family owned a cottage in Michigan, a small house on a tiny lake about fifteen miles inland from Lake Michigan proper. And apart from the month’s worth of supplies my mother insisted on purchasing for a week of vacation, going to Michigan was basically free, at least compared to Disneyland. And so, every summer, instead of contracting ringworm in a communal men’s shower somewhere in the bowels of Wisconsin like a normal midwestern family, we’d pile into a sedan—my mom, dad, brother, and me, along with the dog and our turtle, Cornpop, who traveled in a damp bucket between my brother’s legs—and drove two hours to the town of Sister Lakes, where the paradise of small-town Michigan awaited.
Two hours traveling now is a virtual cakewalk, but back then, a two-hour drive in the backseat of a cramped car was my own personal hell, not only because of my family’s less-than-pleasant digestive failings, but also because of my mother’s unrelenting need to pack an entire deli’s worth of groceries into every available space. Half of those drives, I had boxes of granola bars and packaged pastries pooling at my feet. I rested my head on open bundles of blueberry muffins and twisted bags of hamburger buns, stacked atop a giant cooler that sat between my brother and me in the backseat. In my lap, if I wasn’t charged with holding the dog, who threw up on cue at least every fifteen minutes, I’d be forced to hold some other item we couldn’t have traveled without, like a case of beer or box of wine. Mobility was limited, at best.
To get to Sister Lakes, Michigan, from Chicago, there was approximately ten minutes of suburbia, followed by an hour of open highway, followed by fifty minutes of pure, concentrated countryside, which is to say, absolutely fucking nothing. I’d spend what felt like hours staring at the back of my mother’s seat in front of me, shifting slightly, as much as I could, beneath t
he weight of whatever box of meats was crushing my thighs.
“Look at the cows!” my mother would shout every twenty minutes, and if we turned immediately and glared out the part of the window uninhibited by stacks of frozen waffles and sliced bread, we’d catch just a blurry, passing glimpse of a pasture that quickly gave way to cornstalks or blueberry bushes or whatever boring crop infests those parts of America that most of us try not to think about.
I’d always know we were getting close to the cottage when signs of modern society began to vanish, when stoplights at intersections started giving way to rickety stop signs hanging from strings over dusty roads, and gas-station pumps started looking less like gas-station pumps and more like butter-churning barrels.
The cottage itself was at the end of a winding gravel road hidden by a dense thicket of trees and brush, and was nearly impossible to see, even in broad daylight. If ever I managed to fall asleep, I’d be jerked awake by the rattle of the car lurching along the rocky street, shaking the towers of food around my face and sending one box or another tumbling to the floor. The dog would barf one last time and finally we’d be there.
Of course, this should be obvious, but if a lake is surrounded by overgrown, almost impassable vegetation—so dense that only a gravel road suffices as an acceptable throughway—maybe it shouldn’t be colonized by tourists. There was another house along the gravel road, inhabited by lake-town natives, who I assumed had been driven insane by years spent gestating in relative obscurity. Whenever we’d drive past, without fail there was always a child in one of the windows brandishing a rifle.
Welcome to Disneyland.
The cottage was a relic of the 1970s, a modest-sized structure with all the trappings you’d expect of an old lake house: musty carpet, wood-paneled walls full of kitschy wooden ducks, and wrought-iron birds alongside framed photos of aunts and uncles and cousins holding up fish caught twenty years before. The house had the perpetual whiff of dampness, the smell of decades of wet feet walking on wooden floors, sunblock and sweat dripped onto carpet, the accumulation of dust and dirt and cobwebs settled permanently in those nine off-summer months when a vacation home goes unoccupied. It would have been a comforting smell, if not for the year someone found a dead squirrel in the closet, in the center of an old, rolled-up rug. I hesitate to think how long it was there, whether the fresh country air we had been breathing year after year was actually just airborne squirrel decay.
At least fifteen of my family members would go to the cottage at once—my grandparents, my mother and her three sisters, their husbands, all five of my cousins and me, plus the dogs and the turtle and anything else that managed to fit inside the trunk of the car. Each family unit would cram into one of the four bedrooms, which means I’d get stuck on a deflated air mattress on the floor beside my parents’ bed, my brother on a cot at the end of the bed, an arrangement that virtually guaranteed all of us would go an entire week without sleep. Every night, I’d fall asleep, and in a matter of minutes, my brother would whip a pillow forcefully at my face to stop me from snoring. (My oversized tonsils made any attempts to curb my snoring nearly impossible.) Pissed, I’d groggily whip the pillow back, but given my homosexual aim, a lamp would fall over, the dog would start barking, my dad would start grumbling, my mom would start shouting, and before long, the entire house would be listening to us screaming at one another to go to sleep.
Conflict never contained itself just to our bedroom, though. Virtually every year, by the end of the week, everyone was pissed at someone else, for one reason or another. You put fifteen people in a small house in the August heat, with a cooler of alcohol per adult, there’s bound to be some drama. After all, once the sun sets in the middle of nowhere, there isn’t much to do besides drink. This is how reality television is made, after all. At the worst of it, in the midst of an after-dinner board game sometime in 2000, some innocuous disagreement over the rules led my grandmother to throw her arms in the air and shout, “That’s it! We’re out of here!” And she promptly made my grandfather pack all their belongings in the trunk and drive back to Chicago in the middle of the night, never to return to the cottage again.
To complete the idyllic vacation ambience, the cottage plumbing was as archaic as the structure itself, and to stave off the literal shit show that fifteen people taking daily showers and bowel movements could wreak on the system, we enforced a strict “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” policy in regards to toilet flushing, giving the hallways an added air of dank stench. But, inevitably, the pumps would give way, and the grass in the back of the house would start bubbling up with thick sewage. To make it all worse, my uncle’s parents—the cottage owners—installed a toilet in the corner of the large room we used as a pantry, which, on the one hand, alleviated stress on the otherwise lone toilet upstairs, but, on the other hand, added a layer of filth to our snacks, which we kept on a table on the other side of the room, even after the toilet was consecrated. It was all, to say the very least, a less than ideal living arrangement, to be sardined into a decaying house, floating on a river of shit, delirious for lack of sleep.
Of course, the real draw of Michigan—what they talked about in those horrible commercials—was not to be confined indoors, but to experience the bounty of nature, or some bullshit like that. The cottage was simply the backdrop, a place to sleep (or not) so you’d be rested the next morning for another day spent entirely outdoors, away from television, the Internet, and the refrigerator.
The lake the cottage was on was quite beautiful, if you’re into that sort of thing. In the morning, when the sky was clear, the water still, the sun at a manageable angle, I could almost understand why businessmen faked their own deaths to escape their families for a place like this. But the beauty lasted only as long as you kept your distance. The water itself was nearly opaque with clouds of sand upset by whatever marine life dwelled at its depths. If you tossed a rock into the water, it took only a few inches before it all but disappeared, eaten by a brown fog. Over the years, we saw all manner of oversized fish, snakes, and snapping turtles, some the size of kickballs, emerging from the deep, and that was only what we spotted from the surface, through the seaweed. It amazes me still that we swam regularly in that water. One year, I found a tick crawling on the nape of my neck while I was drying off beside the lake, and spent the rest of our vacation convinced that I’d contracted Lyme disease. Even now, when I think about the fact that I was once willingly submerged in that water, it gives me that uncomfortable tingly feeling at the base of my spine. But then again, that might just be the Lyme disease.
• • •
It amazes me most that we continued to visit this place, considering everything that went wrong there. Idyllic as it was—poop puddles and decaying squirrels aside—the cottage was site to some of the more physically traumatizing moments of my childhood. It was there that I broke my first bone, after all, falling backwards from a bush in the yard, snapping my elbow and leaving me in a cast for the rest of the summer.
And that was only the beginning.
One summer, while we were swimming in a part of the lake that wasn’t yet overrun with floating branches or goopy seaweed, one of my cousins spotted a snake slithering along the grass near the water and shouted, “SNAAAAAKE!” We all scurried ashore, screaming all the way, not to escape it, but to run after it. None of us had ever caught a snake before. We’d seen everything else up close: giant fish, a soft-shelled turtle, an oversized toad. Our very own turtle, Cornpop, was a catch my brother had made years earlier, back when my parents were apparently foolish enough to let their children take wildlife home. (For the record, I’m pretty sure my mother assumed the turtle would die before she’d have to worry about it, but that motherfucker lived for almost twenty years, so take that, Debbie.) But a snake was exciting stuff. Uncharted territory.
Personally, I never understood the appeal of chasing after snakes, or any wildlife for that matter, because I’ve seen Anaconda and I know that all snakes, including the teeny
ones, are capable of swallowing an entire human body and regurgitating the half-digested remains in an abandoned warehouse somewhere in the Amazon. Chasing after a snake seemed to be an easy way of asking for trouble. Even if we didn’t catch him, he would go off and tell his snake friends that a band of children were harassing him, and before you know it, he’d be back with a mob, except this time, they’d be in my air mattress and my mouth would be open because of the tonsil thing and it’s just a whole big nightmare. I wasn’t one to take that sort of risk. The closest I’d ever been to a snake was Halloween when I was eleven years old, the year I dressed as Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, a costume that amounted to short khaki shorts, a matching V-neck button-up, and a stuffed toy snake wrapped around my arm. But even the stuffed snake made me uncomfortable, and not only because I tripped over it that night and put a snag in the skin-colored tights my mother insisted I wear beneath the khaki costume to protect me from the cold. A snake is a snake.
But when everybody is running after one, you get caught up in the adventure of it all, the Steve Irwin part of your brain takes over, and before you know it, you’re chasing and screaming and whooping.
So I chased after that disgusting thing alongside everybody else, all of us barefoot, as it weaved in and out of the tall grass and under overturned paddleboats and through a pile of firewood, all the while out of our reach, until it finally went wriggling back into the water. We were city children, after all. No match for a country snake.
But amidst the excitement, amidst the running and screaming and whooping, my foot landed in a pile of dirt somewhere along the shore and I felt a stinging pain shoot up my leg. I let out a yelp and lifted my leg to see the bottom of my foot, thinking I’d stepped on a sharp rock or maybe a bit of broken glass, but what I saw instead was a bee taking his final breath, his stinger firmly in the bottom of my heel. I’d never been stung by a bee before, and it wasn’t the best feeling in the world. But, like stepping on a used meth needle, it’s really most alarming because you don’t know what happens afterward.
Everything Is Awful Page 6