Hegemony

My father does not understand about asking questions. He does not understand the idea of requesting; my father only demands. Pass me the water pitcher, he says, someone get me a pen, not that one. Everyone is a disappointment to their parents, it is nothing personal. Perhaps it is the price we pay for conscience, imagination, the gamble of free will. If an animal can act only on instinct, on the overriding forces of biological imperative, then the animal by surviving is by definition successful, and it’s parents have thus also succeeded in having survived long enough to reproduce. Not so with humans, as Kipling had cause to muse. And yet…..Is there any harsher answer to a parent than suicide?

The Clock Browses

I was supposed to go to school today, but I didn’t. I couldn’t get out of bed, and then I couldn’t leave my room, and then when I finally could the back door was locked and I couldn’t go outside. I lost the phone. I decided to stay home since I couldn’t go anywhere and the cats might want some company, but all they do is sleep. Mrs. Graelyn won’t speak to me ‘cause she know I’m supposed to be in school and Topher kept using the litter box while I was trying to eat breakfast and the stench was awful so I yelled and threw things at her and now she won’t speak to me either.

I sat in a big chair and ate candy and wore my pajamas all day. My room-mate sleeps in his closet most all the time now. It’s not fair, it was my idea first, only there’s no room in my closet ‘cause of everything else in it. I think I’m going to run away and live in a cave except I can’t leave the house. I wish we had a basement ‘cause that would be a good place to hide, plus also there might be a cave leading off it. We have an attic but it’s just a tiny place for birds and scary monster things to hide in.

I called a psychiatrist and I’m going to see him on Thursday, but that means missing class again and I have finals in a week. I’m going to fail everything. It will be a spectacular failure. When I teach college I will give everyone nap-time and then we will play dress-up where everyone has to trade at least three articles of clothing and write about what it’s like to wear someone else’s style. Then I will pass out cookies with little chunks of anti-depressants baked in instead of chocolate chips. Everyone who wants to will go to calculus and physics and everyone who doesn’t will play on the playground, which will be full of big swings and hammocks and see-saws and tire-swings and saucers. In English/Grammar classes everyone has to invent a new language and gets extra credit if they use it all day, and in chemistry we’ll practice turning twinkies in to gold and creating new designer drugs. After lunch the teacher will read us undiscovered fairy-tales of the Brother’s Grimm and give everyone a prize. Then we will all get on a huge flying-carpet which will take us home again. I can’t wait to take over the world.

Empty Stockings and Chinese Food

When I was five my friends were making lists of things they wanted from Santa—a new bike, Teddy Ruxpin, boxes of chocolate. I wanted a penise. I, oh desperately, wanted a penise. If you had one you got to curse and spit and pee into the toilet standing up. They seemed quite remarkable inventions to me. All I had was a little hole between my legs that people put things into, and I wasn’t terribly impressed by it at all. I asked my mother if Santa would bring me a penise for Christmas, and she explained that Santa only visited Christian children, and we were Jewish. This time, I was unconvinced. I tried with all the power of my childish manipulation to get to spend Christmas at a friend’s house, and when this didn’t work I secretly hung a little stocking behind my bed. Santa was no so easily deceived, and when I woke the next morning it hung sagging, empty. I’ve always hated Christmas; it’s just one more reminder of everything I want and cannot have. I want a penise, I want a pirate-ship, I want purple cellophane wings and a long whippy tail. I want moss-green skin and violet eyes, I want hair the color and scent of of jasmine flowers and a body that fits my soul. I want a cloak of black swans feathers that lets me move unmolested through the night. I want wolf pelts and rocky caves and a fin to wend my way through deep cold waters so I can lie and rest on the linty lishy squish dirt ocean floors. I want my wishes always to come true. I want to forget the reasons why they don’t.

This Little Piggy

Last night for no apparent reason I remember suddenly when I was really little, about four or five, and I first saw a cinderblock type brick. I was absolutely stunned, physically shocked by how it was hollow inside. Imagine a house, my house, being built out of these hollow clay things! It was not a very comforting thought by any means. For years every time the wind blew and shook I was convinced it was trying to keen its way into those scary little spaces. I knew with absolute conviction ghosts lived in them. And I remembered me, little, lying in bed in my old room in the Dayton house, covers pulled tight up under my chin and listening with infant dread to the sounds outside, waiting with a fiercely resigned dread for the house to topple all around us. I think for many years I was surprised to wake up in the morning and find it still standing. I wonder how I finally got over it?

Original Sin

Christians are born with original sin, Jews with original ignorance. I know this from my best friend Joy, and the teacher at Hebrew Day. And they were told by ministers and rabbis. Joy goes to Catholic school so maybe it was a priest. In nursery school they taught us the same things and we were in playgroup and girl scouts together where all the songs and stories were the same. In grade school, suddenly, everything is different. Joy's my first and only Christian friend and I pump her for details about everything. It's something to talk about while we're supposed to be playing neighbors in our parents' yards.

I’m six and it’s fall in Ohio and Moreh Rosenbaum is teaching us the joy of straight sex. She holds up a discreetly illustrated picture book and waves her arm slowly so everyone can see the crayon-box colored pictures. Sex is something a man and a woman do together when they love each other very much, and they don't do it with anyone else except each other because it's so special. And the parts of the body that they have sex with are the parts that make a baby. When the man is inside the woman he makes an egg inside her, and it grows in her belly. The woman's belly gets bigger and bigger for 9 months while the egg turns into a baby and then it is born. She turns the page and shows us a picture of a pudgy baby squeezed up inside a tube. There are simple illustrations of the insides of women and how they are different from men. I know about how the outsides are different already -- in nursery school everyone shared one doorless bathroom stall and if you had to go it was better to be in line behind a group of boys because 2 or 3could go pee very quickly all at once, and girls went slowly, one at a time and drip drip drip. The baby in the pictures can't go pee at all until it is born because there's no boy or girl parts to go with. Then it wears diapers while the penise or vagina finish growing--that's when the baby gets potty-trained. Those parts start growing in the hospital right after the baby is named, and on the next page the baby is clearly on it's way to being a stand-up pee-er; the parents have a new baby boy.

It's the '70' and the new brown baby is now clamped to his mother's breast. The baby is nursing, we're told. At least, I think nursing must have come up because of the nipple question. In class participation. There were prizes for knowing the right answer during class participation; little erasers that smelled like fruit and plastic cars and kosher bubble-gum. The first time I can remember raising my hand in class was to answer a question about nursing, and the teacher used some unrepeatable embarrassing grown-up word like nipple or areola and everyone but me looked at the floor. No competition for my poorly socialized hand in the air, and I explained, with minimal lisping, how babies drank milk from their mama's nipples which were the pointy things on breasts which only women had and that men did not have babies because they didn't have breasts to feed them with. I kept talking the way you do in nightmares to distract attention from whatever everyone was staring at me for doing wrong or to delay them laughing at me and I still wanted to get it right and I kept going waiting for the teacher to nod and throw me a little square of Bazooka Joe and the meatloaf smell was suffocating and the sandwich my mom packed for lunch expanded up into my windpipe, greasing the back of my throat as I kept speaking, wondering what the milk babies drank would taste like and if it was different for every baby according to their favorite flavors like manna was or if it all tasted the same like meatloaf did no matter whose mom it was from and my voice trailed out on the third repetition of the word 'breast' and no one nodded or threw gum.

Genesis

Abnitio. In the beginning. In the beginning is fear, is rage, is a large hand outstretched above a crib padded in bright colors. In the beginning is my mother's voice calmly erasing my bad dreams. In the beginning is nothing but my mother's words: Virginia and Maine and grey and green.

I was conceived in Virginia, in Lynchburg, a town-name which always makes me think of Billy Holliday. I was born in Maine, a state my mother fills with slabs of slate and ice-chopped water and a wooden house with a frozen yard and newsprint crumbling in the walls -- grey upon grey. My mother hates Maine and remembers it for me.

Lynchburg is a green place, and wet. It smells like caladryl and thick-veined broken leaves and asphalt goo and talc and cottony ladysweat. I have been there twice since I could talk and I am going to move there--by myself--last of all. Lynchburg, Virginia is a sauna of dazzling verdance and broken glass. During the day everything is too brightly hugely green to see the sky, only at night or dusk do other colors reach any kind of permanence. Lynchburg is where I am someday from.

What Wednesday Means

Wednesday is a day that tastes like dry-bread lunch, Wednesday afternoons especially smell of warm peanut-butter and dampish days that smugly refuse to rain. Nobody asked my mother if she wanted her first child born on a Wednesday. Nobody asked me if I wouldn't have preferred Thursday. I wanted far to go, goddamn it1 I want far to go as my birthright, why don't I at least get the official sanction of a prophecy backing a fate I know or hope to be true. far to go has some hopeful implications, after all, which full of woe is completely lacking in. Far to go implies you'll know when you get there, doesn't it, implies a rough and ready life with strange adventures and journeys that unfold like stories, Thursday is practically born with interesting stories of itself to tell schoolmates and grandchildren, but far to also implies eventual rest, eventual destination, eventual success damnit, and rest and surcease from the nagging that comes like a migraine to the back of your sleepless head and whines, maybe you're not there after all, maybe you never did it, what you set out to reach, maybe you've just been fooling yourself all these years. Far to go suggests an eventual end to the refrain of 'I don't belong here'. My little sister, the ungratefully lucky little bitch, got Friday and is she ever loving and giving. She could hardly help it, my sister seems to have been born into a world that was just waiting for an adorable little girl-child to come along, my sister has always known a world that likes her, that's glad she's here. Everyone she meets is appropriately loving and giving, and my sister loves everyone as though she had one of those ever-refilling fairy-tale bags to draw from. My baby sister loves everyone and it doesn't cost her a thing, and she is never without an ample stock to give, which she does, kindly and freely, with generous smiles, knowing she will never be left with empty hands.

It's Great in Dayton

Dayton, Ohio, is a city the color of cracked cement. The rain smells of rotting fast-food wrappers; the snow tastes like dead leaves and dried lemon peel. Downtown is a tall square block of pawnshops, XXX movie parlors, and burnt-out apartments. My family chose to move there after a year living in Auburn, Maine; a state my mother hated with the same steely resignation she would later turn on cockroaches, body-fat, and her adolescent patients.

My origins vary with my mother’s moods. Sometimes she prayed to God for a child, sometimes she forgot her birth-control. I was delivered by angels, by imps, and by 38 unbearable hours of terrible labor. In any event, I arrived on a Wednesday, at 3:00 in the afternoon, two weeks late and indignantly squalling. I would have liked Thursday and far to go; I am haunted by images of birth-destined adventures through the drunkard’s Venice of gilded canals or the drug-lined streets of Amsterdam. “What you want and what you get aren’t always one and the same,” is my mother’s sing-song refrain. Wednesday’s child is full of woe, and the farthest my family and I got was Dayton, Ohio.

We lived in a two-story house like those featured on the covers of insurance pamphlets. Red brick, blue and white aluminum siding, and a driveway my parents re-painted every spring. My parents bought it in the 1970’s for about $80,000, and sold it fifteen years later for $62,000. It was a nice enough property, and well-lit, but potential buyers objected to the crack-house two doors down.

The house seemed perfect to me, because that’s where I lived. The front-yard sloped at just the right angle for rolling down, and it was conveniently located near a small park, a Baskin-Robbins and the Good Samaritan Hospital. My mother’s second child, also not a boy, was born there. There are pictures of me at four years, pushing a plastic Fischer-Price lawn mower across the crushed-grass double-lot. There are other pictures, less easily explained, of me standing naked in the back yard beneath a clear plastic umbrella.

My little sister and I shared a single, not-quite-large-enough bedroom that was usually divided I Love Lucy style with a strip of tape or chalk line down the middle. The wallpaper was white patterned with tiny blue and red birds perched in very green trees. It peeled back temptingly in corners, where an older layer of orange paper showed through. Wooden bookcases, also green, lined one entire wall. Opposite it was a set of bunk beds made up with flannel sheets. My sister slept on the top bunk because she wasn’t afraid of heights. I slept on the bottom because I liked the cave effect, and had a tendency to wet the bed long after my sister grew out of it. In the space under my bed lived strange shadows that smelled like my father shaving. I never actually saw them, but I knew they were there because sometimes I woke up from strange dreams with the stale doughnut smell of Old Spice prickling my throat.

Downstairs was a 70’s style den, complete with darkly stained woodeny trim and geometrically patterned curtains. Our color television, which tended to get stolen and replaced on a regular basis, sat on a wheeled cart there; when my father was home he usually sat there too.

The only way out of the den was through the brown shag carpeted dining room. My mother likes to reminisce about following me around the dinner table with a vacuum cleaner while I crumbled matzos into my mouth. Cracker crumbs show up terribly on a dark carpet, she says.

My toy trucks and my sister’s Big Bird oven lived on scrubby white plastic shelves in the kitchen. We played there because it was the easiest room in the house to clean, and my mother could watch us while she cooked dinner. From infancy to adolescence, the kitchen in that house always smelled of garlic and burnt toast. Dinner was usually preceded by the news on NPR, accompanied by my mother’s classical music records and followed by my father crying. I generally refused to eat ¾ of the food on my plate on basic principle, and got sent to my room halfway through the meal. I spent most of my childhood kicking things in the room I shared with my sister, or hiding out at the park several blocks away.

Dayton is the sort of place where grown-ups like to talk fondly about children making up their own adventures, without the corrupting influence of school activities or video games. It’s not a very exciting place; there’s little to do except fight and fuck. I spent a lot of time playing incredibly complicated games with whatever kids happened to be at the park’s play-ground. I also learned about sex, watched the Challenger explode on grainy public school TV, and ran away from my parent’s house 87 times, never making it beyond the state line.

Like most houses in Ohio, ours was not air-conditioned, so my sister and I spent most of the summer packed away at girl-scout camp. It wasn’t air-conditioned either, but the teen-age counselors there did try to keep us too distracted to notice the heat. At camp I learned how to use a machete and how to fight with boys, both skills that rarely got used past adolescence. I came home one August to discover that Satanists had sacrificed my cat, my father had suffered a nervous breakdown, and my bedroom was painted pink, but none of those events left me with any definite combatant.

My family moved to Arizona when I was a teenager; a direct result of my father’s Librium fueled collapse. One of my friends likes to comment that everyone has had a dysfunctional childhood, some just carry it more closely than others. I prefer to keep mine on the other side of the country, in a termite-ravaged house in Ohio.