100% Disaster-Free

When you’re a child, or at least when I was, words have very little meaning until you figure them out for yourself. I did not have a concept of violence as something that affected me directly; it was something my parents talked to each other about in concerned grown-up voices. Violence was something random, that was my immediate understanding. It was something that happened to other people, usually bad people. It was something that could not be explained or anticipated and it often involved guns. Most importantly, it was something foreign that we had to be protected against. It sounded unpleasant, if vaguely interesting, and it was obviously something children weren’t supposed to know about because they always changed the subject when they caught me listening.
In Dayton, Ohio, in the 1980’s, violence was a way of describing events that took place outside of the familiar context. My family lived in one of those neighborhoods people refer to while speaking longingly of traditional family values. Everyone knew everyone else; we played in each other’s sprinklers, borrowed countless cups of sugar, and held block parties every summer. Violence was a strictly external phenomenon; it had nothing to do with the crack heads on the corner, the rapist two doors down across the street, or the residual smell of fear in my parent’s house. We all went to school with bruises sometimes, that was normal. Violence is by definition pathological; therefore it did not describe us.
All through elementary school I got my ass kicked regularly on the playground. I can vividly remember the sudden nausea that accompanies a hard punch in the stomach, the breathlessness. That did not count as violence because there were perfectly normal reasons for it, a familiar context. Boys will be boys. You know how kids are.
School violence, or at least our awareness of it has increased geometrically over the last decade, and with that has come a drastic change in our cultural perspective. Currently schoolyard fights are viewed as pathological and considered grounds for expulsion, when I was little they were perfectly normal, and the worst consequence was being made to hold hands with the person you’d been fighting with. This is important because it demonstrates how subjective the process of labeling any particuliar event as violent can be. I have many memories that seem ordinary, if somewhat unpleasant, to me, but could be labeled as violent by other people.
My sister and I were not affected by the violence on demand phenomenon of pop culture because we were never exposed to it. We didn’t have cable, rarely saw movies, and the closest thing we had to video games was something that vaguely resembled Pong. My parents also monitored what we did see or read fairly closely. The closest thing I have to a memory of mass-media violence is watching cartoons in the half-asleep early morning time before school. I vividly remember my baby sister curled on the granola-textured couch, watching Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner blow each other up while my mom brushed her sleep-snarled hair.
I did come across violence in the printed media, from time to time. We went on one of many miserable family summer vacations to Washington DC when I was eight. All I can really remember is horrible sunburn and the smell of subways and sweat. I was always bored; my dad gave me his Time magazine to look at, and to keep me quiet. It was a special issue on gun violence, featuring page after page of thumbnail prints of people’s faces, long black-and-white rows of them. It looked a lot like a yearbook, but all of the people in it were dead. Underneath each person’s picture was their name, age, and a brief description of how they had died, or rather of the circumstances surrounding their death. The focus was on handguns, so it only featured people who’d been shot. This confirmed my early supposition that violence was something that always involved guns. I was fascinated by this magazine, but didn’t feel any connection to it. I could not emotionally grasp the relationship between those pages of grainy images and real people.
Reading that magazine was like seeing the Vietnam Memorial; I could run my fingers over the names, I knew that each name represented someone who used to be alive and was now dead, and I knew that this was important, but I didn’t understand just how. The people I knew did not fight in wars, or at least did not talk about it. Dayton was too small for gangs and most people couldn’t afford to buy a gun. There was nothing to suggest to me that violence wasn’t in some way restricted to distant, exotic locales like Manhattan or Vietnam.
All of this has left me with a very limited understanding of what violence is. Like the adults I used to eavesdrop on, I still tend to view violence as something that exists outside of normal, everyday life. I am much more quick to identify as violence crimes which I perceive to be unusual, like terrorism, rather than things which are also hurtful but, unfortunately, not uncommon, like domestic abuse. Certainly I have not been exposed to enough images of violence to have become desensitized to it, but as one of my peers pointed out, perhaps I gew up so sorrounded by violence that I never really noticed its presence. A sort of cultural inability to see the forrest for the trees. Although I understand now that violence is generally defined as anything that involves physically harming another person or piece of property, my personal definition is still somewhat confused. Even as an adult I am still searching for a way to understand how I am affected by the violence I encounter, and trying not to fall into the trap of defining violence as something that can only happen to other people.

Crucifying My Dad

Insanity runs through my family history like a cheap romance novel. Depression, obsession, schizophrenia, it’s all there, and it tends to lend a certain surreal cast to everything we say to one another. I am haunted by my family’s plastic past.

My father’s father owned a small store in Detroit, Michigan. He sold bicycles, lawnmowers, and bathroom sinks, the cheap marbleized kind with plywood cabinets built beneath. He used to come home from work, set his head on the table and cry quietly for hours as everyone in the family moved edgewise about him. In time my own father would do the same. He tells us stories over shabbes dinner, stories of his own tormented past as though answering a question none of us has yet asked. His mother, my favorite grandmother, would load all the kids in the car and set off merrily down the freeway, chirping suggestions of driving them all into an embankment. She chain-smoked Carleton cigarettes and locked herself in the bathroom for entire days. These are the stories my father offers up as heirlooms, undisputable as the passed-down tablecloths and wavery silver. In my family the past shifts with dinner-table discussions; it was always the best or worst of times.

Gumball Husks

I tell you—

Burning maple leaves smell like toast when it grew on trees,
powder snow squeaks like confectioner’sugar under your boot, like
the coating on cheap marzipan—
(Mar-zi-pan: you know, the orphanage candy
made of almonds and bourbon-scrapings,
leftover lady’s lotion, glycerin, clove-pinks and
cirtronella rinds.)
—Candy in Ohio doesn’t grow
on trees. Pine-cones. Frosted pine-cones. God provides from earth and sky
what doesn’t rot your teeth.

Homesick is Sexy

11.27.99
12.04.03

Smoking a cigarette, listening to two young
men talk I suddenly experienced a strange
and intense need, as though I badly
needed to piss, but what I really needed
was sex. Sudden desperate intense
fucking. Were I a man I would have
had a raging hard on. Peculiar and
without warning. Randomnymity. Cold. I
was born in Maine on an unseasonably
cold day and have never since
managed to quite warm up. The
first thing my mother took me to
see was the Atlantic Ocean. I
have wanted ever since to go back.
Pre-determinism infantile obsession. Cold
cold cold. I should give up, go
home and jack off. Yes.

The Monsters You Know

Today I thought perhaps I hate winter so
because I am afraid of spring. I thought, I want to
sit out dreamily in the sun until I have the
technicolor gloss of protected grass. My
ragamuffin sweater hung awkwardly on me, sliding
off as I walked, my shoulders white as the
overexposed dust-jacket of a luridly avant-garde
book. I have turned so white, and I
used to be browner than Aje, summers ago
before either of us had jobs or bills.
Do I want to go back? Last night I
thought of dreams like smoky water.
Thought of a picture, black and white and
overexposed so that small details fade into the
objects around them. A picture of a
child’s bedroom and superimposed over it one
of those old style sailor’s maps with
the part about “Here there be Monsters”
circling round and something about a compass
rose.

The Ogres in Ohio

I tell you the burning maple leaves smell like toast, if it grew on trees, and the powder snow squeaks under your padded boots like confectioner’s sugar, like the coating on cheap marzipan—everything is good enough to set your stomach dead-firm against their food. It’s cold outside and the wind burns down your throat in face-whipping shots. It smells like grease inside that yellow kitchen, like decades of accumulated chicken-grease and paint and lumpy things sizzling in pans of margarine. It smells like orphan-dumplings and gingerbread. This is the kitchen of the ogre-god’s wife. They say she cooks children there, too, roasting them unevenly in the Luxe-Deluxe Grand-sized oven in a brisket nest of chopped carrots and frozen veg. And the smell’s so meaty-rich—like veal, of course, or bacon fat so rancid it’s gone sweet—the cooking smoke so dense with baby-fat and glaze you can catch whole gulping mouthfuls of it, just walking by downwind of the gutter vent, and the taste of it coats your tongue and your gums and the sides of your cheeks for days.

Should Have Turned Left at Albequerque

Having grown tired of the endless plaster and
paint of my surroundings I crawled beneath my
deskchair when no one was looking and
after carefully peeling the linoleate
tiling, commenced digging a tunnel to China with
a plastic spoon smuggled out of the cafeteria.
After getting several feet down I jumped into the
hole, sliding the tile back over my head and
continued, with occasional cigarette breaks, until
hitting a thick plug of stone. Luckily I
was prepared for this and, creating a
colorful explosion with several stolen sugar
packets and a couple lighters, was able to
blast my way through. The smoke was
thick enough to buoy me up for awhile, which
was fortunate as I had blasted away the ground
beneath me, but as it dissipated I began
falling faster and faster toward Shanghai.
I could smell opium and singed pork and my
stomach growled and I landed with a bump—
on a pile of grass clippings in an alley behind
the garage of a house I lived in 17 years ago.
My memory was so old most of my surroundings
were black and white, the edges of things kept
grew fuzzy and trailed off, to stare at
an object too long was like trying to make out
details through a thick and constantly
shifting fog.



Splinter shivered myself back into being in the black and white memory of my parent’s garage. The ground is concrete, slick and oily stained. Sleds and old wagons hang from the walls, bikes from a rack overhead. On the left a narrow extension has been added, doorless, seperated by a musty beam wall from the main garage with a simple gap left in the dividing wall to crawl through. A single window faced from it outside into the tangle of ivy and poison weeds, and this window terrified me. Why would such a room have a window unless someone was meant to live inside it? And anyone who lived there was sure to have been strange, pathological, the sort of person who would live in such a space would never be allowed to venture into neighbors’ houses for brownies and applejuice. And who banished them there, and what made them so terrible as to nessecitate being confined in such a space? And if it could happen once, it could happen....No, I was not at all afraid of who had lived there, the space was not haunted, I knew. But there were so many strange things wrong with me.

I Remember Virginia FRom the Womb

I’ve seen 25 years as my parent’s creation. I know my birthdays as anniversaries of their lives. My life is a scrapbook of my parents memories, and by parents, I mean my mother, who shapes endless reminiscences around my childhood milestones.

Remember Maine, she says, where I was born. It’s a rhetorical question; I was only one when we moved away to Ohio, and a bulge in my mother’s stomach when Maine arrived. I was conceived in Virginia, in Lynchburg, Virginia. I remember Virginia from my mother’s voice, her trick of saying ‘ya’ll’ and ‘critters’ sliding the words neatly into her Midwestern Michigan speech without dropping an ‘r’. I remember Virginia from childhood visits overnight, driving, always driving in a school-bus, my parents' station wagon, a rented van. Field-trips, family vacations, summer-camp tours. Air full of midges and ticks in my hair, sweeps of green as deep as my granny’s fur coat, as prickly and with the same dappled depths of light. Nothing in Virginia shines, even wet leaves are too soaked in color to gleam there, even the naked steel tubes of playground swings and slides is reliably matte; talcum covers the state. Dusty-pollen, saline-air and industrial powder fills your lungs, mixing into a humoural mud. It squats down beneath your diaphragm, Virginia, when you breathe and the words in your mouth turn thick as barbecue—it’s a cliché because it’s true. Every vowel is burnt-umber seared earth red. No other air can compete with that; I remember Virginia from the womb.

Guilty Prayers

I get self-conscious in my parents' house. What Jewish woman doesn't? Even my mom moves a bit uncertainly in my grandmother's apartment. Though my baby sister, Jude, seems to make herself at home wherever she is--some combination of incredible social ease and supreme self-assurance. Jude can walk into a party of strangers and sit plop on the floor so naturally that within half an hour every couch is bare. Even those swanky standing in credit-card finery will crouch down on the balls of their feet to speak with her, greet and pass drinks. It is as though my sister is impervious of faux pas. I've seen her skills, hosted parties she's co-opted graciously. Whatever my sister happens to be doing is exactly the right thing to do. Maybe she's like her Aunt Elaine that way, or a more vivacious Elissa. Sometimes it seems like she was born with a double share of social ability--hers and mine. Sometimes I'm a little in awe of her social abilities, her bravery with people and effortless and semi-self-righteous composure. Being siblings though, I'm more impressed by these qualities themselves than the way she uses them. Is it a dreadful sin to be jealous of one's sister? Am I jealous of mine? Of the person she is or talents I'd like to have, the accolades I'd like to receive -- or at least deserve. I don't really know Jude that well, a statement my mother would find objectionable, and sad. I don't know how well Jude really knows me. And maybe we'll be closer as we age. To be honest I'm not sure it's important, one way or the other, to anyone but my mom. I don't write about Jude that often, actually. Sometimes, uncertainly, I pray for her; it's easier to do when she's unhappy, isn't that awful. Sometimes I pray to like her more, to be a better sister to her. Don't think I've ever wished to be like her. Tonight I try to pray we could be friends.

Burning Cigarettes

My father exists to memorialize the bite of his mother’s voice, her bitter mentholated exhales, too stern for sighs. My father may love her; he flew back for the funeral, and later, I think maybe, the memorial. Or maybe not; he doesn’t like his sisters plurally. Jews don’t put down the tombstone the capstone the grave marker granite what have you at funerals, no, the body is shroud-wrapped and buried, pine coffin in naked ground and nameless earth. Hebrew prayers muttered from transliterations and the ritual handful of earth; Jews don’t throw flowers, nothing else covers the newly anonymous dead. Only after a year is the memorial marker pulled into place, the final service held. Jews take a long time to say good-bye to the dead we rush to bury. Plant trees, burn candles, and leave pebbles on their grave at every visit. Not knowing the date of her death I forget why the yartzeit candle is waiting for me. I am waiting for the year my father forgets to light it, forgets to remember the end of my grandmother’s reign. If I don’t know the date I can’t forget her. Jews don’t believe in heaven, I mostly don’t believe in heaven, but if she’s there it’s full of ashtrays.

Three Hospitals

Missed my Grandma Molly’s funeral. Hospital. I picture her last weeks; a hospital bed with the name printed in blue on coarse white sheets, Beth-something-or-other, a sallow woman swaddled in colorless hospital blankets, a nest of tubes. Eyes closed, shrilling when anyone tries to remove her brown-frame glasses. I was 2 weeks from my fifteenth birthday, of course I don’t know her age. My father’s mother, Grandpa Abraham’s wife, his second wife. My Aunt Elaine’s stepmother, did she call her that? I never heard. They married while Elaine’s mother, the nameless wife, beat herself to pieces against the walls. Huntington’s Chorea; an institution. Was there divorce, annulment, some brief symbolic period of widowerhood? Did they sit Shiva while the frantic woman danced in iron shoes, turn her picture to the wall and shroud the mirrors; was she buried alive? Abraham, the unknown grandpa, choose poorly in love, or matrimony, Mildred his second wife was mad. Starkers, raving, Sylvia Plathological with a car full of kids. Or so her only son, my father claims.

Ice and Dirt

My grandparents are dead; both sets, both sides. Safely tucked in Jewish cemeteries in Michigan somewhere, somewhere near Detroit. Are they all four buried in the same one? We’ve been to only one of their funerals, my sister and I. The one for my mother’s mom, Granny Annie, whom she always called Ma. Always Ma, like Little House on the Prairies with a faintly Ashkenazic accent. Ma is a word that always sounds annoyed. It snowed, at her funeral, an unremarkable Sunday sort of snow, an I-can-wait-all-day-if-I-have-to British snow-globe kind of snow, a matronly grey-wool snow, the useless kind that falls in dryly brittle snow-god dandruff flakes, no good for powder nor packing, and crumbles when you try to snow ball it. The tombstones were grey and cold letter-molded concrete, they might have been the same color as the snow but no one scraped the ice back to find out.

Aleveh Shalom

We all hate Maine, my mother and I, where I was born. My stolid Jewish father had a breakdown there, losing his mind and his father’s life in the living room of an Auburn house heaped in snow. Do you remember, my mother asks? My father was such a different person then, even-tempered and more active than obsessive. I only know my father by hands and voice, fleshy tension smells and little notes signed with sardonic smiley faces. What is there to write about my father, I do not know him, and my mother’s hearsay makes shoddy evidence. I have a sister who hugs him in family pictures. A self-imposed/enforced restraining order. An audio-tape to listen to after he dies. It’s 13 years old, the tape, he made it when I was 12 or 13—the tape’s not dated, just sealed neatly into an envelope labeled “From Papa” with a note telling me to listen to it after he dies. That’s how he handed it to me. A little package in a white business envelope, note attached. It came with a tear-smudged papa-story and frequent reminders to listen to it as soon as possible. He wasn’t dying. I can’t remember if I showered afterwards. After hearing my name on this spoken-word death-letter pseudo-suicide-note, addressed specifically to me from a man who was supposed to be resting in peace. Aleveh shalom.

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?