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Page 18
Your roots are showing
“So, what’s your family like?” Maria asked me, trying to draw attention away from our inflamed genitalia. “I mean besides Arthur; like your mom and dad.” Talk about a libido decimator. Where to begin?
“Isn’t it a little too early in our relationship to ask me about my family?”
“No, not at all. After all the messy drama my family’s inflicted on you over the last few days it would be refreshing to hear about yours. I want to know everything about you right now; don’t leave a thing out. So, you’re family?”
“We weren’t exactly the family that refreshes; in fact we were completely dysfunctional,” I answer and she gives me a dismissive wave of her hand and says,
“I’m so tired of hearing everybody describe their families as dysfunctional. I mean, where are these perfectly functioning family units that stand out in stark contrast to this sea of dysfunction that everybody sees everywhere? Did it ever occur to you that maybe your family isn’t dysfunctional at all but just human?”
“No…..NO! That doesn’t describe my family AT ALL.”
I come from a large family and while I was growing up, survival of the fittest was the order of the day. The oldest and strongest made sure that none of the other siblings bonded in smaller groups for fear of losing the hold they had on us. I was among the weak ones, and I remember much of my childhood as though I’d been the resident of an internment camp.
My brothers were pathologically competitive. Often they would make sweeps through the house or the neighborhood plucking the more sensitive of us from our hiding places. “Schnell, schnell,” they would scream, like their SS officer heroes on World War II TV shows. We would be pressed into playing games of football, baseball or hockey during which we would be physically run down to the point of exhaustion, with some of us left to wander insensate onto the railroad tracks in back of our house. On the playing field they were brilliantly lethal, effectively reinforcing our inferiority, but what my brothers really excelled at were mind games.
The summer of my thirteenth birthday was a particularly tense time for the family. For two and a half solid weeks in late July the news on TV had been dominated by two horrifying but unrelated stories about disturbed people who killed other members of their family, and the perpetrators were true to form and way over their heads into Jesus.
Locally, the first week of August during that same summer, three blocks from our house in fact, we had a gruesome axe murdering of parents by their adult son, which didn’t go over too well with Adolf and Eva, which is what we used to call my parents (males earned respect in our house by being bellicose and psychologically disturbed; females by being long sufferers and sneaky.)
Going into the second week of August, all the members of my family started backing away from each other, even the tough ones; they were thinking that maybe the day of retribution was at hand. We suddenly started giving each other space, something we would never have dreamed of doing before.
We’d stare at each other and look quickly away when we got caught. We were all trying to figure out if our many grievances with one another were worth killing for and who was most likely to crack first and who would be the first victim. When you caught someone staring at you that way, you weren’t sure whether they were looking at you trying to decide if you deserved to die or if they were worried you were going to pop them.
As I was also going through puberty at the time, I became completely unnerved by the atmosphere of gloom that hung over our household for the rest of that very hot, humid summer. ‘I don’t even like these people,’ I thought, ‘I didn’t choose this family. It’s so unfair; this is not what I signed up for.’
Things all came to a head a few days before school started up and I for one was especially worried because it seemed to me that the first week of school, when we’d all be pre-occupied with matters of education, would be the perfect time to strike. My older teenage brothers had been spending more and more time away from home, and their absence whipped our concerns into hysteria. ‘I think they’re making plans to get us,’ my little sister whispered to me.
Those few days before the commencement of our (last?) school year we couldn’t seem to get enough of each other’s company because we had by this time decided that keeping every one in sight was our best insurance against multiple homicide.
Finally though, one night while we were all together in the living room, my dad yelled at my little sister, all of seven years old – “Stop looking at me that way, I’m not going to kill you, for chrissakes!” and that kind of broke the spell. We realized that we weren’t killers, just assholes.
We were still in the process of healing when Halloween loomed. The youngest family members, me, Tracy and Debbie, begged our mother not to let the older kids take us out for Halloween. “Right,” she said, vacantly, hands on hips. Then in a manic outburst she said, “Ok, we’re gonna take you out and we’re gonna dress up. Did you hear that, Lenny?” My sisters and I looked at each other as we heard our father in the living room mumble, ‘Jesus Christ’
My mother, now progressing towards a full manic episode, screamed in the general direction of my father, “That’s not what I want to hear, Lenny. It’s time you started taking some responsibility for these kids.”
“It’ll be fun,” he yelled sarcastically
Finally the night arrived, the only truly scary Halloween that I’ve ever had, and we were lead by my parents, who ended up eating most of our candy while we were still ambling about from house to house. My sister Debbie went as Mary Magdalene, my sister Tracy went as a bird with birth defects caused by DDT and I went as the host on that TV game show where everybody had to dress up in silly costumes except him.
My parents went as Oxen.
Maria was all sympathy after I related the travails of my childhood, only somewhat embellished to drive home the point that I had every excuse to justify my being damaged goods, which she confirmed was how Uncle Arthur had described me.
“I like bad boys,” she said and it made me feel just a tad proud and grateful to hear her describe me like that.
Chapter XIV: Disturbing Things