My Life as a Goddess

by Guy Branum

  Finally, Uncle Ray was a drinker. Until this point, it was an issue that had barely affected me. All of my mother’s male relatives drank like it was their profession,2 and generally, Ray stayed out of my way as much as I stayed out of his. The last thing a guy with a good buzz on wants is a grade-schooler explaining to him what Hobbits are in excruciating detail.

  This trip, however, was different.

  You see, on our first day at Disneyland, we left the park at noon. Traditionally, the only thing that can cause a family to leave Disneyland at noon is a toddler with churro-induced diarrhea. This was not why we left. Our parents told us that the park was going to close down for two hours so the attendants could have lunch. This seemed odd to me. However, since these facts were explained to me by my mother, that gentle creature who’d taught me what clouds were made of, how rainbows happened, and who God was, I trusted their veracity.

  The second day it happened, I was less trusting. First of all, the rides kept operating as we were leaving. I pointed this out. My dad told me it was just the people who worked at Disneyland riding them. I also noted that Disney appeared to have a flawed business model: Our supermarket, for example, did not close for lunch; some people had lunch while other people worked, and with a venture as large as Disneyland, it seemed like a similar plan was possible.

  My cousins and sister were dull-eyed sheep going where directed. I was stuck on the clear flaws in the story. Yes, I was mad that I was being made to leave Disneyland, but I was even madder that the story didn’t make sense. I wanted someone to explain it to me, and I was demanding such an explanation very loudly.

  What I never bothered to notice were the two six-packs my uncle Ray openly and notoriously consumed back at the trailer park before our return to the Happiest Place on Earth™. I was seven, so I was inattentive to alcohol sales policies—specifically, to the fact that Disneyland didn’t sell booze. Uncle Ray, meanwhile, was not a human being who could spend twelve straight hours in such a place, so the story of the park shutdown had been the compromise tacitly reached. Tragically, all of this could have been avoided if we’d properly understood the science of butt-chugging in 1983.

  Let’s learn a lesson about me: At the age of seven, I had some instinctive understanding of the laws of economics, enough to recognize that shutting down one’s business in the middle of the day was flawed, but I did not fully notice the human being in front of me gunning twelve Budweisers. That is, theories, facts, and stories have always been very interesting to me, but I’m really great at ignoring things that are actually happening in front of my face. Kind of like if the Department of Education were a person.

  Like all major family tourism attractions, Disneyland insatiably consumes the wealth of America’s beleaguered working class. Also like all major family tourism attractions, it is surrounded by parasitic minor tourist attractions that survive off the leavings and spatterings of family vacation dollars that do not end up landing in the mouse’s maw.3 There’s a Medieval Times, a pirate rip-off of Medieval Times, and lots of other ancillary family entertainments that tempt hardworking midwestern plumbers with the hope that an evening there will delight their children while being moderately less expensive than time spent in Tomorrowland. It’s everything Adam Smith dreamed of.

  One such enterprise is Knott’s Berry Farm. It is an amusement park located on the farm where the boysenberry was invented.4 I know that doesn’t seem like anything particularly impressive, but California is a place without history. Virginia can build its Busch Gardens adjacent to the first democratic legislature in North America, but on the West Coast, which didn’t really get going until the mid-1960s, such things were impossible. California history goes pretty quiet in between the gold rush and the first McDonald’s being built. Thus, we have a berry-themed amusement park.

  Every time my family went on vacation to Southern California—or, as we children referred to the lower half of the state, “Disneyland”—we would spend one day at Knott’s Berry Farm. To be clear, it has rides and shows and a high-quality, affordable fried chicken dinner. Solid entertainment, but nothing like the Imagineering of the Walt Disney corporation. Knott’s Berry Farm was the clove sorbet with which we cleansed our palates before returning for another course of the Happiest Place on Earth™.

  Knott’s Berry Farm did offer one amusement I have not mentioned: liquor. My uncle Ray found the good time he’d been seeking the duration of our vacation. He could ride roller coasters while shitfaced. This shifted the dynamic of the vacation. We would not be returning to Disneyland. We were now spending the remainder of our vacation enjoying the off-brand delights of a former fruit stand. It was a harrowing foreshadowing of Inauguration 2017.

  However, Serendipity knew the game she was playing, for if I’d had a sober uncle or if Mr. Disney hadn’t inflicted his temperance upon his guests, I may never have encountered the plate of fried dough that changed my life.

  One of the days we were at Knott’s Berry Farm, I was playing a carnival game of some sort, doing very poorly because my targeting skills are bad and were even worse during that period when I was growing half a foot every year. If only there had been a carnival game about knowing all the plotlines on The Love Boat. When I turned around, my mother had a plate that she offered to me and the other kids. We broke off pieces and ate what was resoundingly the most delightful thing I’d ever experienced. Even though there were no animatronic pirates or struggling actresses dressed like princesses, I was pretty happy.

  Then several months passed. Months spent back at school—the drudgery of showing my work in math, being yelled at for my handwriting, playing with G.I. Joes. I was separated by nearly 7 percent of my lived life from the days in Buena Park’s most seductive tourist attraction, but I still remembered this second-best part of our trip.5

  I approached my mother in our home and started to request that she make the dish in question. My mother and I had a rigorously understood entente within the household. I would be the obedient, studious best boy on the planet, and in exchange, she would cook me any food I desired. As time went on, certain strictures were placed upon the agreement: Once I started fifth grade, simply demanding homemade doughnuts on a Wednesday afternoon was no longer really practical, but at this time such boundaries were rare. Chronic weight problems start so beautifully, don’t they?

  However, I did not know what to ask for. I remembered the thing I’d eaten. Truly, its magnificence had burned its flavor, smell, and image upon my brain. I said I wanted that thing from Knott’s Berry Farm. My mother didn’t know what I meant, exactly, as we’d eaten lots of things at Knott’s Berry Farm.

  I plumbed the depths of my mind. I turned the fullness of my not inconsiderable seven-and-a-half-year-old deductive skills to the purpose of describing this Elysian treat that my mother would make for me if I simply asked for it. My mother, mind you, was not annoyed. She was going to do it; she just needed to know what I wanted.

  “It was fried spaghetti. Fried spaghetti with sugar on it.”

  It was the best description I could muster.

  My mother was having none of this. You didn’t eat fried spaghetti, and you certainly didn’t cover it with sugar.

  “We ate it with jelly.”

  By this point she was certain I was doing that kid thing where you don’t make any sense and you’re describing something you just dreamed. Surely this fried spaghetti with sugar was just a little fat-boy fantasy, like a kiddie pool full of Jell-O, or having a soda fountain installed in my nightstand. She went back to her housework.

  I was broken. How could this have happened? My instinctive bond of understanding with my mother had failed, and I had been denied a sweet treat. I questioned my own sanity. Had I simply dreamed this impossibly perfect food?

  The answer was no. It was a funnel cake. I, at seven years old, was asking my mother to make a funnel cake on what was probably a weekday. She probably would have tried it. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that I didn’t get a funnel c
ake, and I was pretty sure I’d never get a funnel cake ever again because I did not know what it was named.

  I had seen the power a word could have, and I never wanted to be without that power again.

  After I became literate, I learned an important lesson about calendars: They list holidays. Now, most holidays don’t need listing. Big holidays exist in the world, they are palpable. Christmas, Halloween, and Valentine’s Day show up in stores months before they actually happen. People’s houses change, TV programming changes, you get to miss school, and, yes, you get themed snacks. These are regular, American, gentile holidays.6

  But there were other themed snacks. Every winter, there’d come this day when my mom was grating potatoes and stirring and frying and serving them to me for breakfast with sour cream. There was a day in the springtime when a cracker and a story about Moses would happen, and they were great. They were food and stories and a special feeling I enjoyed. After I acquired literacy, I learned to notice their names written in small letters at the bottom of the days on the calendar.

  Autumn was a nice slew of events. The school-missing and the ham of Thanksgiving, the latkes and the discussion of how we weren’t supposed to eat ham on Hanukkah, then the presents and school vacation and breakfast ham of Christmas. And the New Year’s Day black-eyed peas and ham. It was quite a ham-based run.7 I’d had a great time, but I had, honestly, developed a problem. I was hooked. Addicted. For the better part of two months, I’d had a steady stream of thematic treats, and my body needed more.

  I think my mom got me a chocolate Advent calendar that year, too. That was not okay. No child who’s getting multiple religion-based holidays should go deep enough into Christianity to receive a daily dose of chocolate counting down the days to Christmas. Not when latkes are also in play. At least there weren’t enough Jews to find gelt in my town.

  The point is that after New Year’s Day, I crashed. I was jonesing for some biblical stories and a ritually significant cookie. I was looking everywhere for a fix. So I went to my old friend The Calendar to see what she had for me. There, in small, precise letters under January 6, was a word.

  “What is ‘Epiphany’?” I asked my mom.

  She had never heard this word. I showed it to her. She told me it wasn’t for us. It wasn’t a Jewish thing, and it wasn’t a regular Protestant thing, so I was getting no snacks.

  It was a good word, though. It sounded nice. I didn’t know why. I kept saying it to myself at school for no reason.

  I went to the dictionary. It was a valuable book, not as fun as an encyclopedia,8 but I went to it first all the same. I assiduously flipped through the E’s and eventually found it: “Epiphany.” It was a holiday, the commemoration of the Magi visiting the Christ child, or his baptism or his circumcision or something. But it was also another thing: “A usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature of something, an intuitive grasp of reality through something usually simple and striking, an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure.”

  I hadn’t known a word could carry so much in it. It described a shocking, striking power I hadn’t known existed but had maybe felt the edge of. This beautiful-sounding word (almost as euphonious as the word “euphonious”) had an even more beautiful, powerful meaning. Learning the meaning of the word “epiphany” was an epiphany. Again, I wanted more.

  The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is an idea in linguistics that language influences the world we perceive. Edward Sapir said, “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.” It’s what that Amy Adams movie with the space squids is about.

  Do you know what a “velleity” is? My Microsoft Word doesn’t. The word has a red squiggly line under it right now. I had to check with the Internet to make sure I’d spelled it right. (I hadn’t. No one said I was a good speller. That said, when I corrected the spelling, Word still had no idea what this word was.)

  A velleity is the lowest valence of desire. It’s a wish so slight you’d never even act on it. Can you have a velleity if you don’t know what that word means? I don’t know, because I do.

  If you don’t know the words “coral,” “fuchsia,” “amaranth,” or “cerise,” can you see them as distinct colors or do they just all look pink to you? It’s not a rhetorical question. That’s the question the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis answers, and the answer is “Kind of and kind of not.”

  This strange little hunger of mine changed me. The same way my hunger for snacks made me fat, my hunger for words engorged me. It made me fit in spaces differently. Whether I realized it or not, I had wanted these words for the power they would give me. Power in the world, definitely: Prime-time television had made clear to me that the world was run by people with better vocabularies than the farmers and construction workers of my hometown. I wanted to tussle in the world of kings and princes. But there were more private and subtle powers I wanted, too. I wanted to be able to explain the ways I felt that did not make sense. I wanted to put words to lonelinesses, desires, and fears that it seemed my classmates and cousins didn’t have.

  Like most children, I was a shithead. I spent years voraciously consuming all the language I could, sliding it around in my brain and in my mouth to sop up all the feelings inside me. And when I finally had the words, who was there to know what any of those fucking words meant? Communication isn’t a thing you can do alone.

  Let’s be honest: There were people. My mom and teachers, kind of. But definitely not my peers. They told me that I talked weird. They called me “Gandhi” because I was always talking fancy, which frankly was strange at a school where around a quarter of the kids were South Asian. My dad said I was “putting on airs.” My dad’s parents, whose education had ended at eighth grade, thought I was making fun of them when I used an unorthodox word. I just thought if we had nice words like “clergy” or “textile” or “epiphany,” we ought to use them.

  Books were full of words that let me see the whole world and myself with clarity and precision, but the price was that I lived in a world where the only people who seemed to really understand me lived in books. Thank God I ended up learning the word “Faustian,” so I could succinctly describe this bargain to exactly no one.

  But if there was a word I could never really understand the meaning of in Yuba City, California, in the 1980s, it was “normal.”

  On a very fundamental level, the moral of this story is that I’m not particularly observant of my fellow human beings. In the same way I couldn’t see that Uncle Ray’s drunkenness was what forced us out of Disneyland for the afternoon, I just never paid enough attention to the people around me at school or in my family to be able to communicate with them. A different person—by which I mean a different gay ten-year-old—could have felt his way through the texture of their world and language. He could have found the nuances of their world. He could have figured out what I was supposed to talk about and how I was supposed to talk about it. He could have used that language to camouflage himself from their scrutiny and for no other purpose. Because one of the things the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis teaches us is that the world you live in defines your language and your language defines your world, and Yuba City, California, in the 1980s was not a world that had sensitive little boys in it. It had a language that was very complex and nuanced in its descriptions of horses, rifles, and pickup trucks, but no words for things that were interesting or cathartic to me. Like, say, “catharsis.”

  I realized that saying the right thing was not an option. These words I’d hoped would give me power had made me a target. They marked me as an outsider in the only world I’d ever known. The young homosexual is, however, a consummate survivor. If my voice, diction, and vocabulary were going to mark me as untowardly florid, I would hide myself in the only other way I could. So, for a decade, I became quiet.

  * * *

  1. While
most Jews’ distaste for camping is a mixture of lack of exposure in their childhood, coupled with the nasty connotation the word “camp” acquired for us during the middle part of the twentieth century, my mother’s distaste was the result of excessive exposure. While her mother was an Arkansas Jew, her father was just a regular impoverished, illiterate Arkansas hillbilly. Thus, my mother spent many weeks of her childhood on the side of some mountain, trying to figure out how to cook an opossum her mother would not allow her to eat because it wasn’t kosher. She assures me the answer is parboiling it on its own before removing the skin and glands. “Then you just use it like squirrel,” she says.

  2. This quality is, of course, derived from their gentile ancestry. I am told they were noted bootleggers of the prohibition era whose financial success was inhibited by their taste for their own product.

  3. Despite this derisive image of the Walt Disney Corporation, its intellectual properties, and its subsidiaries as a predator, please do not think I espouse the opinion that said entities are insidiously evil. Disneyland is a magical place that is more than worth what you pay for it, and Disney is a hell of a movie studio to boot. Essentially, I don’t hold that counterintuitive position because it’s super-1990s and trite. I do oppose the Disney corporation’s continued lobbying efforts to extend the period of copyright to protect Mr. W. Disney’s control of Mickey Mouse, mostly because I’d really like to see Brave New World in the public domain.

  4. You may be saying, “How can a berry be ‘invented’?” This is because you are not from a farm town and have no understanding of agriculture. Basically, they bred four existing berries together into a new berry that was sweeter and less tart than its progenitors. Please learn more about fruit domestication before you try reading further in this book. It’s going to keep coming up. Every event from my childhood occurred in the presence of some member of genus Prunus.