A piece of advice if you ever have a cavity:
Do not try to eat an empanada for lunch when you still have a little bit of Novocaine in your mouth because then you might think you have chewed up and swallowed all of your empanada when you really haven't and the empanada chunks will be just hanging out in your cheeks making you look like a squirrel.
--my friend Helen. Clearly the reason we are friends is obvious.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
How I toiled!
For three comments (besides my own)? Oh woe is me, woe is me.
I suspect this is payback for my not commenting on anyone else's blog in the past several weeks. Or else my therapist WAS right, and you all have better things to do than read my rambling non-sensical musings on air travel, virtual reality, and soup cans. Perhaps I should have appealed to the lowest common denominator in you, and written about sex instead. That would certainly keep my attention.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go make an emergency appointment with my therapist. I hope she works Sundays.
I suspect this is payback for my not commenting on anyone else's blog in the past several weeks. Or else my therapist WAS right, and you all have better things to do than read my rambling non-sensical musings on air travel, virtual reality, and soup cans. Perhaps I should have appealed to the lowest common denominator in you, and written about sex instead. That would certainly keep my attention.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go make an emergency appointment with my therapist. I hope she works Sundays.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Hands Free
Dearest reader,
You might recognize a few pieces of this from my previous piece, Lend Me A Hand. This wasn't my attempt to cut corners by publishing regurgitated prose. I liked pieces of that story, but it wasn't working as a whole. But don't be surprised if you find a few pieces of that story in future stories as well. But since I'm cannabalizing my own work already, and it's only a few more steps to pure plagiarism, enjoy the originality while you can.
-JKH
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A few weekends ago, I spent the day at Reagan International Airport (or National Airport, depending on your political inclinations). I wasn't going anywhere, and I wasn't meeting anyone there. When visitors fly into town, I graciously provide them with highly detailed public transportation directions. It's not like the trip will be faster if I'm there, and why should we both suffer when only one of us has to?
Alas, there wasn't going to be any great reunions with long-lost relatives that particular day at Reagan International, which was fine with me, as I'd rather any lost relatives remain lost. Instead, I trekked to the airport as part of a self-imposed mental health program. Granted, these days spending time at the airport causes more mental health problems than it cures, but the cause and the cure are one and the same when you have a flying phobia.
I haven’t flown in years. I hated flying before it was fashionable to hate flying, back in the days when stewardess was still a politically correct term, and a boarding pass didn't come with a cattle prod. I was, as usual, ahead of my time. These days, a fear of flying is one of those convenient personality quirks that you use to avoid family reunions, or trot out at dinner parties to fill the uncomfortable silences.
“I had the worst flight last week to Nashville,” you might say, to a sea of nodding heads. “I refused to buckle my seat belt, and the flight attendant actually slapped me!”
But for me, flying isn’t just a minor annoyance, like Kathie Lee Gifford, or those soup cans with the pull tab that always break off in your hand, thereby defeating their entire purpose. Of all my irrational fears -- spiders, heights, ear hair -- flying is the most intense. Just hearing the words “frequent flyer” or “Mile High Club” is enough to give me the shakes. Although joining the latter is a slight incentive to getting over my fear. Sex in a Greyhound bus bathroom isn't nearly as classy.
In the beginning I tried to attack my fear with therapy, the first line of defense for both Jews and gentiles in Alcoholics Anonymous. One therapist tried to induce panic attacks to help me desensitize to the feeling of anxiety.
“Breathe with me,” she instructed. “We’ll breathe slow at first, and then speed up, and after a minute or two you will hyperventilate and panic.”
It seemed to me we were drawing close to the boundaries of legitimate therapy here. I didn't fully grasp the purpose of instigating panic attacks in someone with a panic disorder. Do therapists routinely treat violent sociopaths by handing them a meat cleaver and a puppy?
Luckily, an hour's worth of hyperventilating failed to trigger a panic attack, which was unsurprising since I usually spent half my day hyperventilating anyway. The only consolation was that I got to watch the therapist turn blue. I refused to pay her for wasting my time with that nonsense. She referred me to a collection agency, which, ironically, gave me a panic attack.
Next I tried virtual reality therapy, which had the added benefit of making me feel technologically advanced. The words "virtual therapy" conjured up images in my head of automatic can openers and flying cars that fold into your briefcase. As a child, I felt a special kinship with the hippest of cartoon families, the Jetsons, who seemed to live in a world of fantastic possibilities. Not like those backwoods, dinosaur-riding Flinstones. Seriously, what kind of psychopath wears a bone in her hair?
Unfortunately, I was thoroughly disappointed with the experience. I expected a high-tech, 21st century system operated by animatronic robots. Instead, a frumpy middle-aged therapist fit me with a pair of goggles, cranked up a machine bigger than a Yugo, and strapped me to an old airplane chair. As the machine whirred to life, a dull, lifeless two dimensional image of an airplane flickered into and out of view. My first generation Atari presented a more realistic image.
“Do I get a bag of peanuts with this?” I asked, considering whether it was a good idea to mock someone who had tied you to a chair. I have a tendency to annoy therapists. I use humor as a defense mechanism, making it particularly difficult for therapists to learn anything about me, other than that I use humor as a defense mechanism.
“So your mother would chase you around the house with scissors. How did that make you feel?”
“Knock knock.”
My sister generally disapproves of my sense of humor, especially when it is directed at our dysfunctional childhood.
“It’s a form of detachment, Jonah," she said, flipping through a photo album and folding a picture of our family in half so that our mother was transformed into a floating hand. "You refuse to deal with your legitimate emotions. It’s really self-destructive. Ok, we’ll have to talk about this later, I’m out of wine and the liquor store closes at midnight.”
Suddenly, the chair started rattling, apparently in an effort to simulate turbulence, but the feeling was closer to a vibrating washing machine (not altogether unpleasant, of course, but the goal was not to remind me of my last date). After a few minutes I got bored. The therapist came back in the room to check on me.
“So tell me, what’s your anxiety level at now?”
“Zero.”
“Zero? But you’re on an airplane!”
“No, I’m not. I’m sitting in your office. The graphics on this thing are horrible. I can hear your secretary talking about American Idol. This chair smells. And where are my peanuts?”
Fortunately insurance paid for these sessions. Otherwise I’d have another collection agency after me.
Over time, I've learned to work around my fear. It's not all that difficult, really, especially these days, when even sane people avoid flying as often as possible. If I need to go somewhere far away for an important occasion, like a wedding, or Cher's fourteenth farewell tour, I take trains. I usually just meet my fellow travelers at our destination, though occasionally I try to get them to take the train with me. They rarely agree. When my friend Brandon and I were planning a trip to the West Coast, I suggested that we take the train from New York.
"You want to go to Los Angeles by train?" he asked in an offended tone, like I had just suggested that he voluntarily contract gonorrhea. "Yeah, it might be fun!" I replied, poorly feigning excitement. Insincerity is not one of my talents, an especially problematic characteristic during my brief stint as a Baby Gap sales associate. If your baby looks fat in horizontal stripes, I'm not going to tell you otherwise.
I showed him the brochure, featuring a happy puppy perched atop an upper berth holding an Amtrak ticket. I figured no one can resist a happy puppy brochure, but Brandon wasn't convinced. He flew to Los Angeles without me, and I decided not to spend three days alone on a train, which might have driven me more insane than I already was. While he was gone, I watched that movie where Los Angeles is destroyed by a volcano. I didn't really want Brandon to be crushed by a lava flow, but I have a thing for poetic justice.
As a kid, I actually enjoyed flying, partly because of the in-flight peanuts -- we only had peanuts in butter form at home -- and partly because my usual destination was my grandparents' home in Florida, which meant Disneyworld, lox cream cheese, and a week away from my parents. It also meant a week with my cantankerous step-grandfather, who would probably force me to simonize his car and play shuffleboard, but that was a small price to pay for breakfast with Mickey.
But as my body aged, my mind became more anxious, as if baldness and bravery were inversely correlated. For every hair that I lost, a new fear emerged. Crowds, heights, eating at Olive Garden -- no activity was immune from obsession. I'm not sure if a receding hairline induces fear or vice versa, but the medical community should lace Propecia with Xanax. That pill would sell like hotcakes. Somewhere along the road, half-way between a Ceaser cut and a comb-over, flying went from exciting to unfathomable.
At first, the developing phobia was frustrating, like I was voluntarily placing a 200-mile leash around my neck. There was still so much of the world I hadn't seen, at least, outside of the Epcot World Pavilion, which is a pale comparator. You can't fool me, Disney Corporation. The real Eiffel Tower is not made of cardboard.
But over the years, my disappointment in not being able to travel to exotic lands (sorry Canada, maple syrup and Mounties do not an exotic destination make) was steadily replaced with more pressing concerns, like whether plucking a nose hair will result in two growing back in its place, and any residual disappointment has been consciously repressed. The mind has an amazing capacity for rationalization and self-denial, a lesson that I learned years ago when my father found a charge to a gay phone sex line on the monthly long-distance bill.
"Must have been a wrong number," he said, quickly whipping out his checkbook and conveniently ignoring the fact that the call lasted sixteen minutes.
But coming from a family in which an emotion didn't exist unless it was communicated -- most often in screaming bloody murder form -- I was never quite able to completely repress this feeling that my life was missing something. Unlike the other missing elements in my life (functional parents, a full head of hair, a digestive system that can process corn), this one was entirely self-made. I couldn't blame anyone else for the leash I had put around my own neck. I had the time, the wherewithal (after several years of working at a corporate law firm, I had wherewithal coming out my ears), and the desire to travel. Still, I couldn't bring myself to face that big tin can in the sky.
Occasionally, the issue comes up at my weekly therapy session with my social worker, Nancy, most often when I come across a beautiful travel destination that is only accessible by air, thereby triggering my self-flagellation anew. Nancy has a last name, but I never learned it, choosing instead to remember her simply as Nancy. Something about a woman with just one name makes her seem powerful and dynamic, like Madonna, or Jackee, either of whom could successfully plum the depths of my psyche. The same theory doesn't apply to men with just one name. I don’t want Fabio asking me about my overbearing mother.
"So why do you hate flying?" Somehow Nancy had managed to actually learn something about me apart from my affection for knock-knock jokes.
"The people," I replied, fiddling with the expired passport I still carried around in my backpack. It hadn't been stamped since 1999, when I travelled Europe with my friend Beverly, in an attempt to become more worldly and sophisticated. It didn’t take. I still prefer non-carbonated water and good hygiene. "Being trapped in a tiny space with hundreds of people freaks me out."
"Why are you afraid of being trapped with people?" she asked, dabbing her eyes with lubricant drops. She claimed that she needed to constantly rewet her eyes because of her allergies, but I noticed that she usually took out the drops when our conversations veered towards disturbing territory. The day I told her about my Miss Piggy obsession, I thought she was going to drown in saline solution.
"Embarrassing myself." I glanced at a picture of her son in his college graduation gown -- or, someone I assumed was her son -- on the desk behind her. He was very attractive. Staring at his picture was probably the reason I had stuck around long enough to get past the knock-knock jokes. "Or worse. What if I freak out on the plane, and they think I'm a terrorist or something?"
Drop, drop.
"You don't look like a terrorist."
"That's very narrow-minded, isn't it?"
Drop, drop.
"So what would make you feel better about flying?"
"Well, maybe if I could fly by myself, in a small private room, so I couldn't panic and embarrass myself in front of people," I replied, simultaneously wondering if she would notice if I took her son's picture home. "Like a flying closet."
"A closet." Drop, drop. "You want to fly in a closet?"
"Yeah,” I said, planning my escape with picture in hand. “ Can I do that?"
Nancy had to cut our session short that day, having run out of eyedrops. But it's not as if we were getting anywhere anyway. I needed to try something other than just talking about it, something a little more proactive, something that stopped just short of actually getting on a plane. So I cleared my schedule for the following Saturday afternoon, packed a lunch, and made my way to the closest flying tin can death trap. Of course, I planned to eat the lunch before I actually arrived at the airport. I don't trust the security people who say those x-ray machines don't contaminate food that passes through them, and I want my cancer to come from cell phones, not tomatoes.
I arrived at the airport in the late afternoon, which fortunately was easily accessible by subway. I had already spent thousands of dollars as a test monkey for experimental therapeutic techniques, and was not keen on spending much more. Before I left, I thoroughly researched everything about the airport; most convenient restrooms, duty-free shopping possibilities, where I could get my hand on one of those wonderful Toblerone bars that they seem to only sell at airports, and of course, potential emergency exits. Most people find the airplane emergency exit speech an unnecessary irritation. Personally, I don't think it's long enough. I'd prefer much more detail. Optimally the flight crew would perform a lengthy demonstration of how the seat cushions actually transform into floatation devices, because frankly, I just don't see it.
"The flames were 30 feet high, and the smoke was so thick I couldn't see my own hand. I thought it was the end. Then I remembered my ass -- which was on fire at the time -- was conveniently placed on one of those wonderful seat cushions. Thank you floating seat cushion!"
I quickly scarfed down my hastily-made tuna fish sandwich, which had grown warm in my bag, thereby adding suspicion to some already questionable mayonnaise. Fortunately I knew the precise location of all of the restrooms in the terminal. When I finally mustered up the courage to actually walk through the sliding glass doors, my stomach was already rumbling, either because I ate too much, or I hadn't eaten enough. My digestive system is never content. The colon doesn't fall far from the tree.
The terminal was busy, but eerily quiet. Though perhaps it wasn't so much eerily quiet as unexpectedly calm. Over the previous several years, I had concocted my own vision of a modern day, post-9/11 airport, which included, in no particular order, terrorists threatening to blow up the Washington Monument, business travelers shooting each other in the shins over the last first-class seat to Toledo, and elderly women being strip searched by security guards with a granny fetish. Add to that the very real threat of being molested by a horny politician in the next toilet stall, and even Charles Manson would find the scene disturbing.
But to my surprise, the airport was calm, efficient, and peaceful. Light streamed in through the high glass ceilings, and the immaculately clean floors -- cleaner than mine, even -- were covered with bright orange-yellow tiles. Passengers strolled slowly through the halls, stopping at various stores and eating establishments, several of which featured "patio" seating complete with faux palm trees and beach umbrellas. The terminal seem more like a fancy resort than a torture chamber, and I wondered if the whole flying is a nightmare these days rumor was just invented by airport maintenance crews in an attempt to reduce their workload.
And most surprisingly, people were actually smiling. They were smiling on the security line, they were smiling while waiting for their pre-flight margarita, they were smiling while being herded onto the New York shuttle. Where was all the angst that I had read about? Where were the people beating each other with exploding shoes? Why was I the only one shaking uncontrollably? I wasn't relieved. I was angry at having been misled by the media, which was apparently in the pocket of the airport maintenance crew union. All those years spent dragging myself on the train to DisneyWorld, I could have just spent the weekend at Delta Terminal B.
Then, through one of the 50 foot windows, I caught a glimpse of an airplane. It was just idling on the tarmac, waiting for clearance of some kind, no more threatening than a stalled Greyhound bus. I could see passengers sitting inside, waiting patiently, eating their in-flight pretzels (which, to my disappointment, had apparently replaced the in-flight peanuts). It was the closest I'd been to an actual airplane in almost a decade.
Suddenly the idyllic world that I had entered minutes before transformed into a claustrophobic freak show. Every movement, every noise, every churn of the insta-daiquiri machine made my head swirl. Even the orange-yellow tiles mocked me with their institutional sterility. At any moment, killer clowns would invade the terminal and take us all hostage. And I would have been happy to go anywhere with them, as long as they didn't make me get on a plane.
The complacency surrounding me was astounding. Couldn't these people see that they were voluntarily placing themselves in extreme danger? Is a honeymoon in Bora-Bora really worth a funeral at sea? If I had been faced with a choice between bungee jumping off of the Empire State Building and getting on one of those metal-plastic amalgam contraptions, I would have strapped on a helmet and took the dive. At least a bungee jumper is supported by something other than air. It seemed entirely impossible that air could hold up a 100-ton behemoth like that. I knew there was some kind of scientific principle at work here, but I didn't trust science. Science couldn't even make hair grow back in my temples, how was it going to save me from hurtling to my death in an Idaho cornfield?
I found a quiet seat facing away from the windows, and tried to catch my breath and resolve the tingling sensation that had invaded every corner of my body. Unfortunately, I hadn't realized that I had wandered into a corner of the terminal from which airplanes were visible on every side. The tingling was not subsiding, and I wondered if this was finally one panic attack too many. The human heart only has so many beats in it, and after my parents' divorce, three years of law school, and the time my mother caught me masturbating, mine couldn't have too many left.
In an attempt to distract myself from my impending doom, I began observing some of the goings-on around me. The only thing that can take my mind off of my own misery when I'm miserable is other people's misery. Most of the people sitting around me were painfully dull, at least to the naked eye. A businessman reading Newseek, an elderly woman knitting, a teenager playing with his iPod. They might all be interesting behind closed doors, but I didn't know one way or the other. I wished that the businessman would have an acid flashback from his hippie days, or the elderly woman would stab the teenager with her knitting needle. Anything to take my mind off of the panic that had gripped me.
Finally, like a gift from heaven, an intensely dysfunctional family of five or six -- two or three of the kids were running around in circles so quickly that they seemed to blend into one -- sat down next to me. The mother and father were arguing, but I couldn't hear most of what they were saying over the screams of their children, who clearly had terrorized several elementary school teachers in their day.
"Don't blame me! I didn't want to go to fucking Colonial Williamsburg," the father shouted, a small amount of spittle landing smack dab in the center of his wife's face. "This was your fucking idea!"
"Where the fuck did you want to go?" the wife screamed back, matching him spittle with spittle. "The fucking Playboy mansion?"
Monster #1, who appeared to be some version of female, started punching Monster #2, who responded in kind with several kicks to Monster #1's shins and some expletives that I didn't know until I was 23. I watched the scene for several minutes, as the burgeoning criminals in front of me battled for the title of most likely to need a public defender one day. Grateful that unplanned pregnancies were only a heterosexual plague, I wondered whether eugenics was really that bad of an idea.
"Flight 117, non-stop to Williamsburg, now boarding Gate 13."
While the mother tried to round up her children, I watched the father sneak over to the newsstand and peak at the magazines wrapped in plastic on the top shelf. Obviously his wife was correct -- he'd rather be going to the Playboy mansion. Then again, he'd probably rather be going to a Turkish prison than to Williamsburg with his family.
"Jerry, get the fuck back here!" The husband dutifully replaced whatever fantasy rag he was perusing, and made his way back to his wayward family, leaving a piece of himself on the top shelf with the dirty magazines. He probably left pieces of himself scattered across newsstands on the Northeast Corridor.
The mother grabbed a hold of Monster #1 and Monster #2, who struggled to break free.
"Let's go you little maniacs!" Maniacs are as maniacs do.
The father gathered up the luggage, glancing occasionally back to the newsstand with a longing that his wife likely hadn't seen in years. I was sad that I'd soon have to go back to focusing on my own life.
"Jason, come on!"
Jason -- an offspring who I hadn't previously noticed -- lay huddled under the chair across from me. He was clealry the youngest of the three, and while his siblings were well-built -- probably from years of beating each other senseless -- Jason was small, even for his age. I couldn't tell what that age was, but I knew he was small for it.
"I don't want to go," he said, meekly, clutching a stuffed Elmo. To my dismay, Elmo had apparently replaced Kermit and other more intelligent Muppets in the hearts of young children.
"I can't deal with this shit right now," the mother said, waving her hand dismissively at her child. "Jerry, you better deal with this."
Jerry's method of "dealing with it" was to grab Jason by the arm and drag him out with more force than should reasonably be applied to tiny bodies. But Jason didn't cry or make a noise, or even seem to notice the noise around him. He just went along, stumbling the entire way as his father led him by the arm through security. Years of invisibility had left Jason deaf, dumb, and blind.
Watching Jason huddle under the airport chair brought back memories of the crawlspace under my childhood home, where I often hid during my parents’ arguments. My parents didn’t relegate themselves to one room to fight. They traveled from room to room, chasing each other out of one and into another, round and round until they tired themselves out, or one of them left the house, or someone called the police. But if I crammed myself into the furthest corner of the crawlspace and stuck my fingers in my ears, I could only barely hear them. I would leave the basement light on so I could see, and I put a stuffed animal in there to keep me company, a giraffe my grandmother had bought me during our last trip to DisneyWorld. I also put some chocolate chip cookies in the crawlspace for sustenance. Sometimes the fights were pretty long, and I got hungry.
During one particularly nasty fight – I think it was about the vacuum cleaner, something about which required my father to go to hell and my mother to save him a seat on the way – I fell asleep in the crawlspace. When I woke up, it was pitch black. Someone must have turned the basement light off while I was asleep, likely my mother, who regularly went around the house turning off lights to conserve electricity, even if you had only walked out of the room seconds before. In the dark, I couldn’t tell which way I was facing. I couldn’t see the opening to the crawlspace. I started to cry, but I didn’t call for help, because that would start another fight, which would necessitate my returning to the crawlspace. I muffled my crying with the stuffed giraffe so no one could hear.
And suddenly, it occurred to me that I might not ever leave that crawlspace. I could die in the crawlspace. No one would think to look for me in there. I didn’t think an adult could have even fit in there. Everyone would think I ran away, or was kidnapped. I’d be on the side of a milk carton within a month. There’d be a manhunt for my captor. People would see me at the supermarket, or in a clothing store, or riding Space Mountain with Elvis. Each new sighting would give my parents renewed hope.
But in a year or two, maybe less, depending on whether the tabloids picked up the story, everyone would just give up. I’m sorry, ma’am, the chances of us finding your son now are slim to nil. Just another missing child in America. My mom would grieve for a while, maybe forever. She’d rip out her hair and tear her clothes and blame my dad and my sister and God and everyone else she set her eyes on. My dad would grieve too. He’d buy himself lots of CD players and television sets and other gadgets to ease the pain. Everyone copes in their own way. But the world would continue to spin without me. It had to. I wasn’t that important.
And in a hundred years, when they bulldozed the house, they would find my corpse, still clutching the stuffed giraffe. By then my whole family would be gone, and no one would ever know who I was or why I had laid under a house for a hundred years holding a stuffed giraffe.
That was the last time I ever hid in the crawlspace. Before my mom sold the house, I ventured in one last time to retrieve the stuffed giraffe. It was still there. It still smelled like tears and chocolate chip cookies.
Jason et al made their way towards their gate, and I took a moment to say a prayer for the flight attendants on their plane. With their departure, I was left to resume my panicked state, which came back in full force and was made all the more intense by the memories that Jason and his family brought back.
I closed my eyes and clutched my hands together. When most people hold their hands together, they fold their fingers on top of each other, so that they are layered one above the other. When I do it, I hold my right hand in my left like I'm holding a stranger's hand. Somehow it feels more comforting, even though I've held my own hand far more times than anyone has held it for me. I always knew my hand would be there. I couldn't say the same about anyone else's.
Thinking about courageous little Jason boarding his flight, I questioned my own lack of will power. Here was this five year old boy, scared to death, clutching his Elmo (I still disapproved of his Muppet selection, but attributed this minor transgression to his tender age), being dragged onto the plane by his tremendously insensitive parents who would surely completely fail to comfort him when he needed comforting the most. But Jason had likely gotten accustomed to hiding under airport chairs. He felt safe under the chair, because there was no where else for him to hide.
And here I was, twenty-eight years old, still hiding. Sure, I hid on top of the chair instead of underneath it, but I was still hiding. There was no one to hide from anymore, but they were still chasing me. My father was still watching pornography behind my mother's back, and my mother was still shouting expletives at my father about the vacuum cleaner. The sound of the airplane engines couldn't drown out their voices. Their voices roared even louder than my fear. I had to get away from the fear and the voices, to save myself that very moment, or there would be nothing left to save.
I got up from the seat and made my way back to the exit, walking quickly but not too quickly, as I wasn't too keen on being stopped by some paranoid security guards who thought some malicious motive lay behind my brisk pace. As I left the terminal, I tried to forgive myself for not getting further along in my treatment that day. I realized that somewhere in the back of my head, I had hoped that once I went back to an airport, all my fears would suddenly dissipate, and I'd be on a plane to Hawaii by the end of the day. Clearly, that wasn't going to happen, at least, not today. But I was still a few subway stops closer than I had been the day before.
I boarded the train back to my home, breathing a sigh of relief as I sat myself down on the orange padded cushion. Subways usually trigger a slight panic reaction, but after facing my ultimate transportation demons, this subway was warm and welcoming. Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don't. Grateful that I had survived the trip, I settled into my seat with a little after-panic muzak courtesy of my "Relaxation Playlist," which was just enough to relax me but would put most people into a coma.
Then the subway came to a sudden stop in between Foggy Bottom and Farragut West.
"Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the delay. We are experiencing some technical difficulties. Please stand by."
The announcement was not comforting. Usually when the subway comes to a sudden stop, the announcer says something like, there's a train in front of us, we'll be moving shortly. But apparently we were stopped due to "technical difficulties," with no estimate for the amount of time that we'd be stuck here, fifty feet below ground. And unless my body developed a liquid-like consistency by which I could pour myself out of the subway car through a crack in the doors -- a remote possibility, at best -- there was nowhere to go.
I felt the panic begin to rise again, and my hands instinctively grabbed hold of each other. My extremeties began shaking -- well, most of my extremeties -- transforming my fingers from useful tools into useless appendages. I thought about trying to read the National Enquirer magazine I had bought on impulse at the airport (ok, I was planning to buy it, but it sounds less pathetic when I claim otherwise), but figured it was pointless, as I couldn't hold anything in my hands. And besides, I couldn't concentrate on a magazine, not even one with Jacko on the cover. I couldn't concentrate on anything at all. Not over the roar of the voices.
I began searching again for someone more miserable than myself to take my mind off of my quickening heart rate. To my disappointment, the only other people in my car were an elderly couple sitting across the aisle. I figured they wouldn't provide much entertainment, as elderly people are generally not phased by trivialities like being trapped on a stalled subway. I found myself longing for the dysfunctional family circus, who would soon be met at their arrival gate by a throng of FBI agents and a tranquilizer gun.
But while the man was calmly reading a newspaper, the woman was clearly disturbed by our situation. She wasn't saying anything, and didn't move a muscle, but I could tell. It was in the squint of her eyes. They pleaded for freedom, even as her body remained completely still. Esperanto may be the language of love, but fear is the universal language.
Her husband -- at least I assumed he was her husband, though he could have been anything to her, a lover, a friend, a chauffeur with a Driving Miss Daisy obsession -- looked over at his quietly panicking companion. Without a word, he put down the paper, and took her hand and placed it in his. And almost instantly, her eyes widened slightly, her breathing became less shallow, and a slight smile appeared on her face. The freedom she sought was still fifty feet away, but that didn't matter. All because he offered his hand, and she took it.
I closed my eyes, and gripped my hands even tighter, which by now were slippery with cold sweat. I thought about little Jason, huddled under his airplane chair, still clutching his stuffed Elmo, separated from oblivion by a few inches of metal and plastic. How little it would take to bring him out from under the chair. Just a hand. Not gripped tightly around his arm, but lightly around his own, squeezing in just the right places, telling him that he didn't have to hold his own hand to survive. And even if that hand didn't come today, or for the foreseeable future, somewhere, someday, someone would offer it, and someday, he would take it. As long as he could let go of his own.
I took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and let go of my hands. For Jason, and for myself.
You might recognize a few pieces of this from my previous piece, Lend Me A Hand. This wasn't my attempt to cut corners by publishing regurgitated prose. I liked pieces of that story, but it wasn't working as a whole. But don't be surprised if you find a few pieces of that story in future stories as well. But since I'm cannabalizing my own work already, and it's only a few more steps to pure plagiarism, enjoy the originality while you can.
-JKH
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A few weekends ago, I spent the day at Reagan International Airport (or National Airport, depending on your political inclinations). I wasn't going anywhere, and I wasn't meeting anyone there. When visitors fly into town, I graciously provide them with highly detailed public transportation directions. It's not like the trip will be faster if I'm there, and why should we both suffer when only one of us has to?
Alas, there wasn't going to be any great reunions with long-lost relatives that particular day at Reagan International, which was fine with me, as I'd rather any lost relatives remain lost. Instead, I trekked to the airport as part of a self-imposed mental health program. Granted, these days spending time at the airport causes more mental health problems than it cures, but the cause and the cure are one and the same when you have a flying phobia.
I haven’t flown in years. I hated flying before it was fashionable to hate flying, back in the days when stewardess was still a politically correct term, and a boarding pass didn't come with a cattle prod. I was, as usual, ahead of my time. These days, a fear of flying is one of those convenient personality quirks that you use to avoid family reunions, or trot out at dinner parties to fill the uncomfortable silences.
“I had the worst flight last week to Nashville,” you might say, to a sea of nodding heads. “I refused to buckle my seat belt, and the flight attendant actually slapped me!”
But for me, flying isn’t just a minor annoyance, like Kathie Lee Gifford, or those soup cans with the pull tab that always break off in your hand, thereby defeating their entire purpose. Of all my irrational fears -- spiders, heights, ear hair -- flying is the most intense. Just hearing the words “frequent flyer” or “Mile High Club” is enough to give me the shakes. Although joining the latter is a slight incentive to getting over my fear. Sex in a Greyhound bus bathroom isn't nearly as classy.
In the beginning I tried to attack my fear with therapy, the first line of defense for both Jews and gentiles in Alcoholics Anonymous. One therapist tried to induce panic attacks to help me desensitize to the feeling of anxiety.
“Breathe with me,” she instructed. “We’ll breathe slow at first, and then speed up, and after a minute or two you will hyperventilate and panic.”
It seemed to me we were drawing close to the boundaries of legitimate therapy here. I didn't fully grasp the purpose of instigating panic attacks in someone with a panic disorder. Do therapists routinely treat violent sociopaths by handing them a meat cleaver and a puppy?
Luckily, an hour's worth of hyperventilating failed to trigger a panic attack, which was unsurprising since I usually spent half my day hyperventilating anyway. The only consolation was that I got to watch the therapist turn blue. I refused to pay her for wasting my time with that nonsense. She referred me to a collection agency, which, ironically, gave me a panic attack.
Next I tried virtual reality therapy, which had the added benefit of making me feel technologically advanced. The words "virtual therapy" conjured up images in my head of automatic can openers and flying cars that fold into your briefcase. As a child, I felt a special kinship with the hippest of cartoon families, the Jetsons, who seemed to live in a world of fantastic possibilities. Not like those backwoods, dinosaur-riding Flinstones. Seriously, what kind of psychopath wears a bone in her hair?
Unfortunately, I was thoroughly disappointed with the experience. I expected a high-tech, 21st century system operated by animatronic robots. Instead, a frumpy middle-aged therapist fit me with a pair of goggles, cranked up a machine bigger than a Yugo, and strapped me to an old airplane chair. As the machine whirred to life, a dull, lifeless two dimensional image of an airplane flickered into and out of view. My first generation Atari presented a more realistic image.
“Do I get a bag of peanuts with this?” I asked, considering whether it was a good idea to mock someone who had tied you to a chair. I have a tendency to annoy therapists. I use humor as a defense mechanism, making it particularly difficult for therapists to learn anything about me, other than that I use humor as a defense mechanism.
“So your mother would chase you around the house with scissors. How did that make you feel?”
“Knock knock.”
My sister generally disapproves of my sense of humor, especially when it is directed at our dysfunctional childhood.
“It’s a form of detachment, Jonah," she said, flipping through a photo album and folding a picture of our family in half so that our mother was transformed into a floating hand. "You refuse to deal with your legitimate emotions. It’s really self-destructive. Ok, we’ll have to talk about this later, I’m out of wine and the liquor store closes at midnight.”
Suddenly, the chair started rattling, apparently in an effort to simulate turbulence, but the feeling was closer to a vibrating washing machine (not altogether unpleasant, of course, but the goal was not to remind me of my last date). After a few minutes I got bored. The therapist came back in the room to check on me.
“So tell me, what’s your anxiety level at now?”
“Zero.”
“Zero? But you’re on an airplane!”
“No, I’m not. I’m sitting in your office. The graphics on this thing are horrible. I can hear your secretary talking about American Idol. This chair smells. And where are my peanuts?”
Fortunately insurance paid for these sessions. Otherwise I’d have another collection agency after me.
Over time, I've learned to work around my fear. It's not all that difficult, really, especially these days, when even sane people avoid flying as often as possible. If I need to go somewhere far away for an important occasion, like a wedding, or Cher's fourteenth farewell tour, I take trains. I usually just meet my fellow travelers at our destination, though occasionally I try to get them to take the train with me. They rarely agree. When my friend Brandon and I were planning a trip to the West Coast, I suggested that we take the train from New York.
"You want to go to Los Angeles by train?" he asked in an offended tone, like I had just suggested that he voluntarily contract gonorrhea. "Yeah, it might be fun!" I replied, poorly feigning excitement. Insincerity is not one of my talents, an especially problematic characteristic during my brief stint as a Baby Gap sales associate. If your baby looks fat in horizontal stripes, I'm not going to tell you otherwise.
I showed him the brochure, featuring a happy puppy perched atop an upper berth holding an Amtrak ticket. I figured no one can resist a happy puppy brochure, but Brandon wasn't convinced. He flew to Los Angeles without me, and I decided not to spend three days alone on a train, which might have driven me more insane than I already was. While he was gone, I watched that movie where Los Angeles is destroyed by a volcano. I didn't really want Brandon to be crushed by a lava flow, but I have a thing for poetic justice.
As a kid, I actually enjoyed flying, partly because of the in-flight peanuts -- we only had peanuts in butter form at home -- and partly because my usual destination was my grandparents' home in Florida, which meant Disneyworld, lox cream cheese, and a week away from my parents. It also meant a week with my cantankerous step-grandfather, who would probably force me to simonize his car and play shuffleboard, but that was a small price to pay for breakfast with Mickey.
But as my body aged, my mind became more anxious, as if baldness and bravery were inversely correlated. For every hair that I lost, a new fear emerged. Crowds, heights, eating at Olive Garden -- no activity was immune from obsession. I'm not sure if a receding hairline induces fear or vice versa, but the medical community should lace Propecia with Xanax. That pill would sell like hotcakes. Somewhere along the road, half-way between a Ceaser cut and a comb-over, flying went from exciting to unfathomable.
At first, the developing phobia was frustrating, like I was voluntarily placing a 200-mile leash around my neck. There was still so much of the world I hadn't seen, at least, outside of the Epcot World Pavilion, which is a pale comparator. You can't fool me, Disney Corporation. The real Eiffel Tower is not made of cardboard.
But over the years, my disappointment in not being able to travel to exotic lands (sorry Canada, maple syrup and Mounties do not an exotic destination make) was steadily replaced with more pressing concerns, like whether plucking a nose hair will result in two growing back in its place, and any residual disappointment has been consciously repressed. The mind has an amazing capacity for rationalization and self-denial, a lesson that I learned years ago when my father found a charge to a gay phone sex line on the monthly long-distance bill.
"Must have been a wrong number," he said, quickly whipping out his checkbook and conveniently ignoring the fact that the call lasted sixteen minutes.
But coming from a family in which an emotion didn't exist unless it was communicated -- most often in screaming bloody murder form -- I was never quite able to completely repress this feeling that my life was missing something. Unlike the other missing elements in my life (functional parents, a full head of hair, a digestive system that can process corn), this one was entirely self-made. I couldn't blame anyone else for the leash I had put around my own neck. I had the time, the wherewithal (after several years of working at a corporate law firm, I had wherewithal coming out my ears), and the desire to travel. Still, I couldn't bring myself to face that big tin can in the sky.
Occasionally, the issue comes up at my weekly therapy session with my social worker, Nancy, most often when I come across a beautiful travel destination that is only accessible by air, thereby triggering my self-flagellation anew. Nancy has a last name, but I never learned it, choosing instead to remember her simply as Nancy. Something about a woman with just one name makes her seem powerful and dynamic, like Madonna, or Jackee, either of whom could successfully plum the depths of my psyche. The same theory doesn't apply to men with just one name. I don’t want Fabio asking me about my overbearing mother.
"So why do you hate flying?" Somehow Nancy had managed to actually learn something about me apart from my affection for knock-knock jokes.
"The people," I replied, fiddling with the expired passport I still carried around in my backpack. It hadn't been stamped since 1999, when I travelled Europe with my friend Beverly, in an attempt to become more worldly and sophisticated. It didn’t take. I still prefer non-carbonated water and good hygiene. "Being trapped in a tiny space with hundreds of people freaks me out."
"Why are you afraid of being trapped with people?" she asked, dabbing her eyes with lubricant drops. She claimed that she needed to constantly rewet her eyes because of her allergies, but I noticed that she usually took out the drops when our conversations veered towards disturbing territory. The day I told her about my Miss Piggy obsession, I thought she was going to drown in saline solution.
"Embarrassing myself." I glanced at a picture of her son in his college graduation gown -- or, someone I assumed was her son -- on the desk behind her. He was very attractive. Staring at his picture was probably the reason I had stuck around long enough to get past the knock-knock jokes. "Or worse. What if I freak out on the plane, and they think I'm a terrorist or something?"
Drop, drop.
"You don't look like a terrorist."
"That's very narrow-minded, isn't it?"
Drop, drop.
"So what would make you feel better about flying?"
"Well, maybe if I could fly by myself, in a small private room, so I couldn't panic and embarrass myself in front of people," I replied, simultaneously wondering if she would notice if I took her son's picture home. "Like a flying closet."
"A closet." Drop, drop. "You want to fly in a closet?"
"Yeah,” I said, planning my escape with picture in hand. “ Can I do that?"
Nancy had to cut our session short that day, having run out of eyedrops. But it's not as if we were getting anywhere anyway. I needed to try something other than just talking about it, something a little more proactive, something that stopped just short of actually getting on a plane. So I cleared my schedule for the following Saturday afternoon, packed a lunch, and made my way to the closest flying tin can death trap. Of course, I planned to eat the lunch before I actually arrived at the airport. I don't trust the security people who say those x-ray machines don't contaminate food that passes through them, and I want my cancer to come from cell phones, not tomatoes.
I arrived at the airport in the late afternoon, which fortunately was easily accessible by subway. I had already spent thousands of dollars as a test monkey for experimental therapeutic techniques, and was not keen on spending much more. Before I left, I thoroughly researched everything about the airport; most convenient restrooms, duty-free shopping possibilities, where I could get my hand on one of those wonderful Toblerone bars that they seem to only sell at airports, and of course, potential emergency exits. Most people find the airplane emergency exit speech an unnecessary irritation. Personally, I don't think it's long enough. I'd prefer much more detail. Optimally the flight crew would perform a lengthy demonstration of how the seat cushions actually transform into floatation devices, because frankly, I just don't see it.
"The flames were 30 feet high, and the smoke was so thick I couldn't see my own hand. I thought it was the end. Then I remembered my ass -- which was on fire at the time -- was conveniently placed on one of those wonderful seat cushions. Thank you floating seat cushion!"
I quickly scarfed down my hastily-made tuna fish sandwich, which had grown warm in my bag, thereby adding suspicion to some already questionable mayonnaise. Fortunately I knew the precise location of all of the restrooms in the terminal. When I finally mustered up the courage to actually walk through the sliding glass doors, my stomach was already rumbling, either because I ate too much, or I hadn't eaten enough. My digestive system is never content. The colon doesn't fall far from the tree.
The terminal was busy, but eerily quiet. Though perhaps it wasn't so much eerily quiet as unexpectedly calm. Over the previous several years, I had concocted my own vision of a modern day, post-9/11 airport, which included, in no particular order, terrorists threatening to blow up the Washington Monument, business travelers shooting each other in the shins over the last first-class seat to Toledo, and elderly women being strip searched by security guards with a granny fetish. Add to that the very real threat of being molested by a horny politician in the next toilet stall, and even Charles Manson would find the scene disturbing.
But to my surprise, the airport was calm, efficient, and peaceful. Light streamed in through the high glass ceilings, and the immaculately clean floors -- cleaner than mine, even -- were covered with bright orange-yellow tiles. Passengers strolled slowly through the halls, stopping at various stores and eating establishments, several of which featured "patio" seating complete with faux palm trees and beach umbrellas. The terminal seem more like a fancy resort than a torture chamber, and I wondered if the whole flying is a nightmare these days rumor was just invented by airport maintenance crews in an attempt to reduce their workload.
And most surprisingly, people were actually smiling. They were smiling on the security line, they were smiling while waiting for their pre-flight margarita, they were smiling while being herded onto the New York shuttle. Where was all the angst that I had read about? Where were the people beating each other with exploding shoes? Why was I the only one shaking uncontrollably? I wasn't relieved. I was angry at having been misled by the media, which was apparently in the pocket of the airport maintenance crew union. All those years spent dragging myself on the train to DisneyWorld, I could have just spent the weekend at Delta Terminal B.
Then, through one of the 50 foot windows, I caught a glimpse of an airplane. It was just idling on the tarmac, waiting for clearance of some kind, no more threatening than a stalled Greyhound bus. I could see passengers sitting inside, waiting patiently, eating their in-flight pretzels (which, to my disappointment, had apparently replaced the in-flight peanuts). It was the closest I'd been to an actual airplane in almost a decade.
Suddenly the idyllic world that I had entered minutes before transformed into a claustrophobic freak show. Every movement, every noise, every churn of the insta-daiquiri machine made my head swirl. Even the orange-yellow tiles mocked me with their institutional sterility. At any moment, killer clowns would invade the terminal and take us all hostage. And I would have been happy to go anywhere with them, as long as they didn't make me get on a plane.
The complacency surrounding me was astounding. Couldn't these people see that they were voluntarily placing themselves in extreme danger? Is a honeymoon in Bora-Bora really worth a funeral at sea? If I had been faced with a choice between bungee jumping off of the Empire State Building and getting on one of those metal-plastic amalgam contraptions, I would have strapped on a helmet and took the dive. At least a bungee jumper is supported by something other than air. It seemed entirely impossible that air could hold up a 100-ton behemoth like that. I knew there was some kind of scientific principle at work here, but I didn't trust science. Science couldn't even make hair grow back in my temples, how was it going to save me from hurtling to my death in an Idaho cornfield?
I found a quiet seat facing away from the windows, and tried to catch my breath and resolve the tingling sensation that had invaded every corner of my body. Unfortunately, I hadn't realized that I had wandered into a corner of the terminal from which airplanes were visible on every side. The tingling was not subsiding, and I wondered if this was finally one panic attack too many. The human heart only has so many beats in it, and after my parents' divorce, three years of law school, and the time my mother caught me masturbating, mine couldn't have too many left.
In an attempt to distract myself from my impending doom, I began observing some of the goings-on around me. The only thing that can take my mind off of my own misery when I'm miserable is other people's misery. Most of the people sitting around me were painfully dull, at least to the naked eye. A businessman reading Newseek, an elderly woman knitting, a teenager playing with his iPod. They might all be interesting behind closed doors, but I didn't know one way or the other. I wished that the businessman would have an acid flashback from his hippie days, or the elderly woman would stab the teenager with her knitting needle. Anything to take my mind off of the panic that had gripped me.
Finally, like a gift from heaven, an intensely dysfunctional family of five or six -- two or three of the kids were running around in circles so quickly that they seemed to blend into one -- sat down next to me. The mother and father were arguing, but I couldn't hear most of what they were saying over the screams of their children, who clearly had terrorized several elementary school teachers in their day.
"Don't blame me! I didn't want to go to fucking Colonial Williamsburg," the father shouted, a small amount of spittle landing smack dab in the center of his wife's face. "This was your fucking idea!"
"Where the fuck did you want to go?" the wife screamed back, matching him spittle with spittle. "The fucking Playboy mansion?"
Monster #1, who appeared to be some version of female, started punching Monster #2, who responded in kind with several kicks to Monster #1's shins and some expletives that I didn't know until I was 23. I watched the scene for several minutes, as the burgeoning criminals in front of me battled for the title of most likely to need a public defender one day. Grateful that unplanned pregnancies were only a heterosexual plague, I wondered whether eugenics was really that bad of an idea.
"Flight 117, non-stop to Williamsburg, now boarding Gate 13."
While the mother tried to round up her children, I watched the father sneak over to the newsstand and peak at the magazines wrapped in plastic on the top shelf. Obviously his wife was correct -- he'd rather be going to the Playboy mansion. Then again, he'd probably rather be going to a Turkish prison than to Williamsburg with his family.
"Jerry, get the fuck back here!" The husband dutifully replaced whatever fantasy rag he was perusing, and made his way back to his wayward family, leaving a piece of himself on the top shelf with the dirty magazines. He probably left pieces of himself scattered across newsstands on the Northeast Corridor.
The mother grabbed a hold of Monster #1 and Monster #2, who struggled to break free.
"Let's go you little maniacs!" Maniacs are as maniacs do.
The father gathered up the luggage, glancing occasionally back to the newsstand with a longing that his wife likely hadn't seen in years. I was sad that I'd soon have to go back to focusing on my own life.
"Jason, come on!"
Jason -- an offspring who I hadn't previously noticed -- lay huddled under the chair across from me. He was clealry the youngest of the three, and while his siblings were well-built -- probably from years of beating each other senseless -- Jason was small, even for his age. I couldn't tell what that age was, but I knew he was small for it.
"I don't want to go," he said, meekly, clutching a stuffed Elmo. To my dismay, Elmo had apparently replaced Kermit and other more intelligent Muppets in the hearts of young children.
"I can't deal with this shit right now," the mother said, waving her hand dismissively at her child. "Jerry, you better deal with this."
Jerry's method of "dealing with it" was to grab Jason by the arm and drag him out with more force than should reasonably be applied to tiny bodies. But Jason didn't cry or make a noise, or even seem to notice the noise around him. He just went along, stumbling the entire way as his father led him by the arm through security. Years of invisibility had left Jason deaf, dumb, and blind.
Watching Jason huddle under the airport chair brought back memories of the crawlspace under my childhood home, where I often hid during my parents’ arguments. My parents didn’t relegate themselves to one room to fight. They traveled from room to room, chasing each other out of one and into another, round and round until they tired themselves out, or one of them left the house, or someone called the police. But if I crammed myself into the furthest corner of the crawlspace and stuck my fingers in my ears, I could only barely hear them. I would leave the basement light on so I could see, and I put a stuffed animal in there to keep me company, a giraffe my grandmother had bought me during our last trip to DisneyWorld. I also put some chocolate chip cookies in the crawlspace for sustenance. Sometimes the fights were pretty long, and I got hungry.
During one particularly nasty fight – I think it was about the vacuum cleaner, something about which required my father to go to hell and my mother to save him a seat on the way – I fell asleep in the crawlspace. When I woke up, it was pitch black. Someone must have turned the basement light off while I was asleep, likely my mother, who regularly went around the house turning off lights to conserve electricity, even if you had only walked out of the room seconds before. In the dark, I couldn’t tell which way I was facing. I couldn’t see the opening to the crawlspace. I started to cry, but I didn’t call for help, because that would start another fight, which would necessitate my returning to the crawlspace. I muffled my crying with the stuffed giraffe so no one could hear.
And suddenly, it occurred to me that I might not ever leave that crawlspace. I could die in the crawlspace. No one would think to look for me in there. I didn’t think an adult could have even fit in there. Everyone would think I ran away, or was kidnapped. I’d be on the side of a milk carton within a month. There’d be a manhunt for my captor. People would see me at the supermarket, or in a clothing store, or riding Space Mountain with Elvis. Each new sighting would give my parents renewed hope.
But in a year or two, maybe less, depending on whether the tabloids picked up the story, everyone would just give up. I’m sorry, ma’am, the chances of us finding your son now are slim to nil. Just another missing child in America. My mom would grieve for a while, maybe forever. She’d rip out her hair and tear her clothes and blame my dad and my sister and God and everyone else she set her eyes on. My dad would grieve too. He’d buy himself lots of CD players and television sets and other gadgets to ease the pain. Everyone copes in their own way. But the world would continue to spin without me. It had to. I wasn’t that important.
And in a hundred years, when they bulldozed the house, they would find my corpse, still clutching the stuffed giraffe. By then my whole family would be gone, and no one would ever know who I was or why I had laid under a house for a hundred years holding a stuffed giraffe.
That was the last time I ever hid in the crawlspace. Before my mom sold the house, I ventured in one last time to retrieve the stuffed giraffe. It was still there. It still smelled like tears and chocolate chip cookies.
Jason et al made their way towards their gate, and I took a moment to say a prayer for the flight attendants on their plane. With their departure, I was left to resume my panicked state, which came back in full force and was made all the more intense by the memories that Jason and his family brought back.
I closed my eyes and clutched my hands together. When most people hold their hands together, they fold their fingers on top of each other, so that they are layered one above the other. When I do it, I hold my right hand in my left like I'm holding a stranger's hand. Somehow it feels more comforting, even though I've held my own hand far more times than anyone has held it for me. I always knew my hand would be there. I couldn't say the same about anyone else's.
Thinking about courageous little Jason boarding his flight, I questioned my own lack of will power. Here was this five year old boy, scared to death, clutching his Elmo (I still disapproved of his Muppet selection, but attributed this minor transgression to his tender age), being dragged onto the plane by his tremendously insensitive parents who would surely completely fail to comfort him when he needed comforting the most. But Jason had likely gotten accustomed to hiding under airport chairs. He felt safe under the chair, because there was no where else for him to hide.
And here I was, twenty-eight years old, still hiding. Sure, I hid on top of the chair instead of underneath it, but I was still hiding. There was no one to hide from anymore, but they were still chasing me. My father was still watching pornography behind my mother's back, and my mother was still shouting expletives at my father about the vacuum cleaner. The sound of the airplane engines couldn't drown out their voices. Their voices roared even louder than my fear. I had to get away from the fear and the voices, to save myself that very moment, or there would be nothing left to save.
I got up from the seat and made my way back to the exit, walking quickly but not too quickly, as I wasn't too keen on being stopped by some paranoid security guards who thought some malicious motive lay behind my brisk pace. As I left the terminal, I tried to forgive myself for not getting further along in my treatment that day. I realized that somewhere in the back of my head, I had hoped that once I went back to an airport, all my fears would suddenly dissipate, and I'd be on a plane to Hawaii by the end of the day. Clearly, that wasn't going to happen, at least, not today. But I was still a few subway stops closer than I had been the day before.
I boarded the train back to my home, breathing a sigh of relief as I sat myself down on the orange padded cushion. Subways usually trigger a slight panic reaction, but after facing my ultimate transportation demons, this subway was warm and welcoming. Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don't. Grateful that I had survived the trip, I settled into my seat with a little after-panic muzak courtesy of my "Relaxation Playlist," which was just enough to relax me but would put most people into a coma.
Then the subway came to a sudden stop in between Foggy Bottom and Farragut West.
"Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the delay. We are experiencing some technical difficulties. Please stand by."
The announcement was not comforting. Usually when the subway comes to a sudden stop, the announcer says something like, there's a train in front of us, we'll be moving shortly. But apparently we were stopped due to "technical difficulties," with no estimate for the amount of time that we'd be stuck here, fifty feet below ground. And unless my body developed a liquid-like consistency by which I could pour myself out of the subway car through a crack in the doors -- a remote possibility, at best -- there was nowhere to go.
I felt the panic begin to rise again, and my hands instinctively grabbed hold of each other. My extremeties began shaking -- well, most of my extremeties -- transforming my fingers from useful tools into useless appendages. I thought about trying to read the National Enquirer magazine I had bought on impulse at the airport (ok, I was planning to buy it, but it sounds less pathetic when I claim otherwise), but figured it was pointless, as I couldn't hold anything in my hands. And besides, I couldn't concentrate on a magazine, not even one with Jacko on the cover. I couldn't concentrate on anything at all. Not over the roar of the voices.
I began searching again for someone more miserable than myself to take my mind off of my quickening heart rate. To my disappointment, the only other people in my car were an elderly couple sitting across the aisle. I figured they wouldn't provide much entertainment, as elderly people are generally not phased by trivialities like being trapped on a stalled subway. I found myself longing for the dysfunctional family circus, who would soon be met at their arrival gate by a throng of FBI agents and a tranquilizer gun.
But while the man was calmly reading a newspaper, the woman was clearly disturbed by our situation. She wasn't saying anything, and didn't move a muscle, but I could tell. It was in the squint of her eyes. They pleaded for freedom, even as her body remained completely still. Esperanto may be the language of love, but fear is the universal language.
Her husband -- at least I assumed he was her husband, though he could have been anything to her, a lover, a friend, a chauffeur with a Driving Miss Daisy obsession -- looked over at his quietly panicking companion. Without a word, he put down the paper, and took her hand and placed it in his. And almost instantly, her eyes widened slightly, her breathing became less shallow, and a slight smile appeared on her face. The freedom she sought was still fifty feet away, but that didn't matter. All because he offered his hand, and she took it.
I closed my eyes, and gripped my hands even tighter, which by now were slippery with cold sweat. I thought about little Jason, huddled under his airplane chair, still clutching his stuffed Elmo, separated from oblivion by a few inches of metal and plastic. How little it would take to bring him out from under the chair. Just a hand. Not gripped tightly around his arm, but lightly around his own, squeezing in just the right places, telling him that he didn't have to hold his own hand to survive. And even if that hand didn't come today, or for the foreseeable future, somewhere, someday, someone would offer it, and someday, he would take it. As long as he could let go of his own.
I took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and let go of my hands. For Jason, and for myself.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Remiss, me?
I told my therapist the other day that I was feeling guilty that I hadn't posted to my blog in a month.
"Why do you feel guilty?" she asked. "I'm sure your readers have other things to do."
Needless to say, I was shocked and appalled by this bold and disappointing declaration. Other things to do? Other than obsess about the life of this odd, once-and-hopefully-not-future attorney with more emotional problems than Suri Cruise? Say it ain't so, readers!
But on the off-chance that my therapist is incorrect, here's the straight dope (side-note -- is there a gay dope? and if there is, can someone please send it to Jake Gyllenhall along with my address (that is, assuming he hasn't smoked it already)). I haven't stopped writing, I've just stopped writing so quickly. Reviewing some of my old stories, I saw a lot of room for improvement. Of course, as a die-hard perfectionist, I can find room for improvement in most anything I do. Wait a second, I think I can write that sentence better...
So don't despair, gentle reader. A new story will appear soon, and I promise it won't disappoint. And if it does, well, my therapist is accepting new patients.
"Why do you feel guilty?" she asked. "I'm sure your readers have other things to do."
Needless to say, I was shocked and appalled by this bold and disappointing declaration. Other things to do? Other than obsess about the life of this odd, once-and-hopefully-not-future attorney with more emotional problems than Suri Cruise? Say it ain't so, readers!
But on the off-chance that my therapist is incorrect, here's the straight dope (side-note -- is there a gay dope? and if there is, can someone please send it to Jake Gyllenhall along with my address (that is, assuming he hasn't smoked it already)). I haven't stopped writing, I've just stopped writing so quickly. Reviewing some of my old stories, I saw a lot of room for improvement. Of course, as a die-hard perfectionist, I can find room for improvement in most anything I do. Wait a second, I think I can write that sentence better...
So don't despair, gentle reader. A new story will appear soon, and I promise it won't disappoint. And if it does, well, my therapist is accepting new patients.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
It's Alright, Jonah
My parents divorced on July 4th, 1993, while I was training for the American synchronized swim team at the community pool. Of course, they didn’t actually divorce on July 4th, 1993, which would have been supremely unpatriotic; they just decided to get a divorce that day. The actual divorce didn't happen until two years later, when they had both grown tired of slowly bleeding each other to death.
After shuffling me and my sister across several state lines and through a number of public school systems of varying quality (at least one of which was a breeding ground for Hitler Youth), my parents finally settled on a three bedroom, split-level, could-be-expensive-if-it-wasn’t-located-on-a-major-road compromise in suburban Long Island. Our new home was a step down from what my mother wanted, and a step up from what my father could afford, which meant no one was happy, least of all the two children who were now forced to attend school with pre-teens who measured a person's social value by the limit on their AmEx card. One year, a particularly wealthy classmate crashed his new red BMW convertible into a kosher Chinese food restaurant, killing two migrant workers in the process. But since the workers were illegal immigrants who barely spoke English, the classmate got off with a year’s probation and some community service, which he paid another migrant worker to do for him. Just like those immigrants, taking jobs away from hard-working Americans.
Eventually I found my niche in suburbia, among the freaks and geeks of my high school, of which there were more than the brochure would have you believe. Once I found friends, I started doing things that people with friends ordinarily do, like seeing movies, shoplifting insignificant trinkets from the neighborhood Hallmark store, and stalking Quentin, the hot waiter from the local diner whose name we didn’t actually know but who we thought looked like a Quentin, for no particular reason other than he vaguely resembled Quentin Tarantino if he had been sired by Brad Pitt. My clique might not have been popular or law-abiding, but we were creative.
Until my social blossoming, however, the community pool became my temporary escape for the summer months (during the winter months, my escape shifted between the local Blockbuster Video and a crawl space below my house). It was only a few blocks from our home, and it was free to local residents under 17, which meant I could spend the entire day there without having to ask my parents for anything, except permission to leave the house. They rarely denied my request, as it meant that I wouldn’t spend the day bugging them to turn up the air conditioning, which my mother routinely refused to do because of the expense.
“But I’m boiling in here!” I protested when she’d inevitably turn off the air conditioner on the hottest days of the summer. My mother grew up in what was, as far as I could tell, a tenement. I had only read about tenements in history textbooks, before the chapter on the war with the evil Germans and after the chapter on the other war with the evil Germans, but the descriptions of her childhood home seemed to have all the hallmarks of one – three people to every bed, a cast iron stove, crying babies who were routinely smothered by cockroaches. Thirty years later, my mother still made me walk four blocks to the nearest pay phone to call directory assistance, so we could save the twenty-five cents. You can take the girl out of the tenement.
“I just don’t understand why I need to suffer needlessly,” I continued, dramatically fanning myself with the living room curtain.
“That’s your problem, Jonah. You have it too easy,” she replied, dismissively. “Now go tell your fucking scumbag father that dinner is ready.”
My goal in those pre-divorce days was to go as long as possible without speaking to either parent. My personal best was eleven days, a streak only interrupted by a spider in my bedroom that required squashing. Poisonous insects trump uncomfortable conversation any day. My fucking scumbag father did it for me, without a fuss. I think it made him feel useful, like a real father, instead of just the resident scumbag. Somehow I doubted Mr. Brady needed to step on arachnids to demonstrate his utility to Carol and the Bunch, but I was happy that I could slightly increase the positive energy in the house, even if it meant the loss of innocent lives.
But any positive energy I felt from my father’s transformation into master bug squasher was far outweighed by the pure joy of the community pool. The attraction wasn’t necessarily the actual water, which was usually cold and uninviting, even if being completely immersed in liquid filled some neglected Freudian need. And it wasn’t the half-naked male lifeguards; I was old enough to know I was different, but I was too young to know how I was different.
For me, the attraction was in the “community” part of the community pool. For a few hours each day, I was part of a larger family, the pool family, whose hedonistic members were guided only by their desire for sun and, albeit placid, surf. Or sometimes, when I was feeling particularly social, I would pretend I was part of a real family at the pool, conveniently laying my towel close enough to a mother with a wide-brim hat reading Mademoiselle and lathering her children in SPF-45, so that outsiders might think that I was actually one of her fair-skinned brood (or, if the family was African-American, a child from her first marriage). Not that I ever actually spoke to any of my adopted families. I was only passively needy; I saved my aggression for violent video games.
Because I didn’t have many friends in those days, usually I spent the day alone at the pool, which aroused suspicion among the pool staff that I might be a homeless child, using the facilities to wash the track marks off my arms before rejoining a group of heroin-addled pre-adolescents. A few of them whispered to each other every time I passed through the turnstile entrance, grinning in my general direction, as if a forced smile from them would put me back on the path to the straight and narrow. My well-kept hair and ironed bathing suit should have tipped them off that I wasn't actually homeless, but some people just like being heroes, even when a hero isn't needed. An unnecessary hero is just a moron in tights.
A few weeks before my parents divorced, a woman approached me as I was toweling off from a four-hour swim, during which I had successfully completed a series of eight back flips in a row without coming up for air, another personal best. Her t-shirt proudly declared her to be the "Pool Manager." I thought that sounded like the coolest job in the world -- this woman spends everyday at the pool, bossing people around, and she gets paid for it, too -- except the shirt itself was a nauseating shade of green, and the "M" in Manager had faded, so she was really just the Pool anager, which didn't sound nearly as cool.
"Hi there," she said, bending down so that she was eye level with me. I hated when adults did that. It assumed that they were my superior just because they were taller than me. If she had tried tossling my hair I might have thrown her anager ass in the pool. "I'm Melanie. What's your name?"
"Jonah." I quickly put on my shirt. It's one thing to be half-naked when you're not socializing with anyone; it's quite another to speak to a stranger with your nipples exposed.
"Jonah, I see you here a lot," Melanie said. I could tell she was itching to tossle my hair. I instinctively took three steps backwards. "Is everything ok at home?"
"Yeah, everything's fine," I replied, marveling at her presumptuousness. Adults think they can say anything to kids without consequences. I doubted that she would ask the fifty-year old guy sitting behind us, guzzling beers and eyeing the 17-year old lifeguards, whether everything was ok at his home, even though everything clearly was not. But since she asked, and since I hadn’t yet learned the value of tact (a skill I’m still developing today), I gave her the complete answer. "I just can't stand my family."
Melanie stood up and shook her head.
"How sad," she said, picking the remnants of the "M" off of her shirt.
I nodded in agreement, and smiled to make her feel more comfortable with this apparently distressing news.
“I know.” But I didn't really understand her pity. What exactly was sad about it? I was enjoying a beautiful day at the pool, at least until Melanie had stuck her sunburned nose into my business. It was just warm enough so that I didn't get cold in the water, but not so warm that I baked when I was in the sun (I refused to use sunscreen, a small but palpable rebellion against my mother). I had my Walkman with me, and a new Gloria Estefan cassette geared up to play that inspirational song she wrote after she broke her spine in that terrible car accident. I had purchased a frozen Snickers bar with a dollar I stole out of my mother's wallet earlier that day, which was going to be my reward for my feats of aquatic strength. As far as I could tell, my glass was at least half-full, if not more.
Clearly, Melanie's baseline was far higher than my own.
And to top it all off, I felt I was getting closer to a spot on the American synchronized swim team. I was sure that being able to do eight back flips in a row without vomiting or passing out must be some kind of record. All I needed to do now was find out how to get in contact with the team's coach. I suspected that there was no listing for "American Synchronized Swim Team" in the Yellow Pages, but maybe Melanie knew someone. She was the Pool Manager after all. Hopefully I hadn't burned that bridge too quickly with my flip conversational style.
Unfortunately, my synchronized swim team dreams came to an end the same day as my parents' marriage, and just as abruptly. Not that most people wouldn't have seen it coming from miles away, like our next-door neighbors, who had become increasingly familiar with domestic disturbance laws since we moved in. Although they were lucky. They only had to call the police on us two times in as many years; our previous neighbors had called at least half a dozen times in the same time span. Still, it was probably two times more than they hoped for. People move to suburbia for peace, not war.
But it didn’t take familiarity with the New York State criminal code to predict my parents’ divorce. Just one look at their relationship was enough to see disaster ahead. They hadn’t slept in the same bedroom for the better part of a decade, originally because of my father’s snoring (which, granted, was disturbing in its intensity, as if my father was expressing all of his pent-up anger in between jagged breaths), but eventually because anxious discontent is easier to maintain with three floors between you. They even looked wrong together. For every pound he was overweight, she was a pound underweight. Personally, I found his girth reassuring – he would have made a great Santa Clause, if only my parents had seen fit to indulge my gentile proclivities – while her frailty was frightening, as if an overly slick driveway could leave me one step closer to the orphanage. Though now that I’m older, I’m glad I inherited her metabolism and not his. Santa Clause might be comforting, but he wouldn’t get much attention in a gay bar.
So anyone with two eyes and a rudimentary knowledge of the English language could tell that my parents weren't going to be celebrating these moments of their lives for much longer. But when anxious discontent is the constant mood of a household, it's difficult to predict just when a barely tolerable situation will cross the line into intolerable. For my mother, that line was crossed when my father revealed that he had clandestinely spent all of the money in our savings accounts, including the money I had received for my Bar Mitzvah, which was ostensibly a “gift” but which I considered payment for being forced to spend four hours with distant and unapproachable relatives. He claimed that he spent the money on necessities like food and flamingo nightlights for my sister, but his extensive pornography collection belied his claim (I received a slight return on my investment when my father left his pornography collection behind after the divorce, perhaps his absentee way of teaching me about the birds and the bees; for my taste, there were too many birds and not enough bees in his collection). It was the worst possible betrayal to my mother, and I doubt that any other indiscretion would inevitably have led to a divorce, which is precisely why he did it. If infidelity had been her Achilles' heel, she would have found escort services on his credit card bill. It doesn't matter what the straw is made of. The camel's back breaks either way.
Fortunately, my Olympic aspirations caused me to miss most of the fireworks that fateful July 4th. Though I imagine the conversation went something like this:
“Honey, I have something to tell you.”
“What is it darling?”
“I’ve stolen all of your money.”
“Oh, is that all? Well, I suppose we should get a divorce then.”
The actual conversation was probably much louder, and included more cursing and hair pulling (my parents come from the soap opera school of fighting, where nothing is out of bounds except healthy communication), but I suspect that was the general gist.
I left the pool a little early that day, in anticipation of our annual July 4th barbecue. It was one of the only "American" things we did, besides pay taxes and gossip about our neighbors. My father would operate the barbecue -- the only cooking responsibility my mother deemed "masculine" enough for her husband to do without shame -- and my sister and I would sit at the patio table, barking our meal requests to him. Of course, everything my father barbecued ended up being well-done (thus setting up my taste buds for future culinary limitations -- if it's not char-burned, it's inedible), but it didn't matter. If you squinted, we almost looked like a real family. I knew it was just a mirage, but it was nice to be on the inside looking out for a change.
I arrived home from the pool just in time to see my father load the last hastily packed cardboard box in the trunk. He spotted me walking down the street, and gave me a half-hearted wave before getting in the car and driving off. There wasn’t much he could say, at least not much that couldn’t be used against him in a court of law. At first I thought he was going to pick up some food for dinner, but when I entered the house and saw my mother crying at the kitchen table -- maybe the first time I ever saw her cry, at least without simultaneously foaming at the mouth -- I realized it would be hot dogs for two from now on.
Over the next few weeks, in between visits to an unscrupulous divorce attorney who I suspect spent his free time hanging puppies and producing Kathie Lee Gifford's Christmas album, my mother slipped further into a state of paranoid delusions – apparently my father had nothing else to do that summer except stalk her, and occasionally let the air out of her tires – while I began reorganizing my father’s record collection, in case he suddenly came home and wanted to locate a Barbra Streisand album with considerable ease (two types of men like Barbra Streisand -- Jews and gays, which perhaps explains why Babs felt compelled to take out a restraining order against me in 2002). Surprisingly, he had left all his records behind. This was an extensive collection, which had required a considerable amount of time and attention, so I wondered whether this was a sign that he might return. Then again, I also required a considerable amount of time and attention, and he had left me behind, too.
I didn't have too much time to devote to this task, however. With my father gone, my mother and I had to determine the new parameters of survival for our new household (my sister's temporary presence was nominal at best, as she would soon physically relocate to a dorm room 200 miles away, and in her mind, she was already there). Responsibilities that used to belong to my father had to be reassigned, and most of them were reassigned to me, as my mother didn't have much time between visits to the lawyer, locking herself in her bedroom, and crafting conspiracy theories that linked my father to Watergate.
I wish I could say I immediately rose to the occasion with good-natured aplomb -- viewing them as a challenge to meet and not a burden to overcome, much like the Pope must feel when he's forced to wear white after Labor Day -- but the new responsibilities weren't welcome. Only a few weeks earlier I had been practicing for the American synchronized swim team, and now I was picking weeds out of the front lawn and folding my mother's underwear. And since it was just me and my mother now, if I didn't take on the new responsibilities, no one else would, and then all hell would break loose; first an unrolled sock, then a dusty mantle, and eventually rats would be gnawing at my pajama bottoms. My Olympic hopes drove away with my father and a navy blue '89 Camry. I tried to keep up with my training, but it's tough to do a backflip in the bathtub.
Except for my mother’s sporadic fits of self-pity and rage, one of which found my sister fleeing the house amid a barrage of coat hangers (I'm not sure if my mother consciously borrowed this from Joan Crawford, or if coat hangers are the weapons of choice for overly wrought divorcees), the house was considerably quieter that summer than it had ever been before, especially after my sister left for college a month before the semester started. I didn't blame her, or if I did, I don't anymore; only a fool would stay in a prison cell without a lock. For me, the quiet was even worse than the shouting. At least when people are shouting they are engaging in some mode of communication. I was 23 before I realized there’s a middle ground between complete silence and screaming bloody murder.
The day my sister left, my mother had an appointment with her attorney, which was for the best since they hadn't spoken to each other since the wire hanger incident. I didn't know she was even leaving until I saw her bags at the door. Unlike my father's hastily packed boxes, my sister's bags looked like they had been ready for years. My sister began packing the day my mother suggested she get a nose job so she could "land herself a nice Jewish doctor." I think my sister was seven years old at the time.
"Bye Jonah," my sister said, inching her way out the door. She probably wanted a hug -- my sister not having developed this aversion to touching that permeates the Haslap clan -- but I only smiled at her, because that's what I did best, and went back to folding the bathroom towels. My father used to fold the towels in a square, but I preferred a rectangle. I considered this a minor act of rebellion, except I didn't really have anyone to rebel against anymore.
Once or twice a week, my grandmother would stop by and lend a modicum of normalcy to the house. She'd cook dinner, thereby replacing my regular menu of tuna fish sandwiches and cold pizza (since my father left there had been a substantial increase of junk food in the house, as food shopping was not high on my mother's list of priorities, especially when she began avoiding public places after she allegedly spotted my father following her at the Gap), and she'd show me how to properly fold underwear so as to prevent creases.
"Who cares if I have creases in my underwear?" I asked her.
"Emergency room doctors," she replied, in a thick Polish accent that always seemed to lend an air of respectability to otherwise irrational arguments. "They see creased underwear, they think you're poor. They think you're poor, they don't take care of you. They don't take care of you, you die."
It sounded illogical to me, but who was I to engage in a debate over survivalist techniques with a woman who had endured the Holocaust, lost two husbands, and lived through eight Republican administrations.
My grandmother and I didn't have many conversations during the summer. Most of the time she came over, did whatever needed to be done, sat with my mother for a few hours, and left. Sometimes I'd only realize that she had been there when I saw of a stack of tupperware containers in the refrigerator. I suppose my mother needed her more than I did. After all, she had lived with my father 22 years, and I had only lived with him 13 years. And my grandmother had known my mother way longer than she'd known me. It was just a matter of crunching the numbers, really.
Occasionally, I would run into my grandmother during one of her visits, and we'd make small talk, like we were both waiting for a bus in the upstairs hallway.
"How are you doing, Jonah?" I could tell that she didn't want the complete answer, and I didn't want to give it. Besides, I needed to save my spare time for reorganizing my father's record collection. He could walk through the door any minute, and Barbra was still mixed in with Bette (who also claims a significant gay/Jew/gay Jew fanbase) and the Beatles (more of a mixed following).
"Fine." I smiled at her, and she smiled back. It wasn't exactly a lie. I was fine. If you divided the world up into fine and not-fine, I was fine. But it still felt vaguely like a lie.
"Good," she said, patting my head. She was the only person who could pat my head with impunity, a concomitant benefit of being a grandmother, especially in a matriarchy. "Ok, your mother needs a glass of water to take her pill."
Pills, I wanted to correct her, but she was already gone.
A few days later, my mother and I found ourselves in the kitchen together at the same time, which was a rare event since my father left. We didn't exactly avoid each other as much as we just ran in different circles; I was busy with folding towels into rectangles, and my mother was preoccupied with creating new psychological disorders for future cataloguing in the DSM-IV. We lingered for a few minutes around the table, unsure of how to proceed. Just another stranger waiting for a bus.
My grandmother had left us Chinese food for dinner, which I didn't particularly care for but my mother liked, so I tolerated. Usually we would just take the food back to our respective rooms, but I had just vacuumed the floors and didn't want to make a mess, and I suspect my mother felt the same way (the obsessive compulsive apple doesn't fall far from the obsessive compulsive tree), so we sat down at the table together, for our first dinner together since my father left, and perhaps our first dinner alone together, ever.
"You haven't gone to the pool lately," she said, taking a spoonful of sweet and sour chicken. She looked even skinnier than usual. I wondered if I did too.
"No." I spit out half of my eggroll into a napkin and rolled it into my sleeve, a trick I had learned during the many years of being force fed various food items that I didn't particularly care for, like half-sour pickles (a half-sour pickle is a sour pickle that is denied its birthright), and anything with avocado, the most aggressive of the exotic fruits. Eventually my mother caught me hiding dinner in my sleeve. Of course, instead of taking responsibility for my somewhat unhealthy behavior by feeding me unsavory meals, she assumed I had an eating disorder (which begged the question of where the four boxes of Entenmann's chocolate chip cookies went each week). She became more convinced of this belief when she found a research paper I had written about anorexia for an introductory psychology class. It was a good thing I hadn't written about matricidal serial killers, I might have found myself on the receiving end of a pair of handcuffs and a revolver.
We ate (or, she ate and I rolled half-masticated food into my sleeve) in silence for several minutes. At this point during dinnertime, my parents were usually fighting about something of minimal importance to anyone but themselves, like my father's forgetting to fill the gas tank, or my mother's refusal to treat my father with a modicum of respect. Eventually my sister would storm away from the table to avail herself of the miniature liquor bottles she kept hidden in her closet (she thought my parents didn't know about them, but they did, they just didn't particularly care -- at least she was drinking at home), my father would retreat to his office/bedroom/hideout/pornography lair, and my mother would spend the next two hours yelling at all of us from various rooms in the house, even if we couldn't hear her. The yelling was an end in and of itself. If the American Family Council had caught a glimpse of what family dinners meant in my house, they might have thought twice before airing those advertisements about the benefits of family dinners.
But now there was just the silence, only occasionally broken by the sound of my mother's chewing or the howling of our next-door neighbor's cocker spaniel. It was a new dynamic, and one that I was not comfortable with. I missed my sister's covert alcoholism, and my father's not so covert isolationism. And if I didn't miss my mother's screaming, I at least missed her passion. The woman sitting across from me was defeated; no longer manic, only depressive. She could have spontaneously transformed into an African-American transgendered midget, and she still would have been more recognizable than the woman she had become.
"I thought you liked the pool," she said, reaching for the fortune cookies. I took some comfort in her desire for a fortune cookie. You don't want a fortune cookie unless you are interested in reading your fortune; the cookie is merely a cover for skeptics.
"It's ok." I pushed the food to the side of my plate, which made my plate look emptier, another trick I had learned over the years. Why couldn't my mother like McDonald's? I was pretty sure that if my mother liked McDonald's, my grandmother would start bringing us Big Macs instead of moo shoo pork. Maybe I could forge my mother's handwriting on a note to my grandmother asking for McDonald's. I had already perfected the art of forging my mother's signature on notes to get myself out of gym class. Though I suspected my grandmother was sharper than my gym teachers. She was definitely much more intimidating.
"You should go to the pool," my mother said, biting into her fortune cookie. "That's where you should be." She tossed the fortune in the trash, and disappeared into her bedroom. I removed the food from my sleeve, realizing that for the first time, I didn’t need to hide it anymore. She wouldn’t have noticed either way.
Eventually my grandmother's visits tapered off, as her attention got diverted to her other child and other grandson, both of whom also needed her more than I did. I was fine, after all, and I did smile a lot, at least, a lot more than they did. He who smiles most needs grandmother least.
Towards the end of the summer, my father's attorney began lobbying for visitation rights, whereby my father would be permitted to spend four hours a week with me, which was four hours more than my mother wanted him to spend with me. I suggested that for at least those four hours each week, he wouldn’t be able to stalk her at the Gap or let the air out of her tires, but she was unconvinced.
“He’s probably installed cameras to watch the house,” she replied. “Probably with that night-vision thing that lets him see in the dark.” I hoped she was right. Batman would be an even cooler dad than Santa Clause. Though I wondered why anyone -- my father, Batman, or Santa Clause, for that matter -- would watch our house at night if they had access to such advanced technology. Personally, I would have used it to spy on someplace more interesting, like the large white mansion down the block whose owners were rumored to be part of the mafia. At least that was the rumor in my house, although I don't think it was based on anything other than the fact that they drove expensive cars and had an Italian last name, which, according to my mother, was more than enough to indict them for racketeering.
My mother held firm to her opposition to visitation rights, until opposing counsel made it clear that if she wanted to start receiving those child support checks, she'd have to grin and bear it, or at least refrain from calling the police and claiming I was kidnapped when my father came around. There might be thirty miles between them now, but my father still knew the precise location of her Achilles' heel, which was somewhere between three and four hundred dollars a week. I was proud that my father was willing to pay so much just to see me – a hundred dollars an hour was worth a lot in those days, even if today it’s standard pay for babysitters -- but I’m not sure if he paid for the pleasure of my company, or the pain it caused my mother.
And so, three days before high school began, I saw my father for the first time since the July 4th barbecue that never happened.
My mother refused to allow my father to come within 500 feet of the house (which seemed like a pointless dictate to me, considering he was apparently watching her shower with his night-vision cameras), so my father picked me up from the drug store down the block. I arrived at the drug store a few minutes early, and thought about getting a card for this occasion, but I wasn’t sure what kind of card would be appropriate. Somehow I doubted “Congratulations On Being A Deadbeat Dad” was a best-seller for Hallmark. It might not be a popular time to celebrate, but it’s all a matter of baselines. A deadbeat dad was still better than no dad at all.
A beige Nissan pulled up in front of the drug store and honked several times, apparently at me. I didn’t recognize the driver, so I didn’t come out of the store. My mother taught me better than that. Very few Jewish kids are ever kidnapped, perhaps the only benefit of being instilled with extreme neuroses before we can crawl.
The car honked again, but I ignored it. Then the driver got out of the car and waved to me
“Jonah, come on!” he said, motioning to his watch. “I need to get you back by 5!”
The mysterious driver, who I had thought might have been related to the disappearance of the Lindbergh baby, was actually my father. Or, a version of my father. His moustache was gone, as was the grey in his temples. He had lost at least fifty pounds, and it showed everywhere – including his face, which looked significantly younger. Over the course of a summer, he had lost ten years, and I had gained twenty.
“It’s great to see you.” He hugged me, which again might be normal for some families, but was odd behavior for mine. I wondered whether he was drunk. He had never really drank before, but apparently this was a new Martin Haslap. Maybe this Martin Haslap drank mint juleps and hung around the Playboy mansion.
“You too.” I smiled, because that’s what I do best, and got in the car.
“You like it?” he asked, patting the dashboard, like it was a '69 Corvette, and not a '92 used Nissan. It was nothing special, but I nodded. It was a rhetorical question. “I treated myself.”
I wondered what his definition of "treating yourself" entailed. I always figured you treat yourself to something when you want to reward yourself for a job well done, but I couldn't imagine what job he had done that merited a new (used) car. I thought about the Bar Mitzvah money, and all the Archie comics it would never buy. Maybe some of my relatives would give me the gifts again if I could convince them I was dying.
“How’s your summer been?” Another question that the person really didn’t want the answer to. I wondered if this was just something that adults did as a matter of course. Ask each other questions, without actually wanting the answers.
“Fine.” Lying to someone is easier when the other person wants you to lie.
Of the fifty pounds he had lost, twenty of them were in his face. After so many years of being overweight, the skin didn’t snap back to its original shape, which gave it a latex-like quality, as if you could use the excess skin around his neck to bungee off of the Grand Canyon. But he still looked younger and healthier – and happier – than he had since I’d known him, though it was happiness with a curiously self-satisfied edge. Suddenly, I wondered what my mother was going to have for lunch. I hoped there was something she could eat in the refrigerator. She couldn’t lose much more weight, without fading into the bedroom walls.
“So where do you want to go?” I had forgotten that we were actually going to go somewhere during our visit, and I realized how little time I ever spent actually doing something with either of my parents. We lived together, sure. And occasionally we would all find ourselves watching television at the same time, especially when Married…with Children would come in, which we all appreciated for making our lives seem only slightly less dysfunctional. At least my mother had normal hair, and my father didn’t spend eight hours a day in the bathroom. But as far as actually doing things, I could count on a few fingers the amount of days we spent our free time together. Perhaps because free time is supposed to make you feel free, and time together had the opposite effect.
“How about the mall?” he asked, the skin under his neck gyrating while he shifted into gear. “I saw some things there I wanted to get for you.”
It was my first taste of divorced father guilt, and it wasn't altogether unwanted, or unwarranted. While some guilt-laden conspicuous consumption was appealing, I worried that we might run into some kids from my high school at the mall. Kids hanging out with other kids, doing kid things. Kids who reminded me that having fun is not synonymous with ironing boards.
“And we can go to McDonald’s for lunch,” he said.
I was sold.
So off we went, an old Jonah and a new Martin, in a used Nissan Sentra, to the busy mall, to buy me expensive items, so that I would be satisfied, and he could sleep tonight. Of course, my satisfaction would only last as long as the batteries in my new Walkman. Forgiveness bought with a credit card is worth the price you paid for it.
On the way to the mall, I fiddled with the car radio, which had a CD player in it, a definite step up from the basic AM/FM radio in the old Camry. In fact, though I hadn’t noticed it before, the entire car, with its automatic doors and windows, and car seats that adjusted on several different planes, was a step up from the Camry, which was bare bones in every possible respect. Maybe my mother was right about the night-vision cameras. The new Martin Haslap was obviously a technologically advanced individual, turkey neck and all. I made a mental note to bring CDs for our next visit, which could help fill the uncomfortable silences, even though there weren’t many of those. My father talked the whole way there, without saying much at all.
"It's been hot this summer, huh."
"I haven't heard from your sister in a while."
"I joined a gym, I'm benching 165 now!"
He looked at me for approval after each of these non-sequiturs. I smiled, which apparently gave him the approval he was looking for, because he didn't ask any follow-up questions.
I noticed that we had been driving on side-streets for a while, even though the highway led directly to the mall. All highways in Long Island lead to the mall.
"Why are you taking the long way?" I asked him, wondering whether we were driving through safe neighborhoods. We were passing apartment buildings now, which I always associated with high-crime rates. I wasn't sure if that was because the people who lived in them were necessarily criminals, or whether they were driven to crime because they had to put up with each other everyday, especially if everyone butted into everyone else's business constantly, as I fully expected they would. Walls are no replacements for boundaries.
"I thought it would be fun to do something different." I wondered what he'd think about my rectangular towels.
We finally arrived at the mall, with its glass roof and metal spires, rising high above any of the surrounding buildings. This was a feat of modern engineering, and modern capitalism. Busloads of Japanese tourists were unloading at the front entrance, excited about their highly anticipated trip to an American shopping mall. The Egyptians gave posterity the Pyramids. The Romans gave posterity the Coliseum. We would give posterity JC Penney's. And Disneyworld, of course.
The trip took twenty-three minutes longer than usual, twenty-three minutes that I could have spent cleaning the microwave, which sorely needed the extra attention after a disastrous culinary experiment earlier that morning. No one ever taught me that you can't cook french toast in a microwave, especially not wrapped in aluminum foil. I suppose some lessons you just need to learn on your own.
"So where do you want to go first?" he asked, again with a self-satisfied air, as if getting me to the mall had anything to do with him and it wasn't the credit cards in his wallet that really won the victory today. I turned away, and scanned the mall directory for my favorite stores, which ranged from the typical clothing establishments (apparently my father was already intimately familiar with the Gap, and I was already drawn to Abercrombie & Fitch, though again, I was too young to know exactly why), to offbeat stores that no one ever seems to step foot in but that somehow manage to stay in business, like those places where they can engrave your name on personalized toilet seats. I was a shopping dilettante.
We went to dozens of stores that day, at which I liberally filled both hands with merchandise that I neither needed or even wanted, but that somehow found its way into a shopping bag. We even went to the Sharper Image, a store that I had previously thought of as a place that only Madonna and Bill Gates could afford to shop. But nothing was too good for the new Martin Haslap's son.
"I really want that," I said, pointing to an entirely unnecessary talking glow-in-the-dark alarm clock that told time in eight different languages. I was prepared for an argument, to which I wasn't sure how I would respond, unless I claimed I had been taking Chinese lessons that summer and wanted to keep up with my studies.
"Then let's get it."
At Banana Republic, my father decided to "treat" himself again, and bought a bunch of clothes for his newly svelte figure.
"Jonah, how does this look?" he asked, trying on a new jacket. More questions without answers.
"Great." Just for asking me how he looked, I would get five pairs of pants instead of four.
At the register, the cashier asked to see my father's photo identification, which he handed to her, proudly.
"You've lost a lot of weight, Mr. Haslap," she said to him, smiling, while ringing up the fifth pair of pants. I wondered whether she was flirting with him, which made me profoundly uncomfortable. The man's not even single two months, and Cashier McRegisterlady already had her claws in him. In fact, he wasn't even technically single yet, which would mean she's committing adultery, and I was pretty sure that was still illegal, at least in the Bible belt. I briefly considered calling the police to get this she-devil hauled away, but this was in the days before cell phones. Good thing, too. She was pretty, and wouldn't have lasted a day in an all-female lockdown.
After two hours of this shopping spree, we retired to the McDonald's, where I ordered more food than I could possibly eat. My father didn't argue, though, just like he hadn't argued the whole afternoon. He just took out his wallet, which was considerably thinner now than it had been two hours earlier.
We sat down in a booth near the window overlooking the mall's foyer. People swarmed in and out with arms full of junk that would eventually find its way to the bottom of a closet, like squirrels burying nuts for the winter, except at least the squirrels could eat the nuts. I couldn't eat the glow-in-the-dark talking alarm clock. The neon was probably poisonous, or at least, unappetizing.
My father munched on a garden salad -- a stark contrast to his usual order of three Big Macs, four large onion rings, and a milkshake or two -- while I smothered my McNuggets with ketchup (I found the special sauce typically provided with an order of McNuggets to be too exotic for my tastes). My many purchases sat on the booth next to me, video games waiting to be played, CDs waiting to be listened to, flood pants waiting to be worn. I wasn't sure whether my closet was big enough to fit everything, but then I could always use my father's closet now. It was big and empty.
The mall filled up while we were eating, mostly with back-to-school shoppers. I saw a mother chasing her children into a Toys 'R Us, with the father following obediently behind, for the time being at least. He didn't want to be there, but he had no choice. Choices are only for the lucky; most of us have to play the hand we're dealt.
"This wasn't your fault, you know," my father said, offering me the last french fry. This was the part of the visit where he was supposed to recite divorced father cliches, and I was supposed to nod in agreement. Although the Bundys themselves never divorced, I watched enough dysfunctional family sitcoms to know the script cold.
"Yeah."
"Your mother and I just drifted apart, you know."
"Yeah."
"Things will get better, you know."
"Yeah."
"Everyone will be much happier this way, you know."
"Yeah."
My tray was still half-full of food, but I'd had enough. I felt vaguely guilty throwing out the rest, but I didn't want to take it home -- fast food doesn't microwave well, another lesson no one taught me but I learned on my own -- and there were no homeless people in my neighborhood, as I imagine the neighborhood watch had them carted off to towns with apartment buildings. I could send it to the starving children in Ethiopia, as my mother had repeatedly threatened when I didn't finish my dinner (which to me was less a threat and more a viable option), but I didn't think Chicken McNuggets would keep on the three-day flight. So my half-full tray found its way to the bottom of the garbage can, where it would surely feed some mall rats later in the evening.
I gathered up my comic books, video games, clothes, and other paternal replacement goods, and we headed out. The father that I had watched entering Toys 'R Us was now lingering outside of a Victoria's Secret, perhaps lamenting lost opportunities, or perhaps considering possible gifts for his wife. I hoped for the sake of his wife and children it was the latter.
My father put his hand on my shoulder, and bent down so he was eye level with me, like Melanie had a few months before. Maybe if the whole divorce thing goes through, I could set them up. At least then I'd be a real member of the pool family.
"I love you, you know."
After shuffling me and my sister across several state lines and through a number of public school systems of varying quality (at least one of which was a breeding ground for Hitler Youth), my parents finally settled on a three bedroom, split-level, could-be-expensive-if-it-wasn’t-located-on-a-major-road compromise in suburban Long Island. Our new home was a step down from what my mother wanted, and a step up from what my father could afford, which meant no one was happy, least of all the two children who were now forced to attend school with pre-teens who measured a person's social value by the limit on their AmEx card. One year, a particularly wealthy classmate crashed his new red BMW convertible into a kosher Chinese food restaurant, killing two migrant workers in the process. But since the workers were illegal immigrants who barely spoke English, the classmate got off with a year’s probation and some community service, which he paid another migrant worker to do for him. Just like those immigrants, taking jobs away from hard-working Americans.
Eventually I found my niche in suburbia, among the freaks and geeks of my high school, of which there were more than the brochure would have you believe. Once I found friends, I started doing things that people with friends ordinarily do, like seeing movies, shoplifting insignificant trinkets from the neighborhood Hallmark store, and stalking Quentin, the hot waiter from the local diner whose name we didn’t actually know but who we thought looked like a Quentin, for no particular reason other than he vaguely resembled Quentin Tarantino if he had been sired by Brad Pitt. My clique might not have been popular or law-abiding, but we were creative.
Until my social blossoming, however, the community pool became my temporary escape for the summer months (during the winter months, my escape shifted between the local Blockbuster Video and a crawl space below my house). It was only a few blocks from our home, and it was free to local residents under 17, which meant I could spend the entire day there without having to ask my parents for anything, except permission to leave the house. They rarely denied my request, as it meant that I wouldn’t spend the day bugging them to turn up the air conditioning, which my mother routinely refused to do because of the expense.
“But I’m boiling in here!” I protested when she’d inevitably turn off the air conditioner on the hottest days of the summer. My mother grew up in what was, as far as I could tell, a tenement. I had only read about tenements in history textbooks, before the chapter on the war with the evil Germans and after the chapter on the other war with the evil Germans, but the descriptions of her childhood home seemed to have all the hallmarks of one – three people to every bed, a cast iron stove, crying babies who were routinely smothered by cockroaches. Thirty years later, my mother still made me walk four blocks to the nearest pay phone to call directory assistance, so we could save the twenty-five cents. You can take the girl out of the tenement.
“I just don’t understand why I need to suffer needlessly,” I continued, dramatically fanning myself with the living room curtain.
“That’s your problem, Jonah. You have it too easy,” she replied, dismissively. “Now go tell your fucking scumbag father that dinner is ready.”
My goal in those pre-divorce days was to go as long as possible without speaking to either parent. My personal best was eleven days, a streak only interrupted by a spider in my bedroom that required squashing. Poisonous insects trump uncomfortable conversation any day. My fucking scumbag father did it for me, without a fuss. I think it made him feel useful, like a real father, instead of just the resident scumbag. Somehow I doubted Mr. Brady needed to step on arachnids to demonstrate his utility to Carol and the Bunch, but I was happy that I could slightly increase the positive energy in the house, even if it meant the loss of innocent lives.
But any positive energy I felt from my father’s transformation into master bug squasher was far outweighed by the pure joy of the community pool. The attraction wasn’t necessarily the actual water, which was usually cold and uninviting, even if being completely immersed in liquid filled some neglected Freudian need. And it wasn’t the half-naked male lifeguards; I was old enough to know I was different, but I was too young to know how I was different.
For me, the attraction was in the “community” part of the community pool. For a few hours each day, I was part of a larger family, the pool family, whose hedonistic members were guided only by their desire for sun and, albeit placid, surf. Or sometimes, when I was feeling particularly social, I would pretend I was part of a real family at the pool, conveniently laying my towel close enough to a mother with a wide-brim hat reading Mademoiselle and lathering her children in SPF-45, so that outsiders might think that I was actually one of her fair-skinned brood (or, if the family was African-American, a child from her first marriage). Not that I ever actually spoke to any of my adopted families. I was only passively needy; I saved my aggression for violent video games.
Because I didn’t have many friends in those days, usually I spent the day alone at the pool, which aroused suspicion among the pool staff that I might be a homeless child, using the facilities to wash the track marks off my arms before rejoining a group of heroin-addled pre-adolescents. A few of them whispered to each other every time I passed through the turnstile entrance, grinning in my general direction, as if a forced smile from them would put me back on the path to the straight and narrow. My well-kept hair and ironed bathing suit should have tipped them off that I wasn't actually homeless, but some people just like being heroes, even when a hero isn't needed. An unnecessary hero is just a moron in tights.
A few weeks before my parents divorced, a woman approached me as I was toweling off from a four-hour swim, during which I had successfully completed a series of eight back flips in a row without coming up for air, another personal best. Her t-shirt proudly declared her to be the "Pool Manager." I thought that sounded like the coolest job in the world -- this woman spends everyday at the pool, bossing people around, and she gets paid for it, too -- except the shirt itself was a nauseating shade of green, and the "M" in Manager had faded, so she was really just the Pool anager, which didn't sound nearly as cool.
"Hi there," she said, bending down so that she was eye level with me. I hated when adults did that. It assumed that they were my superior just because they were taller than me. If she had tried tossling my hair I might have thrown her anager ass in the pool. "I'm Melanie. What's your name?"
"Jonah." I quickly put on my shirt. It's one thing to be half-naked when you're not socializing with anyone; it's quite another to speak to a stranger with your nipples exposed.
"Jonah, I see you here a lot," Melanie said. I could tell she was itching to tossle my hair. I instinctively took three steps backwards. "Is everything ok at home?"
"Yeah, everything's fine," I replied, marveling at her presumptuousness. Adults think they can say anything to kids without consequences. I doubted that she would ask the fifty-year old guy sitting behind us, guzzling beers and eyeing the 17-year old lifeguards, whether everything was ok at his home, even though everything clearly was not. But since she asked, and since I hadn’t yet learned the value of tact (a skill I’m still developing today), I gave her the complete answer. "I just can't stand my family."
Melanie stood up and shook her head.
"How sad," she said, picking the remnants of the "M" off of her shirt.
I nodded in agreement, and smiled to make her feel more comfortable with this apparently distressing news.
“I know.” But I didn't really understand her pity. What exactly was sad about it? I was enjoying a beautiful day at the pool, at least until Melanie had stuck her sunburned nose into my business. It was just warm enough so that I didn't get cold in the water, but not so warm that I baked when I was in the sun (I refused to use sunscreen, a small but palpable rebellion against my mother). I had my Walkman with me, and a new Gloria Estefan cassette geared up to play that inspirational song she wrote after she broke her spine in that terrible car accident. I had purchased a frozen Snickers bar with a dollar I stole out of my mother's wallet earlier that day, which was going to be my reward for my feats of aquatic strength. As far as I could tell, my glass was at least half-full, if not more.
Clearly, Melanie's baseline was far higher than my own.
And to top it all off, I felt I was getting closer to a spot on the American synchronized swim team. I was sure that being able to do eight back flips in a row without vomiting or passing out must be some kind of record. All I needed to do now was find out how to get in contact with the team's coach. I suspected that there was no listing for "American Synchronized Swim Team" in the Yellow Pages, but maybe Melanie knew someone. She was the Pool Manager after all. Hopefully I hadn't burned that bridge too quickly with my flip conversational style.
Unfortunately, my synchronized swim team dreams came to an end the same day as my parents' marriage, and just as abruptly. Not that most people wouldn't have seen it coming from miles away, like our next-door neighbors, who had become increasingly familiar with domestic disturbance laws since we moved in. Although they were lucky. They only had to call the police on us two times in as many years; our previous neighbors had called at least half a dozen times in the same time span. Still, it was probably two times more than they hoped for. People move to suburbia for peace, not war.
But it didn’t take familiarity with the New York State criminal code to predict my parents’ divorce. Just one look at their relationship was enough to see disaster ahead. They hadn’t slept in the same bedroom for the better part of a decade, originally because of my father’s snoring (which, granted, was disturbing in its intensity, as if my father was expressing all of his pent-up anger in between jagged breaths), but eventually because anxious discontent is easier to maintain with three floors between you. They even looked wrong together. For every pound he was overweight, she was a pound underweight. Personally, I found his girth reassuring – he would have made a great Santa Clause, if only my parents had seen fit to indulge my gentile proclivities – while her frailty was frightening, as if an overly slick driveway could leave me one step closer to the orphanage. Though now that I’m older, I’m glad I inherited her metabolism and not his. Santa Clause might be comforting, but he wouldn’t get much attention in a gay bar.
So anyone with two eyes and a rudimentary knowledge of the English language could tell that my parents weren't going to be celebrating these moments of their lives for much longer. But when anxious discontent is the constant mood of a household, it's difficult to predict just when a barely tolerable situation will cross the line into intolerable. For my mother, that line was crossed when my father revealed that he had clandestinely spent all of the money in our savings accounts, including the money I had received for my Bar Mitzvah, which was ostensibly a “gift” but which I considered payment for being forced to spend four hours with distant and unapproachable relatives. He claimed that he spent the money on necessities like food and flamingo nightlights for my sister, but his extensive pornography collection belied his claim (I received a slight return on my investment when my father left his pornography collection behind after the divorce, perhaps his absentee way of teaching me about the birds and the bees; for my taste, there were too many birds and not enough bees in his collection). It was the worst possible betrayal to my mother, and I doubt that any other indiscretion would inevitably have led to a divorce, which is precisely why he did it. If infidelity had been her Achilles' heel, she would have found escort services on his credit card bill. It doesn't matter what the straw is made of. The camel's back breaks either way.
Fortunately, my Olympic aspirations caused me to miss most of the fireworks that fateful July 4th. Though I imagine the conversation went something like this:
“Honey, I have something to tell you.”
“What is it darling?”
“I’ve stolen all of your money.”
“Oh, is that all? Well, I suppose we should get a divorce then.”
The actual conversation was probably much louder, and included more cursing and hair pulling (my parents come from the soap opera school of fighting, where nothing is out of bounds except healthy communication), but I suspect that was the general gist.
I left the pool a little early that day, in anticipation of our annual July 4th barbecue. It was one of the only "American" things we did, besides pay taxes and gossip about our neighbors. My father would operate the barbecue -- the only cooking responsibility my mother deemed "masculine" enough for her husband to do without shame -- and my sister and I would sit at the patio table, barking our meal requests to him. Of course, everything my father barbecued ended up being well-done (thus setting up my taste buds for future culinary limitations -- if it's not char-burned, it's inedible), but it didn't matter. If you squinted, we almost looked like a real family. I knew it was just a mirage, but it was nice to be on the inside looking out for a change.
I arrived home from the pool just in time to see my father load the last hastily packed cardboard box in the trunk. He spotted me walking down the street, and gave me a half-hearted wave before getting in the car and driving off. There wasn’t much he could say, at least not much that couldn’t be used against him in a court of law. At first I thought he was going to pick up some food for dinner, but when I entered the house and saw my mother crying at the kitchen table -- maybe the first time I ever saw her cry, at least without simultaneously foaming at the mouth -- I realized it would be hot dogs for two from now on.
Over the next few weeks, in between visits to an unscrupulous divorce attorney who I suspect spent his free time hanging puppies and producing Kathie Lee Gifford's Christmas album, my mother slipped further into a state of paranoid delusions – apparently my father had nothing else to do that summer except stalk her, and occasionally let the air out of her tires – while I began reorganizing my father’s record collection, in case he suddenly came home and wanted to locate a Barbra Streisand album with considerable ease (two types of men like Barbra Streisand -- Jews and gays, which perhaps explains why Babs felt compelled to take out a restraining order against me in 2002). Surprisingly, he had left all his records behind. This was an extensive collection, which had required a considerable amount of time and attention, so I wondered whether this was a sign that he might return. Then again, I also required a considerable amount of time and attention, and he had left me behind, too.
I didn't have too much time to devote to this task, however. With my father gone, my mother and I had to determine the new parameters of survival for our new household (my sister's temporary presence was nominal at best, as she would soon physically relocate to a dorm room 200 miles away, and in her mind, she was already there). Responsibilities that used to belong to my father had to be reassigned, and most of them were reassigned to me, as my mother didn't have much time between visits to the lawyer, locking herself in her bedroom, and crafting conspiracy theories that linked my father to Watergate.
I wish I could say I immediately rose to the occasion with good-natured aplomb -- viewing them as a challenge to meet and not a burden to overcome, much like the Pope must feel when he's forced to wear white after Labor Day -- but the new responsibilities weren't welcome. Only a few weeks earlier I had been practicing for the American synchronized swim team, and now I was picking weeds out of the front lawn and folding my mother's underwear. And since it was just me and my mother now, if I didn't take on the new responsibilities, no one else would, and then all hell would break loose; first an unrolled sock, then a dusty mantle, and eventually rats would be gnawing at my pajama bottoms. My Olympic hopes drove away with my father and a navy blue '89 Camry. I tried to keep up with my training, but it's tough to do a backflip in the bathtub.
Except for my mother’s sporadic fits of self-pity and rage, one of which found my sister fleeing the house amid a barrage of coat hangers (I'm not sure if my mother consciously borrowed this from Joan Crawford, or if coat hangers are the weapons of choice for overly wrought divorcees), the house was considerably quieter that summer than it had ever been before, especially after my sister left for college a month before the semester started. I didn't blame her, or if I did, I don't anymore; only a fool would stay in a prison cell without a lock. For me, the quiet was even worse than the shouting. At least when people are shouting they are engaging in some mode of communication. I was 23 before I realized there’s a middle ground between complete silence and screaming bloody murder.
The day my sister left, my mother had an appointment with her attorney, which was for the best since they hadn't spoken to each other since the wire hanger incident. I didn't know she was even leaving until I saw her bags at the door. Unlike my father's hastily packed boxes, my sister's bags looked like they had been ready for years. My sister began packing the day my mother suggested she get a nose job so she could "land herself a nice Jewish doctor." I think my sister was seven years old at the time.
"Bye Jonah," my sister said, inching her way out the door. She probably wanted a hug -- my sister not having developed this aversion to touching that permeates the Haslap clan -- but I only smiled at her, because that's what I did best, and went back to folding the bathroom towels. My father used to fold the towels in a square, but I preferred a rectangle. I considered this a minor act of rebellion, except I didn't really have anyone to rebel against anymore.
Once or twice a week, my grandmother would stop by and lend a modicum of normalcy to the house. She'd cook dinner, thereby replacing my regular menu of tuna fish sandwiches and cold pizza (since my father left there had been a substantial increase of junk food in the house, as food shopping was not high on my mother's list of priorities, especially when she began avoiding public places after she allegedly spotted my father following her at the Gap), and she'd show me how to properly fold underwear so as to prevent creases.
"Who cares if I have creases in my underwear?" I asked her.
"Emergency room doctors," she replied, in a thick Polish accent that always seemed to lend an air of respectability to otherwise irrational arguments. "They see creased underwear, they think you're poor. They think you're poor, they don't take care of you. They don't take care of you, you die."
It sounded illogical to me, but who was I to engage in a debate over survivalist techniques with a woman who had endured the Holocaust, lost two husbands, and lived through eight Republican administrations.
My grandmother and I didn't have many conversations during the summer. Most of the time she came over, did whatever needed to be done, sat with my mother for a few hours, and left. Sometimes I'd only realize that she had been there when I saw of a stack of tupperware containers in the refrigerator. I suppose my mother needed her more than I did. After all, she had lived with my father 22 years, and I had only lived with him 13 years. And my grandmother had known my mother way longer than she'd known me. It was just a matter of crunching the numbers, really.
Occasionally, I would run into my grandmother during one of her visits, and we'd make small talk, like we were both waiting for a bus in the upstairs hallway.
"How are you doing, Jonah?" I could tell that she didn't want the complete answer, and I didn't want to give it. Besides, I needed to save my spare time for reorganizing my father's record collection. He could walk through the door any minute, and Barbra was still mixed in with Bette (who also claims a significant gay/Jew/gay Jew fanbase) and the Beatles (more of a mixed following).
"Fine." I smiled at her, and she smiled back. It wasn't exactly a lie. I was fine. If you divided the world up into fine and not-fine, I was fine. But it still felt vaguely like a lie.
"Good," she said, patting my head. She was the only person who could pat my head with impunity, a concomitant benefit of being a grandmother, especially in a matriarchy. "Ok, your mother needs a glass of water to take her pill."
Pills, I wanted to correct her, but she was already gone.
A few days later, my mother and I found ourselves in the kitchen together at the same time, which was a rare event since my father left. We didn't exactly avoid each other as much as we just ran in different circles; I was busy with folding towels into rectangles, and my mother was preoccupied with creating new psychological disorders for future cataloguing in the DSM-IV. We lingered for a few minutes around the table, unsure of how to proceed. Just another stranger waiting for a bus.
My grandmother had left us Chinese food for dinner, which I didn't particularly care for but my mother liked, so I tolerated. Usually we would just take the food back to our respective rooms, but I had just vacuumed the floors and didn't want to make a mess, and I suspect my mother felt the same way (the obsessive compulsive apple doesn't fall far from the obsessive compulsive tree), so we sat down at the table together, for our first dinner together since my father left, and perhaps our first dinner alone together, ever.
"You haven't gone to the pool lately," she said, taking a spoonful of sweet and sour chicken. She looked even skinnier than usual. I wondered if I did too.
"No." I spit out half of my eggroll into a napkin and rolled it into my sleeve, a trick I had learned during the many years of being force fed various food items that I didn't particularly care for, like half-sour pickles (a half-sour pickle is a sour pickle that is denied its birthright), and anything with avocado, the most aggressive of the exotic fruits. Eventually my mother caught me hiding dinner in my sleeve. Of course, instead of taking responsibility for my somewhat unhealthy behavior by feeding me unsavory meals, she assumed I had an eating disorder (which begged the question of where the four boxes of Entenmann's chocolate chip cookies went each week). She became more convinced of this belief when she found a research paper I had written about anorexia for an introductory psychology class. It was a good thing I hadn't written about matricidal serial killers, I might have found myself on the receiving end of a pair of handcuffs and a revolver.
We ate (or, she ate and I rolled half-masticated food into my sleeve) in silence for several minutes. At this point during dinnertime, my parents were usually fighting about something of minimal importance to anyone but themselves, like my father's forgetting to fill the gas tank, or my mother's refusal to treat my father with a modicum of respect. Eventually my sister would storm away from the table to avail herself of the miniature liquor bottles she kept hidden in her closet (she thought my parents didn't know about them, but they did, they just didn't particularly care -- at least she was drinking at home), my father would retreat to his office/bedroom/hideout/pornography lair, and my mother would spend the next two hours yelling at all of us from various rooms in the house, even if we couldn't hear her. The yelling was an end in and of itself. If the American Family Council had caught a glimpse of what family dinners meant in my house, they might have thought twice before airing those advertisements about the benefits of family dinners.
But now there was just the silence, only occasionally broken by the sound of my mother's chewing or the howling of our next-door neighbor's cocker spaniel. It was a new dynamic, and one that I was not comfortable with. I missed my sister's covert alcoholism, and my father's not so covert isolationism. And if I didn't miss my mother's screaming, I at least missed her passion. The woman sitting across from me was defeated; no longer manic, only depressive. She could have spontaneously transformed into an African-American transgendered midget, and she still would have been more recognizable than the woman she had become.
"I thought you liked the pool," she said, reaching for the fortune cookies. I took some comfort in her desire for a fortune cookie. You don't want a fortune cookie unless you are interested in reading your fortune; the cookie is merely a cover for skeptics.
"It's ok." I pushed the food to the side of my plate, which made my plate look emptier, another trick I had learned over the years. Why couldn't my mother like McDonald's? I was pretty sure that if my mother liked McDonald's, my grandmother would start bringing us Big Macs instead of moo shoo pork. Maybe I could forge my mother's handwriting on a note to my grandmother asking for McDonald's. I had already perfected the art of forging my mother's signature on notes to get myself out of gym class. Though I suspected my grandmother was sharper than my gym teachers. She was definitely much more intimidating.
"You should go to the pool," my mother said, biting into her fortune cookie. "That's where you should be." She tossed the fortune in the trash, and disappeared into her bedroom. I removed the food from my sleeve, realizing that for the first time, I didn’t need to hide it anymore. She wouldn’t have noticed either way.
Eventually my grandmother's visits tapered off, as her attention got diverted to her other child and other grandson, both of whom also needed her more than I did. I was fine, after all, and I did smile a lot, at least, a lot more than they did. He who smiles most needs grandmother least.
Towards the end of the summer, my father's attorney began lobbying for visitation rights, whereby my father would be permitted to spend four hours a week with me, which was four hours more than my mother wanted him to spend with me. I suggested that for at least those four hours each week, he wouldn’t be able to stalk her at the Gap or let the air out of her tires, but she was unconvinced.
“He’s probably installed cameras to watch the house,” she replied. “Probably with that night-vision thing that lets him see in the dark.” I hoped she was right. Batman would be an even cooler dad than Santa Clause. Though I wondered why anyone -- my father, Batman, or Santa Clause, for that matter -- would watch our house at night if they had access to such advanced technology. Personally, I would have used it to spy on someplace more interesting, like the large white mansion down the block whose owners were rumored to be part of the mafia. At least that was the rumor in my house, although I don't think it was based on anything other than the fact that they drove expensive cars and had an Italian last name, which, according to my mother, was more than enough to indict them for racketeering.
My mother held firm to her opposition to visitation rights, until opposing counsel made it clear that if she wanted to start receiving those child support checks, she'd have to grin and bear it, or at least refrain from calling the police and claiming I was kidnapped when my father came around. There might be thirty miles between them now, but my father still knew the precise location of her Achilles' heel, which was somewhere between three and four hundred dollars a week. I was proud that my father was willing to pay so much just to see me – a hundred dollars an hour was worth a lot in those days, even if today it’s standard pay for babysitters -- but I’m not sure if he paid for the pleasure of my company, or the pain it caused my mother.
And so, three days before high school began, I saw my father for the first time since the July 4th barbecue that never happened.
My mother refused to allow my father to come within 500 feet of the house (which seemed like a pointless dictate to me, considering he was apparently watching her shower with his night-vision cameras), so my father picked me up from the drug store down the block. I arrived at the drug store a few minutes early, and thought about getting a card for this occasion, but I wasn’t sure what kind of card would be appropriate. Somehow I doubted “Congratulations On Being A Deadbeat Dad” was a best-seller for Hallmark. It might not be a popular time to celebrate, but it’s all a matter of baselines. A deadbeat dad was still better than no dad at all.
A beige Nissan pulled up in front of the drug store and honked several times, apparently at me. I didn’t recognize the driver, so I didn’t come out of the store. My mother taught me better than that. Very few Jewish kids are ever kidnapped, perhaps the only benefit of being instilled with extreme neuroses before we can crawl.
The car honked again, but I ignored it. Then the driver got out of the car and waved to me
“Jonah, come on!” he said, motioning to his watch. “I need to get you back by 5!”
The mysterious driver, who I had thought might have been related to the disappearance of the Lindbergh baby, was actually my father. Or, a version of my father. His moustache was gone, as was the grey in his temples. He had lost at least fifty pounds, and it showed everywhere – including his face, which looked significantly younger. Over the course of a summer, he had lost ten years, and I had gained twenty.
“It’s great to see you.” He hugged me, which again might be normal for some families, but was odd behavior for mine. I wondered whether he was drunk. He had never really drank before, but apparently this was a new Martin Haslap. Maybe this Martin Haslap drank mint juleps and hung around the Playboy mansion.
“You too.” I smiled, because that’s what I do best, and got in the car.
“You like it?” he asked, patting the dashboard, like it was a '69 Corvette, and not a '92 used Nissan. It was nothing special, but I nodded. It was a rhetorical question. “I treated myself.”
I wondered what his definition of "treating yourself" entailed. I always figured you treat yourself to something when you want to reward yourself for a job well done, but I couldn't imagine what job he had done that merited a new (used) car. I thought about the Bar Mitzvah money, and all the Archie comics it would never buy. Maybe some of my relatives would give me the gifts again if I could convince them I was dying.
“How’s your summer been?” Another question that the person really didn’t want the answer to. I wondered if this was just something that adults did as a matter of course. Ask each other questions, without actually wanting the answers.
“Fine.” Lying to someone is easier when the other person wants you to lie.
Of the fifty pounds he had lost, twenty of them were in his face. After so many years of being overweight, the skin didn’t snap back to its original shape, which gave it a latex-like quality, as if you could use the excess skin around his neck to bungee off of the Grand Canyon. But he still looked younger and healthier – and happier – than he had since I’d known him, though it was happiness with a curiously self-satisfied edge. Suddenly, I wondered what my mother was going to have for lunch. I hoped there was something she could eat in the refrigerator. She couldn’t lose much more weight, without fading into the bedroom walls.
“So where do you want to go?” I had forgotten that we were actually going to go somewhere during our visit, and I realized how little time I ever spent actually doing something with either of my parents. We lived together, sure. And occasionally we would all find ourselves watching television at the same time, especially when Married…with Children would come in, which we all appreciated for making our lives seem only slightly less dysfunctional. At least my mother had normal hair, and my father didn’t spend eight hours a day in the bathroom. But as far as actually doing things, I could count on a few fingers the amount of days we spent our free time together. Perhaps because free time is supposed to make you feel free, and time together had the opposite effect.
“How about the mall?” he asked, the skin under his neck gyrating while he shifted into gear. “I saw some things there I wanted to get for you.”
It was my first taste of divorced father guilt, and it wasn't altogether unwanted, or unwarranted. While some guilt-laden conspicuous consumption was appealing, I worried that we might run into some kids from my high school at the mall. Kids hanging out with other kids, doing kid things. Kids who reminded me that having fun is not synonymous with ironing boards.
“And we can go to McDonald’s for lunch,” he said.
I was sold.
So off we went, an old Jonah and a new Martin, in a used Nissan Sentra, to the busy mall, to buy me expensive items, so that I would be satisfied, and he could sleep tonight. Of course, my satisfaction would only last as long as the batteries in my new Walkman. Forgiveness bought with a credit card is worth the price you paid for it.
On the way to the mall, I fiddled with the car radio, which had a CD player in it, a definite step up from the basic AM/FM radio in the old Camry. In fact, though I hadn’t noticed it before, the entire car, with its automatic doors and windows, and car seats that adjusted on several different planes, was a step up from the Camry, which was bare bones in every possible respect. Maybe my mother was right about the night-vision cameras. The new Martin Haslap was obviously a technologically advanced individual, turkey neck and all. I made a mental note to bring CDs for our next visit, which could help fill the uncomfortable silences, even though there weren’t many of those. My father talked the whole way there, without saying much at all.
"It's been hot this summer, huh."
"I haven't heard from your sister in a while."
"I joined a gym, I'm benching 165 now!"
He looked at me for approval after each of these non-sequiturs. I smiled, which apparently gave him the approval he was looking for, because he didn't ask any follow-up questions.
I noticed that we had been driving on side-streets for a while, even though the highway led directly to the mall. All highways in Long Island lead to the mall.
"Why are you taking the long way?" I asked him, wondering whether we were driving through safe neighborhoods. We were passing apartment buildings now, which I always associated with high-crime rates. I wasn't sure if that was because the people who lived in them were necessarily criminals, or whether they were driven to crime because they had to put up with each other everyday, especially if everyone butted into everyone else's business constantly, as I fully expected they would. Walls are no replacements for boundaries.
"I thought it would be fun to do something different." I wondered what he'd think about my rectangular towels.
We finally arrived at the mall, with its glass roof and metal spires, rising high above any of the surrounding buildings. This was a feat of modern engineering, and modern capitalism. Busloads of Japanese tourists were unloading at the front entrance, excited about their highly anticipated trip to an American shopping mall. The Egyptians gave posterity the Pyramids. The Romans gave posterity the Coliseum. We would give posterity JC Penney's. And Disneyworld, of course.
The trip took twenty-three minutes longer than usual, twenty-three minutes that I could have spent cleaning the microwave, which sorely needed the extra attention after a disastrous culinary experiment earlier that morning. No one ever taught me that you can't cook french toast in a microwave, especially not wrapped in aluminum foil. I suppose some lessons you just need to learn on your own.
"So where do you want to go first?" he asked, again with a self-satisfied air, as if getting me to the mall had anything to do with him and it wasn't the credit cards in his wallet that really won the victory today. I turned away, and scanned the mall directory for my favorite stores, which ranged from the typical clothing establishments (apparently my father was already intimately familiar with the Gap, and I was already drawn to Abercrombie & Fitch, though again, I was too young to know exactly why), to offbeat stores that no one ever seems to step foot in but that somehow manage to stay in business, like those places where they can engrave your name on personalized toilet seats. I was a shopping dilettante.
We went to dozens of stores that day, at which I liberally filled both hands with merchandise that I neither needed or even wanted, but that somehow found its way into a shopping bag. We even went to the Sharper Image, a store that I had previously thought of as a place that only Madonna and Bill Gates could afford to shop. But nothing was too good for the new Martin Haslap's son.
"I really want that," I said, pointing to an entirely unnecessary talking glow-in-the-dark alarm clock that told time in eight different languages. I was prepared for an argument, to which I wasn't sure how I would respond, unless I claimed I had been taking Chinese lessons that summer and wanted to keep up with my studies.
"Then let's get it."
At Banana Republic, my father decided to "treat" himself again, and bought a bunch of clothes for his newly svelte figure.
"Jonah, how does this look?" he asked, trying on a new jacket. More questions without answers.
"Great." Just for asking me how he looked, I would get five pairs of pants instead of four.
At the register, the cashier asked to see my father's photo identification, which he handed to her, proudly.
"You've lost a lot of weight, Mr. Haslap," she said to him, smiling, while ringing up the fifth pair of pants. I wondered whether she was flirting with him, which made me profoundly uncomfortable. The man's not even single two months, and Cashier McRegisterlady already had her claws in him. In fact, he wasn't even technically single yet, which would mean she's committing adultery, and I was pretty sure that was still illegal, at least in the Bible belt. I briefly considered calling the police to get this she-devil hauled away, but this was in the days before cell phones. Good thing, too. She was pretty, and wouldn't have lasted a day in an all-female lockdown.
After two hours of this shopping spree, we retired to the McDonald's, where I ordered more food than I could possibly eat. My father didn't argue, though, just like he hadn't argued the whole afternoon. He just took out his wallet, which was considerably thinner now than it had been two hours earlier.
We sat down in a booth near the window overlooking the mall's foyer. People swarmed in and out with arms full of junk that would eventually find its way to the bottom of a closet, like squirrels burying nuts for the winter, except at least the squirrels could eat the nuts. I couldn't eat the glow-in-the-dark talking alarm clock. The neon was probably poisonous, or at least, unappetizing.
My father munched on a garden salad -- a stark contrast to his usual order of three Big Macs, four large onion rings, and a milkshake or two -- while I smothered my McNuggets with ketchup (I found the special sauce typically provided with an order of McNuggets to be too exotic for my tastes). My many purchases sat on the booth next to me, video games waiting to be played, CDs waiting to be listened to, flood pants waiting to be worn. I wasn't sure whether my closet was big enough to fit everything, but then I could always use my father's closet now. It was big and empty.
The mall filled up while we were eating, mostly with back-to-school shoppers. I saw a mother chasing her children into a Toys 'R Us, with the father following obediently behind, for the time being at least. He didn't want to be there, but he had no choice. Choices are only for the lucky; most of us have to play the hand we're dealt.
"This wasn't your fault, you know," my father said, offering me the last french fry. This was the part of the visit where he was supposed to recite divorced father cliches, and I was supposed to nod in agreement. Although the Bundys themselves never divorced, I watched enough dysfunctional family sitcoms to know the script cold.
"Yeah."
"Your mother and I just drifted apart, you know."
"Yeah."
"Things will get better, you know."
"Yeah."
"Everyone will be much happier this way, you know."
"Yeah."
My tray was still half-full of food, but I'd had enough. I felt vaguely guilty throwing out the rest, but I didn't want to take it home -- fast food doesn't microwave well, another lesson no one taught me but I learned on my own -- and there were no homeless people in my neighborhood, as I imagine the neighborhood watch had them carted off to towns with apartment buildings. I could send it to the starving children in Ethiopia, as my mother had repeatedly threatened when I didn't finish my dinner (which to me was less a threat and more a viable option), but I didn't think Chicken McNuggets would keep on the three-day flight. So my half-full tray found its way to the bottom of the garbage can, where it would surely feed some mall rats later in the evening.
I gathered up my comic books, video games, clothes, and other paternal replacement goods, and we headed out. The father that I had watched entering Toys 'R Us was now lingering outside of a Victoria's Secret, perhaps lamenting lost opportunities, or perhaps considering possible gifts for his wife. I hoped for the sake of his wife and children it was the latter.
My father put his hand on my shoulder, and bent down so he was eye level with me, like Melanie had a few months before. Maybe if the whole divorce thing goes through, I could set them up. At least then I'd be a real member of the pool family.
"I love you, you know."
Even though I doubted the motivation for the question -- which was intended to make him feel better, not me -- I didn't doubt its sincerity.
"Yeah."
Suddenly the bags in my hands got very heavy, and I wondered how I would walk the two blocks home from the drug store when my father dropped me off.
"So where to next?"
"I'm kind of tired," I replied, wondering again whether my mother had found something to eat for lunch while I was scarfing down McNuggets. "Do you mind if we go home now?" Of course, we weren't going home. I was going home, and he was going home, but they were two separate homes now, for two separate families, with two separate lives, and I was two separate people.
"Ok." He looked disappointed, but perked up quickly. "I can get to the gym a little early today, I guess. I told you I'm benching 185, right?"
My father took the long way home again, though I didn't mind as much this time. The apartment buildings we passed looked less frightening this time around, and I slipped one of my newly purchased CDs into the player to listen to on the way back. Everything looks less frightening with Rodgers and Hammerstein playing in the background.
When he dropped me off, we still had thirty-two minutes to go in our court-ordered bonding time. He took the last forty dollars he had out of his wallet and handed it to me. If he had had four hundred dollars in his wallet, he probably would have given me that. I felt a twinge of shame, as if my attempt to bankrupt him somehow sent the message that he could actually buy my forgiveness, instead of the message I had intended to send, that he was getting what he deserved. But I was wrong. None of us were getting what we deserved.
"I'll see you next week," he said, still handing me the money. I took it, but now only because he wanted me to, not because I wanted it. And in the years that followed, I took a lot more, always for the same reason. "Say hi to your mother for me."
It took twice as long to get home from the drug store than usual, because I had to keep stopping to pick up items that had fallen out of the bags, or just to rest my arms. I wondered whether my father would take me to his gym one of these days. I'd probably get special treatment, being the son of the great new Martin Haslap, who could bench 205 pounds with one hand.
When I got home, my mother was sitting quietly on the couch, listening to some health-related call-in show on the radio that only attracts hypochondriacs who came away from the show convinced they had four more ailments than they had when the show began. To my mother, radio talk show hosts were the closest thing to God that could be found in the media. I had a similar relationship with Martha Stewart.
I quickly shuffled my bags into a closet, a practice I repeated every subsequent time I came home from a visit with my father. She probably couldn't afford to buy me all the things he could buy me, but she did pay for the storage space.
"Hi ma." I was prepared for a full onslaught of "what happened?," "how did he look?," and "did he do anything illegal?," but she just stared at the radio. I was especially happy that she didn't ask how he looked, because I'm a horrible liar, and the truth would have been horrible to her. I noticed that the air conditioning was turned on high in the living room. I turned it off, even though it was sweltering outside. Electricity is expensive.
"I'm making salmon for dinner," I called to her from the kitchen. The McNuggets had not been nearly as satisfying as I imagined they would be, and I thought we could both use a home-cooked meal, even if I was the cook. I wasn't sure exactly how to go about making salmon, but I'd figure it out. It couldn't be much more of a disaster than the aluminum foil/french toast fiasco that morning, and I had the fire department on speed dial.
As I cooked dinner -- only setting off the smoke alarm twice -- my mother sat silently in the living room, lifting weights with her mind, while my father lifted them with his body, and I carried them on my shoulders. The salmon came out pretty well, if a bit dry, and my mother and I sat together and had dinner, just as my father and I sat together earlier that day for lunch. The meals might not be together anymore, but I was the constant between them. And after a while, the weights either get lighter, or you get more used to them, and you eventually adjust. Especially if it means the occasional shopping spree.
I never did make the American synchronized swim team, maybe because of the divorce, maybe because the ability to do eight consecutive somersaults in a pool was not enough to turn me into an Olympic hopeful. But sometimes dreams are meant to remain dreams, and the real accomplishment is just surviving.
"Yeah."
Suddenly the bags in my hands got very heavy, and I wondered how I would walk the two blocks home from the drug store when my father dropped me off.
"So where to next?"
"I'm kind of tired," I replied, wondering again whether my mother had found something to eat for lunch while I was scarfing down McNuggets. "Do you mind if we go home now?" Of course, we weren't going home. I was going home, and he was going home, but they were two separate homes now, for two separate families, with two separate lives, and I was two separate people.
"Ok." He looked disappointed, but perked up quickly. "I can get to the gym a little early today, I guess. I told you I'm benching 185, right?"
My father took the long way home again, though I didn't mind as much this time. The apartment buildings we passed looked less frightening this time around, and I slipped one of my newly purchased CDs into the player to listen to on the way back. Everything looks less frightening with Rodgers and Hammerstein playing in the background.
When he dropped me off, we still had thirty-two minutes to go in our court-ordered bonding time. He took the last forty dollars he had out of his wallet and handed it to me. If he had had four hundred dollars in his wallet, he probably would have given me that. I felt a twinge of shame, as if my attempt to bankrupt him somehow sent the message that he could actually buy my forgiveness, instead of the message I had intended to send, that he was getting what he deserved. But I was wrong. None of us were getting what we deserved.
"I'll see you next week," he said, still handing me the money. I took it, but now only because he wanted me to, not because I wanted it. And in the years that followed, I took a lot more, always for the same reason. "Say hi to your mother for me."
It took twice as long to get home from the drug store than usual, because I had to keep stopping to pick up items that had fallen out of the bags, or just to rest my arms. I wondered whether my father would take me to his gym one of these days. I'd probably get special treatment, being the son of the great new Martin Haslap, who could bench 205 pounds with one hand.
When I got home, my mother was sitting quietly on the couch, listening to some health-related call-in show on the radio that only attracts hypochondriacs who came away from the show convinced they had four more ailments than they had when the show began. To my mother, radio talk show hosts were the closest thing to God that could be found in the media. I had a similar relationship with Martha Stewart.
I quickly shuffled my bags into a closet, a practice I repeated every subsequent time I came home from a visit with my father. She probably couldn't afford to buy me all the things he could buy me, but she did pay for the storage space.
"Hi ma." I was prepared for a full onslaught of "what happened?," "how did he look?," and "did he do anything illegal?," but she just stared at the radio. I was especially happy that she didn't ask how he looked, because I'm a horrible liar, and the truth would have been horrible to her. I noticed that the air conditioning was turned on high in the living room. I turned it off, even though it was sweltering outside. Electricity is expensive.
"I'm making salmon for dinner," I called to her from the kitchen. The McNuggets had not been nearly as satisfying as I imagined they would be, and I thought we could both use a home-cooked meal, even if I was the cook. I wasn't sure exactly how to go about making salmon, but I'd figure it out. It couldn't be much more of a disaster than the aluminum foil/french toast fiasco that morning, and I had the fire department on speed dial.
As I cooked dinner -- only setting off the smoke alarm twice -- my mother sat silently in the living room, lifting weights with her mind, while my father lifted them with his body, and I carried them on my shoulders. The salmon came out pretty well, if a bit dry, and my mother and I sat together and had dinner, just as my father and I sat together earlier that day for lunch. The meals might not be together anymore, but I was the constant between them. And after a while, the weights either get lighter, or you get more used to them, and you eventually adjust. Especially if it means the occasional shopping spree.
I never did make the American synchronized swim team, maybe because of the divorce, maybe because the ability to do eight consecutive somersaults in a pool was not enough to turn me into an Olympic hopeful. But sometimes dreams are meant to remain dreams, and the real accomplishment is just surviving.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Negligent Blogging
To my four fans, including the guy in jail who can't wait to get out and "meat me":
I finished Lend Me A Hand, but was unhappy with the conclusion, so I began rewriting it, but since I have serious ADD -- is that Patrick Dempsey on television? why hasn't he called me yet? --- wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah, since I have serious ADD, I started another story in the interim which I will probably post before I finish the last story. It will have all the elements of a great drama; passion, intrigue, and of course, a talking turtle. Ok, it has none of those things, but it's about my parents' divorce, so it's sure to be substantially disturbing. Even more so than a talking turtle. It will be arriving forthwith. (That's a lawyer word, like "henceforth" and "greedy son of a bitch.")
Oh, went home this weekend. Lots of new material. Apparently my mother "hates the mail." She really truly does. I'm still not sure why; the investigation is pending. And I went to another wedding, the highlight of which was the attendance of the groom's Aunt Linda, who bore a striking resemblance to Charo. I'm actually convinced it was Charo, considering her exotic dancing, spitfire personality, and substitution of the regular wine kaddish with "cuchi cuchi." I was only sad that the Chiquita banana lady didn't make it to the wedding as well. I like bananas. Frankly, if God hadn't intended for men to be obsessed with their own anatomy, he/she/it shouldn't have created so many phallic fruits.
And so I leave you with a snapshot of a conversation between myself and my mother about my desire to change professions, which she adamantly opposes for obvious reasons (1. money 2. bragging rights to her coffee clutch 3. money):
Mom: You're so obsessed with being happy. Who's happy? That's not the point of your life.
Me: So what's the point of my life?
Mom: Making your mother happy.
I finished Lend Me A Hand, but was unhappy with the conclusion, so I began rewriting it, but since I have serious ADD -- is that Patrick Dempsey on television? why hasn't he called me yet? --- wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah, since I have serious ADD, I started another story in the interim which I will probably post before I finish the last story. It will have all the elements of a great drama; passion, intrigue, and of course, a talking turtle. Ok, it has none of those things, but it's about my parents' divorce, so it's sure to be substantially disturbing. Even more so than a talking turtle. It will be arriving forthwith. (That's a lawyer word, like "henceforth" and "greedy son of a bitch.")
Oh, went home this weekend. Lots of new material. Apparently my mother "hates the mail." She really truly does. I'm still not sure why; the investigation is pending. And I went to another wedding, the highlight of which was the attendance of the groom's Aunt Linda, who bore a striking resemblance to Charo. I'm actually convinced it was Charo, considering her exotic dancing, spitfire personality, and substitution of the regular wine kaddish with "cuchi cuchi." I was only sad that the Chiquita banana lady didn't make it to the wedding as well. I like bananas. Frankly, if God hadn't intended for men to be obsessed with their own anatomy, he/she/it shouldn't have created so many phallic fruits.
And so I leave you with a snapshot of a conversation between myself and my mother about my desire to change professions, which she adamantly opposes for obvious reasons (1. money 2. bragging rights to her coffee clutch 3. money):
Mom: You're so obsessed with being happy. Who's happy? That's not the point of your life.
Me: So what's the point of my life?
Mom: Making your mother happy.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Lend Me A Hand, Part I
So you thought I was gone for good, eh? It'll take more than apathy to get rid of me!
This is the first long part of a long story that I've been working on. Oh, did I mention it's long? Don't say I didn't warn you.
Enjoy your schadenfreude installment for the day!
****************************************************
I haven’t flown in six years. Of all my irrational fears -- spiders, heights, nose hair -- flying is the most intense. Just hearing the words “frequent flyer” or “Mile High Club” is enough to give me the shakes. Although joining the latter is a slight incentive to getting over my fear. Sex in a Greyhound bus bathroom isn't nearly as classy.
Given that my parents had convinced me that Ebola was lurking behind every Toys R' Us display, my fear of flying might not be surprising. But despite my pre-determined pessimism, it's not crashing that really scares me. I just can't bring myself to worry about dying in a plane when I'm so much more likely to die in a New York City cab. Of course, this means that I also have an intense fear of New York City cabs, but that's intertwined with my intense fear of New York City in general. Nothing good can come from 14 million people in a two mile radius.
No, my fear of flying predates even my earliest childhood memories. I’ve been claustrophobic since I was a baby. There wasn’t a crib built big enough to hold me. By my first birthday, my parents had added several levels of bars on the top of my crib to keep me from climbing out. Most babies don’t spend the first years of their lives in a crib that could have held Jimmy Hoffa. Actually, according to my mother, I was claustrophobic before I was even born. Apparently I was so unhappy being trapped in the womb, I almost killed her in my hurry to get out. I was only two weeks premature, but the way my mother tells it you’d think I was born brandishing a meat cleaver. Amazingly, my mother doesn't consider this a reproach on her hospitability. I hate when guests depart early from one of my parties, especially when their departure also results in an epidural and a blood transfusion.
I’ve spent thousands of dollars trying to get myself back on an airplane. Support groups, cognitive behavioral therapy, strapping myself to the nose of a 747 – nothing’s worked. One therapist had the brilliant idea of inducing panic attacks to help me desensitize to the feeling of anxiety.
“Breathe with me,” she instructed. “We’ll breathe slow at first, and then speed up, and after a minute or two you will hyperventilate and the attack will start.”
It seemed to me we were drawing close to the boundaries of legitimate therapy here. We spent the entire session trying to hyperventilate. It didn’t work. I didn’t have a panic attack, and the only consolation was that I got to watch the therapist turn blue. I refused to pay her for wasting my time with that nonsense. She referred me to a collection agency, which, ironically, gave me a panic attack.
But the biggest waste of time and money was the virtual reality therapy. The therapist fits you with a pair of goggles that are supposed to simulate flight and straps you to an airplane chair. The goal is to make you feel comfortable in an airplane-type setting. Tying a claustrophobic to a chair is a great way of making him comfortable.
“Do I get a bag of peanuts with this?” I asked the therapist. He wasn’t amused. I have a tendency to annoy therapists. I use humor as a defense mechanism, and most therapists have a horrible sense of humor. Especially when they’d ask about my traumatic childhood.
“So your mother would chase you around the house with scissors. How did that make you feel?”
“Knock knock.”
My sister says this is an unhealthy defense mechanism.
“It’s a form of detachment, Jonah. You refuse to deal with your legitimate emotions. It’s really self-destructive. Ok, we’ll have to talk about this later, I’m out of wine and the liquor store closes at midnight.”
After the therapist strapped me in the chair, he would switch on the virtual reality machine, the chair would start rattling, and I’d hear the garbled sounds of an airplane engine. I was supposed to feel like I was on an airplane, but the images looked more like a beta version of Super Mario Brothers. After a few minutes I got bored. The therapist would come back in the room periodically to check on me.
“So tell me, what’s your anxiety level at now?”
“Zero.”
“Zero? But you’re on an airplane!”
“No, I’m not. I’m sitting in your office. The graphics on this thing are horrible. I can hear your secretary talking about American Idol. This chair smells. And where are my peanuts?”
Fortunately insurance paid for these sessions. Otherwise I’d have another collection agency after me.
*******************
“You haven’t flown in six years? Why not?” Ethan and I were sitting in a corner at Starbucks. Ethan liked sitting in corners. He liked looking at people, but he didn’t like being looked at. Which was too bad, since he was very pretty. Pretty people have an obligation to the world to be as visible and scantily clad as possible at all times.
“I’m scared.” He took a sip of his coffee and checked out the couple across from us. I watched his eyes gaze from the man, to the woman, back to the man.
“What are you scared of? Dying?”
“No. I know that I’m not going to die on a plane. I’m not stupid.”
“No, you’re right. You’re not stupid. Just crazy.” There was truth in that. I looked over at the couple behind us.
“Which one is hotter?” I asked him. When we first met, Ethan told me he was bisexual. Of course, I didn’t believe him. I was bisexual once too – for about three minutes, until I realized that being bisexual meant more than just not instinctively vomiting at the sight of a vagina. So I took it upon myself to scrutinize his every glance; after four months of following his eyes while we were watching television, out at dinner, in a bar, at the gym, flipping through the Sears catalogue, I decided that he actually was attracted to both women and men. That’s ok, though; I was gay enough for both of us.
“The chick has nice breasts, but the dude is really cut. It’s a draw.” Ethan still used words like “chick,” “dude,” and “bro.” He was only a year out of college, where he was president of his fraternity, a member of the Crew team, and an Abercrombie & Fitch “brand rep model.” He was the kind of guy who would have beaten me up in high school. God was making up for my delayed pubescence.
I met Ethan on ManSlut, or HornDude, or one of those websites where no one has to pretend they’re looking for anything other than a quickie. For the first three months he was just a pleasant distraction. My hairline was just beginning to recede, so sleeping with a 22 year old frat boy was very appealing. He’d sneak in, we’d go to my room, and he’d sneak out anywhere from a few minutes or several hours later. My roommate, Jason, never saw him; it was less complicated that way. I didn’t really care if Jason knew that I had a fuck buddy. Jason was straight only in the sense that he enjoyed sex with women; in every other way, Jason was perhaps the gayest man I’ve ever known, so I doubt this would have disturbed him. Plus a few months earlier Jason had caught me shaving my pubic hair, and once someone sees you shaving your pubes, there’s really no where else to go but up.
As time went on, Ethan and I stopped just having sex and started to talk. At first I didn’t like the talking. He was as close as I had ever gotten to a boytoy, and I didn’t want to add unnecessary depth to the relationship. But I also knew that there was an expiration date to fuck buddies, and we were quickly approaching that time. So it was either get to know him as a person or end it, and I wasn't ready for that yet. Plus my subscription to ManSlut had expired, and I was too cheap to renew. The promise of sex was worth less than $19.95 a month.
Eventually Ethan began to spend the night, which added a whole new layer of complication. I have a very specific nighttime routine, and the presence of a third party interferes with this carefully orchestrated process. Shower twice. Comb hair four times. Make sure all labels in refrigerator face forward. Organize shoes by date of purchase. NASA has less detailed procedures for launching spacecrafts.
But the real challenge for overnight guests is my actual sleeping habits. First, I turn on a fan that sits under my bed for white noise. Then I tie a t-shirt around my head to block out all light. I know there are products specifically made for that purpose, but those are too gay, even for me. Plus they remind me of Joan Crawford, and it’s just a stone’s throw from wearing an eye mask to attacking your dry cleaner with a wire hanger, which I don't want to do. I like my dry cleaner. He's a wizard at ketchup stains.
After the shirt is properly tied, I layer one pillow under my head and one pillow over my head, lie down on my stomach, and stick one leg – just one – under the blanket. One hand rests on the television remote control, in case I have a nightmare and need to quickly turn on the television in the middle of the night, and the other hand rests on the teddy bear I’ve had since I was 2 (a priceless possession I also plan to be buried with). If any body party is the slightest bit out of position, I can’t sleep at all, and then I’m cranky the next day. Crankier than usual. Cranky enough to attack my dry cleaner with a wire hanger.
I also drool in my sleep. I’m not talking a little wet spot here or there – by the morning my pillow is more soaked than a priest’s pants at Chuck E’ Cheese. And I don’t only drool on my pillow – I bite it. Hard. You don’t want to get your fingers too close to my mouth while I sleep. Or other body parts. And to top it all off, I talk in my sleep, usually completely incoherent babble, though my freshman roommate told me that he once found me singing the Star-Spangled Banner while standing on my bed and saluting the television set, naked. I may think like a Democrat, but I dream like a Republican.
I quickly realized that I didn’t mind Ethan’s presence, though. He had this way of being around without intruding, or making me feel self-conscious about my lunacy. Being a self-aware lunatic is much more difficult than just being a plain old lunatic. Sometimes I’m jealous of people with little or no hold on reality. I wonder what it says about your emotional health when schizophrenia is appealing.
“Do you think it’s weird that I have to flush the toilet eight times before I go to bed?”
“Weird? I never thought it was weird. It’s just… one of your things.”
It was easy for Ethan to believe this, as his biggest visible quirk was a preference for crunchy peanut butter over smooth. It’s a little harder to avoid feeling judged when everyone on the subway watches you counting the number of fluorescent light bulbs in the ceiling.
Over time, my lunacy even seemed to become endearing.
“So what color t-shirt are you going to tie around your head tonight?”
“Well, it has to be a dark color," I said, moving the Kenneth Coles behind the Nikes and the Birkenstocks to the back of the line, where they belonged, both because I had bought them in the mid-90s and because they were an ill-advised impulse purchase at Lilith Fair, of which all I remember is being the only attendant with a penis. "Brighter colors let in too much light. But if it’s too dark, and I wake up in the middle of the night, I get scared that I might be going blind. So it needs to be the perfect shade of red, or dark blue. As long as it’s not ribbed. I don’t like the feeling of ribbed fabric against my ears.”
"You know, before I met you, I didn’t think people like you existed,” he said, flipping through the Sears catalogue and pausing at the woman's underwear ads. "You're very interesting."
“Interesting as in, there’s a guy I want to get to know better, or interesting as in, what a fabulous subject for psychiatric study?” I have a tendency to ask questions that I don’t really want the answer to, unless it’s the one I want to hear. Like, am I losing my hair?, or, is it the biggest one you’ve ever seen? My boyfriends learn this trick quickly. They only give the wrong answer once.
“Both.” It was an acceptable answer. He didn’t sleep on the couch that night, though I did rip the woman's underwear ads out of the catalogue. It was hard enough to compete with other men, but there was no way I could compete with a woman. I have a small frame, and my waist is small enough to cause some envy among my female friends, but with a five-o-clock shadow at 6 in the morning, my face is indistinguishably masculine. I wouldn't make a good woman. I wouldn't even make a good drag queen.
Back at our corner table, the couple across from us was holding hands and making smoochy faces at each other. The man was much more attractive than the woman, although of course I was biased.
“Do you ever miss sex with women?” I asked him, observing their pre-coital heteronormative rituals. I don't particularly like homophobics, but I also don't think that homosexuals should throw stones; if gays ever ruled the world, our first proclamation would likely be outlawing heterosexual sex, or at least, restricting it to certain hours of the day when the rest of us are getting manicures or attending Cher concerts.
“Sometimes. But sex with you is close enough,” he said with a grin. Ethan liked to think of himself as the big, strapping man, and me as the little helpless woman. I let him think that when it suited me, just as countless generations of women have before me. And just like those women, if he stepped over the line, I’d serve him his balls on a platter. Behind every great man there’s a gay man.
“It’s too bad about your flying fear. I was thinking we could go to the White Party next month.” The White Party was an annual event in Miami that was supposed to celebrate the culture and history of the gay people. In reality, it was just a glorified, city-wide orgy that would have made Caligula blush. I don’t think Rome ever actually fell. I think it just relocated to South Florida.
I had always been scared of massive gay events like the White Party. Actually, I was scared of any massive event. I was afraid I’d get lost in a sea of people and never find my way out. I’d just dissolve into the atmosphere. I suppose at the White Party I’d become part of a rainbow. I don’t want to dissolve, not even into a rainbow.
But having Ethan there would be an entirely different experience. He wouldn’t lose me to anyone, much less some faggy-assed rainbow.
“I want to go. Let’s go.” It was a big promise. Perhaps a promise I wasn’t capable of keeping. But I really wanted to go. And I didn’t want him going by himself. You don’t set a zebra loose in a herd of lions.
“Good, you’ll be ok," he said, watching the couple leave the store, probably headed for their bedroom to perform ungodly acts that would be outlawed in a gay-controlled society. "I’ll make sure you’re ok.”
This was one of those times his macho attitude suited me. Though I wished he was drinking something a bit more masculine than a Mochafrappacino when he said it.
***************************************
“It’s just not normal,” my mother said, as she cleaned the bathroom for the sixth time that day.
“Pass me the Windex.”
I had only recently come out to my mother. I didn’t think of myself as closeted when she didn’t know. I thought of myself as a totally out homosexual with a totally crazy mother. But when my grandmother told me that my mother had been calling radio psychiatrists to ask if they thought I might be gay (“My son likes show tunes and hasn’t had a girlfriend since the sixth grade – do you think he’s a fag?”), I figured it was time to come clean, before members of the ex-gay movement showed up at my door with a wooden cross and cleansing fire.
“It’s just not natural," she said, eliminating any trace of nature from her toilet. "It’s not what God intended.”
“There’s gay penguins,” I replied, handing her the Windex. Actually, it was store-brand Windex. The Haslaps are morally opposed to brand name products.
“You’re not a penguin.”
At the ripe old age of 56, my mother had already undergone knee and hip replacement surgery, but that didn’t stop her from cleaning every nook and cranny in the house. I once found her trying to move the leather couch when she noticed a dustbunny by the wall. If I hadn’t been there, that would have spelled doom for hip #2. There was no risk not worth taking for the sake of cleanliness. She had long since scrubbed away the rough spots on the bottom of the tub that keep you from slipping. A smart idea for a woman with more bionic parts than Robocop.
“It’s your fucking father’s fault, you know.” The word “fucking” had preceded my father’s name ever since their divorce. “He never played sports with you. A boy needs to play sports.”
“I played video games.”
“Video games aren’t sports. Sports have balls. You never played with balls.” I let that obvious opening slide, as she was already agitated enough. “And how about AIDS? How do you know you won’t get AIDS? Do you ask your partners to see their paperwork before you have sex?”
"Yes, mother," I replied. I called her mother whenever I was annoyed with her, which is to say, quite often. After seeing Psycho, though, I tried to cut back. Given my neatness and thin frame, the comparison was just too close for comfort. "Right before I ask for a copy of their tax returns."
My mother was an elementary school health teacher for 22 years. She was also a raging hypochondriac. Someone really had their finger on the button when they hired her for that job. There must be a whole generation of kids in New York City who disinfect doorknobs every time they enter a room.
“Why don’t you ask Lily these questions?” My sister was 33 and single, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t a virgin. I guess there must be 33 year old virgins -- like nuns, or Daughters of the Confederacy -- but Lily was too attractive to be one of them.
“Don’t bring your sister into this. It’s different for straight people. And for all I know she could be a lesbian.”
“Her life would probably be much easier if she was.”
“God forbid," she said, being unintentionally offensive as usual. After I came out, my grandmother pleaded with me not to take my mother's comments personally, because they "come from a good place." I'm not sure where that place was, but it seemed halfway between homophobia and ignorance, which wasn't such a good place to me.
“You know, there are other things you can do that won't put you at risk" she said, scrubbing the backside of the toilet bowl. I wondered what exactly she was doing at night that could get the backside of the toilet dirty. "Have you considered mutual masturbation?” she asked, nonchalantly, like a Jehovah's Witness might ask whether you've considered the Kingdom of Heaven. I had a flashback to when I was 14 and my mother caught me masturbating to one of my dad’s porn videos, which he had presumably left as a sort of makeshift mentoring program for my adolescence. I promised myself there and then never to masturbate again. That lasted about three hours, until I saw the Slevack brothers playing basketball outside shirtless.
“I really don’t feel comfortable talking about this with you.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about this stuff. You have to enlighten me. People didn’t do these things in my day.”
“Sure they did, they just went home to their wives after they did them.”
To my mother’s credit, her attitude had significantly improved over time. She even started attending PFLAG meetings, where she met some parents who had sent their son to an “ex-gay re-education school.” Apparently, somewhere between the Coping With Cunnilingus Seminar and Finding Your Way Around A Vagina 101, their son tried to commit suicide with a Lady Bic razor. Eventually they realized that maybe his problem wasn’t being gay; maybe his problem was having intolerant bastards for parents. But I don’t think my mother got the right message out of it.
“This school sounded like such a nice plac
This is the first long part of a long story that I've been working on. Oh, did I mention it's long? Don't say I didn't warn you.
Enjoy your schadenfreude installment for the day!
****************************************************
I haven’t flown in six years. Of all my irrational fears -- spiders, heights, nose hair -- flying is the most intense. Just hearing the words “frequent flyer” or “Mile High Club” is enough to give me the shakes. Although joining the latter is a slight incentive to getting over my fear. Sex in a Greyhound bus bathroom isn't nearly as classy.
Given that my parents had convinced me that Ebola was lurking behind every Toys R' Us display, my fear of flying might not be surprising. But despite my pre-determined pessimism, it's not crashing that really scares me. I just can't bring myself to worry about dying in a plane when I'm so much more likely to die in a New York City cab. Of course, this means that I also have an intense fear of New York City cabs, but that's intertwined with my intense fear of New York City in general. Nothing good can come from 14 million people in a two mile radius.
No, my fear of flying predates even my earliest childhood memories. I’ve been claustrophobic since I was a baby. There wasn’t a crib built big enough to hold me. By my first birthday, my parents had added several levels of bars on the top of my crib to keep me from climbing out. Most babies don’t spend the first years of their lives in a crib that could have held Jimmy Hoffa. Actually, according to my mother, I was claustrophobic before I was even born. Apparently I was so unhappy being trapped in the womb, I almost killed her in my hurry to get out. I was only two weeks premature, but the way my mother tells it you’d think I was born brandishing a meat cleaver. Amazingly, my mother doesn't consider this a reproach on her hospitability. I hate when guests depart early from one of my parties, especially when their departure also results in an epidural and a blood transfusion.
I’ve spent thousands of dollars trying to get myself back on an airplane. Support groups, cognitive behavioral therapy, strapping myself to the nose of a 747 – nothing’s worked. One therapist had the brilliant idea of inducing panic attacks to help me desensitize to the feeling of anxiety.
“Breathe with me,” she instructed. “We’ll breathe slow at first, and then speed up, and after a minute or two you will hyperventilate and the attack will start.”
It seemed to me we were drawing close to the boundaries of legitimate therapy here. We spent the entire session trying to hyperventilate. It didn’t work. I didn’t have a panic attack, and the only consolation was that I got to watch the therapist turn blue. I refused to pay her for wasting my time with that nonsense. She referred me to a collection agency, which, ironically, gave me a panic attack.
But the biggest waste of time and money was the virtual reality therapy. The therapist fits you with a pair of goggles that are supposed to simulate flight and straps you to an airplane chair. The goal is to make you feel comfortable in an airplane-type setting. Tying a claustrophobic to a chair is a great way of making him comfortable.
“Do I get a bag of peanuts with this?” I asked the therapist. He wasn’t amused. I have a tendency to annoy therapists. I use humor as a defense mechanism, and most therapists have a horrible sense of humor. Especially when they’d ask about my traumatic childhood.
“So your mother would chase you around the house with scissors. How did that make you feel?”
“Knock knock.”
My sister says this is an unhealthy defense mechanism.
“It’s a form of detachment, Jonah. You refuse to deal with your legitimate emotions. It’s really self-destructive. Ok, we’ll have to talk about this later, I’m out of wine and the liquor store closes at midnight.”
After the therapist strapped me in the chair, he would switch on the virtual reality machine, the chair would start rattling, and I’d hear the garbled sounds of an airplane engine. I was supposed to feel like I was on an airplane, but the images looked more like a beta version of Super Mario Brothers. After a few minutes I got bored. The therapist would come back in the room periodically to check on me.
“So tell me, what’s your anxiety level at now?”
“Zero.”
“Zero? But you’re on an airplane!”
“No, I’m not. I’m sitting in your office. The graphics on this thing are horrible. I can hear your secretary talking about American Idol. This chair smells. And where are my peanuts?”
Fortunately insurance paid for these sessions. Otherwise I’d have another collection agency after me.
*******************
“You haven’t flown in six years? Why not?” Ethan and I were sitting in a corner at Starbucks. Ethan liked sitting in corners. He liked looking at people, but he didn’t like being looked at. Which was too bad, since he was very pretty. Pretty people have an obligation to the world to be as visible and scantily clad as possible at all times.
“I’m scared.” He took a sip of his coffee and checked out the couple across from us. I watched his eyes gaze from the man, to the woman, back to the man.
“What are you scared of? Dying?”
“No. I know that I’m not going to die on a plane. I’m not stupid.”
“No, you’re right. You’re not stupid. Just crazy.” There was truth in that. I looked over at the couple behind us.
“Which one is hotter?” I asked him. When we first met, Ethan told me he was bisexual. Of course, I didn’t believe him. I was bisexual once too – for about three minutes, until I realized that being bisexual meant more than just not instinctively vomiting at the sight of a vagina. So I took it upon myself to scrutinize his every glance; after four months of following his eyes while we were watching television, out at dinner, in a bar, at the gym, flipping through the Sears catalogue, I decided that he actually was attracted to both women and men. That’s ok, though; I was gay enough for both of us.
“The chick has nice breasts, but the dude is really cut. It’s a draw.” Ethan still used words like “chick,” “dude,” and “bro.” He was only a year out of college, where he was president of his fraternity, a member of the Crew team, and an Abercrombie & Fitch “brand rep model.” He was the kind of guy who would have beaten me up in high school. God was making up for my delayed pubescence.
I met Ethan on ManSlut, or HornDude, or one of those websites where no one has to pretend they’re looking for anything other than a quickie. For the first three months he was just a pleasant distraction. My hairline was just beginning to recede, so sleeping with a 22 year old frat boy was very appealing. He’d sneak in, we’d go to my room, and he’d sneak out anywhere from a few minutes or several hours later. My roommate, Jason, never saw him; it was less complicated that way. I didn’t really care if Jason knew that I had a fuck buddy. Jason was straight only in the sense that he enjoyed sex with women; in every other way, Jason was perhaps the gayest man I’ve ever known, so I doubt this would have disturbed him. Plus a few months earlier Jason had caught me shaving my pubic hair, and once someone sees you shaving your pubes, there’s really no where else to go but up.
As time went on, Ethan and I stopped just having sex and started to talk. At first I didn’t like the talking. He was as close as I had ever gotten to a boytoy, and I didn’t want to add unnecessary depth to the relationship. But I also knew that there was an expiration date to fuck buddies, and we were quickly approaching that time. So it was either get to know him as a person or end it, and I wasn't ready for that yet. Plus my subscription to ManSlut had expired, and I was too cheap to renew. The promise of sex was worth less than $19.95 a month.
Eventually Ethan began to spend the night, which added a whole new layer of complication. I have a very specific nighttime routine, and the presence of a third party interferes with this carefully orchestrated process. Shower twice. Comb hair four times. Make sure all labels in refrigerator face forward. Organize shoes by date of purchase. NASA has less detailed procedures for launching spacecrafts.
But the real challenge for overnight guests is my actual sleeping habits. First, I turn on a fan that sits under my bed for white noise. Then I tie a t-shirt around my head to block out all light. I know there are products specifically made for that purpose, but those are too gay, even for me. Plus they remind me of Joan Crawford, and it’s just a stone’s throw from wearing an eye mask to attacking your dry cleaner with a wire hanger, which I don't want to do. I like my dry cleaner. He's a wizard at ketchup stains.
After the shirt is properly tied, I layer one pillow under my head and one pillow over my head, lie down on my stomach, and stick one leg – just one – under the blanket. One hand rests on the television remote control, in case I have a nightmare and need to quickly turn on the television in the middle of the night, and the other hand rests on the teddy bear I’ve had since I was 2 (a priceless possession I also plan to be buried with). If any body party is the slightest bit out of position, I can’t sleep at all, and then I’m cranky the next day. Crankier than usual. Cranky enough to attack my dry cleaner with a wire hanger.
I also drool in my sleep. I’m not talking a little wet spot here or there – by the morning my pillow is more soaked than a priest’s pants at Chuck E’ Cheese. And I don’t only drool on my pillow – I bite it. Hard. You don’t want to get your fingers too close to my mouth while I sleep. Or other body parts. And to top it all off, I talk in my sleep, usually completely incoherent babble, though my freshman roommate told me that he once found me singing the Star-Spangled Banner while standing on my bed and saluting the television set, naked. I may think like a Democrat, but I dream like a Republican.
I quickly realized that I didn’t mind Ethan’s presence, though. He had this way of being around without intruding, or making me feel self-conscious about my lunacy. Being a self-aware lunatic is much more difficult than just being a plain old lunatic. Sometimes I’m jealous of people with little or no hold on reality. I wonder what it says about your emotional health when schizophrenia is appealing.
“Do you think it’s weird that I have to flush the toilet eight times before I go to bed?”
“Weird? I never thought it was weird. It’s just… one of your things.”
It was easy for Ethan to believe this, as his biggest visible quirk was a preference for crunchy peanut butter over smooth. It’s a little harder to avoid feeling judged when everyone on the subway watches you counting the number of fluorescent light bulbs in the ceiling.
Over time, my lunacy even seemed to become endearing.
“So what color t-shirt are you going to tie around your head tonight?”
“Well, it has to be a dark color," I said, moving the Kenneth Coles behind the Nikes and the Birkenstocks to the back of the line, where they belonged, both because I had bought them in the mid-90s and because they were an ill-advised impulse purchase at Lilith Fair, of which all I remember is being the only attendant with a penis. "Brighter colors let in too much light. But if it’s too dark, and I wake up in the middle of the night, I get scared that I might be going blind. So it needs to be the perfect shade of red, or dark blue. As long as it’s not ribbed. I don’t like the feeling of ribbed fabric against my ears.”
"You know, before I met you, I didn’t think people like you existed,” he said, flipping through the Sears catalogue and pausing at the woman's underwear ads. "You're very interesting."
“Interesting as in, there’s a guy I want to get to know better, or interesting as in, what a fabulous subject for psychiatric study?” I have a tendency to ask questions that I don’t really want the answer to, unless it’s the one I want to hear. Like, am I losing my hair?, or, is it the biggest one you’ve ever seen? My boyfriends learn this trick quickly. They only give the wrong answer once.
“Both.” It was an acceptable answer. He didn’t sleep on the couch that night, though I did rip the woman's underwear ads out of the catalogue. It was hard enough to compete with other men, but there was no way I could compete with a woman. I have a small frame, and my waist is small enough to cause some envy among my female friends, but with a five-o-clock shadow at 6 in the morning, my face is indistinguishably masculine. I wouldn't make a good woman. I wouldn't even make a good drag queen.
Back at our corner table, the couple across from us was holding hands and making smoochy faces at each other. The man was much more attractive than the woman, although of course I was biased.
“Do you ever miss sex with women?” I asked him, observing their pre-coital heteronormative rituals. I don't particularly like homophobics, but I also don't think that homosexuals should throw stones; if gays ever ruled the world, our first proclamation would likely be outlawing heterosexual sex, or at least, restricting it to certain hours of the day when the rest of us are getting manicures or attending Cher concerts.
“Sometimes. But sex with you is close enough,” he said with a grin. Ethan liked to think of himself as the big, strapping man, and me as the little helpless woman. I let him think that when it suited me, just as countless generations of women have before me. And just like those women, if he stepped over the line, I’d serve him his balls on a platter. Behind every great man there’s a gay man.
“It’s too bad about your flying fear. I was thinking we could go to the White Party next month.” The White Party was an annual event in Miami that was supposed to celebrate the culture and history of the gay people. In reality, it was just a glorified, city-wide orgy that would have made Caligula blush. I don’t think Rome ever actually fell. I think it just relocated to South Florida.
I had always been scared of massive gay events like the White Party. Actually, I was scared of any massive event. I was afraid I’d get lost in a sea of people and never find my way out. I’d just dissolve into the atmosphere. I suppose at the White Party I’d become part of a rainbow. I don’t want to dissolve, not even into a rainbow.
But having Ethan there would be an entirely different experience. He wouldn’t lose me to anyone, much less some faggy-assed rainbow.
“I want to go. Let’s go.” It was a big promise. Perhaps a promise I wasn’t capable of keeping. But I really wanted to go. And I didn’t want him going by himself. You don’t set a zebra loose in a herd of lions.
“Good, you’ll be ok," he said, watching the couple leave the store, probably headed for their bedroom to perform ungodly acts that would be outlawed in a gay-controlled society. "I’ll make sure you’re ok.”
This was one of those times his macho attitude suited me. Though I wished he was drinking something a bit more masculine than a Mochafrappacino when he said it.
***************************************
“It’s just not normal,” my mother said, as she cleaned the bathroom for the sixth time that day.
“Pass me the Windex.”
I had only recently come out to my mother. I didn’t think of myself as closeted when she didn’t know. I thought of myself as a totally out homosexual with a totally crazy mother. But when my grandmother told me that my mother had been calling radio psychiatrists to ask if they thought I might be gay (“My son likes show tunes and hasn’t had a girlfriend since the sixth grade – do you think he’s a fag?”), I figured it was time to come clean, before members of the ex-gay movement showed up at my door with a wooden cross and cleansing fire.
“It’s just not natural," she said, eliminating any trace of nature from her toilet. "It’s not what God intended.”
“There’s gay penguins,” I replied, handing her the Windex. Actually, it was store-brand Windex. The Haslaps are morally opposed to brand name products.
“You’re not a penguin.”
At the ripe old age of 56, my mother had already undergone knee and hip replacement surgery, but that didn’t stop her from cleaning every nook and cranny in the house. I once found her trying to move the leather couch when she noticed a dustbunny by the wall. If I hadn’t been there, that would have spelled doom for hip #2. There was no risk not worth taking for the sake of cleanliness. She had long since scrubbed away the rough spots on the bottom of the tub that keep you from slipping. A smart idea for a woman with more bionic parts than Robocop.
“It’s your fucking father’s fault, you know.” The word “fucking” had preceded my father’s name ever since their divorce. “He never played sports with you. A boy needs to play sports.”
“I played video games.”
“Video games aren’t sports. Sports have balls. You never played with balls.” I let that obvious opening slide, as she was already agitated enough. “And how about AIDS? How do you know you won’t get AIDS? Do you ask your partners to see their paperwork before you have sex?”
"Yes, mother," I replied. I called her mother whenever I was annoyed with her, which is to say, quite often. After seeing Psycho, though, I tried to cut back. Given my neatness and thin frame, the comparison was just too close for comfort. "Right before I ask for a copy of their tax returns."
My mother was an elementary school health teacher for 22 years. She was also a raging hypochondriac. Someone really had their finger on the button when they hired her for that job. There must be a whole generation of kids in New York City who disinfect doorknobs every time they enter a room.
“Why don’t you ask Lily these questions?” My sister was 33 and single, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t a virgin. I guess there must be 33 year old virgins -- like nuns, or Daughters of the Confederacy -- but Lily was too attractive to be one of them.
“Don’t bring your sister into this. It’s different for straight people. And for all I know she could be a lesbian.”
“Her life would probably be much easier if she was.”
“God forbid," she said, being unintentionally offensive as usual. After I came out, my grandmother pleaded with me not to take my mother's comments personally, because they "come from a good place." I'm not sure where that place was, but it seemed halfway between homophobia and ignorance, which wasn't such a good place to me.
“You know, there are other things you can do that won't put you at risk" she said, scrubbing the backside of the toilet bowl. I wondered what exactly she was doing at night that could get the backside of the toilet dirty. "Have you considered mutual masturbation?” she asked, nonchalantly, like a Jehovah's Witness might ask whether you've considered the Kingdom of Heaven. I had a flashback to when I was 14 and my mother caught me masturbating to one of my dad’s porn videos, which he had presumably left as a sort of makeshift mentoring program for my adolescence. I promised myself there and then never to masturbate again. That lasted about three hours, until I saw the Slevack brothers playing basketball outside shirtless.
“I really don’t feel comfortable talking about this with you.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about this stuff. You have to enlighten me. People didn’t do these things in my day.”
“Sure they did, they just went home to their wives after they did them.”
To my mother’s credit, her attitude had significantly improved over time. She even started attending PFLAG meetings, where she met some parents who had sent their son to an “ex-gay re-education school.” Apparently, somewhere between the Coping With Cunnilingus Seminar and Finding Your Way Around A Vagina 101, their son tried to commit suicide with a Lady Bic razor. Eventually they realized that maybe his problem wasn’t being gay; maybe his problem was having intolerant bastards for parents. But I don’t think my mother got the right message out of it.
“This school sounded like such a nice plac