Mea Culpa, You-a Culpa, We All-a Culpa

A recent e-mail from an attorney friend of mine reads:

"i went to read part IV and nada---what gives?"

Aside from the obvious grammatical errors, and the possibility that I just breached the attorney work-product privilege by sharing that with you, her question was valid. It's been over a week since I promised you Part IV, and still, "nada." Por que?

Well, mi amigos, because I spent all of my free time last week panicking about this past weekend, which left me precious little time to entertain you. You know how I write about my crazy family all the time (I of course include myself in this description)? Sadly, unlike my marriage to Mario Lopez, it turns out they actually exist. And so I went home this weekend to visit them. I won't bore you with the details here (I know it wouldn't actually bore you, as you are all experts in schadenfraude, but I need to process with my therapist first), except to give you three highlights:

(1) When we went out to dinner Saturday night, my mother told me to park in front of the restaurant, while my grandmother objected, claiming that we would have to pay for the meter. A full-blown argument ensued, during which my grandmother declared that no one appreciated her and implored my mother to "take the dagger out of her heart," and my mother threatend to jump out of a moving car. In response, I calmly reminded them that it was just a parking space and there was no need for an argument. Of course, after ten minutes of fighting, my calm demeanor evaporated, and soon I was shouting along with them, "THIS IS NOT A FUCKING HEALTHY WAY OF DEALING WITH CONFLICT!!!"

(Dinner was good though. I had the salmon, if you were wondering.)

(2) After first telling my father that I couldn't see him this trip because of other commitments, I decided that was selfish and cancelled plans to attend my friends 30th birthday party so I could have dinner with him. At the last minute my father called and told me that he was "too busy" to see me. I wonder if we can get Congress to outlaw passive-aggressiveness along with other forms of torture. Personally I'd rather someone dump gallons of water on my head.

(3) My mother suggested to my sister that she sell her eggs, and I don't mean the dairy kind.

So mea culpa, readers. I am hard at work on the next installment of the story, so that you can take comfort in the fact that your life is not nearly as screwed up as mine. Ok, maybe "hard at work" is an overstatement. I'm never really "hard at work" on anything. Unless it's getting David Beckham's phone number. Those new underwear ads of his have gotten me through some tough times.

--JKH

(By the way, has anyone seen this Lifetime show, "Your Mama Don't Dance," a reality show competition where sons dance with their mothers? (One of my three television sets is always tuned to Lifetime, which was a requirement in my homosexuality contract, along with owning at least two pairs of capris pants and knowing the words to Vogue.) Is it just me, or is that show seriously disturbing? I just don't get the social mores in this country. Apparently it's totally immoral to say "fuck" on television, but it's just fine to watch a son dance the Lambada with his mother. I only hope there's an on-set therapist who knows the definition of "Freudian complex.")

Love Is A Palindrome, Part III: Great Expectorations

The rest of the ride up was uneventful, except for the occasional sob and prayer to God, or god-like entity, that I was right about my future roommate's pre-ordained geekdom. As far as I was concerned, giving your child a palindrome for a name was akin to naming your son Jeeves, or your daughter Bambi; you've pretty much drawn up their life plan right there. I wanted to send his parents a thank you card.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kramm,

Thank you for naming your child Mark. Out of all the names in the world, frankly, I’m not sure why you chose that one. Perhaps you chose it because you have a wicked sense of humor, or because you had full mental health coverage for your family and you didn’t want it to go to waste. Or maybe you are both dyslexic, and you thought you were naming him something else. I am all for equal rights for dyslexics, by the way, who are no less intelligent than the rest of us. Theo Huxtable was one, you know, and he was really smart! Or at least his parents were. Actually, I think he went to a community college.

In any event, your name selection was very beneficial to me, which is really all that matters in the end.

Sincerely,
Jonah K. Haslap

But it also occurred to me, even with my head in the Hamburgler’s toilet, that I could be wrong about Mark Kramm. After all, there must be a CEO somewhere named Jeeves, or a Bambi who is not a complete slut. So somewhere between Providence and Pawtucket, I decided that whatever Mark Kramm was, I would live with it. Even if he enjoyed skinning rabbits. Even if he liked peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Even if he was a Republican.

As long as he wasn't attractive. Above all, I hoped Mark Kramm would not be attractive. An attractive roommate would kill me. Figuratively, when I tore myself up inside lusting after him, and literally, when he caught me.
Of course, the chances that I wouldn't be attracted to Mark Kramm on some level were slim. At 17, I could find something attractive in most anyone. If its shorts jiggled when it jogged, I wanted to see what was in them. It didn't help that most of the boys in my high school class were objectively unattractive (something in the Long Island drinking water, I suspect, turns all gentile boys into Joey Buttafuco, and all Jewish boys into Mel Brooks). That just lowered my standards. Drama freaks; geeks; hippies; delinquents; even spazzes. I wanted them all. Too bad Screech wasn't gay, he would have an easy sell with me.

But there was nothing more unattainable -- and therefore, more desirable -- than the highly prized and much sought-after jocks. In most respects, I was a social black sheep, except within my own little circle of other black sheep. The more people enjoyed something, the less interesting I found it. But when it came to my penis, I was just a sheep, white and woolly (at least until I discovered the magic of trimming), sighing and panting, and sometimes dribbling, along with the rest of the crowd, as the varsity football team swept across the gym floor during pep rallies, like the Greeks swept across a field of Trojans. And I was always hoping to use one of my Trojans on a nice, firm Greek. Sadly, I never got that opportunity, although fortunately Trojans double nicely as water balloons.

Years later, when I finally grew into my looks and out of my decade's-long pubescence (I had my last growth spurt when I was 24, while most other guys my age were already growing a bald spot), either because I had become more confident or because I had grown more complacent, I started actually sleeping with jocks. Only then did I realize that ounces for washboard pounds, sex with them was no better than sex with anyone else, and was often far worse, as they are frequently so self-obsessed that in bed, they resemble less an Abercrombie ad and more a can of no-salt tuna fish, lying motionless on a slab while you do all the work. I hate doing all the work. It leaves me no time to lie motionless myself.

At this stage in my hormonal blossoming, however, jocks were still that golden carrot. Nevermind that I had never actually eaten a carrot before in my life, golden or otherwise. I didn’t even know what I would do if the possibility of sex ever actually presented itself. I suppose it would have involved some clothing manipulation and lots of praising Jesus, at least on my part. Even though I was Jewish, Jesus seemed like the appropriate choice. No one praises Jehovah when they have an orgasm.
Contrary to what my mother believed, though, I did not live in a fantasy world. (According to her, if you’re not constantly looking for anthrax in your orange juice, you’re out of touch with reality.) I knew that neither Satan nor Jesus was putting a jock in my bed anytime soon. I knew that the closest I would come to an All-American lover was my All-American pornography. I knew that I would never sleep with the captain of the football team.

I just hoped the captain of the football team wouldn’t be sleeping anywhere near me.

When we finally arrived at the dormitory, I had exhausted all the possible computations for the inevitable meeting with my once and future roommate, and mentally dealt with them all. Let Adolph Hitler, Jr. walk through that door, I was ready. At least we’d have something to talk about. Your great-grandfather tortured my great-grandfather, and so on. Sounds like an excellent basis for a rewarding and long-lasting friendship.

While my dad went to get a cart to start hauling Her Royal Pigginesses up to their new thrones, I took my first hard look at the campus. Everyone around me was smiling from ear-to-ear; the parents, giving up their burdens, and the children, giving up theirs. Sometime during the trip, the sun had started shining (it must have been after the last rest stop, since I spent the remainder of the ride scraping mud off my sneakers and onto my father’s car, which he greatly appreciated), and it lit up the bright young faces of the new students, exceedingly hopeful, temporally sober. Even the dormitory, which I had remembered as cold and institutional during summer orientation (at which the most “orienting” the incoming class received was discovering the location of the nearest liquor store that didn’t card), looked happy to welcome a new group of freshmen, whose alcohol-induced vomit would soon line its halls.

It was an idyllic scene. Which is to say, I was completely uncomfortable in it. I don’t do well with idyllic. When something isn’t flawed, I just assume that the flaw is so big that it must be hiding. I swear there’s a massive alien spaceship in the Grand Canyon, parked there to lull us all into a sense of complacency, before it emerges and takes out Congress. (I haven’t warned anyone about my suspicions, though, considering the current state of Congress.)

I took a deep breath and made a B-line for the dorm, trying not to make any eye contact with passers-by. I wasn’t ready for friends, not yet. A hasty friend is a recipe for disaster. Maybe if Stalin had gotten to know Mussolini a little better he would have thought twice about teaming up. And I’m sure Balki would have ditched that dweeb cousin in a Chicago minute, had he ever stepped back from their insta-friendship and realized that he was the real life of the party in that relationship, and cousin Larry was just holding him back.

I got to my room, and found my father trying to wrestle my fourteen boxes of junk into a room that could have scared Al Capone straight. The walls were grayish-white concrete, and the linoleum floor was peeling under our feet. There was a small window on the far wall, with a gate that couldn’t be opened. The gate was instantly frightening. We were on the ninth floor – were Boston criminals so technologically adept that they could scale the walls up to our room? I was comforted to learn several weeks later that the school had installed the gates after a series of students had thrown themselves out the dormitory windows. Gates are cheaper than lawsuits.

Then I noticed the size of the room. The furniture was lined up in parallel lines against opposite walls – two identical beds, two identical dressers, and two identical desks (the aesthetic symmetry was appealing, at least). The beds were about four feet apart, and there was approximately eight cubic feet of free space in the entire room. Two of us were going to live in here? Did I accidentally request a room for midgets? How was I going to pass gas without him hearing it (a major concern, given my lactose intolerance and unquenchable love for cheese)? We might actually need to have sex, just to fit us both in the room at the same time.

If it hadn’t been a dormitory, it would have been a hellhole.

“Jonah, I don’t think you’re going to have enough room for all of these,” he said, motioning to the stuffed animals that he had carelessly deposited in the corner. “Maybe you should think about sending some home.”

“No, no, that won’t be necessary,” I replied, quickly lifting all of the Miss Piggys off the floor. She’s not pleasant when she feels rejected, and I had my own neuroses to worry about right now. “I’ll find a place for them.”

I opened my closet – which was set off from the room by a thin curtain – and placed the superfluous Piggys on the top shelf, overlooking the room, her favorite spot. Suddenly I noticed that Mark Kramm had already moved in. By “moved in,” I mean that he had hastily dumped his luggage on his bed, and scotch-taped a poster of Pamela Anderson Lee to the wall (who I had previously recognized only as the female lifeguard on the show with all those hot shirtless guys). Pamela Anderson Lee was not a good sign. Geeks don’t have posters of Pamela Anderson Lee. Even straight ones.

An even worse sign, though, was the various sports accoutrements scattered across his side of the room. I spotted a lacrosse stick, a catcher’s mitt, and a half-inflated basketball. This guy wasn’t just a sports enthusiast. He was a dilettante.

Still, I hoped that he would be one of the few unattractive jocks I saw around the halls in high school, the relatively non-threatening kind who had nothing going for them except an excess of testosterone and an ability to belch loudly. Don’t forget, his name is still a palindrome! How much of a jock could he possibly be?

But I didn’t have the opportunity to run through the ramifications of this new discovery. Just as I started working myself into a tizzy, the door began to open. Mark Kramm was coming home. My time was up. Even the Hamburgler couldn’t save me now.
Please don’t be hot. Please don’t be hot. Please don’t be hot.

Oh fuck.

In walked – jogged, actually – my new roommate, his tight t-shirt (declaring his large bosom predilection) and gym shorts clinging to his tanned, chiseled body. His arms and legs bulged with muscles bigger than my neck, and somehow he had escaped both the curse of the Jewish nose and the Jewish hair to develop a perfectly sculpted face. His dark skin was set off by crystal blue eyes that would have attracted my gaze immediately, if my eyes hadn’t spontaneously traveled south to what I quickly learned was not a sock-enhanced crotch. He had just the right amount of hair in all the right places, at least as far as I could tell at this point, and no hair in the wrong places. Mark Kramm was the after-picture in an episode of Extreme Makeover.

More than scared, I was angry at having been misled. Screw the thank you note to Mr. and Mrs. Kramm. Mark Kramm was not a geek. He wasn’t even a nerd. Mark Kramm was, by most objective standards, a hunk. That’s not a term I throw around loosely. I haven’t known or seen too many hunks in my life; one or two bartenders at The Cock, a few pornography actors, and maybe a handful of television celebrities. But Mark Kramm was one of them. He could have given the porno actors a run for their money. And it’s a good think he was Jewish. Otherwise, he might have gotten a bunch of priests into a shitload of trouble.

“Jonah, what do you want me to do with the stuffed Muppet Babies?” he asked, holding Fozzie in his right hand and Kermit in his left (which was wrong – Kermit always liked being on the right). My father always had perfect timing, ever since he left my mother on the same day that I found my first facial hair.

Fortunately, the hunk du jour was still listening to his Walkman, which was blasting something loud and rock and roll’ish, probably by a band that most kids my age worshipped but I’d never heard of.

“Hi, I’m Jonah,” I shouted to him, extending my hand. I knew enough about social etiquette to shake his hand, at least, though I was afraid I’d unconsciously reach out and shake something else instead. Mark Kramm took off his earphones, wiped his arm on his sleeve, and reached out his hand.

“Hi, I’m Mark, nice to meetchya,” he said, with the kind of carelessness of speech that only the very stupid and the very beautiful can use with impunity. I looked down when our hands touched – as I always did whenever I came into actual human contact -- and watched his shorts jiggle in sync with his arm as we shook hands. I quickly turned my attention back up to his piercing blue eyes, but since they too were unsafe, I rested my gaze on his pinky finger, the only part of his body that I felt ambivalent towards. I have no use for the inefficient appendages.

“You too,” I replied, trying to act calm and collected, which is extremely difficult for someone whose usual baseline is nervous and panicked. “This is my dad.”

My father nodded in Mark’s direction, uninterested in the first chapter of a potential tragedy unfolding before his eyes. He planned to make the trip up and back in one day, and nothing was going to stop him, not even my unscrewing the gate on the window and joining the ranks of flying freshmen before me.

“I’m going to get the rest of your crap,” my father said. “It’s getting late, and I only brought my sunglasses with me so I can’t drive in the dark.” He had a keen mind for the kind of lies that were so obviously lies, you couldn’t argue with them without losing your temper, so you let them go just to fight another day.

Left alone to our own devices, I wasn’t sure what to do next. The introductions were out of the way. I was Jonah; he was Mark. Check. We were roommates. Check. Somewhere in the back of mind I pictured him throwing me down on the bed and having his way with me, but then I remembered my mother looking for anthrax in her orange juice, and erased that fantasy from my mind.

The silence weighed heavily on me, though Mark Kramm didn’t seem to notice. One man’s heart attack is another man’s mild chest pain. He tossed his Walkman on the bed and opened one of his unorganized suitcases, which appeared to overflow with sports equipment and soft-core, straight male-directed magazines, neither of which appealed to me.

“That’s my girlfriend,” he said, ruffling through his bag and pointing to a picture he had taped to his desk. “She’s hot, huh?”

I couldn’t see the picture very well, which appeared to be a wallet-sized high school yearbook photo, but it didn’t really matter. It was more of a rhetorical question.

“Um, yeah, definitely. Hot.” I wondered where my father had packed the screwdriver, and how long it would take to get the gate off the window.

Mark Kramm found a towel in his bag and turned back towards me, for the first time noticing that his dorm room had turned into the toddler section of Toys R’ Us. His eyes narrowed on me, becoming less sexy and more suspicious. Mark Kramm finally realized that his new roommate might be less into playing with balls, and more into playing with balls.

“Ok bud,” he said, beginning to peel off his sweaty clothes, layer by layer, until he stood before me in his white boxer-briefs. I had never seen a pair of boxer-briefs before, but as far as I was concerned at that point, they ranked close to air conditioning and penicillin on the list of great human accomplishments. “I’m going to take a shower.”

He wrapped a towel around his waist and pulled his underwear off underneath it, which only heightened my attraction. There is less pleasure in the bang than in the anticipation of it.

“You know, your name is a palindrome,” I blurted out as he walked towards the door, hoping to form some common bond with my new roommate during our first encounter, as his “my girlfriend is hot” attempt didn’t go over too well. He paused at the door, tightening the towel around his waist and grabbing a bar of soap. It was the first time I truly understood the joke about dropping a bar of soap in a jail shower.

“A what?” So much for that.

“A palindrome,” I replied. “It’s a word that’s spelled the same backwards and forwards.” I wrote “Mark Kramm” on a piece of paper, hoping that a demonstrative exhibit would help.

“See?” I said, handing him the paper. “Mark Kramm, Mark Kramm.” I repeated his name a few times, until even I knew it was creepy.

“Oh,” he replied, crumpling the paper and tossing it in the trash basket next to his bed. “Actually, it’s Marcus.”

With that mystery solved, Marcus Kramm left, and I resumed searching the darkling sky for a time-traveling Delorean.

*************************************

Stay tuned for Love Is A Palindrome, Part IV: Empty Adjectives

Love Is A Palindrome -- Part II: "A New Hopelessness"

Three weeks, eighteen panic attacks, and a few dozen Xanax later, my father and I set off for Boston. The drive to Boston was going to be the longest time I'd spent with my father since the divorce. Over the previous five years, I’d only seen him once a week, pursuant to a typical negotiated settlement agreement whereby children and chattel become synonymous. Each Saturday he took me to my piano lesson, and then out for lunch at Roy Rogers, home of the all-you-can-eat fixins’ bar. I enjoyed the fixins' more than the meal itself -- sometimes I wouldn’t even get a hamburger, I’d just get the bun and fill it with tomatos, lettuce, pickles, and enough ketchup to drown Gollum. But even if the fixins' bar had been removed due to health code violations (the sneeze glass didn't always live up to its name), I still would have insisted on eating at Roy Rogers. It made me feel like a cowboy, and I could use all the butch I could get.

"Jonah!" my mother shouted to me, as he pulled into the driveway. "Your fucking father is here!"

My father hadn't actually driven up to the house since the divorce; my mother always made him park a block away when he came around for our weekly visits.

"I don't want him to know my business," she'd say, as if we were running a drug cartel out of the living room.

But considering that we had to pack the car with all my stuff this time, which included eighteen boxes, forty-three stuffed animals, and several bags of canned tuna fish, my mother allowed him to park in the driveway, as long as I covered all the windows with construction paper so he couldn't see into the house.

"He gets an hour, no more," she said, peering out through the lime green paper, chewing her nails in anticipation of his arrival.

"But what if we're not done packing in an hour?"

"I don't give a shit, hire a fucking camel." She examined the construction paper closely, rearranging a few sheets for maximum coverage. "And couldn't you pick a darker color? He can see right through this."

Fortunately, the endorphins were pumping so fast and furious that we packed the car within twenty minutes. That, and I could carry several Miss Piggy dolls in one hand, which took up about half the car.

“Do you really need all of those Miss Piggys,” my dad asked. “Isn’t one sufficient?”

It was a reasonable question, and a question that showed exactly how little he knew me. Not that he was really to blame. There’s only so much you can learn about someone who has eighteen pickles stuffed in his mouth at once.

With the Piggys safely stowed in the backseat – and a few stuffed in the trunk, against my wishes, as no one puts Piggy in a corner -- we headed out. I took a last look at the house that had been both my prison and my haven for the past ten years. My mother was still peering out through the construction paper, half-seething, half-mourning, alone once more to fend for herself. I left three boxes of tampons in the bathroom cabinet, to give her a head start.

We hadn’t been on the road long before we made our first pit stop. I was doing fine until the Connecticut border, when the environment took on a surreal, Who-ville quality. There were towns I’d never visited. Malls I’d never been to. Supermarkets I’d never heard of. It might as well have been Zimbabwe. That’s when it all came together, in one perfect, horrible, intensely nauseating picture – everything I was leaving behind, and everything I was heading to. The Welcome to Connecticut sign might as well have been pointing to the nearest asylum.

My father was patient when I asked him to stop, at least the first three times. But by the time Mile Marker 45 rolled around – four and a half hours into a trip that was only supposed to take four hours total – his patience was wearing thin.

“Dad, pull over!!!” I shouted for the fourth time.

Either out of divorced father guilt or concern for his car, which had mysteriously preserved the new car smell even at six years old, he pulled over again, this time right in front of the biggest Hamburgler statue I’d ever seen. Alas, even the great Hamburgler in all his glory could not make me forget my troubles at that point, and I raced inside to the waiting toilets.

“Jonah, we’re never going to get to Boston at this rate,” he shouted after me as I ran past Ronald McDonald’s mortal enemy, my arms flailing. Vomiting rates somewhere between family vacations and prostate exams on things that I'd rather avoid in this lifetime. Contrary to popular belief, homosexuals do not enjoy prostate exams. What we do in bed does not involve a rubber glove, a doctor's coat, and a jumbo-sized tub of vaseline. At least, not usually. “What could possibly be left in there to puke up?”

But I wasn’t just vomiting Count Chocula out of my system. I was vomiting up lawns and polished rocks. I was vomiting up tampons and frozen lemon juice. I was vomiting up divorce and child support. I was vomiting up the past eighteen years of my life. And once all that was gone, I was afraid there’d be nothing left.

I charged passed the Connecticut welcome center, with its "welcome to our state, now why the hell are you here?" brochures, and into the restrooms, which had been labeled a "Clorox-Free" zone. I suspected the label meant that the restrooms were cleaned with Clorox products, but actually "Clorox-Free" means the opposite. I was going to report that glaring error to the proper authorities, but I was too busy with my head in the Clorox-Free toilet bowl.

I made another mental checklist of things to worry about, beginning, as usual, with "sharing a public restroom with 18 other teenage boys," and ending with "making more mental checklists of things to worry about." I repeated it in my head several times, hoping to find the logical fallacy in at least one of the 49 fears, but they all appeared eminently rational, at least in my frenzied state. Worst of all, I was now beginning to associate the Hamburgler with my anxiety. Yet another cartoon character I'd have to avoid in the future, along with Yosemite Sam and the evil Smurf.

I felt a paper sticking out of my coat during one particularly violent dry heave (my father was standing outside the stall door by this point, as several rush hour commuters had notified management that a "12 year-old kid was dying in the bathroom"). It was the letter, with my palindromic roommate's name and hometown. I took it out and ran my fingers up and down his name. I found strength there, in 12-point Times New Roman.

Mark Kramm was waiting for me, and I wasn't going to let him down, dammit. He had been let down enough in his life, first by his parents for giving him a palindrome for a name, then by every girl who had ever rejected him because of it, and every sports team that automatically cut him first. Mark Kramm just might be my soulmate, and I wasn't going to let that be ruined by a little reverse peristalsis.

I left the restroom with new resolve. I had a new purpose -- to fight for the rights of palindromic people everywhere. And Mark Kramm was going to be my first triumph, or victim, depending on your perspective. Why hadn't I thought of this before, I wondered. This must be what Jews feel like when they find Jesus.

I got into the car, Clorox- and Count Chocula-free, ready to battle the bigoted, non-palindromed members of society, and simultaneously shine a light of hope on Mark Kramm, college student, roommate, American Hero.

"Let's go," I demanded, buckling my seatbelt and slipping Cher's greatest hits -- her gender-neutral voice being an inspiration of antiestablishmentarianism -- into the CD player.  "Step on it, pops!"

My father looked at me curiously, but didn't say anything. It was our first bonding moment in five years.

***************************************************

Coming Soon: Love Is A Palindrome -- Part III: "Great Expectorations"

Love Is A Palindrome -- Part I: "A Geek Grows In Nyack"

Hello all, aka the four people who actually read this blog with any regularity, three of whom are my other personalities and one of whom I compensate with unsatisfying sexual favors,

I've decided to post this story in two parts, because there's no way I'm going to finish this thing in the next few days, and I don't want to keep my other personalities waiting.

Enjoy (or, at least, don't sue me).

-JKH

*************************************

There is a lovely rest stop on the northbound I-95, about an hour outside of New York City, just a few miles after the looming industrial spires of Bridgeport, and a few miles before the five-lane superhighway turns into a two-lane supernightmare. This particular rest stop boasts a Denny's and a McDonalds (complete with a McPlayground, home of the greatest fast-food villain of all time, the iconic and immensely corrupt Hamburgler), several pretzel/donut/ice cream/frogurt/yocream stands, and enough junk food vending machines to clog every artery in Dom Deluise's body. The grounds are kept in immaculate condition, most likely by a group of migrant workers who have a unique appreciation for the aesthetic potential of the American transportation network. And its toilets are cleaner than a nun's cache.

I should know. On the way to college my freshman year, I spent two hours with my head inside one of them. If I knew then what I know now, I would have spent longer.

Refusing to spend another day in Long Island after high school (I'd had my fill of kosher Chinese food and formica), I only applied to out-of-state colleges, thereby making it virtually impossible that my mother would guilt me into staying home for the next four years of my life. When my parents mercifully divorced, I became the man of the house, charged with all of the responsibilities that come with being an adult male -- mowing the lawn, lifting heavy objects, hanging picture frames -- without any of the attendant benefits -- sex, money, alcoholism. But, given my chicken legs, aversion to power tools, and intense pollen allergy, I didn't exactly cotton to my new chores.

"There's a spider on the lawn mower!" I yelled to my mother the first time she asked me to mow the lawn. Mowing the lawn was the worst chore out of all my testosterone-induced responsibilities. I had no patience for anything that required constant upkeep. I still don’t, which makes me question my suitability to be a parent. Kids are fun, but they require a lot of upkeep. Even more than a lawn.

“Why can’t we get astroturf, like the Jensens?” The Jensens were our fabulously forward-looking next-door neighbors. They marched to the beat of their own environmentally-friendly drummer, driving hybrids while the rest of us neanderthals were still cruising around in our gas-guzzling SUVs. Even though astroturf is not actually good for the environment, it does look pretty, and if reality television has taught us anything its that people care more about pretty things than ugly ones.

After successfully ignoring weeks of my complaining -- another quality parents need and I lack -- my mother finally broke down and decided to hire a gardener. I breathed an asthma-induced sigh of relief, until she replaced the lawn with a yard full of large white stones, which required constant washing to keep them at their “whitest,” lest the neighbors judge us by the color of our pebbles. Apparently the racial homogenity of our community extended to lawn decorations. Of course, that chore fell to me as well, but I didn’t mind it as much as mowing the lawn -- at least I could do it sitting down. Plus it gave me the chance to use the rock polishing kit my great aunt Ida had bought me for Hannukah. It would have been a horrible gift, had I not specifically put it on my Hannukah wish list.

When winter came, my mother inevitably turned to me to shovel the driveway -- another job that apparently requires testicles and an Adams apple -- even though I was obviously too small to lift the shovel, which was about two inches taller than me. After I almost lost my pinky to frostbite during a particularly nasty Nor'easter, she never asked me to shovel the driveway again. Good thing, too. I had Child Protection Services on speed dial, and I wasn't afraid to use it. But even though she didn't ask me to shovel, that didn't stop her from pointing out my failure every chance she got.

"See how that Turner boy lifts the snow, Jonah?" she said, enviously eyeing the neighborhood kid she hired to shovel the driveway. She paid him ten bucks to do it, which I considered a rip-off, but I chose not to get involved. He was cute, and I was still trying to figure out how to get him to shovel in his underwear. "Maybe if you pay attention, you can be as strong as him."

"Shhh, mom," I replied, turning on the television. "Bette's on Oprah today!"

Eventually my mother realized that I wasn’t going to be the man, or even the prepubescent boy, of the house, and decided to make the most of it. So she started piling on the “girl” chores, like folding laundry, cooking, and purchasing tampons at the supermarket (though she drew the line at vacuuming, which apparently requires a housedress and a vagina, and I only had the housedress). Putting tampons on the shopping list might have been her way of shaming me into mowing the lawn, but I didn’t mind, mainly because I didn’t know what tampons were. I’m still not so clear on that. All I know is that they have special wastebaskets, and they are usually white, which, as far as I can tell, seems counterintuitive to their purpose.

But to my mother’s dismay, I actually enjoyed my new chores, mostly because they provided me with some freedom in my otherwise stifled adolescence. In the beginning she micromanaged my daily routine, telling me how much detergent to put in the washing machine, what kind of frozen lemon juice to buy, how to spot a ripe cucumber (a skill which came in handy in later years). She'd inspect the bags every time I'd come home from the supermarket. Sometimes I'd try to sneak something by her, but she was too sharp for that.

"Was Count Chocula on the list, Jonah?" she asked, tapping the Count's cardboard face with her fingers.

"No," I replied, gazing longingly at the Count's chocolate-y goodness. Junk food was on the list of forbidden items in our house, along with cable television, rap music, and optimism. "It's the Count. He hypnotized me. Take him away, he'll get you too!"

After a while, though, she loosened her apron strings, and I tightened mine. I started stepping out of the narrow domestic box that she had created for me, trying out new recipes, new oven mitts, new dryer settings. Eventually I became so bold as to try my hand at interior design, rearranging the living room furniture in the morning when she’d leave for work. It was my own form of personal rebellion -- every time I rolled the socks into a ball instead of folding them in half, or moved the living room ottoman three inches to the right, I struck a small but palpable blow for trod-upon Jewish sons everywhere.

“Maybe you should get me a maid’s uniform,” I joked to her once as I was rebelliously rolling my dress socks. The jokes were for my benefit, not for hers, as she didn't find humor in the subtle jabs at my sexuality. While she eventually came to accept my sexual orientation as yet another cross to bear in her Sophie's Choice-inspired life (somehow she managed to turn my cross into hers), to this day she blames my genital preference on my father's failure to play sports with me as a kid. She underestimates the lasting impact of forcing a twelve-year-old boy to fold his mother's underwear.

As the years passed, though, the thrill of sock-rolling began to wear off, and by the time it came to apply for college, I was looking for new challenges. New experiences. New opportunities. New fabric softeners. Somehow, it escaped my attention that college wasn't all about clipping your own coupons, ironing your own jeans, and befriending professors who could fill those parental roles that your own parents had blithely abandoned when you were an infant. It was also about drinking and smoking, dating and sex, being completely responsible for yourself and simultaneously completely irresponsible. It was about all those things that most red-blooded American children look forward to for the first eighteen years of their lives, the very same things that I had dreaded for the first eighteen years of my life. Although I pretended to be independent, in reality, I only enjoyed the semblance of autonomy. The umbilical cord was cleverly hidden behind a stack of rolled up socks.

As the time for cutting the cord grew closer, I began dreaming up various ways to get out of this whole going away to college debacle. I investigated various short-term but potentially serious illnesses that I could develop without actually dying, but to no avail. It seems most deadly diseases entail some physical indicia of, well, death. Leprosy was a possibility, since it didn't kill most people, and I doubted any reputable private university would admit a leper, even if leprosy had a new fancy name. It doesn't really matter what you call a disease that causes you to ooze pus from every inch of your body. You could call it Spectacular Orgasm Disease, and people still wouldn't want it.

I also considered developing a mental disorder, but I couldn't think of one that I didn't already have.

Then again, maybe I didn't have to come up with an excuse. Maybe I'd be kicked out of college, without even developing one pus-filled nodule. Sure, I did relatively well in high school, but maybe I had fooled all of my high school teachers into thinking I was smart. It couldn't be that hard; they weren't that smart themselves. Or what if I wasn't cool in college? I wasn't cool in high school either, but I found a few people in high school who were less cool than me, so at least I was cool to them. Uncool kids don't graduate from college. Radio Shack needs to recruit from somewhere.

I was sure to fall far below the college standard for cool, though. I wasn't even comfortable ordering any drink that could possibly be mixed with alcohol. What if some alcohol accidentally made it into my glass? Or what if the bartender didn't hear the "virgin" part, and made a real margarita instead? Was the tasty lime treat worth a possible criminal indictment? I was only 18, after all. Laws are laws for a reason, and ignorance of a margarita's contents is no excuse.

A few weeks before my imminent departure, my friends and I -- a mix of nerds, drama freaks, and wanna-be nerds/aspiring drama freaks -- gathered at T.G.I. Fridays, the most sophisticated of our regular haunts (some dinner entrees actually exceeded twenty dollars!), to bid farewell to my friend Laura, who was going off to some prim southern college the next day, where Jews are a endangered species and people talk about coming out parties without a sense of irony. Laura was the first of us to leave, and while everyone else treated her exit as a ticket to freedom, to me, it was a death march.

"You're gonna get so wasted when you get there, Laura!" my friend Becky shouted, while downing her virgin Pina Colada like an unrecovered recovering alcoholic. Becky disappeared from our radars the day she got to college, and only reappeared seven years later on Facebook, with two kids and a Wall Street husband in tow.

"Yeah! Totally! Hey, dude, are you going to rush?" my friend Jake asked, while drinking his virgin Rum and Coke (which, as the waiter explained to him, is just a Coke with a mixing straw). Rush? Wasted? Dude? Who were these people? Just a few weeks earlier we had all attended a Star Trek convention together. Jake had gone as Geordi. You don't get any more nerdy than an engineer with a visor who has sex with holograms. I went as Data. At least he was fully functional in every sense, as he proved to one particularly enterprising crewmember in season four.

And where had they learned this new vocabulary? They sounded like they were straight out of The OC. I was still stuck in Saved By The Bell, with its sanitized adolescents who never seemed to get past first base (except Slater and Jesse, but she was a Showgirl, and he was just plain sexy). I was a freak without a posse, a geek without a home. Sure, they were still only poseurs, but at least they knew how to pose. They were on their way to actual post-adolescence. Condoms, mosh pits, and all.

While the rest of my friends went outside to pretend to smoke cigarettes, I curled up in a corner booth, praying for Doc to show up with a time machine and take me back to 1985, a simpler time, when my biggest worry was whether the evil-looking Garbage Pail Kid was hiding under my bed. I took a letter out of my coat pocket that I had received from the university earlier that day, listing my new roommate's name and address, reminding me that in just a few weeks I would be sharing my living space with another teenage boy. There was no way I was going to survive that rite of passage. I barely survived the other rites of passage I had endured so far, like puberty, my parents' divorce, and gym class. But living in the same room with another person -- another boy, and most likely a heterosexual one -- was just too much for my already over-stressed brain circuits to handle. Just thinking about sleeping within spitting distance of another human being sent me into a sort of catatonic state, sort of like the mental hibernation that Kathy Lee Gifford's husband must have entered when he put a ring on her finger. I wasn't sure if I was more afraid of my roommate spitting on me or vice versa, but both possibilities frightened me. I couldn't even keep a goldfish in my room at home. I always felt like it was watching me masturbate.

I hadn't opened the letter yet, in the hopes that it would be a belated rejection from the school.

Dear Mr. Haslap,

Our sincerest apologies, but we do not admit weird homosexual Jews to our school. We confused your application with someone who knows the proper use of the term "dude." We regret any inconvenience our error may have caused, and wish you the best of luck in your future career at Radio Shack.

Sincerely,

A Large Group Of Old White Men

But no such luck. There it was, plain as the pre-angioplasty nose on Baby's face. Mark Kramm, from Nyack, New York. Mark Kramm. Mark Kramm. The name screamed violent felon -- there were just too many consonants. He was probably a budding serial killer. Maybe he hadn't actually killed anyone yet, but everyone's got to start somewhere, even serial killers. There was probably a string of missing kittens in his hometown. Yet here I was, completely unprepared to defend myself. For a moment, I wished I hadn't quit Karate with just a yellow belt. I didn't even actually earn the yellow belt. The Karate instructor gave it to my parents in exchange for their promise never to return to the school again.

Laura came back for her fake matches, and noticed me sipping on my Sprite, fingering the offending letter, and searching the night sky for a flying Delorean.

"Hey dude, what's wrong?" Dear Mr. Haslap...

I handed her the letter from the university. I was afraid to say anything. She looked so cool, with an invisible cigarette in one hand and virgin Pina Colada in the other. She didn't resemble Beverly Krusher at all anymore. She was a full-fledged Deanna Troi.

"Mark Kramm, eh?" she said, adjusting the stuffing in her oversized bra. You can't be a real poseur without poseur breasts. "You know, that's a palindrome."

I grabbed the letter from her, and examined the name again. Indeed, it was a palindrome. I was too preoccupied with Mr. Kramm's hypothetical plans to knock over the campus convenience store to notice it before.

"Oh my god, you're right! It is! It's a palindrome!"

It was the first good news I'd had in months, ever since Buffy was renewed for a second season. No one with a palindrome for a name could be all bad. Even if he wasn't a complete nerd, he had to be at least somewhat intelligent. Stupid people don't have names that are spelled the same backwards and forwards. Mark Kramm and I just might be friends after all. It was a slight hope, but a hope nonetheless.

College was going to eat me alive.

********************************

Stay tuned for Love Is A Palindrome -- Part II: "A New Hopelessness"

Luke, I Am Your Lawyer

There are two Jonah K. Haslaps (well, three, if you count my BDSM avatar). There's the Jonah you all know and tolerate, the laugh-a-minute fellow who keeps you entertained during those dark times. When things look their worst, you know you can always turn to Jonah. At a minimum, his life makes yours actually seem tolerable. That Jonah is a puppy dog.

Then there's the rotweiler. The suit-and-tie Jonah, representative of large, multinational corporations, depended on each day by powerful, Fortune 500 clients to make crucial, life-and-death decisions on their behalf, like what kind of pasta salad should be served during shareholders meetings, and if a tree falls in the woods, can we chop down the rest of them. And even though I don't blog about my job -- discretion is the better part of valor, as well as my paycheck -- it does keep me quite busy at times, distracting me from lavishing warm and sloppy kisses on your collective psyches.

I know what you're thinking. How dare they! Who do they think they are, taking over Jonah's life like this? Could they possibly pay him enough to make it worth this?

Unfortunately, yes, they do. They pay me enough. They pay me ass-buckets of enough. I have enough coming out my ears.

But all hope is not lost! No, hope is alive, and it is audacious. Here's what you can do to bring about audaciously hopeful change:

Pay me.

It's just that simple. Pay me to blog. Again, I know what you're thinking. Why pay him for something we can get for free? Aren't there other blogs on the internet that are of equal or better quality, whose authors do not ask for monetary reimbursement?

Yes. Yes, there are. Many. In fact, if I were you, I'd stop reading right now, out of protest for this outrageous request.

Still there? Man, there's a sucker born every minute. Which explains Log Cabin Republicans. Seriously, folks. How much is a smile worth? How about a giggle? A guffaw? A hearty chuckle? Let's have an open, honest discussion about this, and come to a mutually agreeable understanding of my monetary worth. No, this isn't a democracy, but I am a benevolent dictator. And once our mutually agreeable understanding is acceptable to me, let the money start flowing. I accept cash, credit cards, travelers checks, cashiers checks, money orders, moneygrams, Euros, Yen, Deutschemarks, and, depending on your gender and stats, possibly oral sex.

So whip out those checkbooks, fill up those quill pens, and say it with me -- Yes, we can!

But until those checks start arriving (four figures a week at least, please -- I have an expensive chocolate chip cookie addiction), I will be forced to continue to compromise my beliefs, my morals, and occassionally, my lower back flexibility. And until then, you will have to suffer in silence, gnashing your teeth (or, for one particularly unfortunate friend who recently bit into an overly-cooked cashew, dental implants), waiting impatiently for my next lengthy, inane, and mostly rambling story that you won't fully understand or, due to your MTV-induced ADD, actually finish. Because the best things in life require credit checks.

Still, I don't want to leave you totally in a lurch -- everyone needs a laugh, even cheap bastards like you -- so Jonah K. Haslap endorses Miss Piggy for President!!!