The Etruscans

My best friends’ father Charles was her first inspiration for studying history, though he'd pursued a psychology degree instead, which got him a stressful social workers’ job in the Bronx during the height of the citys’ struggle with crack cocaine in the 70s and 80s. After his idealistic post-college stint in the Peace Corps, a time of hippie experimentation with native sweat lodges and hallucinogenic trips on peyote buttons in the Mexican desert, he struggled to find meaning and equilibrium among the hard-hit minorities who came to his office for help. 

Instead, he found bitterness and a lack of understanding that ingrained in him a casual prejudice fueled by his own inertia and passionless marriage. It was hard for us to watch her hip, smart, educated parents from the city, the first to attend college in their families, go down so deeply into alcoholism and madness, but like so many of their "silent generation", they refused to admit the seriousness of their illnesses to anyone, so they could condescend to the people stuck in the ghetto, who they wanted to see as having so much less than us.

We'd find him puttering in his garage during summer breaks from school, sweating in the heat and avoiding his wife inside the house. He'd made a little workshop for himself there, so he could paint tiny military figurines in exacting period detail, while he expounded upon his favorite topics like the Etruscans, always delivered in the exact same way: "Girls, have I ever told you about the ancient Etruscans? They were a very advanced civilization that pre-dated the Greco-Roman time period. Most people don't know that." Ah, okay. It was better than the usual power struggles between her parents, with their tense silences and chain-smoking drunks that'd go on for days. We'd go on beer and cigarette runs for them just to get the fuck out of the house.

With a little encouragement, her father would go on to describe Etruscan burial mounds and their sophisticated societal hierarchy that would inform and inspire the later governments of the much more famous Greco-Romans. We found it touching that he clung to Italy's historical underdogs out of some sense of loyalty to them and their almost-forgotten world, like any real historian would. Though her parents never made it out of their personal struggles with addiction and mental illness, I can still see him in my mind's eye working in his garage, at a time when the whole world was opening up to us from between the pages of our college textbooks, in the cold mountains of an upstate New York winter. Ta, Charles. Thanks on that. 

The Mat Room

Fraternities and sororities at Oneonta existed mostly for the hardcore suburban Long Island crowd who went to the same high school together (which seemed like a pointless thing to do in college), or those downlow weirdos too embarrassed to join the unisex organization of social do-gooders with the purple triangle logo on their Greek shirts, ya dig? With the high-priced fees that came with "rushing" during pledge, me and my crew thought it was crazy to pay to have friends when you could just throw a kegger and kids would show up, anyway, once the word got out around campus. We had more trouble containing a good time than publicizing it.

Still, a slow Wednesday night with no Thursday classes could find you extending beyond your typical routine to include off-campus frat parties, especially if one of your boys roomed with one of their "frosh" pledges. It meant we might catch a break with the cover charge. Five bucks blown on skunky stale beer or a drained keg meant you just walked down a mountain in a snowstorm with nothing to show for it besides missing dinner at the cafeteria. Oh, well. You'd have to wait until the morning, if you didn't stash food in your room from lunchtime.

I'd been to few of them without incident, which must have driven the crazies wild, because I found myself alone in their basement kitchen thumbing through an old issue of NatGeo I'd found on the counter (with its distinctive yellow border) while my friends made a run for the keg, when some douche came over to make a rude comment to me about the partially nude African women depicted in the magazine. It was a shocking thing to do at a hip New York school with a lot of urbane city kids, but certain pockets of the state bred bad stuff that we didn't have close at hand growing up, though it was certainly around. 

He was obviously drunk, too, and he had a wild angry look to his bulging glassy eyes that made him doubly dangerous. Psychotic drunks were a serious hazard at any party. Most gatherings I went to were attended with my large boyfriend, but without a big bouncer around, anti-social headcases could take the time to hassle you and feel comfortable doing it with their similarly challenged friends. As soon as he targeted me, he flipped on me, demanding to know who I was and how I got into his party. I was trapped against the kitchen counter, alone in the room with him.

I tried to look past him to catch the eye of someone, anyone, because I couldn't see the heads of my friends over the crowd in the living room. He got in my face, yelling about who the fuck did I think I was to rebuff his advances in his frat house? It was insane, and it got out of control within seconds. Some tall guy finally came over to see what the commotion was about, because the kid wanted me thrown out of the party, which was fine by me. I'd had enough. As bad as it was, that was nothing compared to the stories I'd hear walking home that night.

As we walked around collecting our friends after my "ousting" from their lame party, I caught a glimpse of a dirty room, behind a partially opened door, covered in graffiti with bare mattresses on the floor. During the party, we'd been told that it was a makeshift crash pad for brothers too drunk to stand, but that's not what another girl at the party told us. She whispered to our small group that it was the room they took girls too drunk to resist. It was their rape room. And it was the last frat party I ever went to.

Moondance

I knew that my relationship with a certain young Mr. Mulvihill wouldn't last for very long because he was too proud of being inbred and ignorant as fuck, in addition to his poor diet, lack of appropriate sleep habits, and near-daily drinking habit to the point of intoxication, not to mention his utter lack of a well-rounded education. Irish-American boys had become my comfort food, best dated between long-term romances like, say, during a summertime spent mostly at the beach, to be dropped once the party turned violent, and in their battered homes, it always did. Someone else always started swinging first.

But, for a time, it was easy enough for me to see someone who lived a half an hour's drive away from me (with no traffic), so I could pursue my work life in the city. He didn't like the patterns of our weekend romance, but I honestly didn't have much more to offer someone who, while financially successful, remained a high school dropout. He was lost without his "homies", even as he hated being stuck in a co-dependent drunkfest with the old gang at Gerritsen Beach. He was a mechanically-inclined millionaire with a depressingly unfinished house in an insular pocket of Brooklyn, with horrible social skills and a peculiarly small worldview.

There wasn't anything I could do for him unless he did it himself, and with the fistfuls of cash he always had on hand, he seemed to think that he called all the shots with me, a world-class art director. It was delusional and arrogant, but money will do that to ya. He could run his yard and his demented crew, and that was about it. I'd never had a life that small, and the tension of our ill-fitted pairing showed early and quick. I broke up with him often, and the stress of being stalked and pursued yet again in my late 30s, after all my life experiences, made me angrier than ever.

I didn't want the whole juvenile "push-and-pull" dating thing; I never had. I wanted a hot love affair that lasts forever. I was the "queen of clean breaks" who bore her former suitors no ill will, but John had inroads with my family that made me worth pursuing in his mind, which also made me incredibly dangerous to someone as small-time as him. I could wreck him and his family forever with a call to the cops because of his past, and he knew it. Ultimately, after one night's big showdown, that was it. He knew better than to push his way into my life and my home, because he begged me afterward not to press charges.

His "ex" wife (not officially divorced though legally separated, as I later found out that he lied to me) had pursued domestic violence charges with a vengeance designed to chain him even tighter to her, and I was more than fine with that. I didn't need their brutal mind games in my life. Besides, the whole weird love triangle between him, his best friend, and his best friend's wife totally freaked me out, as did the strange semi-incestuous attachment his half-sister had to him. It was creepy and weird, and it felt like I was living someone else's life besides mine. I wanted out, and I got it by fighting for it.

That isn't to say we didn't ever get long. Obviously, a handsome Mick with a good job rolls off me the way water does a duck's back. It wasn't exactly unflattering, and cute New York boys have tons of confidence and charm, especially on a Friday night with their pockets full of pay for boozy food-and-drink extravagances. But, I was no ingenue. More than one girl has sat back and watched a parade of savvy boys try to play me like a fiddle. It takes a lot of finesse. Suffice to say, we had enough cultural commonalities that being with him could be as fun as getting drunk at a football game with a tailgate party full of cheeseburgers. You don't do it often, but once in awhile is fine, you know? I just didn't need season tickets to the show.

One of our last dates was one of our best, though with his crew's challenged perceptions about time, it went on for far too long. They tried to squeeze a good time out of me the way show-biz parents overbearingly set up their kids for child molestation: maybe they didn't mean to hurt me at first, but after their tenth beer or ninth hour, I could feel the suppressed rage of their intolerance towards me chafe like an ugly wool sweater that itched a red rash all over you. It was oppressive. The concert we went to see at Jones Beach* was like that.

They were a little too happy about seeing a show by a notoriously temperamental artist who'd walk off the stage in a huff if he felt the "vibe" from the audience wasn't right. I had that to look forward to, as well as the long car ride (with his sister and best friends, again) who still thought drinking and driving was fun, like being trapped in a time machine from the 70s or 80s. It was a bad feeling, especially with their young girl in the car, too. We got there way too early, which meant more boring hours in a parking lot trying to drink and have fun with people who don't know how to talk.

Finally, it was time to see the show. John was huffy with me in the seats because he hated one of my more mild college stories that I told to pass the time. His best friend defended me by saying that John had an experience like that, too, and he was more subdued after being caught in another lie. And then, just like that, the magic happened. Van Morrison sang one of his most famous songs about the moon in October skies just as a pair of swans entwined neck-in-neck swam by the stage in the surrounding Long Island Sound, sparkling moonlight and twinkling pianos and all. I wished that could have been our good summertime ending, but it was not. Still, I have one more memory to go along with one heck of a talented Irishman, diva or no. It was much appreciated, lad. Ta!




* http://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/66660.html

Allie

Being a natural mother can be odd. I'm often asked about my life, and how I spend my time. Do I ever get lonely? Sure, but not nearly enough to go to a bar in town by myself, to rub elbows with the angry drunk locals who never made it to the city for a career. That was high school for me. Townies are really sensitive about their lack of experience; a trait that is not well-heightened by excessive amounts of alcohol.

They prefer to remain singularly clannish and inbred by pretending an exclusivity that has successively bred the fatal Tay-Sachs disease into their children, offering roadblocks to their status by remaining exactly where their parents and grandparents dropped them, stubbornly adhering to the idea that someone who has only gone to school in one small town somehow has a leg-up on the rest of us Rocklanders. Good luck with that. I found out through their local genetic study that I wasn't "Irish" enough to be considered for their Tay-Sachs research, and my Norman ancestors would be very glad to hear that. Job well done, for a sophisticated merchant family with ancient roots.

Provincial pockets of lonely cousins are still rather common in this area, as a place built before the relative ease of commercial travel, bane as that is to the environment and our collective health. I found another pocket of genetic oddity in Brooklyn, introduced to me through my rabidly social cousin, who drinks like a good time is at the bottom of each and every glass. When I dated a friend of his, the car service driver from Park Slope was astonished at the change in scenery on the way to his house. This is Brooklyn?! He was from the Middle East, and he'd never seen a seaport town with no lawns like the Jersey Shore in a city borough, but that's exactly what it is.

The houses are built right up to the curb, often with no grass; just crushed shells or stones. Everyone was related to one another, and that was the way they preferred it, trips to the green motherland of Eire or not. Most homes had an old-fashioned nautical theme, with anchors or ropes and buoys prominently displayed. My boyfriend John had kept a boat that he didn't use often enough to justify the fees attached to mooring it all year long, and many of his friends had boats, too. The one bar in town had a pier to the jetty; we often went for boat trips to restaurants and bars that were only open in the summertime to boaters who pulled up to the dock.

His family and friends were immediately suspicious of me, because they couldn't tell just by looking at me who I was related to, in their town. Uh, probably the lot of you, though we've had a good deal mixing of the air since then, I'd suppose. Their Irish decor was also everywhere, and I remained (besides my cousin who introduced us) the only person in his crowd who'd actually been to Ireland. Twice. But, that's clannishness for you. I didn't expect a bunch of high school drop-outs who'd married their cousins and/or half-siblings to take a shine to me, and John and I were frequently on the outs from his drinking habit.

He was the only really successful man in his area, which made him both big-headed and a huge target in equally large measures. He made a lot of money with his trucking business, much more than he knew how to spend well or efficiently. I immediately suggested he begin trust funds for his nieces for their college education, to which he cynically huffed, "They ain't goin' ta college. They ain't goin' nowhere." Ah. Keen to help, are ya? And that was that. He was similarly spooked by the subway ride to my office in Manhattan, and the one work-related event where art directors are treated like rock stars, with free food and drink. He could distance himself from my life while at home with me in Park Slope, but not in the bigger world, and that's the place I lived in.

His best friend was an affable short Mick with a round, cheerfully red face who married the prettiest girl at school, and we all wondered about that. She and John seemed awfully chummy, too, which was confirmed for me by my ever-drunk cousin who manages to stay sharp as a whip, G-d bless 'em. He finally admitted that they'd dated for a brief second in junior high, and that was that. With the size of their neighborhood, there weren't a lot of options around. Suffice to say, they were cordial to me and also deeply unnerved by my presence as resident townies, which I respected by staying politely in the background so as not to offend, as I was taught. But their daughter Allie knew of no such barriers that existed between us.

His best friend's daughter loved me from the moment she met me, with her perfect spiral curls and big round eyes. She loved going to the beach with me because unlike her towel-bound parents, I actually love swimming in the ocean. They seemed to be of the belief that the beach was just one big outdoor bar, without need of a cooler, what with all that sand for beer bottles to go into. Allie seemed nonplussed by her parents bad alcoholism, preferring instead to sit next to me whenever she could, at their family get-togethers. My cousin made a lame attempt at making fun of me for playing with her Christmas toys on the floor with her on Christmas Day, but like my stale beer, it fell totally flat among so much dead-eyed, robotic arm-lifting. Ranking on the only adult present enough to enjoy the company of a child wasn't funny in his 40s.

It was like the joy had gone out of all of their lives, in service to a disease that so plagues Celtic people in this century, still. In between our horrible make-ups and breakups fueled by his illnesses, John would relay her messages to me that she missed me, and that it was the first thing she said whenever she came over to his house with her parents. "Where's Marie? Is Marie coming over?" She wouldn't be the first child to miss a mother she never really had. It's not my place to rear the children born to so many sick parents, but it is my fate to do it better than they ever could. I'm right here, Allie. I'll be right here, where you can always find me. Always.

Dune

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sand_Dunes_National_Park_and_Preserve 

Part of the allure of the west for me was that I had never seen it before. It was true: the very first time I "saw" Colorado was the night we drove up to a hotel in Boulder, and it was the dark of a rather recently settled west, which meant there were almost no lights. I couldn't see a thing. I asked Dave once or twice while we were on the highway if we would be able to see the mountains at all, even in the dark, and he laughed at me, saying that the mountains were facing his direction and not my side of the van. Oh. The next morning gave me no better clues about the landscape, because a blizzard had hit the area overnight, blanketing everything in a deep white snow that sparkled painfully in the bright desert sun. "Welcome to Colorado!" He laughed at me as we dug out the old gray van (a.k.a."The Rat") from the light powdery snow. 

Acute altitude sickness left me light-headed, queasy, and then actively vomiting. He was better with that because it mimicked his hard drinking ways, and he flattered himself into thinking that it gave me a taste of the morning sickness from pregnancy that would surely come to us one day as "marrieds". It allowed him to briefly feel like he had the upper hand over me, because his troubles were far too serious for anyone to handle outside of expert medical care, and they had failed at that, too. I knew that if he was going to stick it through, a big move like this would either shake him loose from me or give him the ballast he needed to endure serious married life with a woman like me. 

It was, in fact, exactly what I told my friends and family back home. Suffice to say, Dave was less ripe for adventure than me. Incurable brain disorders will do that to a person. Still, he was sailing on the illusion of greatness, and this was a performance opportunity for him. "Yeah", he explained to me as we swiped snow from the van, "you'll feel sick for about a day or two, but once you acclimate, it'll go away." Nowadays, I could've looked that up on the Internet in 3.5 seconds, but back then he felt that it gave him the leverage he needed to lead like a man, because he'd visited his older sister on their parents dime when she lived out there on a gated golf course community. Great. Along with the factoid about us being a mile high, thus ended Dave's supreme intellectual reign about all things western. Really, that was it.

After Dave went home, I began dating a man who was much more independent (like me), because he was estranged from his child-abusing parents by necessity. It wasn't great, but at least we could get up-and-go early in the morning, without the 12 p.m. wake-up call and grueling hours of coffee and cigarettes that Dave's manic-depression needed for him to remain sitting upright. I didn't have to sit around waiting and babysitting a man-child who would never really be fully functioning without massive support from his too tight crew of incestuous locals who also never broke away from home to explore the world. Vacation badly at a Floridian tourist trap or consistently hit an "all-you-can-eat" cruise ship buffet, yes. Real travel? No. Can't do it.

But Kent could, so we did. After so many years trapped inside a series of dark smoky rooms at night with a bunch of uneducated drunks, I felt free to roam. He was a burly sort of permanent bachelor used to being on his own, and after the cloying co-dependence of David, I found his carefree attitude refreshing. At least I was on my own again. No more playing nursemaid to a sick man. It seemed like I got away from a really bad situation cleanly, in a powerful "no harm, no foul" play that had set me completely free of a family that had never really warmed up to me. In addition to my mobility, Kent also had a great appetite for food, unlike the pale hard-drinking chain-smoker I'd just left.

We ate our way through Denver with expensive dinner dates that left me two sizes bigger than normal, but given what I'd been through with a depressed angry alcoholic, I figured I could lose the weight later, in exchange for my name and my life back. Hard as it was at the time (Denver was suffering through a skinny tan fad brought on by Californian relocatees in the millions), I knew I could bounce back from it, and slowly I did. I had my own feelings to contend with, and during a visit from my mother, she was surprised at the strength of my returning appetite. I'd spent years eating poorly or not at all with Dave, given his weird schedule of habits, and it had left me wanting. I was shocked and afraid at the ferocity of my returning hunger that seemed to never dull, and the somnolence that constantly weighed down my limbs.

The height of the mountains didn't help, either, so even though Kent and I were free to roam around and travel, I often felt too tired to do so, in sharp contrast to the 10-mile hikes I could walk in the mountains back home, even when I was loaded down with a pack. Being considered "fat" and "tired" was new to me, though my status as an outcast for this divorce was not. There was always something about me that pushed the scared conformists away, saggy as they were with their own fears. But gradually my energy returned, and with it, new life. I began ditching the car so I could walk to work instead, and we had a new dog that needed as much walking as we could stand. We hit the mountains, avoiding the obvious tourist spots for the more down-to-earth open spaces that are free to the public. 

I could feel my blood moving again, and I knew I was on the way to recovering from this most recent ordeal. Still, some trips from that time period bring it all back to me, like the sluggishness that felt like I was wading through thick muddy water during our trip to the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado. As I walked through a desert that looks much smaller than it feels after you're in it, I felt a weight sucking me down, trying to pull me in, chaining me to the sand, forcing me to take slow heavy steps, and it was a good thing, too. The desert opens up like a surreal pop-up book after that first small hill, rapidly expanding into a large full-blown desert, and that's no place for a New York girl like me to break down. I come from the water. I come from a solid place I was destined to return. I wanted to make it back home.

"B" for Berkowitz

Having names in America is a tricky business. Many of our ancestors came here with an eye towards reinvention, which made it the perfect opportunity for a name-change. No matter how many times I'm asked, it still makes me smile: "Is Doucette 'French'"? Oh, hell no. "Doucet" is French as all get-out, but "Doucette" is a totally American creation, reflecting our past desires for assimilation and fitting in. Quickly. It's a dangerous prospect for an immigrant not to pass as an American citizen for very long. We know too many cultures of the world not to be hip to foreigners.

Belonging here is mostly a matter of choice that's not from any particular country, culture, ethnicity, or religion, related more to geographic proximity to the nearest overseas nation than anything else. San Francisco has a large Asian district because it is a western hub for Americans traveling to Japan. Miami has a vibrant Cuban community because of its relative close distance to that country; ditto with generations of Haitian boat people who landed in Florida. I can fly to Ireland from New York quicker than to any other major European country (besides Greenland and Iceland) and most American cities, which directly informs the strength of the Celtic-informed cultures of my ancestral home of "New Scotland" and the Northeastern seaboard.

But for parts of my family, their move towards an American identity was more circuitous and convoluted, with large doses of deceit mixed with insincerity. It was the perfect combo for my cousin and my old friend from college. Dave came from a Polish-American father with a phony Irish-sounding name, and both of them are heavy drinkers, just like their fathers before them. They briefly played together in a downtown darts league (my boyfriend and my two cousins who are siblings), until they blew that by fighting in the cobblestone streets of downtown New York City late at night, after one too many.

Still, we were blown away by the reveal that my cousin had changed his name without even telling us. He invited us to a party held by an Irish association that's a popular social club for many Irish-Americans, one necessitating proof of Irish ancestry, which was much harder than he could manage with a dark Indian mother who resembled Pocahontas more than Colleen. That was his gentile line from his maternal side: a mother with more native heritage than anything else, and she'd die an early death in his 20s from the drink before she'd openly divulge the truth about her ethnic origins.

We approached the table at the social club with the guest list, repeating my cousin's name a few times, only to get puzzled looks and shaking heads. Nope. He wasn't on the list! My cousin must have saw us from inside the banquet hall, because he yelled out as he ran over to us: "It's under 'Burke'!" Uh, duh. You could have told us you made the reservations in our name. How were we to know? He quickly checked us in, then pulled us aside. We didn't understand him. He didn't go by the name Berkowitz anymore. Okay...we were still waiting. He got impatient with us."You need an 'Irish' name to get into the club!" Haha! That's funny, 'cause Dave isn't even all that Irish. He's a Polish-Indian mixed with German and Italian.

No, no, no. We still didn't get it. Finally, he coughed up the truth. This time, he leaned in closer to us, seated across from him at the long banquet table with fresh beers, lowering his voice. "I changed my name." What?! Dave was furious with him. "You stole my fucking name so you could drink in a bar?!" Kenny wanted to bartend (i.e., drink for free) at the local chapter, so he felt it was worth it. Besides, it fit his personality perfectly to be a such an outrageous liar, but this was just so fucking surreal. I loved our Jewish family from my father's side. This was bullshit! It was like he cut off an entire branch of our big family tree, and we were bleeding all over the place from the cut. Fuck...what a dumb drunk fuck!

Dave jerked his thumb at me. "She's the one with the Irish grandfather, not you. And besides, she's been to Ireland. You haven't." And that was true. "Yeah, you're 'more Irish' than me." My cousin admitted to us. "That's true." It was a dubious distinction amid so many loud red faces that packed the Brooklyn hall. Uh, yeah, we're not exactly extinct, are we? Take a good look around. Still, he had a point. He was as European-American as probably half the fuckers in the joint, and he could drink most of them under the table any day or night of the week. Heck, genetics is a wild game. Maybe that big dumb fuck was onto something. Maybe he was an Irishman more than anything else all long. It was still funny, though: an Irish Norman name of French origin, stolen from an upstate Polish-Indian. It was just crazy enough to be American. 

Mad Man

My dad absolutely hated working in the city, even though he'd beat the odds against poverty and a "lowly" ethnic background with a supposed "mixed birth" in his ancestry that plagued him wherever he went, because that's the reaction his last name elicits. He was been born in Rhode Island before moving to a farm in Maine with a little red schoolhouse down the road apiece, which lent an idyllic air to the surrounding countryside, if not his actual home rife with spats of violence and severe alcoholism. His family sold the farm and moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, which probably seems to you like the cruelest joke to be played against a young boy, and you'd be right.

He never really got over the change of pace they'd made to be closer to the family who'd help a single mother like my grandmother, even though every place he lived afterwards would never quite measure up to our fair city, because he retained a grudge against New York City from the strife he endured. I totally understood. I hated Rockland County as a kid, mostly because of the viciously competitive yentas of New City who liked to constantly remind us—through their spoiled brats at school—that we were considered lower than them, they who were destined to become doctors and layers, and failing that, dentists and chiropractors. They'd threaten to sue.

Unlike other typical "white" childhoods, we never really passed muster the way outsiders might think we did. Yeah, you had your definite skin tone and features that placed you squarely within a solid group of other "minorities" (and that status has always been highly suspect to me, though not the subsequent abuse and racism after many Americans emigrated, whether voluntary or not), because we still proudly carried our last names and distinctive features. It don't pass notice 'round the way, trust on that, and it always starts out the same way, too, albeit deceptively innocently: "Oh, is your last name 'French'?", in a pseudo-airy style. Of course, they don't really want to recognize European conquerors and other unwanted invaders to someone like me.

Then, they (my purposefully distracted audience) pretend that our real ethnic story is so hard to understand (or dull), that it's quickly followed by theirs. My dad had trouble from the very beginning in the city, because everything about him was wrong. He wasn't Italian, or Irish, or Puerto Rican, or black, which are much easier ethnics for average urban Americans to assimilate.

It became the first conversation that our attackers learned to avoid with us, which they would only signal when hard-pressed with something vague like, "there's something 'different' about you", becoming white code for "I know you're better than me and I'm a fuck-up, but I'm crazy, so if I admit you that to you, then you 'own' me". Well, yeah, kinda. By my rights. The thing is, me and my friends all had it rough, and we couldn't explain our parents crazy on just some po' oppressed n@gro story, feel me? We were all considered lowly downtrodden ethnics, be it a loud Dominican, or drunk Irish, or a greasy guinea (all those "dark" kids runnin' around yellin', ugh...Catholics), or Africans, or my "Half Breed" cousins.

It made him want to reinvent himself at every opportunity, and combined with his learning difficulties and sometimes serious cognitive impairments, it left him feeling extremely prone. He told me half-truths about joining the navy at 17 because his home life was "so bad", when in truth, his drunk dad had left many years ago, to be replaced by my loving, gentle Italian-American grandfather who stayed with my grandmother for the rest of her life. His cousin (also a serious drunk) told me he was on the reserve list before he was enlisted, and I knew what that meant. My dad doesn't make the cut right away, or sometimes at all, which he hides out of an embarrassment and fear that never seems to go away, no matter how much money he has.

He also told me that he was in a gang, and the way my dad gambles and works the pool table tells me the rest of the story about his greaser past as a small-time hood. Like his papa, his mama probably pushed him into the military, in yet another attempt to dry up one of her folk from dying, but unfortunately the military does cure disease. He said his "best friend" was electrocuted for murder as a teen, after a knife fight in an alley went wrong. Like most of his family, it was fucking crazy enough to be true, because we have/had hard-bitten convicts doing serious time in my family. It might be right.

And so, he did what millions of American men have done, since the start of our military: he flipped money from the G.I. Bill into an education, because he found a real mentor in his Naval C.O. He hated military life, but he loved the results, so he set out to remake himself into an American ideal, like the old black-and-white movies he used to escape a rough home life or the troubles he causes, preferring to sink into a dark movie theater cooled with air conditioning that he didn't have at home, so he could check out of reality for awhile. He always carries around this deep sense of need wherever he goes, you know what I mean? Like, a deep sadness settles over him and whatever evil he thinks he's done that he can't quite recover from in a really honest way. It may not even be real, the depth of his pain, but in his mind, it is.

It didn't really hit home for me until I saw the first few episodes of the t.v. show "Mad Men", a show about so many striving city people of his generation looking to ditch their identities for fake ones that Madison Avenue churned out for them in a siren song. It was alluring for them, escaping a reality that hated them for who they were. Everyone and everything had to change to suit some commercial sameness. After watching every episode, I felt an pit in my stomach that was backed up by my mom's impressions, too, and she totally sucks at media. "Yeah", she said to me, "that's exactly what it felt like back then." She paused, "G-d, what are horrible time it was." And it was. People hid anything that they thought was "bad", or less likely to sell in a corporate marketplace, like their homosexuality or their ethnic roots, to be white-washed with the latest lead-based paint or cosmetics that passed FDA approval.

I remembered it in bursts during my own bus commutes, battling homelessness and starvation; his pressing of hot spoons in the mornings to clear up sinuses he always complained were made worse with stress, his heating pad treatments and cookie binges that left him prone on the sofa while we attended church services with our mother. When he did attend, he never mouthed any of the words to our liturgical services, before he finally left the faith for an easier version that he was raised to believe was utter blasphemy in its creation against the church of Jesus Christ. Some protest.

That was just his "downtime". He'd take us into the office for weekends when my mother didn't want us around, so me and my brother could draw pictures on old office papers and eat sugar cubes from the kitchenette area for coffee breaks taken during the work week, after we'd done a thorough search of the office drawers for candy and gum. He got his suits custom-tailored at a Wallach's store in the old Nanuet Mall by this short Jewish guy with a measuring tape around his neck who had his measurements on an index card in the back of the store. I loved it, because it was like attending an exclusive gentleman's club, with expensively-tufted leather chairs and the smell of good fabric hanging on every rack.

He hated every minute of the weird head games and strange office politics, even as he was complicit in the same type of crimes against the public trust, through every deal he'd do that put him deeper into a moral hole that followed him before and after the city that gave him his first family. I felt (and still feel) sad for the lost boy he is, even as I hate(d) his abuses against us. May this weekend, and every weekend after, find him peace, as well as for all the sufferers of the unfair, the unjust, the sick, and the poor of spirit. May they inherit the earth through their humility. This mother knows it firsthand.

Beanie, baby

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beanie_Babies

I didn't blame my friends for all of their problems, because life isn't like that. Humans are social animals, and as such, we need a family group to survive those first fragile years, unlike other mammals that need to run within minutes of their birth. Our relative co-dependence compared to other animals is the price we pay for our big brains, which are given biological precedence in early development, hence the international symbol for "cute" as it is decoded within babies: overly large head, wide eyes, pert lil' features, and an adorable clumsiness. We've simply been bred to stick together in need, and it isn't wrong for us to do so.

But, my friend Dave's parents were way beyond anything I'd seen with my hardcore Brooklyn kids from "around the way". The first time me and Karen went to see him off-campus (we had, of course, early run-ins with the T.A.'s living in our respective dorms for freshman and sophomore year as required on-campus living, because we were seen by the state as being too young to maintain a household by law as teenagers, before we could escape to a funky old house off-campus), he offered to throw up a sheet to divide his off-campus room, and charge us rent for sleeping on his floor. Wow...touched by that. Thanks, dude.

To show our gratitude, we dutifully inspected his room for closet space and other living area features, which he was too slow to respond to. O...M...G....this kid has brand-new clothes with the price tags still on them hanging in his friggin' closet for his exclusive use! But...but...what the fuck? We were baffled, because Dave worked suck-ass summer jobs like the rest of us, except his jobs were upstate in Schenectady, where the pay is much lower than the rest of the state. How, muthafucka?! "Oh, that's nothing!" Dave went underneath his bed and pulled out plastic containers full of new underwear (still bright white and sealed in the packages, yo!), different types of socks, anything he could possibly need, like, bought for him ahead of time and everything.

Who has parents who even do that?! We were stunned. He felt kind of bad for his parents shopping habit strewn about his room so obviously, so he offered to give us a few of his shirts. "Go ahead! Take one! I've never worn them before!" Yeah, we could tell, but, like, fuck, dude...don't you get it? Yeah, he did. He knew they liked shopping more than caring for him, and that's why he was fucked. I mean, what kind of monster tricks you out at the mall in the summertime, so you can fail out of school in the fall?! Sick working-class people with GED's do that. Not really disciplined folks looking to get by and get better. You know? As bad as we felt about our write-ups, we were somewhat grateful for our educated parents from the city at that point, because at least they didn't buy backwards into life. This shit was so weird.

Who buys a 21 year-old guy living in a house with his friends "tidy whitey" underwear?! Is he too stupid to do it himself? WTF?! I couldn't remember the last time my mom actually bought me clothing, and I was still only 18 as a sophomore. You had to work at a clothing store to get new clothes with your employee discount that came out of your paycheck, right? Karen agreed with me, because she was also raised by wolves, so we shrugged noncommittally to Dave's half-ass offer of draining a couple of working teenage women whatever money we had left (deducting school supplies and food, naturally) from our summertime paychecks. Uh, thanks for nothing. Asshole.

We joked about that for awhile, and then we moved on. From the strangely arrogant demeanor of Dave and his wanna-be WASP sister, I thought they came from money, but the first time I ever saw Dave's parent's house, I couldn't hide my shock. What the....where's your...? This is it?! You grew up here?! It was baffling; a rather small, nondescript, squat one-level towards the back of a generically suburban block. Ohhh, shit, dude. It was then that I fully realized how "out of it" they were. Dave made it seem like his father spent like a surgeon, when in reality, "The Captain" is a big Polack
with power plant union money married to his high school sweetheart, a former head cheerleader at the local high school. Ahh....now, I understood it.

It was pure bullshit bravado by the undereducated, and it didn't end there. They had packed the basement of their little house with their dead relatives tacky furniture, also stowing a second refrigerator and freezer next to shelves filled with those huge vats of club-bought mayonnaise, like they were expecting the end of the world any day. They thought it was funny for me and Dave to "go shopping" downstairs in their rat-packed basement when we lived in Brooklyn, but I was never really sure why. How the fuck are we gonna carry this around in the city?! Why would anyone need this much stuff?

And that was far from the end of their madness. They took us along on a "shopping trip" to Amish Country, a dead place on the map for tourists where we wandered around some outdoor mall looking at the exact same stores as the ones in upstate New York. Why are we even here? We didn't really need anything, and we were on a serious budget besides. What the fuck is this even for? They paid for our motel room so they could pack it with more of their stuff, filling their big car with so much shit, that they laughed at us as they packed crap under our arms and feet in the backseat. Ginger had also picked up a raging "collecting" hobby on the side that excluded her husband, hoarding these small toy animals that came with fast food purchases.

She forced his dad to stop at every fast food joint we came across on the road, and when we said we weren't hungry, she shrugged it off: "Just throw it out. I don't care about the food." And that's exactly what we did. We made U-turns in the parking lots of these fast food places across America to dump perfectly good food into trashcans designed to curb litter, not feed addictions, but it made Dave's straits a lot easier for me to understand. I didn't exactly come from a totally healthy background, either. How they ever expected "college" from a life like this was yet another symptom in their family's downfall, comprised of one horrible decision after another.

Just when we thought his parents had gorged themselves completely, we were wrong. His mom shouted out "Stop!" from the passenger seat of their comfortable retiree car, so she could pick up a couple of those wooden cut-out reindeer for her front lawn. For Christmas. In the summertime. What a great vacation idea for us! His dad had finally had enough. "Where are we gonna put them? Come on!" She wasn't deterred at all. "We could strap them to the roof, maybe?" Me and Dave laughed, because we'd bought nothing. Not one damn thing, and we came home drained with less than nothing. We felt worse than before the trip by their unchecked excessiveness, plus all of the drinking and eating in bad strip mall restaurants that we were forced to go to with them, on their dime. We had less than zero.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_buying_disorder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retail_therapy

Care Bear

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_Bears

My Irish twin married his high school sweetheart, years after they met working at DiNoto's deli in New City, down the big hill from our home off Germonds Road, and across the street from her private Catholic school "Albertus Magnus", also in New City. She worked as a pretty counter-girl selling cookies and pastries up front, while my brother and his friend Mike Ryan washed bakery trays in the back. Unfortunately for my shy brother, his friend said he liked her first, which I suspect was a secret way of motivating him into finally asking her out, and it worked. My brother told everyone that as soon as he met her he knew she was "the one" for him, even after college and his jobs in the city.

They were the first couple in my family of siblings to marry and have children, squeezed as they were into a tiny apartment on the Upper West Side that I only visited a couple of times (once for the birth of my first nephew), because Dave and I lived in Colorado. They soon moved to Hoboken after my second nephew was born, and that's where Annie lived when the Towers fell, because I finally got through to her from my office phone at The Denver Post, as she described to me (as best as she could) a scene from a horrific, real-life nightmare that unfolded right outside of her living room window with my baby nephew crying in her arms, cut off from my brother in the city, who once worked for an Internet start-up in one of the towers.

She has never been verbal or communicative (just like my brother), so I didn't expect to have a relationship with her, as the quintessentially shy and aloof Irish-Catholic girl. She could be chilly, distant, and arrogant, like the most difficultly clannish Irish can be, and those were the traits I distanced myself from the most, because that's the intended effect: keep away! And so, as I write to you today, she has never once called me on the telephone, nor written me a letter, or sent me a card, nor has she ever answered any of my correspondence through email, laughingly telling my brother once as I visited their home that he was "horrible" to me for not staying in touch, which is about as far from family as you can get. What's the point of marrying? To become more isolated and alone?

It didn't make any sense to me, and it still doesn't, but like I wrote, I didn't really have any high expectations for her, given my brother's ongoing difficulties, and her own family. Her mother chain-smoked into a thin reedy shape (like a twitchy, over-caffeinated, tea-drinking Mick, you know the type), while her father always hung back behind his strong silent cop facade. When I asked her parents what they planned to do now that they were retired, they gave me a long blank stare, broken finally by his wife "....nothing....", followed by a nervous quick shrug. Okay....so....no traveling? "No. We're just gonna stay home." Huh. Nice talking to you, I guess. Of course, it wasn't.

Her older sister and brother-in-law provided even less conversation, drinking beers morosely at my brother's family holidays, supplying very little effort. Her sister was a bit "butch", but that could be a persona crafted from years of elbowing her way through ER's as a nurse. Her husband seemed to have a slight lisp, deferring to her like she was the boss who ran the show, and their one kid said absolutely nothing the entire time they were at my brother's house in New Jersey. There wasn't much to do in their quiet suburban neighborhood but sit in their kitchen eating and drinking, which I grew up doing. It was intolerable.

My brother likes nature, hiking, sports, music, food, concerts, museums, and photography, but Annie often seemed like she was just there for the ride as his addition, and nothing more. I often thought that, excellent student though she purported herself to be, she went into Occupational Therapy because it seemed like a steady job to have, like her sister's nursing career, because I have honestly never received any sort of care or healing vibe from her. Ever. Not once. Not once has she helped with my mother's extensive therapies that she needs for her M.S., nor has she ever helped my brother with his sports injuries related to his martial arts training, and that's her own immediate family! She does absolutely nothing for anyone else, except perhaps herself and hopefully my nephews, some of the time.

It's a surprisingly selfish way to be, for someone who spent all that time and money (and her parents) to become a part-time housewife realtor (and she did the one task I gave her related to that poorly last year), and an occasional therapist. What the...? Why do all that work to stay at home? I didn't get it, except perhaps she's embarrassed to tell us that she feels the most fulfilled as a wife and mother, which is fine by me, but why not just say that? What's with all the creepy silence?! It's frighteningly dysfunctional, which makes me glad that she didn't take to the O.T. life after my nephews were in high school, and she became certified to practice it in New Jersey. I wouldn't hire her!

She didn't speak up when my grandmother needed transferring to a hospital for an infection from the rehab facility she was in for the elderly, preferring instead to ignore the old women in wheelchairs turned to facing the wall by some minimum wage orderly who took their sweet time changing the sheets in their expensive rooms. It was one of the most shockingly abusive things I have ever seen in the healthcare industry. I was the one who went up to the desk (after visiting with my grandmother), to inquire about my grandmother's transfer status to Nyack Hospital, to be told by the office staff that they had called the ambulance service for her transfer, and we were all waiting on that. Huh...I turned around for support to see my brother, his wife, and their two sons standing mutely behind me, powerless and motionless, like they were avoiding capture and eye contact upon penalty of death.

The last time she seemed to have any impact upon healthcare was her first job after graduation from the pricey Boston school her working class parents paid for, after she bragged to us about having a total academic scholarship, when we were all broke and in college, which turned off us S.U.N.Y. kids about as much as possible, even when she told it to us over a few beers as part of her point of continued disdain towards us. She worked in Westchester for a depressing hospice run for children with terminal cancer, living for free on their campus in a small apartment that my brother stayed in, under the false pretext of living with my mom during their engagement period, like the rigidly Catholic stance her family portrays to outsiders.

I visited them there, to gently inquire why children would need occupational therapy. What did she do, exactly? Again, even over several bottles of beer, it was excruciating to get any information or the barest of answers out of her. She hemmed and hewed, finally saying that she rotated their limbs to prevent them from getting bed sores. Oh....that must be hard for you, since none of your patients ever recover. Yeah, with a shrug and a downward look. We were there for a graduation party to start that she was giving for one of her fellow classmates, which included a girl from my school (hi, Shiela!) who has since helped my mom with PT, when she did that type of work.

They even had a theme for the party, giving each other cutesy cards and little stuffed animals that they giggled over like schoolgirls, because they had dubbed themselves "Care Bears" while in school together, after a dopey cartoon made for kids and the greeting card industry. I was surprised my brother didn't say anything, because we typically outed obviously gay stuff in cartoons, like the infamously purple-triangle "Tinky Winky" from the twee children's show "Teletubbies"*. My classmate Sheila was a total hippie burn-out in high school, smoking cigarettes and pot at "The Wall" with the other low-class metal-head kids, even dropping out of Honors English class (which I stayed in), as well as Honors French. I talked to her about dropping after the few first classes, because I was scared as the youngest kid in every single class I attended at school, and she said the same thing back to me, then actually did it.

I was shocked to find out that she earned an O.T. degree for something as "square" as being a healthcare aide, because she had never once mentioned having an interest in science, let alone attending advanced science classes in high school, in any of the sciences! Her friends in high school attended B.O.C.E.S. in the afternoon for grease monkeys who wouldn't attend college (in lieu of matriculated classes at Clarkstown South), and carried cosmetician cases with their dummies to experiment hair dyeing on. I actually thought she dropped out of school senior year, because she was really into doing LSD, like the harder core Rockland rednecks who came from seriously addicted farm families. "Why excel?", they said in response to us. They were going to die anyway! That was her crowd, back in the day. So, it was a bit of a shock to see her there at my future sister-in-laws party, especially since I now worked in publishing, just like my advanced English Literature skills in school directed me to.

Sheila avoided talking to me at all, or making eye contact, or making the obligatory awkward small talk, preferring instead to adopt the gay "Care Bear" identity that this strange group of girls had. I suppose it was in deference to their training, like brothers-in-arms have after serving in wartime together, but as I watched them pass these little kid items between one another, I thought it was one of the gayest things I'd ever seen in my life, and I suspect that my brother's wife knows the powers of observation I have by now. Perhaps that's the real reason behind all this "radio silence" her and my brother use as a weapon against anyone and everyone. I called out my parents recently for his latest communication blackout, which was met with the same patterned resistance that reeks of enabling, but that ends today, my dear readers, because now you know that I know. I know.

Murphy's Law – Care Bear Lyrics

I just broke a bottle
I just broke some glass
I don't know much more to
And I'm kicking your ass

So what if I broke a bottle
So what if I kicked his ass
Quit counting on me
You're a pain in my ass

I don't need no doctor I can't pay the fee
Don't need no social workers counting on me
I'm not sick there's nothing wrong with my head
Better leave me alone you're gonna end up dead

Care bear
Caring on me

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletubbies

Bark at the Moon

Me, Robusto, and "Dangerous" (a.k.a. Mad Dawg Dave), wandering around Cambridge in the early evening, lost and high and young and having fun.

Back in college, I didn't openly speak about being Native American, because it wasn't something I was accustomed to talking about. Like our old Dutch and British Colonial roots, we had assimilated a long time ago, or so we thought. Being Métis often cropped up at the oddest times, and the most inconvenient ones, too, like partying with the boys back in college. New York State has some very large, powerful, and highly public native societies, a lot of which center on being a mad, bloodthirsty Mohegan, which are not my roots. Most Americans get their ideas about "Indians" based on bad Kevin Costner movies about beautiful hippy chicks with feathered white-girl hairdos, who just happen to live like the natives do in their peacefully quaint pot-smoking tents, where free-love and lots of nudity reigns. Nothing could be further than that about the fucking Indians I know. Promiscuous and alcoholic, yes. Nice? No. Not particularly.

It should be noted at this point in the piece that you really have to judge each tribe individually, and every individual separately, which really sucks if you are manic-depressive and learning-impaired, like my retarded friend Dave was, and still is to this day. He was also very drunk and extremely handsome back when I first met him, which didn't help him out at all as a retarded Indian. He's one of them Half-Breeds where the Euro and the Native just don't quite fucking mix right, especially if that Euro part is part Polish. Some days that fucking kid doesn't know whether his jacket is on frontwards or back, or if he's got armholes in them or not. He's that fucked up. It's actually really funny to watch, if you've managed to skip the ten-day drunk he's on.

Oh, he can plateau for years on dry land, but then he crashes and burns for years, too; trapped in a wetland he can't get out of by himself, without someone else to pull him out of the dirty bog waters he happens to be stuck in at the time. You know? He's got a really small territory, one plain boring chunk of suburban upstate New York that he can handle...and that's barely manageable on some moonlit nights as well. It's like he was made badly out of several types of clay with different firing times that just don't meld well together, and on really bad days, he splits apart at the seams. If you've ever met a New World American with mixed parentage who's really fucked up, then that's it, with some extreme Indian shit added for extra fireworks. He's a wild drunk, but he's also funny and charming at times, too. It's changeable, based solely on his unique blend of chemistry, same as his sister.

Some days she's this gorgeous Native American Cindy Crawford who's also a gourmet chef, and then at other times, she's that desperate middle-aged chick trying to act young, making out with a teenage guy in the back of the bar to prove her worth, still. They're heart-breakingly superficial, and it's a truly weird mixture, man. Just when you think they're soulful, they puke on your shoes. Just when they even out their looks, they go meth-addict skinny on you, smoking and drinking and drugging for days and days on end. Something inside of them never gelled right, and too much time with them can drive the wrong "whitey" mad. It didn't work with me, but then my genetics formed a healthy, stable branch of Indo-European the first time out, creating a strong generation of Métis that thrive in both Old and New World soil. 

Genetics are great if you think about it, but if you half-ass it, you get them: my part Mohegan, Cayuga, Irish, Italian, German, Polish friends who never set into a clearly focused picture, just blurry fleeting images of your fun night out, when you may or may not have made out with one of them. I'm proud that I chose a native blend my first time out, but like the new wave term "starter" suggests, I'm glad I half-assed that first fake marriage so that I could get it annulled, because there's no way a boy like my old friend Dave could ever fully bear the weight of Holy Roman Catholic vows, made in a sanctity that will always escape him. He tries, you know? He tries. And that's about it. He's a half-boy, half-man, wild child of the night, as depressively manic as he can be, and he's not the one for me. Hang in there if you're still seeking your moon-mate. He or she is out there. You just have to look harder...

For you, Fiona

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohegan_people 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayuga_people