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.

Valley of the Dolls

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

My dad ran off with his secretary, to the surprise of just about no one. My cousin worked at the same upstate cable company as them, and linesmen know all the gossip from the constantly clucking office girls. She was a poor country girl with buckteeth, bad eyesight, and what was used to be called "rotgut" which is today's Celiac's Disease, turning her once embarrassingly-skinny frame into the huge marketing hit now called "Gluten-Free Living", a new diet for hiding eating disorders, much like the low-fat craze of yesteryear and the also retarded "Paleo Diet"; food fads that die fairly quickly on the shelves, but unfortunately for her, she has the real thing. 

She'd been shopping around for a man for quite some time, with poor luck. It was a small rural dating pool that had (by necessity) to include married men as well as single ones, guys who figured out really quickly that she was just some scared kid looking for a steady gig that came with a guaranteed paycheck, with a job no one could fire her from, and given my parent's obvious tensions at the company Christmas parties, my dad was just the meal ticket she needed to get out of town, to fulfill her small town dreams about success. 

We didn't really blame anyone involved. It was obvious to us by now that our parents generation was fatally flawed; some of it was not of their own choosing, like canned foods with extended shelf lives and the spoiled upbringings of "Depression Era" parents looking to give their kids a better time of it. We had no such allusions about life: for me and my brothers, life is no mystical magical fairy tale ride at some overpriced amusement park. We do the real thing. There's nothing else for us in this life besides hard work, which is exactly what we do almost every single day of our lives, stopping only to rest by G-d's command on Sunday, as a necessary respite from the weeks labors. Our rewards are the excellence we achieve through the sweat of our own brows, and that's just the way we like it. 

But for people with severe challenges like the ones faced by their "Silent Generation", sometimes the only recourse they had in life was a kind of needy co-dependence, which is exactly how we continue to see our damaged family members. It's not really a "blame game" as much as it is one long, exhausting, and highly overwrought group therapy session from which there is no escape except bad vacations and more shopping trips. Of course we wanted more. What do you do after you buy everything you ever wanted?! And that's exactly the place where my and my siblings wanted to land; a place exempt from petty competitiveness and dead-end jobs. We came around full circle from the often degrading hatreds that lead a family downhill and spiraling out of control, which is another reason I'm in charge: I'm the best!

So, it's with that overall perspective that we hold our parents mistakes. My stepmother's horribly awkward provincial tastes reflect the insular values of backwoods farm folk: people who greatly fear and also lust for the supposed treasures that our fair Gotham is portrayed as giving away so easily in t.v. shows and movies. They actually believe t.v. shows and movies offer redemption for them, or at least provide another delusional fantasy to prolong their inevitable facing up to reality. When my dad's secretary finally had all the money she ever wanted, she had absolutely no idea what to do with it. She bought the requisite gaudy jewelry and furs that ridiculous "trophy wives" are supposed to have, like the show Dallas taught her how to do, in order to blend in with her new western surroundings. 

It was obviously infuriating, but it wasn't my life to live, and I thanked the heavens every day for it (still do). It was a horrible fate to be stranded in a dusty town in the decline that's so far off the beaten path, they pay people to visit them there. I didn't blame my dad for checking out of reality through John Wayne movies. He's from Bed Stuy neighborhood drunks, and he considers living well his revenge against the ravages of their WWII generation's alcoholism and PTSD. She follows his suit, which was the ideal presented to him as the picture perfect way to ride off into the sunset. It doesn't work, but they still try really hard to give us their best stage smiles. It's heartbreaking, and it's not my world to live in. I wait, patiently observing them from a safe distance, offering them ancient hopes about redemption and family life that is theirs for the taking, if they make it back home in one piece. We'll be here.

And so it was no surprise to us that my dad's wife decorates like a twelve year old girl with too much time on her hands, in that QVC/HSN style known as "Country Quaint". It's so fucking bad that I feel bad for my dad, a guy with a keen eye for good wood furniture and genuine antiques. He tries to steer her in the right way, but given the material he has to work with, he meets with uneven success on any given day. Their weirdly overdone mini palace is like a combination of gaudy floral prints mixed with the throw-up from a hungover cowboy's hat. With that in mind, we learned a long time ago to just let it pass, while they give visitors these weird "tours" of their house decorated in all corners with odd trophy cases, like two lost children taking our hands to seek a validation that we do not have to give to them.

For awhile, when Denise was in full-on housewife mode raising my youngest brother, the shopping was through the roof, as she desperately worked to stave off the soul-crushing bordedom that comes with semi-arid plains living; there's no one around for miles and miles but plain dirt road, which must have been excruciating for a small-town girl with dreams of glittering diamonds, never-ending champagne, and tacky Broadway musicals. Big gay shows don't work in the provinces real well. We tolerated their shopping trips with the same rolled eyes we have about their head-in-the-sand routines so indicative of their "do-nothing" generation; we don't get it.

For a time, I gave my younger brother much-needed doses of reality to temper the credit card fantasies of excess they dreamed of while I lived in Colorado, which was a relatively quick drive away for us used to being apart from nearly a continent's width away. We made fun of them as we drove down to the ranch in one of their old pick-ups, giving him guidance, support, and discipline along the way. He had so freaked out my older brothers during his own Spoiled Brat stage, that they cut him off completely, to stave off any infections that might pass onto their own young children.

Unfortunately for them, genetics doesn't work that way, and as a lifelong educator, I don't believe in writing off children, especially the ones in my immediate family, and so I talked and talked and talked to him, breathing fresh life into their stale routines, by planting the seeds of wisdom that he would need later on when I wasn't around. Just like with my grandparents, I talked to him directly (without any of the deliberately frustrating and weirdly convoluted hints that pass for secret-keeping in seriously disturbed social groups), letting him know that his mom's taste freaked me out, too. Whether it was out of a deliberate perversion about childhood or her own unsatisfied needs about her upbringing, she went through this dreadful faze of using life-size porcelain dolls to decorate with, like creepy stand-ins for the friends and family she didn't have around.

I don't know, man. It was so fucking strange, we laughed cautiously about it, hoping to stave off whatever fucking voodoo is cooked up with those things. Again, I wasn't sure if she was using them as evil guards to stand sentry by the guest room door, but there they were for many years; silent, still, unblinking, and very dead-looking dolls, the stuff of every decent kid's nightmares. Like all their other weird ploys, we couldn't figure out if it was on purpose or from her innate brain-damage, and that was the brilliance behind her ploys: she could actually be that stupid for real. My bro told me she was dumb at six years old. I calmly reassured him that it meant our Doucette DNA had survived their many travels intact, and this was the bane of our advanced consciousness: to suffer fools gladly (at times).

He was her only meal ticket to a greater portion of my dad's will after he died; the only kid she had to bargain with, and in their world, that makes all the difference. It meant they could continue to use money as a form of leverage in our family, using their deaths as the strings to pull along family members they viewed as vulnerable, as it suited their games between each other. It worked as a dysfunction between the two of them, but not with us. We don't need money to get ahead. It left them alone in their barren wasteland while we chomped on the Big Business douchebags of Gotham, a wolves feast of fools if ever there was. Our bloodsport is survival, and it helped my younger stranded bro to know that he was not alone in our clan. We are the wolfpack.

Still, I grew up on the stories of New England Gothic and Stephen King's horrors, classic fables that we all know so well (BIG FANS, Mainer). And so, on one rare morning while our parents slept in or drank coffee elsewhere in their strangely built house of hidden corners, I flat out asked Patrick if those fucking dolls scared them shit out of him, by the laundry room where they stood silent and glassy-eyed. "Yeah...", he shrugged, bolstered in confidence by my visit and the strength my big blond Scottish boyfriend represented to him, as a clannish tattoo-covered rock star with seriously Christian ideas to match his own Methodist upbringing, "...but I got over it a couple of years ago." Oh, good! How did you do that? 

I asked him because I was concerned for him being alone as a young boy, stranded in the middle of nowhere with two adults who may or may not physically abuse him while he quickly outgrew them: "One night I just couldn't take it anymore! I just stood in front of them like this," and he planted himself squarely in front of the tallest girl, "and I said to her: 'OK, evil doll. Do whatever you're gonna do. If you wanna kill me, go ahead. Just do it already!'" He'd been taking self-defense lessons on the suggestion of me and my older brothers, because we knew his bratty ass would get beat up on the very first day of school. He liked to brag about money back then, and how much of it his parents had. Wouldn't go over so well with the Mexican kids of teenage sharecroppers, and unlike them, we didn't want him to actually die, just grow up.

Good answer! Me and my boyfriend smiled at each other. He might just survive childhood alive after all! My dad liked to take people into the desert with horses that may or may not hurt them really bad, like the one that almost took off my sister-in-law's head when it suddenly sprang into a bolt towards the barn. She barely made the duck before the barn roof would have chopped off her head. He also strung us along a line of horses uphill in shifting sand, his wife putting an end to trips in the remote back-country because we told her that Patrick's horse almost tipped over on top of us. She went completely white back at the house, and cautioned my dad against his follies for the rest of our time there, a rare show of moxie for his mostly-chastened secretary.

After a heartbeat or two, Patrick turned towards me proudly, "And that's how I did it!" What happened then? "Absolutely nothing! I realized that those dolls couldn't kill me. They're not evil. They're just a bunch of stupid dolls," and like that, the cloud lifted on his nursed fears about old toys and their supposed powers over him in this life. There ain't nothin' we can't do against a bunch of dumb-looking, silly-ass girly toys that any kid outgrows real fast. They're dull! Well done, kiddo. I'll be seeing you under a full nighttime moon, with stars that still shine brightly in the sky, on a beach with no-name. Come on, boy. You know the spot. It's in your DNA, werewolf.

Going to Graceland

We were much more Beatles fans than Elvis fans growing up in my household, a distinction in tastes sharply noted in "Pulp Fiction", in an infamous scene between John Travolta and Uma Thurman. My college boyfriend was an Elvis fan from Brooklyn, which is sort of like being an urban cowboy. It didn't fit, but he liked to cop tastes contrary to the norm to appear different, like sporting a beret or wearing an ascot.

And so I found myself going to Graceland one summer, on an epic road trip that spanned the South to my Dad's place in West Texas. I love road trips, finding them much more preferable to horribly bumpy and terribly turbulent flights that go against the Gulf Stream, a fact that was confirmed for me when my Colorado boyfriend began private pilot lessons. It's gotten worse, too, from compulsive over-travelling brought on by a runner's type of fast pace neurosis that's as addictive as their high sugar and highly caffeinated lifestyles. Chemtrails are the sign that you've polluted the sky, you ugly American.

My exes would fight me on my American preference for the open road, but given my quickness of mind, I usually won out, as I did in this case, because my Brooklyn boyfriend didn't have a driver's license or a car. He was captive to me and my advanced skill sets, a state of affairs that never abated during our acquaintance, much to his chagrin. I made the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia my first day driving, to a smog-filled summer's day that took the wind out of my sails for the rest of the trip. Going to some tourist trap to see the housed remnants of a overdosed singer I never really liked? Great. What a way to spend my summer.

Two days later, I brought us to the state of Tennessee, for a tour of Elvis Presley's house. My very stoned boyfriend was so out of it from getting high in the parking lot, he blurted out that he wanted to see "EVERYTHING!", when the ticket agent asked him which tour he wanted. We'd been flagged by the golf cart security duo as outsiders, for walking towards the house from the graffitied walls outside the grounds, when you were supposed to know to go across the street to buy a ticket, even though no signs were posted with instructions to do so. When he found out that it would cost us over $150 (in 1988, on a working class college kid's budget), he blanched white, and in an embarrassed whispered aside, I told him to just do the house tour.

It was horrible. Priscella still lived in the top floors when she was in town, so we went past his recording studio and racketball court to an impromptu grave site in their backyard, which gave me a blessed moment of silence among the weird hick crowd, who worshipped him like he was some sort of demigod. They also toured his tour buses, his car collection, his costumes, his airplane collection (one of which was named the "Lisa Marie"), and a movie theater that showed his films exclusively. I half-heartedly bought a couple of tepid souvenirs in the gift shop, and then we got back on the road.

My naive New York City boyfriend didn't know how much trouble I steered him out of, until we stopped at a gas station in Mississippi, with a visibly pregnant (and cigarette smoking) woman talking with the clerk behind the counter. They both narrowed their eyes at us when we walked in, eyeballing his dopey "CULTURE" t-shirt, with the word emblazoned over a picture of 70s rhinestone jumpsuit Elvis visiting the White House, posing with Nixon in the Oval Office and shaking hands. He wanted to make an ironic hipster statement that was cutesy "tongue in cheek", and definitely not appreciated by them, which was backed up by our brief exchange with the rural couple at the counter.

The large beer-bellied clerk said to him: "What does that t-shirt mean, boy?" My young boyfriend nervously deferred to him with two palms up, in a conciliatory gesture: "Oh, we've just been to Graceland. It was awesome!." I paid for the gas and asked for smokes, while the two hicks pondered his statement. After a very long pause with continued staring, the large man finally said to us: "Well, we worship him around these here parts." And with that, we were back on the road, albeit with a much more sober and quiet white kid from the city sitting next to me.

Happy trails to you America, on all of your summer road trips. For most of the masses, this is prime vacation season. Just be sure to steer clear of rural areas that worship dead, drug-addicted rock stars. See you 'round the way, mes amis.

CULTURE

Rockland County Redneck

Tits, guns, cows, and lots of red meat. Fuck you, city folk!

Believe it or not, we have serious hicks in New York. It's hard for outsiders to acknowledge that, because they see these crime dramas on t.v. about city people, but truth is, we have an enormous amount of wilderness here; a state so vast up north, driving in that direction will take you to Canada.

I need fake books, hot wings, and beer to be American!

And so, we have certain pockets that stand out in stark contrast to the neurotic, uptight, therapy-case Manhattanite who's originally from "Lawnguyland", or "Long Island", as it's referred to in English. Upstaters chafe at "The City", citing Albany as the state capital and all them types that frequent urban areas as being different and threatening to them and their culture, and they aren't exactly wrong about that.

Spelling and punctuation sucks! If you do it right, you're a pinko liberal.

Truth be told, an upstate accent sounds much more like a Wisconsin "donchaknow" type of folksy backwoods talk than a "Nuyorican" (a New Yorker of Puerto Rican ancestry) who's lived on one city block for his entire life. Provincialism exists everywhere on the globe, and we are no exception in that regard, either.

Mah huntin' dog gets me through deer season. Fuck you! Go hump a tree.

But ideally, genuine native New York culture is actually one that incorporates town and country, like the magazine of the same name. Urbane, sophisticated people typically have a home at the beach or in the woods, and an apartment in the city, switching up locales on the weekends and holidays. It's a harder lifestyle because it necessitates a certain level of income, but also a flexible and adaptable mentality to go along with the life, too.

I needs guns to express myself, asshole. Get a job!

It's something me and my group of friends have always had that marks us as not quite fitting into rigid categories of "city", "country", or "beachcomber", which some people trade on and off like a set of clothes. We do it all because we love it all: the beach, the mountains, the woods, the waterfalls, the wild untamed forests, the parks, the culture, the food, the weather, the changing landscapes with their exceptionally beautiful vistas, and most importantly, our fair Gotham.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker

To know us well is to know and appreciate those things, too, with all their individual facets, and if you can't do that, then we don't have much to talk to you about, so bounce, muthafucka, because that's how we roll. Keep up, will ya?