The Troubles (Na Trioblóidí)

Irish people refer to their civil war as "The Troubles", in a shy euphemism that reveals the gentleness of a warm, kind, generously hospitable people aghast at the suddenly vicious violence that broke out, assisted as it was by outside economic interests. False divides in homelands are disturbing to live under, because it implies that families cannot live together, similarly constructed as the fair people of "The Emerald Isle" are. I have ancestry from Galway and County Tyrone, which, in centuries gone by, would have presented me with the unenviable task of choosing sides before military zones were demarcated by England, familiar as these lines are now, but hard still. Who would you choose? Which side? Your Protestant son and his family, or the Catholic boy living just outside of Dublin? Why did we ever have to choose?

It's the same around the globe, like the same epic battle fought between Cain and Abel we repeat in these disordered histories around the world, as walls built to separate instead of unite. We've seen it throughout time: The Berlin Wall, The Great Wall of China, and a wrongly-felt nation of Korea now split as "North" and "South", just as the U.S. was once divided, too. When will we learn? Mothers and fathers said goodbye to sons and daughters who fought and died in the wars of wealthier people vested in key government positions, far above the grunts sent to fight conflicts that did not always benefit them back home. What would you do?

Who actually wins in these wars? Not us! On my last trip back to "Eire" (it was a big fat New York family trip, let's just leave it at that for now), we were blessed to have a border crossing that was told to us gently, knowing the changeover only when we stopped for gas and got British Sterling back as change, instead of the Euro that marks the currency for the Free Republic of Ireland. Scotland was recently given the chance to switch to an independent nation through a legal vote but declined, and I can't say I blame them as a people. England is far wealthier, like Puerto Rico's relationship with the United States. Would you cut ties with us quickly? Certainly not, and neither would a savvy mom like me who only wants what's best for her children, economically and otherwise.

You haven't seen poverty like the kind that we saw as Americans visiting in Ireland back in the day. My first trip to Ireland in the 80s was like a time machine trip; a country so poor, they still used the local bus to travel with their chickens in cages to sell in the markets of the bigger towns, like the sawdust strewn quickly and cheaply on the floor of a Brooklyn supermarket in the far-out neighborhood of Kensington that was such a long subway trip away from the big city, no one at my first job in publishing ever heard of it. That's changed, though the character remains the same, because genuine pockets for natives never really appeal to out-of-towners or hipsters, and if they do, it's short-lived.

But that's not our commitment to these homelands we love so much as immigrants. When my father and his wife came up last year for a brief visit, we went to Louie's for Sunday brunch on a day that was as briskly cold and sodden as those of "The Green Island" itself. He'd  asked for a quiet spot without music because of his poor hearing (a genetic disorder I share with him), and I instantly felt at home. One of our friends from Clarkstown South worked there as a waitress when we were in high school, and it remains a great local spot.

Our waitress was Irish, as was obvious from the lilt of her brogue. We fell into conversation easily, as we are wont to do here among family and friends, similar in tone to the pubs ("Public Houses" for short) we know so well overseas. She explained a little bit of her life to me, as the parents looked over the classically seasonal menu; she chose to have her sons born on American soil so they would know the the gift of freedom as dual citizens, and it was one of the most beautifully-said, softly-spoken words of progress I have ever heard. 

She went on to say that her life wasn't problem-free living in this new reality. Her husband struggled with his work Visa during her boy's senior year of high school, and we laughed over the difficulty of securing a driver's license through the careful navigation of all those Irish turn-abouts, with its level matched only by New York's requirements for a learner's permit. Poor kid! Her husband stayed with her oldest son throughout his last Irish school year while she remained in New York with her other children, working her part of their family.

She'd knew they'd get by as a family, what with her husband spending time with her boy in Ireland, and her here to keep their family foothold in both lands, and I immediately thought to myself "That's it!". This is the solution that each and every American has longed for: assimilation without regrets, the preservation of culture without the taint of "foreigner" to dull our united hearts, for who could choose better? How do you split your body and soul in half? You don't! Now, with better immigration laws and fairer practices for recent emigres, we're no longer forced to choose between siblings, or children and their grandmothers, because we can keep our families together.  
We really can have it all.

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

Huggy Bear!

Yo honky, this here is Huggy Bear. You know, from "Starsky and Hutch"?

Me and my bros hero-worshipped few people growing up, because real-life heroes are hard to find (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2011/12/ackerman-update.html). Our short list back then (and now) was: Mel Blanc, Forrest J Ackerman, and Lou Ferrigno....in no particular order....or is there? We loved the adults who made stuff just for kids, because that's a form of love every child innately understands, like the punchline to a great cartoon voiced well and excellently drawn. How could we resist? We didn't!

We loved monster movies and the heroes who fought back against the bad guys for all of humanity, as well as any kind of action feature that had the good guys winning, kind of like how we do it now;) To us, they represented the best of what we wanted to be when we grew up: actual human beings that our kids (and their kids, and so on...) could look up to and feel proud of. It wasn't always easy for us to see the kinds of people we knew and loved reflected back at us in mainstream media, marginalized as we are as minorities fighting back against oppression (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2012/06/curly-girl.html), but like any other "good guy" out there, we persevered, living to fight another day.

The supposedly background character "Huggy Bear" from the 1970s t.v. show "Starsky and Hutch" (like the family from "The Jeffersons" and The Walkers from "Good Times") felt a lot like the people and neighborhoods we came from, trying to make their way against insurmountable odds in a cruel world, just like Fat Albert and his ragtag crew of kids from the block resembled the mixed bag of kids from around the way, in a combination of our 'hoods from the city and the country. Huggy Bear seemed to always be there went it all went down, not as the well-paid white actors in the lead, but still essential to the plot somehow by circumstances beyond his control.

But, that's how it went down in the day. Our guys weren't always played by the white actor in the lead, nor were they the sheriff in the big white hat playing up to the movie's full-face, up-close screen time; they were just there, hovering in the background, waiting to step in just when we needed it. In the meantime, we did what every single one of us in my crew did naturally, because we talked about it at length growing up: we worked hard (harder than most), went to school, entered the workforce, and kept our heads barely above water, at times subsumed by the forces of the tides as they turned, to dominate each and every corner of human life, because that's exactly what G-d promises us. Not easy or cushy, not money or houses or cars, nor anything shiny that can be bought and put up for sale, but who we are brought back to ourselves as the reality of who we really are hits us, and how strong we've become through our jointly-applied labors.

For all the underpaid, unsung glories of the world out there (and you know who you are), this one's for you today. Keep on rockin' and doin' your thing, knowing that the right person is watching you, even when it seems like we're not, because we are. We're right there with it.

(For Mo)

Black Eyeliner

"I HATE pichas! I look so weirdly dwarfish and outta praportion  in them! Ugh, she could wayeh a papeh bayag and still look good. I know! I KNOW! I hate huh, too! Don't stand next to huh in pichas!"

By now you know that I grew up in the 80s, right after Punk Rock and New Wave hit it big, and that my family life is less than stellar; the music has changed, but not my peeps. At least, not much. When I was small, we thought my mom's minuscule youngest sister was a kid, because mentally she is. She was 16 when I was born and because she's handicapped, we treated her like a favored pet, because if we didn't, she might come at you with a really sharp knife from the kitchen drawer that she snatched with rare Hobbit-like quickness in under 40 seconds, made odder still by the fact that she is chronically lazy and almost completely physically inept....except in highly important cases of mania, like someone noticing she is very small and unpleasant.

It had some funny moments (like only people who grew up around serious disorders can have), which was driven home for me last week through the animated show "Bob's Burgers", about an eccentric family with a wacky "New Yawk mutha" who has a (surprise, surprise), paranoid tinfoil hat-wearing younger sister who has to hide underneath a tent to go to sleep at night. In her ample spare time, she also creates weird games called "Gail Force Winds" with rules that she can change at anytime, like blowing your game pieces off the board because you're 9 and you don't yet realize that she is clinically schizoid because she acts like a kid you go to school with, and that's why she slept on your grandparent's couch for most of her adult life, with the exception of that time when she had a series of creepy basement apartments, first in my Mom's house (where she was thrown out for competing with my mom's compulsive rules about germs and cleanliness), and some other house in New City...with weird games that had fluctuating rules according to her mental state.

I was fine for awhile growing up, hiding out among a gaggle of grand-kids who are much much stranger than me (some have obvious Autism), but once I hit puberty and started to outgrow her, she went nuts, which was bad enough, because I was the teenager coping with all these changes, like my dad running away with his barely legal secretary, and me losing my childhood forever...but I digress. I began showing markedly different traits than my mom and her short, fat sisters. Like some nightmare fable, they grew wider and uglier from their abusive lifestyles, while I sprung up and grew leaner, with a beautifully perfect oval porcelain face to match, which they noticed sarcastically every time there were two of them in a room against me. Unfortunately for me, I had the body to match, too: perfectly long legs that went on for days to match the rest of my athletic frame, with perfectly proportioned hands and feet to match, beautifully sized and featured extremely well.

After the awkwardness imposed upon me by my mom's poor taste in hair and clothes, my coming out phase was disastrous for me. I grew up to be a supermodel at a normal height, so there would be no giraffe jokes that I could hide behind. I was....well, perfect-looking, and I grew more so with each passing day. I learned how to style my hair really, really well, found a great hairdresser on my own, earned my own money and bought my own clothes, then experimented with makeup that wasn't my mom's cast-off Mary Kay cosmetics, made for someone twice my age. I wasn't wildly punk or new age, but that didn't matter. I was gorgeous and normal, in fact, brilliant at school with lots of friends, hobbies, and interests, which I began not hiding as I blossomed verbally, too.

My handicapped maternal aunt with my paternal grandmother. They knew.

It was under this cloudy sky that I stupidly accepted one of my aunt's summer invites to go to her rented beach house with the younger sister, without my mom or any of my brothers. My mom was cautious about it, and so was I: they are really incompetent. But, we figured, my mom wanted some space and I loved the beach. Who cares, right? They have a house at LBI and I love to swim, which they can't do well. I'd maybe make a few new friends and be at the beach most of the time. It was a complete disaster. The first day out, I was walking with my youngest aunt to the beach when something happened; we passed by a house with two teenage boys about my age playing a board game outside, on the second floor deck of the house their family rented. "Hi!", one of them waved to me from the balcony, "Hey, how are you? What's your name? Do you want to come up and play a game with us?" Maybe! I was thirteen and I really liked boys, but, no, thanks guys, I'm going to the beach with my aunt. Maybe later?

And that was it. She went completely bat-shit insane. She gnashed her teeth in that crazy way she does, baring her large teeth in her huge head that sits on a short squat body, pulling her lips back in a snarl that bares her gums, hissing at me, spitting curses, calling me a slut with black eyeliner and that's why those boys wanted to talk with me, yeah (building up steam), because I look like a WHORE!! in that makeup and that's why I attract attention I shouldn't have and it was all my fault and I look like a slut. She spit out words like daggers, so insultingly out of place to what happened on a mild Jersey Shore beach day that I knew immediately what was happening: she was going to try and destroy me over my beauty, and if she caught me alone, she'd do something really bad to me.

It was such a bad betrayal by a woman who had pledged in front of G-d and family to protect me (she was supposed to be my "godmother"), that I didn't know what to do. My beach day was ruined, which was part of the point, and I was in tears; hysterical, scared, shocked, scalding child's tears, with no responsible adults around: not my mom, or my dad, or my grandparents. No one was there who would help me. I made a scene back at the house anyway, to drive the point home in front of my mom's sisters and my younger cousins, so that they would know it was real, though I knew they'd probably cover their asses and lie about the situation later on. I was bereft. I have never felt so lonely and isolated in all of my life, save for one or two times after that. I was trapped, because I couldn't drive away. There were no phones, so I had to walk by myself to a payphone to call my mom in tears.

She felt terrible, and she knew I was telling the truth. She knows her sisters. We talked about her driving down to pick me up, but I wanted to stick it out. Rockland County is many hours away, and as single mom, her life was hard enough. I calmed down a little bit, wandered around the ice cream hut until sunset, then slowly went back to the house. My cousin talked to me a bit, which helped. He lived with his mom's madness every day, too, and his father had died recently from cancers caused by smoking and alcoholism. He understood, which helped me calm down enough to stick it out for the rest of the vacation, because I had a witness who could testify later, on my behalf.

I didn't talk much for the rest of the summer, and from then on out, I knew my aunt was so sick, that she could kill me in the wrong mood, or if I was alone with her for too long. I turned inward against myself, and after the insults that stung successfully manifested itself directly in my markedly changed behavior, the sisters snapped at fake "slut" slurs as the ammo of choice. I would go on afterwards to have sporadic periods of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll brought on by family madness, fueled by the fact that I might as well try and act like a slut, since I looked like one anyway. I was doomed no matter what I did, which opened the door wide to a series of adult male predators. And to think that I once thought, as a young kid, that I looked like an 80s rock star.

A year later: me and my bro at the beach (I was 15) with a friend and my mom, wearing my "slutty" 80s eyeliner. We did it, man. We won, because we survived. BTW - "quel tan" in this photo, bro! Rock on!

To all my peeps: I told you I wouldn't drop this, because Rockland kids shouldn't punk-out on one another, ever. Here you go, man, for that next time your moms gets drunk and mad at you for breathing at her the "wrong" way, or your dad gets slap happy with his stupid asshole drunk friends when the family BBQ turns bad after nightfall...without the horribly nigthmarish "Annie" foster care bullshit to hurt you even worse. 

I kept my word, didn't I? Yes, I did. Because I want you to make it, guy. I don't want to be the only one at the top anymore, you know? And call the cops in town. They're my friends as grown-ups. You can trust them to help. We went to school together. They know me. Also, in this century, we leave a paper-trail that's mile wide and a mile long until we get the help we need for one another. Do it. This Mommy doesn't lie to cover her ass. (I might to help you, though. Acting chops also help me to not get knifed in a drunken bar fight gone bad, ya dig ;) We have to stick together in this world to make it.

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