Contents Under Pressure

Unlike the addicts and "headcases" lurking around us, me and my working class friends always knew we smoked, drank, and experimented to escape the daily hell(s) we came from. We always knew that if/when we ran things, it would be better, and now it is. But, that didn't help us out much as kids, except in the same dully repetitive way, which was the point behind our terrible homes: we had to do what our insane parents wanted us to, or needed and/or forced us to do, or we'd become homeless children susceptible to crazy-ass hookers and the drugged-out zombies on crack serving them up as their pimps on the then-wild streets of 70s-80s New York City.

We'd see the bombed-out buildings and wandering packs of wild dogs lope through our old neighborhoods like hounds escaped from hell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfen_(film), and wherever we went, there'd be art in our wake to tell our "peeps" about the bad news, too, though in a really fun and entertaining way. That's how you have to do it with the insane, or they could "snap out" on you, in a suddenly violent way. We'd been at the bad end of a father's fist or a mother's belt borrowed from him, and what they couldn't beat out of us, they starved us into doing, by withholding money and time and parenting.

My grandparents were "hip" to the whole scene; they'd also been forced onto our mean city streets before they were ready, by sick households that just gave up, to have family that then joined together to force them out of school (where they belonged) into rotten jobs that were humiliating and demeaning to the brilliant kids with potential that they were, and remained for the rest of their lives. Their mad families made their prowess—in comparison to their ineptitude(s)—their punishment for "out-living" them. I asked them about it, in between abusive bouts in our sick households, as I leaned in over summertime glasses of excellently-made iced tea or fresh lemonade, drinking in their good health like the succulent blend they had made it for; just for me and my ears alone.

My grandmother wanted to be a nurse or a teacher, and so in response to the brutal pushing of her parents, older brothers, and older sisters (who lived in their own fantasy worlds of delusional thinking and absenteeism), our Great Lord gave them, in His Infinite Wisdom, me to teach, and I drank it in like I was ready for it. I needed it, their succoring. Lord knows I was hungry for it, banished and isolated as I was in a home full of untreated sick people that they also knew all too well from their own lives and upbringings. Well, what did you do after your brother pretended he was "trying out" for the Yankees (cough<bullshit>cough), by wasting his time playing stick-ball in the streets? I asked her, and she told me the truth. Oh, she told me, I won the decision-making process in my household, by becoming a factory manager by the time I was 19 or 20-years old. 

Yeah! That cheered me up. And she did. Through her superior ability to earn, she ruled the roost, which pulled her out of an abusive relationship that was to be her arranged marriage with a boy back from "The Old Country" in the Abruzzi region of Bari, most likely a cousin too closely related for a good healthy match anyway. He put his hands on her, and she fought back by standing up to him, which earned her her father's approval and respect. In the meantime, she met and fell in love with my French Swiss/Irish-American grandfather while canoeing, because they both loved the beach and the outdoors. Ha! Of course, you do. Me, too! But, like, why did they do what they did to you?

"Oh, I don't know..." She'd trail off, in recollection. "After refrigeration put him out of the ice business, he just stopped working." Huh? I never heard of such a thing in my extremely strict household, where child labor was considered a natural right by my sick parents, just like theirs. Why? "I don't know!" she responded to me. "I think they were scared and tired of trying to 'make it' in America. They just refused to learn English." Ah...Yeah, I knew that one, too. Just give up and cave into it. "And my brothers were favored for being older by Italians, so they got away with doing nothing all day." Ha! Yeah! Right! I have that, too! She nodded, and then continued talking to me in private, where no one else could hear her but me, and maybe my silent grandfather.

"Yes, but you have to understand something, Marie..." My ears perked up like the puppy I was, in the presence of greatness, because even I knew from my earliest years that my grandmother ran shit like the strong-armed, Bronx-born female she was. "The work that they refused to do made me much stronger than them." Uh huh. Preach it. Better than school on a Sunday. "After I took the economic lead in my household, I had 'the say' then. Not my parents. Sure, my father loved me and stood up to the neighborhood after my fiancee 'put his hands' on me, but I also had to wait almost four years before I could marry your grandfather, because they were prejudiced against Irish people", and here she made the drink symbol with her hand to her mouth, like you're tippin' back all the way in one big swallow from yo' glass.

Yeah, word. I got that. It meant I'd have to wait for what might be a very long time, even after I succeeded from all my hard work, to get what I wanted, maybe much longer than necessary, because it would take that much time for my family to catch up to my reality in any time, either the past, present, and/or future. And after that, we'd pause in our short conversations that were blessedly free from the static of the mentally ill around us—either swirling about in tense motion, or sitting around us in fretful waiting—in these short exchanges that were like breathing in fresh air after working underground all day in the explosive sewers of the city, like my grandfather did for most of his life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Edison). 

They'd take a long steadying pull from their cool sodas or glasses of beer, as I followed along with my baby soda or lemonade. It became a ritual that me, my friends, and our classmates would re-enact at about the same time, wherever we were, that'd bring us together in an almost magical synergy we knew it was; a deeply spiritual destiny that we were fated to meet, like the aligning of the planets under a thick blanket of stars in the crisp clear air of upstate New York, protected as we were in our hard-to-reach mountain stronghold of Oneonta, re-creating sacred rituals of renewal and refreshment as young teenage "parents" who'd been made to run things way before our time(s): "It's 'smoke 'em if you got 'em' time!" 

And then we would. We'd pull out cigarettes to take long drags from, in a steadying way that meant the next fight was near, followed by a long drink from an ice-cold beer that'd been cooled from the snow we'd just reach outside our dorm rooms or old houses to grab for our coolers. It wasn't alcoholism, or addiction, or the "touchy-feely" language of some fake pseudo-science made just  for t.v., like the bad pop psychology that's become the business of rehabilitation, rather than the cure. We wanted more for them and for you; now, then, and always. We want(ed) a cure; not for us, but for you. All of you. You get me? Yeah, I bet you do. Now you do. From me, you do.

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

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

Happy Birthday to Me

When I was growing up, birthdays were rare breaks from my very strict norm. It was the one day (read that again: ONE DAY) of the year when I was allowed to choose what we had for dinner as a family, and what kind of cake would be served as dessert. As I got older (say, around 7 or 8 years old), birthdays became trading opportunities for my brothers to petition me with (ahem, more like, try to strong arm me into), by giving up my birthday dinner for money. If I switched out my usual spaghetti and meatball dinner with something more palatable to them, ("So boring! You pick the same thing every year!"), something they preferred, like spare ribs, they'd give me an extra $10 or $20 bucks for my birthday, which was really money for the Christmas gifts I'd spend for them, and they knew it, because it came up quickly on the heels of December 17th. Everything in our household was up for negotiation: my birthday, my gifts, my privacy, my body, even the food I waited all year to have free from strife, or so I thought. 

We were desperate for these few scant "outs" from our daily lives, which my parents could not tolerate as well, because they bartered between each other over just about everything, like a couple of spoiled and highly deprived children. It was excruciating to endure and bear witness to, and so, birthdays lost their luster eventually, too, just like everything else in that house did, quickly becoming another day to me, and a very abusive one that was rife with potential conflict at that. In short, I grew up, even when the people around me couldn't or wouldn't, stuck on just one speed or another. You want my cake that badly? Sure, take it, I guess. I mean, what the fuck?! It's readily available food! What gives? They became greedy, grasping, rabid animals in the face of this one freedom we had among the crushing grinding reality of our day-to-day life that my parents so hated. So, as I matured, it went: first, it was my simple chocolate cake with whipped cream and canned peaches that my grandmother had perfected over the years, next it was my humble pasta dinner so that I could have money to buy the few things I wanted, needed or liked. In short, I became a mother, as the people around me began pushing and pulling against one another after I caved into their stronger desires. 

At the end of the day, it was just a spaghetti and meatball dinner, covered with tomato sauce and coated with grated cheese on top. Shit, I could make that any time I wanted to, with some advanced planning. I was already a master chef by age ten, absorbing and inhaling my mom's few scant cookbooks in the pantry, because she considered cooking a plebeian chore for lesser minds, far beneath her "advance degrees in science" kind of mind, a skewed and warped view of her "feminism" loudly pronounced through a wedding gift titled  "The 'I Hate to Cook' Cookbook" that sat on the pantry shelf in accusation. It spoke to her desperation for some kind of legitimacy, one that she would never really be able to achieve on her own, given the problems inherent with her brain chemistry. She wasn't bashing against oppression. She came up against her own inequities, and creative cooking was just another one of her shortcomings that she cleverly hid, saying that baking was more precise and to her liking, because the measurements were like her lab concoctions at work, which were so much more important than us and our dinnertime. 

And so it went throughout the years, as I watched these days ripped away from me one by one in a type of silent horror show, like the throwaway milestones they had become to my family. First, it was the food I liked, then my gifts were traded for money given grudgingly, shoved at me from across the kitchen table, or thrust hastily into my hand as we passed each other by in the hallway, on my way to my childhood bedroom. My supposedly big adult years became birthday bashes they could use to manipulate one another with, and also use against me to dominate me with their far more pressingly petty needs. I knew it went haywire one year, when I found myself eating grossly over-sweetened cake that I did not like nor want, in my grandmother's overheated apartment, that I grew sick over with a painful food headache from yet another forced ingestion that had to take place in front of my very sick godmother, to placate her mental illnesses through her viciously depraved sweet tooth that she angrily substituted over actual medication, in tribute to her before I was finally allowed to reach my intended destination of a Sushi dinner my sick mother paid for with her birthday coupon, which she promptly screwed up by falling down on a slight sidewalk incline to the restaurant the moment I was distracted by opening the door for her in the bitter cold night. 

Whenever I folded in family, they ruined it gleefully and spitefully, right in front of my face. My brothers took away my 40th from me cruelly as well, co-opting the play I wanted to see with one of their selections instead, picking the restaurant and meeting place, booking a hotel for their families' comfort and enjoyment by pushing me into a forced engagement that I hated every minute of, culminating in my nephew taking and eating the birthday cake right off my plate in front of them without bothering to ask anyone about, that they pretended to ignore. In families with rampantly untreated mental illnesses, I was simply another pawn they tried to pass around abusively, as a covert excuse to hide their real intentions. Such was force of their hatred against me.

The next morning after that 40th birthday debacle, I found myself sick and throwing up into a tote-bag that I had bought from a breast cancer charity in honor of my cousin's successful battle against Stage Four Lymphoma (I bought her one for Christmas, too): on the subway, and in full view of fellow passengers, because I no longer drank as much alcohol as my family did anymore (I was well into MMA training at the time), stumbling through a full-blown snowstorm, stopping to heave in big gulps of cold air so as to not get sick again in public, desiring only to climb four flights up a rundown Brooklyn townhouse to an apartment I could barely afford but made due with through my salary by finding a rare rent stabilized place in a good, safe neighborhood. 

I knew something had to give, and that something was me, because they would kill me if I allowed this to go on. Certainly, they had bankrupted me until I had nothing left except myself to give. And so it went on: over these preceding next few years, I fought battle after battle with everyone in my family, as they deliberately turned their backs on me one by one, during my time of greatest economic need (which had never happened of such duration and acuteness before), to finally, in this year, achieve the real success my family has always needed. How did I do it? By allowing them to bash me bloody, body and soul, pushing my body and brain to its' limits, to achieve the actualized success of a self-sustaining kind, the type my people have always needed, by becoming a leader who is a force to be reckoned with, and on to the destiny I have always been fated to be, recounted here as a Queens' true life tale about the real Game of Thrones.

This year I will order food that I want, off the menu of a female warrior who runs her very own kitchen, cooking her very own type of food, in this town we call home, paid through blood, sweat, and tears covertly disguised as a paltry birthday lunch on my mother's dime, long overdue and sorely lacking. Finally on this day, our day has come. And so as my birthday approaches, so does our day together. As a united people, we will move forward through the power of a forceful realization felt in my body and soul, a queen to be linked and joined to her destiny at long at last. Enjoy this 17th day in winter in remembrance of me and on the house, to be always paid by me through The House of Doucette. Long may we reign, in peace and in victory. Amen to you, my children, from your ever-loving Mother in Christ, who is also Marie the Beautiful, Marie the Strong, Marie the Brave, and Marie the Brilliant, the very words you spoke near me to invoke the spirit that will be here forevermore. We have won. The fruits of my success will be yours to savor eternally ever after, on this 45th birthday of mine in the year of Our Lord 2014, the 17th day of December will forever and always be known as my true Mother's Day because it is for you, my people.

My 39th birthday at my grandmothers' house, December 17th, 2008. I made a minor typo in the photo caption when I posted it on Facebook back in 2008, which was immediately pointed out to me in typical "clever" hipster fashion as an error, unsolicited as it was by a older and supposedly more powerful man from my employed publishing past.

Fame and Fortune (Football and Farming)

When I was growing up, my dad used to say "if you have to choose between fame and fortune, you should choose fortune". Of course, he said this as a tentative, new businessman sensitive to humble origins, during a time when having our last name meant near-constant hazing and bullying on the mean streets of New York, especially on a rough, working class block in BedStuy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford%E2%80%93Stuyvesant,_Brooklyn), where standing out doesn't help you out at all. It hurts, sometimes a lot. Such is the fate of being just one among many; they (the people in our surroundings) have a lot more common ground than us, and we had our fair share of bullying and beatings during childhood, too.

Me and my brothers fared no better than my father did in the 'burbs or the country, and widening out our territory only drew more attention my way. My dad has chosen to be, as he puts it, a "big fish in a very small pond", tucked safely away in a extremely rural corner of the globe, where he retreats when life and family obligations become too demanding for him, but I have chosen to stop running away from the fates, which find me no matter where I go. I know. I've tried.

So when I see a story that centers around the good things that attention can do, my interest is piqued. When it uses fame and fortune as a leverage for the best things in life, like charity, farming G-d's green earth, and giving back, I'm sold. Farm, faith, and family? Never goes out of style. See for yourself. (Thanks, to Jason Brown).