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.

Candyman

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

My next door neighbors in New City were the remnants of the old Dutch/German farm families of Rockland County, and they were not happy about the changes around them. Family farms were split apart to make room for hastily-constructed tract homes, and the farm families who had long relied on those plots to make a living soon tore apart, too. Country life is significantly different than city life, as immortalized in the cartoons we watched as kids, like Tom the zoo-suited city cat who slickly tries to two-time good ole country mouse Jerry by stealing his girl. They were afraid of us, and deeply suspicious of our motives, as we were with them.

My dad got into property disputes right off the bat, and the folks up from the city were "coloreds"; just on our block alone, we had a Puerto Rican street preacher with a storefront church who never once signaled our existence to us. Not once, in all the years we lived there. The Italians next door were just as weird; Tino was a typical con artist of a jerk who hated everyone except Italians, including the black people he served pizza to in the Bronx, where he kept his store. The Evretts were African-American, and they had the last house built on our quiet country lane. They were extremely reserved as well, which only fueled the fires of our imaginations further. They kept a nanny goat in their backyard, which was so odd for the time, we joked they had "voodoo" rituals at night, hence the need for discretion and their relative distance from the rest of the pack.

There weren't many play options available for hip city kids like us, which led us to make a sometime acquaintance with the farm kids next door, though truthfully, they had a mental retardation that served more often as comic fodder for our bored country brains, rather than forming any real alliance between us. You did what you had to do. The nearest store was a mile walk away (and a hard one at that), to a tiny convenience store...sigh. So, sometimes when the country kids came a-knockin', we let 'em in, but the window was a very short one, since we'd passed them intellectually at birth. Eddie, the youngest, was so markedly effected that he couldn't speak real words, only a homemade kind of patois that his older sisters had to decode for us. "Drin" was his name for Kristine (she was the girl I played with), and "Grog" was his name for his middle sister Margaret.

He got into all sorts of trouble, the kind of trouble that retarded kids got into, like banging his head on the family tractor in their garage, causing a rush to the emergency room that only further hastened his decline of a lifelong condition that never fully cleared up. I re-connected with the sisters using social media to find out he had passed in his 30's, which didn't surprise me at all, though I expressed my condolences for our childhood friend. His nose always ran, and his eyes were either red or watery, giving his wide country face a streaked, mad appearance. They ran around without shoes or parents, which scared us, too. Who are they? Where are they? Their insular culture was only reinforced every time we saw their fat mama on the porch. She hated us on sight, preferring to team up with their uncle next door to strip our plot of its' rich topsoil, in retaliation for the humiliation of having to split up the family farm.

She was a tall, plain, fat woman with short mannish hair, who screamed at her kids to get back into their yard every time she saw them on our yard or playing with us, which freaked us out even more. The only time I heard her speak was when she came out of the old farmhouse to tell her kids that Elvis had died, and that was because my mom was in the yard with us, playing badminton with the family net we set up running parallel to their family plot. It was so odd for her to even speak to us, that I have never forgotten the event to this day. We saw her more infrequently after that, what with school and winters spent indoors. There were whispers going around that she was unhappy, and we kids just figured it was more redneck static about "city slickers" that they were expressing to our parents, because our mom and dad clammed up almost totally when we were at the kitchen table, giving each other silent adult-like looks instead.

The only other time I ever remember seeing her again was the next summer, when my mom told me she was pregnant again. I tried making out the swell of her stomach but honestly, because of her weight, cheap baggy clothes, and ugly demeanor, spying was hard, plus I really didn't care what women did with their husbands when playtime was to be had, however infrequent it was at times. After that, we waited for the baby to be born so we could see the farmer's wife at suppertime, when she opened the kitchen door to shout for her three kids, who may be anywhere in the vicinity, and we were not disappointed. Finally, one evening the screen door banged open loudly to reveal her large frame with a small swaddled bundle in her arms. The kids were in the yard with us again, with our family group playing badminton, and we were rewarded for our patience with a closer look, bolstered by the presence of my mom.

We creeped up to the line of tall bushes they planted to separate us from their view, a harsh property line to obscure the horrors of city-folk in close proximity to their sturdy farmer's stock, or so we thought. Emboldened by my nosey mom, we stood right next to the bush line to get a closer view of the baby in her arms, my mom telling us that she was indoors a lot because newborns needed a lot of attention (to explain her relative absence as a country housewife, which was weird in hindsight), to see tiny arms and feet moving. There's the baby! We've always been a child-loving family, so the sight of a newborn made us really happy, and for once, the farmers wife seemed proud to have our attention. You see, dear readers, as the baby squirmed in his blankie, he pushed down the part that was covering his face, a face that was not "white" in any way, shape, or form.

Our snobbish uptight farmer's wife had just given birth to a beautiful and obviously "black" little boy, and that was the last time we ever saw her again. My mom couldn't wait to run indoors to tell my dad, and neither could we. Gossip this good didn't break 'round there very often, and when it was as juicy as this, no one could refrain from talking about it. After all, the indiscretion was already out, right? She'd cheated on her farmer husband with a black man, and their wasn't enough land in all of New York State to cover up that fact. They moved away after that, the kids with the mom, with the father alone in the house for sometime on his own. I kept in touch with the oldest girl via "Pen Pal" letters for awhile, but given how little we had in common besides proximity, the friendship died out. None of them would attend college or attain the status that was always my destiny to reach, leaving little besides New City goings-on to message each other about, which is exactly what we did during my brief foray into common social media.

As hard as the break-up had been at the time for their family, the girls enjoy (to this day) a happy, healthy relationship with their younger biracial half-brother, choosing to have a loving family instead of perpetuating the typical prejudices of the day, a rare but very beautiful ending to the beginning of this witching hour that is the start of our traditional Samhain season (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain). Get ready for the real bugbears* of this world. It's Halloween.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candyman_%28film%29