Millionaire

Before Gen X'ers made their "Special Needs" children into hip play-things, serious mental illness was a drawing room subject that could be hinted at politely in mixed company using a bunch of phony-sounding euphemisms, but never to be directly addressed. Once a problem is accurately named (so the thinking goes), superstition held that one had to go about solving the problem, and my parent's "Silent Generation" doesn't do that. We do.

Of course, my family is like any other family; we have some very seriously disturbed people living within it, though how alive they feel is of some debate. In order to quantify as "successful" to a bunch of brain disordered people, my family had to vigorously redefine success as the blind obtainment of objects without purpose. That was it: car, spouse, house, kids. Done. You passed! If it seems too easy, you're right, and just as many of my friends and I escaped the common traps of the falsely upwardly-mobile lifestyle for treasures that can't be bought and sold like so many commodities on the open market. 

We invested in ourselves and our education, like our hard-working grandparents taught us to do, so that when the time came for us to give back, we'd give way more than our fair share, which is the world you're living in right now. But the retarded living "secretly" (not so much) among us had to do so much more than us, just to pass as simple 9-to-5 office drones. They needed long-studied Masters degrees, and every time society shifts technologically, they are right back to feeling lost and afraid again. 

They are the perpetual students who never really learn or master anything, which is why you'll find so many expensive MBA's working at suburban tax preparers after their initial MA and BA degrees, or rote technical jobs in labs that took them almost ten years to attain. When I presented them with my real accomplishments (like scoring an interview at the Annie Lebowitz studio in the 90s on an Illustration degree as my second ever professional interview), it was undermined and shoved mentally in a drawer in the back of their minds, while I suffered through their bad photography with overly expensive cameras and trite tourist shots taken on plush cruises, with tales of photo contests never won spinning through their delusional heads.

And so it was with one of the more anti-social members of my family who preferred light switches and t.v. fuzz to contact with humans, memorizing train schedules over normal conversational greetings besides a light grunting that replaced actual speech. He was lovingly called "Rain Man", like Dustin Hoffman's infamously Autistic character, for his ability to mentally check out using inane facts and trivia. It was always the same. Always the same. When he finally used his abhorrence of all things personal to his sole advantage by appearing on a game show none of us watched (we were all busy with travel, careers, and love lives), me and my brothers didn't even know about it, much less care, to the detriment of the psychotic gathered among us at holidays.

Ahem. Perhaps we hadn't heard? If it was intended as a snide reference to my hearing impairment as a feeble attempt to correct the imbalance of their completely co-dependent ineptitude, consider that a huge failure as well. And so we had to feign an enthusiasm over his one chance at being in a spotlight, using all three callers for the more difficult questions you had to actually know through real study habits, not blind compulsions. Game over. Still, with the help of his family, he won a nice chunk of change for someone with his limitations. Christmas will be good this year! He and his father were notorious cheapskates who would sit around with glazed eyes and blank stares with their arms folded tightly across their chests, while we exchanged humble gifts at my grandparent's apartment.

They just sat on a couch waiting for food to be served, doing and saying nothing to anyone, except for the one year my uncle gave me some free mugs from his Met Opera attendance that were "too girly" for him to use, or some spare calendars he also got for free. Like any real mother, I was touched by these few shows of humanity that had stolen away from the tight grip of his mental illnesses, as remote and alone as I know them to be. The son never improved, because we were never allowed to discuss his diseases with him, which might lead to a cure. Instead, he languished year after year in the same dull IRS government job that went slowly from PT to FT on a special needs work program, slowly draining his show earnings on a bunch of train rides with similarly disordered people. And he never gave us a thing. Not one single present. Not ever. Not once.

The Buddy System

Soldiers Holding Hands: It is not unusual in many societies throughout east Africa for men to display their friendship for one another by holding hands in public. Two soldiers on patrol in the streets of Bujumbura, Burundi nonchalantly express their affection for one another. Geordie Mott from Halifax, NS, Canada

My best friend from high school and I formed a friendship pact the summer after our graduation, drunk and high as we were on the beaches of New Jersey, because were were going to be roommates as freshmen, and we were looking forward to freedom, school, boys....or maybe that was just me. I tried back then to be as discreet as possible about my liaisons, taught as I'd been by many years of envious abuse that my looks (never to be openly discussed) were in the same category as my rampant heterosexuality; something to be hinted at, glossed over quickly (for your comfort), and then summarily dismissed, lest it cause anyone else in the room with me embarrassment over something I couldn't control then or now.

It was oddly secretive, which aren't my personality traits, but I considered good social manners and politeness towards my friends to be very important, because we all came from disastrously broken homes that were rife with crazily violent outbursts, followed by those mellow periods that marked our parents shameful lives. It also followed cleanly along with those typically deeply-ingrained patterns of manic depression that we "wrote the book(s) on" as children, because we studied it up-close and personal, and not by choice.

We continued our comic routines about our fucked-up parents well into adulthood, and some of us even have their native New Yawk accents down pat (uh, yeah, me). Our brilliant timing and high sense of comedy made for strong bonds between us; everyone in our crowd loves a good time. Having fun with my friends was something that got me through the rough spots even when we were badly banged up by other people's problems. It was in this common spirit of preserving a well-maintained equilibrium among the mental anguish around us that made the difference between our success and failure, alone as we were.

So, me and my best friend devised a few necessary ground rules to cover us through those first few rough patches we would inevitably have during our first year in college. We were accepted into our schools of choice, proving to nasty detractors (and family alike) that our intelligence wasn't just some crazy person's bullshit hype, something our hapless parents have denied to our faces all of our lives (they have to be smarter), despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Karen's parents took their pride all the way home to an early grave, which was a type of winning in their twin books of life's massive stand-offs and epic show-downs. They'd rather die from cancer and addiction than admit we were winning, which we are, and we knew it because we had to always justify our existence to the madness of their minds, despite our freedom from their decision to meet, mate, and marry.

We were independent way too soon, and we knew that, too. There would be no rescue for any of us from any of our failures (as individuals, or within a group), because our parent's were the first people we knew who hurt us badly. In response to their insanities, we became perfected, which they hated, too. It was the perfect love/hate dynamic for a disordered generation with no real ups-or-downs. It was "Easy Street" all the way for our softer parents, which is exactly why we went to school with a lot more focus than most 17- and 18-year old's matriculating within an excellent working-class school in upstate New York. We had jobs, some money, and a strong sense of self... and that was about it, besides all of the ideals we knew we had to enforce to create the change we needed to exist out there in the world.

The first challenge for us to address was our rather infamous party skills, ones openly displayed that were duly noted by friend and foe alike, and isn't that life itself? Know thyself first, then know thy enemy second, and we did. Karen was hurt early on during our last summer home by a group of friends who turned on her while they "played house" and we drank on the beach around boys with bonfires, and then I got hurt later on in the season by a man in his 30s looking to "score with a hottie", which meant someone else existed in his head besides me, probably someone made-up and far from reality.

We hammered out the details, though, behind the backs of people we were meant to cut off from, because they couldn't keep up. In between peals of giddy laughter at our new-found freedoms, we planned for the inevitable backlash that always followed on the heels of our frivolities, like partying on a beach in summertime and then being dropped into the coldness of a Canada-like deep freeze for college, in a simulacrum of opposites that we could do nothing about but accept, because we grew up swinging between other people's polar extremes. We knew what to expect, hurt as it was inevitably designed to do anyway.

But, we didn't die at school, and believe it or not, that can happen at any time, which we accepted as gracefully as any teenage woman could. I contracted a serious illness from a tick bite during a walk through the woods my second month at school, after first tangling swords with the "Duke of Puke" and then meeting my first real boyfriend, though today's concept for kids is to stay safe, like we tried to do. One of our few precious rules was to "never party alone" which we intoned to any kid reasonable enough and sober enough to listen (or care about). We didn't save everyone, but we fought hard for our generation, the very one you as Millennials (or more charmingly known as "Gen Y" by their inept parents, as in "Why did I have kids?" Indeed! Why did you?) hold us to the highest human standards one can have for their elders, which is the right thing to do.

Always have a drinking buddy, never go to a party alone, don't party by yourself (in case something should happen to you that requires immediate medical assistance), and never walk home at night in the dark. Stay safe, loved ones. The woods are full of wolves...and Generation X. Welcome to the "New World Order"! It's time to survive, and it's time for survival skills, because "survival skills are paramount to success" (yes, another saying just like my...NOOO!!! My Dad says that!) So. Survive. I want you to survive. Then, we can thrive. And that's another one of our motto's, too. Survive, then thrive.

https://www.nspcc.org.uk/

https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/keeping-children-safe/staying-safe-away-from-home/. Every childhood is worth fighting for.

Swap

For years, my mom and her immediate family have been stuck in deeply ingrained patterns of dysfunction that are hard not to notice, though if they are openly observed and remarked upon, they freak out to prevent revelation, which is part of the abusive cycle they remain trapped in. It's heart-breaking to watch sometimes, because like children who want candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I know that their bad choices will only make them sicker through my continued neglect. And just like I know that all those pop-culture movies contributing to deliberately false ideas about real American life that we know aren't true (just like I know that people in India do not break out into Bollywood-type skits every time someone gets engaged, funny as that might in the entertainment world), I know that they argue with me because they fear committal to a state mental institution, like old horror movies filmed in black-and-white.

They don't realize that those abusive types of hospitals are a thing of the past, because they fear healthcare, too, just like my mother's youngest sister hides her irrational phobias over rain and storms, because she knows it's another symptom of her psychoses. It was in this manner that my mother and her family hid the worst of their sicknesses behind socially acceptable hobbies like cleaning and eating and shopping, because they provide easier cover than drinking and smoking, which they mistakenly believe are more open manifestations of mental illness and the stress that produces.

Of course, their weirder addictions simply made our households much more stressful to reveal to anyone outside of our family group (which was part of the point), forcing me and my Gen-X friends into old patterns of drinking and smoking to relieve the inner tension cause by their abusive patterns, which put us right back to where our Depression-Era grandparents lived: at hip, flapper-type bistros full of smoky jazz and fun, which was not at all what my mom and her sisters wanted. They can't smoke, or drink, or have fun easily, because their nervous tensions make them feel nauseous all the time, especially when they don't take their medications. 

My youngest aunt is so "pukesy-poo" (they make up cutesy names to hide the root cause of their anxieties), that as kids, we knew she'd get sick from sitting in a rocking chair that moved slightly (so we'd sneak up behind her to tilt the chair back-and-forth, making her squeal), or from hearing about someone vomiting (so we'd imitate puking sounds with our grandpa), or it might be that she simply she wasn't sipping from a straw the stomach-calming sodas that she's addicted to.

In was in this way that my mom's middle sister became a hardcore food addict, with an addiction so severe that she has to attend weekly group meetings and pay out big bucks to some unhealthy food company that "has to" feed her controlled portion-sizes of chemically-laden food that will surely kill her off someday soon, like my mom's Aspartame-addicted youngest sister. They haven't actually conquered anything in this world. If anything, their silent generation of "Do-Nothings" have created even worse patterns with harder addictions, like hoarding and binge eating, or simulating a "shopper's high" through a covertly athletic "runner's high", making it extremely difficult to diagnose and treat, which is also part of the point.

One year, my infamously large "Moose Dog" accompanied me to my mom's eating-disordered sisters' house in upstate Westchester with me, staying overnight in her basement on Christmas Day Eve, with the understanding that he and I would leave early the next morning for my mom's place in Rockland after staying the night, because I wanted access to her immediate back yard for bathroom runs that are easier when no else is around, like we did whilst in the country. She was fine with that, and so throughout the day, as other family stopped by, I went up-and-down the basement stairs to the rest of the house, periodically checking in on my still-young Malamaute.

At some point during the day, Ted had figured out how to open up sealed plastic containers to gorge himself sight unseen, because on a food run to the garage, my cousin (her son) was looking in the garage and then the basement room for something, while I held Ted's leash and looking on. He stuttered a bit at first while he looked for something his mom had asked for, because where some such holiday food had been stored were the missing Christmas cookies that my aunt and her "fat friends" (the women who join her in her periodic over-eating that's related to their disorders), trade with each other under the cloud cover of a traditional church cookie swap.

You see, Ted masterfully uncapped (without marring them) the tops of each container with Christmas cookies, eating every single one of them, and it was at least three large flat containers that can hold sheet-pan sized cakes. Hilarity ensued, as first my other cousin (her second son), and then my aunt joined us in the mysterious search for her cookie-swap cookies. We all laughed about it, as Ted reposed regally upon on the cool tile floor near the basement door, in a tellingly calm Zen-like fatness, well-satisfied with his holiday endeavors, unruffled as he was because he successfully masterminded this quest for food done on the sly, because winter is coming!! Feed me fat!! FAT!!!

But that's not why my cousins were laughing. They loved Teds' "taking one for the team", because each and every year my cousin's suffer with this gaggle of crazy females and their weird cookie obsession, because even more than that, they bake poorly on purpose to hurt one another with. Addicts don't eat food because it tastes good like we do. No, the point behind their cooking is to make the drug that they need to get high (taste, flavor, and skill aside), and that's exactly why my cousins will always remember one very special dog who ate all the food that sucked, forever putting him in their memory favorably, because your food addiction is no match for my dogs, ladies.  
You're not even as good as one of my animals, woman.

Static

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_%28video%29

In every human family there are unhealthy people, and then there's me. In contrast to my sick family members, I stand out like there's a permanent spotlight shining down upon my head at all times, which there kind of is. I can't help it. I notice things like people, places, and, well, the things that are around me, which is unnerving to a lot of people with serious mental disorders. After the state psychiatric institutions were deregulated in the late 70s, herds of brain disordered people have littered our neighborhoods like the societal indigents they are, without ever choosing to be that. I feel sympathy for them, but not much, because when I was growing up, me and my friends were terrorized by people too fucking sick to care about us, with absolutely nothing to replace those scary old psychiatric wards of yore, except the anger of an entire generation of children who served as the "X" marking the spot where healthy parents should be. We had none.

And so we began a lifelong crusade of speaking about our lives openly: first to one another, and then to a wider audience in the real world, as wild and different as the frightened and totally unmedicated people we were forced to spend somewhat intimate company with at family gatherings, not that seriously sick people can handle normal human relationships, like, say, that of greeting your cousin in an appropriate manner. Instead of recognition or awareness, we got weird kids who stood facing empty corners, or they sat staring into space for hours while stuffing their faces with food, faces twisted into grotesque expressions that are the opposite of genuine hunger, like Gorgons from ancient mythologies past. Our job was to ignore them as best as we could, while normalizing the oddball behavior of the mentally ill among us, lest they notice our healthily flushed cheeks fresh from outdoor exercise, or our bright eyes that shine from good eating.

It was what we knew how to do: pretend that our cousins were perfectly fine, even when it was obvious that they weren't, but what else could we do? Put them away? My mom and dad were friggin' nuts, but they were also brilliant at times, too. Yeah, my paternal cousin from Brooklyn was a lying thieving drunk, but he's also one of the quickest, sharpest, funniest comedians I've ever met in my life. They were not all bad, certainly not horrible enough to toss into some prison-like hellhole of a Halloween haunted house, like those abandoned buildings that litter this country's poor history with our collective psychological past. Some people have disorders they can manage with professional help on an outpatient basis and some can't, but what we all agreed upon was that prison is no place for people with schizo-affective disorders. They need reliable adult supervision and affordable medicine, but if you've ever tried to reason with a hallucinating schizophrenic on a ten day bender, you know how bad other people's psychoses can be, especially if you aren't the knife-wielding maniac.

So that's what we did; we tried to lives our lives alongside seriously under-treated patients because there was no alternative to the horrors of the penal institutional system, until today. My cousin John A. was so bad, though, that there was no amount of explaining we could do to cover for him. We told friends and distant relatives visiting from out-of-town that he was merely "autistic", when that was clearly not the case, but what else could we do? My uncle barely managed on his own, and his ex-wife is an alcoholic nurse. There wasn't anyone to turn to. My uncle has successfully raised two completely abnormal and utterly dysfunctional adults who cannot pass as normal in society, leaving us with the burden of coping with them as best as we can, while they take and take and take from us without ever giving back, creating a deficit so brutally one-sided, that each and every one of us in my immediate family have borne the brunt of their irresponsibility.

My uncle has a very small business that's staffed with one lifelong employee, a man so sick, he has completely filled up his apartment with stuff like any decent hoarder would, living out of my uncle's office space by taking showers where he can and eating off of a hot plate, and this is what passes for "legal counsel" in my mother's family. This, after he almost bankrupted my grandparents so he could not work any job while attending lengthy law school exams and numerous tries at the Bar Exam, living at home like my mom's youngest sister has all of her life, until both of my grandparents passed. My cousin spent hours at our house in New City flicking light switches on and off, until we worried he would break them. Ditto with the microwave and the doorbells. And just like horror movies of the day, he would stare for hours at the t.v. set in the basement. At what, we had no idea, until one afternoon when we were emboldened by a group of us, we asked him: "Hey! What are you staring at?"

Do you know what he told us? He told us that was listening to the voices coming out of the set that spoke to him in between the static. Fuck...that would be why he had answered "nothing" in a flat monotone to our previous lone inquiries, because he's clever enough to know what not to say to us, as if someone had coached him about "passing" under keen observation. And do you know what he does today, readers? He works for the U.S. Department of Taxation, otherwise known as "The IRS". Yep, he compulsively fills out numeric data day after soul-crushing day, until his supervisors finally gave him another column of numbers to fill in, after slowly transitioning from part time to full time work over the years, with lots of great benefits that we all pay for as U.S. citizens. He does the job that a mindless computer can do better every day of the week, and he does it with your life and taxes on the line . How's that for a case of the Halloween "Heebie Jeebies"?

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heebie-jeebies_%28idiom%29

Mallhead

The First Church of Toronto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_mall

My mom's youngest sister is addicted to shopping and junk food, just like she's always been. My grandparents took care of her all of their lives until their deaths, but even my grandmother's Norman Italian longevity wasn't good enough for her. If she was having a "bad" day (and they're all pretty fucking bad, by her choice), she'd express her magical desire for my grandmother to live forevuh in her horrible-sounding accent, because apparently her giving life wasn't good enough for her youngest brat. My aunt likes magic instead, a perpetual teenage attitude delivered in the most blatantly obnoxious tone possible, guaranteed to start a fight so she can get high off of the juices that flow from anger; an addict right down to her core.

My grandparents struggled all of their hard-working lives with her terrible presence, alternating between disgust and trying to care for their very sick daughter, between fits of living that they managed to squeeze successfully into the margins of other people's disordered lives. After all, we were experts at it. I was healthy and so were they, and that's about it for our small immediate family circle. Not much material to work with, but we managed it as best as we could, thankfully with our sanity and good health intact, much to the gnashing teeth despair of my mom and her ugly sisters. They removed moles like they tried to shed their awful weight, without ever covering up how horrible they are.

Desperate to escape the confines of their children's miserable homes, me and my cousins sometimes tacked on excursions with our young aunt out of sheer desperation, which my grandparents understood. They can barely drive around, but small distances are fine. If I needed clothes for school, Aunt B. could manage that, with lots of compromises for her girlish brain to accept our passage with her. Given my mom's sugar addiction, I grew up in a house plagued with migraines that only abated until I was well into college and young adulthood. It could have been genetic (I have lots of overweight diabetics on both sides of the fence), but it was certainly never helped by my family. They forgo real food to eat dessert first, which pretty much guarantees I'll get sick if I eat like they do, so I avoid it like the plague. It is the exact opposite of our traditions about breaking bread.

Nonetheless, stuff is stuff, and where better to cadge a ride than from a junkie who goes directly to the source to mainline it? She's never practiced religion, preferring instead to excel in cheap gaudy plastic shit that she can torture us with by using them as "ugly bombs". Her best friend died an untreated hoarder, with my aunt claiming ignorance of it after her death, which fooled none of us. You see, each and every one of the grandchildren in my family have become violently ill on these shopping sojourns with our aunt; every single one of us. At first, my mother and her sisters used cleverly hidden techniques to cover up the fact that they made us sick.

First, it was my supposed "hypoglycemia" that caused me to return home from shopping trips pale and nauseous. Oh, no problem: just feed her food! My mom treated me like I was a pet her sister didn't know how to feed and water. After that, it was on; I had to gulp down these sugar-free foods so she could continue her worship at store windows. "Stuff something down her throat", was an oft-repeated phrase in my mother's house, to keep people from guessing the source of my sickness. Same thing with my other cousins: Bill had a strange gluten intolerance that made him dizzy, Elizabeth ("that poor thing") grew up without a real mutha (not true), therefore she's a sickly orphan...on and on it went for years, until the Nanuet Mall fell into disrepair, in which case, Auntie simply needed a venue change.

Same thing with the "new" mall in West Nyack. We all strangely felt sick just walking through the multi-level building with her, which she quickly devised cover stories for, aided and assisted by our mysterious "symptoms", "Oh, yeah? You don't feel good?", with a quick panicked look to her sidelong glance at us. Uh, no. I feel overly hot and sick to my stomach. Unfortunately for her, I outgrew all of my bad health and habits through hard work. "Weird...I call it 'Mallhead'. Billy gets it, too", and so it went for a few more years, until each one of my cousins confessed to me that every one of them got sick shopping with her, with the exact same set of physical responses.

I let it slide while my grandmother slowly declined in her advanced old age, but not by much; my aunt loved using her as a deferred payment plan to big family discussions that would "out" her true agenda. I let my cousin and his long-time girlfriend buy her a huge flat-screen t.v. one Christmas, with the excuse that my grandmother's cataracts were the reason she needed a new one. They were gone for hours, hours that I comfortably spent in happy companionship with my grandmother and mother. My cousin returned from the excruciating trip red-faced and ashamed: another sucker punch by that crazy incompetent bitch. He was kind enough to install the set for her, just like we all enabled that hateful little dwarf: in honor of our parents' parents, those G-dly people who gave rise to us.

I finally put my foot down during a weekend stay with my mom. I offered to go with my girl cousin (that poor unfortunate "orphan") and my aunt to the mall, but we were barely down the street when something odd happened. Elizabeth suddenly took ill in the car, which forced our aunt to stop at a junk food convenient store chain. She used the same old line about my cousin just being hungry, as she tried to hide her delight at this unexpected pit stop for her preferred type of junk food. For once, she sprang sprightly out of the idling parked car to grab something quick in the store. She was all smiles as she watched my cousin (who was going to nursing school at the time, hence her new-found knowledge about healthy foods and exercise), gulp down rotten food so we could all go shopping for her.

But, for some strange reason, her evil alchemy didn't work this time. Liz didn't feel better as we drove down the same street we were on before the "pit-stop". "I'm not actually hungry", Liz tried to explain to our sick aunt, as she sat in the passenger seat, mulling over a nasty selection of salty junk food over sweets, neither of which is designed to cure anyone on the planet. "I still don't feel good", Liza said weakly, grown pale as I watched her open her jacket for air and crack the window at the same time, the very same actions we all took over those long hard years, as my aunt rehashed her old lines about carsickness and the car's heating system. "I don't think I can go shopping", she muttered, and if there was a heart that was gladder than mine at that moment, you'd have been hard-pressed to find it. I was already in recline just being in the backseat, hearing the same old bullshit in my head about my ill health again and again.

And just like that, we were back at my mother's apartment, with Liz resting on my mom's couch, like I had also done for years and years, recovering from another awful bus trip from the city. It was over....it was finally over. The curse had been lifted! I wished Liz was healthier so I could hug her, but my girl was all grown up, aided and assisted in my mastery of invisible motherhood by no one but myself, just as she had also suffered with her own disordered parents. The curse had been lifted forever. After that, we began to openly speak about "Mallhead" to each other at family gatherings in quiet companionship, whenever that little bitch was out of earshot. Nothing beats an evil witch like the greater good. We had finally won in adulthood. We won.

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

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

Counterfeit

My attempts at creating a home out of the remnants of my aunt's apartment in Kensington were often met with sneers from the 30-something crowd who competed with us as teenagers at RISD (taking the one available scholarship for Illustration from us as well!). She dropped snippy remarks about my poverty, like: "Oh, this is such a claaasic 'starter' apartment", the very same privileged bitch who took college money from us by working professionally as a graphic designer for many years, and was taught illustration by her illustrator dad before going to school with us for Illustration (hence "winning" that Hallmark prize money, the one and only prize awarded to students for Illustration), living off the comfort that her IT husband provided for her. She then set at sabotaging our lives and work when she realized NYC was out of her reach (even after she ripped us off), to finally retreat to that northern place where all rich hippies go: Woodstock, NY.*

But enough about her. I was left with whatever my aunt didn't want to pack and move with her, like she was on the run from a serious crime, instead of the easy living my father's sponsored support provided her, present at each and every level of her life, which included (totally free of charge): apartments (in New York City), houses (in West Texas), jobs (in his company), healthcare (from out of his pocket as her employer), furniture, movers, cars, insurance, food...everything was always included. The only way I could do my apprenticeship in the city and stay alive was living in her cast-off apartment that had some furnishings, leaving me to pay off her monthly maintenance fee (it was a co-op), and all of the other bills that came with living in Brooklyn.

Anything else that I needed to survive, I had to either find, make do with, or do without. It was with this barely-able-to-eat budget that a basic answering machine came to mind because I had none, and I needed one for potential employers to contact me while I interviewed for work. I had nothing except my clothes, my artwork, a drafting table, and a few lamps, moving out of my mother's house at 17 for school, and not looking back. I have always been almost completely and totally on my own, for most of my life so far. I told my cousins from Sheepshead Bay (they liked to drink at the old man's bar on the corner, down the block from my aunt's place, because it's a cheap dive with a great jukebox), that I needed an answering machine, and they told me not to shop on Canal Street for home goods, but what could I do? I was flat broke with just my work savings from college jobs and a credit card, before I began living paycheck-to-paycheck.

I'd known about Canal Street since my student days, because there's a really well-known art supply store there, packed with several floors of stuff. It's the one place in the city where you can find everything you need to make art, and that's a rare thing. Back in the frontier days of Brooklyn, I had to do most of my shopping in Manhattan, and lug it home on the train or (if I just got paid) in a taxi, but that was extremely rare. Every penny counts. I screw up my budget, I starve. End of story.

So, I knew when I picked up a shrink-wrapped machine down on Canal Street (which cost me two subway fares to get to, for the ride there and back from way-out Brooklyn, taking me hours to do, with transfers and construction re-routing on the weekend) that I was entering into a shifty no-man's land of goods and services, a shady place to shop where there are no guarantees, but when was my life any different? If I didn't do something (anything) to help myself, nothing happened. Absolutely nothing changed, because no one did anything about it, just like it is today. It looked "hot" and slightly used when I picked it up in front of a street stall, but it was either this or nothing, so I bought it from some chain-smoking Chinese guy for $15.

My dad's cousin laughed drunkenly in my face the next time I saw him, because within a month, the two mechanical arms that sprang up when you needed to change the tape broke off. They completely popped out of their tracks, never to be put back into proper working order again. "I told you so", he slurred at me, and then he bought another round. Thanks. Within a week, I made the painful decision to invest in a $25-35 machine, knowing I'd feel the squeeze at the supermarket that weekend; no after-work drinks or take-out slices for me. When I turned to look around the joint, I simply saw myself reflected in the mirror behind the bar, because there was no one else to turn to. Ain't never been any different for me than that.

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trustafarian

Garanimals

In case you haven't figured it out, yet (because I publish to whoever happens to be reading, or not, as the case may be), my mom has a lot of really serious issues with her brain. Some are silly, but many are not. She did not adjust well to young motherhood, but given her brain, there would be no reason to expect otherwise, so it wasn't. It was pretty much exactly how I describe it, which is hard for her, because she suffers from severe limitations in her brain's ability to remember stuff, sometimes really easy basic stuff, too, which is very embarrassing for her as a self-described "feminist" with "advanced degrees in science". She simply doesn't understand how she went to school with a brain disorder and yet, people do it all the time.

Enter onto this groovy 70s scene a woman who was never very feminine, even on a good day, coupled with the unnerving task of dressing children appropriately for school and life. It's excruciating to watch now, but as a child, it was horribly abusive. She missed certain key dates and appointments, and she was excessively tardy, which she covered under a nasty princess-like attitude that allowed her to sweep into a room like she was going to some swinging cocktail party, except it was my ballet class, and she left me sitting on the curb for almost 2 hours when she was a five minute drive away, because she babbles compulsively on the phone with her similarly disordered sisters for stress relief, none of them actually healthy enough to retain the repetitive inane gossip they share.

I was privy to such revealing truths overheard by one of them as thus: "So. How ya doin'. Oh, yeah? How was _______ (insert name of local suburban chain store here). Oh, yeah? How much? Blah blah blah blah blah..." Then, at some point, someone would get up to use the bathroom, or simply run out of tiring gossip, and at that point it was understood in their OCD world that this brief pause or interruption ("NO! Go ahead! You talk now!"), was a signal among them that they could emit throat sounds and other vocalizations amounting to nothing. 
For some reason, my mom and her delusional sisters thought this placed them far above our safety and security as kids, because such is the power of untreated patterns coupled with crippling delusions. And so it went, still, to this day, as I sit here writing to you.

Fortunately for us, most of our dads worked the city as "Mad Men", which gave them the ability to sell to their desperately bored and firmly ensconced housewives. There was a bevy of products available in the 70s and 80s for every type of disorder three times over, in brightly covered and very hoard-able plastic, which gave them the same type of shopping high as if they fondled them directly in stores for hours, so as to check out from reality. "Stuff" became this way out of your domestic iron chains, when in actuality, it was another outward manifestation of a common compulsive/addictive disorder that needs firm addressing in these modern times, lest we generate more "reality" t.v. contestants and their weirdo objects, an ironic term if ever there was.

Because my mom was so challenged in such an obviously similar way to other dysfunctional females, she used t.v. to create an artificial world that she could drone out to and disappear within, and that was exactly the point advertisers wanted to make. Unhappy? Here: buy this! It was instant and immediate relief, but not the kind that ever solved their problem. Do you have to feed kids? How awful! Throw this on the table, girls. Then you can have FUN FUN FUN again! Do your growing children need clothes for school....again?! Omigosh I can't believe children grow so fast. They're like weeds! All of Madison Avenue in the city catered to their flawed senses of self (mostly lacking), and their immaturity about caring for others, by solidifying their points of view through commercials, which gave them the wrong idea that they were getting it right.

Ever year my mom used a thick Sears catalog to handle the enormity of clothing for small people by asking us to go through it, flag what we wanted, and then she would order it over the phone and pick it up in Nanuet, a task you can still perform in Rockland County today, though most "bubbies" have migrated to the internet to hide their gnawing addictions. My mom floundered even under that simple system, and like-minded disabled salespeople responded in kind, by designing a foolproof way to clothe children with as little thought as possible, you know, because the fate of the world is in your hands, SuperWoman!

It was nuts, but so were our parents. Even more pathetic than hating a rather banal and easy task was the fact that my mom mismatched the turtle icon with the giraffe pants. It may have been cruelly on purpose, so that we would be mocked in school, in retaliation for not liking her horrible dashed-together food, or simply because "Dr. Diane" didn't want to be bothered attending to the needs of others, which is the same type of patterned self-centered selfishness that each and every kid I grew up with had to contend with: the mindset of a bully, whether small or large. It didn't matter if it was clothed in a child's sized shirt, or a grown-ups tailored suit jacket back then, and it still doesn't. Gen X'ers see past advertising gimmicks easily today because we had to back then, just to get through any school day. YAY! Fashion!*

So bring it on, world. We're more than ready for any type of insanity you got. I got ten kinds of crazy flavors in my peeps, some of which you ain't never heard of before kid, ya feel me? Yeah, you do. That's 'cause it's a round-the-way type of life from NYC, babay. Everybody crazy in the hood. It's our way here, yo. Project people be snappin' out all day every day, just 'cause you there, right? Word. Your crazy-ass Brooklyn grandma is now my mom's next door neighbor, and my mom's from the Bronx, okay? Let's work through this together, people. We ain't got nobody else to solve problems for us.


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

Long Island Ice Tea

A street in Beach Haven on Long Beach Island.

Like most people from around the way, families either went to the Jersey Shore for the summer or out to Long Island, which I knew nothing about. I never really met anyone from Long Island until freshman year at my SUNY school, and it was rough. I had no idea where people that horrible came from, except maybe the town of New City here in Rockland, infamous for nasty, vicious, desperate housewives with their scary long-clawed manicures and overly coiffed hair. My best friend was my first roommate ever, and she did no better with them, even with her family summers at Montauk fishing. We were adrift in a sea of some of the worst human behavior we'd ever seen, but I'll tell that story on another day.

Me and my family made the long drive to LBI* almost every summer, with the occasional stop in Cape May to see family, but mostly we went to a rental house in the town of Shipbottom, and we loved it. Long Beach Island doesn't have a boardwalk, or cheesy strip malls or (back in the early 80s and late 70s) much of anything besides mini golf, surf shops, seafood joints, bike rentals stalls, saltwater taffy/ice cream/fudge stores that also sold seashell magnets, and a few depressing old man Irish bars thrown into the mix.

But we didn't care. We weren't there for the human ambiance. We were there to soak up some sun, play in the sand, and body-surf, because the ocean side of the island is one big beach that seems to never end. When we were kids, we tried walking the length of the island when we got bored, but we never actually made it, because it's 18 miles long, which was way too far for us to go. It was magical, and it was family-oriented, for at least for my childhood and preteen years, until my family broke apart through divorce; a sudden stop with a horrible soap opera ending that included one very short, skinny, thick-glassed, and bucktoothed barely-legal secretary, which was excruciating to tell people, so I mostly didn't unless I was talking to a schoolmate.

My family tried to stumble along with our summer traditions, like the times when my grandparents or my aunt (who had money from her late husband) rented a house, but it wasn't the same. They weren't ocean people or active swimmers, so some of the fun was lost. In any case, in the summer of '87, it all blew up anyway. I already finished high school with Regents college credits by my junior year at age 16, while my mom held me hostage in her house by denying me most of the obvious suburban teenage supports, like rides to work or a cheap used car, so that her and her ugly Italian boyfriend from the house next door could find time be alone (which was so creepy because I grew up with their household as neighbors), after his wife died of cancer. 

They made my mom's house unbearable for me on purpose to have some privacy from their kids, secure that they had the upper hand over me while my older brothers were away at school. One night when my bro was on break, he pulled me quietly onto the staircase so we could hear them downstairs gossiping about money. The old boyfriend from next door actually suggested to her that I could be a hooker ("Maybe she's 'whoring'!"), or selling drugs, and that she should check my purse regularly for items related to those work pursuits. Meanwhile, his daughter had barely made it through high school, and not one of his kids ever went to college. She told me one time at the top of our lane, while waiting for the morning bus to school, that she thought she had a miscarriage. She was just 15 at the time, and I was a late bloomer who'd barely been kissed, and someone who'd also been taught to pinch every damn penny like it was my last, from my thrifty Acadian father and all of my Depression-Era grandparents; which was totally unlike my pampered, white-gloved, private-school mom, with her tea parties and petty, vicious sisters used to getting their way. I made $20 last a long long time, just like I do now.

But everything I did, wore, or said was open to suspicion and scrutiny in my mother's house. I became accustomed to their unfounded fears and wild paranoia about me, and like any good teenager, I eventually caved into their hated suggestions to become the wild rebel they wanted me to be deliberately (so they could tear me apart), and not without a certain amount of style. I couldn't wait to leave home. Senior year was a wash for me and my mom knew it, but letting me stretch my wings towards serious academia would break her "College at 16" family record, and like any evil mother from a fairy tale gone wrong, she couldn't let me get away with beating her, which is as far from parenting as you could get, but both of my highly insecure and very disordered parents were always more childish than mature.

Under this hateful cloud, I took an invite to join my mom and her younger sister at the shore for the 4th of July weekend, but this time I was more experienced. I'd been accepted into every SUNY school I applied to, and my "bestie" would be bunking down with me at Oneonta, so I thought I was set. What could my mom and her vile family do to me? I was naive about powers of destruction, and foolishly optimistic. It was the let-down in my guard that my teenage spirit needed to run free. After a giggly night on the beach with wine and fireworks, I put my mom and her sister "to bed" back at the house (they can't handle adult drinks), and then I went in search of a good time. I didn't have to walk far. I had found my confidence with men (which would lead to a late summer downfall later on, but I didn't know that, yet), learned by watching a pushy Jewish frenemy with lots of time, absolutely no parental supervision, a free car, no after-school jobs, and lots of money. She does PR for fashion in the city today. Yeah.

So, leaving my mom and her sister at the shore shack eating chips at the kitchen counter, I put on a white half-shirt with shorts and a funky hat from a thrift store in Nyack, in true 80s style, and I walked into a house party that was a block away uninvited. I just walked into the house, quickly scanned the place, picked out the best looking guy there, walked up to him at the keg in the kitchen talking to a group of girls who surrounded him as they laughed at his story, blew through the ring of them, and then picked him up over a beer that he poured for me. I left the party with his name and phone number in my pocket. It was the house phone number to his swank downtown Nyack pad with a wrought-iron spiral staircase and exposed brick walls, with a cool city job as an sound guy at MSG. Nice...but I was just getting started.

The next night, my mom was feeling good for once, a little tipsy because she actually convinced her pukey little sister to drink one of her dumb little kid drinks, like Coke and Root Beer Schapps; disgustingly sweet drinks to match her sugar tooth, with its' raging soda and caffeine addiction, one that continues unabated to this day. She was feeling loose, so my mom let me order Long Island Iced Teas at our table, the strongest drink known to man. She didn't know that, which was rare for her, so I took advantage of this opening to order with impunity. I'd been warned that they snuck up on you silently, but by the third one, it was already too late. I was knock-out, pass-out drunk.

We were at one of the few nightclubs in town, because my mom's latently gay sister had decided to showcase her rarely seen heterosexuality by openly gawking at male strippers, boldly proclaiming her lame status as a "cougar" (a term sadly not yet in existence in 1987) by hanging a Chippendale's air freshener in her car, when her and her gay friend went to a club in Manhattan on one of their rare hetero-themed larks. It didn't last long (thank G-d), but she was in the middle of her 30s, and this was the last gasp her immature sexuality had before it died forever, helped along by junk food and Valium. She and my mom were also getting along, which was rare, too, because they don't have much in common besides family.

I don't remember much about the show at the time, except that I made eye contact with the cutest guy on stage, while my mom and her stupid sister encouraged me to put money in his pocket so he would come over to our spot where they could look at him. He wasn't my type at all; he had a cheesy pencil-thin and very gay mustache, with tightly-coiled curls that were shaped into the mini mullet of the day, with a tan that was classic guinea at the seaside. Anyway, I really hadn't wanted to see anymore of him than I already did, but I got bored with my mom and her dumb kid sister, so I turned my attention to the dance floor.

"Macho Man" was now in his street clothes, dancing with some girls and waiting for me to make eye contact, which I then did, and WHAM! that was it. He came over to talk to us, asked me to dance, and then we did. My mom went back to her sister, barely noticing me until later on, when the dancing got tighter and closer, and the lights blinked on and off. Uh oh. This was a highly public display for me, something I didn't often do in front of family, because the bitchy repercussions weren't worth the few minutes of attention I got. My mom had sobered up a bit for the drive home, and then she was on us like a harpy, eyes flashing with anger, her nails dragging along my arm and digging in, because she loved scratching me as warning signs to more aggression.

"Do you now how old she is?!!" My mom spat out the words into his face while she pulled me away him. "Uh, no. She told me she was 19!" He looked really young then, too, and startled at this New York mom outburst, which was probably a lot like the spiteful guinea mutha he had at home, waiting for his tip money to put into the family till. "Well she's only 17 years old!!" She screamed it out, and by then, we had made a scene. With the house lights on, he and I looked very young, like the teenagers at the beach that we were, caught red-handed at having a good time. It was all for the best; he wanted to go further with me, and that I couldn't do. I probably would have thrown up in the sand, just like "The Uker" rep I had earned at that summer's first trip to the beach with my friends in lieu of senior prom, and I was just getting started. It was the summer of 1987. Anything was possible.


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