KILL YOUR INNER CHILD by Samuel Bernstein

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2007-03-01T20:23:00.000-08:00

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I Am Sally Picow

2007-02-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

I pretend to be my mother on the phone with AT&T Universal Visa. "This is Sally Picow," I say, rattling off her social security number and date of birth as my own, and acknowledging that Samuel Bernstein is the additional cardholder on the account.

The fact that I am not her, that she is in fact dead, and that I am not a woman in her early-50s does not stop me from making these phone calls. "This is Sally Picow." My voice, naturally a bit high, goes a little higher, and for some reason I usually speak with a southern accent, though my mother never did.

I make these calls in the several years after my mother dies. At forty-nine. Now she is fifty-three and I continue pretending to be her. As I am her.

Sometimes I get confused about what maiden name I have given her on her own accounts, on my accounts, on everything. The problem is I don't know my mother's real maiden name because she is never sure of it herself. Mom was on her own in South Texas from something like the age of eight, living as a sort of servant girl with a family who had a decidedly Anglo name that she took as her own. When I first became an adult that was the name I gave as her maiden name to financial institutions because it is the name I am given.

But when she is sick we talk a lot about her life. It is never a proper narrative, just bits and pieces. I learn that she had a Mexican mother and she believed her father was of Indian descent, maybe French-Indian, maybe Mexican-Indian. The fact that she isn't Anglo, and by association, that I am not either, only then fully dawns on me. Family photos make our mixed ethnic background perfectly clear but you don't know you’re in denial about something until you stop denying it. Her Latino heritage is never mentioned by the Bernsteins. Photos of me with my brothers from my dad's first wife also make clear the distinction, or at least make it clear that we can't possibly have the same two parents.

My father threatens me once, saying there were things I don't know about my mother, that she has a past. What could he reveal? Did she kill someone? Is she a whore at some point in her youth? I don't think so. But who cares? There is nothing he can say that could make me love her differently or think any less of her. I have no shame. Maybe a week or so before she dies I am helping her spruce up in bed. She takes a warm washcloth and wipes between her legs, then carefully wraps another cloth around it before handing it to me, saying I shouldn't touch it; it's dirty. I don't care. I'd bury my face in it just to save more of her except for the fear doing that might embarrass her.

Knowing Mom is a Latina would not have bothered me as a child. It just never occurred to me. The ethnicity of your saint and savior isn't something you really think about. The dopiest part of it is that the name given as her maiden name on my birth certificate, which may or may not be her true maiden name, is decidedly Latino, not the Anglo one at all. I just never notice.

Out of pride after finding out I then start giving out the Latino one as her maiden name to financial institutions. The problem now is that I don't know which name I've given to which company. It's fairly embarrassing when they ask and I give them the wrong name. It takes a while after that to convince them that I am who I say I am. I don't take it personally though. Their suspicion is understandable, and with my history of pretending on the phone, I'm in no position to make a fuss.

The story is that my father had fake documents created for my mother when they married – a driver's license, birth certificate, social security card; the works. Mom thought she remembered having a sister. Her father died young. Her mother was abusive. That was the extent of what I will ever learn about that side of my family. There was a marriage before my father, to a man even more violent and abusive. My dad Adam was apparently a breath of fresh air

I kill off my mother with the credit card companies in the mid-'90s but it is years after her actual demise. Let me be clear: I pay every cent of the money I borrow in her name, even though some of the banks say, as her supposedly newly bereaved next of kin I don't have to, and I close all the accounts.

The banks who say I don't have to pay them back would require a current death certificate, which I probably could manage, changing the dates in Photoshop, but protecting her good name posthumously matters a lot to me. I pay the money back, on time, with interest, and I never cheat anyone out of anything.

The whole thing happens by accident really. While she is dying Mom gets a pre-approved application for a gold Amex card, and she signs up with me as the additional card holder. My credit is shot from my years playing ATM Lotto, never knowing whether I will be able to get cash since I never know if I actually have any, and since I have no idea how to manage money. After she dies and I move to Los Angeles with Stephen, I change the address on the credit card to mine and that's that -- except that pre-approved applications for other cards start rolling in, especially as I am continuing such a solid repayment record in my mother's name.

At my peak I have probably eight or nine cards, but it all drags on much longer than I ever think it will, mainly because my work life is erratic and having large lines of credit gets me through the dry patches. It starts making me really nervous after a while, and I feel ashamed. I think if people find out they might take it in the wrong way. Actually I have the same approach to credit my mother had, not the part about pretending to be someone else, I mean that I pay every bill the day it comes in faithfully, never mind the actual due date, so I never owe late charges, and though I have sometimes been as overextended as everyone else in Los Angeles, I have a perfect repayment record.

Her name is unsullied.

When she died I focused on the memorial service and having people at the house afterwards. I make enchiladas. Like she would have. I feed everyone. I keep busy. I lose my mind at the funeral. It is Greek. I am told I sound like an animal, wounded, in agony. I scream and wail for what seems like hours. The entire universe collapses inside me and even thinking of it now my knees go wobbly. I am barely able to stand long enough to take my turn at throwing dirt on her coffin. On one side I am held up by my cousin Edy, with my grandmother on the other side of me, and Stephen holding me up from behind.

After that I stop wondering whether or not my capacity to love and feel is deep enough. This is Sally Picow. I am Sally Picow.
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The $10,000 Chicken

2007-01-08T13:45:00.000-08:00

I'm taking breaks in between posts as I write about my mother dying, since I know it's hard for people to read about. Meanwhile, shooting starts soon on "Kill Your Inner Child" the digi-series. I'll keep you posted.

After the Santeria ritual in Chicago, Mom and I eat a subdued dinner in our room at the hotel. We avoid the chicken, having experienced one being ritualistically sacrificed just hours earlier. The chicken's blood is supposed to give my mother new life and cancer-free breasts.

"This is the only thing that makes sense," she says.

We both act like we believe what the babalao has said, that the cancer is gone, that anything left will dissipate as she drinks a specially prepared tea during the next ten days. She is also nervous because she has written a post-dated check for $10,000 to pay for the ritual. The babalao was none too pleased about that. But to get that kind of money Mom has to raid a stock account my grandfather has set aside for her. (My grandparents are not her parents of course, but Mom and Dad's divorce did nothing to alter their relationship with their former daughter-in-law, who is kinder to them than either of their sons will ever be.)

I am glad we do the Santeria blood ritual even though I know in my heart that she isn't cured. I am glad because I know I'll never have to wonder if it might have been the one thing to keep her alive. My brother Aaron and step-father David know what we have done but no one else does, ever. Until now. I can't have a conversation about it but I can write it down for strangers to read.
When Mom and I arrive back in Texas from the Chicago Santeria pilgrimage, the matter of the postdated $10,000 check looms large. Mom calls up my grandfather and tells him she needs the $10,000 from her stock account immediately to cover a check she has written for an experimental treatment. She is shocked by the fact that he cops out and asks her to call my uncle, who raises what I have to now acknowledge are perfectly rational red flags – particularly in light of what we really have spent that money on. What is this treatment and why does it cost so much? Is a charlatan taking advantage of a sick woman? Mom and I don't see this foot dragging in a reasonable way at all, and she is terrified that some black magic from the babalao will take her cure away if the check bounces.

"Don’t they understand," she says to me crying, "I'm fighting for my life." You hear people say that in the movies and on television all the time and it's meaningless, but when someone you love is dying and says it to you, it cuts you in half. I want to die instead of her. With her. I want to kill my grandfather and my uncle. I hate them. My uncle gives her the money. The check to the babalao clears. We settle in for the rest of the ride, never mentioning to one another how quickly things turn bad, how little the Santeria accomplished. David is exhausted from being the main caretaker for the year before things turn bad and he is too terrified she will die to object to black magic, whatever his private misgivings. Aaron probably doesn't dare cross me on the issue. At the same time I am opening up, finding bottomless sources of emotion to share with Mom, I am becoming a tyrant with everyone else, particularly Aaron, because I have no feeling for him at the time, for anyone else, just for her. Instead of spending time with her on the rare occasions when I leave for the supermarket Aaron rigs up a bell system so he can sit out in the garage and smoke. Mom just has to ring the bell if she needs anything. He should stay with her every minute. She is the only thing that matters. I even threaten Beelzebubbe after a visit where I think she has said one too many upsetting things. I tell her if she doesn't stop talking like that I will forbid her from seeing Mom at all. It's one of the few times she backs off. Even she can tell I mean business.

Aaron may not cross me on the Santeria but he does about one other thing. When the doctor says Mom has about two weeks left David and I don't want to tell her that specifically, we don't want to give her the time limit. She doesn't talk about dying and never reaches the stage of acceptance, and as far as I am concerned, it isn't our right to force it on her. Aaron disagrees, but I don't know how much so until he tells me someone is on the phone for me, and I am ambushed into talking to our father.

At this point Adam and I haven't spoken for about five years. He is a smoothie on the call, at his oiliest and most condescending, his dulcet tones trying to lull me into agreement by telling me how I am doing everything right, how I am caring for her with such love and courage, but that I am horribly wrong to keep the news from her about how long she has to live. He then blows whatever tidbit of goodwill he might squeeze out of me by saying how he knows she is dying, that if he thought there was any chance for a recovery he would be there himself, not leaving it in my inexperienced hands. He says that through nutrition and herbs he would cure her if there were still any hope. At that moment I want him to get cancer. I want it to travel up his spine, reach into his skull, envelope his brain and stop him from talking.

That is what I want to say.

Instead I calmly, rationally explain how and why David and I believe not giving her the time limit is proper, that she knows how serious things are anyway. With every word, every syllable I resent having to talk to him about my mother. The woman he abused. The woman he kept me from. But then the wind goes out of my sails and I just finish the call without complaint. There is so much else to deal with, and who cares about my father anyway, who cares about Aaron. Who cares.

Aaron and I are estranged for a number of years after Mom's death, for complicated reasons, some financial, some having to do with a bitter falling out between Aaron and our uncle. The fact that I can't forgive him for making me take that call from Adam doesn't help matters. I treat Aaron badly during her death but I have no way of quantifying any of it. When you're in the trenches, there every day with creeping death, there's nothing anyone can contribute that you really care to hear. They're just tourists. You live there.

But Aaron does finally dive into the trenches when Mom is in the hospital, during her last days. She is barely conscious most of the time. David and I are fried, overwrought, unable to function. Aaron stays awake the whole time, Led Zeppelin in his Walkman keeping him alert, so he can make sure the morphine drip is working, that the nurses are doing their jobs. He is determined that Mom have whatever comfort is possible while she is dying in front of our eyes.
The day before Mom dies her chest is a mess. The cancer has broken to the surface everywhere and she is a sea of ruptured flesh.

When my uncle comes for what will be his last visit, he can't hide how repulsed he is. He tries to pull the sheet over her chest, but I don't let him, saying she is too hot and shouldn't be covered. I don't remember now if she really was hot, but I do remember that I don't want him to cover her because I want him to have to see what her death is like. Making my uncle look at her bloodied chest is my way of punishing him. I have to punish someone.

Comments? Questions? Email me.

Cat Scratch Fever

2006-12-09T07:54:00.000-08:00

The confusion over my mother's true identity during the Santeria ceremony finally flips a switch in my head. Baby pink light bulb please. I now understand that she is Latina. Mexican. Not white. Not Jewish. And more than most likely an illegal alien. I would enjoy this more if she weren't dying.

Knowing Mom is a Latina would not have bothered me as a child. It just never occurred to me. The ethnicity of your saint and savior isn't something you really think about. The dopiest part of it is that the name given as her maiden name on my birth certificate, which may or may not be her true maiden name, is decidedly Latino, not the Anglo one at all. I just never noticed.

Out of pride I then start giving out the Latino one as her maiden name to financial institutions. The problem now is that I don't know which name I've given to which company. It's fairly embarrassing when they ask and I give them the wrong name. It takes a while after that to convince them that I am who I say I am. I don't take it personally though. Their suspicion is understandable, and with my history of pretending on the phone to be my mother, I'm in no position to make a fuss.

The story is that my father had fake documents created for my mother when they married - a driver’s license, birth certificate, social security card - the works. Mom thinks she remembers having a sister. Her father dies young. Her mother is abusive. That is the extent of what I learn about that side of my family.

There has been a marriage before my father, to a man even more violent and abusive. My dad Adam is apparently a breath of fresh air, at least for a while. I think they end up divorcing because Mom always fights back. She tells me about gaining the upper hand with him occasionally, how during one particularly violent fight, for instance, he isn't wearing a shirt, and her Siamese cat freaks out and flies across the room, sinking its claws deep into Adam's back, and hanging on. My father can't get the snarling, spitting cat off until he starts beating his back against the wall. The cat finally falls off and hides under the bed. Adam is bleeding all over the shag carpet and they have to go to the emergency room. Mom is laughing. She says even Adam can't keep from laughing.

Until I am in my 20s I tell people that as a very young child I see him strangle her, that she collapses to the floor unconscious, and I go into asthmatic hysterics, thinking she is dead.

This is a lie.

I never see anything like that happen. I am just an inveterate drama queen, and I put myself into my mother's narrative. She is the one who tells me the story about the cat and Adam's bleeding back. She is the one who tells me he strangled her to the point of passing out. Mom says my father comes one step away from killing her. But that she isn't afraid. She says she never gives him the satisfaction of making her afraid.

She lies about being afraid. I lie about seeing her almost die. Maybe that makes us even.

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Sacrificing the Chicken

2006-11-14T15:07:00.000-08:00

I try not to think about the fact that my mother is dying; except sometimes at night, with Stephen's steady breathing in the background, and me sitting up, paralyzed.

About eight months into it there is a recurrence of my mother's breast cancer. Mom and her husband David still keep the reports from Austin upbeat. Then my uncle calls my in New York and says don't I understand? She is dying. I need to get back to Texas. I'm still grateful to him for that. I might not have had the sense to do it on my own.

Stephen and I are contemplating changes then anyway. He hates his job and wants to become a teacher. Meeting him and getting my play optioned has satisfied the aims of my return to New York. We have increasingly begun talking about relocating to Los Angeles, a place he has always dreamed of one day living. A place where I don't mind being.

So we move to Texas. Underneath is the understanding that when my mother dies we will move to Los Angeles, but we don't talk about that. Once in Austin the structure of the days with my mother present themselves fully formed. David is exhausted from being the main caretaker for eight months prior while holding down his job so I take over the lead role. I cook for her. We have long talks. She is all I think about, the sole focus of my life.

People who lived in London during World War II sometimes say how wonderful the experience was, scary, but transformational. Everything else fell to the wayside while the importance of living, of feeling took precedence.

It is like that for me with my mother. I'm not even scared. I'm just with her and that's enough. More than enough. It's everything. At some point in the chemotherapy, radiation, macrobiotics, faith healing, meditation, self-help world we live in during her illness, I learn about a Caribbean religious practice called Santeria from my friend Tanya who believes in it wholeheartedly. Her father, a rich stockbroker, also believes. They say their babalao (a kind of witch doctor is the best way I can describe him) can help, but it will cost a lot. When Tanya mentions it to me I have a choice to make about whether I will bring it up with Mom. I am hyper-aware of wanting to make sure every important decision is made by her, not because I don't want the responsibility, but because I believe passionately that I have no special knowledge of what will make her well, that none of us, not even the doctors do, and I'm not going to position myself as some self-proclaimed expert. I don't want to put that on her and I don't want to put it on myself. I knew if she dies I'll have to live with every single choice I have made; every single word I have said. I believe they aren't my choices. They are hers.

We fly to Chicago where the babalao lives. Mom is weakening but you wouldn't necessarily know that to look at her. In fact, she looks better than she has in years, since the macrobiotics and chemo have contributed to a stunning weight loss. She started getting a little heavy once she hit her 40s and now she looks years younger. While in Chicago we are trying to cross a windy street and I shudder to remember that I grow impatient with how slow she is walking. For that moment I forget how sick she is. Why we are here. She becomes a little reproachful, saying it's hard for her to get around, and I am mortified. How could I have let myself for even an instant be so insensitive? There are two isolated moments like that during her illness that haunt me to this day. The other is during a day when a friend of hers is visiting and I feel like Mom is treating me a bit like a flunky. After all, I am there for her, not to provide bedside table service for her friend. I make the horrible mistake of telling her I feel a bit underappreciated. She bursts into tears. "How could you think that? How could you believe I don't appreciate you?" My stomach drops to my knees. How could I make her cry. Why did I say anything.

I block out a lot of the Santeria ceremony itself, even while it is happening. There is a fair amount of blood. A chicken is killed. Maybe a goat. But the clearest image that comes back to me is seeing that the babalao has the same linoleum in his kitchen as my mother, a fact she doesn't much like, whispering to me, "I know, I know," and waving me away when I point it out.

There is confusion about her correct name during the ceremony. Tanya blames the ultimate failure of it to cure my mother on this name confusion. The problem is we don't know my mother's real maiden name, because she isn't sure of it herself. Mom was on her own in South Texas from something like the age of eight, living as a sort of servant girl with a family who had a decidedly Anglo name that she took as her own. When I first became an adult that was the name I gave as her maiden name to financial institutions. But when she is sick we talk a lot about her life. It is never a proper narrative, just bits and pieces.

I learn that she had a Mexican mother and she believed her father was of Indian descent, maybe French-Indian, maybe Mexican-Indian. The fact that she isn't Anglo, and by association, that I am not either, only then fully dawns on me. Family photos make our mixed ethnic background perfectly clear but you don't know you're in denial about something until you stop denying it. Her Latino heritage is never mentioned by the Bernsteins. Photos of me with my brothers from my dad's first wife also make clear the distinction, or at least make it clear that we couldn't possibly have had the same two parents.

My father threatens me once, saying there are things I don't know about my mother, that she had a past. What could he reveal? Did she kill someone? Was she a whore at some point? I don't think so. But who cares? There is nothing he could say that would make me love her differently or think any less of her. I have no shame or embarrassment.

Maybe a week or so before she dies, I am helping her spruce up in bed. She takes a warm washcloth and wipes between her legs, then carefully wraps another cloth around it before handing it to me, saying I shouldn't touch it, that it's dirty. I don't care. I would bury my face in it weeping, except for fear that it might upset her.

Comments? Questions? Email me.

Waiting To Exhale

2006-10-30T08:55:00.000-08:00

Mom gets breast cancer while I am in New York with Stephen. She calls me, her voice breaking just a little, saying she has bad news, but that it is all going to be all right. Her reports are upbeat. I fly to Texas when she has her surgery. They say they got it all and we are relieved, pretending to be completely reassured of her good health. I can't contemplate her death for any length of time without going to pieces, particularly since as a child I endlessly obsessed about the possibility that she would die so often and so intensely that I sometimes made myself sick with asthma attacks and stomach pain. Year later I tell that to the psychic who now stays with our miniature dachshunds when we're out of town, and she says that from an early age I was psychically aware I would lose my mother too soon, and that this psychic knowledge was part of my possessive attachment to her. Now I live in California. I have taken our oldest dog for shiatsu where the practitioner smudged her to rid her of negative chi. It's easy for me to accept the word of our psychic pet sitter, if for no other reason than my mother's death was the thing I feared most in the world and it happened. Adam took her away from me. Then death did too.

In New York as it is happening I try not to think about it except sometimes at night, with Stephen's steady breathing in the background, and me sitting up, paralyzed. About eight months into it there is a recurrence. Mom and David still keep the reports upbeat. Then my uncle calls and says I don't understand: She is dying, I need to get back to Texas. I'm still grateful to him for that. I might not have had the sense to do it on my own.

This is not supposed to be happening now. I am in love with Stephen, in love for the first time, and I don't have A.I.D.S. And I am writing seriously. My nonexistent acting career (I'll write about that some other time) has finally morphed into what I should be doing.

I started writing a play about a dead mother and the ones she leaves behind.

But I began the script a year before my return to Texas; four months before my 48 year-old mother is diagnosed with anything. As far as I know she is perfectly healthy when I begin the dead mother play. Almost as soon as I finish the script a friend of an acquaintance reads it and options it. She was Delta Burke's manager though she is now suing over the "Designing Women" money. This was the big time. This rush of bliss crashes for no apparent reason before Mom has cancer. Everything is ostensibly coming up roses. But old feelings of failure press into me during my days alone when I am supposed to be writing, I think a lot about illness. And depression. And death.

I'm told that someone asked me when I was three or four if I knew what death was. I don't know the context. Maybe a dog died. Maybe I shot my father in his sleep. Apparently I answered the person that yes, I did know what death was, that it was knowing all the answers to all the questions you have without even asking. Spooky for a kid with no religious background.

Maybe writing the play is what gets me thinking about death so much around then. All the characters are dealing with it, with their guilt, their sorrow. Death starts to seem kind of nice to me, and comfortable, not in a suicidal sense. I just like contemplating the gorgeous quiet, the peace, and the release of it, the relief.

I have this tic that started when I was really young: Wherever I am, whoever I'm with, when they leave the room, the building, the house, or whatever, I listen for the door to close behind them. When I hear that click and know they're gone I can breathe easy. I'm no misanthrope. I might even go so far as to call myself one of the people who need people, though I would stop short of considering myself among the luckiest people in the world. Not surprising that the habit of waiting for doors to close started when I would wait to hear my dad leave the house, knowing it was safe to come out when he was gone. The habit continued though, through the years with my mom and step-dad, through my years in New York, with Stephen, and I still feel it now. I've come to believe it is a sigh of relief, the "Waiting to Exhale" moment of knowing the audience is gone. I can revert to being myself, whomever or whatever that is. I can be like a big blob with no one there to watch, no one there wondering why I'm not better than I actually am.

Comments? Questions? Email me.

Stretch Marks

2006-10-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

With my mother's bessing and the acknowledgement of our shared belief in unseen powers, I move back to New York, register with a service called Brunch Buddies and find the first love of my life in three days. Magic.

Stephen is tall, handsome, has a real job, and drives a motorcycle. He thinks I am lively. After years of not knowing how to do it, I fall into our relationship with an absolute lack of muss and fuss, not much questioning the massive change in my life, the impossible suddenly emerging as not just possible but easy. The universe loves me. I start to believe that again. Maybe I'm regaining my powers.

My first date with Stephen lasts eighty hours. We are tender and careful with one another. I love that he is larger, taller, that he can envelope me in his arms and hold me warm against his chest. He doesn't talk as much as I do. That makes him seem strong to me, invulnerable, protective. I throw myself headlong into becoming what I consider to be a loving partner. By and large it works. I commit myself again to transformation and by choosing to become something I admire, something new, I make it real. I decide to love him and I do.

The fucking astrologer, who so long ago told me love had to be at the center of my life, has turned out to be so accurate that it is embarrassing. Loving and being loved sets off an explosive chain reaction in me, almost instantaneously demolishing huge chunks of the emotional walls that once seemed so impregnable. Mom and I start talking constantly on the phone. We talk about our sex lives, about what it feels like to be in love, about the past. I begin to let her know about the way I fetishized her as a child, about how desperate I was all the time. We both cry when she tells me she never knew. She feels guilty that I was in such pain and she couldn't tell. I cry some more. There is almost always an edge of tears to our calls. Mostly happy ones, but still… I love her so much. Finally. Not the idea of her. Her.

I am working at home, doing freelance work for the promotions company in Los Angeles, trying to drum up business for them in New York. Mom has been right about how much they value me. They keep paying me for over six months, even as their own fortunes head south, leading to bankruptcy a year later. I use my free time to write and to become a housewife, getting dinner on the table every night when Stephen comes home, and throwing myself into becoming the ideal in-law with his brother and sister in-law who live across the park and are about to have a baby.

There is one horrible fear nagging in the back of my mind though. I have never had an H.I.V. test. I am too scared. The sheer volume of encounters I've had, most of them completely unprotected, a majority involving practices that put me at greater risk that the other guy, make the outcome too certain. Stephen is negative. We are reckless with one another. Testing positive could not only mean losing my life, it could destroy my newfound happiness in finding out how successful I am at loving and being loved. Then one day I notice red welts on my stomach, low, going down to my crotch. I don't know if they are new, or if they are birth marks, or just something I've never noticed before. I don't tell Stephen about the welts because I am absolutely positive (positive, get it?) that I have Kaposi's Sarcoma. The year before my gums were bleeding and I thought I had A.I.D.S. then too. It turned out that not having my teeth cleaned for seven years was the problem. The hygienist, while communicating her amazement that my teeth and gums were still healthy under all that plaque, asked why I hadn't been to the dentist for so long. I said no one told me I was supposed to get them cleaned at all, let alone every year. That was true, but what I didn't tell her was how the bleeding had been scaring me for a few years already, but that I was too terrified to go to the dentist and ask about it since I believed I must be positive and the bleeding was symptomatic of my first opportunistic infection.

I hold out about the welts for a few weeks before breaking down in our bedroom, sinking from the bed to the floor as I show Stephen my lower abdomen and start sobbing. He hasn't noticed them before either since they are covered with the trail of body hair leading down to my pubic area, and he doesn't know if they are old or new. As I sit on the bedroom floor, pointing to my welts, trying to stop crying, Stephen is very gentle with me, understanding my terror, but reassuring me that he believes it is nothing, that it can't be A.I.D.S., and that he believes I am negative anyway. Wouldn't I like to finally get tested and not have to be afraid of anything?

He really thinks I'll test negative. I know he is wrong. We go to an alternative testing center at the women's health clinic, because they get the results back sooner than the gay community center. They give me this incredibly long speech about T-Cells, AZT, and DDI, what infection means, what it doesn't mean, while I'm screaming inside, "Take the goddamned blood!" I am scared of the needle but more scared of what it will show. My arms are rigid, my fists clenched, and Stephen puts his arm around me. Finally they take the blood samples and tell me to come back on Monday. It is Friday. I sit there thinking, it's now seventy-two hours before the rest of my life is gone (this is before cocktails and new inhalers) and then it washes over me, the strangeness of it. I am either positive or I am not, and my not knowing had nothing to do with what the results would be. It is a viral reality that exists independently of my fears or any new bargain I can offer God - though I do make the offer of giving up ice cream for the rest of my life for a negative result. I would not possibly be able to abstain from eating ice cream for a lifetime but I swear anyway.

Stephen just tries to keep me laughing, drunk, trying not to think all weekend. We have sex lovingly, carefully. He is prepared to take off work on Monday but I say no. I don't want to make any more of a fuss than I already have. I promise to call from the center if the news is bad so he can come get me. I walk into the lady's office and am again overwhelmed by the idea that a piece of paper has a result on it already, that I can't alter that in any way. She rummages through a file and doesn't even look at me. "Okay, that one is negative."

As shocked and overjoyed as I am, I think about her, about how hard it must be for her when the news is the opposite, and wondering why she doesn't take more pleasure in being able to tell someone good news. I expect a parade. Then I think, what if it's a false negative. I've heard of that happening. The next week I get another test just to be sure. Negative. I go to a dermatologist to find out what the welts on my stomach are.

They're stretch marks, like women get after giving birth. He says sometimes they can be caused by stress. Have I been under any particular stress? "Yes!" I say, "The stress of worrying that I might have A.I.D.S.!"

I don't have A.I.D.S. -- I am a housewife with stretch marks.

Comments? Questions? Email me.

The Easter Bunny Gets Real

2006-08-31T18:02:00.000-07:00

Who knew? My mother is as addicted to Magical Thinking as I am. She reassures me that I will find love. That I will find myself. Even if I have to retrace my steps 3,000 miles to do it.

Enough is enough. I have to settle down with someone. Three years in Los Angeles go by quickly. My acting career is non-existent, though I do have a fabulous run as the Easter Bunny in a kiddie show. I don't take chances on anything that matters to me. But I'm still in show business since my day-job at a television and film promotional fulfillment company has turned into something resembling a grown-up career. I become a twenty-two year-old account executive, overseeing the distribution of press kits, posters, t-shirts, and various other ad specialty paraphernalia to television stations and video stores. It is better than shoveling elephant shit. If you don't get the reference, go ask someone else in The Showbiz to explain it to you.

I work myself into the ground at my new company, loving the feeling of totally losing myself, of reaching utter exhaustion, of living a kind of martyrdom. When you put in sixty, seventy hours a week, working harder than everyone else, no one can question you about anything you do. I don't want to be questioned. I just want to be right. In control. I am very bossy and some of the people I work with hate me. Maybe "hate" is too strong. They just can't fathom why it all matters so damned much to me, why it is life or death if a press kit goes out on time.

I sleep with my boss a few times, which appeals to my sense of drama since he is in a long-term relationship. I develop deep, if evanescent, crushes; on a slightly dimwitted blonde who works there (who poses nude for an art book and shows me the pictures), on a client at Paramount to whom I send flowers at the company's expense, on a gorgeous television production designer. Nothing comes of any of it.

I work all the time. When I have a free weekend I sit at the beach all day reading and eating hamburgers. A job offer in press and promotion from one of our clients shakes me up. Is this supposed to be my future? Have I spent my whole life dreaming I will live the Jacqueline Susann ideal only to end up writing promotional copy for syndicated television? Okay, so maybe I have needed some stability after my friend Pam's suicide. Maybe the job thing is a good choice. Temporarily. My mother almost kills me when I quit. She has been out to stay for a couple of and has met everyone at work. She sees how much they value me and knows how much I need that. The way she connects those dots touches me. She is a practical lady who cares about things like job security, but when she talks about my job as mattering to me emotionally, as being something important that fulfills a deep need, it dawns on me that she actually understands me better than I imagine. I take a step forward with her and let my hair down and tell her how she is right, but that I have dreams I am afraid of losing, that without those dreams I'm not sure if I actually exist. How I feel like a failure.

She gives me her blessing even though I get the sense that she thinks I am doing the wrong thing. We cry a lot together. Not over the job thing, not really, though that is the pretext. I think we both know that we have broken through to real connection at last. All it took was me admitting how scared I am. Practically all the time. I tell her another truth. Part of why I have quit my job is that I have come to have an overpowering belief that I will find love, not in Los Angeles, but back in New York.

My pragmatic mother grows even more supportive. I learn that she believes in psychic impressions too. She believes in magic. Like me.

The Extra "E"

2006-08-17T13:02:00.000-07:00

The New Age dawns for me in California. I embrace it for all it's worth and celebrate by killing my inner child. Really.

My grandmother, Beelzebubbe, used to clean out the refrigerator of any house she entered. Family, friends; even if she was just a dinner guest you could often find her in the kitchen emptying out the fridge, sometimes before anyone was in there doing the dishes. She would be there everything that that wasn’t unopened and vacuum-sealed from the store. Sometimes she’d throw that stuff away too, talking to no one in particular while she went along, grunting, rasping, saying "Good! Get rid of it! Good!"

She was always proud of leaving her hosts with almost no food, her work there done. That is probably how I am most like her. I have an impatience with any kind of mess and want things to be clean and orderly, gotten rid of at all costs. If a scab needs to be pulled do it now. Whatever the cost.

There is a curious, unintended upside. As controlling my physical environment grows more and more vital to my sense of well-being, imposing absolute order on my physical surroundings gives my mind the freedom to wander about recklessly. As the early '90s dawn, I come to neither expect nor want explanations for the mysteries of creativity, of the metaphysical world, or the human spirit. Who knew? I begin to explore lots of weird, supernatural, New Age, pop-psychology ideas, reveling in their messiness. Maybe I just like being contrary. People who know me expect rigidity. Perversely, I like surprising them with my California-appropriate spiritual openness. I even go to an energy movement specialist who hypnotizes me, drains the darkness from my chest, and helps me kill my inner child.

That death gives birth to the title of this opus.

It is a mercy killing. The psycho/meta energy movement man regresses me down to seeing this pathetic little boy (ostensibly me) and asks me what the boy wants. I say, "To die." I don't know where it comes from, but I know in an instant that it is quite true. His lonely suffering has been so acute, so damaging, that the only real answer is euthanasia. He dies happily.

I then can't resist running around and telling everyone I know, and many people I have only just met, that I have, indeed, just killed my inner child.

As I do with most things, I make light of it, enjoying the strange, counterintuitive triumph of doing something that feels revolutionary. And surprisingly, it does feel rather light and buoyant. Perhaps letting my inner child die is giving me an honest to God breakthrough. Or maybe it's the Herbal Life I'm taking. Or the wheatgrass juice. Or my new friend, the psychic dog sitter.

I don't know if it has anything to do with the killing of my inner self, but gradually I stop paying people for massages with happy endings. I'm not ready for real love, but I want to be. I vow to at least try to meet someone, and drop the pleasure for-hire since I intuit that I am unlikely to acquire a real boyfriend by buying one.

My skills at courtship are still rudimentary though. All I know how to do is pick up people in bars and clubs. The last time I did that, back in New York, it was a hunky bartender who rather inadvertently (I think) peed in my bed. We were both very drunk and he fell asleep as soon as he climbed into my bed, leaving me horny and pissed off. When I awoke his mouth was below my waist and he was holding me rigidly in place on my side of the bed, not letting me spread out over to the side where he had slept. When he was gone I figured out why. There was a huge puddle of pee on his side. Massage therapists and hookers don't wet the bed. Not unless you pay them to.

There was this sex channel for a long time in New York on free cable, where Robin Byrd had a talk show that opened with the song, "Baby Bang My Box," and where Al Goldstein of Screw Magazine would interview guests as he sat naked, his flaccid penis hidden by bulges of fat (a life changing, Medusa-like sight, that could replace capital punishment if it weren't so cruel and unusual). This station also offered commercials for prostitutes and phone sex. "We have warm, Oriental girls waiting to serve you." Like that. One particular phone sex commercial has stayed with me all these years. It was for 976-PEEE. A woman peed on a cop while saying, "The extra 'E' is for extra pee." Comments? Questions? Email me.

Nuclear Winter

2006-07-31T06:17:00.000-07:00

I tell no one about the relationship substitutes I am hiring. My mother calls asking if I'm seeing anyone special. Mom, they're all special.

Being truly intimate on a longterm basis, getting romantically close to people, seems unattainable. It isn't that I don't want to take someone home, have them go back to Texas with me and meet Mom and my stepfather, David. I crave the normalcy. I'm just not getting any better at figuring out how.

In fact I am regressing. The astrologer's demand that I love and be loved seems ever more Sisyphean and unreal. The great thing about paying for love is always being in control, even while giving my body over to someone. It's a love life devoid of emotional risk. The fact that I even think of it as a love life is probably more telling than I might wish, and more pathetic.

I stop writing here, worrying that I'm making myself appear pathetic. Should I go back, erase all of this? Talk about something less personal, like the size of my penis?

The need for control grows stronger. Like a metastasized cancer it spreads into all the crevices of my life. The massage habit is only one symptom. I develop a fetish for spring-cleaning in every season. In truth I will always look at the idea of reorganizing a closet as a fun and satisfying way to spend the afternoon. But I start getting weird about stuff, like an old person, obsessive and set in my ways. Towels have to be folded a certain way. Dishes stacked just so. Physical and emotional encounters continue to have clear boundaries. I liked cutting things away, starting from scratch. There is a destructive element to it all. You might imagine being able to put stuff in perfect, Germanic order is less a destructive activity than one of building or creating, but I don't think it's that at all. What I like is the ruthless clearing away, the garbage bags crammed full of trash, the shredded financial records.

I also develop a thing for what it feels like after the exterminator comes. There is an eerie stillness, no sound, nothing stirring, like nuclear winter, which I think of as comforting. I can stay in bed in my bomb shelter forever. Comments? Questions? Email me.

Happy Endings

2006-07-13T13:09:00.000-07:00

If you talk about Marianne Williamson and Eastern religious beliefs before and after, is it still prostitution?

After my friend Pam's suicide, and once I settle in Los Angeles, seeking a new life (again) amid all the raucous, Technicolor flora, I find spiritual connection with practitioners of sensual massage and erotic release.

That's how it's worded in their ads. Or they call it a Happy Ending, which I guess is less legally suspect. The masseurs embrace a retro '70s gay-lib attitude of all things having to do with sexuality being beautiful. Death and love feel close and connected to me. Pam stays around as ghostly subtext, not a haunting, more like having someone possess me. It is far easier to seek the touch of a stranger than a Jewish exorcist.

Paid-for sensualists bring moments of contained happiness, and a new, if temporary, friendship. It's uncomplicated, perfect; a little expensive maybe, but often more reasonable than you might expect. So reasonable I sometimes feel guilty. Sensualists have to eat too. There is this one really skinny guy who does an hour and a half for $25.00. That's less than a grocery checker makes. The skinny masseur's dog sniffs around you sometimes while you're on the table, occasionally licking something private, which is a little disconcerting, but the guy is very nice. He speaks his poetry aloud while he works on me, my moans drowning out the words. (Just for the record I'm talking about moans from the deep tissue work, not from the happy ending.) After he finishes he likes to talk about writing and his spiritual journey. He believes in divine purpose. In things happening for a reason. I say I believe that too, and sometimes I do. Whatever else it is, this is not prostitution. There's also a guy in the Valley who's truly gifted at both parts of the massage. The whole thing becomes a bi-weekly ritual; the shiatsu moves, the almost-but-not-quite painful upper back work, the moment when I hear his shorts drop to the floor, the precise time for him to climb on the table and lower himself on top of me. His smile is so genuine it never fails to move me, and his blonde, blue-eyed Waspness seems exotic. He is happy. He exudes it in a way I can never imagine myself doing. A part of me gets bored by the ritualized repetition of his healing touch, but I grow to like the routine, to feel safe in knowing what I can expect and getting it every time.

Sometimes when I go to someone new I'm not always sure whether it's okay for it to go farther than the massage itself, and I don't want to insult anyone or be inappropriate, so I can feel awkward, but not once do I find someone who isn't perfectly comfortable exploring further, releasing me, finding me. They may not bring joy exactly, but it is incredibly joyful.

I don't have health insurance at the time. Paying for sex is much cheaper than going to a shrink.

The massage is almost always great, no matter who the guy is. So is the release. Sometimes I am moved to reciprocate, wanting them to feel what I feel, wanting them to like me. More than a few times men ask me not to pay, which I guess is the highest compliment a hooker can give you. That's just for cheap effect. I've already established they aren't hookers. Either that or definitions of prostitution should be widened. Actually, now that I think of it, Mary Magdalene was supposed to be sort of like these guys, cooling and healing with her ointments, showing Jesus he was still made of flesh and engorged blood, even if he was destined to be non-corporeal.

Comments? Questions? Email me.

The Glamorous Life

2006-07-06T07:56:00.000-07:00

This is my life in New York: The alarm goes off and I have a glass of water, an amphetamine pill, and a caffeine pill on my bedside table. I take both pills and stumble into the shower.

By the time I towel off I'm bouncing off the walls, ready to face a new day. When I want to go to sleep I take a sleeping pill. I love the idea of it, since it's all so very "Valley of the Dolls."

Maybe tonight I'll take two. After all, it's New Year's Eve.

It is never actually as dramatic, or as Mickey and Judy as I like to tell people. The couple of months after I stop taking the pep pills are a real drag, but I can't say for sure whether during that time I don't want to get out of bed because I'm in withdrawal, depressed, or just being lazy. Sometimes I get myself out of bed and spend the day lying in the bathtub with the shower running, eating boxes of donuts and smoking, destroying the bathroom walls from the constant moisture. I resent having to get out of the tub to order nachos from the Mexican food restaurant on the corner, but a cordless phone around all that water seems unwise.

Lethargy mixes with an almost subconscious fear, not of anyone who lives in New York, but of my father coming to attack me. I have security alarms on my windows, again, not because of robber or rapists or killers, but because I dream about my dad, Adam, shooting me dead. He probably thinks about me rather less often than I imagine. And murdering me isn't a likely part of his mindset.

No matter how glamorous I pretend my life is (since glamour is absolutely defined by eating donuts and smoking in the shower, waiting on tables between bouts of depression, and occasionally stumbling home with a stranger) I'm finding it hard to shake the past.

I look back now on the crazy restaurant where I vent my fury by hurling entire trays of water glasses at the wall, shattering them into a million little pieces for real, with a perverse kind of affection. I haven't had any job since where I can get away with chucking sour cream and destroying property with impunity.

At the time I don't connect my frequent bouts of rage with anything having to do with my family. I'm just blowing off steam. It's normal. Right? I remember people I wait tables with there, I can see their faces more clearly than some friends I've known for years. Restaurant staffs are good to one another, creating family, even if it lasts as little as a week or two.

I first learn about workplace family life from my mother. During the last ten years or so of her life she is the manager of a department store, first in Austin, then in Georgetown, Texas. She cooks for the women who work for her. She gets involved in their lives, warning this one that her boyfriend is treating her badly, helping that one with a sick child. I don't connect those dots at the time. I don't understand how much I absorb from my mother during the six years I live with her. It's all subtext waiting to be fully realized later.

The camaraderie of the wait staff is exactly the same though. And the lonely 4:30 A.M. shift notwithstanding, we usually travel in packs after work, getting hammered together, hanging out in all-night diners, having sex. A shift is like a performance of a show. Sometimes I even pretend to have a different name. I tell phony stories about my background, use accents, or I even sometimes fake a limp. After a shift there is this leftover energy to burn off. We aren't the lifers - the waiters and waitresses who make it a career - so we can party.

It's a wonder we don't all get mugged or killed once we split up to make our separate ways home, drunkenly wandering the streets of New York in our tell-tale uniforms of white shirts and black pants, our pockets full of cash.

The glamour of it all still astounds me.

Comments? Questions? Email me.

Waiter Psychosis

2006-06-26T02:30:00.000-07:00

We anticipated a few bits of gravel showing up in one, or maybe two customers' salads. But when we start finding bits of glass it probably should be a wake up call. It isn't.

Let's take a step backwards here, you and I, from the grim, hangman's tone of the last few posts. It's now before my dead friend Pam and I begin our dance in the dark, before I decide to leave New York, before I am told by the creepy astrologer that without love I am nothing.

I am nineteen, a year out of the American Academy of Dramatic Art, two years from moving to Los Angeles. Waiting tables is what I do while pretending to have a career as an actor. The thing is, I'm actually really good at it. I have the multitasking capabilities of a soccer mom, which is what a good waitron-unit must have if any level of competence is to be mastered. It's like throwing several small dinner parties at once, where everything has to come out at the right time if the courses are going to work out, and where every guest has an allergy he or she failed to phone you about beforehand.

While living in New York I work in a number of places, most of them fairly respectable, but all of them managed and/or owned by specimens from a vile, hostile, cruel-just-for-fun, mistrustful, abusive subspecies of the human race. By and large, restaurant owners and managers are just not nice. They fire waitresses for not giving them blowjobs. They think racial and sexual slurs are funny. They deal drugs on the premises and never share.

The kitchen staffs are difficult in a different way, and unlike with the owners and managers, if you prove yourself to the cooks and prep guys (always guys) then an atmosphere of mutual if distant respect can prevail. Every kitchen staff is composed of the same ethnic group, be it Korean, Caribbean, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Chinese, or Indian, and they are all invariably hostile to waitpeople, at least initially, probably because in the places I wait tables most of the waitpeople were white and working with no expectation of making it a career. The kitchen staff think of us as dilettantes, guilty until proven innocent. It is physically very hard work, especially in New York, where storage basements are usually reached by going outside, wrestling open two huge metal doors in the sidewalk, and descending down perilous steps to dark, dank, moldy, rat-infested caverns. Eat and enjoy.

I never knowingly put gravel or glass in a customer's salad. It just happens THIS ONE TIME at a place owned by a notorious cokehead who constantly shows his penis to all of us, whether we want to see it or not. (It isn't even particularly large or interesting - not unless white pubic hair gives you a big thrill.) Anyway, there is an enormous refrigerated salad bin in the kitchen that has to be replenished by the waitpeople, who are required to haul gigantic trash cans full of pre-prepared, cancerous, phosphate-preserved salad up the basement steps, through the metal doors, across a long length of sidewalk, and into the kitchen.

Doing this in the snow is its own little holiday on ice. If we stuff enough salad in the trash cans however - smashing the greens down, packing them as tightly as possible, we can often manage to make only one trip in an evening's shift rather than having to do the whole thing twice.

So we load the salad bins and jump on top of them, mashing the salad down with our feet until the bin's capacity reaches its limit.

The gravel and glass must come from our shoes. I suppose we could put something between our shoes and the salad itself, some plastic wrap or whatever, but why would we?

At this particular restaurant they like to promote you to senior staff as soon as they can. I am senior staff at nineteen even though I'm not even technically allowed to sell alcohol yet. We serve the full menu until 4:30 in the morning, every night of the week. The senior staff member selected to work the late-late part of the night arrives two hours into the dinner shift at 6:30. By 9:30 or 10:00 some of the other waitpeople are allowed to leave, as the dinner crowd dwindles. More depart by 11:30 or midnight, then at 1:00 in the morning comes magic time:

One waitperson, one busboy, and one bartender. That's it. Not even a manager.

Sometimes the 1:00 to 4:30 hours are uneventful, but other times you find yourself with twenty tables. A triage situation. A strange mania I call Waiter Psychosis takes control as I juggle the food and drink orders. Any extraneous movement or conversation that interrupts my flow puts the entire mission in jeopardy.

One time I throw sour cream in a woman's face.

Here's how it is: I'm there, it's 2:00, and she is giving me such a hard time, sending things back over and over, three times, four times, and I have so many other customers. She tops off her obnoxiousness by telling me she thinks I 'm not very nice. Me? Not nice? I am niceness itself to my customers, genuinely warm, listening with unfeigned interest to their stories, even the boring ones, the very tedium of them fascinating me. If she wants to tell me I'm not nice, I tell her I'll just show her how not nice I can really be. At least the sour cream is in a paper container. It doesn't bruise her or anything as I fling it at her, its gluey whiteness splattering all over her face. I call her a Miserable Fucking Bitch and tell her to get out and not to come back. Or I'll kill her. (I'm really not kidding. I did this. Which is why I call the syndrome Waiter Psychosis. Not to be cute. But because it is insanity itself that takes over when nerves are stretched too far beyond the breaking point.)

After I chase out the woman who is now as sour on the outside as she is within, I leave a message for the next day's manager telling him of having to throw a drunken lady customer out because she was scaring the other customers by flinging sour cream around and screaming at me when I refused to give her more to drink.

This is in case the sour lady calls to complain. The manager won't think I'm the crazy one. He'll think she is.

Sometimes at the end of one of these really long shifts, after finishing my side work (which is refilling salt and pepper shakers, ketchup bottles, and the like) I blow off steam by hurling entire dishwasher racks full of glasses at the brick walls, leaving a spiky river of shards, taking an almost sexual pleasure from it. I know the Korean kitchen porters arrive in the morning before anyone else and their first task is to sweep the dining room, so not one of the managers or owners will find out.

Whether the sweepers regard all that glass as out of the ordinary never enters my mind. There's always broken glass everywhere at the restaurant anyway. Even in the salads.

Breakfast with a Tiffany Lamp

2006-06-15T13:28:00.000-07:00

Maybe it isn't stealing since the will leaves everything to me... Or is it?

In Philadelphia for Pam's funeral I wonder if people think it's my fault. I am nice to her father and her evil step-mother, betraying Pam by cozying up to the two people she hates, because I want them to reassure me that they don't blame me. I am somebody else with them. The urge to play and pretend makes a comeback. It is all acting, the flight, the funeral, all of it. My old heroin addict acting teacher from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts would be proud.

The whole performance is a break-through in emotional realism, even as I try to firmly distance myself from the reality of what I feel after her death. After she kills herself. After I find her.

Pam's father assures me he will honor Pam’s suicide note and will, though her is also quick to point out that it probably isn't legally enforceable. He wants me to have whatever is left after probate, but tells me not to expect too much. Flying her body out from Los Angeles has been very expensive, and it is only fair, in his words, to pay for it out of her own money. Then he starts asking me what I know about various pieces of furniture and art Pam got after her mother's death, if he might have them back, since they were stolen from him by his wife.

I say I think Pam has sold a lot of stuff, that I'm not sure. I am scheduled to leave on a flight the morning after the funeral. I stay only twenty minutes at the post-funeral buffet, pleading exhaustion. They tell me Pam was lucky to have a friend like me, and that they hope I will stay in touch. I am such a good person.

From their place I take a cab to the train station and immediately go to Pam's apartment in New York. I take everything; the art, the small pieces of furniture, the jewelry, all of it.

Her father calls me a week later to say he is surprised at how little is left in Pam's apartment of the stuff his wife took from him. Did Pam sell everything? I say I guess she must have. I cling to what I have taken. I want it all. Including an original Tiffany table lamp I will sell for a lot of money years later.

I am not honest. I don't tell her father that these things are mine by rights. That they were Pam's mother's, left to her, then left to me. For him to get any of it back is unthinkable; a betrayal of what killed Pam, even of what killed her mother.

When I get back to Los Angeles my mother calls from Texas and asks if I want her to come out and stay with me for a while. Stupidly I tell her no, rejecting the idea, not wanting to be weak or needy. No one can know how dark it is in my head, least of all my idealized mother, who can only stay idealized at a distance.

Pam and I come from the same place and have the same weaknesses, keeping everything good at arm's length while we luxuriate in pain. She is now in the past tense. I am overwhelmed by her death, by the absence of her, but one true thing emerges: The astrologer in New York, the one who says I must have love or die , is right about me. Accept it or die. Just like Pam, like Pam, Pam --

Six weeks later probate closes. Her father sends me a check for $2,000.

Comments? Questions? Email me.

Stealing From the Dead

2006-06-12T08:49:00.000-07:00

It's the night my best friend hangs herself at the Howard Johnson's. I'm a shepherd boy singing a love song to Mary Magdalene. Really.

My friend Pam is in Los Angeles, still alive for only a few more hours, though I don't know this yet. I'm acting in a terrible musical in a small dumpy dinner theater, where I play a shepherd boy who falls in love with a non-reciprocating Mary Magdalene, performed by an actress whose main claim to fame is her decade-old Miss West Virginia title.

The wig the actor playing Jesus is forced to wear makes him look like Marlo Thomas in "That Girl." Often when he turns his head too quickly, the wig goes a bit askew. Keeping a straight face while he sings at me is hard work - the kind of thing they never prepare you to do when you're in acting school. It's my first job in La La Land. Hooray for Hollywood.

When I get back to Pam's hotel after the show there is no answer at the door. Pam is supposed to be having dinner with a mutual friend and I figure they are out at a bar or something, which pisses me off, since Pam knows I'm coming back to the hotel after my show.

The thing is, I'm stuck. A crazy older lady cousin of mine has rented a room to me near Toluca Lake. I've already told her I'll be staying with Pam tonight. The cousin is nutty and prone to fits of rage. If I go back there it means waking her up, since she will have put the chain on the door. Waking her up is a bad idea. Plus I'm embarrassed. I don't want to admit that Pam has forgotten me.

It's cold. I wait in the car. My shepherd boy costume has this cavernous cloak/cape thing, so I use it as a blanket, and I fall asleep, waiting in the parking lot. Even as I sleep I grow angrier with Pam. How could she do this to me? I'm ashamed; ashamed that I'm stupid, unloved, and disposable. After I've taken such care, shown such concern for Pam, how can she forget me like this? I grow furious.

After a fitful night I knock on her hotel room door again. Still no answer. I make the maid let me in the room. My anger with Pam evaporates as I'm filled with a surreal sense of absolute disconnectedness. Time stops. The bathroom door is ajar. I peek though and see Pam's fingers, ruddy and dirty looking at the fingertips, hanging over the side of the bathtub.

After the maid screams in Spanish and her supervisor pronounces Pam dead, over and over, her southern accent searing itself in my brain, we find a hand-written will leaving most everything to me. The suicide note says nothing really; just that she's sorry; that everything hurts too much; that this is the only way.

Before the police arrive I grab Pam's purse and hide it in my backpack. The cops get there and tell me to go wait in the hotel restaurant. I call a friend who calls my cousins - the nice ones, not the crazy lady I live with, and they come and stay with me. I go into the men's room and look through Pam's purse. She has five hundred dollars in cash. I put it in my pocket.

The police seem to suspect me for a while. The handwritten will can be construed as suspicious. Maybe I'm her killer. I sit in the restaurant drinking scotch on the rocks, waiting to be questioned. I'm the star of this episode of "Law and Order." When they finally get to me, several hours later, I can see it in their eyes, that just a few questions is all it takes for whatever interest they have in me to disappear. I am skinny, effeminate, and bewildered. Not a killer's profile, I guess.

The cops are patient and nice. They tell me how she hangs herself on the shower rod, how the weight of her body pulls it down after a while, which is why I find her crumpled and broken looking in the tub. Her fingertips are discolored, they say, because that happens with dead bodies. I let them know I have her purse; that it isn't missing or anything. I explain that I was afraid someone might steal it, so I picked it up almost instinctively. They search it and find no money, but they don't accuse me of taking it.

I have five hundred dollars in my pocket, stolen from a dead woman, but I am innocent.

I insist on acting with Mary Magdalene that night, ridiculously proud of how I know the show must go on. I don't know what I feel yet, and the rest of the cast are very careful with me. I want to play to their sympathies. I want to try on the role of tragic widow. Very "Valley of the Dolls." But something brittle inside me snaps. Her death feels real, and I don't like it.

She had to know I would be the one to find her. That goes around my head. She had to know. I sing my shepherd boy song and go home.

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Hanging Around Howard Johnson's

2006-06-05T11:32:00.000-07:00

You know the show you're in sucks when you have to be drunk to get through the performance. Running away to La La Land solves nothing. Not when the Reaper tags along.

After my six-hour session with the astrologer, I'm completely convinced I've got to change my whole life. I must find love or I will never be famous. My friend Pam wants to change her life too, so we set out trying to do it together. But before we can really implement our makeover, Pam's mom gets really sick with leukemia. This puts a crimp in our plans to love and be loved.

Everything happens to me.

While Pam goes to Philadelphia to be with her mother, I go on tour with the ghastliest musical revue in the history of musical revues. In a red velvet jacket, singing in Italian, Polish, Yiddish, and even ocassionally, English, in places like the Jerry Lewis Room at the Brown's Hotel. Our boss is a bombastically mean, fat, smelly man who has been staging the same show since 1950 or something. We are all ill-prepared, unrehearsed, and miserable about it. During the day the elderly Jewish clientele at the "resorts" where we play buy us endless drinks. We usually perform bombed out of our minds. It makes the time go by quicker.

I stage a labor walkout. Half of us quit the show over our treatment and unpaid wages, and we catch a bus in the early hours before anyone can stop us. Like we're escaping from prison, which we are.

Pam calls when I get back to New York. Things in Philadelphia are bad. Her mom is dying. My worst, most secret fear in my own life is that my mother will die, and I'm willingly drawn into Pam's drama, heart and soul. I go to Philly.

Her mom's apartment is like a warehouse. Through ugly divorce proceedings with Pam's father, still ongoing, the mother manages to filch as much art and furniture as she can get her hands on, all of it forming a maze in her apartment you have to stumble through to get anywhere. Pam and I sit down to eat. Over the dining room table is an enormous oil painting of a cemetery, with agonized wraiths rising from the graves, their mouths contorted by screaming. I make Pam cover it with a blanket.

Pam's mom dies a couple of weeks later and I am there for Pam as best as I can. There are endless issues to resolve with the estate and ongoing fights between Pam and her father. She is sometimes irrational; as if he is touching her again, like when she was a kid, loving her in all the wrong ways. Depression hits fast and hard. I glom on to her depression, letting it give substance and ballast to my own misery, fear, and lack of direction. I still don't know how to love or be loved and my career doesn't exist.

I decide to move to Los Angeles. I need a change. I need to be someone else. Pam doesn't want me to leave. I go anyway. I love L.A., spending the first month going to the beach every day and eating the same lunch at the same restaurant, charging it to my American Express card. I charge a month of car rental to it too. And new clothes. I have no job or income. Meanwhile, Pam's spirits are dropping. She decides to see a shrink who prescribes Nardil, the first time I learn the name of an actual antidepressant. I'll know all the names later.

Palm trees vs. the onset of winter in New York; I persuade Pam to come out to L.A., just to visit, maybe she will like it here, maybe she can move too, and she says yes. I am ashamed to admit that I make her suffer through a ridiculous charade when I introduce her to my cousins who live in the Valley. I say we are engaged. That Pam and I will soon be married. Though I am totally out to friends, acquaintances, and the people I have sex with, I still haven't gotten around to having that conversation yet with family. I don't know why not. But saying we're engaged embarrasses the hell out of Pam - not because she minds people thinking we love one another, since we do, but because I am twenty and she is thirty, and she has been married once briefly before. She thinks my cousins will think her a cradle robber. Probably they do not; too busy laughing at the idea that I will marry a woman to worry over the age difference.

Pam and I have no real plans and she keeps extending her visit, staying on at a hotel where I often spend the night with her. We still tell each other our worst childhood stories ever. We eat in coffee shops. We pretend one day we will have everything we want, everything we think we need. She is still depressed. So am I. She hangs herself at the Beverly Garland Howard Johnson's in Studio City, which is now a Holiday Inn. The shower rod is broken. Pam is crumpled in the bathtub. The maid screams in Spanish and her supervisor comes in. "That girl's dead," the supervisor says over and over. "She's just dead."
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Venus and the Grim Reaper

2006-05-30T18:30:00.000-07:00

Astrology and Tarot change the course of my life; while Death is the understudy waiting to seize the lead role as soon as the star obligingly breaks her neck.

I am flailing. Sinking. It is astounding to me now that apart from my time at the American Academy and a semester at NYU, I will never go to college. That just doesn't happen to Jewish people of a certain class. It is an impenetrably idiotic decision, based in my sense that college is frivolous and fun, and so I should embrace the misery of my climb to success.

Or some shit like that.

I just stay in New York, waiting tables, falling into a fantasy life of how I will be Discovered, so I don't need to waste my time going to school. I've lost too much time already, the years being forced to live with my father, and I want to live my real life NOW. The fact that there is nothing at all real about my relationship to life doesn't occur to me. Yet I always seek solace and solutions, often in unorthodox places.

My friend Pam, my partner in the crime of fantasy, is the one who will pay the bill when it comes due. She hears about an astrologer and Tarot reader who's supposed to be fabulous. We both decide to go. I know he will tell me how rich and famous I am destined to become. We make our appointments separately. I go to see him first. He is on the Upper West Side, in a filthy, pack-ratty apartment covered with cat hair.

My reading lasts six hours.

This man knows every goddamned thing about my life and he scares the hell out of me. Abusive dad? Gotcha. World travel? Ditto. But it goes so much farther. I am convinced he can see into my soul. I also get the feeling he wants to date me, but that seems a little beside the point, even though it could be construed as undercutting his principal bombshell, which comes when he asks me what I think is the most important thing in my life, the one thing I can't live without.

I say success.

He shakes his head, getting very, very serious and telling me that it is imperative I understand this: loving and being loved is at the very center of my entire existence, and that without it my life will come to tragedy and early death.

Well. He goes on to say that I currently have a small window of vulnerability in the wall of emotional defenses I elaborately constructed as a young child - that if I don't break through these defenses, if I don't find a way to be closer to people; to my mother, to myself, to someone who will love me unreservedly - if I don't accept what he is saying fully, take it in, truly accept it - if I don't do this - I might never have another chance. Ever.

I am terrified. Particularly since if my life ends in tragedy and early death, that probably implies I won't become rich and famous.

But I know what he says is true. I know he is telling me who I really am. Not who I want to be. Who I pretend to be.

Our schedules keep Pam and me apart for a few days, during which time she has her reading. When we get together and I excitedly tell Pam all about me reading, she is terribly jealous. We both paid the same fee. I got six hours and a life changing experience. She got one hour with a lot of questions about depression.

She doesn't know that her understudy is getting impatient.

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P.B.J. Needs Prozac

2006-05-24T17:40:00.000-07:00

Two drama queens find best-friendship amid the dementia of the Pimp Acting Teacher's classes.

My new best friend Pam is under the same spell as I am. We think Carol, the Pimp Acting Teacher, is supernaturally gifted and will make us world famous. It seems a very reasonable expectation to us both; a comment on our mutual insanity.

Pam is an older woman. I am twenty and she is thirty. Pamela Brenda Jacobson (P.B.J.) which stands for her initials as well as her favorite sandwich. Pam and I actually served time at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts together without really knowing one another well. But we don't really become close until we are studying with our magic woman. We meet up after our restaurant shifts in separate restaurants most nights at a place on 88th Street and Second Avenue called Cronie's. At two o'clock in the morning we have buffalo wings. I drink scotch. She drinks vodka. During the day we hang out in Greek coffee shops dreaming about the future, reassuring one another how unfair and temporary it is that we aren't being recognized by the world for our essential fabulousness.

Somewhere along the way we start talking about real stuff. We take turns trying to top each other for which of us has the most abuse-filled childhood memory. It's pretty much a draw. Maybe that's the source of our mutual adoration. We're both freaks. Her parents have been in the process of divorcing for something like fifteen years, with her mother accusing the father of creating a secret cabal of judges to cheat her out of what should be rightfully hers.

Pam remembers her father touching her. She is very articulate about how confusing it is, since she remembers loving the attention, loving the physical sensations, loving feeling so special. Then feeling so ashamed.

People don't pop antidepressants yet, not like now, where you aren't eligible to join the Writers Guild without a note from your psycho-pharmacologist.

We don't know how depressed we are. A couple of deaths will change all that.

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An Excess of Enchantment

2006-05-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

A female pimp becomes my spiritual and artistic guide. Oh, like that's never happened to you...

After the Academy breaks up with me, I start studying with another teacher, a woman who is introduced to me by an obese agent who declines to sign me, but who meets with me a number of times anyway. I am never able to impress her sufficiently to become a client, I think, because I'm unable to successfully hide my disgust at the agent's habit of eating constantly, spitting out tuna salad or whatever in great globs, while she lectures me about how and why I'll never work as an actor.

I will call the teacher Carol here. I fall deeply in thrall to her in a way I am never able to do with anyone else before or since. She is so much more subtle than the teachers at the Academy. Carol lures us in with her honeyed, enveloping warmth and positivism. I later find out she is sort of pimping the girls in class to wealthy older men. It isn't being a hooker and she doesn't get a cut of the profits or anything, but she knows a lot of men who like to date struggling actresses, older guys who are willing to help them out along the way. They have "scenes." A girl in class tells me about walking into a room at an Upper East Side townhouse dinner party one night and finding Carol on her knees giving some old coot a blow job, gesturing to her student to come on over and join in.

Before knowing all this, and safe anyway, being of another gender, I just think Carol has magic powers. She has a way of nodding and making pronouncements that cut to my heart, defining me with their psychic aptness. Unfortunately I don't now remember anything specific she offers in the way of spiritual-cum-theatrical knowledge, but believe me, at the time, she is the Wiccan of Wonder, who will make my dreams come true as long as I do exactly what she says.

I am deeply and desperately taken in by her wisdom and her continued application of the word "visceral" to describe my work, though I have no idea what she means. I don't ask. Nor do I look up "visceral" in the dictionary. Why take the chance of spoiling the dream?

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Never Surrender, Never Submit

2006-05-17T11:27:00.000-07:00

My heroin-addict acting teacher resorts to psychological torture. Is she taking lessons from my father?

I am having a horrible time at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. I just can't give in enough, or freely hurl myself into the clutches of the lunatics who teach us. The ones who make me crazy have a creepy intensity, and make demands for submission that feel just like living with the Naked Dad.

So I am constitutionally incapable of surrender, no matter how much I want to succeed, or how hard I try. It just feels like they all hate me, though they are probably all very nice out-of-work actors just trying to get by. Except for the heroin addict. She's nuts. She wants to probe me, like a Vulcan. Her take on me is that I'm too obsessed with how I appear to others and need to free myself. (Well, just because she takes heroin doesn't mean she is without observational skills.)

She does this strange exercise while breathing deeply, turning slowly on one foot, the other held high in the air, her breasts thrown forward, her toes spread apart in a way that makes her feet look webbed - while she inexplicably chants speeches from "Hamlet." Everyone is enthralled. I try to pretend I am too, but I think she's crackers. And her zeal, how it borders on religiosity, is my father, Adam, to a tee.

(When the Jim Jones thing happens Adam turns to my brother Aaron with a smirk, saying he could do that too if he wants, make people drink Kool-Aid and die. Everyone has to have a hobby. I am visiting Aaron and his wife and kids once, and we bring them a packet of Kool-Aid. Oh, how we laugh.)

Another girl in my acting class, also seventeen like me, is having the same trouble as I; neither of us seem able or willing enough to submit. One harrowing day the heroin-driven teacher decides this girl isn't responding to her acting partner fully. She is right about that. But the teacher's solution is to begin following the girl closely from behind, yelling epithets at her, trying to get her to respond. No dice. Then the teacher calls up several guys from the class, including me - though I refuse - and tells them to chase the girl and try to forcibly hold her down against her will and take her clothes off.

"Do you like that?!" The teacher is screaming. "What are you going to do about it, huh?! Wimp! Crybaby!" The point of the whole thing is to get the girl to fight back organically, but to me it's like watching Life with Father, and not in a good way. I'm sitting there getting furious. How dare the heroin addict. How does she know whether the girl is a survivor of rape in childhood or something? How can she set off a bomb in someone's psyche like this? And why is this heroin addict turning into my dad when I am in New York to escape him?

When the dust settles - the girl never fights back but the teacher stops it before it becomes Academy-sanctioned gang rape - the teacher asks the girl why she won't fight back, and her garbled, emotional response boils down to something about not going against what a teacher tells you to do. In the spirit of "If I tell you to jump off a bridge," the teacher tells her to jump out the window. The girl crawls out toward the window ledge. A couple of us drag her back. And... Scene.

The teacher turns to us all and asks if any of us are upset with what has taken place. She singles me out immediately, belligerently saying she knows I will have something to say. Finally we have something to agree about. I tell her she is irresponsible and that what we have witnessed, what my classmate has been subjected to, is a psychological and sexual assault.

I am proud that I stand up to her, even as she sneers at me, daring anyone else in the class to agree with my narrow-minded, literal, anti-artistic position. No one does, though the girl later thanks me for being the only one to think about how she feels.

This is it, my big moment of courage during my first year in New York. I take the issue to the administration who steadfastly defends the teacher and says it is the way they do things at the Academy. That's the end of that romance for me. I can't tell anyone back in Texas. It is my first real failure. It never occurs to me to talk it out with someone, with my mother, to ask her advice. I don't have the vocabulary to admit I don't know something.

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In a New York Minute

2006-05-10T14:09:00.000-07:00

My acting teacher is a heroin addict. During a class exercise she pushes her breasts into my back, reaches around to rub my thighs, and asks me what I feel in my groin. Nothing, bitch, nothing at all.

I start classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York when I am seventeen, with more enthusiasm, more energy, and more desperation to prove myself than I now imagine a single human head can contain. I am also a little smug at school since at seventeen I'm the youngest, and there are people I take class with who are already really, really old -- as old as thirty -- and yet I actually have more practical experience than some of them.

I'm very showbizzy already, taking all of a New York minute to embrace the tinsel and glitter of my new life. I yammer on all the time about what is professional, like I would know, and talking about how much I want to be on a soap opera, which isn't an ambition the Academy considers to be particularly worthy.

The move to New York is one of the happiest events in my life so far. I relish the time alone, knowing that each choice I make, every step I take will define the next period of my life. I see myself as a character in a novel. (Any guesses which one? You've got to climb to the top of Mount Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls...) These are the early, struggling years. I am the only person in my acting class with my own apartment in a new building with a doorman and a terrace. Mysterious family money helps me along. I say mysterious because I never know how much there is, how the mechanics of it work, or when I will run out - an event that happens far sooner than I anticipate or than anyone in my family has the presence of mind to tell me. I am turning out like my father and uncle, a chemist, happily making shit out of money.

I don't worry. I am a fabulous waiter. Plus I think often of how fun it might be to become a prostitute.

Mostly, though, my struggles at the Academy consume me. The grim details are for the next blog, but as my horror at the whole Jim Jones-ness of the place grows, I begin to feel more and more strongly that all the teachers and students hate me. I know I hate them. All except my Theater History teacher. Him, I sleep with. And I do make friends with one other student. She kills herself a few years later. But I digress....

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See No Evil

2006-05-03T08:52:00.000-07:00

Using a blind girl for protection, I unleash the Beast.

New York looms. When I want to say good-bye to my nine year-old sister Betsy, Adam makes his big play, decreeing that I can only see her if I agree to have this serious talk with him about my life. He has been going on and on about having it for the last year or so, and now, forever using his kids as bargaining chips, is determined to give me what for. For what I don't know. (My grandmother, Beelzebubbe, tells me he sometimes threatens her that she can't see the kids if she doesn't give him money.)

I say okay to the talk but plan a double cross. I have this friend, Shelly Brisbin, also a writer now, who is legally blind. She can see a bit actually, but when wearing dark glasses she looks like she can't see anything at all - which gives her a little bit of a stealthy quality when it comes to observing the people around her. Mismatched debate partners at McCallum, my first school, she and stay friends even when I leave. I decide to take her along with me when I drive up to my father's house. Not just a friend as a buffer, but a BLIND friend! How nasty can things get if I have a blind girl with me when I wiggle out of having the Naked Dad's dreaded talk?

Pretty nasty.

I arrive, my car stocked with food, and pick up Betsy for a picnic at the river. This is in the Texas Hill Country. All roads lead back to that fucking countryside. The father, Adam, doesn't expect me to arrive with a friend, and he is exceedingly nonplused when I take off with Betsy, after staying in his house for no longer than two minutes. We are happily picnicking when I hear the ominous sound of tires on gravel behind me.

The Beast drives up in his station wagon. He wants a word. (Just the one? I doubt it.) In the kind of stage whisper that anyone within five miles can hear he rips into my character, my "fucking" friend, how gutless I am, and how if I don't have "the talk" I'll never see my sister again. Surprising even myself, I start to laugh. I don't know why. I'm still kind of shocked about it to this day. It's just that we've all given him so much power over us, for such a long time, and suddenly his whole control trip just seems sort of funny to me. I calmly tell him I will NEVER talk to him about anything in my life, that his opinions don't matter to me, that I lied about letting him talk to me so I could see Betsy. Then I walk away. I can practically hear his face turning purple behind me, he is that enraged. "Don't you walk away from me, or it's the last time you'll walk away from anything!" God. Not just a ridiculous threat, but a hoary cliche. Can't he do better than that?

I turn back around. "What are you going to do?" I ask, "Shoot me?" And that's it really. What CAN he do? Even though I'm half-convinced he will pull his gun from the glove compartment in the car and do it, I know listening to him tell me about his perceptions of my life would kill me anyway, since it would make my head explode to submit to him. I'd rather chance it here and now, by the river, with my blind pal as witness.

I'm not sure if Shelly ever really forgives me for this day. Warning someone beforehand, as I do, can't really prepare a person for my father. For his bitterness, his violence, and his righteous certainty - the closest thing to religion I know in my childhood.

Betsy and I carry on a surreptitious relationship for the rest of her childhood. For a minute and a half once, when I am nineteen, I attempt a reconciliation of sorts with Adam so I can have more regular access to her. I am visiting Mom and my step-father David in Texas, and I drive out to Adam's. I want peace. He wants influence in my life. And obedience. I decline. That part of my life is over for good. On the way back from my father's I stop at Sonic for a large chili-burger, large fries, lime slush, and chocolate shake. Then I throw it all up.

My Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades

2006-05-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

Which is worse: Bulimia or the bullshit I feed myself about my fabulous life to come?

My best friend at L.B.J. is probably my other bulimia pal, Donna, the one who won't let us vomit in her bathroom. In the end I believe she likes me for who she thinks I am, remaining drawn for all the time I know her to ambitious people who seem surer of themselves than she. A few months into the school year, I let my hair down and tell her how much I obsess over what people think of me, and how insecure I sometimes feel. We stay friends for years after that but our relationship never really recovers from my telling the truth. What I tell her makes her sick - she tells me so - no small thing when bulimia is a casual part of your life.

During that last year of high school I travel for several weeks to audition for schools in New York and Pittsburgh with my brother Aaron as my chaperone. The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York tells me right away, right in the room, that I am accepted. That is in April. I return to Austin to finish the year, and then take Tennis and Government in the summer to finish out the credits I need to graduate early.

I spend that last summer dying in the heat, driving to summer school with my friend Julie Kenner, then Beck, who is now a successful novelist. We hang out at her house eating Kraft Macaroni n' Cheese, the sort of processed food that I am never allowed to eat, so it holds an exotic allure for me. (It occurs to me that I may be the only person on Earth to have ever used the words "exotic" and "Kraft" in the same sentence.)

Julie is very indulgent. A couple of years younger than I, she doesn't interrupt my constant babble about how my life in New York is going to be so fabulous. Years later we live next door to one another in Los Angeles where we sort of grow up together, even though we are already grown-ups.

At night during that last summer in Austin, Julie works crew and I act in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the blazing outdoor heat of August. I play Bottom like a demented Marlon Brando. Every moment, every breath for me is about the future. I live so far outside my body it might as well be astral projection.

My mother is resigned to my going to New York but very ambivalent and sad. She can't understand why I don't stay in Texas where I can probably go anywhere on full scholarship. We have been together properly for only six years and I had to fight so hard to make that happen. Maybe I need to leave so that she can remain my fantasy. In planning for New York and during my first years there, as separation looms, my fetish for her returns with a happy vengeance. We shop at Montgomery Ward for my new kitchen. She buys me clothes. We do coke (just the once). Yet I am impatient for my shiny new life to begin. I am so restless I can hardly sleep, and I walk for hours at night near our house, singing to myself, smoking, and dreaming of New York. No one will be able to hurt me there, because I will become an entirely different, new-and-improved famous person. I have that power. The universe will change just for me. Magic. Always the magic. Like dog shit I can't scrape off my shoe.

The Gag Reflex

2006-04-25T10:38:00.000-07:00

Purging. It isn't just for breakfast anymore.

My duet acting partner Wendy and I come home from our two-day speech tournaments, usually on a Saturday night, and order ten or twenty items at Taco Bell. Then we vomit every last bit in the restroom before leaving. She finds it tricky to put her gag reflex back in gear when we start doing it since she has successfully learned to avoid gagging in order to give deeper blowjobs.

I generally use a toothbrush, which I carry around in a Ziplock bag.

My friend Donna is more delicate about the whole business. She won't even let anyone else vomit in her bathroom at home, which I think is terribly inhospitable.

It is just such a perfect system. What could be better than going for lunch to the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet at Pizza Inn and taking them at their word? Donna is perhaps a tad hefty but none of us is actually fat, we are just obsessive and controlling. For me the idea that I can eat without stopping whenever I want is intoxicating; especially considering my father and step-mother's crippling food dictates in my earlier years. My years as their hostage and kidnap victim.

The Naked Dad and his bride drag us into vile smelling health food stores, buying chalky carob bars and Tiger's Milk. (I am tempted to throw a party when I later hear that their guru, Adele Davis, dies from cancer in her early 40s. Her books make my life as a hostage into even more of a misery. Her early death is not forestalled by eating things that disgust me, so why should I torture myself?)

After my release from their custody I steadily get weirder about food under my mother's benevolent reign. She tries to get me to eat well, like a normal mother, like someone other than my step-mother who doesn't shave under her arms, like someone who loves me. But I digress. I eat to stuff down everything I feel. I eat in a fever of strangely exhausting exhilaration. I eat because I can.

Ice cream is the best binge (and purge) food, acting as a soft, liquid buffer, easing the way for any badly chewed chunks of tacos, hamburgers, or pizza that might hurt a bit coming back up. How clever we are to dream up this idea. How efficient the process is. Somewhere along the line we get wind of the fact that the Romans did it too, giving the whole mess a classical seal of approval.

This is my junior year; the year that will turn out to be my last year in high school, though I don't know this yet.

Donna and I become friends the summer after my sophomore year, where I attend a school called McCallum. We are both working on a summer theatre production of "Romeo and Juliet," me playing Mercutio and she designing costumes, which she later does professionally in New York.

My two years at McCallum are successful. They have an honor there called Torchbearer, given to the graduating senior boy and girl who are the highest achievers, determined through a complicated point system. I work on the yearbook staff and see how the system is scored. At the end of my sophomore year I have more points than the senior boy who wins the title that year. My problem is R.C.P., the Royal Court Players, which is the drama club at McCallum. It is run like a Peronist military state for twenty or thirty years by a stout, mannish woman rather improbably called Lady, who slicks back her short barbered hair and smokes brown cigarillos. She is now dead from cigarillo-induced cancer and emphysema. I am in power in my other extracurricular activities (speech, choir, journalism, sex) but Lady never wants to cast me in anything, believing that my intense ambition might upset the balance of her shows. I actually like her very much, and believe her early favor toward me as a freshman will be rewarded in my sophomore year but it hasn't been, and I am pissed. I don't want to be in the chorus of "Little Mary Sunshine" singing about being a fucking forest ranger. I want to be a star.

The summer production of "Romeo and Juliet" is directed by the drama teacher from L.B.J. and she invites me to transfer. I am filled with glee. I tell everyone I have been recruited, that she has promised me artistic freedom to pick and choose, though of course she does nothing of the kind, and I prepare to leave McCallum - a complicated process since one must reside in the district of a school to attend it. My first thought is to make my mother and step-father move to the new district. They actually give it some thought before sensibly refusing.

I now refer to this refusal as sensible. At the time I refer to it as a betrayal.

Finally I engineer it so that we tell the school district that my mother and step-father are going to be traveling a lot, and I will be living with a family in the district. We have to give them power of attorney over me and everything. I am fifteen years old and I have learned from my father that gaming the system is never a crime - not if you get what you want in the end.

My speech teacher at McCallum, a lovely woman named Gretchen Bullock, a minister's wife if memory serves, thinks I am insane when I tell her my plans to leave for L.B.J. How can I be taking all this so seriously at such a young age? "I just don't want to see you at speech tournaments, completely lost in your ambition, flitting about in your green velveteen jacket, oblivious to everything important," she tells me with an unexpected level of passion. I say I can't see becoming that person. She laughs and says, "You already are."

Inventing Bulimia

2006-04-21T13:47:00.000-07:00

Is there a connection between the deeply demented person I secretly am, and the fact that I throw up all the time?

I count and remember how many awards I win during my last year of high school at L.B.J. in Austin, Texas. Forty-nine. And I am by no means one of the biggest winners around town. Choir, Speech, Drama, and Journalism are my areas and there isn't one category where I'm not given an award saying I am one of the best in Texas at what I do, sometimes among the best in the nation.

Along the way I get cold sores, dermatitis, asthma attacks, and welts from the anxiety of it, but I never choke when it counts. I take my amphetamines and perform. When I want to be in Texas All-State Choir I face and flourish through six months of District, Regional, Area, and State auditions, knowing I haven't just learned my music, I have memorized it, including an entire Latin mass. I hammer that music so deeply into my brain that I can still sing most of those damned Latin songs from memory - a peculiar talent that comes in rather less handy today than one may imagine when I am singing in the temple choir during High Holiday services.

Of the ninety school days in my second and last semester, I miss well over half for school excused absences so I can leave campus and come back with trophies, plaques, medals, ribbons, and certificates. Not once in the years that follow do I come close to feeling as blithely confident as I do in high school.

I'm getting all embarrassed now and worrying that despite how pathetic I think this all sounds, I may be coming across like the popular girl in high school who complains about being too pretty to be taken seriously, or a National Merit Scholar ratcheting up the false modesty to let you know that yeah, quantum particle physics can be a little hard at first. You just want to slap them. Maybe you want to slap me. Screw it.

The truth is I'm positively giddy, ready to wet myself in more ways than one, from bragging about my triumphs. I love talking about them. I tell virtual strangers about the time I win first place with a Humorous Extemporaneous Speech after drawing the topic, "Are Hamsters Good to Eat, Raw and Alive?" Sam I am. I am a ham.

I'm at L.B.J. for just one year, which is my sixth year of being allowed to live with my mother again. Mom, the object of my desire, the unattainable Madonna I am kidnapped from by the Naked Dad and his Girl in Braces, my stepmother.
Despite my happily satisfied high school ambitions, I love my mother so much I sometimes cry at night because I'm not sure if she loves me. She shows me all the time but I still can't feel it.

Somehow during my junior (and final) year of high school it finally dawns on me that I am heading down a path that probably isn't all that good for me, and that my pursuits lack a certain depth; which is not to imply that I connect that in any way with my father's fears for my future. The thing is, I very much want to be considered deep. That way when People Magazine does an article on me I can wear glasses and look intelligent in a sexy, serious way. I decide to graduate a year early, forgoing my senior year which would be the most lucrative one awards-wise.

It means leaving my mother a year earlier than she imagines I will. I do weep at night about that, but I don't tell her. I don't tell anybody. I am too busy showing everyone how cool, adult, glamorous, and-- God, I'm sick of adjectives. Fill in the blanks yourself. I remain the only person I know who misses high school. Everyone else seems to have been filled with dread and self-loathing all through it. Me? I can't wait to get to school every day; vocalizing and smoking cigarettes as I drive to my early morning Madrigal class that starts at 7:30, an hour before regular school begins. I like learning. I like sleeping around with adults I shouldn't. I like bulimia.

I think I am inventing Bulimia, along with my Duet Acting partner Wendy and my friend Donna Myers. It isn't all over daytime television yet so we have no way of knowing it is epidemic and bad for us. We wouldn't care anyway.

Trophy Whore

2006-04-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

I will do anything for gold-painted plastic and wood, and I am possibly the only Dexedrine-fueled speaker at State Finals.

My dad, Adam, keeps trying to shore up his waning influence around my junior year in high school, wanting to have a serious talk with me about my future; a proposition that makes me want to peel off all my skin almost as much as my mother's cocaine does.

Dad believes I am obsessed with all the wrong things and headed for disaster. The fact that he is right does not occur to me at the time. I am fanatically enthralled with winning trophies and plaques for extracurricular excellence. The kick of winning things is almost as cool as sex with grown-ups and under-aged drinking; almost as engrossing as fantasizing about my future life in New York as a star. Winning feels like almost being alive.

Competitive Duet Acting, the Texas Forensic Association State Tournament in Dallas: I contort my face and body, standing on a classroom chair to become the Elephant Man. Wendy Sellers, my Duet Acting partner, plays the famous actress who unintentionally breaks my heart. We are desperately serious, even in the comic moments, suffused with art and the glory of trophies; bits of marble and gold-painted plastic that matter more than life. I can't wait to get to the part where I say, "Maybe my head is so big because it's so full of dreams." I do it with every ounce of ham I have, making sure I get my waterworks going in time for one or two perfect tears to stream down my face as Wendy turns to leave.

My tastes are luridly melodramatic, so much so that for me, "The Elephant Man" is restrained. I usually gravitate toward things like "Bent," "Equus," and "Oedipus the King." There's nothing like competing against a hundred other high schools at the National Forensics League state finals in Abilene Texas, finding yourself at Abilene Christian College, and realizing that your judges, most of whom are students on the Christian campus, are not as eager as you might hope to hear your Dramatic Interpretation of "Bent" when you play both characters in the scene where the two men talk each other to orgasm; or finding out that in a semi-final round in Persuasive Extemporaneous Speaking, the topic you've drawn, to which you will give a seven-minute speech pro or con without notes in just thirty minutes time, is "Should the federal government fund abortions for the poor?" and after hastily preparing a speech where you will say, why yes, yes they should, you walk in to the classroom where you will compete only to find that your judge is a nun.

One of my speech coaches gives me diet pills to keep me going when semi-finals run very late into the night and finals are very early the next morning. I'm sleeping with her husband. She's sleeping with one of her students. We are both whores.

My Mother and a Gateway Drug

2006-04-12T12:10:00.000-07:00

Is it wrong for a parent to do drugs with her child? What if she has a good reason?

I try cocaine for the first time with my mother.

As the dry energy rushes up my spine, like amyl nitrate multiplied by the force of one hundred, I know immediately I hate it. My mother starts laughing as I describe wanting to rip off all my skin, a feeling that is already familiar enough without chemical magnification. I can tell she's relieved. Her own experimentation with coke will only last a few years. It is the last gasp of the '80s. Everyone is doing it. Don't your parents?

I am seventeen and graduating high school a year early to go to New York where I will study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Mom is terrified about my being on my own, and being a pragmatic person, she knows I'll be exposed to lots of entertainment and vice in the Big Apple. That's how the cocaine comes into it. She asks if I think I will ever be interested in trying it, saying if I think I might, maybe my first time should be in a safe place, at home.

People are shocked when I tell them about the cocaine with Mom, but I think she is farsighted and responsible. I do. Young adults try drugs. Some parents do them too. She isn't promoting them, she's protecting me. If you don't see it that way, don't email me or tell me, or I'll hate you for thinking badly of my mother.

I'm not sure if she knows I have already tried pot, a drug that never really takes for me. I mean, why in the hell would I want a drug that makes me want to eat MORE? It is notoriously easy to get liquor in Texas. From fourteen on I can get double margaritas at Bennigan's without so much as a fake ID. And I am not one of those hard-bitten teens who look like adults. I look like a kid until I am deeply in my 20s. Like chicken.

Mom does know (and is furious) about my smoking, which I dabble with at a ridiculously early age, but don't fully embrace until I am older, like eleven or twelve. Another bad habit picked up from doing theatre and sleeping with adults.

Winnie Gets Hard

2006-04-03T14:14:00.000-07:00

My brother is dead. But the Show Must Go On. Then Pooh shows his honey roll.

When Gary dies, the Naked Dad's accusations are not the only ones ripping apart the family fabric, such as it is, a kind of Taffeta cum Denim cum Orlon.

My mother accuses me of not caring that Gary is dead, when, a year and a half later, I throw a tantrum over her refusal to allow me to take driving lessons - an entirely understandable reaction on her part given how Gary dies.

She says I have a cold, frozen heart.

The next morning, before leaving for work, she comes into my room and hugs me, tears in her eyes, saying she doesn't mean any of it. She loves me. She is genuinely sorry that she has said that to me, but I think at the time, deep down, she does mean it. And I think she is right. I do have a frozen heart. Later, long after his death, a deep well of pain and loneliness about losing Gary surfaces in me, but at the time on a surface level, I don't know how to feel anything about it. It isn't real. The generally accepted line of reasoning in my family, from all sides, is that I am selfish, completely wrapped up in my own accomplishments and exploits. They don't get it. It isn't selfishness. I am a fortress.

My grandmother, Beelzebubbe nee Buddie, makes the most far-reaching accusation. She blames God and the entire universe for taking away everyone in her life that she ever loves. Gary is her favorite. I am the understudy, but I am happy to have the chance to play the lead. That is when I become her favorite.

Gary's death dovetails nicely with my ongoing creation of self. I already make shameless use of my violent and strange upbringing. Now I can claim the martyrdom of a tragic figure. It is a badge of honor. It makes me special. I see it as a life-altering event that will grow into being part of my legacy and legend. Even when bad things happen, especially so, the power of self-invention and transformation prevails. I will not feel his death. I will not feel my disconnection. I will not feel love. I will teach myself to throw away happiness with both hands should it ever have the temerity to approach.

Since "Winnie the Pooh" opens so soon after Gary's death, it becomes important to everyone in the extended mess we call a family to attend in a gesture of togetherness. The effort touches me. It does. The problem is I know the show sucks and I am deeply embarrassed that some of them will be seeing me perform for the first time in it. I am right to worry. When I leave for New York three years later my uncle who with his wife sort of helps me make the move, is brutally honest about believing my chances of making it as an actor are negligible, citing the unimpressive "Winnie the Pooh."

Maybe his assessment of my comedic abilities would be more positive if time is turned back and he can see the memorable night when Pooh has a hard-on. One of the adult stagehands strokes me before I go on. I am not wearing a dance belt.

The audience who sees it falls out of their chairs laughing.

I am a Fourteen Year-Old Murderer

2006-03-31T13:47:00.000-08:00

Asleep at the Wheel or Suicide?
In the months before my brother Gary dies, our father and step-mother return from South Africa with their other two kids. Gary doesn't spend much time with them. None of us do. The only thing that ever makes me want to visit at all is my relationship with my little sister, Betsy. We have a strong bond that will be tested by distance and fatherly fiat.

Gary and I spend the Friday and Saturday of my ill-gotten holiday from "Pooh" rehearslas nominally visiting our grandparents, Budie and Zadie, but mainly farting around on our own, eating too much, drinking a little, and talking a lot while we drive around. He is always encouraging in a funny, sideways fashion, telling me I should do what I want, what makes me happy, even if it's stupid.

Sunday morning he leaves for Corpus Christi to shoot a wedding. He is a photographer, and even though he is only eighteen, he is good enough to start getting a bit of work here and there. I remember waving good-bye to him in the parking lot outside our grandparents' condo.

He dies on the way back to San Antonio. I will breathlessly tell my friends in the years that follow how I am the last one in the family to see him alive. I don't remember how my other brother Aaron gets to San Antonio that Sunday, and he is no help now since he has blocked just about every single memory that he can of his childhood.

Somehow Aaron and I both wind up at our dad and step-mom, Adam and Laura's temporary apartment, where Adam tells us Gary is dead. I don't react at all. Aaron immediately bursts into tears. Adam keeps getting on the phone to tell people the news. Aaron is still crying. I just sit there. Across the bedroom Adam barks at me, "For Christ's sake, would you hug your brother?!" Hug him I do, begrudging them both every second of it. Who is my father to tell me what to do, how to feel, how to treat Aaron, the brother I instantly begin to resent since if one of them has to die, why can't it be him?

Aaron later admits to having the same thoughts about me, which goes a long way toward alleviating my guilt over being so hateful. I am fourteen. I am guilty.

Our father accuses his parents, our grandparents, Buddie and Zadie, of causing Gary's death by buying him a compact AMC Gremlin. Gary crashes the Gremlin head-on into a Cadillac, the passengers of which survive the accident.

As I understand things, it happens like this: Tired from shooting photographs at the wedding in Corpus Christi, Gary falls asleep at the wheel and crosses the yellow line, placing himself in the Cadillac's oncoming path. There are further accusations from Adam. It's all murky, but I'm given to believe that our father may believe my brother committed suicide. I think. Possibly, so Adam imagines, because in the year before his death, Buddie fills Gary's head with horror stories about how Gary's juvenile diabetes will bring nothing but pain and early death.

But in the two years he lives with diabetes Gary is healthy. The disease is manageable. And my grandmother's frequent mentions of diabetes aren't to Gary, but to Adam and Laura. Buddie is furious about the fact that before Gary is finally taken to a doctor and diagnosed at sixteen, he goes untreated for months while Adam and Laura, who know something is very wrong, believe vitamins and natural food will cure whatever it is that Gary has.

No one ever mentions the fact that on the night he dies, Gary is on his way to get me in San Antonio, to drive me back to Austin the next morning. With a terrible flutter in my stomach I think that maybe if he didn't have to pick me up, he would have stayed the night in Corpus. In a way it is my fault he is dead. This is not something that occurs to me until just now, right at this moment, as I write this paragraph.

More of a Death in Paris

2006-03-29T15:54:00.000-08:00

With a guest non-appearance by Diana Ross as the Unseen Neighbor.
The funeral activities for my brother, Gary, are almost immediate since Jews are supposed to be buried within days after death. I am worried this might make it perfectly clear to the director of the show I'm rehearsing, "Winnie the Pooh," in which I am The Pooh, that I have not, in fact, been in Paris - which is the lie I tell to get the weekend off. I tell everyone at the show that when we get the news of his death while in Paris we fly back on the red eye - a story no one has any reason to dispute and so did not. I learn several years later that because of the way the Earth spins on its axis and the whole east to west thing, there is, in fact, no such thing as a red eye from Paris.

I am in San Antonio with Gary the day before he dies.

It is an escape from working so hard on the play and on my various jobs. Gary encourages the idea. He is gorgeous. Everyone wants to sleep with him. Eighteen, blonde, tanned, muscular like a swimmer, and a natural leader. At fourteen I don't know how much I love him or will miss him once he is gone, but I am always drawn to him, especially since we don't live together very often. My move to Mom and David's is followed by a confusing series of relocations by my two brothers.

Aaron originally comes with me but later goes back to the Naked Dad, Adam, and step-mother, Laura. Then he comes back to Mom and David, and then goes back to Adam and Laura. Meanwhile, Gary's self-proclaimed mission is to somehow reach inside our father and change him. He believes there is good in him and that he will be the one to find it and help it grow. You know, just like a battered wife. I don't know if this is evidence of some deep empathy on Gary's part or just the normal sort of teenage narcissism that makes you believe you have superpowers.

For much of my two years in junior high Gary and Aaron live with Adam and Laura in Beverly Hills, in a house I'm told they rent from Paul Mazursky, on Alpine Drive, reputedly next door to Diana Ross, though they never see her. That is when my father is trying to break into movies with a man named Jay Weston whose credits include, coincidentally enough, "Lady Sings the Blues," starring their next door neighbor. Adam's quest proves largely unsuccessful from what I know, and he never makes a completed film.

When Adam and crew leave for South Africa to try to make the movie that reminds me of "Imitation of Life," middle brother Aaron comes back to Texas to live with Mom and David again. Gary decides to go with Adam and make his last stand or whatever at trying to help him. Whatever happens there between them doesn't go well, and before long Gary is back in Texas, and all three of us brothers are under the same roof again. Gary swears he will never go back to our father. Never. Then he dies.

Death and Winnie the Pooh

2006-03-28T14:59:00.000-08:00

Is it actually funny how a bear likes honey? Not so much.
I never have acne, my voice changes without incident, and body hair appears at normal intervals in a not-unattractive way. But at fourteen I still have braces, which I think look incredibly stupid when I am dressed and made-up to be a singing bear.

The version I'm starring in of "Winnie the Pooh" is one of the worst shows I will ever do. The costume is uncomfortable and the director makes me wear a dance belt after I go on one night with a visible erection caused by a member of the backstage crew groping me as I wait in the dark to go on. I supposed it is my fault for encouraging it.

A few weeks before we open I want to get out of a few rehearsals. I tell the director my father, Adam, is flying us to Paris for the weekend and has insisted I go. This is not true. He does actually fly a group of friends to have dinner at Maxim's in Paris at some point, but I am not among the guests, as he and I are enemies at this point. By the time I am Winnie I barely see the Naked Dad at all. The year or two before my singing bear act my father is in South Africa trying to shoot a movie that is never completed called "Point of Departure." I vaguely remember it having something to do with a person of color pretending to be white - you know, like the slutty daughter of Lana Turner's maid in "Imitation of Life," a character played by the Oscar-nominated Susan Kohner, who will go on to give birth to Chris and Paul Weitz, the brothers who will hit it big with "American Pie" before broadening out to making really groovy movies for grown-ups. This is a chain of facts I find fascinating for no apparent reason.

The idea of saying Adam is flying us to Paris comes to me because I do occasionally admire my father's style, and I often use stories about my colorful upbringing to give the false impression of wealth to new acquaintances. I am in Austin living an extremely middle-class life with Mom and my step-father, David, waiting tables at Swenson's after school, and working at The Gap, where I have perfected a means of pocketing money when customers pay for their purchases in cash. Between that and my tip money I do okay. I have to pay for gas and cigarettes somehow. As David later confirms, I never appear to others to be troubled or rebellious. My grades are terrific, I am the king of the extracurricular activity, I work, and faithfully do my chores - in fact, I am far more fastidious about the state of our house than Mom or David ever is.

Listen children and gather round: Succeed spectacularly at the things that impress adults and you can get away with murder. Drugs, sex, shoplifting, "Rocky Horror," or whatever. I never get caught, not once, not even during the several years when I shoplift with the determination of Winona Ryder, successfully making off with suits, shoes, music, small appliances, and so much cheap jewelry I don't know where to keep it all. I bring this same sense of determination to every aspect of my life, and will never be the sort of person who shirks responsibility. If I say I will do something, I do it. Always; whether a school assignment, a favor for someone, or an unpleasant sexual act. It probably has something to do with wanting to be in control and right all the time. There can be no obstacles to my accomplishment. I must never be unable to perform or forget an obligation.

So getting out of "Winnie the Pooh" rehearsals by means of a pretended Paris weekend is a very unusual thing for me to do, and the jig is potentially up when the same weekend I am supposedly in Paris, my brother Gary dies in a head-on collision.

A Flacid Forty Year Old or a Boy Gentleman

2006-03-23T20:48:00.000-08:00

Sleeping around is easy. Dating? Impossible.
When I am sixteen I think I am in love for a couple of weeks with my speech teacher's husband, who has trouble keeping his erection, and who likes to languidly drape himself on the sofa, smoking, laughing at the bitter ironies of life, and mispronouncing "ennui."

I don't look on my sleeping with him as anything wrong, since his wife, my teacher, seems to know about it, and rumor has it she is sleeping with one of her students anyway. The overwrought dramatics of it all, the seediness, the emotional masochism is very "Valley of the Dolls," and an essential piece of the self-portrait I am creating.

Blinded by ambition he doesn't slow down long enough for love. Will scandal and disaster strike? Will early burn-out and death follow?

Alan Hunt is the boy I really have a crush on. He is kind of gawky but has the kindest eyes and a slight lisp that is boyish rather than effeminate. We are rivals at L.B.J. High School since my year there is supposed to be his year to shine. I arrive, all pushy ambition, with no thought to his plans at all. The drama club there has a habit of giving out awards at the end of the year, and Alan and I are in a run-off for Best Actor. I lose. But I find out that after a huge struggle with himself Alan has actually voted for me. The fact that I still remember losing that award is testament to my own insanity, but I'm still touched by his gesture. I am infatuated with him well before knowing of his vote for me. I am out to most of the people I hang out with, but few others are, and I have no idea whether or not Alan is gay. I know the language of sex but haven't a clue as to the language of courtship. I don't have the foggiest notion about how to approach him.

I think it's very funny when I learn several years later that all during our time in school together Alan is messing around with another guy in our class - someone who later visits me in New York and we sleep together. Small world.

I'm still in touch with Alan, and for some stupid reason I feel weirdly responsible or guilty or something that while for years I sleep around and sleep around with no ill health consequences, Alan gets H.I.V. from his very first proper boyfriend.

Go ahead: Light a cigarette. Laugh hollowly at the bitter ironies of life.

A Fluffer with Frontal Nudity

2006-03-21T18:21:00.000-08:00

The Perk of Having People Falsely Believing Your Dad is a Child Molester

My brother Gary and I share a room my first year of high school when he is eighteen, and I masturbate myself to sleep into a gym sock, some nights fantasizing about him. He makes a funny comment once about knowing I jerk off a lot, but I don't think he quite understands it is sometimes about him. Maybe he does. He is pretty comfortable with being desired by the hoi and the polloi, and at the time is having an affair with a much older woman. She is twenty-three.

I remember everything in my childhood, everything of importance, and as much as all the facts seem like they should point to some sort of sexual abuse in the home going on behind closed doors it never happens. Okay, there is the man I've written about before who my father is friends with when we live in Cairo and I spend one night with him and his family. I am scared and want to sleep with the man. Once we are alone in his bed I ask if I can hold his penis. He looks a little mystified but nods. When I am looking at it, he explains about circumcision. Then I start to cry and he has to call my father to come get me.

My first movie turns out to include a fairly accurate depiction of my vivid childhood fantasy that starts when I am about six, of wanting to get back at my father; the razor-naked-chair thing I have also written about before, where he is naked, tied to a chair, and I slice him up with a razor blade, refusing to kill him, so he can be awake to feel the pain.

In the movie I want to depict the violence of my upbringing, and I want to explore early sexual stuff, but I don't want to make a gay movie since I figure there will be such a limited market for it. I compromise by telling the story of a girl whose father returns after being in prison and wants to take up his sexual relationship with her. She kills him in the end after also accidentally shooting her sister and probably implicating her best friend as well. I wish I could say it is a musical.

On the film festival circuit a lot of the press coverage surrounds my own experiences as a self-proclaimed abused child. As carefully as I explain that my father never sexually abuses me, lots of reviews and articles take to referring to me as a survivor of incest, which I start finding fairly funny. After all, though I know my father has never done anything of the kind, it's a kind of perk if people come away from the movie thinking he is a child molester. That's what I gleefully tell people anyway. It isn't really how I feel. I have no way of knowing since everything in my life becomes a story, a dinner-party anecdote, a way of sparkling in a room. I can't be sure this blog isn't more of the same. It feels honest. What is honesty? I say all this stuff about how there is nothing ever directly sexual with my father, and yet he is always the Naked Dad to me, and while shooting the movie I am hugely attracted to the actor playing his doppelganger, who has a scene with frontal nudity, and likes to tease me by asking me to be his fluffer.

The Curse and Sixth Grade

2006-03-18T16:06:00.000-08:00

Can a Single Tampon Change the Course of Your Life?
I have some sexual play with a girl in sixth grade whose boyfriend, Ben, appeals to me. We almost get to penetrative sex but she is having her period. I try to pull that white little string out of her, not knowing what it is, but she stops me with a giggle. Maybe my life goes a different way in the version of these events where she doesn't have her period, where we have sex all day long, where she gets pregnant and we are married at thirteen. But I doubt it. I am with her because at this age I feel sexual about everything and everyone, but mainly because I have something to prove, since sixth grade is the one school year in my life of out and out torture.

Everyone teases me and calls me faggot. I wear short-shorts and a lot of jewelry that I successfully shoplift. My main tormentor is a rich boy named Christy, and the worst part of it for me is that I found him incredibly attractive. It is no small pleasure to learn while in high school that he becomes known as the Queen of Austin High.

But I have a wonderful teacher for home room my sixth grade year named Kathy Street. One day she takes me out into the hall because my mother has been called to talk about the teasing situation with her and with the principal, and also because I have been caught reading a Jackie Collins book at school, material some teacher or other (not Miss Street) considers to be pornography.

Mom eagerly defends my right to read and to be whatever I want. Two faces. She angrily tells me I should get a sex change if I want to be a girl when she catches me in her stuff, but she soulfully defends same-sex love and cultural differences most of the time, often telling the story of how she sees a movie called "The Fox" which has a lesbian theme, and when the audience starts laughing during a love scene, standing up in the theater, angrily telling everyone to stop laughing, that the love scene is beautiful, and they are all bigots and idiots.

On the way back to the classroom from the principal's office Miss Street says to me that she wants me to know that there is nothing wrong with people being gay. I assure her that I agree, even though I am not gay myself. I don't know why I lie to her. Luckily the school system Austin has at that time houses us all in massive sixth grade centers before packing us off to seventh grade in various junior highs all over town. So junior high is a new start for me, I transform into someone else, someone more aggressive if still a bit girly, and everything is all right after that. I get a bit of teasing here and there, but everyone except the most macho jocks do, especially the speech and drama people, and once I become a high achiever I find that achievement is respected in Texas above all else. If you are good at underwater basket weaving there is an organized system of district, region, area, and state competition. Football may rule the roost but all trophies are prized beyond reason by administrators and teachers, an attitude that seems to trickle down to even the most delinquent of juveniles.

By high school I no longer spend any time with students who aren't high achievers at something or other. Some of them may be into drugs and sex, but to a person they are intelligent and motivated. Like me. So all of us can get away with absolutely anything.

Lucy and Ethel's Vagina Monologue

2006-03-15T16:44:00.000-08:00

Wanting a vagina isn't the same as wanting to be a woman.
I tie a string around our German Shepherd's testicles when I am only about three. It doesn't seem to bother him but when I accidentally step on the string, yanking his balls, he gets a little upset. I don't know why I do it. They are just so interesting looking, lying there like that, and he can lick them himself, which fascinates me. I am not as interested in looking at what I call his "lipstick," a sight that always grosses me out. I get in trouble for the string incident. My father has seen me do it and punishes me accordingly. I think he sends me to my room where I sit eating animal crackers and planning my wardrobe for the day I become a fairy princess.

I am staying one summer with my mother. She has a cat who is supposed to go into heat once before getting spayed. When it happens it is horrifying. She moans, ovulates, and bleeds all over everything, and every time she starts to stop, it all starts up again. Later the vet says she is having some weird heat cycle, where it doesn't seem to want to stop on its own. So she gets her tubes tied without ever going out of heat. But while she is still in the grips of the madness no one knows what to do. Someone tells my mother to get a pencil. I don't immediately understand the intent, which is to penetrate the cat's vagina with a lubed pencil. But the cat keeps biting and running away, horribly affronted at every whisper of a touch of that pencil against her little flower.

As much as I like sex as a boy, even after the pedophile, (especially after the pedophile?) I kind of want a vagina. Not at the expense of having a penis. I just like the idea of being penetrated "properly," with the mechanics getting easier, more "natural." I don't want breasts or anything. Actually, the sexual appeal of breasts to straight guys always eludes me a bit, not the aesthetic appeal mind you; they look lovely in a strapless gown. And the sensitivity of my own nipples makes their sensual importance to their owners perfectly clear, but what's in it for the man, or in the case of lesbians, the other girl, the one touching them and squeezing them and putting them in his or her mouth? Actually I think I can answer my own question since I just realized something I do with my own mouth that isn't necessarily connected to my own... oh, just never mind...

Dicks are so different from vaginas. At school in junior high gym class jocks wander around naked, some of them aggressively so, like one guy at my West Hollywood gym now who plops his genitals on the counter while he shaves at the sink. Talk about a need for antibacterial soap.

Jocks are muscled and fit. Impenetrable. Except for their penises, where one kick can bring the hardest guy to his knees. Vaginas are so much more self-contained and economical. You don't have to put them anywhere, worry about their size, or think about what they look like in a bathing suit. A recent spate of magazine articles about the surgical "rejuvenation" of middle-aged vaginas, though, may mean that vaginal self-consciousness will one day equal penis paranoia, but we'll have to wait and see. See, I'm still fascinated by vaginas. I think Neiman Marcus should offer them in their Christmas catalogue along with all that David Orgell jewelry.

I like to imagine television stars from the '50s in commercials for modern feminine hygiene products. "I'm Lucille Ball, and when my vagina itches I use Monostat 7. It's the greatest!"

Or I look at sitcom plots. "Hey Ethel, remember that time we pretended to be having a lesbian affair to make Fred and Ricky jealous? We thought it would make them so mad, but then the boys just asked if they could watch!"

Then Ricky gets his soundless 8 millimeter home movie camera out from under his twin bed and finally lets Lucy be in the show.

I Am My Own Sex Object

2006-03-13T13:01:00.000-08:00

Is a sex-obsessed kid entitled to be the victim when he makes the first move?
It's during a run of "To Kill a Mockingbird" at a community theatre in Austin when I meet the crossover guy; my first actual adult. I'm acting in a string of shows playing a child, since at eleven, that is what I appear to be. In "Mockingbird" I must boyishly throw a football as if I am an actual boy.

During rehearsals I scope out the crossover guy and I make the first move. It is most emphatically not the other way around. I am absolutely the aggressor. Surrounded by adults, I am very anxious to appear as grown up as possible. I take up smoking with zeal, and learn to laugh hollowly at the bitter ironies of life; just like I do when my grandmother complains about her sex life with my grandfather.

That I have far more ironies to laugh about than most of the grown-ups I am appearing in these shows with is not immediately apparent to them or to me. The desperate seriousness of the artiste destined to be famous has its hooks in me - which I still think of as a kind of virus, far more hazardous to my long-term emotional well-being than a little childhood sex play.

The crossover guy isn't very attractive, but he is kind of funny, and once I make my move he starts doing all the things pedophiles are supposed to do, like buying me liquor, trying lamely to boost my confidence, things like that - all for no reason whatsoever since I am completely certain I'm going to fuck him before I even walk over, and he can save time and money by skipping the cheesy gestures and just getting us to a motel room.

It's with him in a motel when I learned about actual ejaculation, which catches me off guard. I don't ever like revealing that I don't know something and I am afraid my alarmed reaction to the sticky white mess pumping itself out of his penis will reveal my lack of knowledge.

He looks up at me then and says, "I like little boys."

This totally blows my mind. Whatever I look like on the outside, I totally believe he's with me because he sees through my eleven year-old physical self and recognizes the incredibly mature adult inside.

What he says makes it obvious that I am like this thing to him, this child. I don't like children, and I am horrified that he should think me one of them.

It doesn't put me off sex though. I start riding the bus, going to the University of Texas, cruising public bathrooms. I am still eleven. The thrill of discovering glory holes helps me forget how much of a pain in the ass sixth grade is turning out to be. Other people remember the torments of high school, but for me, sixth grade is the nadir of my existence. It is my first year of attending any school anywhere for a whole year without moving. But now I am with my mother. Now we no longer move on.

That there is a probable if totally indirect correlation between my finally being allowed to live with my mother and my sex play with adults doesn't occur to me until about five minutes ago.

Having sex is easier than confronting the differences between the fantasy of wanting her and the reality of getting her. I have new people to fantasize about, grown men, college students, occasionally even people my own age.

What I spend my childhood thinking will be my defining moment, being allowed to be with my mom, comes and goes without my actually being there.

But a stranger might love me completely. Rescue me. Take me to New York. Make me famous. I still crave rescue even as I am supposedly already rescued. My self-awareness only extends to what I want and how to get it. I never think to question what I am doing or who I am.

My mom's boyfriend, soon to be my step-father, David, and I are close still. When I am a child he is playful, loving, and a little more sexy than he imagines I might notice or think about. This is before he becomes so fatherly, back when he is still just Mom's hunky boyfriend, tearing around in an MG, smoking pot while he drives, bounding around the house naked. He is much bigger than my father, Adam. Simple justice.

Years later when I am an adult I finally tell him about all that pre-teen sex with grown-ups. He starts crying, ashamed that he and my mother never knew how needy I was, how troubled and lonely. He says I must have been lonely if I went out looking for that. I don't know. I hid myself from them and from myself. "But you were so good," he keeps saying, "Never any trouble, always good grades, we never thought you had any problems."

Having sex with adults in public restrooms takes no courage at all. Admitting loneliness is next to impossible.

Does Jesus Squirt Too?

2006-03-06T09:15:00.001-08:00

Behind my mother's apartment on Shoal Creek in Austin, back when I am only allowed to spend summers with her, I play around with a young Christian on an old mattress we drag to the middle of a large vacant lot covered with tall weeds that hide us completely. We are both ten. It is one of my summer stays with Mom. The Christian kid is totally freaked out by what we're doing, though he never once stops once we start, and he's always blathering on about how Jesus won't like it. I go along, engaging in earnest discussions about how we will quit doing it tomorrow, next week, next month, while wondering who is this Jesus person and why does he give a damn?

I don't mean that I'm entirely unfamiliar with the idea of Christ and Christianity, I just have no practical knowledge of him as an actual being in his followers' lives - spiritually, ghostly, judgmentally, or otherwise - or as someone who might take an interest in my sex life, which I don't think of yet as a sex life, more like after-school play. Other boys like to play sports. I like playing something else.

I'm pretty sure this is the summer my brother Gary gets into serious trouble with his own sex play - something I don't know about at first. An older, apparently predatory, boy - he is probably about seventeen - had been having sex with Gary, as well as with others in the neighborhood. I call the older boy predatory now, way after the fact. My sense of it then is just that it's the kind of messing around I do all the time. Someone, I don't know who, finds out about it and rats on Gary, who bursts into tears when he has to confess. I am asked a couple of questions. Do I ever spend time with that boy? I can honestly answer no. Then I am put firmly on the periphery and have to eavesdrop from the hall.

I can't fathom why Gary is crying. What on earth is he making such a fuss about? Then I feel jealous. Why hasn't that older boy asked me? Am I ugly? Can't he like me too?

As sexually adventurous as I am, I'm also bizarrely uninformed about the biology of any of it, so my first actual climax, at eleven, is alternately terrifying and the happiest sensation on the planet. I am alone, so I am able to allay my worried incomprehension of what has just happened by reading up in a sex manual which explains everything. I don't read all of it, so I don't get to the part about anything squirting out. That hasn't happened yet. I don't know if this is true for all boys, but for me there is a period of about six or eight months when I have the feeling of climax without any viscosity. Seeing semen for the first time appalls me. At least it doesn't spurt out of me, but out of someone else, my first grown-up. That's really the beginning of my pre-teen sex addict double life. I want more. A lot more.

Tongue Tied

2006-03-04T03:39:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or is every kid having sex?

Every single place I live as a pre-preadolescent comes well stocked with children my age who want to have sex. Never penetrative. Always secret. The lack of emotional mortification we all feel is confusing to me now in an age where all such behavior is regarded as evidence of something sexually evil going on in the home. As bizarre as my childhood is, no one diddles me without me initiating it. Deep down I think it might be less harmful than everyone on "Oprah" wants us to believe.

I know I seriously undermine that statement in my last blog by pointing to the six year-old girl's vaginal ointment as evidence of something not right in her household.

For a while for me as a kid it is pretty evenly divided between girls and boys, but somewhere around the age of about eight or nine my sex play begins to get more exclusively male. And insertive. In Hawaii where we live when I am briefly in the third grade, two slightly older boys meet up with me every afternoon after school. There is usually some pretense of talk about how we are doing this only because there were no girls around who are similarly inclined, which I go along with, preserving their fantasy of normality, even though it seems perfectly silly to me even then.

One of them asks if I want to kiss, and I don't yet know how to do it properly. His saliva is a little acrid. I don't see the point of having his tongue in my mouth when it could be put to such better use elsewhere. A friend of my father's from Blanco, Texas, visits us, bringing his wife and his son, who enthusiastically make our sex play into a foursome - the son, not the father or his wife. One night in the bedroom he is sharing with me, the son wants to play and I am tired. He grins and says if I don't do what he wants he could tell my father what we are up to. It isn't coercive and he really is kidding, but this is the first time it strikes me that some people might consider what we are doing wrong. Maybe that's a little disingenuous. I must have an instinct that it won't be looked upon favorably, otherwise why keep it a secret? But mainly I don't see it as any big deal.

As I mention 2,899,431 times in earlier blogs, there is nothing coy about sex in our family. A plumber points to my step-mother's pregnant bump when she is carrying the kid that is born after my sister, Betsy. The plumber asks Betsy, then about four, whether she knows that her mommy has a baby in her stomach. Betsy snorts as derisively as a four year-old knows how to do. "That's dumb. It isn't in her stomach, it's in her uterus. She didn't eat the baby!"

Sex and the Single Five Year-Old

2006-03-01T09:26:00.000-08:00

When I am five there's this little girl, an older woman, she's six, across the street from where we live in Albuquerque, New Mexico (the place where my father is almost shot and killed - see January 27, 2006 "Magic Bullets and a Fairy Princess"). The little girl and I don't play doctor. We don't need a pretend excuse for sexual gratification.

She asks me point blank whether or not I want her to lick me down there, making me promise to reciprocate if she does.

I like the cool, wet sensation of her tongue, and I don't know orgasms exist yet, being incapable of producing one at the age of five, so there is no lack of a happy ending even though the experience can't technically have one. When it's my turn though, it's tough going, not because I have any problem with reciprocating, as such, but because she has some kind of strange ointment smeared all over her, and I don't like how it smells or tastes. I renege on my end of the bargain.

Only recently do I get past what I consider to be the funny thing of getting but not wanting to give oral pleasure at such a young age (how like a little man-to-be) long enough for it to dawn on me that for a girl of five to have ointment on her vagina and to be initiating sex play with a playmate isn't a good sign. Someone is probably raping her. But she is the aggressor with me and I don't say no. It would never occur to me to say no. I grow up in such sexually free households that the idea of something sexual being ill-advised doesn't register. My parents and step-parents are always running around naked. I know people who never see their mothers without eyeliner. After my mom takes a shower or when she is changing I sometimes see her vagina, or more accurately her pubic hair. Eyeliner doesn't really factor into the equation.

I have no idea that childhood sex play is a taboo of some kind. I also grow up with an absence of media since my father and step-mother don't allow television. Societal concepts of shame are unknown. We are amoral.

The Asiatic Flu

2006-02-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

There will be much more about finally being allowed, at the age of eleven, to live with my mother again; more stories; some deaths; shoplifting; sex; cocaine. But I want to jump back first. I want to finish some of the travels and hold onto my anger for a while, the anger with my father that eats at me still, though only occasionally, in the middle of the night perhaps, or when my mind wanders as I'm stuck on the freeway.

On a trip to Asia when I am seven, our dad, Adam, tries unsuccessfully to get us into Red China. This is the '70s. Carter may be following Nixon's let's-be-friends-with-China example but it's still very difficult for Americans to get the permission to travel there.

To me, it's hard to imagine my father in a totalitarian state unless he is the totalitarian.

He does manage to get us permission to go to Vietnam even though the war's effects are still being felt. My passport from that time even has a visa for Vietnam stamped in it. Before we board the plane, though, someplace at or near the airport in Saigon is bombed by someone or other and we can't go, but I don't mind. The hotel in Bangkok has a petting zoo, and the cooks in the restaurant there knew how to make scrambled eggs the way I like them, hard, nothing gooey or wet like the hotel in Cairo. Thankfully I am not aware of Thailand's burgeoning trade in boy prostitutes. If someone tells me I am sure to run away and sell myself. Give myself, really, for free to all comers.

Instead of going to Vietnam we end up in Hong Kong, where every one of our dollars is worth five! I love that. I feel very lah-dee-dah at the mall there, spending $50 on a Corgi car set, my first experience with actual cash in many a moon. The hotel provides guests with silk robes my father tells us we can take with us when we leave, though it is unclear to me how the hotel management feels about it.

My half-sister Betsy (I just call her my sister) has been born by then and is tagging along. Traveling with a baby is a drag, especially since her mother, Laura, my step-mother, insists on breastfeeding her everywhere. Laura's breasts don't bother me, but the fact that when she does it people can see her hairy underarms mortifies me. And the diaper situation is dire. Laura will only use cloth diapers which means stinky diaper pails and a faint odor of ammonia wherever we stay. I don't care if landfills kill the planet, I don't want to live in a world without disposable diapers. Or air-conditioning.

The Asian travels go on for a couple of months, and seem pointless in a way. Most of the time we sit around the hotel. Dad goes off and does things that I have no knowledge of or concern about. We aren't even tourists really. Just odd Americans ordering a lot of room service and stinking up the place with dirty diapers.

Our return to Blanco, Texas is to be temporary as my dad is building the first of his ranches and we are in town waiting for the houses to be constructed.

My aborted attempt at running away still resonates through our household. A war of attrition is beginning. Adam often tries to talk me out of wanting to leave, to explain, patiently, hypnotically, how his influence is so crucial to my development, how his superior knowledge and far thinking genius is what will make the difference in my life, how it will turn me from the selfish materialist that I am into a caring, brilliant adult.

I think he's full of shit. But all I do is nod and repeat over and over to him that although I know he is right, I still want to live with my mother. Occasionally my hatred and resentment bubbles through and I forget to preface my request with the requisite "I know you are right," but those times are rare.

The ranch makes it all worse to me since to this day I hate the outdoors and anything rustic. Adam and Laura are to be in the main house with my sister Betsy. It is a strikingly designed building with a soaring cathedral ceiling on one side of the house and a glass bridge going over to the bedrooms that occupy the other side of the second story.

My brothers and I are to live in what we call the bunkhouse, so named, one assumes, since we sleep in actual bunk beds.

I may be unhappy about living with my dad and step-mother, but my unhappiness is mitigated by the prospect of having my own house. I think of it as mine, even though it is shared. This is not an unusual reaction for me to have. Adam calls me selfish. Others will echo the judgment. I think of it as just trying to stay alive.

Inventing Sammy Picow

2006-02-25T04:07:00.000-08:00

When I am eleven I finally get to live with my mother. The dreamlike, momentous event, the holy grail, the miracle of all miracles starts with a collapsing ranch.

My grandfather, Zadie, has his third heart attack. Adam, the Naked Father, takes over the cheese business during Zadie's illness, and quickly branches out, opening a classic motor car company and building a huge dream-ranch with an elaborate plan for an indoor/outdoor pool.

This is about two years after running away and after learning that my mother is mine alone (see January 17 "Inner Child/Inner Oedipus" and January 18 "Bernstein Hot in Fem Bowling"). I am in the midst of my overly complicated, mechanically unmanageable plans to fake my own suicide. I start making my feelings more pointedly known. Over and over, like a daily mantra, I tell Adam I hate him. That the only thing I care about is being with my mother.

There are so many allegations about what happens business-wise around this time, and years later the whole troupe will end up in court bickering over it all, but what is unimpeachably clear is that in short order the cheese company is out of money, the car company goes out of business, and a rain storm makes the ranch construction site at the house and pool collapse into a sea of mud.

For the 26,469,328th time I tell Adam I want to live with my mother. He is so stressed out he finally says yes. Just like that. Magic. I pack everything, Mom and her new boyfriend, soon to be husband, David are there by that night to pick me up, though they have to wait because my father, bizarrely, insists that I pick tomatoes before being allowed to leave. (Yeah? Well, better than stripping cedar posts.) I pick a couple of tomatoes, throw a bunch of them on the ground, smash them into bits, and tell him I'm done. Completely, irrevocably done. One of my older half-brothers, Aaron, decides to come with me after Adam opens up the situation by turning to him and my other half-brother, Gary, and sneeringly asking if either of them wants to abandon him as well. Aaron votes himself off the mud island. Gary stays. I don't really know exactly why either one of them make the choices they do. Aaron still doesn't know. I will never find out with Gary since he's dead now.

But as I pack to leave I am uncurious about them, about anyone, about everyone except my mother. All the years of wanting her have by then confused the issue. I don't want to be with her so much as I want to become her.

Before we leave the ranch, David, Mom's new main squeeze, gives me a t-shirt from his new clothing store, David's Station. I put it on with pride. I'm already starting to imagine myself taking his last name. Picow. I will be Sammy Picow. I have no middle name so I add one: Samuel Leonard Picow. Jordan Samuel Picow. Putting on the t-shirt is a direct salvo at my father. I want him to see the new man in my life. I don't remember saying good-bye to anyone. We just drive off.

I am free. From and for what I'm not sure. My double life, the fantasies, the autistic-like breaks from reality; these are what I know, and I hold fast to them, in retrospect, blowing the opportunity to truly experience living with my mother.

Once I get what it is I want, Mom, it all becomes about escape from Adam rather than a return to her. I know the double life so completely that I don't know how to open myself to living just one life, where it is safe to love and be loved.

Mom and I certainly get on all right, and I love the routine and relative quiet of life with her and David. We just don't become very intimate. She is busy, working six days a week at Dillard's department store, and David is involved with his store, and they are newly in love with each other, building a life together.

There is a lot of fun in the house; Neil Diamond on Sunday mornings while Mom makes hot sauce; spaghetti dinners; the continued ritual of eating on the bed together.

I use her curling iron and cut my bangs when she is at work one day. She came home and is furious to discover bits of my hair throughout her make-up drawer. She yells at me that if I want to be a woman I should go have a sex change operation. Then later she tells the story in my hearing, leaving out the part about the curls and the sex change, laughing at how I give myself a haircut and there is hair everywhere. She has two faces too. Like me. The thing is, no one really knows about my two personalities. My thoughts, dreams, and hopes have been volatile and often ugly, monstrous even, for so long, but people see me as sweetness itself. I have an easy manner. Dimples. My brothers and I are alarmingly polite. ("Because they’re scared to death, my cousin Edy tells her husband Bernie when he comments on how fabulously well-behaved we are.)

My evil twin carries a full plate, what with the long cold war against my father, my recognizance missions for information to use against him, my fantasy life as a murderer, and my fantasy life with my mother.

Which is probably why people don't notice my becoming a pre-teen sex addict at the age of ten when I am nearly done living with Adam and Laura, still hating my life, and still maintaining the visage of a little gentleman. Living with Mom doesn't change that part of my life a bit. I just find new partners.

In a Piss-Ant Place

2006-02-22T09:13:00.000-08:00

Six years-old. We live seventeen miles from Johnson City, Texas, birthplace of you-know-who, in an even smaller town called Blanco, a piss-ant place with little more than a bowling alley and cafe, a post office, a small grocer, and an old courthouse falling down in front of everyone's eyes. There is a Dairy Queen and a laundromat at one end and another burger joint at the other.

We will leave in six months, though I don't know that yet, and then three years later we will return, after living in Egypt and visiting Lebanon when I am still six, leaving for a long trip to Asia before I can finish second grade when I am seven, then Hawaii when I am eight, and back to living in Blanco at nine. Got that?

I hate Blanco. On the first go-round my first grade year started there badly as I am intensely bored by my schoolwork at Blanco Elementary. We are expected to study reading from workbooks with no cohesive characters or plotlines. Many times the teacher wants us to read aloud, and the other kids plod along in barely audible monotones. Where is their feeling for drama? For color? After several experiences with a Dick and Jane primer I walk up to the teacher, Mrs. Stowbough, and smile sweetly. "I really don't want to read this shit," I say with no comprehension of how negatively this simple declarative sentence will strike her. She sort of cuffs my ear a bit and tells me she will call my father about the incident. When I get home I tell my father that my teacher hit me. He storms down to that school and tears the poor woman a new asshole. Adam is actually great about things like that, insisting we must never follow authority blindly. It doesn't occur to him that I will turn that logic against him sooner rather than later.

Back to Beelzebubbe

2006-02-20T10:51:00.000-08:00

For a moment I want to get back to my grandmother, Budie a.k.a. Beelzebubbe.

On the record, hand on Koran or whatever: My feelings about her are not negative, not in the least, even as I recognize her limitations. I should be appalled, I know that, and I am, but I'm also not.

I tell stories about her and am gleeful when listeners at the dinner table gasp, eyes popping at the extent of her outrageous behaviors. But when I am a child she has the gift of making me feel like she is letting me into the most exclusive club in the world, since it is a world basically defined by making fun of everyone who is not us. Heady stuff to a preteen. With her I believe I can be omnipotent, I will always be able to strike first before someone has the chance to attack. Without having any depth of character she becomes the largest character of my youth and early adulthood. I always take her side and she usually takes mine, except when it comes to spending money. I am a chemist. I make shit out of money. She also decides later, in my very late teens, to tell everyone I am an alcoholic for no particular reason, though I am not now nor have I ever been a habitual great big drunk - which is not the same as saying I haven't even been a great big drunk on the odd occasion.

Saying I am an alcoholic is a lie but everyone believes her. Later, by her eighties, her convolutions with truth get out of control. She accuses a houseguest she doesn't particularly like of having taken a crap in her bed, ruining the expensive bedspread. An astonishingly audacious lie. She bends the universe to her world, to her truth, believing her lies the minute they come out of her mouth.

I want to bend the universe too, see it through the jaundiced glasses of righteous rage like she does. She becomes my talisman when she starts confiding in me; reliving the gruesome blood when my half-brother's natural mother, Helen, tries to kill herself, opening her eyes wide as she tells me how my older half-brother Aaron, Helen's youngest, beats his head against the side of the crib when he is an infant, giving himself cuts, bruises, and once, a black eye; accusing Adam of being a wife beater, melding stories I tell her of life with him and my step-mother with stories she tells from when Adam and Helen live at home with her and my grandfather Zadie after Gary is born. The stories usually come to some conclusion where she is proven right, or where she gives someone his or her comeuppance.

Yet there is magic and transformation in her back-story. She isn't particularly pretty, but with money, grooming, and flair, she makes herself into a high class dame. Her guileful skills will rub off on me. I will transform from a lumpy child into a swan. I can will it into existence. She is powerful as I will be, willful as I will be, feared as I will be, funny as I will be, and deeply unhappy. That is okay. Unhappiness is also inherited. Pour a scotch. Tell a joke at someone else's expense. Go for the jugular and when they cry snort in their face: "Come on! I'm kidding! Can't you tell?!"

There is a picture taken at the bar mitzvah of her younger son, my uncle. Every other woman there is dowdy by modern standards. Their undefined bosoms sag down to their waists in shapeless dresses that give their waists and hips the impression of being the same size. They are respectable. Dutiful. The mother of the bar mitzvah, only later to be called Buddie and Beelzebubbe, sits apart from the others. She wears a strapless yellow silk dress, her firm breasts pointing out, creating a right angle beneath them down to her tiny waist. She is blonde, her hair is artfully arranged, and a cigarette is casually draped between two of her long red nails.

She stares blankly out at nothing in particular, looking like she has no idea how she ended up in this room, with these people, in this life.

Barbed Wire and the Violent Vegetarian

2006-02-18T12:58:00.000-08:00

We are in Texas. It is winter. I am nine and being kept out of school by my father Adam who does not believe in school. He is building the first of a number of ranches and often puts us to work stripping cedar posts. It is complicated. Some of the bark comes off easily, in big flaps, but the rest has to be cut off with a knife in jagged, small sections, leaving your fingers feeling arthritic and gnarled. I'm not sure how it gets into my father's head for my brothers and me to be unpaid, outdoor slave labor. Retribution for running away the summer before? Does it qualify as our home schooling? We are sent off early each morning with someone else driving us since our father is too busy screaming on the phone to strip cedar posts.

When we arrive at the ranch I often steal the keys to the pickup truck and lock myself inside, refusing to peel posts. I wonder when someone will think to get an extra set of keys but they never do. We need hundreds of stripped cedar posts, thousands it seems like, to use for the barbed-wire fences that circle the acreage we are calling home that month. This is why I want to go to school, this is the kind of day labor I want to avoid. It is like sweatshop work without the shop, and what the government has in mind in the early twentieth century when they ban certain child labor practices. The only relief is losing myself in the grim satisfaction of ripping apart the bark, peeling it back like flesh, stabbing it with my knife, seeing his face.

I really can't imagine what my father is thinking. Maybe he is farsighted and getting us ready for the new global economy, for foreign outsourcing, though now that it is here, I think rather than outdoor work I would prefer being on the phone in India for America Online. I already have the skills to be as unhelpful as any of their customer service reps.

Many years later I become friends with a woman who is a childhood friend of my half-sister's, who is born when I am eight. Her friend is a witness to the Bernstein household long after I have any contact with it. Apparently Adam goes vegetarian at that point. My sister's friend laughingly tells me how when her mother first meets Adam she comes away saying he is the most violent, psychotic vegetarian she has ever met and refuses to be in the same room with him ever again.

Shattered Glass and a 200 IQ

2006-02-15T19:16:00.000-08:00

After the chest burning, after learning I am loved by my too-often naked monster, I start trying to solve the technical problems of faking a suicide attempt.

But I am notoriously poor at working with my hands. I score in the 25th percentile on the portion of an aptitude test that covers spatial and mechanical reasoning. The practical aspects of how to manage a noose, how to let a chair fall without actually killing myself, and then how to make it all seem like a near-miss, while giving the performance of my life when found by my father, proves overly complicated.

I'm ashamed for never having the guts to go through with it. It might have worked, bringing me back to my mother a couple of years earlier than it happens.

At least my discovery of His love emboldens me to be more forthright about wanting to leave. It's so hard to get any time away from Adam, the naked father, even on just a daily basis. He keeps my brothers out of school because he thinks it will be bad for them. Attempts by our step-mother Laura at home schooling are haphazard at best. I not only like to read, but rebel-with-a-cause to the end, I always insist on going to school. I demand it. No matter how much he tries to sweet-talk me out of it. How else could I get the hell out of the house?

Once we move out of Blanco and to a ranch some seventeen miles away, I have to get up very early to catch the bus for school, to go on a two-hour ride that snakes through miles of country roads. I often go out an hour or so early, even before sunrise, to the highway, Ranch Road 165, in front of the gate and the cattle guard that leads to the road on our property, and I wait for the bus, happy to be alone, singing, dreaming of how famous I will be one day.

Maybe Adam thinks we don't need school because his brilliance will rub off on us through osmosis. He tells me he is the smartest person I will ever know in my life. I want to laugh, knowing I shouldn't, but not knowing why. Family lore has it that his childhood IQ score is over 200.

Adam enjoys telling a story about what happens when his parents, Buddie and Zadie, send him to military school hoping to gain control of the little fiend in their midst. One day when he and his fellow military students are in formation outside, my dad becomes obsessed with the idea that he has to quench his thirst immediately with orange juice. He does not raise his hand or ask permission, he just breaks rank and begins making his way back to the building. His commander, or whatever such people are called at military academies, orders him to stop. Adam doesn't respond, just keeps going. The commander then orders several of the older students with some sort of defined older student responsibilities to go after Adam. My father outruns them, refusing to stop. As the chase becomes more in earnest he just runs faster, making his way to the building, tearing down the hall, and sprinting across the mess hall to the kitchen. It is locked. He breaks the glass with his fists, lets himself in, and right there, bleeding all over the floor, pours himself his glass of orange juice.

We all laugh a lot when he tells this story, like trained monkeys. We knew we are supposed to find his sort of "Billy Jack" iconoclasm worthy of respect. I think of it now and I want to peel off all my skin and throw myself into a vat of boiling oil.

The Monster Under the Bed Loves Me

2006-02-14T07:14:00.000-08:00

Finding out my dad Adam loves me happens quite by accident when I burn myself badly. We live in Blanco, Texas, population 1,022. I am seven. I'm looking for ice in the freezer and my step-mother Laura has placed a boiling hot pot of tea on the top shelf to cool. I pull it down, searing my entire torso with the boiling tea. It is bad. My dad races me the seventeen miles to the hospital in Johnson City, and for once I am not afraid of his speed-demon ways in the car. He keeps up a steady stream of conversation with me, about nothing at all really, just hoping to keep my mind off the pain, which is agonizing. He's great in that kind of crisis, knowing just how far to joke, when to pull back and offer soothing sounds of empathy, when to shut up. He and my step-mother give me nothing for the pain before we leave for the hospital. Their organically inclined household isn't like mine now, where I have an embarrassingly large collection of pain pills and tranquilizers on hand. Adam and Laura don't believe in aspirin.

At the hospital the doctors do whatever they do to fix me up. I don't much remember much, though I do recall them wheeling me out to the car and not listening to me when I tell them that I want to shift the hospital gown so that my seven year-old penis isn't hanging there getting cold.

My realization about my dad loving me comes on the drive home. The first thing he does is stop for gas, telling me that the whole way to Johnson City, to the hospital, terror filled him since the gas gauge was on empty. He tells how he is frightened on the trip he might run out of gas but stopping for gas is unthinkable with me in so much pain. That's when it dawns on me that he loves me. He is not remotely a man given to confessing fear or confusion - in fact I don't remember him ever doing it before or since - but his reaction here to me being burned is unmistakably that of someone who is worried about a person he regards with actual love.

I am astounded.

I have given him little consideration beyond wanting to get away from him. Escaping Adam. A Lifetime movie title. I make him a villain without ever thinking of him as an actual person. You don't stop to ponder the humanity of the monster under the bed, you just stab him and run away.

Along with his booming roar of a voice, filled with damning expletives, I now most remember his smile, a sort of shit-eating grin - a self-satisfied smirk that sometimes shifts into a deep, striking kindness before inevitably at some point dropping back into something challenging and ugly. Violence comes even in the quiet times when a word of encouragement can somehow morph into a character autopsy. I am frozen around him. My heart stops. Time doesn't exist as I generally smile and chat away, presenting a face to the world so false it takes my breath away when I think about it now.

On the drive back to Blanco from the hospital, even with the pain of the burns on my chest rekindling and starting to overpower the drugs, thinking of my father having feelings and fears about me blows my mind. I use the pain medication as an excuse, consciously looking like I'm zoning out so I can ponder what I've learned. Adam loves me. The bad man loves me. I turn the realization over and over in my mind, looking at it from every side, wondering if I can turn it to my advantage. The answer hits me with a blinding, scarily adult sort of clarity:

If he loves me I can use that against him, since I don't love him. I know instinctively that not loving holds the tactical advantage over loving. I look at the situation from an emotionless, businesslike perspective, pondering how I might use this new information to gain my freedom from him. Rage may have threaded itself throughout my childhood self but this isn't like that. Realizing that our imbalance of affection will become a weapon of war is a coolly strategic observation, made without rancor. On some level I'm aware this is not the normal observation of a well-adjusted seven year-old.

Shit For Brains

2006-02-12T08:19:00.000-08:00

I think of my grandmother, Buddie, a.k.a. Beelzebubbe born fifty years later. She will start Microsoft or build the Luxor in Vegas or rub out a leader of the Jewish Mafia so she can steal his empire. Hers is a life defined by a kind of misdirected nuclear energy. Maybe having a family is her biggest mistake but doing anything else isn't an option in her town, in her social circle - even as she bolts that circle the first time she and Zadie made a buck, never really looking back except to dredge it up once in a while to prove how she and Zadie are morally superior to everyone else who doesn't know the value of a dollar.

She and a childhood friend save the nickel the streetcar costs, and walk all the way to the movie theatre downtown so they can have both popcorn and a pickle. When I was a child we didn't have feet.

Buddie's favorite place in the world is Vegas, never once said with the preceding "Las." In some years she goes as many as nine times, never winning or losing more than a few thousand, which keeps it from seeming like an addiction. What appeals to her is the timelessness. No phones, no sunlight, no children or grandchildren, and usually no husband. She likes secrets and she withholds information for no real reason, things that don't matter to anyone but her. It has its advantages sometimes. Toward the end of his life Zadie is getting a bit forgetful. It isn't Alzheimer's or even senility, just a general lessening of his mental prowess, like only being able to recognize the abbreviations on the Dow for stocks he owns personally rather than the abbreviations for every single company listed. Buddie has planned a trip to Vegas with a friend. This is completely normal. Zadie no longer wishes to accompany her anywhere. But she keeps the trip secret if for no other reason than because it gives her pleasure. At the last minute her friend backs out, selfishly deciding to stay in San Antonio when her husband has a heart attack. It may be a cliche, but Buddie's actual response is, "Everything happens to me." Later that night Buddie is playing gin with her niece, my cousin Edy. Zadie walks into the kitchen and Buddie turns to him impatiently. "Are you packed yet?" she demands. He looks confused. "Where are we going?" She turns on him violently. "I told you! I told you we were going to Vegas tomorrow! What? Do you have shit for brains now? Is that it? I told you! I told you! I told you all about the trip!" She slaps her hands on the table for emphasis several times, going so far as to disturb the deck of cards next to her placemat. "I told you!" In a bit of a fuddle Zadie mumbles that he will go pack, that he's sorry he forgot. When he is gone Buddie turns to Edy with a laugh. "I didn't tell him."

Black Market Cheese

2006-02-10T14:07:00.000-08:00

My grandparents, Buddie a.k.a. Beelzebubbe and Zadie, are both from very poor families. Zadie leaves school after sixth grade in Chicago so he can help support his mother. He likes to tell us how he once sells a newspaper to a man who takes it over to a car with Al Capone sitting in the back seat. Zadie's main income as a kid is from selling sandwiches to prisoners in the local jail, splitting the money he makes with the guards, greasing the wheels even then. He meets my grandmother not in the jailhouse as certain wags suggest today, but on a job-seeking trip to San Antonio, Texas. Courtship leads to marriage and before he knows it my grandfather is borrowing his father-in-law's bread truck every day at the crack of dawn to make milk deliveries before the bread comes out of the ovens at the bakery.

Zadie is a humble milkman. A mere fifteen years later he has his own thriving cheese and dairy company that grows to the point of being one of the largest distributors of store-labeled cheese in the business. That means his cheese is rarely sold under his company name but instead is packaged to be the Safeway brand, the Kroger brand, or in Texas, the H.E.B. brand; H.E.B. being the most dominant grocery chain in Texas, initialed after its founder, Howard E. Butts, though a Jewish friend of ours gleefully points out that H.E.B. can be construed as standing for Heeb, and I can't think of it any other way now.

How Zadie gets from rags to riches remains murky, though he does admit that one of his biggest breaks is figuring out how to sell black market cheese during World War II, when rationing is in effect. He boasts that the government never bothers him because he always pays taxes on whatever he makes, even the cash that comes in under the table. There are also some incredibly well-timed stock transactions that might now be called insider trading. By the late '40s they are rich. If he were to know now how the business will fall apart years later at different times under the care of his sons, he'd die all over again.

The loss of the business under his descendants might be shocking to him, but he probably would not find it surprising. He avidly enjoys turning to total strangers in restaurants, telling them, "My sons are chemists. They make shit out of money." Later it is our turn, and he says it about the grandkids, much to our annoyance. He is right but we all hate hearing it.

Buddie and Zadie come from nothing and make something of themselves, financially at least, and they see one another as true partners where the money is concerned, neither begrudging the other much of anything, particularly since they are both actually quite frugal a lot of time. Much of her more valuable jewelry comes from Zadie foreclosing on personal loans he makes to people they know, and keeping the jewelry he is holding as security. Imagine the small talk at Hadassah when Buddie flashes a jewel on her finger that everyone there knows actually belongs to some other financially strapped mahjong partner.

Buddie probably gets a big kick out of waving her ill-gotten rocks under their noses. She likes to cackle and then confide to me in her deep baritone, "There's nothing I hate more than a bunch of women."

Felony Fraud and the Ugliest Sable Coat in the History of the World

2006-02-09T09:59:00.000-08:00

We all inherit the seed of larceny from my grandmother Buddie a.k.a. Beelzebubbe. There are many, many illegalities over the years: stealing china in Aruba, smuggling pearls from Hong Kong, taking a loaf of bread from Jerry's Deli in Los Angeles on the night my first movie premieres - but the incident involving her sable coat turned her into a career criminal to me.

My grandparents are married for almost sixty years before the death of my grandfather, whom we call Zadie. Talk of divorce first surfaces in about 1934. They hate each other. You know how you sometimes go out with a couple who fights? How you sit embarrassed in a restaurant while they snipe at one another, each turning to you for confirmation of how idiotic, misguided, and just plain wrong the other one is? Now imagine that couple armed with semiautomatic weapons. Buddie and Zadie are at war from the time I meet them.

The sable is a by-product of a particularly nasty separation when she throws him out of the house. "Let him go live with his mistress," she shouts to me over the phone, her baritone going bass. This is where she mentions the bleeding from his penis thing. To me it isn't too much information. I'm fascinated.

She is so angry at his betrayal, his bleeding putz aside, that she goes out and buys a full-length $14,000.00 sable coat. Money is not a normal flashpoint for them, so her act of economic revenge is kind of weird. Every other couple in the world might argue about money, but my grandparents, the most contentious married people in history, are surprisingly fair-minded about it. Both are from very poor families. When they strike it rich they figure they both deserve it.

So Buddie buying the sable coat as an act of retribution is an aberration. She can buy a sable anytime she wants, no questions asked. She starts hating the coat once they reconcile - well, they're living together again anyway, if not truly reconciled. That crappy sable really is phenomenally ugly, and there it is, day after day, hanging in her closet, reminding her of the recent bad blood between them. That just pisses her off.

The sable is fully insured of course, so she takes to wearing it out to dinner and casually leaving it draped over chairs, hoping someone might steal it. No takers, which gets her even more pissed off. Buddie is defiantly adamant about not wanting to keep that coat. "Why should I have to look at it? Tell me! Why?!" Like that explains everything that follows.

My cousin Edy, Buddie's niece, gets a terse phone call in Northridge, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. "There will be a package for you at the Greyhound bus terminal arriving in three days. Don't ask any questions." Then a click. Edy and Buddie are very close, but becoming a criminal accessory has never been part of my cousin's role in the relationship.

Back in San Antonio Buddie calls the police. "I came home, the door was open, the coat was gone." She sticks to that story no matter who asks the questions. "I came home, the door was open, the coat was gone." When the police point out the lack of signs of a forced entry she remains nonplused. "Maybe they stole a key." She has actually planned it all out rather well. Two days previously she takes most of her jewelry to the safe deposit box, using an upcoming trip as an excuse, reasoning that if she is going to say her coat was stolen, the first question will be about whether anything else is missing, and she knows not to push her luck. One of her diamond rings is worth $75,000.00. As tempting as it is, she can't go there. "Thank God my jewelry was in the vault, or they might have gotten that too." Clever girl.

It gets worse. The man who facilitates her insurance policy is married to Edy's brother's ex-wife, a woman who despite not being a blood relative remains loyal to Buddie, serving as chauffeur, gopher, and schlepper for decades, until my grandmother angrily drops her for no good reason a couple of years before she dies, breaking the woman's heart. But Buddie wants to get rid of that damned sable, she wants her money back, and the force of that desire obscures the idea that committing felony insurance fraud might be wrong, or that screwing over people she considers family isn't very nice.

A few days later Edy drives all the way to downtown Los Angeles and picks up her box. In it are the sable coat, two or three old sport coats of Zadie's, and a broken travel alarm clock. "They also took some of my husband's clothes and a few electrical appliances. I came home, the door was open, the coat was gone."

Everyone knows she is lying but it's impossible to prove. These days they could send a pert medical forensics specialist to locate the trail of sable hairs between Buddie's house and the Greyhound bus terminal in downtown San Antonio, linking the crime to my cousin, and tracing it to the thrift store where well over a decade later Edy finally disposes of it.

I have no doubt Buddie imagines she is doing Edy a good turn by sending her the coat. She urges her to sell it and keep the money. But how exactly does she envision Edy fencing a custom-cut, full-length sable coat, with my grandmother's name embroidered in large silk thread along the lining? The coat sits in the closet, making my cousin nervous for fifteen years. Her house is destroyed twice, once by the Northridge quake, and once by a city bus jumping the curb and knocking off three rooms, but that coat survives. Round about the fifteen-year mark Edy calls me. "I finally got rid of it!" she says. We probably haven't spoken of the sable coat for a few years, but I know immediately what she's talking about, and I knew it's a huge relief to have gotten rid of the burden, no matter how many years has passed.

"I came home, the door was open, the coat was gone."

Scotch and Sympathy

2006-02-08T11:02:00.000-08:00

Once my grandmother, Beelzebubbe, starts giving me the dirt on my brothers' crazy birth mother, the floodgates open and she begins sharing with me the details of her various lawless escapades. She even involves me in minor ones, like shoplifting from supermarkets and filching bits of dishware from restaurants. "Here," she cracks , handing me a stack of sheets and towels from the maid's cart at the Parker Meridien in New York, "Stick these in your suitcase. And could you get some boxes of Kleenex in there too?" I was nervous about it at first. "What's the big deal?!" she says, "They want you to take it!"

She loves breaking the law but never considers herself guilty of anything as serious as stealing, insurance fraud, or international customs violations; which is, properly speaking, what she actually is guilty of. The next time your grandmother starts stuffing Sweet n' Low into her pocketbook at McDonald's, remember, it could be a gateway crime.

Much later, when I am seventeen and move to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, she calls often, cackling over the phone, "Have mink, will travel!" to let me know she wants to see me. I think she's great. She gambles, drinks, bleaches her hair, says "fuck" a lot, and wear an eight carat diamond ring. On her visits to New York we sit up all night playing gin and eating brisket sandwiches from Wolf's on 57th Street.

She's tough. Game. A real broad. I believe she is capable of killing, like Barbara Stanwyck in "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers." I like that. I adore her for all the wrong reasons. I'm embarrassed to admit that it's only just now occurring to me how much she resembles Helen Lawson, the boozy, cruel, beast of Broadway, a viciously funny caricature of Ethel Merman in "Valley of the Dolls" - but then for me everything does somehow loop-the-loop back to Jacqueline Susann.

When I am very little, as young as five, Beelzebubbe has cocktail hour, pouring me a large glass of water with a small amount of Dewar's scotch in it. She believes that an early introduction to alcohol will demystify it enough to keep me from overindulging once I come of age. In actual practice it gives me an incredible tolerance for alcohol. Before I turn fourteen I can drink any adult under the table.

Meet Beelzebubbe

2006-02-07T06:40:00.000-08:00

I now call my dead grandmother Beelzebubbe, which is a combination of "Bubbe," the Jewish word for grandmother and "Beelzebub," another name for Satan. I say it with love. Really. But it is a recent name. For most of our lives we call her "Buddie" instead of Bubbe, since we aren't really Jewish about being Jewish.

When I am insatiably curious about the woman who has emerged as the secret mother of my older brothers it is Buddie who gives me all the gory details, breathlessly recounting in her cigarette rasp of a voice her version of how Helen tries to kill both children and tries to kill herself, before ending up confined to the loony bin, whereupon my father meets my mother in a bowling alley and marries her.

When the court gives Helen's family custody of Gary and Aaron anyway (apparently her dad is a judge) our father steals both kids, then just babies, and whisks them, along with his new wife Sally, destined to be my mother, to Mexico, where they hide out from American authorities for a year or two.

So... He steals the two kids from their mother and leaves. Is it just me, or is a pattern emerging here?

My grandmother’s voice is a throaty cross between Bea Arthur, Marlon Brando in "The Godafther," and Harvey Fierstein. A few years later, after her favorite grandchild, my brother Gary, dies, I will move from second-best into the number one slot. But at the moment I am eager to please her, eager to bond somehow. Her bile at Helen, my brother's birth mother, proves a way in.

When I visit her alone a few months after the running away incident, she isn't particularly upset or surprised that we bolted. Nothing ever really surprises her. We shop for clothes and go to the all-you-can-eat Pizza Hut buffet where I flirt with bulimia while she sits glamorously, just having coffee, pouring out the cold remains in my water glass when the waiter comes to refill her cup, leaving lipstick stains, clicking her long, polished nails against the rim of the coffee cup.

For her the story of Revelation and our running away is about how much of a little monster Adam has always been, and how he was always out to give her as much grief as possible. "He and Helen put me through hell,” she says, "Absolute hell." She does not tell me to respect my father. She calls him a bastard, warming to how much obvious delight I take in her storytelling skills.

She tells me about my grandfather's mistress, bellowing, "I don’t know what he does with her, since with his kidney problems he's bleeding from his goddamned penis." Cool.

I revel in our new closeness. We were equals now and I want more than anything to light one of her cigarettes and smoke it just like she does, taking deep, elegant drags, blowing the smoke away from the table, in between shocking disclosures.

Valley of the Dolls

2006-02-05T16:06:00.000-08:00

I spend most of my time wanting to be someone else. A vague idea at the age of five when we are living in Phoenix, that I will one day be a famous actor, blossoms full-blown at the age of seven, in Texas, when I find an old, dog-eared copy of "Valley of the Dolls" and read it for the first of many times. Masochism, mass love, and misery leap off every page, feeding and paralleling my own sense of drama and martyrdom. These women eagerly accept punishment for wanting so very much from the world, but they also call the shots and Live Large. Their despair is glorious, inevitable, rapturous. Neely O'Hara, Jennifer North, and Anne Wells, my id, ego, and superego. I read it over and over again, some thirty-nine times in the coming five years. I count, marking each reading. I buy into every bit of it, the heartache, the sexual humiliation, the boom/bust cycles of wild success, incapacitating failure, and spectacular rebirth.

Somehow my fantasies about one day being allowed by my father to once again live with my mother get intertwined with my fantasies about living in the world of "Valley of the Dolls." Mom is breathtakingly glamorous to me. Being allowed to live with her is as achingly impossible as Neely, Jennifer, or Anne finding happiness. But I will be like them. I will give up everything to make my dreams come true. My mother and I will be together. We will have whatever we want. I will be loved by the masses and by her as well. I'm such a little freak.

The Irony of the Unintended Fist

2006-02-03T18:11:00.000-08:00

Here is my first crappy memory of my father, Adam: I am three since my parents are in the same bed. Our grandmother, whom I will call Beelzebubbe many years later, gives my brothers and me these small timers on key chains. It takes us a while to figure out how to use them, there is some sort of trick, I don't remember what. But once we understand how we each set our timers for a minute, they tick until time is up, and then they loudly ding. Mom has made some sugar cookies the day before, the kind with colored sugar on top, and we're happily setting our timers, and then eating a cookie at every ding. Eventually we run out of cookies. For some unknown reason I then get it into my head to show the timer to my parents. I toddle into their bedroom where they are lying naked, Mom awake, my father asleep. He is very hairy. Her breasts are very large. She covers them up. I show the timer to her and she smiles. Then I want to show him, Adam, my father, Dad. I creep over and hold the timer to his ear, so he can hear the ticking. The dinger goes off. Adam is startled. His fist shoots out like a boxing glove on an accordion extension in a cartoon. I fly across the room. Then I run back into the kitchen and sit under the table screeching. Both of my parents are mortified. It is an accident, and one of the few times I remember Adam being absolutely sorry about anything. First memory. Unlike many of my generation I earn rather than inherit the right to see the world as a place of immeasurable irony.

Dreams Die Hard

2006-02-02T16:27:00.000-08:00

My fantasy world is one of two extremes - the Eden of what I imagine my life will be like if I can ever live with my mother again, and the Hopped Up Hell of various revenge fantasies, the most common of which involves a faked suicide attempt and my father, Adam's realization of how wrong he is to keep me away from her.

I never find the technical wherewithal to make good on that plan, as my mechanical reasoning skills are notoriously poor.

My favorite idea of revenge, as opposed to the daydream I have most often, is rather more vivid and violent. I am scary inside, like the kid in "The Omen." We're in New Mexico, where the gunman with the rotten aim shoots up our living room, aiming at Dad (see "Magic Bullets and a Fairy Princess"), and I'm five years-old, when I start having a recurring dream: My dad is naked and tied to a metal bed frame. (I will insist for years there is nothing sexual in the scenario, but like, how dumb is that?) Adam struggles wildly. Slowly I advance, straight razor in hand. I start slicing away at bits and pieces of him, making him beg for mercy, for forgiveness, and finally for death. But I keep going slow. I don't want him to die too quickly. If he does he'll miss feeling the pain.

I start having this dream a while before starting first grade. See spot run. See Dick and Jane cross the street. See Dad Die. That sounds like a movie for Lifetime. I should pitch it to Lifetime. Melissa Gilbert can play my mother, Adrian Pasdar can be Dad, and some Disney Channel brat with a pretty pout can be me.

I actually think that particular fantasy is healthy under the circumstances. Stop laughing and hear me out. It's about control, about forcing him to empathize with what I'm feeling, and about a deep-seated belief that what's happening to me is wrong. I mean, it's not like I ever actually try to make the fantasy a reality. Clearly, if I can't manage one little pseudo-suicide attempt, how in the world can I get him naked and tied to a chair?

Of course, if I actually had sliced him to ribbons, selling the story to Lifetime would be a slam dunk, but I would hold out for a feature film. Then Hilary Swank could play me and win a third Oscar for playing a boy. Actually parts of it already are a movie, my first, a gritty drama called "Silent Lies" that wins some awards at festivals in 1996, miraculously gets picked up for distribution, and starts me on my way to the Hollywood High Life.

I am now a very different kind of prisoner.

Note: Actor Michael Harris, above, as "Carl Saltemier" in a still from "Silent Lies."

We love You

The Lawman and the Little Boy

2006-02-01T15:09:00.000-08:00

I have it all planned out: Aaron and I will run away and Gary will stay behind to tearfully explain that we won't ever come back unless Dad agrees we can all stay with Mom. My mother. Forever. I am willing to share her with my nowhalf-brothers since I know she belongs to me alone. I'm so generous.

Aaron and I trudge over ten miles, following the freeway access road, back toward the airport, to an apartment complex Mom lived in when she first got to Austin. There is a friendly neighbor there, someone we think can help us, hide us, maybe even feed us. The neighbor isn't home. We sit, waiting on the outdoor stairs that go up to the second floor of the complex. Several other tenants demand to know what we're up to. We decline to answer, only saying we're waiting for the neighbor to get home, that we are expected. One of the bastards calls the cops, and next thing we know a sheriff's car pulls up.

A sweaty, muscle-bound redneck in uniform ambles over. I think he's pretty cute but thankfully I resist offering to become his one and only little boy right on the spot. Such an offer might further complicate the trouble we're already in. There is a lecture at the station, along with dire warnings of what happens to evil children who break the law. Twenty years or so later the Travis County District Attorney indicts an eleven year-old learning-disabled African-American girl for a murder she decidedly has not committed. They are a serious bunch. I often think of the officer over the next few years in private moments - a delicate way of saying I close my eyes and picture him when I play with myself.

The dreamboat lawman dumps us back at Mom's house. She looks miserable. Gary has probably screwed up his part of the plan, I think, so I'm not sure if she quite gets that we ran away not from her but from Adam. Later I know she knows. Just not at the moment. Adam interrogates us, which is terrifying. God, his voice. If a razor could roar it would sound like him. I am not sorry and I don't pretend. Usually I am very good at pretending. I don't know about the Stockholm Syndrome yet but I think I instinctively understand that hostages who at least act like they identify with their captors have a better shot at making it out alive. I know how to give a reasonable facsimile of identifying with my captor but sometimes the pressure builds up too far, and without warning my head cracks open, splattering the room with bile and pus. My father's interrogation is one of those moments. I know I should act like I'm sorry but his every accusation infuriates me further. Gary and Aaron are crying. I keep my head down but suddenly the words, "Fuck you," come out of my mouth, aimed in his direction. I am in terrible danger. My captor sees the truth, his outraged, "What did you say?!" scaring me straight. I cry out, lying, screaming that what I said was, "I'm sorry!" which Dad isn't fool enough to believe. He picks me up like he wants to tear me in half and takes off down the hall with me hanging from his shoulder. My mother shudders like she might break apart but does nothing to stop him.

Once he has me, though, he doesn't quite know what to do with me. Maybe I freak him out too much. Maybe he senses how my thoughts revert to other father figures, to my cop, to men. Finally Dad takes me to the bedroom my brothers and I are sharing that summer and unceremoniously dumps me on my twin bed. I melt into the cool feeling of the blue leatherette bedspread against my cheek as I check out, privately losing myself inside a world of my own creation.

I am a princess. My own personal lawman rescues me.

Busted by the Fuzz

2006-01-31T14:17:00.000-08:00

Daydreaming about saviors helps me get through the days of confinement, the years with my father and step-mother, of my mother existing only as an unattainable panacea.

Back to the summer when I am nine, when I find that, as I have fantasized, Mom is only mine and not my brothers' (if you joined the blog late in the game, go back to the beginning to learn about it all).

The magic of the Oedipal Revelation is the engine that drives all my dreams, even as I know my father will still make me live with him. But life isn't supposed to happen this way. You aren't meant to wish for something as primal as full ownership of your mother and get it. Even my shrink thinks it's wacky. The knowledge makes me giddy and reckless, giving me an unreasonable feeling of power over my brothers and potentially over my father.

The summer of the Revelation is almost over. I play the moment of Knowledge over and over in my mind at night, unable to sleep, trying to understand how this information that changes everything might affect my actual day-to-day existence. It means everything to me and nothing to my father, who still expects me, us, to return to live with him at the end of August. I decide to force his hand. In my own screwy way I think tactically and figure he must be made to see how serious my unhappiness is.

So I run away and get arrested.

Well, in all fairness to the Travis County Sheriff's Department, my brother Aaron and I are only made to hang around the station for the afternoon. We aren't actually fingerprinted and booked, or put on a chain gang or anything like that, which is surprising, Texas justice being what it is. I want to call Aaron my co-conspirator in running away but I can't since I am the instigator. We ditch Gary, telling him someone has to stay behind and deliver our demands. My now-half-brothers are twelve and thirteen. I am nine. Maybe they let me play fearless leader because they know I'm playing for keeps.

Vegas Savior in a Bikini

2006-01-29T16:26:00.000-08:00

I want my mother so badly I save every single scrap of paper or greeting card she sends me, rereading them, holding them, smelling the traces of Givinchy L'Interdit. She is a fetish.

I'm held against my will by the evil man who calls himself Dad, and my only potential Savior is my mother.

Except for occasional Alternate Savior possibilities.

I meet Mrs. Rosen, a curvy forty-ish woman in the pool, during a three-month stay in Vegas when I am eight. She is an excellent Alternate Savior possibility.

This is two years after Cairo. Adam, the Dad, has taken us to Caesar's Palace and is said by his mother, my grandmother, Beelzebubbe, to be losing something in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars. I am told Caesar's mistakenly believes my grandfather, Adam's father, will pay whatever is owed. As my dad sinks deeper into debt they keep moving us to glitzier comped rooms and we have no limit on our free room signing privileges. In the final few weeks we are in a penthouse suite with purple velvet everywhere.

The fact that Adam apparently never pays Caesar's the money he has lost confuses me greatly. Don't they kill people who do that?

There is a whirlpool area of the pool where you put a silver dollar into a slot and the water jets tickle your crotch if you maneuver yourself into the right position. I almost never get to use the whirlpool since getting hold of an actual dollar in cash is always hard, even as signing for a $200 meal is not a problem. One morning I treat six people to breakfast. Reminder: I am eight years old.

When I meet Mrs. Rosen at the pool she wears a blue bikini over her tanned body. Her black hair reminds me of Mom. She is warm and gregarious, an easy talker. If she thinks my paying for lunch is bizarre she doesn't say so. We talk about everything and nothing and bond thoroughly. After I walk her to her suite and say good-be, I spend the rest of the afternoon feverishly envisioning my future. My new life will start with my emotional confession to Mrs. Rosen of my Dickensian circumstances, her loving embrace with promises to adopt me, and a fresh start with her under an assumed name. (I'm uncertain whether I imagine Mr. Rosen liking me or Mrs. Rosen dumping him so she can be with me exclusively.) By the time I work up the courage to go find Mrs. Rosen and throw myself on her mercy I can't remember where her room is. I wander up and down the flocked hallways knocking on doors without success. I feel such shame. I have thrown away my one chance for happiness.

A present day note: For the record, I may have been precocious, but I did not, in fact, know the word "Dickensian" when I was eight. If I had heard the term, I would have assumed it meant Angie Dickensian.

Magic Bullets and a Fairy Princess

2006-01-27T03:21:00.000-08:00

Through the strangeness, the violence, the sex, I retain a weirdly positive attitude most of the time, undoubtedly rooted in fierce, if rather demented, denial. This is disastrously exacerbated by the whole Oedipal-Inner-Wacko experience of learning Mom is mine alone. Never mind the kidnapping Dad who keeps me from her most of the time. In my longing for her I concoct a fantasy that she has no connection with my brothers or my father. She is mine alone. I go back to these two words, mine alone, like a mantra as I rock back and forth. My expectations of the world are forever warped during the summer I am nine, in Texas, when I find out she is, as a matter of literal fact, mine, alone, when I learn of the other mother, the one in the loony bin that my brothers must now call their own. It's mind blowing and dangerous. It is, after all, the event that starts this saga… The event that leads inevitably to the bumping off of my Inner Child.

The power of this Revelation isn’t just about showing me that my deepest desires can actually come true, that Mom can be mine as I wish. No, this breathtaking fulfillment of my unspoken dreams infuses me with expectations of other miracles. Maybe I can escape my father too.

After discovering my personal connection to the magical side of the universe I begin to hope my father Adam will just go away.

Before Cairo, when I am about four, someone in New Mexico anonymously tries to shoot him through the sliding glass door leading to the backyard, leaving a bullet hole in a painting. The bullet misses his head, but just by inches. Magic. He might even be taken away. We never know who shoots at him. I have a vague memory of being told it has something to do with the C.I.A. but I don't think he is important enough for that. Not everything is a cloak and dagger story. Not everything is epic. I would love it if it is just that Adam is sleeping with someone else's wife and the guy gets drunk and comes after him, but that isn't the kind of life we live. Motives are never that clear.

He is a near-victim of a bullet in New Mexico several years before the universe drops the ownership of my mother into my lap. I vow the magic will work again. Once I am free of him I will work on my next secret wish - to become a fairy princess. But that's another story.

The Naked Dad Problem

2006-01-25T09:23:00.000-08:00

Part of my father Adam's superhuman shock value and power comes from the fact that we believe he can do anything. Later, after Egypt, after a million other places, a friend of his in South Africa calls, crying, saying her ex has taken their child. All she knows is that they are supposedly somewhere in the Alps. She doesn't know what country. My father gets on a plane to Europe and finds that kid in two days. The irony of his returning a child taken from its mother does not occur to him. There is no superhuman to rescue me, to return me to my mother when Adam takes me at the age of five. I don't want anything the next six years with him brings - not the world travels, not the upheaval, not the violence. A razor blade goes missing once. My brothers and I are lined up as one-by-one we are asked whether we are responsible. Dad slugs us in the face, going down the row, until one of us confesses. I forget which it is, but I don't think I'm the one.

The sexual experiences start early. Five. It feels incredibly good. Is the idea of kid-sex rooted directly in the whole hot-naked-dad-problem? Or is the adult prism, the looking back, is that unduly influenced by the satisfying gasps and horror-filled eyes of adults I now tell? When I am five and the little girl next door is six we don't play doctor, we don't play post office - we have oral sex. The only surprise to me now is that it's a girl the first time. Maybe there are others earlier. Now that I think of it, there is, a boy with an overly sandy crotch. The grains of sand taste too gritty and I don't like it. We're four. Also no pretense of playing a child's game here.

Is this a direct path from Dad? Does violence lead to tasting a sandy crotch? Aside from fear tactics, empathy is my father's greatest weapon. If you talk to him for any length of time he walks away knowing everything in your heart, especially your weaknesses. While oozing genuine understanding and charm he ferrets out what he can use against you. Half the time he probably isn’t even aware he's doing it. Sometimes it can be something small - guessing he can tease you to tears about your looks, for instance, or knowing you're a kid who's embarrassed about the child-like size of your penis in relation to his. It could also be something that affects you for the rest of your life, like using your mother's deep sense of shame and uncertainty about her background to convince her she's unfit to care for a child. You know. Something like that.

Many years later my father accidentally admits something to my cousin Edy. It happens in such a trite, "Law & Order" way that even now it makes me giggle. Whatever else I think of him never imagine Dad capable of reducing himself to making an easy slip on the witness stand. Edy is on the phone with him and asks how things are, and he tells her how aggravated he is with Aaron, who is in his mid-20s at the moment, and on the outs with him. He tells how Aaron has crazy ideas that as a child he is beaten and abused, allegations Adam heatedly denies. My cousin asks him, "Well, what if Sam has the same memories?" That's when Adam loses the plot, telling her, "Not Sam, maybe Gary and Aaron, but I never hit Sam." After thinking of him as a superhuman genius, the fact that he implicates himself, admits to hitting Aaron and Gary so easily and stupidly, is thrilling. You can see the late Jerry Orbach turning to Sam Waterston: "We got our guy."

The few times Adam hits me, with his fist, in my face, make a big impression on me. But the barrage of sound, the screaming, the constant everyday vitriol make me think it can happen again at any moment. That's worse. That's what can still wake me up at night, Dad's voice in a bad dream, all these years later. No words, really. Just a roar. My brother Aaron feels it the same way. Plus he wakes up thinking that a million pound weight is bearing down on his chest, forcing the life out of him, all the while the roar screaming away, surrounding him, penetrating every part, until he dies.

Thalidomide Boy

2006-01-24T09:52:00.000-08:00

Our first few months in Egypt we stay at the Cairo Hilton, where the scrambled eggs are always watery and gooey, no matter how many times you beg or send them back. And then we live in a rented flat for a month or two. My six year-old Self as well as my ancient, already aged Inner Child is most impressed by a cripple on the street nearby, rolling along on a board with wheels. He must be a Thalidomide baby. He has no limbs at all, just one flipper that he uses to propel himself. A cigarette hangs almost sexily from his mouth. I love that. He is a poor, deformed mess, but he still has the insouciance to smoke.

I suffer through watery eggs every day. I want my mother. I imagine what it is like to have flippers instead of arms and legs. Powerless. Cursed. At least, I think, the Thalidomide Man is free. He is able to wear his True Self on his outsides. (I am probably very wrong about that. Now I think his True Self, the one in his heart, probably has legs, arms, hands...) But as repelled and scared as I am by him, I am also enthralled. And at least he can smoke in peace.

This is our first overseas trip with our new step-mother, Laura. Her pigtails, braces, and peasant blouses make her seem prepubescent. The hair under her arms does not. She is barely of legal age. I don't know why I'm being so snide about her since she is kind and deeply concerned about the three boys that have been dumped in her lap, me and my brothers Aaron and Gary. Laura later tells me about ongoing incidents where I disappear for hours at a time, rocking, eyes blank, like an autistic person, an idiot if not a savant. She says she takes me in her arms and holds me tight, desperately trying to will me into coming back, but that I am always reluctant to return. She worries one day I will disappear forever. I like that idea.

Naked in Cairo

2006-01-22T16:05:00.000-08:00

Mom is a glimmer during most of this time. Between visits I don't remember much about actually being with her, maybe a smile, a card, the way her laugh stays with me. I think of her when I fall asleep in some foreign city or when we live in the middle of nowhere on ranches, and I hold her close, trying to remember her smell, how her hair feels, how she paints her nails.

My brother Aaron and I try to fit the puzzle pieces together of where we live and where we travel as children. We almost always get the order wrong but can recall all of the luxury. We are never rich. Sometimes in the years that follow there is barely enough cash in our step-mother's purse for my brothers and I to steal, leaving us chronically short of cigarette money. I am told that flying first class throughout my time with Adam and Laura is possible because our dad has a judge let him take control of some money our grandfather puts aside for us. That's what our grandmother says. It feels true whether or not it is. Plus Adam supposedly stiffs American Express for something like a hundred grand. That must have helped keep us in four-star hotels. But the money always runs out since it seems he never has a real job and rarely earns any kind of living. There are businesses sometimes, and ranches, but no jobs, and no steady money. We don't usually do much as a family on our travels.

I am taken out of the first grade in Blanco, Texas and we move to Cairo, Egypt. We are fairly atypical Jewish visitors since we are there before peace is declared and Adam may or may not be selling arms and ammunition to the Palestinians. There are propaganda films in the theaters that show Israelis using napalm to burn innocent Egyptian children to death, and I watch in rapt wonder as skin peels off the victims, bloody, scabbed, on fire. There are blackouts. It is not for a decade that I think to note that I am quivering in the dark, frightened, numb from the terror of being bombed by My Own People.

Lots of times upon hearing how much we move around people ask if my father is in the military. I tell them he is a pirate. Bluebeard in blue jeans. Propelling me down the plank with words that tear me apart at a volume that shatters glass. He is brutishly attractive in a skinny, Alec Baldwin-punching-photographers way. I watch him as he stalks around in the nude, wondering what it would feel like to touch his dick. Instead of doing that I wait until I am spending the night with an Egyptian man and his family, a guy my Dad has befriended. I am six. The man sleeps alone, without his wife, and asks me if I want to sleep in his bed with him. I reach into his pants and hold his penis, its warmth sending a strange sort of shock into my fingertips. It is all my idea. He is going along with it but clearly confused. I start to cry and ask to go home.

Kill Your Dad For Lent

2006-01-19T13:43:00.000-08:00

We are culturally Jewish if religious unbelievers. Lent is not our thing. But the idea of killing for spiritual sacrifice has such emotional resonance.

On the day that changes my life forever with the magical, Oedipal gift of Mom being mine alone, our dad Adam arrives breathless after his drive from the Hill Country ranch he is building. Adam always drives like a bat out of hell. He says he once comes in third in the Mexican Grand Prix. He tells us seat belts are dangerous. He is a car screamer. I forget which half brother utters his first words, moyah hoyah, an attempt at mother fucker, the words we all hear most often in the car from our father.

Adam does not have to be in the car to scream. When we live on one of his ranches I get up to catch the school bus very early, so I usually cook my own breakfast. Often he will be up early as well, on the phone with some of his mysterious (Palestinian?) business associates. One morning he is screaming on the phone in the kitchen. I creep in to fry up some eggs. I must stop to think before acting: If I crack the eggs against the side of the pan it could make the pan clatter loudly on the burner. But if I crack them on the counter I might drip some of the egg whites. I choose the latter plan, resigned to my fate as he takes time away from screaming on the phone to scream at me that I am a fucking, cocksucking idiot, why is it I cannot see I am dripping fucking egg all over the goddamned kitchen, and what the fuck do I think I am doing. He does not hit me. He rarely does, maybe only three or four major times in my life, but I always think he will.

On the night of the Demented Inner Child Oedipal wish coming true Mom and Dad say they need to talk to us because Aaron, the middle brother, met a woman on a Greyhound bus while traveling from Austin to see our grandmother in San Antonio. He returns to Austin that afternoon, telling Mom about the woman he meets, and in turn, Mom calls her ex, my father, the one who will die for Lent. The stupid, unbelievably coincidental way it happens is that Aaron and the woman on the bus are chattering away when she apparently realizes she knows him, met him as a baby, because she is a former friend of his mother, Helen. My mother is named Sally, Aaron says. Not Sally, says the woman, You know, your real mother, Helen. You cannot make this shit up. The meeting is totally by chance. Adam is in his best, most genuine, most concerned mode, explaining how their mother, the other mother, the mother who makes my mother mine alone, is sick, and that he and my mother spent two and a half years in Mexico so my (half) brothers will be safe. Huh? I knew there is more to this story. But Adam just assures my brothers (again: half brothers!) over and over that they are loved, and that my mother is still their mother, while inside I scream with glee: No she is not! No she is not!

Finding out she is mine gives me hope. Adam will not let me live with her but since she now belongs only to me it seems destined that we will one day be reunited. The fact that I often see her on weekends and summers makes no impression on the drama of my longing for her. It is always as if I have not seen her in years. When Adam first moves us to Texas from New Mexico I am only six and I do not know where my mother is for a whole year. That is exactly how I remember it and how it feels. It has been pointed out to me many times that this is patently untrue. I only go a few months without seeing her. I am told all the time when I ask that she will be moving to Texas and I will see her soon. I do not remember that. She is missing. Stolen. I am kidnapped.

I never will know exactly how Adam got me away from Mom. The law is not a consideration in our numerous households. Ever. He just does what he wants, teaching us a deep disrespect for any form of authority and encouraging a disorienting kind of lawlessness that makes no sense, since when we live with him it is like being in the military. His rules are seemingly ironclad but they change according to his mood. In the guise of celebrating the last dregs of some variant of Flower Power we live under a reign as paranoid as anything Nixon or Bush II could think up. I am a political prisoner without a political cause. Occasionally, like when I am eight and our dad inexplicably keeps us cooped up at the Palace of Caesar in Las Vegas for three whole months, I up my classification to concentration camp victim. Nazi Germany and three months in Vegas. Before they died Susan Sontag or Hannah Arendt should have written about how similar the two experiences can be.

Bernstein Hot In Fem Bowling

2006-01-18T12:36:00.000-08:00

There is much backstory to how my mother is secretly mine alone and not mother to either of my older brothers. Another blog will tell of Dad abducting the boys and heading for Mexico with my mother to take care of them, to keep them away from their "real" mother. Of how they are raised by MY mother without ever knowing the truth. Until five years after the divorce. Until the night in the bedroom. The night my Inner Child greedily gets exactly what he always wanted. Her.

I cannot see my mother as a person. Yet I will kill for her, kill for the glamorous, all knowing, all loving force who will give me the perfect life if only I can escape. From him. Dad. The badman. I love everything about her. Sexy. Even I can see that. And funny. I have a picture of her where her hair is frosted and teased within an inch of its life, and she wears a silk stole over her bare shoulders. She turns to me with a grin and says the photographer is very good looking, that she is naked under the stole, and that my father will throw a fit if he knows. This is before they mercifully split up, before he steals me away from her.

I am unreasonably proud of her bowling skills. She is a champion. A gigantic trophy she wins by scoring 279 in her final game of a tournament is a treasured possession. Her bowling skirts are always short and her legs are always good. During one championship tournament a newspaper runs a picture of her from behind with her leg kicked high in the air, the unmistakable bowling stance while throwing the ball. You cannot see her underpants or anything, but the headline says it all: Bernstein Hot in Fem Bowling. I am the kind of child who gets the double entendre. Years later I tell my mother that the picture with the article framed is hanging on the wall of my kitchen. She gets upset which mystifies me. For some reason she thinks I must be sitting around with my friends laughing at it, laughing at her. She has no clue. Make fun of her to my friends? I invite them to worship her with me. I bathe in the fact that Mom is Hot in Fem Bowling. I am so in love with her. My attachment is beyond obsessive. Language has not evolved far enough to completely encompass the depth of my madness…

Inner Child/Inner Oedipus

2006-01-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

She belongs to me alone.
My Inner Child, Inner Oedipus, Inner Freak sees her as a sexual being, if not a sexual object. Her long legs and ample breasts, her classically beautiful face, frosted hair… Do I want to be with her or just BE her? With age and dates I jump around a lot. The Palestinian Egypt connection happens at six. At the moment I am nine. I sit quietly with Mom and my two brothers in her bedroom as the epic unfolds. She is mine now, mine forever. I would thank God but we are a family of atheists so my sense of Him is murky. This particular night of my deep joy that should never have happened starts out normally. Our father, Adam, is allowing us to spend the summer with our Mom, Sally, in Austin, Texas. My two brothers, Gary, thirteen, and Aaron, twelve, are gathered in her room, which is typical. We all often lie in her bed watching television, our dinner plates flat on our chests, a practice I follow still, though back then bits of spaghetti rarely got tangled in my chest hair since I had none.

That is how it is. We are pigging out on tacos.

Then suddenly Dad arrives and it all starts tumbling out of them, of Dad really, with Mom putting her arms around Aaron, who has no clue what might be going on, while she throws Gary supportive glances. I am virtually ignored, an incredibly rare thing that makes me so indignant I almost miss the real news. Our father gives us a few careful facts. He was married to someone before our mom Sally, to a local girl in San Antonio named Helen, and she was the one who gave birth to Gary and Aaron. A woman who is now, I kid you not, in a mental hospital. The parental units focus entirely on my two brothers, imagining, I guess, that they are the ones whose lives are about to change. They have no idea. My head wants to explode. The rush of joy is suffused with pain and mystery. I want to laugh, sing, and cry all at the same time, but I just sit there as my heart stops, time stops, and I silently let the Revelation flow through me. I have always wished for my mother to belong to me alone. Desperately. Secretly. And now she does.

Sally is my mother. Not their mother. Just mine. My father, the man who keeps me hostage mostly, away from her, traveling, in Egypt, in the Orient, in Hawaii, in California, my father, the bane of my existence has unknowingly given me the greatest gift possible. My sexy mother belongs only to me. My brothers? Let them go fantasize about the crazy woman in the hospital who gave birth to them.

Magical Thinking

2006-01-16T17:48:00.000-08:00

There are things that should never come true, Oedipal, irreversible things that warp your expectations. Something desperately wished for is plopped in your lap, like it is the most normal thing in the world, like it could happen again. Just for you. You learn to think magically about the universe. Sometimes it can be harmless, like believing if you win at Spider Solitaire then the person you met last night will call today and be your one true love. At its worst magical thinking leads to Santeria and blood sacrifice. I know. I once saw the chicken die. But I had a good reason. A reason that as I post on this blog in the coming days and months will lead you directly to my central point: Do not reclaim your Inner Child. Kill the little bastard.