If I wasn’t around the previous evening, I can always tell what kind of nuts Jack was serving during McNeil/Lehrer Happy Hour because I find them whole and undigested in Jackson’s diaper the next afternoon. YES, IT MUST BE A SLOW WEEK IF I’M WRITING ABOUT THE SILENT, PAINLESS JOURNEY OF SEVERAL ROASTED PEANUTS THROUGH MY SON’S DIGESTIVE TRACT. So very extra slow, in fact, that I might as well just post another fossil from my parents’ basement and go clean something.
. . . every once in awhile they give me a good haunting. This is a picture of me and Robert at the Columbine High School Homecoming Dance 1979. We met at a speech meet* the winter I turned fourteen (he was fifteen). I gave him my phone number and he called that very night. I think we spent three hours twisting up phone cords and talking about how boring we were, which was, of course, fascinating. Here you see Robert wearing a fashionable Rooster knit tie and Calvin Klein camouflage shirt/jacket combo. I have on a teal velvet skirt and a polyester teal-and-flowers blouse, both made by my mother. (Astonishing, yes, that she actually finished them in time for the dance.) Robert here is thinking, “This is so fucking stupid I can’t believe it.” I am thinking, “Tilt chin down,” because it is two months after having my photo taken by a professional photographer who kept yanking my chin toward my undeveloped chest in order to hide my babyfat under my cheekbones. I still have both copies of this picture because Robert didn’t want his. I tried to be cool about it, but come on. This was the guy who for my sixteenth birthday gave me a copy of Never Mind the Bullocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, and two stuffed monkeys hugging each other.
*Ah, the National Forensics League. Robert was in extemp, where the judges gave you a random topic — oil prices, guinea pigs — and you had five minutes to come up with a two-minute speech about it. It helps if you’re a fantastic bullshitter. I was in the humor division, where you memorized a ten-minute “cutting” — I used mainly Woody Allen or Dorothy Parker short stories — and then performed it in three different rounds in front of a judge and five to ten of your competitors who would try to psych you out by not laughing at the jokes.
Robert and I dated, on and off, for about seven years, but it was by no means an exclusive relationship, and we never went all the way. At one point I remember he picked me up for a date in an unfamiliar car that had a pair of pom poms in the back seat. “Oh, I gave a cheerleader a ride home,” he said. I later found out that it was the cheerleader’s car, and that he was dating her, and that he had the balls to borrow her car to take me out and lie to both of us about it. He also told her that he got me pregnant and I had to have an abortion; he told me pretty much the same story, too, but about a fictional girl at his school. I got it all straightened out when my school played his school in lacrosse and I was on the field defending yet another girl he’d gone out with. It was a slow game so we had a lot of time to talk.
Anyway, I eventually met the cheerleader at a Clash concert and we really hit it off. Robert sat scowling about three rows down from us while we laughed and laughed about all the shit he’d told us. By this time he’d become a blackout drinker, and our dates inevitably ended up in one of several Denver dives — The Cricket and The Mercury Lounge are two that I remember– and he was living in the basement of a friend’s house. The last time I saw him I was dropping him off at Vassar. He was starting his freshman year as I was beginning my senior year at Connecticut College (he’d had a disastrous year in Boulder before dropping out to lay sod and grow up some), and we’d shared the drive from Denver to New York in my Volkswagen. I got a few fucked up, drunken phone calls in my dorm that year, and then nothing until he tracked me down in Brooklyn a few years later. We yakked for a good twenty minutes as though we’d seen each other only yesterday, and then he asked me to meet him and his friends at the Plaza, but it was already late and a weeknight, and knowing I wouldn’t even make it uptown until midnight, and knowing what a disastrous state I’d be in for work the next morning, I said no. I think he went to Seattle after that. Who knows.
On the left is me and Jay, later the same year. My mom made this dress, too. Jay looks like George Hamilton’s bastard son in this photo, but I must say I appreciated the effort of getting a tuxedo and all. He took me to dinner at a restaurant owned by his three older brothers. He brought a little flask of brandy and a blanket for after the prom. I was too shy to dance with him, or anything else with him, and I think the evening ended on a politely early note. I wrote a short story about it in college. I ran into Jay about ten years later as I was walking down Broadway carrying sacks of lunch for my Shakespeare & Co. coworkers. I was in a dykey boots-and-crewcut period, and Jay looked like Stephen Seagal on safari, like a Tom of Finland wet dream, and appeared to be “with” a gorgeous blonde woman who gave me kind of a twisty “who the hell are you?” look. We were genuinely shocked to see each other, I think, and he said to call him, he was living in the village, he was in the book. I did try to call him later but got a machine, and didn’t leave a message because I didn’t really have anything to say besides, “I see you’ve kept up your tan!”
I don’t want to bore you by listing all the stuff we found in my parents’ basement (and my old room, which was being used just to hold the overflow), but holy cow, there was some stuff in there. Matchbox cars, slot cars with twenty Earth miles of plastic slotted track, old license plates, car parts, for all I know there’s a whole car in there somewhere, we’re still not done and now I’m back in California until it’s my shift again.
But I just have to say:
19. My uncle Harry’s brown leather jacket from the 1970s. Makes everyone who wears it look like Beck. My uncle Harry has Alzheimer’s, but he’s just at the beginning of sort of losing his way around town, so it’s not ugly yet. I talked to him on the phone the other day and he sounds exactly the same as always, with his eye-rollingly bad Henny Youngmanesque jokes. If you saw him you would say, how was it possible that Johnny Carson and Jack Lemmon were able to mate? A picture doesn’t do him justice, you have to feel that crazy martinis-and-bowling-shirts vibe he emanates.
27. My uncle Harry’s bowling shirts. 100% Polyester, size medium, in colors that would remind you of rusty Camaros with no hubcaps.
51. Tons of fancy art supplies. My dad spent his entire postwar career (that would be World War II) in sales, much of it repping for manufacturers of art stuff. We found boxes of tempra paint, leaky tubes of oil paint in exotic-wood cases, ink-pen nibs for left-handed calligraphers, huge blank sketch pads, and a selection of sample pull-down world maps that he tried to woo the Chicago Public School System into buying. I think he was pretty successful, too, without being too Glengarry Glenross about it. If my father were a David Mamet character, he would be played by Fred Gwynne.
97. My father’s sales contest winnings. What’s a sales division with a midwestern mindset without sales incentives? We found twelve boxes of glassware that my father had won — glasses for old fashioneds, manhattans, margaritas, highballs, beer, and wine. Twelve boxes! My father doesn’t drink. After gathering dust for twenty or thirty years, those boxes are now sitting in a Goodwill store in Littleton, Colorado, and if you’re thinking of opening a bar get on over to Coal Mine Plaza quick and all you’ll need after that are some barstools and a dusty jar of pickled onions.
103. Sheherazade’s Secret Fabric Boutique. My mother has a sickness, it’s called the “I’m going to buy thousands of dollars worth of fancy imported fabrics, thread, buttons, and zippers, and then leave it in the bag with the receipt for thirty years so my children will find it and look at each other and say, Thank God she never finished making that hot pink corduroy pantsuit” disease. I also found at least twenty boxes of yarn, often containing several sweaters knitted up a couple of inches and then abandoned with the needles still in place. I shipped three boxes of fine Italian, Irish, and Welsh wool to myself so that I can start my own spider-infested collection of commitment failures. Maybe it has something to do with her growing up during the Depression. All I know is that my mom now spends most of her day in her recliner reading murder mysteries and driving my oldest brother mad by knocking over her walker, sitting on the TV remote, and then asking him to get her a Fresca. It must be nice to be old enough to become a pain in the ass to the child who gave you the most trouble growing up. Payback is a bitch.
Then there were the boxes and boxes of classic family pictures, dried-up Bic pens, receipts from department stores that closed ten years ago, Bicentennial drinking glasses, outgrown ski clothes, yearbooks, and embarrassing prom pictures. Maybe next time I’ll show you those, right now I have to make the most of my finite amount of naptime/alonetime and take out the garbage.
And if you haven’t done it already, vote for Matthew and Anil.
UPDATE: SCANDAL!
My weekend in five easy-to-digest nuggets
1. I learned how to draw thirty-five units of insulin into a syringe, but so far no one’s offered to let me stick it into my dad.
2. Some seven-year-old girls have the big swinging balls to teli you how it was, how it is, and how it’s going to be forever and ever so just shut up.
3. Jackson, especially when naked and feeling sassy, is a potent mood elevator for all present.
4. Don’t get upset and hang up on your husband and then turn off your cell phone so he can’t call back, because you will wake up feeling all crusty on the inside.
5. Atari Super Pong pristine in the box!
Lunch
Sometimes what you need is to do is eat some Cheetos and raisins underneath the dining room table.
Tomorrow I’m taking the Nut back to Denver for several days to check in on my post-bypass father. He sounds great on the phone, but apparently the house is a tangle of oxygen tubing and expensive monitors, and the wind is whispering long-term care faciity. So tomorrow will also mark the beginning of my posting-by-e-mail experiment. My father has a Mailstation that is solely for text e-mail. I have tried to sell him on the advantages of having a real ISP, but he is afraid of worms and he doesn’t like the sound of cookies, either. So we will adapt to the available technology.
Jackson’s latest words
“Wawa” (water)
“Momo” (motorcycle)
“Chichu” (Cheetos)
“Choochoo” (train)
“Bubble” (bubble)
“Quack quack quack” (duck)
“Cock!” (Triscuit)
“Mao” (new stuffed kitty toy)
My latest words
“What do you mean, my parents aren’t going to live forever? What if I need another car loan?”
Jack’s latest words
(After work) “God, I’m tired.”
(After a few beers) “Howya doin’ down there? When ya gonna gimme summa that?”
(After six years of marriage) “God, I love you, you fucking pain in my ass.”
