Don’t turn your back on me baby
Don’t turn your back on me baby

1990. I was 12. It was hot and sticky and my father’s car didn’t have air conditioning, but it did have a tape deck and one cassette. The tape was a blank one he’d filled both sides entirely with Santana’s Black Magic Woman, and the deck kept auto-flipping so that we’d been listening to it nonstop from Philadelphia to wherever it was he lived back then.

Yes, don’t turn your back on me baby

At one point he pulled up to a gas pump and shut off the car, and then gave the key a slight twist to keep Black Magic Woman going. “No!” I shouted over it, but he was already inside paying to fill up.

Stop messing round with your tricks

I hit the eject button and flung the tape into the bin between the pumps. His radio was, of course, tuned to the classic rock station and when he got back in the car Black Magic Woman had just started again. As it finished I side-eyed him, watching his mustache twitch before he turned to me.

“Did you take my tape?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to give it back?”

“I threw it out of the window.”

“What?”

“I didn’t litter. I tossed it into the trashcan back at the gas station.”

“That doesn’t make it ok!”

“I won’t do it again. You don’t have anymore tapes.”

“They’re just at home.”

“More tapes of just that one song?”

Don’t turn your back on me baby

I didn’t see him again after that, but I did get an email right after I’d left school, about a month before my university account was purged. I refused to listen to his bullshit. Six years and not even a birthday card from him? (Let alone years without court ordered child support checks.) And now he was blaming his long, silent absence on my mom? I replied with the coldest, meanest dismissal I’ve ever produced. He fired back an angry reply and I told him to leave me alone. He did.

Turning my heart in to stone

Several years ago my stepfather had a heart attack, and a bit later spent an entire night on the telephone with me telling me all of the things he would’ve done differently if he could do it all again; none of it included my mother, me, or my step brother. He insisted I promise him to not repeat his mistakes, to do what I want, and not be miserable like him. A few months later, or maybe even then — who knows? — he was cheating on my mother. They’ve been separated for three years now and he lives in their house with his girlfriend and her kids –a replacement family younger than the one he’d had plus one more kid. (I don’t really get it either.) I’ve tried to be civil, but it’s easier to just leave it alone.

His almost-dying and turning into a completely different person made me wonder how often people do change. Does everyone? And if one can change from a relatively decent person into a complete ass, is the opposite also true? Could I be less of a jerk to my own father now? Could he have also grown up a bit over the years? I started looking for him, and the closest I came was discovering that my grandmother had passed in 1998 — not very long after our ridiculous email argument.

I can’t leave you alone

Last week it occurred to me that perhaps my search was too narrow. As soon as I checked the social security death index, I found him; he’d died in 2008.

How do you lose two fathers at the same time and not know it?

Ten years? Really? It seems so much longer, and like that kid wasn’t even me. Here’s a quick mix of 8 tracks that would’ve been on that kid’s iPod if such a thing were a thing back then. (Launched in October 2001 –I looked it up so you don’t have to.)

I’m packing up to move again this weekend, this time New England. Once I get there I’ll make a follow-up post with a current state-of-affairs for comparison –should be good for a laugh, at least.

On the way home she had The Talk with me and that is how I learned that all of my cartoon friends who’d visited me were really Aunt Pat in costume on her way to various singing telegram/flower/balloon delivery jobs.

My father would’ve been the one to take me, had I gone. If we’d been faced with the choice of Physical Play and Girls Play, I would’ve set right off for Physical Play (looks like the Legos I had at home) and he would’ve grabbed me by that annoying handle part of the Osh Kosh B’gosh overalls and set me down in the Girls Play area. He would’ve said something like, “Your mother wouldn’t want you rough housing with a bunch of boys.” After all, that’s the connotation of “physical play”, no?  (Later that night I would’ve declared that day The Worst Day of My Life, to my army of stuffed animals, many of them pink.)

By setting up Girls Play as the contrast to Physical Play, they’re suggesting that girls need a safe, subdued alternative to stimulating boldly colored exciting adventure that requires construction hats. They’re also saying that all boys are rough-and-tumble and into the same thing. They don’t have to say “Boys Play”. It’s a given to many misguided parents. That’s why Santa brought me the pink bike with the streamers and the basket and crap tires, and my brother who didn’t even want a bike got the cool metallic blue off-road one that could take a beating. It’s why my best girlfriend couldn’t go fishing with us until they discovered the pink tackle box with the glittery neon pink rubber tadpole bait. It’s why my coworker’s husband wouldn’t let their toddler son wear a pale yellow sweatshirt someone had given him.

Boys and girls go to school together, and have recess together, and play kickball in gym. They read the same books in class,  do group projects together, play in the same orchestras, sing in the same chorus groups, build sets together for plays that boys and girls will perform together. And someday they will work together in Grownupland, so why in the world shouldn’t they play together in Legoland?

I quit smoking when I was a teenager. (Started at 11.) Cigarette smoke in my hair and clothes, and then transferred from my clothes to the car, and then into my home stinking up the laundry hamper is –irrationally– much more offensive to me than the second-hand carcinogens. Yes, I know, I’m just being honest. But I have to admit that I sorely miss the smoking sections in restaurants since the ban went into effect here in Pittsburgh.

We try not to make it a habit of eating at family friendly places, opting mostly for bars when we’re stopping for a meal out. Sometimes though you just really don’t want to make your own omelet in the morning and the only places that serve breakfast are places with children’s menus.

Every single time I am starting to come around to the idea that perhaps children aren’t entirely awful (brought on by a sudden uptick in the reproduction of my friends from high school days) we go out for breakfast and I am promptly reminded that it’s not the kids, it’s families that are awful. No, I do mean it. I do.

You might be a perfectly lovely couple, and your children might be the best and brightest of their age levels but I don’t want to sit anywhere near you while I’m trying to have a conversation over a meal. Children apparently stopped being able to whisper some time after I stopped being one, and parents have developed new aural adaptations allowing them to tune them out and go about their discussions undisturbed by their unruly accessories. Or maybe it is a new ability to not be completely mortified by their children’s’ food art and non-stop screaming techniques? I can’t be sure.

If faced with a family-friendly establishment prior to the ban, I could at least hide in the smoking section in a cloud of protection, perhaps behind a partition or on the opposite side of the building from the howling chaotic masses squirming in high chairs and under tables. I didn’t have to witness a child’s meal being applied topically and to the booth, the walls and the floor in a three foot radius around their table while the parents droned on and on about lovely table topics like Amberleigh’s latest diaper rash.

Really though, my fault for wanting pancakes over fish n’ chips n’ a pint. I get that. But what about when they show up at the pub? And what about the screaming infant down in front at the late showing of The Dark Knight? What is wrong with people? You have a baby. You knew life was going to get more expensive. Don’t cry foul when some angry moviegoer (not me, I swear) shouts “GET A SITTER ASSHOLE” at you because everyone else should be able to enjoy their movie outing.

If there were movie theaters and restaurants with separate family areas, I would make it a point to only go to those places. One of the theaters I liked when I lived in Maryland had a Mommy Matinée, giving parents a chance to see new releases without ruining it for everyone else. I don’t understand why more of them don’t have age restrictions on clearly mature films, but mostly I don’t understand why someone would want to subject their special snowflake golden child’s delicate ears to TRX sound blasts.

And for what it is worth, I sat quietly and ate whatever my mother ordered for me in restaurants and spoke in whispers because that’s what she said people did in restaurants and as a toddler, why would I argue with The Law? The first and only time I fussed in public at an age where I could communicate verbally, she leaned in really close and whispered, “All of these people are going to think I’m a bad mommy because you are crying and that makes me sad.” The thought of my mom being sad upset me so much that I did my best to zip it up and be polite — until I joined the Girl Scouts. But that’s another story.

I look at trends and subcultures as a cycle of rebellion. That makes it sound much more negative than I intend. — Rebellion, to me, is not limited to aggressive upheaval of norms; I’m talking about even the smallest acts that teenagers commit in their quest for perceived individuality. (I will be the first to admit that my youthful interest in alternative genres of music was actually counter to the goal of setting myself apart.)

I grew up under the rule of my stepfather’s dictatorship. He saw little value in the things I was interested in: literature and art. One evening after school when I was in third grade he spent over an hour looming over me at the kitchen table shouting, “What’s 4×6? What’s 4×6? What’s 4×6?” over and over, without pausing. A year before that he’d broken the clock that my mother and I had had longer than him, pushing the hands around, thumping its face, demanding I tell him “What time is it now? And now? And now?” My best friend, Melvin, who did his homework at our house until his mother came home from work, shrunk down into his chair, frozen as The Monster (as we called him in secret) shouted at me to stop crying and answer these simple questions in a voice that could be heard. No stammering! No tears! Wipe that nose! It didn’t matter that I was at the top of the grade in reading and writing and got As in social studies and Pennsylvania history. The stars on my book reports and “Elizabeth is a joy to have in class” comments in letters from teachers meant nothing if I couldn’t memorize the multiplication table as fast as everyone else. Math was the most important thing and if I couldn’t get with the program I was a failure and always would be. I believed him.

“Great. Someday you can write a book about how mean I was to you.”

School became a nightmare until the principal of the arts magnet school came to see us in junior high. A whole high school with four different types of English every year! I was determined to get in and threw myself into preparing for my writing audition, and an application/sample for a summer arts program at the university I would eventually attend. Both accepted me. “Great. Someday you can write a book about how mean I was to you,” I remember him saying. “You’re not going to get anywhere else without math.” As if taking longer to solve algebra equations than some people meant I couldn’t do them at all.

Fortunately, when I was in high school his job as a cop kept him out all night and asleep most of the day. Keeping my distance, I focused on friends, novels, and my sketch and notebooks. Anything math or science related scared the shit out of me. (Not having books thrown over my head when I ask for clarification on things I don’t understand has definitely helped me get over that.)

My brother, eight years younger, got it worse. He was a happy kid and quite a ham on stage at Sunday school holiday programs. Today, I don’t think you could get him to open his mouth in front of more than one stranger. There can be no other word than abuse to describe the afternoons that poor child spent trying to catch footballs and not fall off his bicycle because “a real son” just could. Imagine a six year old who can stay composed and unflinching as a large chunk of glass is taken from his bloody knee, but pales and starts quaking when he hears, “Don’t worry, here comes your dad.” This was my brother’s childhood. He made friends with two physically and mentally handicapped boys and became another target for the neighborhood bullies that threw rocks and insults at them. Woe, woe be upon him if he didn’t win the resulting fights. (I had my fair share of tussles with their older sisters when I got home from the magnet school downtown.) Eventually we moved to the sticks of Western Pennsylvania and our differences, and our new seclusion escalated the bullying at home and in school. My brother snapped and went from a gentle giant into a rage fueled storm-in-a-can getting into fights at any provocation from his classmates. I graduated and moved on to campus. He got into computers, and video games – things that don’t require getting other people involved. We ran out of things to talk to each other about. I eventually was kicked out of the house and moved to Los Angeles. When I returned to this side of the country, my brother was unrecognizable – painfully shy and socially awkward.

Did I ever really like Nurse with Wound or Skinny Puppy?

The writer in me sees an alternative family history. If he’d only left us years ago, my brother would be a successful, beloved television meteorologist. (He had a thing for weather radio.) My mother would’ve gotten back in touch with her bohemian poet and fashion designer friends and would have built a healthy network of support to nurture her creativity. I imagine we would’ve stayed in Philadelphia. I’m not sure who I would be. I feel like my entire personality was shaped by rejection of his authority and prejudices. In my early teens anything that would piss him off became instantly attractive. Did I ever really like Nurse With Wound or Skinny Puppy? Or did I just really enjoy his confusion and frustrated outrage. Not that anyone develops alone in a vacuum, but would I have gone in the same direction without the fear of being even remotely like him urging me farther and farther away?

I suspect most teenage rebellion/subculture trends are due, in part, to some variety of daddy complexes. Which makes me wonder what the children of geeks will do when they want to be different. In the teenage quest for individuality, even if your parents are awesome, aren’t you still going to want to do something different?

Related links to friends discussing labels, identity, and teenage life:

Laura discusses being a gamer and geek.
Mark’s awesome series:

• Because nobody demanded it: Tales of a Teenage Pagan Superhero
• Tales of a teenage pagan superhero: Sarah and the Dragon Mage, part one
• Tales of a Teenage Pagan Superhero: The Cat’s Name Is Sun (an Interlude)

October is passing quickly and so goes my last scramble to move out of the Hobo Alley apartment. I keep finding things that I’m not even sure how I’ve managed to hold onto through years of annual moves. And then, completely unexpected, a bit of the past found me.

The subject line read, “J. K. sent you a message on Facebook.”

“What?”

It said the same thing on the second read. And the third.

“Wait –No!” I’m not usually in the habit of talking to my inbox. The potentially dead aren’t in the habit of contacting me from beyond-the-potential-grave, either. My high school friends, especially the friends from the Philly years, reside in my memories in three categories: Probably Alive, Certainly Not Alive, Likely Dead. After my family moved, when calls home to Skillz had no new reports on our missing friend, I figured like so many people I knew, he was gone too. (This is not commentary on my friend, but on the overwhelming sadness of those years of my life.)

The good news is that my friend is very much alive. The bad news is that I’ve been too busy with the move to sit down and continue proper communication continuation. I have managed to get back in touch with Skillz, to bring him up to speed on these latest, most happy, tidings. We’re the sort who can maintain non-disjointed dialogue no matter how erratic the gaps in our conversations tracks are from year to year. I’m hoping that December brings enough of a slow-down for picking up some of these ties I’ve neglected. Correspondence has never been something I’ve done well with.

This has been the month of reminiscence; while assisting with preparations for her move to Vermont, Mom finally got me to confront the bins in the basement filled with my childhood things.

I found a box of old black and white marble composition books filled with tortured sentences straining to fit all of a week’s spelling words into one questionable line, and a mimeographed form letter from a teacher informing my parents that Elizabeth has been (check box) very good, did very well on his/her book report and (check box) played nicely with the other children this week. I found the adorable soft bodied black baby doll that upset my first grade friend Kelly’s sense of right and wrong or whatever. (I kept this doll in the glass cabinet with the fragile dolls I wasn’t to play with, because I felt she was too nice to crush in bed, but I remember taking her out of the cabinet and hugging her often. Like the special dolls, she didn’t have a name. In my five-year-old logic, once you name something it’s too real to keep behind glass.) An army of stuffed animals, a high school jacket, a few caps and gowns, awards, and a ton of personal ephemera in the form of notes passed in class to ticket stubs from Greyhounds, movies and shows. A menagerie of good times and terrible times all stowed away in a cardboard ark.

Another box held an entire parallel unexplored world in the form of photo albums I’ve never seen –or, as Mom insists –do not remember; the past reaching out and asserting itself, saying “These are the strangers you came from” and humanizing my biological father with snapshots he sent to Mom from Vietnam.

It’s been quite a month, and November promises to be similar. I’ll be driving to Vermont, following D in the moving truck. I haven’t really driven much in the past eight or so years after selling my car when I moved to Los Angeles. But everything old is new again, it seems, and survival is what we do.

I’ve been thinking about Santa Claus, ever since it came up in conversation over dinner with my boyfriend about two weeks ago. He said he wouldn’t lie to a kid, and I was intensely disturbed for several minutes. Here, I’m the adamant skeptic and he’s the on-the-fence leaning-towards-there’s-something-bigger-out-there sort, and he’s the one saying Santa Claus is a dirty trick.

At first, I couldn’t figure out why I was bothered by the notion that our hypothetical (hopefully to stay that way) children would miss out on the elf, the myth, the legend that is the jolly fat man. Was it just the warm and fuzzy memories of my very merry holidays growing up? Why was I so insistent that “they” would miss out and resent me later?

So I’ve been turning these ideas over and over in my head ever since, and I’m still not entirely sure how I feel. I do know the following:

• I was sad for about three days when Mom finally let me in on the Big Secret.
• Once I really thought about it I realized that my parents had given up credit on the most exciting and fun gifts under the tree all that time, just to make it more fun for all of us.
• Mom asked me not to spoil it for my brother or for any kids at school who didn’t know. “That is for their parents to do. Don’t take that away from them. It would’ve made me very sad if someone had ruined our fun.” I got it, promised I wouldn’t, and never did.
• However, I also felt really dumb for having believed it. There’d been so many funny things grownups had told me in the past that I knew were silly jokes or just a “because I said so” brush-off/avoidance tactic. Why hadn’t I seen this coming, I chided myself.

How would my childhood have been different if I’d never believed in Santa or the Candy Rabbit or the Tooth Fairy? Would I also have been less terrified that perhaps the creepy looking dolls in the glass cabinet opposite my bed would at some point come to life, find or create their own makeshift weapons and murderously attack me in my sleep? This is actually quite likely, as the weird magic-y elf stuff made me wonder what else lurked about. It couldn’t all be flying reindeer and generous bunnies, I figured. And why wouldn’t I? If there can be a castle made of teeth, and beings that can travel the world-over in a single night, why couldn’t they have some wicked-awful contemporaries? Mom said there were no such things as monsters, but was she just saying that to make me feel better? I slept with one eye open, and made sure my limbs never got too close to the side of the bed. You just never could be sure, apparently.

Are a few nights of joy a year worth the 360 or so plagued with potential nightmares? Maybe, maybe not.

It took only a short while after the Claus was let out of the bag, for me to start to question everything they’d told me. Maybe the cats really could eat people food — Samantha did seem interested in my sandwiches. Maybe the police didn’t arrest children out after dark that weren’t directly in front of their houses. How did they know what kids belonged to which house anyhow? Maybe there really were cooties. Maybe grownups weren’t just lying about things — maybe it was worse. Maybe they just didn’t know.

I started getting into trouble at Sunday school. I wanted to know how everyone was so sure the monks got the Bible straight. Wouldn’t it be like whisper-down-the-lane? How was anyone to know if it was even close? And who was this lady Cain went off and started a family with? Where’d she come from if his parents were the only people in the world?

“Beth, don’t you dare question the teachings of Jesus,” is all Miss Elsie would say. But Mom’d told me it was important to ask questions when you didn’t understand something, even if the other kids rolled their eyes or laughed. “There are no stupid questions,” she said, “The bigger mistake would be to try and keep going without all the information.”

At 8 or 9 years old, they stop saying “bless her precious soul” when exasperated. You’re difficult and a disruption, even more so than the kids who chatter without paying attention, and the ones snapping rubber bands or drumming on the table. By 11-12 you’re pulled aside and told to keep quiet. “Don’t ruin it for the other children. You keep your mouth shut and speak when spoken to,” hissed Mr. D, who made sure I wasn’t spoken to again. Disappointed and frustrated, I started sneaking down into the church cellar as soon as I was out of sight from my mom and step-grandmother, to hide in the supply closet or the ladies’ room and read whatever book I smuggled in.

By 13 I was fed up with getting up early on Sundays to go and do something I could just as easily do at home in my pjs. I finally realized Mom would be really pissed off if she knew why I’d stopped wanting to go to church, and it wouldn’t be at me. I never had to go back, after that and after a few weeks of her coming home, agitated and narrow-eyed, she stayed home with me. Weekends were suddenly much more enjoyable, but I felt bad she’d lost a social outlet because of me.

Around that time we went on a trip to see our extended family who live in snow-country. It was summer time, and my younger cousin who was about three at the time runs through the meadow that is their backyard at me with something clasped in her hands.

“I have a bird!” she squealed.

“Oooh, whatcha got there? Let’s see,” I said cupping her hands as we peered in, a little worried she’d snatched up a fallen chick. Fuzzy brown antennae emerged, followed by the velvety body and wings of a particularly dazzling moth.

“Oh! That’s not a bird, though it does have wings and can fly too. Do you know what else can fly?”

“Bats!” she said. One of her favorite books was about a bat, Stellaluna, who lived with birds. “It’s so small.”

“Maybe it’s a baby bat,” I said. “Go show Aunt Jo!”

“Lookit! I have a baby bat! I have a baby bat!” she chirped as she ran into the kitchen, to the horror of my Aunt. Because of the distance between our states and our infrequent visits, well over a decade later, my cousin still raises an eyebrow when I tell her something. “Yeah right, Beth! MOM. . .”

I totally get the appeal of lying to children, and think I want to do it as often as possible. It is probably a good thing the kids are going to stay hypothetical. But maybe not.

The first time he found Sally had passed on, Gramma was out. He was so worried she would be devastated and thinking perhaps having a new dog to fall in love with would be a distraction, he quickly went to find a replacement. The shelter had another liver colored doxie. Perhaps familiarity would be comforting? But when she came home she immediately started lavishing attention on “Sally”, not realizing she wasn’t, before he could explain.

The seventh, and last Sally, was a boy, and not even the same size or color. You’d think walking “her” would finally be a tip off, but she’d just say, “Land alive Miss Sally! You put that leg down and act like a proper lady!”

It was very difficult to get a word in with Gramma, so I can see how this happened. She also insisted she was Russian royalty, and wouldn’t hear otherwise; a direct descendant of Anastasia — and no time lines or encyclopedias were going to sway her.

She also read tarot cards for her friends and neighbors, as well as gave readings of tea leaves. She refused to read mine saying that my future wasn’t set yet. (This left me wondering when futures are set.)

According to Gramma, a bit of green glass she stepped on as a child was circling through her body causing all of her ailments. Her knee hurt? “Oh that glass!” Maybe her shoulder ached? “There’s my glass again.”

Finally, her doctor cured her; she had the shard of green glass in a small vile to show for it. I think about this doctor, a man I never had the pleasure of meeting, quite often. What a kindness to a nice elderly lady. What kind brilliance.

I never questioned her directly, or rolled my eyes, or giggled. I never said she was insane or strange or silly. She was a nice old lady, who made killer latkes and collected elephants with upturned-trunks. She would crochet Muppets for me and managed to give me the same birthday card for five or six years — the same pink unicorn, yet somehow with increasing digits in the printed greetings. Amazing. But I never said a word to her about her odd beliefs. But she also never said I had to agree with her.

So if you’re going to play the Grandma Gambit with me — maybe let me do the honors first: If your dying grandmother wanted to read your tea leaves on her deathbed, would you stop praying and listen?