Chapter One
Lets face it: I was a weird kid. I always felt that my parents must have been some strangers. Perhaps some hippies from California. Perhaps some rock star seduced my mother and impregnated her. That’s the story I like to tell myself. Or maybe, more likely in my mind… I came from the stars. How I might have come from those two people I called my parents, is a mystery of the ages. I’d always look up at the stars and wonder where I came from. Was this world
As I child I held the belief that when something got super hot, it would become super cold. Or when something got super cold, it would become super hot. That in the grey area of the infinite, things were circular.
Another belief I held as a child were that all liquids were water with something diluted. Fuel oil was a solid diluted in water. Acid was water with stuff in it. Cola was nothing but water at its core also. This meant to me that water is purity. And it can only get dirtier. That all things come from one source. Everything is water with something mixed in. Once something is polluted, it can only get worse.
These two very strange beliefs have become hardwired in my mind. Like a successful business man who went to a catholic school, being afraid of a Nun for his entire life. Or the way that our concepts of God from childhood haunt us. The Ghost of a God long killed by reason and thought rides in the passenger seat of my life. Always commenting on my driving. Always telling me what I am doing wrong.
Water gets polluted and only gets worse.
Back to my parents. My father was a lawyer and my mother fancied herself as an decorator “slash” party planner. My father was well respected with the men in the community and my mother with the women. My mom used to bring me around when she was doing her work, because my dad was too cheap to get a maid. “Mother nature gave you a goddamn instinct for this shit. Fucking use it. I’m going to work.” Don’t get the wrong idea, my dad is a gentleman. But an asshole.
I remember sitting in the kitchen of some rich woman’s house alone, while my mother helped plan a party. She laid all of her papers out on the counter and I laid on the linoleum staring at the ceiling. The black maid, with her dirtied white hospital shoes, walked back and forth past me for several hours.
She did her best to ignore me. She was working hard and must have regards me like a New Yorker regards a homeless person.
“Whaa sho’ name, boy?” she asked.
“Peter.” I responded. Peter was not my name.
She let out a hoot. “Woooo! Like Pan, eh?”
“Sure.” I said as I stared into the pattern on the ceiling like a college student on mushrooms. Everything else is uninteresting except for the patterns on the ceiling. I guess you can figure a lot out about me in that statement. That is a bit how life feels to me. Like a college student laying on the floor hallucinating. I was just here to watch. It wasn’t real in the first place. I was just waiting for my real parents to come and rescue me. Deus ex machina style, like only a bad greek playwright could do.
When I was 9 I entered the local spelling bee. My mom had seen a flier at the local Piggly Wiggly grocery chain. I didn’t know what kind of thing a spelling bee was, but I did know that she would serve brie at the party if I won.
My dad would come home and sit me on the couch and call out words to me. I didn’t know why I was doing it. Actually I didn’t even know what a spelling bee was. But I had to assume that anything called a “bee” couldn’t be too much fun. Up until this point in my life, my experiences with bees had been negative. And that would be a continuing trend.
On the day of be bee, my mother dressed me up in a ridiculously horrible white button down with high-water khakis. She might as well have tattooed, “KICK MY SKINNY WHITE, FAGGOTY ASS” on my forehead. I remember my mom standing me up and dressing me. I was standing on a stool and she was puffing on her cigarette. I stood there with indifference.
She spun me around a few times and said, “I am so proud of you son, win or lose.” At the time I didn’t know these words, but my feeling may have been best described as “Stupid bitch.” Why would you be proud of me…. for getting dressed? Hell, I didn’t even dress myself. At this point I had done absolutely nothing. Especially nothing which requires pride. But I guess that’s the thing with mothers. They are proud when you do nothing and are embarrassed when you do anything at all.
I went to the spelling bee and lost. First round.
My dad tried to tell the judge that he would sue him for discrimination. The judge just replied with, “For what?” My dad just stared him in the eye and turned his back. I looked at the judge and said, “You’ll be hearing from us!”
It was something I had heard before. But I think that was the only time that my father was proud to have me as his son. When I had lost.
My parents were experts at fucking me up.