Chapter 3

“If home is where the heart is then there are stories to be told…” – Axl Rose

            White privilege affords the recipient thereof the luxury of taking a shit in private. Sorry to sound so legalistic.

            When Alisa dropped turds in her toilet, did it wake the befuddled drunk on her doorstep?

            A Zen koan. Sasquatch hear the trees fall in the forest.

            Did the North Jersey party animal wake up – with a leaden hangover - and say “Dude, what the fuck was that noise? It sounded like a plop! And what the fuck is that smell? I think someone inside that house just took a shit! Wait! This isn’t even my house! I better walk one block over and throw up in front of my own rental or that person inside who’s taking a dump might call the cops on me! Wait a second… I am a cop… Up in Newark. Okay. I guess I can throw up on this person’s doorstep without Wall police giving me any shit… Professional courtesy and all that…”

            Blecccchhhhhhhh… (the Newark cop vomits Corona and tequila shots all over Alisa’s door.)

            But Alisa lived 5 miles and a trillion light years away from our power-washed doorstep, the “portico of privilege.” A cop’s vomit chunks would have disintegrated under the force of a Home Depot pressure washer.

            Pray, how doth appear the sanctum of white privilege? The inner city envies this unknown just as a Caucasian incel envies a hood orgy; there are not many black incels, if any. Lucky black bastards! But wasn’t I fortunate to grow up in a spacious house? If not a specious house?

            Let us push through the deadbolted double doors of my parents’ dwelling as we ponder these questions.

            The profane feet of the few welcome guests who passed through our unwelcoming threshold would have touched down on a semi-octagonal foyer of smooth gray tile. No shoes were ever – under any circumstances – allowed past this point. If the house caught fire, the firemen would have to take their boots off before rescuing us.

Shoes were removed and placed on the lower right-hand corner of the vestibule. Intentional or accidental disregard of this strict rule resulted in a reprimand for any and all guests (regardless of status or familial familiarity.) My sister and I knew better than to challenge this statute. The one and only time I had stepped on the carpet with my dirty shoes (we had just moved in and I had not yet been briefed on the rules of the new house) mommy-wench had wacked me with an open hand. She warned me that any further violations of her shoe rule would be punished with the wooden spoon (which hurt almost as much as my dad’s belt buckle.)

            If a hypothetical guest had stood in our entrance he would have met with a view of the inner temple, the holiest of holies: my mother’s living room. Six lacquered rectangular columns obscured the view and offered a glimpse through horizontal slats, the vantage of a prison cell window. Between the last column on the right and the thin railing to the further right was an entrance/step narrower than the gate of a Southern Baptist’s heaven.

            As a High Priestess of Bourgy Consumption, mother granted herself and only herself the permission to enter this sunken, cavitied display room – and then only for the purposes of necessary maintenance. She trusted only herself to dust the silent piano or arrange the Nativity Set on the mantle of the Georgia Marble fireplace (one would think the Ark of the Covenant itself rested on the pink rock.)

            One step above the living room, like a fatso slouching on a steel chair, was the slightly-less-forbidding (and forbidden) dining room. The dining room table stretched from railing to the sliding glass doors of our back porch. We dined on the varnished surface twice a year for Thanksgiving and Christmas, at which time we looked down at the conspicuous, numinous living room with the reticent solemnity of soldiers picnicking over a battlefield, a charnel ground littered with unspeakable carnage.

            Mother’s china cabinet watched over our holiday meals like an attentive maître d. A foreign, tuxedoed man who asks: “Would you like a bottle of IBC cream soda or root beer this Yuletide?” Cunt Mother always bought us IBC cream soda and root beer every Thanksgiving and Christmas – even she couldn’t be a cunt all the time.

            Still, I wished to smash all the china in her cabinet (with a crowbar, no less) and do a Kaka-Nee-Nee dance all over the shattered glass and ceramic:

            “Kaka Nee Nee! Kaka Nee Nee! Kaka!”

            In the winter, possums ate from the frozen-crusty cat food bowls on the back porch and pressed their pointy noses against our sliding glass dining room door. Their rat tails… Tailypo! Tailypo!

            “Heeli! Heeli!”

            Heebie-jeebies.

            Our oxymoronic square bubble protected us against the frigid wilderness (but possums are everywhere, even in Alisa’s crowded-ass neighborhood; even in Queen, NY; probably in Central Damn Park.)

            Opened and unopened cat food and tuna fish cans (a possum feast) littered the sink of the adjacent kitchen, our ultra-modern cooking alcove. Our top-of-the-line culinary stations and devices sat ready-to-hand but disused. Mommy did not like to cook and so we ordered Anthony’s Pizza 5 to 7 nights a week. 

            Mother spent most of her solitary days next to the sink rather than over it, her dull gaze glued to the tiny television suspended from the corner cabinet.

            She preferred daytime trash t.v., anything from Maury to Jerry. She lived the same vegetative, unproductive lifestyle enjoyed by some (but certainly not all) unemployed welfare recipients. Ironically, she looked down on such people as shiftless drags on society, but what made her any different (except that she consumed more than them?) She didn’t smoke weed and Newports (she hated cigarettes) or get drunk on Boone’s Farm, but she wasted her life just the same as those ne’er do well niggers!

            Instead of indulging in alcohol, tobacco, and THC, she ate tuna fish sandwiches (“the crust is the best part”) and cheered on Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, the American Fascist Party, and the other extremist kooks who appeared on shock value talk shows.

            “They (the Neo-Nazis) really need to start carrying themselves better,” she would say as she chomped on albacore and mayo. “Every single thing they say is 100% right and they make really good points, but they ruin their message by dressing like such wackos. If they came out in a suit and tie, they would reach more people – because they have a good message!”

            And, in my opinion, they should have also used a Celt or Lapland swastika anyway (just because they look cooler): 

            Like some hillbilly who had hit oil and moved to Beverly Hills, mother was supported in her sedentary lifestyle by hired help. Twice a week, a weathered Irish cleaning lady dusted and scrubbed every room of the house (except for the off-limits living room) as my mother sat in her kitchen swivel chair and cheered White Aryan Resistance or the Southern Virginia chapter of the KKK.

            Annie O’Sullivan separated the wheat (the unopened cans of cat food) from the chaff (the opened cans of cat food) and hauled – with those strong Irish arms – both trash and recycling to the curb. Then she dusted the sub-particles of hate and resentment into our stuffy atmosphere (and so made it easier for the bad mojo to find its way into our lungs and under our skin.)

            The Irishwoman was my mother’s dirty (or clean) secret. Dad did not know that mother spent his hard-earned money on a maid service. He would have disapproved. What else did the bitch have to do all day? Compared to Mommy Dearest, the Michelle Pfeiffer character from “Scarface” lived a constructive and fulfilling life. Consequently, Annie Sullivan was instructed to only visit our homestead between the hours of 9am and 9pm. What must Annie O’Sullivan have thought of mother, what with her Ellis Island Irish washerwoman mentality? Not that mother cared what Annie O’Sullivan or anyone else might have thought of her moral character. She knew she was superior by virtue of my father’s money and that’s all that mattered.

            But back to the foyer, where even Annie O’Sullivan was forced to remove her shoes.

            If any real or imaginary visitor to our foyer looked to the left, he/she would have noticed a walled, tunneled, carpeted staircase to the second floor, like one of the endless tunnels wormed through by motheaten old men in Metallica’s gross and unforgiving “Unforgiven” video. Chutes and ladders for eternity! But God must negate both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer with higher physics, the reconciliation of all opposites and contradictions, a 5^th-dimensional gift of knowledge given to the wrong philosopher – the bore Plato. So that we could “repeat” without “repeating.” Both the “Eternal Recurrence” (in its most dogmatic interpretation) and “Eternal Life in Heaven” seem untenable. No one would want to go through my wintry isolation over and over and over again (some of my sexual experiences with others should “repeat” forever, but my solo experiments should be consigned to the meta-dustbin.)

            The first door at the top opened to my room, the sanctuary of supplementary and necessary (as it if for many young males) self-pleasure. One should peruse Derrida’s thoughts on “masturbation and the supplement” to understand the role of both fucking and jerking off in the development of civilization (civilization itself being a perversion of nature – why do anything extraordinary if sex, food, and warmth are easily attainable?) Disturbing reading for a serial masturbator such as myself (I built septillions of advanced civilizations in my mind!)

            Coca-Cola stains spotted my blue carpet like patches on Paul Bunyan’s bull, but the fibrous fiber was mostly devoid of dried semen. I preferred to lie on my back while playing with myself. That way I could imagine the perfect girl riding on top of me in either cowgirl or reverse cowgirl (as a virgin, I did not yet know the various advantages and disadvantages of every sexual position.)

            A north-facing window offered a view of the deep blue sky and our nearest “neighbor,” a then-abandoned farmhouse which, of course, offered no outlet for my voyeuristic impulses. From my perch I did notice that prospective buyers toured the house every now and then. Hopefully some hot girls – even a sorority (but for what nearby college?) – would move in and give me a chance to put my trusty binoculars to use.

            A painting of Jesus Christ hung on my wall. He offered Communion to children (though I had already ceased to believe in that Jesus Christ.) There’s a reason why “seder” and “satyr” are homophones. To worship the One God is to worship all and everything: saints, sinners, satyrs, satters, angels and archangels, all myths, all mysteries, lesser gods, the universe, science, and all Messiahs – a basic scrambling of all logic and rationality (though logic and rationality have a place in this rubric as well) in the name of the caca-laka-nee-nee dance. I am as much a Jew (though not a Jew by blood at all) who enjoys seder dinner as I am a Zen Episcopalian (nee lapsed Roman Catholic) who does the “Satyr Dance” as I am a cold-headed (but illogical) logician; just as I am a na-na who builds catastrophe-inducing particle colliders. My dream was always to be the Talmudic scholar (penetrating the infinitely-unsolvable riddles of everything) humiliated by pagans over the course of an unusually rowdy Saturnalia (I love humiliation.)

            But as I sat in my room, I was what I did: a jerk-off. (Some would suggest I haven’t changed.)

            In the middle of jerking off, my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder often compelled me to evaluate my relationship to God and religion (and that relationship is existent – I will never be a nihilistic hipster who believes in nothing; every particle of the universe is pregnant with infinite meaning.) God loves perverted sex fiends as much as he loves anyone!

            But back to jerking off (and that’s not meant as hipster disrespect to Christ.)

What was Aliza’s room like? I’ll bet it smelled worse than mine. Should I jerk off to her? Nah… I’ll jerk off to Amanda Goldstein instead. Amanda Goldstein, one of my first crushes, had just returned to town from a two-year absence. She had been living with her father in Florida but, apparently, the people down there were too nice for her. It was great (especially for my fantasy life) to have her back in our school.

            Why on earth was I thinking about that fat Mexican from my math class instead of Amanda Goldstein?

            Okay… Now think about Amanda Goldstein riding my cock… Not Alisa… Okay… I’ll think about Alisa.

            I had no aversion to jerking off about unattractive people (I sometimes fantasized about my oldest and ugliest female teachers), but Alisa just didn’t seem, well, sexual enough to me (though that would soon change and change for good.) I tried and tried to jerk off about Alisa, but it didn’t work.

            Back to Amanda Goldstein.

            Diagonal to my limp right hand (I always jerked off with my left) was a television stand that held a standard-sized boobtube complete with mounted illegal box. Thankfully (for the sake of non-chafing) I had not yet figured out – in my own mad scientist way – how to descramble the Spice channel, which looped softcore fucking movies 24 hours a day. The Internet porn addict teens of today don’t know how good they have it compared to my stodgy generation! Yet, somehow, most of them are asexual compared to us “young Gen-Xers.” They must have been sexually deadened by too much porn! We were the time of magazines, VHS tapes, and Larry Clark’s “Kids.” Look up that period film, you Millenial volcels (voluntary celibates!)

            Many of the kids in my time were just like the kids in “Kids.”

            But not Aliza. She doesn’t go to parties and hook up with jerks like Telly. She’s just an unwanted Mexican.

            How do I know? Maybe she fucks all sorts of guys like Telly from “Kids.” I’m thinking about Amanda Goldstein now. She is the one who rides my cock several times a day. Amanda is riding my cock now.

            I came while thinking of Amanda’s asshole and what it might look like in reverse cowgirl.

My television blocked the northmost half of a folding-door closet, so I kept the other side wide open. That way I could see if anyone or anything shuffled between the clothes.

            Everyone in the entire world knows this about me, but I’ll say it again: I have endured (the best word for it) a lifelong fear of alien abduction. And they could have so easily taken me from our isolated location! What if the “person” pictured below peeked out from my closet door?

 

            HOOLA! HOOLA! HOOLA!

            (I am still so scared of this picture – to this very day – that I deleted it from my files as soon as I posted it for y’all! Now I can’t work on this novel at night! Shit!)

            What if that face peeked out from my closet? If it pushed aside a pair of jeans and looked at me? White privilege means worrying about entities floating me out of my window and upward to a waiting craft.

            I needed a woman. One who would love and protect me through the dark hours. Company to accompany me through another long, dark night on my parents’ outpost. In the projects you hear nothing but merengue parties all night long, but in the ‘burbs you hear crickets, bug-faced mofos who look like aliens. Cricket… Cricket…

            Did that picture hypnotize me as I was writing this? Will that make it more likely that they will bother me soon? They better not!

            Anyhow, I really needed a woman back then. Not just to love me and make love to me, but to protect me from aliens (or whatever they are.)

            Kayla, my scraggly little sister in the next bedroom, was not a “girl,” a “woman,” or any help at all. A thin wall separated us, but it might as well have been a gulf, a giant Hoover Dam constructed by antediluvian giants, a thick 100 miles of concrete at the narrowest point. My ear pressed to the wall failed to hear her breath; the comforting sound of a fellow human, my sister (if I could ever call her that), my blood (if blood means anything.)

She did not fear intelligent non-human entities like the one pictured on the cover of Whitley Strieber’s “Communion.” She looked at the paperback cover and shrugged. Not scary. No big deal. They probably didn’t exist anyway. And if they did, what could she do about it?

The empty tank of her imagination failed to fuel fears, rational or irrational. She would not quiver if an asteroid careened toward earth. What could she do about it? Only imaginative people fear asteroids. If anything, she would just take up the mainstream media’s position on the asteroid: “Well, they say it will only wipe out about half the human race, so hopefully it won’t hit our side of the earth. They say we’ll be fine here in New Jersey despite a 30-year nuclear winter. And why should I worry about a global cataclysm? There’s nothing I can do about it.”

            Sister did not fear death or any of the implications of it. What could she do about it? She didn’t worry about what might happen after death. That was all outside of her control!

            “I’d rather worry about living than dying,” she once stated, as smug and smarmy as Tom Hanks. “There’s nothing I can do about death. So why worry about it?”

            When we went on family trips, she sat in the back of the car and read one of her “Babysitter’s Club” books. The bouncy print never made her carsick – she was too mediocre to suffer from motion sickness.

Unctuous little snotnose. Unimaginative dullard! Though 2 years younger than me, she had been the one to tell me that Santa Claus did not exist (only the imaginative can bend logic to make way for Old St. Nick.) Santa protected me from aliens and asteroids and the world felt lonelier without him.

Yes, I had a squawky-voiced, stringy-haired, and freckle-nosed little sister. Outwardly loveable if only for her physical flaws. Ugly-cute, if not for her sneaky nature. Like my dad, she knew how to break a dollar and manage money. Kayla manned the cash box for all of dad’s promotional events. She flicked the dollars back and forth like a coked-up Vegas blackjack dealer, an accountant’s neuro-gears turning in her silly-savvy mind. She cheated at Monopoly (but without the roguish charm of my dad’s sleight of hand.)

Kayla did not concern herself with what lay beyond her control (such as death and global catastrophes), but she managed, with the astute care of an amoral Balzacian merchant, the state of her own safety, comfort, and convenience. For her, the horrors of the grave (whatever they might be) were trivial compared to the wrath of my mother. She could do something toward the mitigation of a mentally ill mommy.

 A coward (on the practical plane), she hid, huddled, and camouflaged her way out of punishment (including beatings.) In any of our sibling disputes, she turned the facts, spun a yarn, outright lied, lied by omission, admitted half-truths, slanted the story, and spewed forth CNNish pro-Kayla propaganda, monologues that made the national media look like amateur purveyors of misinformation. She cast herself as the victim rather than the perpetrator (though she almost always started the trouble and then deftly teased – like a crafty witch – the mischief to a maelstrom of chaos and confusion that only she could manage, control, or even understand.) She edited and presented manipulative narratives worthy of a percipient MSN editor and then, in that tinny voice of hers, ejaculated the usual “But I was just trying to help him and then he shouted at me for no reason…” The tears followed, and she hugged my mother, regressing to the gelatinous meltdown of a tactless toddler (the serpent posing as a slimy dove.)

“Don’t you see she was just trying to help you?” shouted warlord mother every time. “You’re lucky you have a sister who loves you!”

            How was she helping me by defacing my Spelling Bee certificate (the only award I had ever won?)

            “But… But… But…” I shrieked, the high-pitched squeal of frustration, impotent rage, and suppressed fury (I’d had best suppress any untoward emotion while speaking with mother, the handsy warlord.) “She’s lying.”

            “She’s not lying! Now you shut your face and go to your room!”

            I slumped to my room for the thousandth time, incredulous that such a lowly worm as my sister could be related to a spiritual aristocrat like me.

            Wily Kayla always left me flatfooted and defeated (she couldn’t match me in honest conflict and so she resorted to subterfuge.) I felt as dumb, naïve, and guileless as a dog who smiles, pants, chases his own tail, eats his own excrement, and then doggy-smiles at his abuser! I was the moronic mutt who talked with puppy eyes for too long, who said – with the lovesick twinkling of his not-yet-cataracted pupils – “Please hit me with a newspaper and ruin me as a sentient being while I’m still young!”

The little brat (she was only a brat with me, as my parents would have tanned her pale hide had she acted out with them) could have murdered me and then beat the case by whimpering “But I was just trying to help him…” The shrewd little mouse (more like a rat) could have acted as her own attorney in court and the judge would have wiped a tear from his icy eye and sniffled “Oh, you poor little angel. You innocent little thing. You sliced his throat for a dollar because you were trying to help him! I don’t care what the jury says. You are not guilty!”

The sneaky coward.

Like most pragmatic people, sister lacked a certain idealism… Now Plato was a bore, a prig, a life-denier and a pleasure-hater, but there are ideals of love and meaning that animate most humans beyond the state of a bio-automaton (even if some of those humans consider us little more than animal organisms/bio-automatons, most of them still tend to place us under the superstitious and idealistic aegis of dialectical or rational materialism.) My sister, to twist the words of Nietzsche, had no why for her how. Comfort, convenience, safety, and survival were ends in themselves and those ends were protected at the expense of everyone else, if necessary. A hypocrite without a conscience (conscience requires a certain kind of idealism), she often accused me of selfishness, accusations that only shored up and secured her own selfish needs (my sister should have been a politician.)

Her imagination was as geometric as the cookie-cutter of a Danish crumpet factory, as colorful as the fat, dull, blunted uber-Crayola crayons (the lowest-common-denominator-shaped crayons big enough for the kids with sensory issues, but pliable for the average kids – a one-size-fits-all implement, same as public school itself.) Her inner universe stretched to limits as set-rigid as the lines of her Kindergarten coloring book, and like all the other mediocrities she never colored outside the lines. She never saw any reason to not follow the rules.

Though she skirted both the brunt of my mother’s wrath as well as strife from the school educrats simply by doing what she was told, it would be unwarranted jealousy on my part to assume that she somehow had it “easier.” To do so would be the same as assuming an adult must be happy, functional, and well-adjusted just because he or she is good at making money.

My sister did not walk on eggshells but tiptoed around shards of broken glass laced with psychic hepatitis.

She hid under a blanky well into her Zoloft and Xanax-saturated adulthood; a lifelong hermit crab. Forget about “dark night of the soul.” I had gone on to swim in the pitch-black abyss. But Kayla never even bothered to meander around the outer edge of the Event Horizon and fully commit to the nightmarish vision quest, the breakdown that leads to reintegration as a decent human being. She refused to do “the work” – the alchemical work – of merely becoming a human for the first time ever. One of us (me) worked hard just to be human (becoming a decent human being was extra credit.) Kayla got caught on the edge but lacked the spirit for the last push. Now she’s destined to swirl on the outer ring forever, a dizzy, nauseating spiral, the swirl on her hermit crab shell. A hermit crab, but not a human being. Will she ever be human?

She would have been an “interesting” hermit crab had she been pretty like a consumptive Gothic heroine or deep and introverted like Emily Dickinson, but she did not receive either looks or talent as a reward for her constitutional sickness (and constitutional here includes mind, body, and spirit.) She coughed up blood but did not get a poem out of it.

Outside of Kayla’s room and at the apex of our Swiss-cross-shaped landing was the first of two upstairs bathrooms. My favorite room in the house if only for the heat fan, which drowned out and dissipated the sound and smell, respectively, of shit. Recall what I said about white privilege at the very beginning of this chapter. Unlike Alisa, I took care of private business in utmost privacy; the cocoon of a hermetic chamber.

Mother cared more about our bath habits than the sound, smell, or duration of our shits. She forbade us to take baths or showers after 9pm.

“That bathroom is right next to my damn door. I can hear you sloshing water! I can hear your ass sliding against the bottom. You better take your damn bath before 9 our you’re not getting a damn bath! And you better keep it short! Money doesn’t grow on trees in case you didn’t notice!”

Mother’s bedroom was the largest in our house. She slept in a central king-sized bed with our Rottweiler, Greta, and various and shifting aggregates of our five cats (‘tis rare to keep one cat – let alone five – in bed for an entire night.)

The size of her closet dwarfed most tornado alley crawl spaces. She stuffed it with seldom-used dress clothes: slacks, evening dresses, and Hillary Clinton-esque suit jackets with already-dated 1980s shoulder pads.

She only dressed up for formal nights on Caribbean cruises. Other than that, she went through her life as a slob.

Mother, like Ernest or Pee Wee Herman, wore the same outfit every day.

The front of her one and only sweatshirt bore a cutesy illustration of the front halves of three cats. On the back of the sweatshirt were (logically) the backsides of the same three cats. The back of her shirt was much like the example below except that it was not Christmas-themed and the feline anuses were much more prominent - more like the anuses of baboons in heat: 

            Brilliant artistry. Whoever designed her fuckin’ sweatshirt was an accomplice to my humiliation!

She rounded out her ensemble with a pair of gray sweatpants, Kmart sneaks, and a Jansport purse (which always smelled like Spearmint gum.)

            The shame I experienced over my mother’s appearance would have been less or non-existent had she been a goodhearted person by any measure or standard.

It would have been different had my mother been a fat, doddering, warm-blooded eccentric, the sort of old dingbat who loves people and animals. The “crazy cat lady” type encountered in discount supermarkets and thrift stores; buying Fancy Feast for her babies and cheap Barney flip-flops for her beloved nieces and nephews (who, unbeknownst to her, were already too grown-up and cool to wear anything with purple dinosaurs on it.)

            I’m talking about the sort of frumpy, middle-aged woman who is one of the meek of the earth; a harmless guppy bullied by the slick sharks of the world. The gentle pacifist in Walmart clothes who is mocked and made fun of by jock douchebags and guido hotshots. A person so soft they do not shuffle but rather melt down the pet food aisle (because their babies deserve Fancy Feast.) The sort of ladies who – like a teen with Down Syndrome – ask everyone (even strangers) for a hug.

If my mother had ever been a kind person toward me or anyone else, I would have defended her honor with my words and fists. I would have said “What did you say about the cat assholes on my mother’s back? I’ll beat the shit out of you!”

            And then I would have at least tried to kick some ass, even if the antagonist was bigger/stronger/tougher than me. I had fought with my fists for the honor of Amanda Goldstein and other girls who wouldn’t even talk to me, but I could not work up the courage to defend my own mother’s not-so-good name. I loved and cared about near-strangers more than I ever loved or cared about mommy dearest.

            Mother didn’t need my help. She may have looked like an innocent victim, but that was just her fashion sense. She wasn’t a fat flounder or even a shark. Rather, she swam through petty bourgeois waters as a Remora, a parasitic fish attached to the eyeball of a Great White.

            I cannot speak for my sister Kayla, but I was ashamed of my mother. Embarrassed by her. Think of what it was like when she showed up to my school! “Yes, that’s my mother, the one with a bunch of cat assholes all over her back!”

            What hot High School girl would want to fuck a guy with a mother like that?

            I hated the fucking bitch.