Honest Conversation Is Overrated
Actual Human Interactions Witnessed Or Overheard
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
Just back from another glorious weekend with Racist Grandma. After letting me sleep in all the way until six in the morning, she cooked me ham and eggs for breakfast, making sure to remind me that I had to share most of my ham with the dog, or else the dog would cry.
I made the dog cry. "Do you like the eggs? I broke the yolk. Your father doesn't like it when I break the yolks, he always makes me recook them. He's such a kidder. I don't understand why the Blacks think they need everything. They all have nine hundred dollar shoes, and all that gold(!), and they keep crying about how expensive the heat is. But have you ever been to a Black Person's apartment? They all crank they heat up, and leave the windows open. My god. I don't get it. At least they get all dressed up and nice for Church, not like the Spanish. I keep telling the priest he needs to talk with the Spanish, they let their kids run around all the time, and they always spill their sodas on the floor. Who do you think has to clean it up? The white people. It's not fair. Do you know how hard it is for a white kid to get into those, what do you call them, magnet schools? They're all Blacks and Spanish. I thought Those People didn't want segregation. Oh, and the singing. I hate the way the Blacks sing in Church. It's shameful. Are you all done with your ham? Frisky wants the rest of the ham, don't you boy, yeeeeeeeeeea." I have discovered that my body's defense mechanism is sleep. I'd be completely functional, and working on writing, or reading, and she'd start in on a rant, and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I'd be out for about an hour. But when I woke up, "And another thing, why do they drive so fast? All day long, zooom, zooom. Always The Blacks racing up and down the street. Shameful." Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I needed the excess sleep for my return trip home, as I detoured to Worcester for a slam. Before the slam, I went out to dinner with a couple of friends at Crapplebee's. While we were perusing the menu, the teenagers at the table behind us were trying to remember the names of Hanson songs that weren't MmmBop. And then one of them said, "I just got tickets to The Spice Girls show in January. I'm so excited." Apparently, I detoured to Worcester circa 1998. After dinner, we headed to the poetry venue. I debated just going to watch, but when I heard Ben was coming, with a carload or two of Hampshire students, I decided to make him pee a bit by slamming against them. I won. And, instead of going straight home, I decided to be a fratboy, and play drunken Monopoly with some friends until three in the morning. In order to be a fratboy, I could have drank some Budweiser, some Natty Light, a forty of just about anything. Instead, I drank Skittlebrau. Smirnoff Ice, with Skittles dropped in it, making it fizz and change to whatever color the Skittles are. It tasted wonderfully not quite awful. I didn't win Monopoly. At all. I was only able to buy two properties during the game. I wasn't being selective, I just never landed on a property someone else didn't own. It was kind of eerie. The game ended a bit after three, and a bit around six, I drove home with one of my roommates. I stayed up, banning bad_sex trolls until it was time for work. During the middle of the shift, a bunch of coworkers stopped in. We were discussing my being caught in Worcester circa 1998, when one of them said "At least it wasn't 1986." "I beg to differ. If it were 1986, I could have at least Pogoballed while people talked about the new Falco cassette." None of them knew what a Pogoball was. "You don't...I mean...they...they were these neon colored Saturn looking things. Two balls with a sort of plastic tray between them that you hopped up and down on. You don't remember?" They didn't remember. So we ended up talking about other 80's fads, Hypercolor t-shirts, Jams shorts, jelly shoes, "Do you remember slap bracelets?" a random customer asked. "You mean those brightly colored fabricy things with the metal rods inside?" He did. "I hated those things." I said. "The metal was always just waiting to slice through the fabric and into your skin. I hold the inventor of those stupid toys personally responsible for the entire generation of cutters we have out there." And then the store got eerily quiet. "Too far?"
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My inability to hold boring small talk with strangers is proof of nature over nurture. Friday night, my father, my stepmother, Ben and I managed to have a ten minute discussion on how cold it was. It was really fucken cold. That could have summed the whole discussion up.
To rectify the coldness, my father and his wife are headed to Cancun. My mother is in Florida. I have been walking around the streets of Boston with Ben at two o'fucken clock in the morning to get milkshakes, because really, what warms a frigid body more than cold milk blended with ice cream? "You should use some of the family's timeshare in Florida." My father says. "It only costs about $400, and you could take like eight people down there with you. That's fifty bucks a piece." My father, the human abacus. Maybe I should. I haven't taken a vacation since...I don't know. I went on tour with Steggy in 2003, I moved to Arifuckenzona a few months later. Since then, the furthest I've ventured is to my grandparents in Connecticut. "My mother's pissed at me." My father says. "You've seen that commercial with the old guy who shuffles, and can't remember things? Your grandfather has that, and I'm trying to tell Ma she should tell the doctor to have him checked for it but" and small talk and small talk and small talk. I should go to Florida. Or California. Or go to Vegas with Ben. My father says, "Last time I went to Vegas, I learned to only take $200 with me. That way I won't spend more than I can afford. And if I make money, great. I've been doing really well at the dog track lately." and small talk and small talk and small talk about medium money. "Your parents are remarkable." Ben says, on our way back to his house. "I've never seen someone be so interestingly boring. And they're so...nice. What happened to you?" Nature over nurture. "I don't know." But I remember my father's temper when he was still with my mother. The way she taught me to work him into a rage. He was never the violent asshole father depicted in movies of the week or cop shows, but he had his moments of my body slammed to the wall head first into wheelbarrow the coffee table splintered my grandmother standing between us. But he didn't mellow with age. He didn't have a revelation or therapy or karma. He just got away from us. A small island with a woman who loved him more than power, kids who would offer him grandchildren. "She's so smart." My father says of my stepniece. "She's fifteen months old and when her parents watch television too long, she climbs on to the table in front of them and dances. And sometimes" small talk small talk small talk "and we gave her one of your old Raggedy Andy dolls?" "One of?" Ben asks. "Yea, I had a big one from my grandparents, and a small one that we got from this place on the Cape, years before we moved there. It's weird, Jennifer had one too, and she got it around the same time. It's possible that we actually met when we were―" "Wait." Ben says. "You had two Raggedy Andys but no Raggedy Ann?" I know where this is going. "Yea." "Well that explains a lot." "It was because of my red hair that people got them for me." "Oh, I'm not judging you. I just think it's funny. When I was a little kid I had My Little Ponys because my best friends were girls and they had them. I just didn't know any better." He laughs. And under his breath I hear "Two raggedy Andys. Homo." I'd kick him under the table, but it's a small table and the angles are all wrong. "Sorry about the gay jokes." Ben says on the T ride home. "But, really, two Raggedy Andys but no Ann? Gaaaaaay," Before Ben, the only gay person my father met through me was Elvis. It was after things had started to go horribly horribly wrong, so Elvis wasn't terribly talky, just terrible. He mostly moped that he was on an expensive resort island and no one was buying him anything. He had a bus ticket home in his not so distant future. My father, like my mother and all my friends, hated him. But unlike my mother and all my friends, he didn't say a word about it. To this day, he's never asked how Elvis was doing or what happened to him. Elvis was there, then he was gone. He probably doesn't even remember the false name Elvis gave him (because if he'd given his real name, who could forget it?). My dad likes Ben. I know because he called me from Cancun (and my dad NEVER calls me) to small talk and mention that "that Ben kid seemed really nice. Anytime you want to come down to the island together, let me know." "It's tough to get him out of Boston." Ben says. "But I'll try." So there is balance to the universe. Ben's dad likes me. My dad likes Ben. "How come I didn't get to meet him when I came to visit?" My mother asks. "He was in New York, remember? I had you drop me off at his house so I could feed his cat." "Well, next week I want you to come down and get all the stuff you want out of the old house so we can put it on the market. You should bring him with you." Um. Um. Um. Um. Pilgrim's Academy was my chance to start over. None of the kids in my new school knew that I had been third-grade famous for my Woody Woodpecker impersonation, or that Queen Popular Sarah The First had caught me picking my nose in fifth grade science class. Nobody had heard about the time Kevin Harris pushed me off my porch and broke my arm. Nobody even knew who Kevin Harris was. I was safe.
I've never asked my parents precisely why they decided I should go away to a private middle school. I think they believed that I was too smart for the public school system, and that's why my grades had been dropping. It couldn't have been because I was bored with the facts the teachers mumbled, and terrified of the small humans who were supposed to be my peers. Whatever the reason, I'm mostly grateful. I've heard stories about what happened during my two year absence from the public education system: group showers, rat tails, stabbings, a pregnant girl, marijuana. The most exciting thing I can remember from my two years at Pilgrim's was when the Latin teacher had a nervous breakdown between third and fourth periods, and stormed out of her classroom yelling that my friend Scott and I were "trying to destroy" her and her "teaching curricula". That night, she called our parents, and the parents of a few of our classmates, and told them how "ill-behaved" and "dangerous" we were. After a brief investigation into our third and fourth period activities (the highlight of third period being that my teacher failed to collect the homework I didn't do, and the highlight of fourth period being that nobody blamed me for the fart someone dropped in the darkroom), the Headmaster issued a written and verbal apology to all the children and parents involved, and the Latin teacher was demoted to assistant librarian. It was during the Pilgrim's years that I fell in love with the idea of Jennifer. Long brown hair, green eyes, nose that wrinkled pleasantly when she laughed at my stupid, stupid jokes. After voluntarily going to a couple of her cello recitals, and convincing her tutor me in Science, I finally got the courage to ask her out, and was stunned when she said "Yes." I was less stunned when she dumped me four days later, confessing that she'd only really gone out with me because she wanted to make out with my supposed best friend, Scott. And he hadn't noticed her at all, until she started tongue kissing me during lunch. I'd like to say I spent the rest of the year shunning both my treacherous friend, and that filthy hobag, Jennifer. But I didn't. I continued to worship my ex-best friend's new girlfriend. And pretended to not hate Scott for his betrayal. After all, they were my best friends. Unlike public school friendships, private school friendships are hindered by distance. No one in my school lived in the same neighborhood that I did. Only two of them lived in the same town, and neither of them were my friends. So, during most school vacations, I stayed home alone and began my affair with computers. Typing elaborate fantasy stories, and some of the worst rhyming couplets recorded by twentieth century man. I became really good at top of the line games like Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, and King's Quest IV. During my Spring Break (which did not correspond with the public school's February and April vacations), I spent some time at the doctor's office where my mother worked, and riding in my father's work truck, eating sandwiches while he fixed electrical wires and telephone poles. On the third day with my father, I ate a runny Grilled Cheese sandwich that had decided that, since it had defeated my throat with its power of burnination, it was more than up for the challenge of destroying my colon. Despite my life-long dislike of public restrooms, I had no choice but to run into the restroom that my father's many coworkers shared, and purge my body of this greasy affront to cheesdom. I knew this was going to be a multiple part bowel movement. At least a three minute project. Unfortunately, I'd left my copy of The Two Towers in my dad's truck, and the only thing in the stall with me was a Wall Street Journal. I picked it up, and out fell a glossy magazine with a scantily clad woman on the cover. Club magazine. I was ready to put the potentially offensive periodical back within the pages of the newspaper. I'd "read" through my father's Playboys, and hadn't found anything interesting aside from the joke section. Slim women with large breasts leaning over cars, or kneeling on beaches didn't do it for me. But the woman on the cover was not like the women in my dad's Playboys. She didn't look like the kind of girl who liked long walks on the beach, and dreamed of curing cancer, or becoming a veterinarian. This wide-hipped, huge nippled goddess had probably dropped out of highschool after her third abortion, and decided that stripping only provided temporary fame, while posing for porn meant that her nineteen year old pussy would live forever. I flipped the magazine open. I marvelled at the way she squatted to the ground, a whip held tight in her teeth. In the background was a bright red motorcycle, and beneath her was...a huge cock. Sure enough, the next page showed her leaning over the motorcycle, while a guy in a visored helmet and nothing else pointed his cock in the direction of her mammoth ass. My butt clenched. I leaned over and checked the room for a pair of feet. I was alone. I folded the magazine back into the Wall Street Journal, ran it out to my father's truck, and zipped it into my backpack. |
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