So, there we stood in the parking lot of the Chateaux Rose in Rosemont, watching Kelly’s dad puke. When you’re a kid, seeing an adult vomit is like spotting your teacher in public, but way worse. You’re shocked and appalled by their realness, their human-ness, and, in the case of Kelly’s dad, their complete and total drunkenness.
My grandmother Madeline often glanced up from her sewing or stopped the vacuum cleaner, stared at me for a long moment and said, softly, “God will give you blood to drink.”
I threatened to murder my brother once. It was a hot summer day in his room, which was at the top of the stairs, littered with dirty clothes and He-Man action figures. It was 1986. I was ten years old. Carl Eric was about to turn seven. In his fingers, he had a tangle of my chest-length dirty blond hair and was yanking, hard. This was his preferred maneuver in our many physical fights. I know what you’re thinking, who […]
For the past eight years, at the first sign of frost, my mother has packed up her things, coolly kissed me goodbye, and boarded a plane to a lesbian retirement commune in Florida. At the lesbian retirement commune, the houses are painted soothing coral, ocean blue, sunny yellow, and have mermaids and parrots dangling from the eaves. The women, who all resemble Roger Ebert on a tropical vacation, drive around in golf carts and wave to each other with a […]
“Hi there, Mrs. Jones? My name’s Maggie. I’m the one who has been talking to all of the families here in Hanover this summer about those study guides to help your kids with schoolwork. It only takes a quick minute to show you. Do you have a place to sit down?” I have recited that script about 10,000 times. It is seared into my soul. It haunts my dreams. That’s what happens when you devote two summer vacations to selling […]
In college, I was a raging, unapologetic gay-basher. Still recovering from Christianity, I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and would sit in the cafeteria at the University of Arkansas, holding court on how disgusting gays were, and how they should all be shipped out to a “Gay Island” and left to sodomize each other. I had my entourage of college boys, laughing at my angry rants, my hate-filled comedy of intolerance. I was like a young Rush Limbaugh, gathering […]
The theme of my sister-in-law’s twenty-sixth birthday was “Fried and Flaming.” Her birthday was the Thursday before my other brother’s wedding, and we decided that she would only eat fried foods and drink flaming drinks to celebrate the anniversary of her birth. It all started a month before at my parents’ surprise party to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. At the party, my dad had told us about a drink called “The Statue of Liberty” in which you pour some […]
Everyone remembers where they were that day. You know the day. That day. People were at work, getting ready for work, getting the kids ready for school—all in our usual morning routines on that particular Sept. 11th.
About four years ago, I had a breakthrough in quitting mentality. I had started dating for the first time. Well, I had been “dating” a man since college, though I don’t know if you consider eating in the university cafeteria and playing computer games together dating. I did, and we moved in together after college. He was a physicist who played “Legend of Zelda” on three monitors at once. He thought the city was almost as inconvenient as socializing. I […]
