TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

I only lived in Portland for two years, although it’s hard to imagine that so many bad things happened in such a short about of time. Most of the bad things that happened to me there were a direct result of my actions–or, more precisely, a direct result of my alcohol consumption, which was high, though in no way atypical in Portland. Actually, not all of the bad things were a direct result of my decision to, say, quit a full-time job with benefits and a company cell phone because working before noon was incompatible with my hangover. There was, for instance, the time the sewage main in my apartment building backed up into the drain in my bathtub, which felt like the city itself was shitting on me. This situation certainly wasn’t helped by drinking all day while I waited for the plumber–I peed in the alley beside my building in full daylight, twice–but most of the other bad shit was my fault. Still, even though I now recognize that it was me with the problem, not Portland, I find the love-affair everyone under fifty and to the left of Congress has with the city an annoying reminder of two really bad years. For this reason, I avoided watching the first season of Portlandia, which seemed like a TV version of a Keep Portland Weird bumper sticker: tacky, self-congratulatory, and, like the city itself, not really funny. But after reading Margaret Talbot’s recent New Yorker profile of Portlandia creators Carrie Brownstein–the former guitar player from Sleater Kinney–and Fred Armisen–the not-famous guy from SNL–I decided to try it out. Besides, it’s been four years since I moved and it’s not as if Portland broke up with me, right? I mean, I’m the one who left. Surely I could handle a few hours of Portlandia landscapes–which look nothing like the city for the ten months of the year when it is choked by drizzle–without collapsing into my dislike for the city, which started soon after my girlfriend kicked me and my drinking problem out.

Portlandia is a sketch comedy show with Brownstein and Armisen doing caricatures of Portland’s subcultures. You have the ultra-feminists, the fixed-gear cyclists, the dumpster-divers, and players in an adult hide-n-seek league acting, respectively, neurotic, obnoxious, disgusting, and infantile. The sketches are all pretty much the same: take a stereotype and stretch it to the extreme. Make the people who quiz servers about the origin of their chicken leave the table to check out the chicken’s free-range home for themselves. Take the couple who pickles everything and make them pickle everything. This formula was funny for a minute before I got bored and started tallying the number of times I wrecked my bike on the streetcar tracks after getting shitfaced with a bunch of strangers when I lived in Portland. Better than the actual show is synopsis from Talbot, who writes that it’s about “campaigners against any theoretical attempt to bring the Olympics to Portland and animal lovers so out of touch that they free a pet dog tied up outside a restaurant,” which does sound pretty funny.

What should be enjoyable about Portlandia is that, even as a farce, it shows a place not so different from many other left-leaning cities and towns. Sure, Portland is quirky with it’s sanctioned pillow fights and double-decker bikes, but it’s no quirkier than Asheville, where I periodically attended college while dumpster diving everything from bagels to sushi, working in a lesbian bookstore, and judging women who shaved their armpits. Portlandia could be about Carborro, North Carolina, where I moved after Portland: a town of 20,000 people that passed a resolution opposing the Iraq War and where a completely unqualified transgendered woman came close to winning the 2008 mayoral race because how cool would it be to have a trans mayor? Portland’s just not that different. It may be known for it’s locavore movement and the multitude of drummers with tattoos of inanimate objects, but you see just as many toasters with wings on peoples’ biceps and Eat Local tote-bags at the farmer’s market in Durham, North Carolina, where the hot social event is vegan brunch at the queer bar. But more so than yogis and cyclists and kombucha babies, what cities like Portland and Asheville, Carrboro and Durham, San Francisco and Austin have in common is an immense love of self. People are just so proud to live in all these places. And this is what I dislike about Portlandia: the show pokes fun at hipsters and freegans and earnestness itself, but it does so while patting itself on the back for being just so special.

The sketches that succeed do so because they are less about Portland and more about Portlandia’s audience. One of my favorites is “Did You Read That,” in which Brownstein and Armisen battle each other across a table: Did read that thing in the New Yorker last week about how golf is an analogy for marriage? Did you read the thing in McSweeney’s comparing cd tracks and album tracks? Did you read that thing in Mother Jones? Did you read that thing in Spin? Paste? Dwell? The New York Times? The Wall Street Journal? The phone book? That fortune cookie? Those menus? As someone who frequently–though with embarrassment–starts conversations with, “So I was reading this piece in the New Yorker,” this skit made me laugh. It was, after all, about me. And that’s why Portlandia appeals to people: we all like to see ourselves. The same people who are laughing at “We Can Pickle That!” are people who actually can pickle that. But I don’t pickle and I’m not vegan; I haven’t dumpster-dived since college and I’ve been shaving my armpits for years. So maybe that’s why I dislike Portland and Portlandia–they represent a type of person who I fundamentally am not: those with optimism and a passion for their home and the honest belief that what the world needs is more birds on things.

I didn’t start crying when the boss told me that I was fired because I was stoned and wouldn’t have comprehended the gravity of the situation even if I hadn’t smoked my tear ducts shut in the parking lot before clocking in. The stomach-dropping terror of being unemployed in an economy where it takes three interviews and a master’s degree to get a job removing gum from picnic tables didn’t come until later. My first concern was that I was way too high to drive. It’s possible that my boss knew this, but I hope he took my impassive face as a sign that I was calmly processing the information and would save us both the embarrassment of getting upset or even asking why. There was no need for explanation: while I wasn’t always stoned at work, I was always bad at work, and so getting fired was as shocking as being late, which I was that morning and every other. While I’m good at a number of things—I can change a flat tire, make delicious potato-leek soup, and know all the state capitals—work is not one of them. This position, personal assistant to a corporate executive, required a level of attention to detail I just don’t have, which was clear when I emailed a client that my boss was “rubbing a little behind” but would be there ASAP. And so, unsurprised, I nodded my head when my boss asked if I understood and then shook it when he offered me a cardboard box to pack my things in. I could have used the box but holding the contents of my office—a desk lamp and three five-pound bags of peanut M&Ms—awkwardly in my arms seemed less humiliating, as though my co-workers wouldn’t notice that I was being escorted out of the building as long as I didn’t leave with my things in a cardboard box.

When I got home, the crushing weight of rejection settled in. This wasn’t a new feeling. The first time I was fired was my freshman year of college when I worked the circulation desk at the library. It was dull and paid poorly but required no skills beyond stamping books, so I should have been able to keep this job even with lunchtime marijuana breaks in the faculty women’s bathroom that no one ever used. Everything was fine for the first month of the semester, but one day before work, I stole what I thought was Vicodin from my roommate’s stash to treat a raging freshman-year hangover. The pill turned out to be prescribed to my roommate’s dog, who was put on meds after biting the mailman. It cured my hangover because I was too high to think about my headache, but I also became a twitchy mess, unable to sit down, much less stamp books and use my inside voice. I tried to work through the panic attack for approximately three minutes before giving up and hiding in the bathroom for the remainder of my shift. My boss, who was shaped like a Lego man and stopped liking me when I asked if he learned to shush people in graduate school, fired me from outside the bathroom door. Now, here I was, a decade older and dismissed again.

I had enough in savings to cover my rent and bills for about a month and I’d surely qualify for food stamps, but without income, I’d have no money for essentials like weed and Redbox. This was bad. It was also nearly a month ago, and I haven’t found another job yet. I’m so convinced of my inability to get hired anywhere that I haven’t actually applied for any jobs. I get to the part on applications where you check the box allowing your prospective employer to verify your last place of employment, and think, what’s the point? Even my friends have stopped pretending to be job references for me. When I asked my neighbor to serve as a reference, to tell just a few minor lies, namely that I managed her bakery and did a good job of it, she looked at me sadly and said maybe if I hadn’t been so late picking her up at the airport last week she would have but just didn’t feel comfortable now.

Even if I had good references, I don’t know what I want to do for a living. When I think about my dream job, I picture what I’m doing right now—still in my pajamas at three in the afternoon, eating cupcakes bought with food stamps and searching the Internet for videos of three-year-old violin prodigies. If I weren’t required to make a living—if I married up or won a game show—I’d happily spend my days sleeping till 11, maybe going to yoga or for a bike ride if I felt especially ambitious, smoking weed all day, and spending lots of time making elaborate grilled cheese sandwiches. But with no prospects, references, or even a middle-class girlfriend to pay the rent, I’ve had to look for other ways to make money since I got fired.

I’d long seen advertisements in the local paper seeking ADHD smokers for a drug study. Despite earlier periods of unemployment and poverty, I’d never applied before because I’d never thought of myself as a smoker. Maybe I was in denial, like the man who spends Sundays after church with his wife at Atlanta bath houses yet insists he’s straight, but soon after I bought my first pack of cigarettes a decade ago I decided it doesn’t count if you brush your teeth after every one and so never considered myself a smoker. With this latest layoff, however, the $930 payment for study participation made calling myself a smoker worth it and so I signed up.

I’d never been diagnosed with ADHD before, but it didn’t seem like it would be hard to fake, and considering that I showed up for my screening appointment a day early, I didn’t even need to fidget much to be convincing. The study involved taking either Ritalin or a placebo for several months and maybe, I thought, it would change my life. Maybe I really do have ADHD and Ritalin would cure it, make me a workaholic, an alpha female, driven and ambitious and not too distracted by the squirrel digging a hole outside my window to finish this sentence. I hoped I didn’t get the placebo.

My first appointment went well, at least at first. I did fine on the intelligence test and my physical exam was normal and the staff psychiatrist thought I was plenty ADHD after I started pacing around his office. Unfortunately, the screening process also involved a drug test, which I failed. The research assistant, who seemed as disappointed as I was, told me that I was a perfect candidate and asked if I would be willing to lay off the weed for two weeks and then coming back to re-take the drug test. Sure, I said. Two weeks without pot might clear my head a bit, give my brain cells some fresh air, repair the damage of a stoned adulthood. If nothing else, abstinence would lower my tolerance, which, after years of daily use, was at near-Rastafarian levels. Besides, with no late-night runs to the grocery store for frozen pizza and Cheetos, I’d even save food stamps.

I took abstinence seriously for the first week, but I didn’t like it. I felt no surge of energy or ambition and I was no better at crosswords sober than I was stoned. I was bored. When you’re unemployed, time is your enemy. You have too much time and not enough money to make it interesting. Pot cures this. You have all the time in the world and you don’t notice it passing because the square of sunlight shining through your window is just so interesting to look at. Being stoned makes me okay with being bored, and so after a week of discontent sobriety, I sold a few quarts of plasma and spent the money on a bag of pot. I’d just get a non-stoner friend to donate clean urine before my appointment.

The hardest part of smuggling urine into a drug test is the temperature—the sample must be within three degrees of body temperature—and so the morning of my appointment, I woke up early and made a hot-water bath for my urine sample, which was stored in a Tylenol bottle in the fridge. I then tucked it into my underwear to keep it warm. Walking with a Tylenol bottle of someone else’s urine between your legs is uncomfortable, but $930 would keep me happily unemployed for another few months. And it worked—my urine tested negative for pot. Unfortunately, my urine also tested negative for nicotine, which indicated that either I wasn’t actually a cigarette smoker or that I’d cheated on my drug test. Either way, I was out of the study, and miserably so. As I left the clinic, the research assistant gave me the same sad look my neighbor did when I asked her to be a job reference, a look that says, Shame. She had such potential.

Since then, I’ve looked into other drug studies. Getting a flu shot and snorting broccoli spores will cover my phone bill and an eighth of weed; having my blood drawn 28 times in 90 minutes will get me a burrito and laundry money; and taking a non-FDA-approved HIV medication, having two vaginal biopsies, and spending 48 hours prone in a hospital bed will cover my rent for three months. But the real money, I’ve heard, is in egg donation. I’m healthy and educated and above average height, and so, in theory, my eggs are worth a lot, but what would I write on that application? That my place of employment is this clinic and my job is selling my own body parts? Even if prospective buyers were impressed at my master’s degree, my police record and stints in rehab would likely make my eggs even sold at a discount seem too much a risk. Besides, does the world need more people like me? Even with attentive child-rearing, there’s no guarantee that a kid made from my eggs would be anything more than I am: unambitious and unemployable, with the long-term malaise of the longtime pot smoker, with friends and bosses who shakes their heads and think, What happened? She had such potential.

Tomorrow will be exactly a month since I collected my things and was escorted out of my office. No game shows or rich women or couples desperate for a baby have come calling, so I suppose it’s time to start from the beginning, to look for jobs that don’t require references, and hope that I find something before I run out of drug studies to do and plasma to sell and am left with nothing but an empty jar of pot and all the potential in the world.

Because I listen to NPR all the time, taking breaks only during Car Talk and pledge drives, apocalyptic stories from what’s happening in the economy are always in my head. Until recently, our collapsing economy hasn’t bothered me more than any of the other terrible things happening in the world, for instance, the deaths of starving African children and Amy Winehouse. It’s not that I’m wealthy and immune to the economy’s failure; on the contrary, I’m as solvent as the guy on the Swift Street on-ramp who holds a sign declaring that his name is Keith, he’s homeless, and he hopes you have a blessed day. I make precisely $30,233 below the median household income in this country, but my household is just me and I’m cheap. I take the bus, steal toiletries from hotels, and never eat organic. I’ve been able to get by despite refusing to work more than twenty hours a week because I’d rather spend my time watching Law & Order reruns, but my indifference about the economy changed to concern after I fell asleep during a meeting at work a few weeks ago. I only nodded off for a few moments–my head drooping to the side, my mouth hanging open–before a coworker nudged me and whispered that I should get a cup of coffee, which I later spilled all over the conference room table. Afterward, when told that falling asleep during a meeting is a very big no-no and my job was now in jeopardy, I was genuinely surprised. What’s the problem, I thought? I slept my way through college and did just fine.

If I can keep this job for a few more weeks, I’ll hit my one year anniversary. An entire year of steady employment will be a record as I tire of jobs quickly and either stop showing up or get fired after a few months. Given my work history, it was surprising that I was offered this job in the first place. My resume is spotty, with long gaps during the times I’ve collected unemployment and played old Nintendo games instead of sending out resumes. I’ve had eighteen jobs in my dozen years in the workforce, and most have been so short-lasting that they aren’t worth the ink on my resume. The last time I was looking for jobs, I realized that I would never get one that didn’t involve a hairnet and latex gloves with an honest resume, and so I made one up. A six-month internship became a four-year full-time job, complete with promotions and pay raises. Helping a friend make a mixed tape for his girlfriend got listed under “Volunteer Experience.” Blogging became freelance writing and a weekend in Cancun became a Spanish immersion class. It worked, I got the job, and I’ve spent the past year in my cubicle, trying to block my computer screen so no one can see that I’m looking at baby pandas instead of spreadsheets. But if I can’t rectify this situation, a year is all I’ll get before I go back to unemployment and old Nintendo games.

My inability to keep a job started from the beginning, when I got fired from my only babysitting gig for locking the kids out of the house after they refused take their baths and yelling through the window that I was eating their ice cream. My next job, at Taco Bell, lasted until the manager handed me a spray bottle and pointed at the men’s room, at which point I decided working for a corporation meant selling my soul and walked out the door. After my day at Taco Bell, I explained to my parents that fast food was disenfranchising. Proud of their budding socialist, my parents didn’t ground me as long as I promised to find something else. I decided, however, that not working was better than working and I started what has been my employment path since.

Education is an excellent way to avoid work. It also provides buildings with heat and air conditioning, plenty of events with complimentary food, and money that seems free until the government starts garnishing your wages. And so, despite my dislike of academics, whose purposefulness I envy, I decided to go to graduate school after I was fired from an art gallery for my liberal interpretation of punctuality. It was mostly the prospect of student loans that convinced me to enroll, so I sent in my application to the only program I could get into, one with notoriously easy classes and college-affiliated happy hour three times a week. Although I cared little about my grades, I thought of graduate school as a job and student loans as my income. I even went so far as to purposely fail summer school because I needed a loan but couldn’t bear to spend my summer in a classroom.

I was in graduate school for almost two years before I quit. Characteristically, I bungled dropping out by writing on my withdrawal form that I was quitting because graduate school made me want to kill myself. I was kidding, of course, but I received a phone call from the octogenarian dean hours after submitting the form, panicked that I was lining up pills or inching toward a ledge. I explained that if anything made me want to kill myself it would be far more interesting than graduate school and thanked her for a two year reprieve from employment. After that, it was back to the workforce.

When I told my friends about my current situation at work, everyone advised me to buckle down, to stop looking at pandas online, to stay awake at meetings and make myself indispensable. But working hard is as natural to me tanning, and I’m Irish. No matter how hard I try, my attention lasts for three minutes of data entry before I find myself Googling chow chow puppies dyed to resemble teddy bears. Contrary to everyone’s advice, after my boss’s ultimatum–shape up or ship out to the bread line–I decided instead that I would use my well-cultivated ability to bullshit to save my job. It wouldn’t start showing up early and staying late: I would make my boss like me so much that he would employ me just to keep him company.

The biggest barrier to my mission is politics. Along with a life-size cut out of Derek Jeter and a framed photograph of Alex Rodriguez, my boss’s office is filled with Republican propaganda. He even covered his company-owned laptop with a sticker readingSomewhere in Kenya a village is missing its idiot, which seems unfair considering I have to cover the DYKE LOVE tattoo on my arm at work. Given a stronger economy, one with even low-paying jobs, I wouldn’t work for someone whose hates liberals even more than he hates the Red Sox, but I need this job and so I decided to make my boss think we have common values. I started on Monday morning when I stopped by his office to say hello. I asked how his weekend was and he said it was good. Went a church picnic on Saturday and taught Sunday school the next morning. I too went to church, I said. This was a lie. My faith in atheism is as strong as my faith in gravity, and the last time I entered a church was to steal a can of Sprite from the kitchen of St. Mary’s when I was twelve. When my boss, who first looked impressed when I told him I chose church over brunch, asked where I went, I said the first thing that came to mind: AME Zion. He looked at me oddly just as I remembered that AME Zion is a black church. Don’t you have work to do?, he said. And shut the door on your way out.

Later that week, I further sabotaged my chances of gaining job security when I accidentally sent my boss a text message meant for a friend about scheduling a meeting for a club we started. Our club, the Federation for the Advancement of Gay Girls Learning, organizes workshops for members to learn new skills and goes by the acronym FAGGL. Lez get together to talk FAGGL this week, I wrote. Your homo or mine? Perhaps if my boss, who applies words like “bandwidth” to people and tries to seem hip by cursing, thought I was making a homophobic joke he would have warmed to me, but he has eyes and so he knows I’m gay. He used to point his fingers like cocked gun and call out Rockstar! when he walked past my cubicle. Now he just walks by.

My situation is precarious, and for this I am scared. I am victim of our national carelessness but mostly of my own carelessness. No longer can I get by with hotel toiletries and the occasional part time job. There are so many people in this same situation that I would be competing with laid off teachers and lawyers and people who actually finished graduate school for even menial jobs. After years of listening to the bad news about the economy, the Recession is finally real. For the first time in my year of employment–for the first time ever–I dread the day I’ll go to work and leave with my things in a box big enough to hold my new pictures of Ronald Regan and the cross I tacked over my desk, but not big enough to live in after I walk to the Swift Street on-ramp with my own sign: My name is Katie, I’m homeless, and I hope you have a blessed day.

My therapist wants to talk about my drinking problem, which makes me feel like I have a drinking problem, so I interrupt her and say that my fear of upholstered furniture is getting worse. I wonder aloud if they makes pills for this phobia. I could use more pills for my stash, store them along with unopened bottles of Celexa and Lamictal and Adderall and Flexerall. My gag reflex, the strongest muscle in my body, is too sensitive for pills and drinking is self-medication enough, so I don’t touch drugs. Still, I fill prescriptions and store them with my other survival gear, all part of my plan for the end-of-days. When the cell towers collapse and the oceans dry up and the black market replaces the neighborhood grocery, I’m going to trade my uppers and downers for gasoline and booze and be glad I never got hooked on pills. My therapist tells me to make an appointment with my doctor and changes the subject to my drinking problem.

While I can ignore my drinking problem as long as my hangover isn’t too bad, my fear of upholstered furniture is undeniable. And unlike my alleged drinking problem, I feel no shame about this psychological glitch. This is a completely rationale fear. Have you ever considered the possibility of contracting lice from the headrest in a city bus? Think about that next time you decide it’s too cold to ride your bike.

Despite the common sense of being wary of upholstered furniture, it is rare phobia, less common even then papaphobia, or fear of the Pope, who obviously can’t hurt you from inside his bullet-proof box. The number of Google hits for “fear of upholstered furniture” is only sightly higher than the number for “at home lobotomy,” but this problem causes me serious anxiety. Unlike drinking, which I can combine with virtually any task, my phobia limits what I can do. It makes travel especially difficult. I think about taking the overnight train from North Carolina to New York to see friends and family brave enough to move north, sleep the whole way and wake up already there, but I couldn’t possibly stand up for the 500 mile ride. Besides, I’d be more comfortable sleeping on a pile of bricks than a hotel mattress, so overnight trips are out.

Unfortunately, my fear of upholstered furniture isn’t limited to upholstered furniture. More accurately, I have a fear of any cloth-like material people I don’t know have touched. I’d have to be running naked down the interstate after an oil spill before I’d put on used pants, and because I can’t afford anything new, I spend a lot of time hand-washing my one outfit, stretching the fabric’s lifetime through fashions and fads.

It’s the smell of second-hand stores that really gets me, a smell like slow waiting rooms with legs stuck to vinyl seats. And, like venturing into an illegal absinthe bar, you have no control over what you’ll encounter at second-hand stores. Unlike illegal absinthe bars, however, you don’t get the benefit of alcohol. In a real-life worst case scenario, a friend of mine dug through a mountain of other peoples’ trash at a Goodwill that sells by the pound, and instead of the vintage Calvin Klein windbreaker she was hoping for, she found a giant flesh-toned dildo with a foreskin and veins. After hearing this story, I started crossing the street to avoid the building, as though it were an obnoxious panhandler I was sick of refusing.

Several years ago, I moved across the country and, bringing only the things I could fit in an small but adorable suitcase, I had to set up an entirely new household. Had this been a household of one, I would have furnished my new home with a few folding chairs, but my girlfriend and I moved together. Despite my argument that sleeping side-by-side on yoga mats would be good for our backs as well as spiritually healing, she wanted furniture. My girlfriend got her way, but because we could barely afford the gas to Ikea, much less anything in the store, we had to turn to used goods if we weren’t going to eat sitting on the floor and holding bowls to our mouths. We slept on a Wal-Mart air mattress for several months before we could afford a bed and, desperate for something that wouldn’t deflate in the night, my girlfriend ignored my panic attacks and bought a used mattress, which should be illegal and is in most states, even ones where you can marry your cousin.

There were more danger zones in that house. I could deal with our used dresser as long as the drawer liners where in place, but the living room furniture made me pull out my application to the most spartan monastery I could find with wireless. The couch became safe after I splurged on a washable cover, but I couldn’t breath near the chair my girlfriend picked up at a cheap hotel’s liquidation sale without my inhaler. After a few months of sitting on the cold floor while the chair sat empty, I decided that it would be safe to use if it was covered by the quilt my mom gave me after my power was turned off one winter. The chair was a comfortable break from the floor, but once the quilt was on the chair, I couldn’t bring it to bed. It was the chair blanket, not the bed blanket. We couldn’t possibly sleep under something that had touched the hotel chair. My girlfriend disagreed, but I bought her a hot water bottle and a sleeping bag and she forgave my neuroses.

I moved out of that house years ago, and my home now is furnished entirely by friends and family. Things that are used by people I care about generally get a free pass from my rules. I have a futon from a friend who moved to San Francisco and a chair from my boss and a mattress from my sister, which is especially safe because we have DNA in common. The only furniture I avoid is a couch given to me by a friend. Considering that this friend wears vintage shoes without socks on, I probably should have realized her couch was rescued from Craigslist, but I didn’t ask until I had taken my front door off it’s hinges to move it inside. I kept the couch, but I sit on the floor instead, stare at from across the room, imagining afternoon naps and train tickets north and warm bus rides on cold days.

Before the session ends, my therapist tells me that I need to change my routine, to do something everyday that scares me, to start to fix my problems, and I tell her that I will. I might run from my drinking problem for as long as I live, but when I get home, I’m going to lay on that couch without even a sheet to protect me from it’s second-hand fabric. I’m going to lay on it so long that it becomes mine, as safe as clean towels and new pillows. This fear started small, with visions of lice on headrests and sex-toys in piles of clothes, and I’m going to sit on that couch until it’s small again. I won’t be the like woman who is so terrified of footprints in her carpet that she drags a vacuum behind her as she walks through her house; the woman who thinks about those footprints in her carpet all the time and eventually avoids the floor entirely, jumping from couch to chair to doormat. I won’t be the woman who can’t leave the house because everything out there is so terrifying, so toxic, so out of control. I’ll get over this fear and I won’t find myself in the middle of my living room someday, not touching anything, with a closet full of pills and nothing to sit on but a case of booze.

The last time I was this ugly was during my sixth-grade braces and bowl cut phase. It’s partly my outfit (denim on denim), my pedicure (chipped), and my hair (flat, frizzy) but it’s mostly my face that has made people avoid eye contact with me since I wrecked my bike/face a few days ago. It was my first sober wreck since I got my training wheels off and the most damaging yet. The right side of my face is covered in road rash. It just looks like moderate sunburn on my cheeks, but my jawline reveals what’s underneath all those layers of skin: flesh and blood and quite a bit of puss. But as ugly as my face right now, it’s as milk-smooth compared to my hands (which look like they were repeatedly burned with cigarettes like I’m a mob snitch or an enemy combatant), and my knees; one is a deep purple quickly moving to green and the other is covered in a delicate yellow scab that keeps getting ripped off by my jeans.

It’s been three days since the wreck and I’ve been trying take the correct steps to ensure a speedy and successful healing, but the wounds are deep and I fear scars will be difficult to prevent. Besides, I refuse to pay money for things I can’t ingest (bacon, Perrier, drugs) or live in (house, car) and so I’m using the antibacterial soap in my office bathroom instead of Neosporin. With the exception of my face, I won’t be upset if these injuries leave permanent reminders on my skin. Additional scars may even lend some symmetry to my body; my right elbow will match my left as it hasn’t since I drunkenly biked into a stop sign a few years ago and was helped to my feet by a bum, whom I thanked and gave a quarter. My right shin will now mirror it’s counterpart, with a long scar running below my knee from the first time I shaved my legs, unaware that water and soap is key. A few more scars are just a few more scars on a body covered in them.

While most of my scars are the direct result of careless actions like the aforementioned bicycle and body hair accidents, my earliest scars come from being born imperfect. I’m not missing a leg or an arm and all of my body parts are in roughly the correct places, but I was born with a tumor on the middle finger of my left hand. After many operations to remove the tumor, it’s not something you would notice if we weren’t comparing the size or our hands or the lengths of our fingers, but it doesn’t take too close inspection to see. The skin on my middle finger (or my fat finger, as my family calls it), is thick and pink and there’s a dime-sized lump on the side. The skin itself is actually from my hip, grafted onto my fat finger after it turned purple and started bursting blood vessels when I was five (which, surprisingly, wasn’t painful, and since I wasn’t whining and they had to work, my parents wrapped my hand in a dish towel and sent me to school the next day.) The subsqueuent surgery was not entirely successful, and there were other attempts to improve my finger’s appearance. One doctor, afraid that my tumor would turn malignant, advised my parents to have my middle finger amputated. My dad, tired of sleeping on chairs pushed together in hospital rooms every time a surgeon tried to fix my finger, thought amputation a good idea. As he told me, “It would have looked perfectly fine but you would have had trouble counting past nine.” My mom wanted a second opinion and the surgeries continued until my finger settled into it’s current state–ugly and asymmetrical, but still there.

Besides an imperfect finger, I was also born with an imperfect skull. This isn’t because of a mutation like my tumor, but because my mom went into labor very suddenly and as my dad drove to the hospital, my head started to crown. He pulled the silver Dodge Omni into the parking lot of Pedro’s Fine Mexican Food and pushed me back in. I’m convinced that this is why the top of my skull is flat. No one else agrees with me, but as my twin sister’s head is perfectly round, I’m sure it was my impatience to enter the world that flattened my head.

Despite these two imperfections from birth–one of which is an advantage for carrying things on my head–and being prone to alcohol-induced bike wrecks, my body has been good to me. I’ve gone through periods of drinking more alcohol than water and yet I’m very healthy. I’ve chain smoked and stayed up for days and once took anti-anxiety pills meant for aggressive dogs and yet I haven’t had a cold since smoking pot in a walk-in fridge three years ago. I’ve gone years between exercise more taxing than throwing darts at bars and I eat food made in New Jersey chemical plants. Maintaining good health through things like food and exercise is far less interesting to me than guinea-pigging a new strain of LSD or sampling every whiskey in the bar and going for a bike ride, yet my body stays surprisingly fit. I still have a runner’s build even though the last time I ran was to the jungle gym in third grade. I can swim and climb and do pushups and throw a baseball. And until recently, I only had to think about exercising to lose weight. As I’ve aged, however, I’ve realized that my butt is going to settle and my hips are going to expand and my boobs–small enough now to seem impervious to gravity–are not going to hold their own weight forever.

It was this concern that led to my bike wreck last week. I was attempting to exercise for the first time since my gym membership lapsed two years ago. My bike was newly-tuned and it was a nice Sunday afternoon, not so hot as to make central air the only way to happiness, so I decided to go for a ride. I made it about two miles before I wrecked. It wasn’t debris in the road or a swerving car or margaritas at happy hour that caused this accident, it was my iPod, which shuffled to my least favorite Beyonce song. As I reached into my pocket to skip to the next song, I lost control and skidded to the ground. I hit the flat part of my head first and then my face, hands, elbows, and knees scrapped along the road. Thankfully, my bike was unharmed, without even a flat tire, and I wasn’t so hurt that I couldn’t get back on. As I rode the two miles home, blood streamed from my chin down my shirt and onto my bike. It dripped onto my front tire left a track of red on the road.

There have been many accidents, some dramatic, some too pedestrian to clearly recall. I’ve forgotten which scars came for which wreck. I can’t remember if the L-shaped the scar on my left elbow is from last summer when I fell off my bike on the way home from a lesbian bar–a damp place where all the women wear cargo pants and Life is Good shirts–and was stopped by a cop, who put my bike in the trunk of his car and drove me home. Or was it from a few winters ago when I wrecked on my way home from the Egyptian Room, a converted pawnshop with cheap drinks and bars on the windows? I know the scar above my lip came from my most expensive accident, which broke my front tooth and left me with a scab below my nose that looked like a Charlie Chaplin mustache from a distance. That particular accident occurred on Inauguration Day 2008 when bars opened early to celebrate our new president. I took advantage of this occasion for morning drinking and tripped off the sidewalk walking home. I didn’t even attempt to break my fall and my hands and knees, those parts of the body that most often bare these superficial wounds, were unscathed. A taxi home would have saved me the pain and the dental bills, but I can neither ingest nor live in a cab, and so I walked, and I tripped, and I spit out my front tooth on the street. As I sat in the dentist chair later, my mouth forced open with plastic things that reminded me of a speculum, I told myself that was be the last time I got too drunk to get home healthy.

That L-shaped scar is not, I am sure, from my scariest bicycle accident, which left me with a only a busted chin when it could have killed me. I didn’t ride away from that accident but was taken to the ER by paramedics even as I argued that hitting my head on the road without a helmet was nothing a nightcap and a few hours of sleep couldn’t fix. After we got to the hospital, I gave the intake nurse a fake address and told her that my name was Jane Carney–my middle school nemesis who told everyone that I peed when I coughed–and left the hospital when no one was looking, bleeding and wearing a neck brace. The scar on my chin is visible only after a summer in the sun, but I have a blue hospital bracelet with my old enemy’s name on it to remind me of how very lucky I was that time and all the rest.

As I write this, the wound on my inner elbow badly burns. I hurt, and I’m ugly, but I’m glad that it was exercise and an iPod that caused this accident and not a half-dozen drinks. I’m trying at last to be as good to my body as it was been to me, to get scars from bike rides on Sunday afternoons instead of late at night, walking or riding or stumbling home with bloody knees and scrapped elbows and the continual promise that this accident will be the last. When these new scars are faded but still visible in certain lights, I’ll have no story to tell about sneaking out of the hospital or looking like Charlie Chaplin or being rescued by a bum, and when people ask me what happened, It was nothing, I’ll say. Just a bike wreck.

Combine fruit juice and water in a large plastic bag. If no bags are to be found, a toilet tank will do. Add several packets of sugar and two Honeybuns torn into small pieces to expedite the yeasting process. After three days of fermentation, filter with the cleanest socks you have and drink. This recipe comes from David D., who spent twenty-five years in prison. I’m not sure what David D. did to land this sentence and, of course, I wonder if he killed someone. He doesn’t look like a murderer. He wears smart glasses and his shirt is ironed and he is in good shape, unlike the rest of us, who are either too thin or too fat. David D. doesn’t look like a drug addict any more than he does a murderer, but I know the is one because everyone here is. David D. is the most verbose and articulate among the ex-addicts who meet in this room every Wednesday, and I like listening to his stories about prison, as horrific as they are. I like listening to everyone’s stories in this room, which are so different than my own that every week I have the same thought I did the first time I stepped on a different continent: so it exists after all.

David M., who sits across the table from David D., spent ages eighteen to twenty-nine, thirty-one to thirty-eight, and forty to forty-seven in prison. In the two months he’s been free, his mother died, his wife confessed that she has a boyfriend and that she loves him, and he met his grandchild for the first time, who is a teenager and not as likely as to love his absent grandfather. David M. is still not used to freedom. He takes his own utensils and plate to the dinner table then and takes them back to his room afterward, unused to having a full drawer to choose from. David D. laughs at this from across the table. It gets better, he says, or at it gets least easier.

At times, David D. and David M. are the only ones who talk in the room. You hear about Bill Smalls?, David D. asks. I was in the next cell when someone cut off his head and rolled it down the hall like a bowling ball. David M. says he was in the next cell when a prison guard beat an inmate to death and then hung him from the top bunk to make it look like suicide. The showers, they both say, are the worst. Theresa J., who takes a medication that causes such a terrible sickness when combined with alcohol that drinking on it is considered a suicide attempt, says, I hope you held onto that soap, and we all laugh.

It’s surprising how often we laugh in this room. Liza H. says she thanks God everyday it was coke she was addicted too and not meth. I can’t smell anymore, she says, but at least I can chew. We laugh good naturally at her optimism and again when Charley D. says he’s started watching daytime TV and now he can’t go a afternoon without The Young and the Restless. We laugh at that as well: a large brown man with three tears tattooed under his left eye fighting drugs with soaps. And when Tabor S. tells us about his old cellmate, Puerto Rican Joe, who was actually Irish and slept with a pillow case clutched in his hand like a child, we laugh with him too.

But mostly instead of laughing, we nod. Trace C. says he used to reward himself for a night of sobriety by getting high the next day, and we nod. Janice E. talks about how now that she’s sober, she changes light bulbs when they burn out, something she would have ignored before, not because she was so drunk she couldn’t stand on a chair to change the bulb, but because what was the point? It was just going to burn out again. We nod when she says this because we know what it’s like to see a burned out light bulb or a pile of dirty laundry or a floor that needs sweeping, and think, what’s the point?

There are nine of us here today. Including me and Ms. P, the social worker moderating the session who looks just like a social worker and always seems a little nervous, there are three white people in the room. Sometimes a young white woman who moved in with her parents after her husband put her in the hospital shows up. She has a receding hairline and a gecko tattooed on one side of her neck and the word George tattooed on the other. She isn’t here today, but Tony G., the other white person who shows us, is sitting beside me. Tony G. wears a dirty baseball cap low over his eyes and has metal earrings that pull his earlobes down. He rarely talks, but he periodically clears his throat in a way that is laced with threat, and when Miss P. asks he how he deals with anger, he says that when he’s angry, he takes his handgun outside and fires a couple rounds into the dirt. This disturbs me, but not as much as what Jermaine C. says he did two days ago when he got in a fight with his baby mama–about what he can’t remember, only that the bitch was wrong. He went for a walk, which is what Ms. P advises, but it didn’t help, and when he came across a possum behind the McDonald’s dumpster, he picked up a brick and beat it to death. Worked better, he says, than deep breathing.

We do a lot of writing exercises here, which are meant to make us think about barriers to recovery. Today, Ms. P gives us photocopied worksheets with instructions to write down the names of six friends and how they help us meet our needs. Friendship is something we often talk about. Most people lost friends when they used and more when they quit. Carol K. says her two mutts are her friends. Johnny F., who uses his finger to follow the directions in his exercise book and whispers the words as he reads, says that the only friend he’s ever had was crack and he misses it fiercely.

I am visibly different from the rest of the group. I’ve never smoked crack or been to prison and my problems are more along the lines a poor performance in graduate school than spending my rent money on heroin. I drive my Prius to work in an office with casual Friday and Christmas bonuses. After this meeting is over, I’m using a Groupon to get a hot rocks massage. It even seems at times that we speak completely different languages, the others and me, and I wonder if they have a hard time understanding me like I sometimes do understanding them. I’m curious about why so many of the men have long fingernails–not painted, but well-manicured, but I don’t want to ask. I don’t know what the others think of my business casual and electric car, but they seem to accept me like any other addict in the room. When I talk how plainly unfair it is that I can’t drink anymore, that I have to avoid even walking past bars when other people can have a drink before dinner and then go home for dinner, they nod, and it’s clear we’re similar enough.

After we are done with the worksheet, I feel lucky that I have six names to write down. I have more than six, even, and with a big and helpful family as well. Brandy L., who has diabetes and wears a towel around her neck on hot days, says her granddaughter is her friend but her son won’t let them see each other even though she’s sober now. Some say they’ve made friends at AA or NA and others say they have friends at church. When Teresa W. is writing down the names of her friends, she calls out, How do you spell God? That’s another thing different about us: they turned to religion when they got clean.

I am not Teresa W. I didn’t drop out of school at fifteen or sell my body for drugs or get HIV from a drug dealer, and I have no faith in God, however you spell his name. But I do have faith in recovery, and if God is Teresa’s way there, I hope her belief is strong. All of us in this room hold on, perhaps foolishly, to the faith that David D. will never again drink prison wine and that David M. will get to know his grandson and that someday all of us will unthinkingly walk past bars and street corners and into the arms of friends. And so it’s good too be with these people, with God or without, who keep faith that it will get better, or, if not better, at least it will get easier.

I started thinking about promiscuity after seeing a New Yorker profile of Anna Faris, who stars in the new comedy What’s Your Number? While I haven’t seen the film, I did watch the trailer and so this, along with skimming the review, makes me feel like I can confidentially speak as to the movie’s content, which is about a young woman who reads in Marie Clare that any lady who has slept with over twenty guys is a used up bag and will never find a man to marry her. The heroine, having slept with exactly twenty men, revisits ex-boyfriends in the hopes that she missed the right one the first time around, will recognize him with a second glance, and won’t have to attend a friend’s upcoming wedding without a date. The film-makers had a hard time choosing a number that was high enough to seem a plausible barrier to marriage yet not so high that women in the audience wouldn’t be able to relate to the story, and twenty it was. Their chosen figure doesn’t seem an especially large number of sexual partners to me, but I looked to the Kinsey Institute for statistics and it appears the average American heterosexual female has only four partners in her lifetime. Four. This floored me. I’m a lesbian, and yet I’ve had sex with more then four men. Even more shocking was the Kinsey Institutes’s data on heterosexual men, who apparently have an average of only seven sexual partners in their lifetimes, a number I surpassed approximately five minutes after coming out. (I’m certainly not alone in finding these numbers surprisingly low. When I ask a straight friend to guess the number of lovers heterosexual women typically have, she said, “Oh God. This is going to make me feel like a slag. Twelve?”)

The exact number of people I’ve slept with debatable. A couple of summers ago, some friends I tallied our numbers on an old flier that was folded up in someone’s purse, writing down names or initials or occasionally descriptions of former lays if details were fuzzy. Drummer. Green bike. The girl with the giant tattoo of Tori Amos as a fairy. As the summer went on, we added names and tally marks until the flier was covered. That was an especially busy time for me. It was hot and I drank a lot and threesomes really shoot your numbers up. The list in long gone–as are the girls who were with me as we wrote it, moved on to new cities or even monogamy and marriage–and it’s even harder now for me to remember the names and faces of the people I’ve slept with than it was then.

The exact number of sexual partners I’ve had varies because I change my definition of sex according to if I regret an encounter or not. One night stand with someone who looked remarkably similar to Pat Buchanan next morning? Well, your underwear never made it below the knees so you can take that one of the list. Drunken hookup with girl who who kept repeating, “Slap my vagine! Slap it!”? It only lasted for three minutes until you ran to the bathroom to vomit the tequila that got you in the situation in the first place. Subtract that one too. This is a benefit of lesbianism. While it’s difficult to argue that heterosexual intercourse is anything but, women-who-sleep-with-women really do have different definitions of what exactly constitutes sex. For some dykes, it’s not real until the toys come out from the box underneath the bed. For others, a hand outside panties counts, and for others, the only sex is oral sex. There is so little universal agreement that you occasionally find that someone you’ve slept doesn’t consider what you did sex. Take that one off the list too.

For the majority of my life as a sexually active person, I was happily promiscuous. If people wanted to sleep with me, I thought, I must have at least some appeal. I might be a shitty cook and have feet so small that I buy shoes a size too large so it doesn’t look like I’m about to tip over, but at least I could get laid. I didn’t pursue sex because I’m a hyper-sexual or even sexy person; it was always less about sex itself and more about getting a rare sense of accomplishment. My work lay unfinished on my desk, my laundry made it to the hamper but not the washing machine, my bills were always delinquent and I finished tasks so infrequently that my to-do-lists were filled with entries like, “wake up,” and “brush teeth,” just so I’d have something to cross off. But when I was slutting around, I would decide to get laid and then do it. Chasing sex was an excellent distraction from all the other things I wasn’t doing, and so at least after meeting someone at a bar and going back to her place or mine, I felt like I’d followed through with at least one thing.

I don’t feel this away anymore. The older I get, the more I employ my creative subtraction of lovers. While I’m not ashamed of my past, I wish I could take back roughly seventy percent of the people I’d slept with because most of it wasn’t just been meaningless, it also wasn’t that good. Much of the sex I’ve had has been orchestrated by ingesting large amounts of alcohol, and even if women don’t become impotent with too much booze, we get whiskey dick of the mind–an inability to concentrate on what’s happening, much less enjoy it. Drunken sex is rarely worth the hangover, and I no longer consider getting laid anything but a sign that I need to take my to-do lists more seriously.

Thankfully, even if I’m not proud of the notches on my bedpost, the community I’m in is largely non-judgemental about these things. There have been a couple of exceptions to this, when I’ve learned that my reputation as a slut has hurt my chances of being a slut, but in general, my people don’t judge. Despite the joke about lesbians bringing UHauls to the second date, queers get around. This is especially true of young urban homos, who seem to forgo monogamy in part because it’s the thing to do. For these folks, being in a relationship isn’t hip or progressive or queer, but being in lots of relationships–and sleeping with lots of people–is. Personally, the idea of a truly open relationship–where your girlfriend might have other girlfriends–is unappealing. Casual sex with multiple people is fine, but when you add the word relationship, there are state-of-the-union discussions to be had, which are about as interesting as the NPR fpledge drive when you can’t get any other stations. The one time I was in an open relationship–a last ditch effort to save something unsalvagable–we spent way more time talking about our feelings than actually sleeping with other people. Not worth it.

The actual girlfriend/girlfriend relationships I’ve had–the kind where you hold hands not just as you leave a bar together, but also during the day when you’re not even drunk–started out with sex. We met, we hooked up, and only later did we decide to get breakfast or watch movies or spend nights in bed not having sex at all, just spooning and sleeping. This is hardly rare. Hooking up the first step in contemporary courtships. I’ve never been friends or even acquaintances with any of my exes before we slept together. Perhaps this is why those relationships failed–because we were physically intimate before we even knew each other’s middle names or favorite foods beside pizza. And when those girlfriend/girlfriend relationships failed, I was always so very sad that I will do anything to avoid breakups. I have stuck with relationships far past their natural expiration dates just because I can’t the post-breakup depression, and so when I’m in a relationship, I’ll say with my girlfriend no matter what, even if it means weekly dinner with her great aunt who eats only soup and takes her teeth out before she slurps it down. The simple way to avoid this is to be single. Even a not-great relationship is better than a not-terrible breakup, and so I’d rather forgo relationships entirely than get sad for days days because I saw my ex holding hands with someone whose feet are a normal size. Or, at least, that’s how I used to feel.

My avoidance of relationships is changing. I’m still terrified of breakups, but one-nights stands have lost their appeal. Like Anna Faris, I’m approaching thirty and going to other peoples’ weddings and watching my friends buy houses and start gardens and raise puppies with their partners. Unlike Anna Faris, I’m not afraid that my past as a slut will mean a future alone, but I am tired of getting drunk just to get laid, of exchanging phones numbers that I’ll never call, of repeating the same mistakes with different people. I don’t know if Anna Faris gets what she wants in the end, but I suspect that she finds someone to love, not just because it’s a movie, but because we all fall in love in the end. We’re human and we need each other and so we try out different people. We find new mates or go back to old ones until that final relationship comes along, until we find the person we will grow old and ugly with despite our shitty cooking and our tiny feet and a number we sometimes regret.

I lost my innocence in July of 1990. Not yet the part of summer when malaise settles in and even the town pool is tiresome, my twin sister Betsy and I were happily eating white bread and mayo sandwiches one afternoon when our dad walked into the kitchen and announced, There’s no Santa! And there’s no Easter Bunny!

Childhood was over.

After we went back to school the following August, Betsy
and I entered a new set among our peers: the non-believers. We considered ourselves worldly and mature because we knew the truth. Elevated above the believers, this made up for losing Santa. We were both cruel and kind with our knowledge. He still believes in Santa. We said it loudly to be mean, softly to be nice, recognizing that with knowledge, comes power.

But Betsy and I were not merely non-believers when it came to Santa; we were non-believers when it came to God. Had our dad walked into the kitchen and announced, There’s no God!, we would have blinked and continued to eat. Our parents never indulged in creation myths or dreams of everlasting life, not even to comfort us when our golden retriever died. Would we see her in Heaven? No, we would not. There is no Heaven. The only thing good to come out of Christianity, our parents told us, was soul music.

Of course God was a myth. He created the planet in six days, made the first woman out of a man’s rib, and his son’s image appears on shower mold and pieces of toast that the faithful find and save. Ridiculous. The Bible, the supposed true account of the origin of life, seemed like a really long novel with sticky pages. Besides, if God were as kind and benevolent as people said, he wouldn’t have let my new bike get run over when I left it in the driveway.

For this, we were different from our neighbors. Our atheism in a rural town in the Appalachians made us seem rare and misplaced. When one of my third grade classmates asked where I was baptized, I didn’t know what she was talking about. What was baptism? I had heard of Hell, of course, but I didn’t know that Hell was your soul’s final home just because your parents hadn’t put you in a white dress and let a preacher dunk you in river.

I was both fascinated and terrified by this strange Christian ritual. Did it hurt? It sounded like it hurt. I didn’t want to wear a white dress or get dunked in the river, but as my peers talked, I started to think that I’d be the only person in my class to land in Hell. Bobby Queen gave us Indian burns on the bus, but he’d get into Heaven just because his parents had prepared his mortal soul. I made my bed with hardly any fight, and yet I was going to Hell just because I had never been baptized. I was furious with my parents. They, after all, were safe. When I told my mom that I wanted to be baptized no matter how much it hurt, she said that it was fine if someday I wanted to join a church, but there was plenty of time to think about it. She made salvation seem like drinking or sex—adult things that I was free to choose but shouldn’t until I was a little older. And when I was older, I chose to believe my parents instead of my neighbors.

In my rural hometown, more than one of my eighth grade classmates went over the mountains to Dollywood, Tennessee to marry older boyfriends, a ring in one hand and a permission slip in the other, and yet my siblings and I were the only children around who weren’t believers. But even with neighbors who believed that my family would be left on the apocalyptic planet while they ascended to sunny heavens, I am glad I grew up there, a few miles down the road from a sixty-foot cross on the top of Mount Lynn Lowry. There are no suburbs, no sprawl, no leash laws or automatic sprinklers in my Christian hometown. There aren’t even neighborhoods—just small collections of houses occupied by generations of the same family: the Queens in one valley, the Hensleys in another. It is my home, God-fearing and un-air conditioned, with 3574 believers and my little family.
———-

The lack of religion in our young lives was a point of contention for our grandparents. For them—two Baptist, two Catholic—a life without God spying on your every thought was no life at all. This is how they raised their children, and it’s how our parents would have raised us had they not lost their faith.

Both of my parents were religious kids. They didn’t just go to sermons because they had to; they wanted to. They really believed in Heaven, Hell, salvation, and punishment. My father became more involved in his Baptist church after having what he describes as a “deeply religious experience” while at a Christian summer camp. He says he remembers little about this experience other than he felt God as an almost tangible force, but perhaps he’s just embarrassed to have once felt the presence of a god that, to him, so clearly doesn’t exist. But back then, he believed.

A few years after his revelation, my father began studying at the American University of Beirut. He was one of the few Americans in a school populated by Arabs and Europeans. He was also one of the few Christians. There was no church to go to, but he silently prayed over meals and read the Bible his parents had given him just before his plane took off to the other side of the world.

1967, just before my father was to graduate, Israel attacked several neighboring states. My father watched Israeli bombers fly over his adopted home on their way to kill Arabic civilians. These neighbors were enemies because they had different stories about how the world was made, about who owned sacred lands, and my dad saw this as much as he had seen God a few years before. He was evacuated from Lebanon and spent the next year traveling in Europe and Asia, doing what he wanted without God to ruin his fun. The transition from Christian to agnostic to atheist took years of thought and analysis and the works of Marx and Nietzsche and Darwin, but by the time I was born, there was no Jesus in our house.

At the same time that my young father prayed at Good Hope Baptist Church, my mom was committing to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. A model student at St. John’s Catholic School, my mom planned to become a nun when she grew up. She would have been happy to sacrifice marriage and kids and sinning to serve God and the Pope. She led with her younger sisters to St. John’s each morning, their hands in prayer, whispering to Jesus as they walked.

When my mom was sixteen, she attended a school dance with a few friends and their dates. The girls wore modest party dresses and the boys wore coats and ties. The rest of my mom’s friends passed through the door to the gym decorated with streamers and with a real band playing, but my mother and her date were stopped at the door by the headmaster, Father Matthews. Father Matthews, soon to be Monsignor Matthews, accused my mother and her date of showing disrespect even though they hadn’t said a word since they arrived, even to each other, nervous about this new thing, dating. An obedient Catholic, my mother didn’t protest. Father Matthews called my grandfather and demanded that he pick up his daughter. When my grandfather arrived, furious, he saw my mom—the most pious of his daughters—was as humble and polite as always. The problem wasn’t that my mother was misbehaving; it was that her date was black.
The next day, Father Matthews called my grandfather to inform him that his daughter had been expelled from St. John’s. He gave no explanation. My grandfather pulled the rest of his seven children out of Catholic schools and enrolled them in public schools for the first time. Sometime between graduating from public school and the end of the Vietnam War, my mom found the Rolling Stones, birth control, activism, and atheism.

Like my mom, my grandparents never forgave the church for what Father Matthews did. When I spoke to my grandmother recently, she told me that she had a wonderful time celebrating her eighty-fifth birthday at the slot machines in Atlantic City and that if she saw Father Matthews today, she’d kick him in the shins.
———-

Although our parents rejected religion in their own lives and never made it a part of their kids lives, they realized that banning us from attending church could lead to teenage rebellion, and dabbling in Christianity was better than vandalism and skipping school. When my older brother Adam wanted to join a youth group, they didn’t object, and so he went to a church basement on Sunday evenings to hang out with his friends and eat cookies and drink soda that the Christian moms brought. Adam didn’t pray with the others during youth group, but he bowed his head politely and didn’t mention that our pet beagle’s name was Darwin.

My brother’s attendance at the Cullowhee United Methodist Church youth group ended after the pastor screened Hells Bells: The Dangers of Rock ‘n Roll. Through careful analysis of the lyrics of Van Halen, Led Zepplin, and Metallica, the host—who struggled with a love of rock ‘n roll until he saw the light—revealed the consequences of the devil’s music. He played songs backwards to reveal Satanist lyrics and showed videos of Gene Simmons, his face painted, his tongue wagging dangerously, obviously not a man of God. Along with spiritual degradation that would surely lead to promiscuity, violence, drugs, and suicide, Hells Bells claimed that listening to loud rock ‘n roll could cause brain damage. In the vein of the then ubiquitous television commercials that showed an egg in a sizzling frying pan with a stentorian voice warning, This is your brain on drugs, the movie claimed that rock ‘n roll could boil an egg and, therefore, your brain. Adam, who listened to Nirvana loud enough to leave him with a permanent ringing in his ears, was done with youth group.

The school science fair was around the time my brother quit youth group. To our parents’ delight, Adam decided to disprove Hells Bell’s. His research was impeccable. He started with a control group—half dozen white eggs sitting in silence. He then placed another group of eggs in front of a speaker blasting AC/DC at 120 decibels. The family stood at the end of the driveway during that phase of the experiment because the music was so loud that it was actually painful. Afterwards, when Adam cracked both the control group eggs and the experimental eggs, they were all raw. We had omelets for lunch.

Adam displayed his project with pictures of Mick Jagger Gene Simmons cut from Rolling Stone Magazine and Polaroid’s of his eggs pre- and post-exposure. He typed up his aim, hypothesis, methodology, and results: Hell’s Bells has misleading information, which means some of the other statements in the movie might not be true; that is, God might not be true.

While our parents have been proud of plenty of our accomplishments—they framed my pictures from art class, gave Betsy a globe when she won the sixth grade geography bee, clapped at talent shows and swim meets—it was Adam’s science fair project that they really treasured, despite the fact that he didn’t bring home a medal and the speakers were never the same.
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There was a brief time when religion was the cause of a strange dynamic in our family. As a junior in high school, Betsy attended a protest at the School of the Americas, a Georgia military operation that trains Latin American soldiers and police to kill and torture their countrymen in support of American interests. Betsy spent much of the protest behind a barbed wire fence with Jesuit priests and nuns who risked their lives working for human rights and social justice in Central America. My sister was inspired by their stories, and when she returned home, she said she had something to tell us as we sat around the dinner table. I waited for her confession of lesbianism, but the next words out of her mouth were far more shocking: I’ve found Jesus. It was the ultimate rebellion.

Betsy lost Jesus after a few days of us asking if she wanted to pray over dinner or watch Pat Robertson preaching against fornication and homosexuality on the Christian Broadcasting Network. You can go to church when the rest of us are eating pancakes at home, our dad said. Betsy’s love of Jesus was weaker than her love of pancakes and for this we were all glad. Indeed, years later, when I came out of the closet, it was a non-issue. When I asked my mom who told her, she said, “No one. Your father has gaydar,” and asked when she could meet my girlfriend.

Not long after Betsy’s brief-lived turn to Christianity, Christian Heritage Week was celebrated at our high school. While the principal praying over the loud speaker would have too clearly crossed the line between church and state, the school administration found it acceptable that a student member of one of the school’s many Christian clubs read from the Bible during morning announcements. When we told our mom about this, she was both outraged and gleeful to have an opportunity to piss off the school administration and the religious community. After my mom called the ACLU, Christian Heritage Week was over for good.

Our mom’s actions won us no popularity with our neighbors. They didn’t understand how we could develop a sense of right and wrong without Jesus, as though morality can only be learned from the Bible.

Fundamentally, our upbringing without God wasn’t all that different from theirs with God. Christian parents taught the Golden Rule and ours taught us Kant’s categorical imperative, but the message was the same; that is, be good. And although we spent Sunday mornings eating pancakes when everyone else was at church, we all grew up with a sense that there was a power beyond us, a power that could punish, but mostly save. Their higher power was God. Ours was our parents, who knew everything about Santa and the Easter Bunny and soul music and rock ‘n roll and finding Jesus and losing him. They were all-knowing when I was throwing a tennis ball against my bedroom door; omnipresent when I started a small and completely manageable fire in the backyard; all-powerful when it came to piano lessons and homework. And when bad things happened, when I fell off my bike or the monkey bars or attic ladder when I was looking for Christmas presents, there they were, with Band-Aids and hugs and the reassurance that I wasn’t going to hell.

Somewhere Over North Carolina

I’m writing this from 30,000 feet above the Earth. There’s a newlywed couple in the seats beside me. They keep looking at their wedding bands, not yet used to their newly bound fingers though it will someday feel like they’ve always been there. They’re talking quietly about the honeymoon they’re about the have, how they should have registered at Barneys after all, the absence of her step-brother, who said he threw out his back but was probably too stoned to get his suit cleaned. They are darling and they are annoying. It’s their periodic kissing–a little too loud, a little too wet–that really gets to me. The sight and sound of kissing has always made me uncomfortable. As a child, I ran from the living room when a kissing scene came on TV. When my parents kissed at the end of every night, a quick peck on the lips when my mom went to bed; she would lean down to my father reading the newspaper or watching TV on the couch, they would kiss, and the bile in my stomach would reach for my throat. The newlyweds aren’t that bad–and besides, it’s been well over a decade since I last ran from the living room–but I still wish I were somewhere else, in the bulkhead maybe, or on a train.

On the other side of the aisle is a young woman with a dog in a carryingcase under the seat in front of her. I noticed her at the gate and wondered what she would do if her dog howled at its proximity to the moon, 30,000 feet closer than normal. This dog is not the only one; there are four dogs on this flight, each small enough to fit under a seat. Before we boarded, three of the dog owners let their animals sniff each other. They circled and smelled, learning who-knows-what about each other. One woman at the gate kept her dog–small and white and surely AKC-registered–in its case on the seat next to her. I wondered if her dog mounted another dog at the park once and she doesn’t want this to happen on American Airlines flight 2200 from Raleigh to Aspen.

Somewhere Over Tennessee

Despite the newlyweds making out on one side of me and the dog quietly farting on the other, I slept for the last few hundred miles. This isn’t really hard for me. I excel at few things more than sleeping, especially in uncomfortable places. My father has insomnia and I’m afraid this is something I will inherent from him, the same way I got his blue eyes and feet that are too small for my body. I don’t want to be like him in thirty years, awake during the night, listening to AM radio shows about alien abductions through headphones so not to wake my mom. But this has yet to happen, and so I reclined just a touch, put in my own headphones, pulled a knit hat all the way over my face like an enemy combatant being transferred to Guantanamo, and fell asleep.

Somewhere Over Arkansas

I read the in-flight magazine instead of watching the in-flight movie, which I think was about a woman who gets hit by Cupid’s arrow and then falls in love with a seagull that shits on her head, although it’s hard to tell what’s happening when I don’t have my glasses on. I would have preferred the movie to American Way Magazine, but I never watch movies on planes because they make me cry. On a flight from Seattle to Atlanta a few years ago, I became so overwhelmed with while watching The Longest Yard, an Adam Sandler film about violent but lovable prisoners who compete with corrections officers for the penitentiary football championship, that I faked sleep, leaning my head against the plastic window, shaking from the effort of keeping the tears in. Ice Age, a cartoon about a prehistoric squirrel who can’t find a place to hide the last acorn on the planet, was the worst. It was playing on a flight from Charlotte to Chicago that I took with my sister and my mom several years ago. My mother laughed so hard that the other passengers looked at her oddly, wondering why a grown woman who find an animated squirrel so hilarious. My mom’s uncontrollable laughter was so endearing that I leaned my head against the window and squeezed my eyes shut and pretended to be asleep.

Somewhere Over Kansas

I haven’t said a word to anyone on this plane, not even the flight attendant taking drink requests. When I was younger, I loved flying alone. I didn’t let the strangers sitting next to me open their books or put in their headphones without asking them where they were headed. I told them stories about my life, that I was in boarding school, on my way home for the summer, or that my dad was a pilot and so I got to fly anywhere in the world for free, which I almost believed. My grandfather was a pilot and so I considered myself part of the PanAm family, which I told my fellow passengers before I found out that the company went bankrupt when I was eight.

The last time I made conversation on a plane, I was twenty-four or twenty-five and had a long layover in Santa Fe. I drank gin and tonics at a western-themed restaurant that with cacti and margaritas painted on the walls. I felt comfortable at that bar even though I didn’t know what to do with my carry-on, which was unwieldy and over-packed. I sat at the bar and watched a man start to pour his drink into a plastic water bottle, but then the bartender–a very tan woman who seemed to be working every time I was in the Santa Fe airport–caught him and gave him a talking to. He apologized and didn’t protest when she took his water bottle and gave him his check. After I boarded my plane in Santa Fe that evening, drunk, I sat beside a woman who was in the military. I brought up Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell before we even buckled our seat belts and turned off our cell phones. I asked if she knew gay people in the military and didn’t listen before telling her my opinion as a gay woman–that the policy was the best thing about being gay. I then hiccuped, laughed said, Just kidding. The best thing about being gay is gay sex.

Somewhere Over Colorado

My sister is picking me up at the airport. That’s why I’m on this plane–this is where she lives and I haven’t see her or anyone else in my family for three years. I’ve eaten nothing since liftoff and I hope my sister brings me a sandwich or a takeout container of lo mein, which she probably will do because she is a good sister.Tomorrow we will drive back to this airport and pick up our parents, who are taking the red eye from O’hare. We’re renting a house in Aspen, and the woman who owns it called to apologize for her manger and wreath because it just occurred to her that we might be Jewish. This amuses us because we are so not Jewish. We are not anything, not Catholic or Protestant nor even baptized. We don’t worship Christmas or Hannukah, but the plane is landing now, and for this, I celebrate.

We will all turn on our cell phones as the plane taxis, text our rides that we’ve just landed and will meet them by baggage. We’ll stretch and open the overhead compartments and wish the people in front of us would move faster because we’re finally here, for honeymoons or Christmas trees or to see our families after too many years. We’ll take our bags and our dogs and each others’ hands, walk on cramped legs off the plane, still far, but 30,000 feet closer to home.

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This will be my last post for a while because I’m writing a book! Or, at least, trying to.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, a new book by psychologist Hal Herzog, confronts the paradoxical and sometimes arbitrary relationships humans have with animals. Some We Love is the culmination of 30 years of the author’s work as an animal behaviorist, but it’s not about animals themselves. It is, fundamentally, about us, the people who love them (and, yes, hate them, and eat them). According to Herzog, our views of animals are morally inconsistent. Why is the geriatric family retriever who farts in his sleep eaten with kimchee and noodles in Korea? Why are men more likely to be hunters and women more likely to be both animal rights activists and hoarders? Are cat people really different from dog people? Why are cockfights illegal and McNuggets delicious? Some We Love attempts to—and often does—answer these questions.

While I am hardly objective (see my last name and half of my genetic code), Some We Love is so interesting that I probably would have read it even if I weren’t scanning the pages for my name. And although I generally prefer Dan Brown to Malcolm Gladwell, I know it’s good because I’ve read the reviews on Amazon and even the ones not written by members of my family are glowing. Some We Love has received national press as well, which we all know is a mark of quality. It was in Parade, a newspaper supplement that lines the liter boxes of 70 million homes each week. It was favorably reviewed in Nature, which is cool, but not as cool as a favorable notice in the double issue of People with Kate Gosselin on the cover. The author, my dad, has been on C-Span and NPR and Coast-to-Coast, an a.m. radio show that appeals to insomniacs and conspiracy theorists. Best of all, the New Yorker compared Some We Love to Freakonomics, a 2005 best seller that made the authors household names—at least in houses with breakfast nooks and espresso machines.

But this essay isn’t about the book. It’s about the dedication.

My sister Betsy and I both happened to be visiting our parents when the un-proofed reviewers’ copies came in the mail last spring. There it was: the end product of four years of our dad’s labor, the culmination of his life and work in science. Betsy and I glanced at the cover, nodded our approval, and immediately flipped to the most important page: the dedication.

To Mary Jean,” it said. For whom I owe everything.

I wasn’t surprised that our mom was the sole recipient of this honor. Not only did she read every sentence of his drafts multiple times, she accompanied him on the bizarre trips he made while writing the book. She ate a dinner of raw steak with him at a commune in Western North Carolina. She spent a week in the Utah dessert at the largest no-kill animal shelter in the country. She stood close enough to Michael Vick’s pit bulls to see saliva fly as they shook their massive heads. And, her biggest sacrifice, she listened to him talk almost incessantly about the book for four long years. But none of this started with the book—my mom has spent over three decades with my dad and his various projects.

In 1972, my mom moved from New York to Knoxville, Tennessee, where my dad was in graduate school. Knoxville was not on her list of dream destinations. Sexual assault was so common at the time that my dad went to the diner where my mom worked every evening to walk her home. Their first place together was on the 13th floor of a cinder block apartment over an Indian restaurant that smelled of curry. My dad was incubating chicks for one of his research projects and he kept them at home—50 or 60 chickens born every few weeks. Their kitchen floor was scattered with eggshells and bird shit. My mom woke to the high-pitched chattering of baby chicks each morning.

After Knoxville, they relocated to Gainesville, Florida, where my dad was writing his dissertation on communication in alligators. Stepping on eggshells and bird shit was nothing compared to Gainesville. Part of my dad’s research involved taking baby alligators from a humid North Florida swamp, transporting them back to his lab in Knoxville for observation, and later releasing them back in the swamp. He enlisted my mom to assist him in this process. They would take a canoe out in the middle of the night so they could see the alligators by their glowing eyes. Initially, my mom’s job was to steer, but she soon proved to be an inadequate guide. As she told me, “I couldn’t row so I had to be the snatcher. I would get ready to grab the baby alligators and I would start to put my arm in the water, but then I would hesitate and not be able to do it. Then Hal would have to row and snatch them anyway he could—by the back, the tail, the head. They would start squawking, and then the mother would come racing toward the boat and all you could see were their beady red eyes. The mothers at least seven feet long. Huge.”

After a successful night of gator napping, the couple would take their haul back to their apartment. My dad had nowhere to keep his specimens until he could to take them back to his lab in Knoxville, so they put the smallest ones in coolers in their kitchen. And the bigger ones? They duct taped their mouths shut and let them run around the apartment, darting from the bathroom to the kitchen and back, hiding under their bed and scaring Molly, their Labrador puppy. Once my dad’s research was finished, my mom got back in the swamp with him to release the young reptiles. Later, she typed his dissertation for him.

My mom might not have loved Knoxville or Gainesville, but she loved my dad, and so living with chicks and alligators and a man with a consuming devotion to his work wasn’t a sacrifice. I suspect that those years seemed sort of romantic and easy a few years later when my mom was working, finishing her own PhD, monitoring her kids’ television watching and convincing them that soda was actually Seltzer with grape juice. My dad’s research might have been dirty, but my mom wrote her dissertation with a young boy and twin girls vying for her attention, running into her office and screaming, “MOMMY, I HATE YOUR DISSERTATION” while she tried to write. In those days, my dad was working an hour away from home. He left early in the day and returned late. Our mom walked us to the bus stop before school in the morning, walked us home in the afternoon, and kept us entertained. The minute our dad opened the door to our small home, we ran to him, excited to see our daddy, quickly moving from her lap to his.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat was released this past September. It’s a beautiful thing, with heavy paper and a fetching cover and my dad’s name right on the front. I went to Barnes & Noble as soon as it came out. I flipped to the dedication page first, part of me hoping that he’d added my name at the last minute. And there it was, the revised dedication.

To Adam, Betsy, Katie, and most of all, Mary Jean, to whom I owe everything.

I’m glad my dad included the rest of us in the final dedication—it’s a pleasure to walk into a bookstore and see my name in print. And I’m proud that I was somewhat involved in the process of writing this book, thanked in the acknowledgments for occasionally telling my dad that his sentences sucked when I read his drafts. I love that my dad—my dad—wrote a book that people are reading and enjoying. But really, I’m the one who should be thanking him. Not just because he told me stories about catching alligators before tucking me in; not just because he took us to see snake pits and animal rights marches instead of Disney World; not just because he taught us to mimic the peculiar yap of the baby alligator and took us to swamps in the night to feed them marshmallows from the safe distance of a wooden pier. What I’m really proud of–and glad for–is that my dad had the good sense to marry Mary Jean, for whom he, and we, owe everything.

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Originally published at Splice Today.