TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

I grew up about five hours from here, in a town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s not so much a town really as there’s a gas station and a Mexican restaurant with a constantly rotating name and ownership but not much else beyond its 3,500 residents. It’s beautiful and it’s quiet. Even though winters in the mountains see far more snow than we do here in the Peidmont, people are equally unable to deal with it there. The closest grocery store—which only started selling alcohol a few years ago because it’s across the street from the high school and the management thought it was morally wrong to sell booze in such close proximity to the fine young minds of Jackson County, North Carolina—sells out of eggs and bread and American cheese and plastic bottles of Diet Coke. Like here, the roads don’t get plowed because there aren’t any plows. And the power goes out. This happened often enough when I was a kid that our parents bought one of those big kerosene heaters that smell like brain damage and melt your new flannel pajamas if you get too close when trying to warm your butt.

The event precipitating this purchase was the Blizzard of ‘93, also known as the Storm of the Century or the White Hurricane. This storm was huge, actually huge, and not just because I was kind of short for my age and could jump into snowdrifts and disappear. It stretched from Central America to Canada, and in places where it’s more likely for cocaine to fall from the sky than snow, people wrapped their hands in newspaper and learned to shape snowballs. The Florida Panhandle got four inches, Birmingham, Alabama got twelve, and Cullowhee, North Carolina got four-and-half feet. It was as white as the time when I worked at a bakery and my boss dumped a bag of flour on my head after I forgot to put sugar in a dozen batches of muffins. School was closed for so long that we forgot how to multiply and we had to start from the beginning, singing the alphabet and counting on our fingers. The whole town lost power. A neighbor’s house had a wood-burning stove, so my family stayed there. It was their family of four, the five of us, and our various pets, including a couple of dogs and my brother’s boa constrictor Sam, who stayed under the heater in a pillow case with the neck knotted shut, unbeknown to our hosts.

All we did was sled. We lived on a hill about a half-mile long. It’s steep—hard to ride your bike up, a pain to walk up when you’re not up to your knees in snow, and really, really fun to sled down. Because the roads were covered, we didn’t have compete with cars. We started from the top, often two or three kids on each plastic sled that soon cracked from abuse, and sped down, hitting ramps carefully manufactured out of ply wood by my brother and his friends–flying for a brief second, hitting the snow with a jarring thump, and then walking twenty minutes up the hill and doing it again. From the thinking-back years of adulthood, it was idyllic: drinking hot chocolate made on a camp stove, sleeping on the floor with all the blankets we could find and then towels thrown on top of them, sighing every time the sun came out, not ready for those inches to melt and for life to go back to what it was.

During the Blizzard of ‘93, our six-month-old puppy Tsali disappeared. It was common for dogs in the neighborhood to wander off for a while. It was a sort of free-range zone for neighborhood pets. We didn’t take our dogs for walks because we didn’t have to. We just let them outside and expected they’d come home when they got hungry. We never owned leashes and never worried about the dogs getting lost. Tsali, however, did get lost during the blizzard. She was the same color as the snow, white like only puppies can be. She just disappeared. Her collar was where we left it, hanging off a closet doorknob. We hiked all over the neighborhood, calling her name even though she didn’t even know it yet. We saw her last when the snow started and didn’t think we ever would again. It was a traumatic glitch in our week of powder. About a week later, when the snow was turning dirty and the fun was wearing off, Tsali wandered into the yard. We found out later that another family had taken her in in storm and, when it was over, she simply walked home.

Snowstorms aren’t as fun when you’re grown. As comfortable as it is to hibernate every once in while, to really be at home, it reminds you of what it is to be young and also that you aren’t young. I hear the shouts of my neighbors’ children and the occasional adult reliving the easy joy of speeding down hills and I feel guilty for not joining, for sitting on my couch when I could be breathing hard with laughter. There are so many reasons to stay inside—you’ve got the day off so you might as well clean out those closets, and you’ve always wanted to make bread and there’s plenty of flour in the pantry so you should do that instead of blowing on your hands and getting snow in the cuffs of your pants. And there’s books to read and essays to write and endless episodes of Law & Order to catch up on. Besides, you don’t have the clothes for sledding and it’s too cold and you’re just so cozy. So you stay inside but still feel a little guilty for enjoying the quiet from the heated interior of home.

My parents are snowed in right now but their power is on, unlike most of the neighborhood. Their neighbor is staying at their house tonight, the same neighbor whose house we stayed at seventeen years ago. Things are different now, of course. None of the kids live at home. We’re dealing with power outages and cabin fever on our own or with new families and friends. Tsali is gone, and so is Sam, and, sadly, terribly, so is Malcolm, the father and husband of that family we stayed with seventeen years ago. And this, when the world is still but for snowball fights and sledding children, is what makes me miss the Blizzard of ‘93. Not just because we were all there, but because the idea that someday we would not all be there hadn’t yet penetrated our little minds. Our world was snow and sledding and finding puppies and, we thought, it would it always be.

This year, Thanksgiving is at your house. You thought that your first time hosting a holiday less drink-oriented than Halloween would feel momentous, like buying your first dishwasher or pledging to NPR, but you haven’t actually bought a dishwasher or donated to NPR. Rather, your parents are renovating their kitchen and your brother is with his wife’s family and your sister winters in Des Moines, so your parents come to you. They not only bring the entire contents of their refrigerator—including two heads of past-date lettuce and an unopened jar of mayonnaise—they also bring a full-size charcoal grill and several rolls of toilet paper in case you ran out and were planning on going through the coffee filters first.

Holidays are about getting drunk with people you love either because you want to or because you have to. Over-pouring the Pinot that your parents bought and confessing that it was you who broke the Victrola ten years ago, not the Guatemalan exchange student, is the highlight of any holiday. It is also something you don’t take part in because you don’t drink around your parents. The reason for your familial sobriety is because you made a grand mistake two years ago after your girlfriend found out you cheated on her more than once and more than twice and more even than three times. She was white-washed when she found out, shocked, like the person shared ice cream and washed the dishes with her was a mirage, a stranger, a non-person. You decided then that you are either a fundamentally bad person or an alcoholic. Alcoholism seemed easier to cure than a black soul, so you called your parents in the midst of a metaphysical hangover and told them that you are a drunk, and, not only that, you have been since you were eighteen or maybe twelve or maybe even when you were still a parasite in the mobile home of your mother’s womb.

There are a lot of things you can take back. I no longer love you, I want to move out, Give me back favorite hoodie—who hasn’t said or heard these words? But, I’m an alcoholic is the pinkie swear of confessions, the nickname you can’t seem to shake. And because you never actually stopped drinking, you pretend that you’re comfortably saddled to the wagon around your parents. Your dry liver is an obvious counterfeit when your parents look at your recycling bins when they come up for Thanksgiving, but you attribute the empties to your roommate and they believe you because they want to believe you. The only time your father overtly asks about your drinking is when you’re picking up last minute cranberry sauce at the grocery store and a bartender picking up last minute stuffing yells, Dude! You have to stop walking out on your tab! when he sees you. You tell your dad you drink soda water and eat bar nuts and sometimes forget to pay.

It’s a lie, those glasses of water and handfuls of nuts. You actually spend a lot of time at one bar, your neighborhood bar, an everybody-knows-your-name bar, a bar where wet hounds look up when the door opens, wondering who new people are. Is this sad? Sometimes. Sometimes not. You’ve had exceptionally fun nights at this bar: nights when the shots melt your faceplate and you dance around the pool table and pour beer your head and stumble home, a walk you won’t remember in the morning but you will still wake up happy to be a part of this drunken family. There are also touching moments, like when a rainbow arcs over the sky and everyone walks outside and stands and blinks at the colorful yawn above. Or maybe there’s a hail storm and everyone turns on their stools to look out the windows at the ice splitting windshield and pavement. Despite the occasional monkey barrel nights, however, bar culture is measles for certain aspects of you life, like, for instance, your bank account, which you’ve stopped paying attention to because the daily bar charges make you feel like what you’ve decided that you’re not: an alcoholic.

But can you decide you aren’t an alcoholic? Maybe not. Maybe as soon as those words exit your mouth, they are always and forever true. After your mistaken announcement to your parents, you started thinking about drinking all the time. That is the worst part of thinking you’re an addict: it’s boring. You are always aware of the hour when you would usually go to the bar but are not going to go to the bar, definitely not, unless this coin lands heads up, in which case you will take it as a sign that you should drink. You attended a couple of AA meetings after your mistaken announcement but hearing people talk about booze made you thirsty. Some people say that they aren’t into AA because of the Jesus thing and you agree that putting your problems and fate and your glass in the hands of an invisible man who lives on a cloud pillow makes no sense. Why make yourself feel powerless when getting sober takes power? But you mostly hated the meetings because you didn’t want to be one of the those people. You didn’t want to see yourself in their stories and their sadness and their sobriety. So you kept drinking and if you didn’t drink one night, you woke up elated, not because you were clear-headed and pain-free, but because a sober night deserved a party, and what better way to party than to party?

Recovery programs talk about addiction as a disease, but you know it’s less the flu and more your inability to recognize your own humanness, to recognize that you are a living being who will someday be a dying being and then someday be a non-being, just scattered cells and quiet atoms. This is what addicts don’t accept: their own unshakable death. This surprising considering that they see the symptoms of physical demise when they wake up cloudy and heavy. It’s not just their hands that shake, it’s their brains, a Parksonian tremor that slows after the first fifteen minutes of happy hour and stops when happy hour has past but they’re still at the bar. This is why you don’t drink in front of your parents. You don’t have that tremor but you can’t take it back.

Your Thanksgiving might have been small—just you and your parents, equal parts Perrier and Pinot—and the turkey might have been grilled, but you still said your blessings and recited your thanks. To good friends and good health and good luck. Afterward, you wonder if you will toast with sparkling grape juice at every Thanksgiving. Will you never again get drunk at a family reunion, one aunt passed out in a lawn chair, another dancing a little too sexy, a grandfather lost in his glass? Or will you someday know, really know, that is wasn’t true, that you were never an alcoholic, the tremors were imaginary, that it wasn’t a disease, it was a mistake. Maybe after you buy the dishwasher and donate to NPR, you will be able to tell your parents this, and maybe the next time Thanksgiving is at your house you will hold your glass in your hand, lift it to your mouth, and toast to friends and to health and to luck and to parents who bring their grill and their toilet paper and their belief in you.

Things have gotten pretty serious between my virtual girlfriend and I. We Gchat roughly forty hours a week and text on the weekends and she sent me an adorable drawing of the two of us with our three future children, Rocket and Panda, who she will gestate, and Sushi, who we will adopt from an undecided East Asian nation. I returned her romantical mailing with my own—a mixed CD and a love letter that went something along the lines of, I want to make out with you and buy you things with other peoples’ money. This is how serious it is: Virtual Girlfriend (VG) came out to her parents. Frank, Betty, she said, I’m gay on the Internet. Frank and Betty may have been a little confused because they are slightly older than average and may not be entirely sure what the Internet is, but I guess they got the point, which is that their daughter likes to put her head in other girls’ laps.

So, in honor of my dear sugar bitch VG, today’s episode is all about tearing down that closet door. I realized I’ve alluded to my own coming out in previous posts, but here’s the story, real talk style….

I had a friend growing up who was obviously a boy. I mean, she was a girl, but she looked like a boy. This didn’t really change as we got older. She always had really short hair and was built like a guy. Very handsome. I realized at some point that she was probably a dyke but we never talked about it. I also remember thinking that I was really glad that I wasn’t like her, that I wasn’t a dyke. Just like parents who think that their son’s life will be difficult because he likes to shop at Banana Republic and bend over for guys who shave their chests, I didn’t want my life to be difficult. My life was already difficult. I was sixteen. Life is difficult for everyone at sixteen, especially for androgynous boy/girls in a school where the mascot is a Confederate army general. I was glad the gay disease wasn’t something else I had to worry about catching. My butch friend didn’t come out until after high school, but no one was surprised. What was surprising was that a lot of my other friends also came out after high school. We never talked about girls. We may rarely have kissed boys, but we talked about them the same way all teenage girls do. Turns out we just had to leave the vast hell of a small town to be who we are.

I made out with boys for a while in college, but anytime I found myself looking at the curve of some woman’s hip, I held my boyfriend’s hand tighter and told myself that I just really appreciated beauty. There was no way I was gay. I mean look, I’m holding hands with a boy! But then I met A—, and, along with making me crazy, she made me gay.

My friends at school were unfazed when I came out to them. My brother and sister were equally flapless. I was the only girl in Little League. Of course I’m gay. I did not, however, want to tell my parents. This wasn’t because I thought they would be upset—my parents would be more upset if I married a Republican or became a youth pastor—but because telling your parents you’re gay means telling your parents that you aren’t just emotionally and mentally gay, you’re also gay with other gay girls. Like, naked gay. I didn’t even tell my parents when I got my period. I definitely didn’t want to tell them that I was a sexually active person. You know how weird and terrible it is to think about your parents having sex? Think about how much worse it is for them to think about you having sex. You’re their little girl. You sat on their laps and giggled when they tickled you and cried when they spanked you for starting a small and completely manageable fire in the neighbor’s yard. And now you’re telling them that you not only have sex, you have the kind of sex that won’t give them grandkids no matter how hard you try. Not a conversation I really wanted to have.

About a month after A— and I got together, we drove from Asheville to the Outer Banks for a romantical weekend. Before we could get there, however, we were rear-ended by a dump truck on I-40 and crashed into a construction barrier. The air bags popped. The windshield shattered. Traffic was stopped for hours. The car was totaled. We went to the hospital and got prescriptions for completely unnecessary painkillers and stayed at a nearby friend’s house that night and borrowed her car the next day so we could get to the beach and back home. While we were at the pharmacy collecting our completely unnecessary painkillers, my sister called. She happened to be visiting our parents that weekend and said that our mom knew I was homo and was really upset. Like tears upset. Like, what-if-you-had-died-before-we-talked-about-this upset. I got that sinking stomach thing right away and started screaming that I was an orphan as of right now, this very second, no longer a member of my very own nuclear family just because I’m a big gay, fated to a Christmas alone with afternoon movies and Chinese takeout.

It was a hard weekend. A— and I were still freaked out about the wreck. We weren’t farther than arms-length away from each other for three days. When she was in bathroom I waited outside the door just in case she got sucked into the toilet. But it wasn’t just the whole near-death thing that freaked us out. It was the conversation I would soon have to have with my mom, a conversation I would rather have with my cellmate than my mother, a conversation A— also hadn’t had with her mother yet, a conversation that would make everything real. Alas, I like my mother and was still on her insurance, so I at was also a conversation that had to happen. I avoided her pleading messages until we got back from the beach and popped a few of the completely unnecessary pain killers and drank a few completely necessary beers and sat on my porch with A—, holding her hand like we were trying not to get torn apart by a tornado. The conversation went exactly like this:

Me: Who told you, my brother or my sister?

Mazog: No one. You’re father has gaydar.

And while I do think that my father’s gaydar is probably better than average because he kind of walks on his tiptoes, I suspect the big giveaway was less my hair cut and more the way A— and I interacted with each other. I had taken A— to my parents’ house one afternoon to borrow their canoe. I hadn’t done this with any of my other friends. All my parents knew about most of my friends was that they littered cigarette butts on my front porch and wiped with coffee filters because we never had any toilet paper at my house. But it wasn’t just that. It was the way we were with each other. Not touchy and not fawning and not overtly together, but still together, like there was a string that connected us and only us. The string, of course, broke. But I’m still gay. That’s not going to break.

And so, welcome to the family, VG. Frank and Betty will get over it when they meet me.

This might not make any sense if we don’t share alleles, but I was at a family reunion last weekend and my grandmother commissioned me to write this, though I would have anyway.

———-
My family reunion is not like your family reunion.  It’s not an afternoon at a park where people wear name tags and talk genealogy.  There’s no mini golf or badminton.  If there are introductions, it is not to a distant cousin but to an aunt or a brother no one has seen in decades; to a grown nephew who sees more of himself in this family, his blood family, than in the one that raised him; to a quiet infant, content to chew her fist and watch these people who share her DNA , who will influence the course of her life through their presence or their absence.

This is not an annual event, nor semi-annual, nor even inevitable.  The last time my aunts and uncles were in the same room was exactly thirty-five years ago, the day my parents wed.  If we were your family, we might take out photo albums and talk abut how young everyone looked, about the fashions that have gone out of style and come back and faded again, about all that has changed.  But because we are not your family, because we are my family, no one remembered to bring a camera to that wedding thirty-five years ago.  The only surviving artifacts are one framed Instamatic photo and a drawing crayoned by the mother of the bride, the cartoon wedding cake the same size as her youngest son.  And the marriage.  The marriage survives.

The family has expanded.  There are so many grandchildren and cousins and nieces and nephews and husbands and wives that when I try to count the number of my relatives, moving in my head from the Northeast through the South and the Midwest, I lose track somewhere around Colorado.  The family has gotten smaller as well, through death, yes, but also through a gradual waning.  The missing aunt, the absent uncle, the sons and daughters who don’t call—all have lives and families somewhere else, not so distant in space, yet invisible.  But we are here now, some of us meeting for the first time.

It has been thirty-five years and we are together, full of food and blood and drink and stories.  It starts with a toast to the Pope, who prescribed our existence.  What would this family be if not for the Pope and his rules against contraceptive?  Smaller, surely, easier, quieter, with fewer disability, less tragedy.  But we would also be without the good, the flawed, the beautiful—the brother whose body failed him from the very beginning, but who didn’t complain, not ever, despite the pain and the transplants and the crutches and the wheelchair.  When the siblings rented out their lawn to visitors of the horse racing track down the street, this brother stood outside the nearby cerebral palsy center with free parking and waved drivers into the children’s costly lot, crutches aloft.  This brother exists now in the Atlantic and the Appalachians, in Yankee Stadium and on his sister’s bookshelf and everywhere people live with courage and dignity and humor.

Things have changed these thirty-five years.  The Pope, not just our maker, but their leader, is now their past.  Girls who once walked to school veiled in white, hands in prayer, hail Marys on their lips, left the church long ago, tired following rules imposed by an institution they didn’t trust.  To their children, my generation, the Pope is a just a man in a silly hat and a bulletproof box, the church just a building with pretty windows and closed doors.  Even our octogenarian matriarch—a woman who has settled into a graceful ease while remaining autonomous, a woman who went down South to work for Obama because that is where she needed to be—no longer has the patience for the distant figures who once ruled so much of her life, preferring instead to create her own sense of what is real and what is right.

Like her, the women of this family are strong, and independent, and willing to forgive.  For this one weekend, the sisters don’t hear family news through a conduit, from this sister telling that sister about another’s kids or troubles.  This weekend they tell each other about their lives and tell the rest of us about their past.  We are grown enough not to be shocked by hearing about our mothers smoking marijuana with our grandmother, who first said that she didn’t feel anything and then asked where she could buy a pack.  We are amused and grateful that this is who we come from.

This is our blood and we, the children and grandchildren, need little explanation for the little dramas and larger faults of our family, but you can see that we are exhausting and over-whelming and just plain too much through those who married into this family.  They have their own subtle methods of surviving.  One husband organizes, another rocks his child, another disappears to a makeshift kitchen, away from his wife’s people with our voices endlessly carrying over each other.  These men raised children who are strong and imperfect because they married women who are strong and imperfect, full of conflict and forgiveness.

Everyone is leaving soon, off to our different dots on the map.  If we were your family, we might make tee-shirts or mugs commemorating the occasion, say our goodbyes and promise to call.  We might trust that we will all be in the same room next Christmas or the one after that.  But we are not your family.  We are my family.  And although we may not see each other before there are more or fewer of us—at the next wedding or funeral, after the next divorce or birth—we will see each other again.  We will listen to the old stories and tell new ones and thank both our good luck and the Pope to have been born to this family.

My twin sister and I are similar like Miss California and Elton John are similar: we’re both flaming queens but only one of us is smart.  People are continually shocked to find out B—* and I slipped out of the same slide.  It’s not just in brain power and ambition that we differ: we look alike the way pets and their owners look alike.  A stranger once asked if my ex-girlfriend and I were twins while we were standing beside my actual twin.  Also, B— was born in the First World stir-ups of Memorial Mission Hospital and I was born in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant.  Because of this, I not only have a trace of brain damage, the top of my skull is also pancake flat.  My sister’s head, however, is round as a silicon teet.  I was also born with an extra middle finger.  And there is, of course, the obvious gay/not gay thing.  As the only girl in Little League, it was pretty clear that I’d never be the type to get high off the smell of Old Spice.  When my sister talks about dudes I’m like, “Um, you know dudes?  Will you ask one when its balls dropped?”  B—, however, lives in a town that is 80% broken chromosome.  And likes it.  I suspect that if she ever breeds, there will be no turkey baster involved.

The archives of various gChats between my twin and I reinforce that we have some serious interpersonal issues and also that she’s a huge bitch.  Take this example from five minutes ago:

me: can i have a loan?
B: no. dont mix twinz n loanz.
me: m i ur bst frin?
B: duh
me: wuld u like me if we wernt twinz?
i dont think we’d really be friends
cause the time differnce
plus i don’t think we would have ever met
cause you are younger than me
B: different generations
me: tru dat
B: ur too old to be my friend
me: tru dat
plus i dont join runing clubs
or book club
B: we would be facebook friends but that’s all

I recently decided to get “brunch” tattooed on the inside of my lip.  I told my sister this on our birthday and she said, “As my birthday present, can you not do something stupid today?  What if brunch goes out of fashion?  What if next year is all about the mid-morning snack???”  I understand her concern, but I figure I’ll get both and if eating in general goes out of style, I’ll just turn them into “munch” and “mid-morning snatch.”

*My sister insists that I call her “B—” on this because a.) she doesn’t want to be associated with me, and b.) she thinks it makes her seem like a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

Thanks peeps!

Katie, I read your blog for the first time today.  The part about your hometown being the “archive of the many small humiliations of your youth,” resonates with me.  I am contemplating a move back to Jackson, MS.  Among other things, I’m trying to figure out how I will address Mrs. Cannada when we run into each other at the grocery store.  Four years ago, I “accidentally” pissed on her daughter’s calves at an Ole Miss football game and then skipped her wedding the following year.  To make matters more degrading, my parents have said that they don’t have enough room for me to live with them, despite the fact that they live in the same house that my brother and I grew up in.  They kindly offered me a spot at my grandmother’s house.  Nana seconded the notion on a voice message that said, “Daaan, if you do live with me you can have Mexicans, Blacks, Arabs and Chinese visit the house whenever you like.”

—Dan W.

True story: My dad and I were watching Name of the Rose (Christian Slater’s first movie, a quaint little period piece about the Inquisition) in about 1986. When it was obvious that Christian, the apprentice monk, was going to lift his gowns of brown and climb atop the hot disheveled nonverbal feral trashgirl in the hay in the monastery barn, my dad stood up and approached the tv—leaving the sound on, mind you—and just stood facing it, pressed up against the screen. I dont think that he even said anything! Or maybe he did, but in my mind, it was just horrifyingly embarrassing: animal-like sex noises and my dad with his lower torso and hips pressed against the TV to block the visual assault of lusty unprotected coitus on my virgin eyes. Then he sat back down when the scene was over and we watched the rest of the movie like nothing had happened. Jesus, that was sooooooo horrible. I am blushing about it right now.

—Amy C.

Amy C. mentioned that she’d like to hear other mind-searing tales of youthful embarrassment at the hands of our elders, which will not just entertain but maybe even be a sort of therapy for you. Hmmm. Therapy. I’ve never really considered myself the most empathetic person, but therapy sounds like a potential career path. I do like secrets. Want to share your humiliation? Lay it down in the comments or email krherzog@gmail.com