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My father has never willingly put on a seat belt in his life. He has always found the very idea of “safety” to be ridiculous. Why would he ever want to be safe? What was he, a little girl? A miniature woman? A babylady? John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, huge hairy Samson from the Bible—those men didn’t wear seat belts. If they needed a seat belt, they tore off a man’s arm and laid it across their lap.
IF MY FATHER is best described in terms of his nudity, my mother is best described in terms of her Danger Face, which is organized around the information that somewhere in America, a house is on fire. There are human Lassies among us, who are more alert to disaster, who feel a little ding! go off in their heads whenever a child falls into a well. She is one of them, and all humankind is her Timmy.
My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive options, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.
Pretty much all art in this house is of Jesus reaching out with two fingers and trying to milk things—the air, the clouds, the Cross, a cripple who wants to get blessed but who instead is going to get milked, by Jesus. Jesus stands against a celestial background. He reaches toward a plump, dangling ray of the sun. He is going to milk the hell out of it.
On top of the chest of drawers is my entire childhood collection of gnomes, accumulated during a time when I lusted after gnomes so strenuously I’m surprised I grew up to have sex with human beings as opposed to whimsical statues in people’s gardens.
Some people are, through whatever mystifying means, able to make the guitar talk. My father can’t do that, but he can do the following: Make the guitar squeal Make the guitar say no Make the guitar falsely confess to murder Make the guitar stage a filibuster where it reads The Hunt for Red October out loud
He was born, like many seminarians, at the age of sixty-five, with a pipe in his mouth and a glass of port in his hand.
I’m not sure whether the inkblots themselves have been somehow designed to be gay—balls everywhere, kaleidoscopic bursts of abs, the words “I’M GAY” doing backflips in the ink, a dong on the classic Rorschach butterfly—or whether they just expect people to see gay things in them. Either way, the test cannot be categorized as either scientific or sane, but my father places great faith in it.
Men, it bears repeating, are so weird. This is so far outside my area of sexual expertise it’s not even funny. Tell me you want to role-play a butlerfuck while pretending to serve your penis on a big silver tray and I will nod with understanding, and perhaps even offer to film it. But you want a woman to wash your clothes in a river? What are you, some kind of pervert?
The more people believe in a religion, the more they trust smudgy, paranoid newsletters printed off in a church basement by a woman named Debbie.
The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It’s about not being able to choose the secrets you’ve been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?
“Did you know rats in big cities are getting aggressive from eating too many cigarette butts? They’re addicted to nicotine and they want more.” —Karen Lockwood, nearly screaming, while eating an omelet at a breakfast restaurant in the year of our Lord 2013
“Still, it’s good you moved away from the South when you did,” she comforts me. “According to a website I was reading about gators who kill, more and more gators are becoming killers. One gator, they opened him up, and they found twenty-two dog collars inside.” A pause. “Mom, that doesn’t sound . . .” “No, it doesn’t sound real at all, now that I say it out loud.”
It happens this way: after driving all day, after getting lost on our way into town, after a steak dinner at a local roadhouse staffed entirely with aspiring country singers, we feel we have earned our rest. We check into our room at the Hyatt Place, and we wash our similar faces and change into our respective pajamas and yawn identical yawns and then, and then, as it sometimes does, the whole world stops spinning on a single second. My mother turns back the blanket and gasps. From the look on her face I can tell she has seen cum. She throws back her head and howls, and the sound chills me to
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According to the internet, there are two possibilities. Sperm either die shortly after they leave the body, or else they live eternally, first on earth and then in heaven, banging themselves adoringly against the great gold egg of God’s face. No one can decide.
“Tricia,” she says, “beds are supposed to be comfy, not cummy.”
The next morning she stomps down to the front desk and registers a complaint about the amount of semen in our room—the ideal amount of semen in a hotel room being none, the amount in our room qualifying as an actual wad. She has never felt more alive, you can tell. She is enjoying herself with all the immensity of a recently inseminated elephant. She inserts the phrase “COME on” into the conversation wherever possible, and when the concierge attempts to make excuses, she tells her not to give her that load. The concierge’s face is serene—so serene that I become suspicious. Perhaps she is the
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My mother is starring in a one-woman play called Biohazard and the critics are loving it. Unable to capture the full feeling of the experience with words, she resorts to interpretive dance, throwing back her head, making jackoff gestures, leaping back in horror, and finally shaking both fists at God. At one point she appears to yelp, like a guard dog who has been trained to bark whenever cum gets near it.
BECAUSE MY FATHER WASN’T allowed to hunt hippies, he decided to settle for hunting deer instead. It was a good compromise, all things considered. Deer were the pacifists of the animal kingdom. They sat around doing weeds all day and didn’t even try to get jobs. The males of the species pranced and ate salad and had a hundred kids they didn’t know about.
Paul was a hunter from birth. He was feral and patriotic, like a boy who had been raised by coonskin caps, and my father had high hopes that he would join the military as soon as he was of age.
I had always thought the words “hotel” and “motel” were synonyms, but as soon as I stepped across the threshold, I understood that a motel was grosser. It looked like the place where Smokey the Bear went to cheat on his wife.
“No,” he said in the startling baritone he had had even as a baby. Back then, women regularly screamed when my mother brought him into the ladies’ room, believing a fully grown businessman had burst through the door and was requesting a diaper change.
It is probably the last conversation like this the seminarian and I will have. After his ordination, particular friendships with women will be discouraged. I understand why, but in a wider sense, it is frightening. If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.
The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.
Heaven—Was a Sugar Cube Baby took a Taste Just—as Pearls—of Cherubim Bit into the Christ
I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn’t work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome.
