This is where I get it from

I tend to put my foot in my mouth more often than not. I'm one of those people that can always be counted on to say the wrong thing at the right time and make an ass out of myself. If you're one of the people on whose blogs I randomly leave stupid comments that make no sense, then you may have already guessed this about me.

I recently read back one of the comments I left and wondered, "what the fuck was I talking about?". If I was wondering, I'm sure he was, too. On another lady's blog, I almost incited a riot when her sister wanted to kick my ass over an inappropriate comment I made about her daughter (that I thought was funny as hell, but her sister didn't get). I've actually decided to back off on the commenting so much because of these and a few other goofs, and especially not commenting while drinking. But that is not the reason for this post, just setting up the story that helps explain that I come by this honestly, it's in my DNA.

This is my mother's story, I'm just borrowing it.

After my parents divorced, my mother was still invited to all of my father's family's functions. My mother and her sister had sort of grown up with my father and his siblings and she counted my father's sister as one of her best friends. When my father started getting serious with the lady I call Bee, he decided he needed to introduce the two of them in a neutral setting. He took them both out to dinner.

My mother was understandably extremely nervous. My parents had been married for almost a quarter of a century, and she had never loved another man but my dad. She didn't date after the divorce, either. Now she was going to meet the woman my father was moving in with, a woman at least 10 years younger, and have to face this woman at every family function in the forseeable future.

They got to the restaurant and made nice-nice, small talk. My father can be charming when he wants to be. They ordered a round of drinks and continued chatting politely about nothing that mattered. My mother was still nervous, and slammed her first drink. My mother is not a big drinker. My father seemed very surprised by this and asked her if she was ready for another. Apparently my mother was just as surprised, because she looked at her empty in astonishment and replied, "Oh my, I think I have a glass in my hole".

This broke the ice for the rest of evening, and has become a classic example of the verbal dyslexia that runs rampant in the family.

Keep it in your sneaker

After my father, Horhay, moved out of my mother's house he was a fleeting presence in my life. He was supposed to have custody of those of us under 18 on an every other weekend schedule. But for the most part, it was not enforced. It would have gotten in the way of his drinking. No one wanted to get in the way of Horhay's drinking. By the time I was 14, I was the only one left under the age of 18.

My father was living with a woman, Bee. I will not say much about Bee, other than she was younger than my father, and had no children of her own at the time. I have to say that she tried with me, and I did not usually repay her very nicely with my teenage hostility. It must have been quite an adjustment to suddenly have teenage step-children, and also step-grandchildren calling her Grandma Bee.

(On a side note, they eventually married and had a child together. When my little brother was born, I was 16. Kouf was 26 and her husband was the same age as her step-mother. My little brother was born with 2 nieces and step-niece, all older than him.)

Between the ages of 12-14, I started spending a good amount of time over there on the weekends. They let me drink beer and smoke cigarettes, and sometimes Bee and I would smoke pot. Sure I had to listen to the drunken screaming matches sometimes, but it was like staying with a kinda cool aunt. It also gave me the chance to get to know my father, whom I previously only saw on holidays.

At one point, my father decided to give me "the talk". It went something like this - Keep It In Your Sneaker. Already long knowing about the birds and the bees, I still had no idea what he was talking about. My mother had given me the clinical version in fourth grade. Anatomically, I had nothing to keep in my sneaker. Do they really have thingies that are long enough to keep in their sneaker? Does it hurt when they walk?

Asking for clarification, I was told, "All a boy wants to do is get in your pants. Look at me, I'm a 48 year old man and I'm still trying to get into the pants of anything that moves." Um, thanks, dad. That's a visual image I'll never be able to get out of my head.

I pretty much have had no idea what Keep It In Your Sneaker meant all these years until I started searching around on the net recently. It apparently refers to being a kid and your parents might tell you to put money or keys in your sneaker. Keep it out of sight so no one can get it/steal it. More broadly used to mean keep a secret, keep it on the DL but in a much more Leave it Beaver way. (Yes, I did just manage to put the word beaver on a post about the sex talk.)

Has anyone else heard this phrase? Especially in reference to sex?

How did your parents explain it to you?

My mother almost got us kicked out of Monkey Jungle

When I was about 8 years old, my parents took us on a trip to Florida. My father had an old Citroen station wagon that I thought was the coolest car. It had a hydraulic lift system, and jump seats in the back. I really loved that car. It never looked as good as the following picture, it was a dull white (probably spray painted!) with a green hood.



In the end, it looked a little more like the following picture. My father never could get rid of a car until one ex-wife or another sent it to the junkyard. He's a bit of a pack rat.



Anyway, Kouf got to stay home because she was old enough, so my parents loaded the four younger kids and all of their wordly possessions into the Citroen. As my mother couldn't really read maps, Horhay made poor Bouf sit up front and be the map reader. I've done the trip to Florida with my father as his map reader as an adult, and it was brutal. As awful as that job was, however, there was another one that was worse. Because the trunk was piled so high that my father couldn't see out the back window, they smushed Jimmy in between the luggage and the hatchback door so he could see if it was okay to change lanes. For 3 days down and 3 days back, in the middle of winter, where no heat could reach him.

And what a trip it was! On the way down, Virginia and the Carolina's got hit with an ice and snow storm. Apparently in 1979 they shared one plow and one sand truck between all three states. And no one had ever taught anyone in any of those states how to drive in precipitation other than rain. Oh my god, do you mean to tell me that it can freeze? I remember hanging on to my mother for dear life in the back seat while my father stubbornly forged on in his trusty and reliable Citroen, dodging cars that were at a complete stop in the middle of a lane on an interstate highway!

I truly do understand that they were woefully unprepared for what turned out to be a devastating storm for them. Why would they be prepared for something they never expected to have happen? And really, why would they be prepared for Horhay to be driving through it like a mad-man, not willing to stop until "the next planned stop" on our itinerary, dammit?

He carried around a little notebook, and marked down gas prices and mileage, and how long before we were allowed to go to the bathroom, again. I'm sorry, but a little act of God like a major ice storm just didn't fit in with how many miles we HAD to travel that day.

So we got there, all in one piece, and I think we all actually enjoyed ourselves. My father's parents had a trailer in Jensen Beach at the time, and we visited with them, and did a day at the beach. Then we went on and did Disney, and Parrot Jungle and Monkey Jungle.

I remember Parrot Jungle being fun, I have pictures of myself and my siblings posing for pictures where they line the parrots up and down your arms. I was actually a little terrified, I had no previous experience with birds, and quite frankly - they have sharp little beaks and are not against taking a nip out of you. Birds have too much free intellect, and are just a different species altogether. Give me a simian over an avian, any day.

Monkey Jungle was right up my alley. They had many habitats that were wide open, except for nets overhead . The whole thing was amazing to my 8 year old eyes. The best part, however, was that they had people walking around with monkeys. Nowadays, they try very much to show you how cute and cuddly the animals are, but don't let you touch them. Mostly for the animal's sake, but also because of liability issues. Back then, however, they were much more interactive.

We came across a man with a baby spider monkey - In A Diaper! I thought I had died and gone to HEAVEN. This was better than any Betsy Wetsy doll Santa had ever brought me. This was a real live baby monkey, and I wanted to love it, and hug it, and stroke his hair backward and name him George. This was my first real estrogen rush, and I could have easily sacrificed every estrogen rush in my future if I could just bring this baby home with me. Apparently, I was not the only one. Look how happy my brother, Jimmy, looks in this picture.




(And really, good lord, get a hair cut, Mr. 1979 monkey keeper! Barry Gibbs you are not!)

After this picture was taken, the baby monkey kind of crawled up my arm. I don't know whether he was tired, or hungry, or what, but he started sort of suckling my arm. I didn't know what was going on, I was 8. It didn't hurt or anything, it sort of felt like what I later realized a hickey would feel like. Not a big deal, to me. But to my mother, holy crap!

Apparently she thought the wild crazy monkey was trying to eat her youngest daughter. And She Started Hitting It! Hitting and slapping a baby monkey in a diaper, yelling, "get off, get off". Which is why they probably don't let their patrons touch their animals, any longer.

My mother is probably the only person in the history of Monkey Jungle not to get kicked out for slapping their baby monkey while yelling, "get off, get off". And if any one is here because of a really dirty search - HA-HA on you, you pervert.

I bottle fed a baby raccoon

When we moved from Buffalo to Connecticut, we lived in a very old house in the middle of nowhere. My mother made friends with a lady up the road who lived on a farm. I don't know if they were friends before or after my sisters started dating the lady's sons, but whatever. I was only about four years old at the time, and I don't really care.

The farm had a hen house, and the hen house was being raided on a nightly basis. I don't know if just the eggs were being taken, or if it was worse than that. I do know that they were a blended family with at least 5-7 children to feed. It was not a loss that they could afford.

One night, the man of the house heard a ruckus in the hen house and went out with his shotgun. A huge raccoon was raiding the hen house and he shot her. As she was dying, she gave birth to a bunch of little helpless baby raccoons.

The man of the house was not a bad man, he was protecting the food that they needed to survive. He asked around to find people who were willing and able to take on the baby raccoons, instead of killing them also. My mother has always been a sap for babies and taking in strays, and we took two of them.

Wasn't I cute?

We bottle fed the baby raccoons. We were never able to domesticate them, they remained wild animals. One of them died, despite our efforts. The other one could not get along with our cats and dog. We gave him away to one of my oldest sister's hippie friends. This was 1976. I'll never know what really happened to that little guy. The story I was told is that the hippie friends had him in a car with the windows rolled down, and he freed himself while they were shopping.

Before we gave him away, though, I brought him to my kindergarten's Pet Day. My father and one of his friends brought him to my school that day, and I won "Most Unusual Pet". I also got my picture in the local paper. Thank god it was a very rural town - read "Very White Town" - or I think my family may have had some trouble afterward.

I honestly did not know any better, I was five years old at the time. When the man that was taking my picture asked me my pet's name, I told him straight out, "his name is Tyrone, Tyrone the Coon."

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for ensuring that the only time I've ever been in the paper in my life is when I am uttering a racial slur.

West Point

My father, Horhay, who was born in 1936, went to Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia for his high school years. His parents weren't well off - they survived the depression and raised 4 kids frugally on a teacher's salary.





My grandpa was Cary Grant Hot!



Grandma had a garden, and they raised their own chickens and rabbits for eggs and meat. She sewed all their clothes, sometimes out of the left-over flour and rice sacks. They were hardworking, religious people who were extremely strict.

I honestly don't know why exactly my father went to FUMA or how they afforded it. He was the oldest, and neither of the other 2 boys went. He did well there, and he apparently enjoyed it enough that he wanted to continue and have a military career. He wanted to go to The United States Military Academy, West Point, in New York.



Back then, it was even harder to get in than it is now. You have to prequalify to be extended an invitation to take the tests (academic and physical assessment) to get in - and you have to have a nomination from a Congressman or a Senator. They have waiting lists for their waiting lists to just take the admissions tests. From their website:

The majority of the Members of Congress use a competitive nomination process, whereby 10 candidates are named to compete for a single vacancy. A minority of the members of Congress names a single candidate as their primary nomination, and some choose to number, or rank order the alternates. If you have an excellent academic and extracurricular activity record, however, you have a good chance of gaining admission with an alternate nomination. Each year several hundred of the best qualified alternate Congressional and military service nominees are offered admission from the West Point waiting list.

My grandmother managed to secure Horhay a first rank nomination. His record at FUMA spoke well enough of him that he was invited to New York to take the tests. My grandmother then scraped together the money to get him a bus ticket from Virginia to New York.

He - missed - the - fucking - bus. One single opportunity that would have altered his life immensely, gone in the blink of an eye. I honestly don't think he ever got over that.

He ended up doing a semester at UCONN, then joined the Air Force. While he was stationed in upstate New York, he reconnected with my mother and her family. When my father was young, his mother took them up to Buffalo every summer, where her father lived. They would rent out half the duplex that my mother's parents owned. Their mothers became very good friends, and all the kids kind of grew up together. My parents started casually dating.

My father got sent overseas, which he loved. He was an incredibly intelligent man. He had been taught Latin, and he became fluent in both German and French. He was also very musical and creative. He could play many instruments, but his talent was the clarinet. He has said that rock-and-roll killed his dream of playing in a jazz band, professionally. Prior to that, he reveled in being part of the Air Force jazz band, and all around DJ and band leader. (He saw Elvis in 1955 at the Amarillo Air Force Base and HATED him!). He told me a story of the military ship leaving the shore of New York, with him spinning records for his fellow recruits, and how happy that made him. He wanted to be so much more than where his life eventually led him.

My son took clarinet for one year. My father was over one day shortly after my son got his instrument, and I asked my father to blow us a few notes. I had never seen him play before - he gave all that up before I was born. I was shocked that he actually agreed, and he played an amazing song for at least 3 minutes. I was unfamiliar with the tune, and asked him what it was. He was free styling - 38 years since he had last picked up that instrument.

I hate to say that I feel for my father, but sometimes I do. It insults my sensibilities 'cause I am such a bitch. However, I feel that he found himself in a situation that he could not get himself out of. I feel that a couple of wrong decisions cost him a lifetime of happiness. I don't think he understood the mental illness awaiting him on the other side of the "I do's". I also don't think he understood his own alcoholic, abusive nature. Or his depression.

When my father got out of the Air Force, he went to Buffalo to help his grandfather run his bicycle shop. His grandfather was grooming him to take over so he could retire. He again reconnected with my mother, and they got married on October 31, 1959. You would think someone would have realized the significance of this date!

My mother should have worn a black dress with orange eye-shadow and practically screamed at the top of her lungs, "We are doomed - run away! All of our children will be demon-spawn!"



And that is how missing one little bus can fuck up your whole life.

My bother, Jimmy

My brother, Jimmy, was a lot of things to a lot of people. He was a natural born comedian who hid an abusive past behind a wall of comedy. He almost never let his tragedy side show.

He was the kid who gave my uptight mother wet-willies, and she would laugh. He was the kid who told our mother that he was growing tomato plants in his bedroom in the middle of winter, and she believed him right up until those plants started growing stuff that didn't look at all like tomatoes. He was the kid that took care of both his older and younger sisters, because he felt he had to be the man in the family after my father moved out. He was the kid who took the brunt of my father's brutality before the bastard moved out.

I remember an exceedingly cold night in which my father had told my brother not to let the fire go out in the living room fire place. Jimmy could not have been any older than 11 or 12 at the time. When my father got home from the bar in the middle of the night, Jimmy had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room, and the fire had gone out. He made Jimmy go out in the snow in his pajamas, bare foot , down a set of stairs, over the driveway and up a hill to get more wood for the fire. I can't put a number on how many other similar situations the kid had to endure.

Jimmy started getting into trouble when he was 12. He started using drugs and alcohol around the same time. They sent him to the military academy for ninth grade where my father had gone to high school. Jimmy hated it and made sure he got kicked out. That was pretty much the end of school for him. It turns out that not only do mental health issues run in my family, but also dyslexia. Back then, they just thought he was stupid. He used to ask me to fill out his job applications for him because his "hand writing was so bad." He was pretty much illiterate.



He was the nicest guy you would ever want to meet. He was funny, he was kind, he was generous. He loved kids, he loved wildlife, he loved to go fishing more than anything else in the whole world. He may have eventually looked the part of a dirty, greasy alcoholic who got into bar fights and did some time in jail, but he was never any of those things to us. To us, he was always the only sweet little boy in a house full of girls. "Excuse me, ladies, but I believe someone left their soiled panties to soak in the sink, and I would like to brush my teeth."





I pretty much adored him. Even when he threatened to break the thumbs of a much older guy who I thought would be dreamy to have for my boyfriend, when I was 13. He taught me how to play baseball and how to throw a football. He taught me basic self-defense, and gave me a knife to carry when he found out I was hitch-hiking.

When I was 16 and finally had a much older boyfriend, he offered to give the guy a ride home. I found out much later that Jimmy had waited until they got to my boyfriends house, pulled out an unloaded gun and put it to the boyfriend's head and asked, "are you sleeping with my little sister?". Apparently, the guy nearly shit his pants, making my brother a much better judge of character than I was, in retrospect.

I'm not condoning any of the following behavior. It is the truth, and part of the story.

He had already had a couple of DWI's, as they were called then, when he got pulled over driving an unregistered, uninsured car, containing an unregistered, unloaded fire arm. Possibly the same unregistered, unloaded gun as above. He had picked up a hitch-hiker whom he claimed he didn't know was carrying a large amount of marijuana, which the hitch-hiker stashed under the seat. Possession is 9/10ths of the law and Jimmy got busted for it. He finally lost his license and was lucky enough to be put on probation. He then got caught driving without a license, this time with possession of cocaine. He got sentenced to two one-year jail terms, back to back. In our area there are very different terms you could sit out. Jimmy got sent to what we affectionately called the Brooklyn Country Club. It's like summer camp with dorms, but more barbed wire, and less swimming.

When Jimmy got out of jail, serving less than six months of a two year sentence, he really seemed to have changed his law-breaking ways. He never again got behind the wheel of a car until he had his license back. However, he and alcohol were never very far apart. We thought that he had kicked his love affair with drugs, but we were wrong.

He got steady work at a lumber yard. He and my father moved together into in an apartment. Jimmy sometimes spent weekends at my mother's house, and sometimes spent them at my oldest sister, Kouf's house. He was helping Kouf's husband turn the attic into rooms that they could rent out. He seemed to be a nomad, who was welcome anywhere he went. He was always the life of any party he found himself at.

After five years, the State of Connecticut agreed to give Jimmy his license back. I took the day off of work and brought him for his driver's test. He passed with no problems. From that point on, all we talked about was getting our motorcycle licenses together. I don't know why it seemed so important to us, but it did.

Maybe it meant to me that I had finally proven myself to him that I was an equal, that I could stand up to him, and his friends that he wouldn't let me date. I so wanted to be a bad-ass bitch in his eyes, I guess. Maybe for him, it was the same in reverse. He had taught his little sister to be a bad-ass who could stand up for herself in a world that he tried to, but could not always, protect her from.

Three weeks after getting his license back, we spent a Saturday afternoon together looking at bikes. Neither of us was ready to make any decisions, but we had fun with it. I dropped him off at Kouf's house. I had plans, and Jimmy was staying with her for the weekend. He hadn't yet gotten himself a car.

Kouf and her husband also had plans that evening. Jimmy apparently walked to a nearby bar looking for cocaine. We did not know until later that he had been shooting cocaine intravenously. From what we pieced together, he couldn't find any cocaine, so he decided to try heroin for the first time as it was all that was available. He bought a bad batch that killed 17 people in the Connecticut and New York area.

The next day, I was rather a bit annoyed with my sister, Bouf, for waking me up on a Sunday morning by banging incessantly on the front door at my mother's house. I was hung over and assumed she just needed to do her laundry and had lost her key or something. I opened the door, and was already half-way back up the stairs when she said, "Wait, Fancy, I'm here for a reason - Jimmy's dead". I literally cried like a fucking baby, sitting on the stairs, telling my poor sister that she was a liar. It could not be true, we had just spent the day together. We had plans, goddammit! Why was she being so mean?

My mother had worked a 12-hour shift the night before, 7pm to 7am. Bouf and I had to wake her up and tell her that her only son was dead at the age of 26 of a heroin overdose. That was definitely one of the worst days of my life.

Horhay

My father moved out when I was about 9. I remember my mother telling a social worker at my school about the impending divorce. The social worker was trying to be sympathetic and gave me a book about how I should be okay with feeling sad. SAD? Are you fucking kidding me? We were joyous! Why did it take my mother 23 years of alcoholic rage and abuse to get rid of him?

I don't remember a lot of things about my early childhood, I've been told I am "blocking" memories. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, as I was the youngest. I suffered the least of the abuse, next to Shouf, who was born special. My father, bastard that he was, tended to steer clear of Shouf individually, unless she was being included in the group. Of course, that doesn't mean that either of us didn't see a lot of scary shit!

One of my earliest memories is my father playing hide-and-go seek with us. You would think that would be a happy memory, right? But my father played a "Here's Johnny" version in the middle of the night while my mother was at work. He had woken us all up when he got home from whatever bar he was frequenting after his 2nd shift job. How it worked was we all got the chance to hide, and whomever he found first got beaten with a stick he found in the yard. Who the fuck knows what triggered his anger that night, it could have been anything. I don't remember the outcome, I was probably 6 at the time. All I remember is hiding under a bed with Shouf on one side of me and Bouf on the other. Bouf had one hand over my mouth, and the other hand over Shouf's mouth because we were both hysterical. Kouf, as the oldest, was probably hiding Jimmy. The only boy in the house always deserved to be treated as an extra special punching bag, it didn't matter if he was ten years old. I'm assuming Horhay* must have passed out that night before he found anyone, because I don't remember the outcome. Who knows, maybe I blocked it.

*Horhay is what we now call him. I do realize I'm not spelling it correctly, but Jorge just doesn't have the same look. He is now a sad depressed old man living in Florida all by himself. He is no longer scary, but I still don't want pretty much anything to do with him.