Floored

Trying to force himself to remember a moment from his childhood, Tommy Fawkes squints at Katie Parker.

"I had a little red car..."

"Yes," Katie says, in her charming, French accent as she smiles in the slightest sympathy at Tommy, "and you drove it into everything!"

"Funny Bones" is my favorite (non-Wes Anderson) movie, because it is as funny as it is painful as it is charming as it is dark as it is passionate as it is flawed.  It's everything life is-- or should be.  And I knew, when I first saw it, almost half my life ago, that I wouldn't see a film that touched me the way this one did, that filled me with fun and hope and despair like this one did.

And I haven't.  But I still go to the movies when I can anyway.

I still go to my parents' house when I can anyway, too, although, with twins, it's hard to go pretty much anywhere.  "Oh, yeah," parents of one muse gently, "I guess it would be harder with two..."

Yeah.  Only twice as hard there, duck-shoes.

I went to my parents' house yesterday because they'd just gotten new flooring put in, throughout the entire first floor.

"It's beautiful," my mother said on the phone earlier in the week, "there's shades of green and purple and it looks just like stone-- it's going to feel like we're eating outside on some patio."

My father, speaking to me on the phone later in the week, had something slightly different to say.

"It's fuckin' floor-- I put my fuckin' feet on it and walk around-- what?  I'm supposed to care about it or something?!  Who gives a shit?!"

My nearly three-year-old nephew, a clear moderate, said, "I like this floor" as he ran his fingers over it when I came by yesterday to see it.

I mean, it's sheet linoleum made to look like stone.  They did a good job with it, it almost looks like real grouting in between the large square "tiles", but it's all one flat sheet of linoleum.  It's ugly.  Unless the people who buy my parents' home when they die are in their seventies already, the floor will be the first thing they'll replace when they move in.  Sure, it's nicer than the linoleum it replaced, but it's still ass-ugly.

If I'm honest with myself-- and, by turn, with you-- it's not so much that I don't like the floor, it's that I'm always kind of insulted when a change is made to the home in which I was raised.  I remember being ten or eleven and putting up quite a protest when the time came to replace the sofa and chairs in the living room, which, admittedly, looked as if they'd been through a hurricane and a pogrom.

"They're FINE!" I'd insist, "and so COMFORTABLE!" as I'd do a head-first dive into the warped sofa cushions that had virtually no filling left in them.  The next thing on their agenda, after the floor is finished, is to replace all the carpeting in the living room, and the staircase, and, of course, all the furniture in the living room.

Again.

Every time I go there, it seems, it's less and less, um, mine.

Not that it ever was mine-- it's not-- and not like I have any right to it, because they offered to will the fucking house to me and I said no, but it's mine in memory.  And the memories are still there, but the reality is changing.  It would be easier if some random family were living in there now, gutting it, making additions and deletions, trashing it and rebuilding it to greater glory.  But that my parents are there doing it themselves, it's like they're trying to erase the past we'd all built together that, in my head at least, was so happy.  Most of the time.

That old, peeling, yellowed, disgusting linoleum floor was mine.  And I had a little red car.  And I drove it into everything.

Down to Zero

"Oh the feeling
When you're reeling
You step lightly thinking you're number one
Down to zero with a word
Leaving
For another one

Now you walk with your feet
Back on the ground
Down to the ground
Down to the ground."

My wife and I have been spending a lot of time recently watching "Homicide: Life on the Street". It's a police procedural-- well, it's a lot more than that-- that was filmed in Baltimore, and Fells Point, from 1993-1999, and it was one of my favorite shows on television when I was in middle and high school. There's a picture of me, somewhere, standing in front of the building that was used as the headquarters, in Fells Point-- and I'm grinning in that picture about as big as I can.

I can remember well watching Pembleton, who made suspenders look cool, scream a confession out of some moke in The Box, or Bayliss going through some existential crisis, or Munch never doing any actual police work-- just cracking wise, or paranoid. I can remember the brilliant Yaphet Kotto astonishing with his performance as Al Giardello, expertly towing the line between rabid attack dog and sensitive mentor. I can remember watching this show in 1998 when I decided to enter college as a theatre major, but I can remember watching "Homicide" in my parents' basement dreaming not of becoming an actor, but becoming a cop.

Instead, I became a father. I wrote a book about cops. I appear in local theatre plays. And, in 2011, I'm still watching "Homicide", with my best friend beside me on the couch-- and she loves it-- while she breastfeeds our twins, or pumps.

The song lyrics at the beginning of this blog are from the Joan Armatrading song "Down to Zero". The song plays at the end of the Season 5 episode of "Homicide" called "Prison Riot". I love Joan Armatrading's voice. It's a lot like Tracy Chapman's, and it's frequently confused for hers, but there's an earthier quality, a more impassioned fervor to Armatrading's voice. Something. If I knew more about music, or anything, maybe I could tell you what it is, but I don't know.

The older I get, the more I realize that there's a lot I don't know.

Life's funny. On December 15th, my twins were born. I didn't get to cut the cords, because the O.R. was way too chaotic, and my son came out white as a hospital wall. I was hurt, bummed-- diminished, I suppose might be a better way to describe it. My daughter had jaundice, my son had to have help to breathe, but we all went home together, and they grew, and we fell into a new routine, of feeding, and pumping, and watching Kay Howard, Meldrick Lewis, Mikey Kellerman, John Munch, Tim Bayliss, Frank Pembleton slug their way through another shift on the dirty streets of Bal'more.

Maybe four days after we got home with the twins, my brother-in-law was diagnosed with lung cancer. Stage 4. Metastases in his stomach, his liver, his brain. Multiple masses in the brain, including one that was so huge it was growing even while he was hospitalized. A mass that's 9 centimeters in his chest. He's lost thirty pounds in no time at all.

No time at all. Down to zero.

Down to the ground,
Down to the ground.

I was reminded, in thinking of all this, of the story of a young New York City patrolman who, on one particular shift in the early 1970s, shot and killed a suspect who had pulled a gun on him, and, several hours into the same shift, delivered a baby. That's how fucked up life is-- that these things happen like that. That life can come in and go out so soon, so close. My brother-in-law's life has not gone out, but it feels as though it is on its way out, as the lives of my children begin.

And what's to be done? My mother-in-law wants to send them lasagna, and cookies. She wants to festoon my nephew's room and life with an abundance of toys to make up for the fact that his father won't see much of 2012, let alone 2013. People want to clean their house and hold beef-n-beer benefits. People want to pay their bills, and I guess I hope they do. Me? I don't know what I want to do. It sounds cruel, but I have two children to raise and provide for, and I don't know how to do that, and I feel like I've got to start figuring that out. I never figured me out, and I guess that's going to have to wait until, I don't know-- retirement?

Maybe.

In the meantime, I'll be changing diapers, and receiving more bad news texts from my sister, and watching "Homicide" with my wife while our twins snore on our chests.

Since news of my brother-in-law's ill health broke on New Year's Day, I know now what Joan Armatrading is singing about, about being down to zero-- at the beginning, or at the end, it barely makes a difference. Sleep-deprived, half-psychotic, half-dreaming, in love, in mourning, in despair, infatuated, indefinable.

Down to the ground,
Down to the ground.

In the Fog of My Dreams

I have many dreams-- you know some of them by now.

My dream of becoming a police officer-- saving my own little corner of the world-- and revitalizing the image of "the cop" by wearing my uniform pressed and proud and being a gentle intermediary in peoples' disputes.

My dream of becoming a professional writer-- being compensated for my thoughts and opinions, musings and rantings, ravings and cravings.

My dream of becoming a father, of raising children who will suffer terribly through many an operetta featuring their pattering dad and will no doubt be allergic to everything, including the dog that we'll own anyway.

My dream of owning a vintage Volkswagen Beetle, not a beautifully-restored showpiece to shut away in a temperature-controlled garage, to obsessively molest with a diaper, and take out for a 1/2-hour spin three bone-dry Sundays a year when my knuckles are gnarled and my hair is as white as freshly fallen snow-- but a handsomely imperfect daily driver to, well, daily drive.

While driving to rehearsal on Wednesday night, I spotted a silver 1971, idling at a stop sign. It was no showpiece.

"When am I going to own my own Bug?" I said aloud, not even really to my wife, though she did happen to be sitting in the passenger seat.

"I don't know, Buddy."

"When I'm old and wrinkly and won't be able to enjoy it?" I asked, definitely to her this time, "and when there'll be practically none left?"

"I don't know," she said.

Of course, we both know. And knowing hurts, because we also know what happens to a dream deferred, thanks to Langston Hughes. She was against the Beetle-- and she pushed all the right buttons. We are planning on having a child, and there is no way I would put a child of mine in a 40-year-old car like that, would I? No, of course not. She can drive a stickshift car, but flatly refuses to because of the anxiety it causes her. "What if my car needs to go into the shop and I have to go to work? I won't drive a manual Beetle." She pointed out that a 40-year-old car just isn't reliable or sensible to drive every day, in all seasons. I countered with my deeply-entrenched, almost Aspergian knowledge of the Beetle's excellent reputation in the snow, due to its rear-mounted engine, its simplicity to maintain, and the fact that, while the car might be 40 years old, most Bugs that have survived this long have scads of redone parts, including engines and transmissions.

But I was fighting a losing battle, and I was barely even fighting.

We had a long talk about it in bed together on Saturday morning, and it changed and diverged and morphed into a talk about my job and my employment aspirations and just what the hell I want to do with my life. See, my wife has a career. I, as I've always had since college, have a job. And I've had many several of them, and none of them have ever really had the potential to turn into careers. Partly because I've never wanted to do any job I've ever held for longer than a year, even though I have.

I don't remember how we got to talking about my job when we started talking about a vintage Bug to replace the P.T. Cruiser, but sometimes talks go in different directions. I think it had to do with dreams-- the unfinished, unrealized kind. Around the time we moved back to the suburbs, I read that my town was hiring police officers. It's a lovely little suburb-- not very dangerous (the last officer killed here was in 1989) and the pay is pretty excellent and the benefits are far better. More importantly, I said, when I came home and talked to my wife about it, I would be able to police the community in which I was born and raised and live. My wife was very upset.

"I thought we went through this already," she said to me, "I thought we were finished with this."

But, with me, things aren't ever really finished. Remember, I owned a 1966 VW Beetle from the time I was fourteen to the time I was fifteen-and-a-half.

"Part of me wants to just say, 'Sure-- go for it-- what the hell? Let's see what happens...' but I don't want to. I don't want to live like that, in fear that you could get hurt, or that I'll never see you because you'll be working weird hours."

With a measured amount of frustration, and sadness, I let the application date pass without another word about the subject.

Yesterday morning, in bed, my wife looked into my eyes and the lower left corner of her mouth turned down, as it does whenever she's about to cry, as it's done ever since 2004, when she had her brain surgery.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm always stepping on your dreams-- and I don't want that. I don't ever want to kill a dream you have."

I told her that she, the affirming, respectful, loving life I have with her, is my biggest dream of all-- one that, when I was a younger man I never thought would ever materialize. And I told her that, because it was true.

She apologized for "forcing" me to go to grad school, and that broke my heart-- maybe because it was true. I told her that I don't even remember anymore, because I don't. Who knows how things happen anyway, they're all a mess of circumstances and words and best intentions. On paper, it looks like I'm not using my graduate school education, only paying for it, but I am using it. In every interaction with a young person, I use the techniques and tactics I learned there, and I know that. "Just because I don't work in a school with cafeteria trays and lunch bells and shitty ditto sheets doesn't mean that I'm not a teacher."

"I know," she said, between sniffles.

She then told me that, if I wanted to try to become a writer, she'd support me, and that was hard to hear. I do want that, but I lead a life littered with enough rejection letters to wallpaper every house on my street-- so is that really a worthwhile risk? I think I'd be more successful at owning and operating a vintage Beetle.

In my life, the Beetle is rather like a pimple that recurs in a tell-tale spot on your cheek, by your nose every now and then-- you forget that it comes there until it arrives, all round and red. So is being a police officer, or a writer, or an actor-- these things come up and up and up and they only go down below the surface after a good astringent and squeeze session, and maybe that's what Saturday morning was, or maybe it was something larger. Maybe I've finally understood what is important in life, and what is less so. Dreams are good, and they keep us moving forward, but it's what we've got in life that keeps us alive. And I don't ever want to forget that.

Forging Ahead Back In Time

While I was away on vacation, my sister had a baby.

I was relaxing on a small beach in Rockport, Maine, watching a ten-year-old blonde girl stab a hopefully deceased lobster with a stick when I got the typically dry text message from my father:

"NOAH is doing great was born
around 1 today big baby 7 lb 11 oz
everyone is doing great i love you
dad take"

My father's text messages are always the same: factual, uneffusive, grammatically dubious/containing scant punctuation and always, always concluding with one extraneous word. I suppose that, whenever he wants to send a text message, he merely recycles one he already sent, deletes most of it, starts anew, and forgets to delete the final word of the old message. Often I receive texts from him that end in a word having to do with his business-- manufacturing undergarments for sports teams. One day prior to Noah being born, he sent me a text about my mother:

"mommy is a nervous about everything
Now I know where you got it from ha ha ha
love dad phillies"


One thing he has gotten very good at with his phone is taking pictures. My wife and I enjoyed several of them while we were in Maine, sent as attachments to his bizarre text messages ("mom @ noah" [ed: I presume that meant "mom & noah"] "you sister is running away" [ed: the picture that accompanied this text is my oldest sister holding Noah as if he was a bomb slathered in radioactive honey] and, my personal favorite, "mom is high" [ed: I have no idea what the fuck that means.]) It was only upon our arrival home tonight that we were treated to the full barrage of Noah pictures on my father's cell-phone, including two others of my oldest sister holding her new nephew both gingerly and increduously. According to my father, my oldest sister's nose looks inordinately larger in these pictures than it ever has before. He now refers to her as "Pinocchio."

While a new baby was entering my family's life back in Pennsylvania, it seemed only fitting that I should make the acquaintance of an old baby in Rhode Island. Last night, I got to experience my wife as a captivating, newly-minted four-year-old girl, courtesy of some dusty Betamax video tapes, and the perhaps even dustier Betamax player that resides in her mother and father's bedroom and, miraculously, still functions. While we fumbled our way through setting up the Betamax player, which had lain dormat since, I presume, around 1987, when most of those items went the way of the dinosaurs and vinyl bench car seats, I realized that people were more intelligent back when Betamax players were popular. For example, the Betamax video cassette cases were emblazoned with the word "epitaxial." I mean, I can only presume that average, run-of-the-mill 1987 grown-ups knew what that word meant, otherwise they wouldn't buy things listing it as an apparent selling point or virtue. Also, you had to be pretty clever to actually set up the Betamax player, and being Hercule fucking Poirot couldn't hurt if you need to find the tracking dial.

I can't speak for Mrs. Apron but, for me, it was a pretty strange experience, sitting there on the edge of her parent's bed, next to my 27-year-old wife, watching her four-year-old self be-bopping around a totally different world. I mean, there she was, opening up presents that turned out to be not Anthropologie skirts but Babar & Celeste music boxes and puzzles. And, unlike in all the photographs I've seen, this version actually talked! She looked straight into the lens, at me, and she told me about how she went into the swimming pool at the Howard Johnson's and she stuck her head under! I mean-- what a big girl! What a sweet girl. A bossy girl on occasion, but, on the whole, a sweet girl. With her raven-haired father and her smooth-faced mother, clad in the eye-popping duds of the day. Frozen in time and bustlingly alive with motion, all at once. I'm glad the Betamax held on for one more trip down an epitaxial-laden memory lane.

We never had a video camera when I was a little boy. The earliest film of me comes from when I was twelve years old, filming a 6th grade English mockumentary about the Loch Ness Monster in which I played four characters, including the program host, and I referred unknowingly to another character called "Constable Clitoris." Thanks, Monty Python. Fortuantely, my English teacher refrained from calling home about that. Though it was an innocent faux-pas, the more innocent, earlier years exist only in still pictures, and I think that's actually okay. If I could see my beautiful and energetic mother moving around, devoid of her trigger finger and her arthritis, my robust father with more, well, hair, I just don't know. I don't know if I could sit through that without hot, blinding tears streaming down my cheeks. I don't know how my wife did it. I felt a thickness in my throat last night, and they weren't even my movies, my history. I guess I just look at the world differently than she does, and I think that's okay, too. Sometimes it's nice to just sit back and enjoy the world the way it used to be, without obsessing and depressing about what it is now or what it will be in days and years to come.

Well, I suppose it is anyway. I wouldn't really know.

It's okay, though. There are always new memories to enjoy, to someday join the old ones. There may not be Betamax films to preserve in a layer of dust-bunnies, but there are text messages, like the one my father sent me on Tuesday. He's been on a mad dash to find my sister, her husband, and their brand-new baby a house, seeing as they're rapidly outgrowing my sister's one-bedroom apartment. He sent me a text to inquire about houses for sale on our street:

"We just saw a twin near you the
realestate kathleen stupid blond told
me twice on the phone 185,000 i went
there at 5 to c it she said sorry mistake
its 285,000 i almost toppoled her out
the fucking window"

Hi, I'm White Trash

My telephone rang at 11:04pm last night, and, like any neurotic, Jewish worry-wart, it scared the shit out of me. Someone's dead. Or at least bleeding profusely. I had left my telephone upstairs on the bed and my wife and I were watching "Law & Order" downstairs because, now that we have cable, there isn't a moment when "Law & Order" isn't on. And, even though Elliot was shouting at tear-stained Hillary Duff about pictures of her grabbing a man's crotch on her "Face-Space," I distinctly heard the theme from Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen" blaring out from upstairs.

Tell me there's someone else in the universe with that ringtone.

I raced up the stairs to retrieve my phone and saw that I had just missed a call from my oldest sister. My oldest sister is a world-renowned hypochondriac. Having a younger brother who is an emergency medical technician only makes this condition worse. Every time I visit my parent's house for a quiet family dinner, she is there, in her assigned seat, waiting patiently to accost me with some ridiculous malady that I can diagnose and/or treat. When I enter the dining room, she promptly sticks a rash-covered limb or a misshapen mole or a prominent zit in my face. Most recently, I was greeted by her wide-open mouth displaying a uvula covered in dark blood.

So, naturally, I feared the worst.

Fortunately, this time, she wasn't lying on her kitchen floor in a pool of phlegm or urine. She was calling to gossip about our other sister.

"Did you know she was getting married?" my oldest sister blurted out on the phone.

Actually, I did know, but I had only found out that morning. It will be a civil ceremony, in judge's chambers, sometime during the week of August 10th-14th-- whenever the judge gets a break from mediating traffic court, I guess.

She's marrying the guy she's been seeing for about a year-and-a-half. They guy who impregnated her. The guy who already has a kid from a one-night stand in college. The guy with tattoos all over the parts of his body that the outside world can see. The guy who's a post-man and also a part-time employee at the pizza joint where he's worked since before he could drive a car. The guy who has a baby mama.

My sister is eight-and-a-half months pregnant with this guy's kid. The kid who will be my nephew. When she told me of the impending marriage to the unenthusiastic lothario, who apparently proposed to her while they were sitting on the couch watching TV, my response was,

"Oh. Okay."

I wanted "congratulations" to slip from my lips, but I didn't feel very congratulatory. Besides, the information was presented to me in a very ambivalent way, so that's kind of how I responded. Tone for tone.

My oldest sister, unfortunately, had found out about the impending nuptials from our 84-year-old great-aunt, who lives in Pompano Beach where she takes care of her 92-year-old husband who is suffering from Alzheimers and, consequently, tries to pick up married women in their twenties at the local country club and routinely walks around his condo in nothing but a t-shirt that doesn't cover his dong, as my parents observed when they spent a week there two months ago.

"Is your mom happy about the wedding?" my great-aunt asked my sister.

"Um, what wedding?" my sister asked.

"Oh."

Yeah. It's that kind of a thing.

In conversing with my pregnant middle sister, she also told me to "save the date" for a "beer and hoagie, hey, we got married and had a kid party." She also warned me not to make her beau's family feel "uncomfortable" by wearing a tie to said event. I wanted to ask her if I should not shower for a week or tug on my crotch incessantly at the party in order to make them feel more at home, but I didn't. I've done a lot of growing up since I was fifteen, and I know now that the cheap thrill of engaging my sister with smartass comments is short-lived and only causes familial turmoil.

"Oh. Okay," I said as I put the event into my Treo's calendar.

I don't know how this all happened to our family. Children out of wedlock, baby mama drama, white trash inlaws... it just doesn't seem real to me. But it is. The bulge underneath my sister's shirt tells me that it's very, very real. I know my mother wants my sister to be married before this baby's born, to legitimize the whole thing, but is what's happening here worth legitimizing? What if she doesn't love him?

"Well," my great-aunt opined to my eldest sister over the phone, "after the baby's born, they can just get divorced!"

Yeah. Good idea.

Bed, Perchance to Sleep...

I slept for shit last night.

I don't know why. My wife and I were at my mother and father's for dinner last night. The event commenced, as it is ordained so to do, at 5:30 and, by 7:20, we were both nodding off at the table.

"Jesus Christ," I hazily exclaimed after looking at my watch, "it's only 7:20?"

"So?" my mother dared me to proceed with further commentary.

"Well, come on," I slurred, "it's like a fucking opium den in here. Look at her," I said, gesturing lazily to my wife, "she can barely keep her head up."

My wife, almost cross-eyed, enthusiastically bobbed her head up and down, presumably in agreement.

I don't know what it is about my parent's house that is so soporific, but you can't be in there for longer than an hour and a half without your brain turning into a gray slushie. It's not like the conversation isn't lively-- it is-- last night we were conversing energetically about safety recalls of the pack-n-play my mother bought for my sister, my father was trying to harrass me into accepting a re-gift of a Continental Airlines credit-card holder ("The Israeli ambassador gave it to me! It's Italian leather, mummy-- beautiful!") while my eldest sister was giving my wife meticulous directions to the gynecologist's office in New Jersey. I mean, it's a pretty festive fucking environment.

I ended up not accepting the credit-card holder, regardless of its alleged quality and provenance. "How many credit cards do you think I have, for God's sake?" I asked. This thing was made for big boys. It even had a slot for a passport, with a piece of paper in it made to look like a passport, and a long, vertical slot for an airline ticket, with a fake airline ticket inside for "HAPPY AIRLINE." Can you just picture the flight attendants on Happy Airline?

My father is always trying to give me shit I don't want-- coupons to Ruby Tuesday ("Take your wife out for dinner, for God's sake-- it's beautiful!"), supermarket coupons, "Sveetie-- you won' believe this-- 2 liter bottles of Pepsi Diet for 89 cents each! I mean, fuck!") or random food products they have lying around the house that they can't wait to get rid of ("Mummy-- you like sunflower seeds, right?") but it's usually fruit.

Yesterday, we managed to escape with only half a watermelon, which we had to carry home in a bag as we walked to their house. It's a pleasant enough walk, though when encumbered with half a watermelon, it's decidedly less so. I don't know how serial killers or mafioso walk around with severed heads in bowling ball bags all the time.

I guess we should have gone to sleep immediately after arriving home from their house, but we stayed up for another three hours and while this should have only increased my thirst for sleep, I instead got totally wired. As I lay in bed, my wife instantly asleep after a back rub, my mind wandered to the following topics:

Everything I did wrong this weekend including, but not limited to,

# hitting my head a total of four (4) times

# breaking a shelf my father-in-law hand-made for us five years ago

# breaking a large lamp bulb in the kitchen (by hitting my head on it-- #2 out of 4)

* being unprepared for work today

* all the bills that have been paid/have to be paid

* obsessing about our mortgage and its seeming unendingness

* ditto on school loans

* the many ways someone could easily break into our house

* the fact that I sleep naked in the summer and how stupid I would look confronting a burglar in such aforementioned nudity and how my only shot at not getting killed would be that the burglar would probably laugh so hard at my emaciated form that he might drop his gun.

* thinking about death

* thinking about Michael Jackson's death

* considering a myriad of snappy combacks I'd love to say to people, especially my boss

* obsessing about why I can't fall asleep

I must have fallen asleep for at least a little bit, because I know I had a dream about my father promising to buy my a vintage Volkswagen Beetle (something he already did for me when I was fourteen-- and I ended up selling it at age 15-and-a-half because I was too scared to drive it due to its lack of safety features, like, um, shoulder belts). The dream, of course, didn't go well, and ended with me yelling at him because he didn't understand that Volkswagen stopped making the original Beetle in the year 1979 and that I was only interested in Beetles from 1962-1967, but that I wanted to test-drive "a later model just to be sure."

"You mean like 1995 or 1996?"

"NO, GODDAMNIT! THEY WEREN'T MAKING THEM THAT LATE!"

"You mean like 1991 or 1992?"

"AAAAAAAAH! NO! WHAT THE FUCK! I MEAN, LIKE, 1968 to 1971! JESUS!"

"Oh. So, like 1989 or something."

My poor father. We are destined to be unable to communicate, even in my dreams. My very brief, unsatisfied, unkind, unrequited dreams. Oh well. There's always tonight. Maybe, instead of our marital bed, I can try sleeping at my parent's dining room table. It's a good thing I don't see a therapist anymore, or he might call that a disturbing bit of regression.

This, I Swear

There's a great dialogue exchange in the vintage Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor comedy "See No Evil, Hear No Evil" which I saw so many times as a child that I'm proud to report I can replicate in its entirety without the help of the "Memorable Quotes" section of its IMDB entry:

Gene: You swear an awful lot.

Richard: You're fuckin-aye right!

Gene (imitating Richard): Fuckin-aye! Something bothers you, fuck it! Your wife leaves you? Fuck her! Boss fires you? Hey, fuck it, right!? Fuckin' fuck! Fuck 'em!

Richard: You're fuckin' right!

Gene: Do you know that it's a blessing to be able to do that? I can't do it! You're a lucky guy-- I can't do it!

Richard: Well fuckin' change!

Gene: It's not that easy.

Gene Wilder's character who, by the way, is deaf, is right: it's not that easy. It's not that easy to change. It's not that easy to let negativity and acrimony roll off your back like a drop of sweat. And it's not that easy to be liberal with your lips. But it does feel good.

I love to profanity. Most of you bastards who've been hanging around here for a while know this about me, and you're obviously okay with it, or you wouldn't be frequenting this establishment. If you don't like it, you're more than welcome, of course, to fuck off.

My mother-in-law doesn't swear, and it doesn't particularly thrill or please her when other people do, and this is, in large degree why she has never been invited to read my blog. Before I first met Mrs. Apron's mother, I was warned of her no cussin' disposition and I initially bristled at Mrs. Apron's request that I govern my tongue judiciously when in her presence.

"But swearing is a pretty intrinsic part of who I am," I said, "why should I have to change who I am to suit someone else?"

"Because you love and respect me, and I'm asking you to."

Ah. Game and match to Mrs. Apron.

I didn't realize how extreme my future mother-in-law's displeasure of cursing went until I was at their house one day and her husband announced that he was going to the backyard, armed with at least a dozen plastic bags to "pick up dog shit."

"ARTHUR," she screamed shrilly from the kitchen, "the word is POOPIE!"

Of course it is.

Like every twentysomething, I blame my parents for my zealous use of profanity. Well, I blame my two older sisters, too. Our reparte was littered with obscenities from a very early start. It probably began with a class of jest my eldest sister was fond of called "Little Johnny Jokes." Little Johnny was a bad, bad boy who was always starting up trouble. I don't really remember any of the jokes in their entirety, but they always ended with some authority figure kicking the shit out of him. I remember, in one of the jokes, Little Johnny had just come downstairs in the morning and his mother asked him what he wanted for breakfast. I believe he answered,

"I'll have some fuckin' cornflakes."

"And his mother kicked the shit out of him," my sister said, howling, "BAM, BOOM, CRASH, ALL ACROSS THE WALL!"

My sister and I would collapse in heaps of hysteria and then, the next day, I would repeat these jokes to my second grade friends at recess.

My parents not only allowed this behavior to take place, but they were pretty entertained by us, and, by the time I was in middle school, our dinner conversations were frequently peppered with profanations as adjectives, such as, "my fucking homework" instead of "my very challenging homework" or "my Goddamn teacher" as opposed to "my diligent, hardworking, unionized teacher."

My father's stories from work routinely involved obscenity, and, being Israeli, his use of swear words, especially when excited and animated, always made for riotous family dinner memories, like the time someone outbid him on a contract and my father said he wanted to "kick him fuck up the wall."

For decades, his catchphrase was, "I mean, what am I'm? Fuckin' crazy here?"

When we were quite young, my father capitulated to our requests for a home computing device and came home with a defecatory-colored Commodore 64. Not exactly what we had in mind, but what the hell did we know? Would an Atari have been better? I don't know. At least this had a keyboard-- not that we knew how to type back then. Anyway, my sister and I were sitting downstairs reading the Sunday Comics and eating "Frosted Mini-Wheats" while my father was upstairs, struggling for hours to put the thing together, probably covered in wires and reading Japanese instructions. Finally, he'd had it:

"What the fuck!" he screamed down the stairs. "Hey! Stupid! Jerk! Get the fuck up here and help me already!"

My sister and I nearly burst our goddamn guts. We probably laughed for fifteen minutes straight. To this day, we still debate about which one of us was "stupid" and which one was "jerk." I'm pretty sure I know.

A year later, we were all at the beach, sharing a wonderful family summer. I had a cold, but was on the mend. My sisters and I asked if we could go for a walk on the beach. "Fine," my parents said, "just don't let your brother go in the water, he's still not feeling well."

Of course I went in the water. We were maybe thirty feet from my parents, who were sunbathing on a packed New Jersey beach. They saw the drips of water coming from my hair, and my father went absolutely ballistic.

"WHAT ARE YOU, FUCKIN' STUPID??!!!!" he roared at my oldest sister as bemused onlookers turned their heads in our direction. "JESUS FUCKIN' CHRIST! WE TELL YOU ONE FUCKIN' THING AND YOU RETARD CAN'T EVEN DO IT! YOU FUCKIN' MORON!"

Was my sister embarrassed by this public lambast? Was she reduced to hot, anguished tears by this very public, very obscene and very loud attack by our father? Mmm, not really. My sister's reaction? Hysterial peels of laughter.

"Fuck you!" was her guffaw-ridden retort.

Bam boom crash: all across the wall.

See You in Heaven

Because I live less than half a mile away from my parents house, I have the good fortune to be over there a lot. I'm not sure that many other people would consider such proximity to be fortuitous, but I do.

My wife and I were at my parents house on Sunday for a combined Mother's Day/Masonic Apron Birthday celebratory dinner. My father, who is a late bloomer in the kitchen, cooked his traditional garlic-swathed vegetables and succulent shrimp. (A side note: Yes, he is Israeli, and yes, shrimp are not kosher. We do what we want.)

My oldest sister was in attendance at the dinner, and, being the gossip maven, she kept me abreast of the latest important developments in our small little world:

1.) My aunt and uncle are selling their house, which burned to the ground in 2005 while my aunt was drunk and napping in the bathtub. She only survived because a neighbor saw the fire and ran into the house and got her out. They used the insurance money, and a lot of other money that wasn't theirs, to rebuild greater and grander than before. The house is going for $1.4 million. Cash or check. Paper or plastic.

2.) There is a Cryptosporidium outbreak in Montgomery County. Why does my sister know this? Why, because she elected to receive text message and e-mail alerts from the Montgomery County Health Department to aide in scaring the bejesus out of her, obviously.

Cryptosporidium, by the way, "a gastrointestinal illness caused by parasitic protozoa of the genus Cryptosporidium and can produce watery diarrhea lasting 1--3 weeks; one or two cases per 100,000 population are reported annually in the United States. Fecal-oral transmission of Cryptosporidium oocysts occurs through ingestion of contaminated drinking or recreational water, consumption of contaminated food, and contact with infected persons or animals (e.g., cattle or sheep)."

This information is taken, obviously, from the email message that she forwarded to me the following day. I have since taken steps to limit my intimate contact with cows and sheep, as well as putting the kabash on fecal-oral activities.

Thanks, sis.

If you weren't discussing gastrointestinal diseases at the dining room table at your Mother's Day celebration, I have no doubt that you were at least chit-chatting about death and cemetery plots. No? You're weird. We were.

I forget exactly how it came up-- I think we were talking about my Great Aunt who is currently living in Florida with her 3rd husband, who is 92 years old, in excellent physical condition, but whose brain is being turned into a cottage-cheese-like mixture, not by Hulu, but by Alzheimers. He is uncontrollable. When the two of them go out to dinner, he routinely approaches young, beautiful women and advises them to have sex with him, regardless of whether or not they are already accompanied by a gentleman caller. When my parents visited them in Florida last month, my father complained that the kitchen chair on which he was sitting was very hard. My Great Uncle cried, "AH! Like my PENIS!"

Always an Olympic-level alcoholic, this tendency has only increased with his Alzheimers. Where he used to begin drinking at two or three in the afternoon, my Great Uncle will now commence libation activities at around 9am, consuming twelve to fourteen glasses of vodka or gin (that are watered down with futility by my Great Aunt.)

"You know, she's going to leave him there (in Florida) when he dies," my father said to us at the Mother's Day dinner.

"Oh, yeah?" I asked, not entirely surprised.

"Yeah," my father said, smiling mischieveously, "she said that the second he's in the fucking ground she's moving back to Philadelphia."

"Well, where will she be buried?" my sister asked while conducting a necropsy on her eviscerated piece of shrimp.

"With my parents, with us," my mother said with irritation.

"With us, huh? Where the hell are "us"?" I asked.

"My parents are in Frazier."

"Is that where you're going?" I asked.

"I'm going to Heaven," my mother answered with all the confidence of someone announcing that they were going to Trenton or to the gas station.

"Oh, really?" I asked, amused.

"Yes," she answered, cracking a smile.

"Wow. I didn't realize that's where you were going. I guess I should engage in more air travel after you're dead, maybe I'll see you out the fucking window."

My mother laughed at that.

"Sure, you will. I'll be floating around the clouds."

I stared at her.

"Hey, it's better than thinking I'll be stinking and rotting in the ground."

"Well, yeah, you got me there," I said. My father continued eating, no doubt completely disengaged from the current conversation. My father is like HD-TV. Sometimes he's totally tuned in and impressive, and then *poof!* the signal goes out.

"What exactly is it that makes funerals so expensive," my sister pontificated, "is it that people haven't pre-purchased their plots, or is it the service, or.... I mean, what is it?"

"Well, I think part of it is the fucking casket, for Christ's sake," I blurted out. "I mean those fucking boxes alone are, like, $3,000."

"Really?" my sister asked, stunned. I was surprised she hadn't already exhaustively researched and vetted them on Consumer Reports.

"Really," I said, "and those aren't even the ones with power windows."

I asked my mother if they had their plots purchased.

"Yup. Picked out, purchased and paid for."

I admired her businesslike attitude about the whole thing. She's always been a no-nonsense type person, like Margaret Thatcher without the business suits, handbags and cool accent. I guess it was her stoic practicality that made her comment about ascending upwards in a white robe to hobnob with St. Peter and Gandhi so surprising to me. My mother can smell bullshit a mile-and-a-half away and no greater bullshit story has ever been written to surpass Heaven. If there is a Heaven, my mother will be there. I just hope they'll let me have visitation sessions.

Ten or so minutes later, the conversation had moved onto another topic-- God knows what-- I think my wife was putting my sister onto the Consumer Report hunt for a new gas stove for us. In a week, we will have a dossier on ovens bigger and more detailed than J. Edgar Hoover's file on Marilyn Monroe. Ever the perseverator, I turned to my mother.

"So, let's say you decide to get cremated and have your ashes spread in the ocean. If I go snorkeling, will I see you?"

Get Your Goop On: It's Ultrasound Tuesday!

So, my sister and I both had ultrasounds today, for very different reasons.

You might have noticed that I really don't talk about my family much on here (except for my father) and the reason for that is very simple: if they ever found out that the blogosphere was privy to their intimate details, I would promptly and forevermore be missing teeth, testicles, and family dinners.

Privacy is their thing, not so much mine, and so I normally try to respect that. Today, though, I'm not. Fortunately, I don't really think I have to worry so much: my mother only uses a computer at work, my father still uses dial-up, my 31-year-old sister just got an email address six months ago, and my 41-year-old sister strictly uses her computer to research product safety reports, bizarre diets and gossip about washed up celebrities from her youth (e.g., this Saturday I got a very long text message from her about Davey Jones' most recent appearance on an episode of "Spongebob Squarepants.")

My ultrasound was a component of my stress echocardiogram so, obviously, it was an ultrasound of my heart. I was lying down on the exam table naked from the waist up, with one arm propping my head up. It might have looked seductive if I weren't in a doctor's office, if I didn't weigh 136 pounds, and if I didn't have 12 EKG leads and wires stuck all over me.

The ultrasound technician gooped up her doohickey a substance that I can only describe as blue jello cut with seminal fluid-- sorry. She then proceeded to jam and move the goop-slathered device all across my chest. Now, as I mentioned, I'm kind of svelte, and this thin-lipped bitch was shoving her device straight into my sternum and ribs-- not pleasant. So, obviously, as a natural reaction, I was tensing up.

"Can you just relax, please?" she said sharply, "It's really difficult for me to see your heart when you're not relaxed."

Oh, I'm sorry, I wanted to say-- perhaps I would be more relaxed if you shoved a rusty corkscrew and a mango-splitter up my asshole while you're doing that. That's really the only thing missing to put me right at ease.

Crotch.

(Sidebar: I think it's pretty funny that there are still people out there who believe that only caring, empathic people become nurses. The healthcare industry attracts its fair amount of sadists, too. Don't believe me? Become an EMT.)

I don't know how many of you have ever had the opportunity to obtain a cardiac ultrasound, but watching your heart do its thing on that flatscreen GE monitor is really..... um..... disfuckingusting.

Seriously.

My first instinct was to go, "Oh, man-- that's cool" but, after about four seconds of watching it, I was immediately sickened. There's tunnels and caverns and there's shit floating around and goop and blackness and it looks like underwater vegetation or something. I don't know-- maybe you'd be into it. I wasn't.

After the ultrasound, they make you run on the treadmill at varying speeds and incline levels until you're ready to pass out. One of the inclines was so steep I could barely hold onto the fucking grab handles. The fact that they're taking your blood pressure every four minutes doesn't help either. I got heaps of praise and congratulations from the two nurses running the treadmill exercise, for my endurance and for my cardiac performance. Of course, like anyone who's ever been praised after any performance event (yes, even sex) you always wonder if they say that to everyone.

When I left the testing site, I turned my phone back on and there was a voicemail from my 31-year-old sister informing me that the object inside her was officially determined today to be a boy. She was getting gooped on and deviceified at the same time I was, at another facility-- and I'm sure the ultrasound bitch wasn't pressing as hard on her belly as mine was on my sternum.

I called her back immediately and congratulated her.

"Yeah, apparently, from the ultrasound picture we got, he's a pretty well-endowed boy."

Her boyfriend looked at the picture quizically and asked,

"Is that his foot?"

"No, you ass-- that's his dick!" she said.

And it was. There was even an arrow pointing to it that said "Boy."

Apparently, when my sister called my mom to give her the news, my mother reported that there is a family legend concerning the *ahem* proportions of males on her side of the family.

"Wow." I said. "Mommy's a real pig sometimes."

"Yeah," my sister replied. "My kid's definitely gonna be in pornos if it keeps growing at this rate."

"Either that or he'll be doing cock-pushups on exercise videos," I said.

I guess we're all pigs. Healthy pigs, but pigs just the same.

Dinner at Home

I love going to my mother and father's house for dinner.

Not necessarily because it's all warm and cozy, (it isn't-- I don't think they've ever turned the thermostat above 59 degrees), or because the cookin' is "just the way I like it," (it isn't-- there were both mushrooms and olives in the pasta, and I hate both with a vocal passion) or because everybody gets along so well, (yeah), but because it's usually a genuinely funny experience. At least, it is when the frigid air isn't fraught with tension because of some topic that is not allowed to be spoken about (a pregnancy, an illness, a new purchase, a death, a misfortune, a faux pas, a coincidence, a situation, a blood test, a new Nabisco product.)

Tonight was pretty enjoyable by typical standards. Mrs. Apron was having a much-needed night out with two of her friends from her grad school program, and so I, not especially wanting to be home in our new house alone with the dog, invited myself over to my parents house. My sister did the same, at my suggestion.

SIS: "Well, do you think they'd want me there?"

(She's there for dinner at least six weekends a month.)

ME: "The fuck do you care? Just come over."

SIS: "Do you think Daddy will make shrimpies?"

Shrimpies. Did I mention that this woman is forty-one?

So, there we were, around the dinner table, just like old times. My other sister was not present, which was also just like old times. Daddy did indeed make "shrimpies" (with mushrooms and olives) and we all consumed our meal contentedly.

ME: "That was great, thank you."

DAD: "Sure, sure."

SIS: "My noodles were very dry." {MOM, DAD & I all turn to look at her.} Well they were.

MOM{motioning to the tub of Keller's}: "Well, there's the butter."

ME: "Maybe you should run them under the faucet."

DAD: "Hey, don' blame me. That's how you asked for them. Of course they're dry, you don' have shit on it."

My father is Israeli, which explains him well enough. My sister, on the other hand, has some kind of esophogeal disorder. I don't know what the fuck it is. Mrs. Apron could explain it to you, she's the Speech Language Pathologist. My sister belches constantly, and ferociously-- like a lion. Because of my sister's gastrointestinal issues, she has to have food prepared in a very specific way, and she doles out meal preparation instructions to our aging parents with Nazi-like efficiency. She's also hypoglycemic and requires feedings at regular and exact intervals.

If you were here and had even a faint pulse, she would also tell you in detail about her abraided cornea, which requires eye drops every half-hour, but she must have applied them ten times between 5:30 and 7:30. She is more regimented than an Annapolis cadet and more full of ridiculous ailments than a Moliere play.

I mentioned that I was having breakfast tomorrow with my other sister.

DAD: "Where?"

ME: "Milkboy's."

DAD: "Do you know about thees other place? Vat it's called? Sexboys?"

{MOM whips her head around and glares at him.}

MOM: "What?!"

DAD: "Say-- Sex-boy?"

ME: "Saxby's."

SIS: BBBRRRRRRRRRAOOOARRRRRRRGGGHHHHH!

DAD: "What?!"

ME: "It's called fucking "SAXBY'S" not "Sexboys!" Jesus fucking Christ!"

DAD: "Well, yeah, but, to some foreign-- to someone who just fell off the boat, it's look like "Sex-boys."

MOM: "The only person who just fell off the boat is you."

DAD: "What kind of a name it's is anyways? Sahx-bohs?"

SIS: GRRRRRROOOOUUUUUGGGGGGGGFFHHHH!

This is the truncated version of this particular conversation. In real-time, it probably went on for around six minutes-- at least long enough to require another application of eye-drops.

The discussion then mercifully turned to the fact that Mrs. Apron's mother is coming to visit us next weekend.

DAD: "Listen, I'm meaning to ask you: what are your thoughts? Is it-- should we be taking her out to dinner when she comes here?"

SIS: EERRRRRRROGGGGGH!

ME: "What the hell are you asking me for? Do whatever you want to do-- you're adults, aren't you?"

DAD: "Yeah, but I'm talking about what's the manners? What is the manners?"

ME: "What?"

DAD: "What is the right manners?"

ME: "How the fuck should I know? Why don't you write a letter to Miss Manners and ask her?"

DAD: "What? Don't you have any fucking manners?"

SIS: BRRRRRRRUUUUUOOOOOOOOOAAAAAARGFFH!

ME: "Obviously not."

My sister then excused herself, I assumed, to vomit. My father brought out the coffee and a container of small chocolate cookies.

MOM: "Those are stale, you know."

DAD: "Come on, no they not. See?"

He put one in his mouth and it sounded like he was cracking a walnut.

MOM: "That's disgusting."

DAD: "No it's not! See? I can eat it."

ME: "That's because all your teeth are fake, you could eat a shoe if you wanted."

Upon re-entering the dining room, my sister announced that, while in the bathroom for under three minutes, she hurt her other eye with the cord from her hoodie. My father and I exchanged a regrettable glance and we both started to laugh.

SIS: "Hey-- it's not funny, you assholes." This, of course, made it even funnier and prompted only more laughter.

She stormed out of the room with her Bausch & Lomb bottle which was, by the way, the size of a thimble.

The experts tell us that we regress when we go home-- it's like a time warp or something. And, at least in our case, those experts are right on the money: even Dr. Phil. In our house, nothing changes. The linoleum on the dining room floor is the same as it always was, just like our behavior patterns. My parents age with subtlety-- well, my mother does-- my father doesn't seem to age and, when he does, he won't do it subtlely. Subtlety isn't his his style.

Our final conversation of the night turned to my uncle, who has recently decided to put his house up for sale instead of paying his mortgage payment. The house is located across the street from a Catholic seminary.

MOM: "I'm just not sure he's going to get a million dollars for that house-- I mean, he needs to. Maybe in May, when all the flowers are in bloom and he can open up the pool..."

SIS: "OOOOORRRRRFFFFUUUGGGH!"

DAD: "Maybe that church or whatever will buy it-- as a place to fundle, you know-- with the window curtains down."

ME: "Yeah. They could call it 'Sexboys'."