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.

Me-ness

Mrs. Apron and I went to the King of Prussia mall together on Saturday. It was the first time I had been back at the mall in years. When I was a child, when my family was bereft of things to do, we all inevitably piled into my family's Oldsmobile, or Buick, or Toyota, or Pontiac or, finally, Saab, and went to the mall. It was the Saab that my father was driving when he ran my foot over in the parking lot in front of Bloomingdales when I was fifteen. That traumatic event marked our last family trip to the mall.

Those treks were getting a bit long in the tooth by 1995 anyway.

As Mrs. Apron and I parked the car at Bloomingdales, I stared at the facade of the immense retail space and said, "That's where he ran my foot over with the car," pointing to the curb cut by the entrance, "right there." I shook my head and laughed to myself because, really, it's funny. And I instinctively reached for my wife's hand, and she took it.

When my family would go to the mall together, my sisters, my mother and father and I, we would invariably split up. My sisters would shop for girl things with my mother, and my father and I would pal around together. I would drag him all over the place, to the K. B. Toys, where my dilated pupils would hungrily gaze at all the enormous die-cast cars in 1/18th scale. It was at K. B. Toys where my father first noticed me, as a nine-year-old, standing in the aisle, bent over, rubbing my hand against the small of my back like an octogenarian with spinal stenosis.

"Mummy," he asked, his brow furrowed, "what is the matter with your back?"

"It hurts," I said simply, my brow furrowed, too.

Scoliosis. Thanks, gene pool.

I would also take my father to the Electronics Boutique, where I would show him the backs of all the computer games I wanted. I invariably chose ones that our computer did not have sufficient memory of graphics capability, (remember VGA vs SVGA, 256 color requirements?) to run correctly, or at all. And these wastes of money that would not perform on our home P.C. were invariably not returnable because, in my excitement to use them, I had torn the box to shreds till it resembled hamster bedding.

That man wasted a lot of money on me.

Looking back on our time at the mall, I can't remember one time-- not one single time that he and I were together that he made me go to Macy's with him to look at sweaters for him, or... anything for him. Those trips were all about me, to fuel my interests and my desires and my wants and my perceived needs, and I had no idea.

On Saturday, I accompanied my wife to the mall for no other reason than for her to purchase new bras at Bloomingdales, because our impending twinnage has caused her to appreciably outgrow her current bustenhalters. Okay, we also got Auntie Ann's pretzels, too, but the bra shopping was the main event. And it took an hour. And all the while I stood out among all that lacy and frill and cups and straps looking like part husband and part pervert-- which I am both-- and I texted a friend to ameliorate my feelings of awkwardness by giving voice to them in those text messages.

And it helped.

I suppose I could have gone somewhere in the mall for myself that Saturday, but I had no desire to do so, and it wasn't just my counterculture distaste for the mall.

As we exited, we passed through the men's department (or "menswear" as they used to call it on "Are You Being Served?") and I saw a handsome cardigan, stylish and conservative at the same time. Ralph Lauren. My wife and I both went to it at the same time and investigated it. I didn't look at the price tag, but I didn't have to.

"I can't have anything for myself anymore," I said, half-jokingly, "because we're having twins and my life is over."

Mrs. Apron smiled at me.

"Or, you could say that it's important for you to still have things that you like so that you don't lose your me-ness," she said.

"Right," I said, "the me-ness of penis."

I don't know what that means, I just said it because it rhymed and it's sophomoric.

My me-ness.

Antique typewriters
Old telephones
Eyeglasses
Short-sleeve dress shirts
Skinny ties
Wing-tip shoes
Monty Python
Gilbert & Sullivan
Thrift shopping
Amateur theatre
Writing
Bacon
Coffee
Chocolate
Brash humor
Sensitivity
Introspection
Brooding
Crappy TV
Cuddle time
Worrying

I don't know what parts of my me-ness I'm going to lose once these twins come-- I suppose every parent loses some, as my parents did. Some of it is willing, some of it gets lost with a fight, and I guess what ends up after being funneled and distilled and wrung out by time and diapers and sleep deprivation and sacrifice will be the essence of my me-ness.

Whether I like it, or whether I don't.

Watching The Movie

The windows at my parents' house on the first floor are fabulous. They're big and comprehensive and, essentially, the entire out-facing wall of the dining room and the living room are windows. They're covered by these sexcellent rice paper shoji screens framed in angular black wood. Once, when I was fifteen and an idiot, I was filming a history project with a friend of mine (who is now a famous singer-songwriter that you can hear on Pandora-- weird) and there's a scene where we're dressed in periwigs, frilly blouses and waistcoats pretending we're from the mid-eighteenth century and he, of course, throws a pie at me. Well, I'm laughing and I move slightly to the left as the pie is about to make contact with my face, and the vast majority of it goes flying onto the shoji screen. The cameraman, a real pro, kept right on filming until the end of the scene.

And then he screamed his fucking head off at us.

God bless my father-- he's really been put through it. You can still, to this day, see the discoloration on the section of rice paper that got besmirched by whipped cream.

Years before I was filming movies in front of these wonderful windows, I was watching movies through them. As a child of five or six, whenever a huge storm would be brewing outside, my mother and I would turn two of the dining room chairs around to face the windows, push all of the shoji screens out of the way, and we'd sit together and gaze in amazement at the storm outside. It's funny, the two most neurotic people in the house, sitting together, absolutely mesmerized by nature's fury. And we watched some pretty badass storms together, my mother and I.

We called it "Watching the Movie."

At the first crack of thunder, I would run into her room or into the kitchen or wherever she was and excitedly cry,

"Mommy! Mommy! Let's go watch the movie!"

And I would tug her into the dining room, shove the shojis out of the way, and come face-to-face with whatever the wicked world had to offer. Maybe it's because my mother and I were so afraid of, well, life, that we were the ones who gathered together-- maybe "huddled" is a better word-- and maybe I liked the comfort of being with my Mommy when there was tumult and tempest going on outside. Maybe I liked the idea of calling it the "movie", as if it were not something that could come through a television screen or a window pane and harm us, maybe that made it okay.

Or maybe it was just something silly my mother and I used to do when I was young and wore my hair like Moe and was clad in monochromatic sweatsuits.

It's getting windy outside right now-- I can see it battering about the very tippy top of a tree. I'm watching the top of that tree bend and sway, but most of it's blocked by the house next door, and most of that's blocked by the computer monitor, and, really, it's just not the same. No shoji screens with tell-tale whipped-cream discoloration, no big dining room windows. And I'm in my house, and my mother's in hers. A few nights ago, there was a huge storm, and my mother called me "to make sure you're all alright."

"Yeah," I said, "we're watching the movie."

"Oh," she said, "what movie are you watching?"

And I smiled and shook my head.

"Mommy-- look out the window." She paused for a moment.

"Oh! That movie," she said, laughing a little bit to herself.

"Don't you remember?" I asked.

"Of course," she said, "I remember everything."

And she does. Of course.

Lords of the Flies

My wife let the word "bullshit" loose at the dinner table at my parent's house last night, and my mother was hysterical with laughter.

"She's really one of us now," I said, and my mother laughed even harder.

"What?" Mrs. Apron asked, the picture of innocence.

"I've never heard you talk like that before!" my mother exclaimed, laughing still, in her gray sweatsuit-- her Sunday evening, don't-care-a-damn outfit.

"Oh, please," I said, "her mouth is as filthy as any of ours."

(It's thanks to me, of course.)

Mrs. Apron was born to a family where swearing was not tolerated. It is not tolerated by her mother. I recall a visit to her parent's house several years ago and her father made the mistake of telling his wife that he was going in the backyard, "to pick up dog shit."

"THE WORD IS 'POOPIE!'" Mrs. Apron's mother shouted with strained vocals.

The word, my friends, is poopie.

At my parent's dining room table, the swears fly like, well, flies.

"What the fuck is with all these goddamned flies?" I asked my mother, swatting the air in front of me, brushing aside yet another savage little black bastard.

"They're coming from the sink," my father said, "the plumber asshole is finally coming over on Tuesday."

"Does he have to come on Tuesday, for Christ's sake?" my mother yelled, "the baby's here on Tuesday!"

"Uggh, please! The baby is here-- who give a shit if the baby is here? We have to get rid of these fucking flies! The plumber is not going to be banging on pipes! FUCK!"

"I DO NOT WANT HIM HERE WHEN THE BABY IS HERE TRYING TO SLEEP!" my mother shouted. It worked.

"Okay, I will tell him to come Wednesday. Jesus Christ."

Coming home can be entertaining at times, and, at times, it was entertaining even last night, but even I have to admit that it was kind of gross sitting around the dining room table, trying to enjoy sugar cookies and coffee, with flies in the air. You try to ignore them, or pretend that you didn't just see one on the wall by the door to the porch, or on the table, or on the floor, or on the fake plant in the corner. My mother poured my father a glass of orange juice and nonchalantly placed her hand over the top of the glass and held it there.

"Are you fucking serious?" I asked her.

"What?"

"If you don't do that, is a fly going to kamikaze itself down there?"

"Well, would you want to find out if that were your orange juice?"

She then placed a paper plate on top of my coffee mug.

It was kind of gross. I mean, my parents aren't poor people. Last night, there were two Volvos and two BMWs parked outside. Admittedly, the BMWs are bottom-of-the-line, and leased, at that, but still, we do okay. We're not driving Oldsmobuicks anymore. And yet, last night, I felt like I was sitting around a table in Ethiopia. All of a sudden, my parents' dining room felt like a Sally Struthers commercial. I feel dirty even as I sit here, in my own home, devoid of all discernable vermin and pestilence. Filthy, in fact. I'm scratching my hair periodically, eyeballs scanning the air in front of me for any sign of a fleeting little bugger.

It's easy to picture us-- sitting around, cursing like pornography-peddlers or homeless troglodytes with big, steaming piles of doo-doo surrounding us as we scoop heaping spoonfuls of beans or fingernails into our hot, steaming swear-wielding gullets.

But that's not us. Swear to fuck.