A Naked Marriage

My sister got married today.

She got married in judge's chambers, at approximately 4:00pm this afternoon. I was at home, having just walked the dog, and was in the process of trying to decide whether to take an online quiz about Poe, Melville and Dickinson, or masturbate. Today, the scholar in me won out. And I suppose it's better that I was engaged in an innocuous, studious act at the moment my sister was getting married-- better ju-ju and all that.

I never imagined that my sister would get married and I wouldn't be there. Then again, I never thought my sister would ever get married, and I certainly never thought that my sister would be eight-and-a-half months pregnant. My mother says that she saw it coming for years, but she also said that about September 11th. Well, perhaps I lack my mother's foresight/prognostication skills, but nevertheless, here we were, tonight, at 5:00pm, on the back deck of my sister's new in-laws, my sister as big as a zeppelin, celebrating a marriage that occurred with bewildering speed. I was informed that it was happening last Friday, and, Tuesday night-- kaboom.

My mother, my other sister, my wife and I were all there as my father made a semi-coherent speech that managed to embarrass just about every single person present. Being Israeli, it's remarkable what he gets away with. My side of the family all held glasses of champagne from which we all pretended to sip after the marathon toast was completed. From the moment we arrived, the groom's four-year-old son bombarded his father, my sister's new husband, with one question over and over again,

"Can I take off all my clothes now?"

After the photographs were taken, his request was granted and he careened through the evening's festivities in nothing but a pair of olive-drab colored Osh-Kosh underpants.

The boy wasn't the only one celebrating this naked marriage. My sister's now exceedingly ample breasts were positively valoomping out of her blouse. It was easily the most naked wedding celebration I'd ever attended, but then, I've never been to a wedding in New Orleans.

People we appropriate, by and large. There were certainly elephants in the room a-plenty, there was even a bichon that was the size of an elephant. This fucking thing looked like more of a basset hound than a bichon, and more of an ottoman than a dog. But, in spite of the elephants and the fetuses and the things left unsaid and the sidewards glances and the whispered side conversations and the groomly debates about what to call my father, things went pretty smoothly. The kid provided ample entertainment via streaking and beating the holy shit out of a starter child's drum set in the living room. As I watched him cavorting around in his underwear, enjoying himself the way four-year-olds can, barely aware that anything significant occurred today at 4pm that will change his life forever, I was seized with a palpable desire to be him, or at least his age. I wanted to run up and down the driveway in my Osh-Kosh underpants playing wall-ball with the kids next door, or giving my broken Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots to my grandfather for a quick repair. I wanted to not give a hoot in hell about what was going on with the adults in the room-- all the drama, all the tension, all the questions and the doubts and the bullshit because, as much as I like to say "I don't care" about what my sister does or how all the stupid things she does and the irrational, ill-advised choices she makes are inconsequential to me, well, that just isn't true.

I do care.

I just wish that sometimes I had the excuse of being four-years-old. Or even Israeli.

I don't know how things are going to turn out for my sister, or her new husband, or her new step-son, or her soon-to-be-born child, but I care about how things will turn out. I expressed some concerns about what was happening to my mother on the phone and she said, "It will all work out."

"You mean that we're all going to die?"

"Jesus Christ," she said.

I can't help being morbid. I've always been that way. I've always obsessed about death, ever since I was old enough to know what it was, and probably before that. Tonight, my mother asked my sister's new husband how old the furniture dog was.

"Eleven," she answered, then remarking that the life-expectancy of a bichon was around 15 years.

"Oh, well don't think about it," my mother sagely advised, which I found very funny.

"Yeah," I said, "I never do."

And then I thought about what I'd said when I saw no reaction from my sister's new mother-in-law. She was meeting me for the very first time, didn't know me from Hell's bartender. Anyone who knows me would have cracked up at my saying I never thought about death, or they would have at least given me a knowing smile. It's funny how you can lie, stone-faced to people who don't know you, and they have no idea. One day, I hope that she gets to know me, to know all of us, better.

I hope a lot of things, for my sister, for her husband, for their kids. I hope it all works out, and not just in the end.

Public Indecency

Have you ever seen someone do something that just positively blew your mind, left you slack-jawed and thunderstruck and, at the same time, completely and utterly disgusted?

No?

Think back to college, Old Head.

You'll remember the R.A. who, stumbling back to the dorms positively blind-drunk opened your hall-mate's sweater drawer and pissed all over the woolen contents residing therein. You'll remember the jock who, also blissfully and inebriated, mistook the sink for the toilet and took a volcanic shit inside of it. Want to wash your hands? Surprise!

You'll no doubt recall multiple incidents of inappropriate expulsion of bodily fluids. That's what college is all about. Well, that and losing your virginity, which also involves an expulsion of bodily fluids, and usually an inappropriate one, considering the partner/receptacle.

Tonight, though, far away from the college I attended, and indeed far away from anybody remotely college-aged, I witnessed a sight that shocked and horrified me, and brought me right back to the puerile and bold-faced immaturity that are hallmarks of college freshmen nationwide.

These behaviors tonight, however, were exhibited, or I should perhaps say "exhibitioned" by an eight-year-old.

When I first saw this child in JoAnn Fabrics tonight, I immediately judged him to be a descendent from the proud and prevalent White Trash Tradition. See, he wore a mohawk. Now, I know, I'm mean and judgmental and everything but, seriously, when you allow your eight-year-old to have a mohawk, well, he's white trash and so are you. Sorry. I felt bad about passing judgment on this trashy little bastard. Well, a little bit. But, that's what we do, and there's really nothing wrong with passing judgment on people. We do it all the time, and it's a self-preservation device. Our judgment/instincts tell us who we can trust, who we feel is going to rape us, who we can take advantage of, who we can use big words in front of, who we can privately admire/deride. My step-grandmother uses her judgment to determine with whom she can safely share the sidewalk.

"This black man was following me home from the store," she said to my parents one time years ago.

"What did you do?" my mother asked.

"I crossed the street."

Anyway, so I knew from the start that this kid belonged to a white trash family. His mother was a dumpass-- stringy hair haphazardly flying this way and that, father was balding-- his mohawk days long gone, and the two daughters had farmer's tans. Classic.

We were all at the framing counter, and I was standing behind Roseanne Barr and her family. We were all drawn to the framing counter by the 60% off coupon. My wife and I had just inherited a piece of bizarre artwork drawn during possible stages of dementia by our friend's mother using paint marker. The piece of artwork is wildly colored and crazily patterned with all kinds of lunatic geometric shapes and floral patterns and it looks like a kaleidoscope on acid and meth. Our friend had hundreds of them and I made the mistake of admiring one of her mother's pieces on the wall of their house, and so, of course, we ended up with one.

"Thank you," I said.

"You won't be thanking me when you go to get it framed."

She was right. An irregular size, requiring UV-free glass because of the unorthodox materials used to create the painting, the bill came to $233 before presentation of the coupon, still not cheap.

Before I could even get up to the counter, though, I had to wait for Roseanne, her husband and her kids harrass the framing lady with their own especially wacko framing request. Those coupons just bring in all the weirdos, I guess. The little boy with the mohawk kept turning around and staring at me. Ordinarily, when kids look at me, I wave. This kid, though, received only an uncomfortable glower from me. His parents were taking up a lot of my time, monopolizing the framing counter and they were trashy. I, standing there in my linen trousers, dress shirt, silver pocket-watch chain and expensive shoes, deserved to glower at this be-mohawked child in his tiny wife-beater.

"If you ever graduate high school," I mused while staring him down, "you will be voted 'Most Likely to Be Tased'."

Later on in the evening, after my wife acquired some fabric and we went to the counter to pay, we were standing behind Roseanne, her husband, and one of the daughters. I wondered where the pint-sized miscreant and his other sister went off to. Probably copulating in the fleece aisle, I thought. But I soon saw them, riding the escalators up, and then down, and then up, and then down, until the JoAnn clerk at the cash register asked the mother to tell them to stop. I love it when store employees are forced to compel parents to, well, parent their children.

Unfortunately, there were no eagle-eyed JoAnn employees, or police officers present in the parking lot when my wife and I got into our car. As I started it, I peered out over the steering wheel and the sight I saw stopped me completely. My jaw dropped, literally. I couldn't believe, barely could I process and then report what was happening.

"Oh my God."

"What? What?" my wife asked, thinking maybe something was wrong with our car.

"He's pissing on the car! He's pissing on the car! He's pissing on the car!"

And, indeed he was. My wife looked just in time to catch an arc of urine, cresting gently through the air, splashing all over the gold-colored wheel of a white Acura Legend, parked two rows in front of us. It took me a second to realize that I recognized the tire-pisser. It was the mohawk child, and he was grinning his very naked ass off, his shorts around his ankles as his parents and sisters were entering the car. The parents weren't reprimanding or discouraging. The sisters weren't razzing him or chastising him. It was just a pretty blase affair to this brood.

I, though, was shocked. He was pissing all over his own family's car. I don't know what's worse, really-- pissing on your family's car, or pissing on somebody else's car. I mean, pissing on somebody else's car is a crime. Pissing on your own car is just retarded. Especially when there are restrooms inside JoAnn Fabrics for customers' use. I know. I've used them. They're perfectly adequate, especially for children with mohawks.

My wife waved at him, and he pulled up his shorts, only mildly embarrassed. What did he think: he had an invisibility cloak?

I wanted to go find a policeman, but I didn't know exactly what I would say. I didn't want to get the kid in trouble, I wanted to get the parents in trouble, though, very much. I couldn't imagine what kind of people would think allowing their eight-year-old child to let loose a hot, steaming stream of piss all over the family car in a public place is an appropriate thing to do. I mean, who the fuck are these people? What else do they let this kid do-- shit in the neighbors' mailboxes? Fart inside the dog's ear while he sleeps? I mean, once you're allowed to piss on the family car in the JoAnn parking lot, you're pretty much capable of anything.

Watching this kid urinate in public reminded me of a time when I had done something similar. I had come home from school on the bus and my mom had not yet returned home. I had to pee extremely badly and I had no idea when she would be back. I was a very nervous child, always petrified of doing the wrong thing, and even more petrified of being caught, and so I surreptitiously as possible found a secluded spot in the back of the house and peed. Knowing that we were upper-middle class Jews and were not ever supposed to do such things, I cried as I relieved myself by the central air conditioning unit behind the house. I knew I was a bad boy, but I didn't feel I had a suitable alternative. I mean, I could have knocked on a neighbors door, but the neighbors on both sides of my parents' house were elderly and weird, and I thought I should take my chances outside.

The next day, after school, I was playing in the living room with my Matchbox cars, racing them along the patterns of the rug when a strange car pulled up in front of our house. It was a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria with tinted windows and four or five long antennae sticking out from its roof and trunk. It had small hubcaps and two spotlamps on the A-pillars. My heart stopped. Even at the tender young age of seven, obsessed as I was with emergency vehicles, I knew an undercover police car when I saw it. The doors opened, and two men emerged, wearing the stereotypical crew-cuts, dark suits and Ray-Ban sunglasses. Positive that I was about to be arrested for my vile, reprehensible actions of the prior afternoon, I raced up to my sister's bedroom and immediately hid under her bed, just scooting underneath the bedskirt, silently weeping as the doorbell rang.

The guys left shortly thereafter, but I wouldn't come out from under the bed for several hours.

Though my mother was finally able to convince me that I wasn't in trouble for peeing outside our house, it was only years later that I learned that the two gentlemen who visited our house that day were there looking to speak to my grandfather, who used to live at our house but had since moved in with my step-grandmother, the one who crossed the street to avoid the stalker. He had owned a small clothing store that, in the 1970s, was frequented by many members of the Testas, a notorious Philadelphia mob family. My grandfather made custom-tailored suits for many members of the Testa family, and the men held informal "business meetings" at my grandfather's store, so, obviously, the FBI wanted to know what was discussed at said gatherings. Besides haberdashery, that is.

As I watched this kid piss all over the wheel of his father's Acura in the JoAnn parking lot, I wished silently that an unmarked police car might happen to visit his parents' home tomorrow, on some other errand, to scare the bejesus out of this little mohawked bastard. But I doubt very much that it would have the same effect on him that it did on me, lo those many years ago. I was a different child than this boy, I knew that for sure-- and it wasn't religion or social standing that made us different. It wasn't his mohawk versus my bowl-cut. It was the fact that, as he did his urine-soaked deed, he smiled.

And I cried.

Coolification

What the hell is going on?

Seriously-- don't you sometimes watch yourself some TV and that exclamation/rhetorical question just slips effortlessly from your lips? My wife and I just saw an advertisement for something called "Nat Geo."

"What the fuck is 'Nat Geo?'" I asked Goodwife Apron.

"I dunno," she replied.

And then, at the commercial's conclusion, the emblem of a small, yellow rectangle with a globe inside of it appeared on the screen, and the words "National Geographic" fanned out across the screen and the deep, resounding bass voice of the announcer commanded you to tune into "Nat Geo."

Nat Geo.

What the hell is going on?

Who is the marketing genius who was hired to flip up National Geographic's pink Izod polo shirt collar? Come on. You can't just slip a pair of Ray Bans on a motherfucker and call it "cool." Or "Nat Geo" for that matter. The thing is, National Geographic wasn't cool when it was a magazine, and it isn't cool now that it's a cable channel. And it never will be. Period. I don't care what you call it-- "When Gazelles Attack," "So You Think You Can Hibernate?," or "The Bestial Rape Channel," sorry-- it's just National Geographic. Now, granted, National Geographic magazines are probably the publication where I saw my first pair of unadorned breasts, and I give obligatory props for that. Yes, they were a pair of floppy pancake-lookin' things, tenuously attached to the chests of several women from the Yanomamo tribe, but full nip is full nip. And these nips were full, no doubt. Like the hubcaps on a Hupmobile.

Still, why does a storied, venerable institution like National Geographic feel the need to coolify itself? What does it stand to gain?

It's happening in my city, too, and I'll bet it's happening in your city, too. Yes, even yours, Morgantown, West Virginia. The coolification of stodgy, stolid institutions to attract a younger, hipper crowd. I never thought, for instance, that hospitals would have much trouble attracting young people. I mean, young people flock to hospitals every day for a colorful variety of maladies-- from sexually transmitted diseases to closed head injuries from dumbass motorcycle-without-a-helmet stunts to multiple gunshot wounds (this is Philadelphia, after all). But hospitals are definitely marketing themselves on television to the youngins.

Take a look at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

They're working a couple angles in the name department. They sometimes go by "TJU" but they're not satisfied with mere abbreviations-- oh, no-- their television ad campaign, which must be costing them millions and millions of dollars an on-air minute, usually ends with "Call us by our first name. Jeff."

Now, that's kind of funny, because it's Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, right? Shouldn't we be calling them "Thomas" or, at least, "Tom?" I mean, how fucking stupid can you get. I'm sure Thomas Jefferson took a big, bloody shit in his coffin when that commercial first rolled out on the airwaves.

Then there's the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Now, I admit that this is a fucking mouthful, no doubt. Since my wife had surgery there, I've had to say that name a lot, and I've used several of its abbreviations in casual conversation, but it always landed me and the folks with whom I was conversing in confusion-- because there are too many coolisms/abbreviations. There's UPenn. People think you're talking about the school. There's Penn Medicine. Well, there's like, five Penn Medicine satellite campuses all across the suburbs, so people in the burbs can pretend like they're getting Penn care. They're not. Then there's U of P. Well, that just sounds nasty. There's also "HUP." People think you're a drill sergeant. Nobody knows what the fuck you're talking about. It's awesome.

We've also got this cute little museum downtown. It's called "The Benjamin Franklin Institute." Well, it was called that, but now it's commercially known as "The Franklin."

Seriously.

They also call it "TFI" on their website. No doubt this is to honor those in South Philly who, when friends ask if they're going to see the new Star Trek exhibit and where is it showing, they, adorned in their traditional wife-beaters, gold chains and smoothing back their shellaqued hair respond,

"Yea! I'm goin' to The Fuckin' Institute! You's wanna come?"

Drinky Drink

Sometimes, our society really gets on my wick.

I guess it's good that I have a blog.

A thoroughly illuminating article appeared in the New York Times online edition today that centers around alcohol and work, two items that should never be combined in the first place.

According to Jody Queen-Hubert, executive director of cooperative education and career services at New York's Pace University, you shouldn't go out boozing with co-workers and/or your boss.

Wow. Who knew, right? So glad I read the NYT for actual information and not just snob appeal.

Cy Wakeman, president of a human resources consulting firm agrees, stating that "the risk is very high that something negative will come out of it." I wonder if having a beaver-bumping party with your supervisor counts as "negative" but let's assume for the moment that it does, or at least that the fallout from it does. Certainly sticking your foot in your mouth, making an inappropriate comment about minorities or the well-endowed or the emotionally disturbed may earn you demerits, even if you manage to keep your hands to yourself and/or your peenie locked up in its pleated, gabardine cell.

Let's face it, though I don't drink and never have, I'm well aware that people aren't exactly on their A-game when they've been tossing back a few, regardless of what they may think of that themselves. When you're in the company of the suits, you always want to be on your A-game, and gabbing it up while sloshed doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. That said, I'm left to ask the question: why is alcohol a part of work culture at all? Now, working in the non-profit sector, and a very small non-profit at that, I can't imagine having a three martini lunch with my executive director, though I admit the ensuing mayhem would probably be You Tube-worthy. Obviously, we're talking about the for-profit, corporate culture. I don't know what it is about alcohol that makes it pervade into even the occupational facet of our lives, where we're supposed to be competent, sober professionals. What is this seductive allure that comes with introducing alcohol into work relationships? Is there anybody who actually thinks it's a good idea?

When it comes time for the advice section of the article, Queen-Hubert gives some pretty shitty advice:

If colleagues regularly have drinks after work, order what everyone else is having but sip it slowly. “Make it last all night,” Ms. Queen-Hubert said. “Holding a drink without drinking is a way to feel like part of the crowd without compromising your judgment.”

No offense, Queenie, but what the fuck is that? Why should I have to spend $8.00 on a glass of wine because the other assholes sitting at the table are drinking? Why can't I drink a Diet Coke? Or water? What the hell does it matter what I do? Why can't they just do what they want and I do what I want?

Ah, because, amongst drinkers, abstaining is not allowed.

See Section B of said article:

Q. How do you politely decline to drink, especially if others are urging you to have one?

Well, here's my A.

"I don't drink."

Any further questions? Go fuck yourself.

I think it's pretty amazing the balls people grow when it's time to grill someone about why they don't drink. If you order a hoagie with no tomatoes, does everybody sitting at your table you at Quiznos bombard you with interrogatives about the abberation of your order?

"I just don't get it, man-- why don't you eat tomatoes?"

"Like, what's up with that?"

"Dude-- we all ordered tomatoes. What are you-- a fag?"

Somehow, though, in our culture, posing unrelenting, personal questions to the unfortunate teetotaler in the room is perfectly acceptable behavior. Why do we need a "polite way" to refuse a drink? Aren't I polite about everything else? Why is this even an issue. You do what you do, let me do what I do.

The problem, as I see it, is that people who consume alcohol, particularly large quantities thereof, want to feel their behavior being normalized. In order to accomplish that, one of two things needs to happen:

1.) They need to harrass and harangue anybody who is not participating in their behavior or.

2.) They need total compliance, participation, and assimilation from everybody in the room.

Otherwise, their behavior becomes questionable. And we cannot have that because, in our culture, engaging in the consumption of alcohol is acceptable and "normal," and abstinence is weird and suspect.

Q. When you attend business-related social events with more-senior colleagues, they always seem to be holding a drink. Could your refusal to do the same draw attention to your youth and inexperience?

Funny, I thought that refusing to do what everybody else is doing might draw attention to your independence, logical thought and self-preservation instinct. It might show that you aren't a squabbling little toadie that only wants to play dress-up in Daddy's big shoes and pretend to shave like the big boys. Of course, those participating in the New York Times article disagree with me, stating emphatically that you must "play along to get along."

"If you are at a high-profile event and all the executives are having a drink, you may feel you need one to be part of the club,” she noted. “That being said, you can still drink very little of it or have one drink and then switch to water.”

Man, fuck that. If that's what you need to do to be accepted in corporate culture, if working hard and making intelligent decisions isn't enough, fuck that. Hard.

The icing on the cake, or perhaps I should say "the ice shavings in the bourbon" comes like a thunderclap in the closing paragraph of the article in answer to the question, "How can you tell if you have a drinking problem that needs to be addressed?" The answer stunned me:

"A. If you can relax at professional events only by having a drink, that could indicate a problem... You may be using alcohol as a crutch when navigating uncomfortable social situations."

Well, yeah-- isn't that what your article just advised its readers to do-- use alcohol as a crutch? "Look, as long as you have that all-important scotch in your hand, that Holy Grail of corporate America, you'll do just fine." I mean, you're kidding me, right?

There are a lot of things about this world that I wish were different, but attitudes towards alcohol rank pretty high on my list.

Happy Hump-Day, Do the Humpty-Hump with DEAR APRON!

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The Guilt of Suburbia

It only takes one.

One neighbor. One lawn-mower. One weed-whacker. One whiff of freshly-clipped grass.'

It only takes one.

Instantly, upon hearing a lawnmower roar to life two doors down, I am instantly filled with the guilt of suburbia.

It's a well-documented fact that, as soon as one asshole starts buzzing his hedges, seven other homeowners will gradually trickle out of their houses and sheepishly grab their clippers or their buzzers or their trimmers and silently, diligently go to work.

Today, I learned that I am no different.

Our street is one block long and it is populated by twin homes built around 1928. Our house is connected to another and the houses themselves are cuddle-up-close to each other, so, when one neighbor fires up the Toro, well, you just can't sit back and pretend it isn't happening. Because it is. The 60-year-old widow next door with her hairsprayed pompadour is sweating behind her John Deere and, brother, so should you.

Hell, you should be mowing her lawn for her, let alone your own.

Our hedges were severely out-of-whack and I had ignored them for three weeks or so, since the last time my wife clipped them. We pointedly refuse to purchase an electric hedge trimmer, because we enjoy the intimacy of getting lip-to-leaf with our hedges. Plus, really, our property is so small that, seriously, it's not that much work. That said, though, to clip the hedges with our manual clippers and to do it well, it takes around an hour. To do a shitty job, with the left side obviously higher than the right, it only takes around forty minutes. That's what I did today.

If you didn't know me better, you'd think I'd been drinking or inhaling ReddiWip.

I would love to bravely exclaim that I am immune from the guilt of suburbia but, obviously, I am not. I cannot stand knowing that there are others out there spending countless hours tending and mending while our flora casts a pall over the street. I watch these middle-aged and elderly people breaking their backs over weeds and and lawns and gardens and I feel responsible, not just to my home and my pride, but to theirs as well. I love to shop myself around as a don't-give-a-fuck guy, but I'm not. I do give a fuck.

I can't help it.

I don't give a fuck, though, about my hedges. I could let them grow until they're thirty-six feet high-- wouldn't bother me a bit. In fact, I'd probably prefer it that way. I don't like people looking at me, so a shroud of shrubbery would suit me just fine. But they'd still look at me, even with a thirty-six foot high shrub. They'd look through the fronds at me. The heat of their glowers and their glares would penetrate the leaves and twigs.

I know it.

See, the people who lived in this house for sixty-three years before us kept house very well for a very long time. They are mythologized by the neighbors who remember them in their heyday, through the rose-colored Victorian glass of sentimental memory. The neighbors recall the former residents of our home fondly, they recall a sweet couple who kept their garden and the gentleman who trimmed his hedges constantly and measured his work with a yardstick. Our next-door neighbor recalls them with a misty-eyed fondness that I cannot help but receive with jealousy and scorn because only my wife and I know the modern, unkind truth about the former occupants of our home-- deed transfers up the wazoo, second and third and fourth mortgages on the house, reverse mortgages, unpaid mortgage payments, unpaid school and real estate taxes, even unpaid sewer rental fees, summonses from lawyers, creditors, banks-- and the inside, left to rot in a detritus of old lady wallpaper, a hopelessly outdated kitchen with a fucked up oven, broken two-by-fours, roofing shingles left on the backyard lawn for half-a-years, all held together by strapping tape... on... everything.

And still, I am motivated to get out there and keep house, not just by the sounds of my neighbors lawnmowers, but by the undead spirits of the former owners of this house, whose tenure here ended in a personal shame that could not overshadow the great glory they had built for themselves amongst the diehards. I know that, no matter how hard I try, no matter how I may slice up my hand while tearing stumps out of the ground, no matter how straight I try to cut my hedges, no matter how much I water the pachysandra or keep clean the front porch that nobody will ever remember me when I'm gone with wistful and melancholy compliments of my yardwork, for a green thumb have I not.

And nobody sings your praises for paying your mortgage on time.

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.