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The Autobiography of Alex Mead How To Care About Humans Chapter 1: Growing Up
"na na na... Gonna have a good time" -Fat Albert & the gang
In the Beginning, Shiny Things. (written circa January.05.2003) My very first vivid memory is of the Toronto airport. There was a strange sense of importance to this occasion that I didn't understand since I was 5 years old. I've since come to understand that my family doesn't get together very often and this was a lot more family members together in one place than there would be for quite some time. I guess at that age you're still trying to figure out what your family is about. I knew my mother was at the center of the universe and that was the only detail of vital importance. These other strange people fit in some kind of way and at the end of the day, who really cares how? A five year old can care about these things, but only so much. Shiny things though! That's a very different story. Ooooh shiny things. A five year old has an infinite ability to care about shiny things. To be transfixed by them and have them take over his world in a way that only shiny things can. I wish I could remember exactly what they were, but alas, I remember only that they were shiny and that I had to stop and stare at them in the window of a store in one of the biggest, most crowded airports in all the world while my mother drifted farther and farther away. Now my mother was the type to NEVER let me out of her sight. I have to guess that it was something about rushing and the reuniting with people she hadn't seen and general stress, but I waited for a while for her to realize I was gone and come back and buy me a shiny thing. But that was not to be. I started to call out to her. And call louder. And then scream her name. No results. This would be the time for a 5 year old to panic. But not me. No sir. I was trained not to ever panic. Panic does no good. You just think what to do next. Yes. Even a 5 year old can calmly think what to do next --especially if he'd been raised by my mother, and fortunately for me, I had. So... I went up to the nearest police officer. I tugged on his coat. I told him "My name is Alex Mead, I live at 107 Dodge Street and my phone number is... and then correctly gave him my phone number. I still have the same phone number today so nevermind what it is. Now I have to say my plan was pretty good. There were a few shortcomings, but I was only five so I forgive myself. Like for example, 107 Dodge Street didn't really mean anything since Dodge Street was in a different city far away. And, my police officer wasn't a police officer. He was actually a pilot. Oh well. Just the same, he knew where the PA system was and how to leave me in the care of a stewardess (it was the 70s, they were still stewardesses back then) while they announced my name over the loudspeaker. In addition to hearing my name echo all around this big important building I also got to wear a pilot's hat and I got a pair of wings from the airline to keep. I hadn't realized getting lost was going to be so rewarding but it was great. Still, I had grown tired of being lost and being separated from my mother caused me great anxiety even through all the fun I was having so I was very glad when I saw my mother running up to the counter where I was. I had never seen my mother run before and I never saw her run thereafter. But on that day, she ran back to get me. Because she would run when I needed her to. 107 Dodge Street (written circa January.05.2003)
There was a wonderful group of folks who lived at 107 Dodge Street on the East Side of Buffalo, New York. There was my grandmother (who wasn't really my grandmother), my sister (who wasn't my sister), my sister's mother (who wasn't anything, she wasn't around much), and then there was me and my mom... Oh, and way back then there was my grandmother's husband (no relation). My grandmother's husband liked to get drunk. Really drunk. Maybe the right way to say it isn't that he liked to get drunk. A better way to put it might be to say that he hated to ever become sober. He seemed to appreciate a constant state of extreme drunkenness and really worked at it on a daily basis. Now to be fair, all of Dodge Street was peopled with individuals in much the same condition, but they didn't live in the same house with me. The drunks across the street just acted funny and had loud energetic arguments that I never saw the conclusion of because it was time for bed by the time they really got going. But the husband of my grandmother (who wasn't really my grandmother) I got to see in every vivid phase of his drunkenness. The first and last time I ever drank alcohol was because he thought it would be funny to have a 6 year old kid drink beer. It didn't smell good and it tasted worse and I was completely bewildered as to why anyone would drink it. I hoped that he would never make me drink it again and he never did because not long after... he died. I remember very little about his death. Only that they told me he died of drinking. So here we had a drink that tasted like shit, made you act like an asshole, and then killed you. I decided that this drink was not for me. And more than 25 years later I have yet to change my mind. The Forward (written Feb.02.2004 & May.19.2004) Hi. My name is Alex Mead. During my 33 years on this Earth I have been a son, a student, an artist, a world famous software author, a writer, a lover of women, a composer of hundreds of songs, a programmer for hire for big corporations, a poet, a magazine publisher, a website developer, a world famous pornographer, a columnist and a well-regarded advocate for peace and social justice. I didn't really set out to do any of that it's just stuff that happened while I was trying to live my life. But I'm proud of most of it. I did almost all of it in service to humanity (well, except working for big corporations). I did the whole thing the best way I could think to do it at the time and along the way I created a lot of things that I could point to and say "Hey look what I did." And since this autobiographical thing is being written for the internet, I can even show you a whole lot of it. This autobiography was originally called "Writing down Random Junk from my Mundane Life While I Still Remember It." That was a pretty clever title I guess but as I wrote more of the book it became less random and less mundane. I was trying to show my humility with that title. I am impressed by the things I have done in life, but I also believe that anyone could have done them. I was just fortunate enough to have been convinced early in life that I could do things if I tried. So I tried all the time. And one thing led to another and I was in the right place at the right time a whole lot. So now it seems I've gone from one extreme to the other with the title. I started off musing at random about my mundane life and now I seem to see myself as qualified to give advice on how to care for humanity. Really, this is just the story of my life. I've read it. It may offer some useful pointers on how we might better care about one another. I sincerely hope so. It was with that hope that I changed the title of the book. One cautionary note before you continue though. I'm not a big believer in orthodoxy. I don't believe that a forward ALWAYS has to go before page one or that it has to be super long and boring. I don't care that my sentences don't ALWAYS have a subject and a predicate. I like starting sentences with 'and' or 'but' and I take great pride in my ability to create mind-bogglingly unwieldy run on sentences. I can't be bothered to put that apostrophe thing in every time I end up leavin a 'g' off of the end of an 'ing' word so you'll just have to trust me that I did it on purpose. And now that I think about it, the readers of this book should just consider themselves lucky that I ever even decided to conform to the standard spelling norms. I resisted that for a long time, and I'm not promising that I won't do so again at a later date. If you're put off by those ideas, that's probably nothing compared to how put off you will be by the actual content of the book. This is probably not a good book for people who don't believe that the status quo should be challenged. But we have plenty of time to get into that later. For now, let's journey back to my days of Growing Up. East Siders (written circa January.05.2003) I once had three grandmothers. Now I don't have any. Back then there was a lady who was my father's mother and I saw her maybe a few times a year. There was a lady who was my mother's mother, and even though she lived in the far away city of Pittsburgh I saw her probably every couple months and I talked to her on the phone sometimes and she was really nice and comforting and nurturing. Good stuff. Then there was my grandmother that was not my grandmother. Other people often ascribed the title of my 'babysitter' to her, but if my mother said she was my grandmother... then she was. It was really just as simple as that. My grandmother that was not my grandmother was a very sweet lady. She loved me and I loved her. There were some things I didn't like about her. But the important thing was that she was the second fixed point in the universe. If anything ever happened to my mother I would have still had my grandmother who was not my grandmother to take care of me. She took care of me all day long while my mother was at work before I got to be school aged, and every day after school once I was school aged. Her home felt like a safe place to be and even more of a safe place to be after the drunk guy wasn't around anymore. So then, what were the things I didn't like? Well, her house smelled like feet and cigarettes. She was a chain smoker and her house was very dark and smoke permeated every corner of the house. I preferred to play outside whenever possible because, really, what kid wants to smell cigarettes and feet? Not me, for damned sure. Another thing was that she liked to cook big meals frequently. I had nothing against big meals in particular and the Peach Cobbler that came along with it was actually a treat. The things like yams and mashed potatoes and green beans were neither good nor bad, they were just there. But then there were the chitlins. Always with the damned chitlins! If you've never smelled a chitlin while it's cooking let me describe it for you. It smells like rancid pig intestines that have been left in the sun to rot and then brought inside to marinade in diarrhea and then baked for hours and hours and hours and nobody will let you go outside to play you just have to stay in the house and smell it. In fact, I think that might actually be what chitlins are. I've never taken the time to find out. I know only that they stink and there was often no escaping them. The big thing though was a difference in child rearing style. My mother was kind and patient and loving all the time. My grandmother who wasn't my grandmother was very nice most of the time but when you were a little kid who made her mad you might find her grabbing a switch and whipping your legs with it. For the uninitiated, a "switch" is a thin tree branch stripped of its leaves used for disciplining bad children. Personally, I preferred to never, EVER be hit with a switch and my mom agreed that I shouldn't be hit with a switch and so I rarely ever was. To me that was good. My sister that was not my sister didn't care for that whole arrangement however. There were plenty of times where we would both collaborate in being "bad children" somehow and my poor sister would get a switch taken to her while I got to sit there and watch. So my sister that wasn't really my sister mostly loved me, but there were days when she didn't.
I honestly used to believe that all white people got to be on tv when they grew up. Really, I did. Because there were so few white people. You could look around and you would never ever see one. Yet on tv they were everywhere. So I had figured it out that all white people got to be on tv when they grow up and I hoped that I would get to be on Sesame Street or the Electric company or something cool like that. And I prayed that I would not have to be on something totally boring like the news. The fact that adults could sit and watch the news for so long--I mean it went on forEVER-- was a source of genuine irritation for me. I was just hoping my mom wouldn't want to be on the news when she grew up because I'd probably HAVE TO watch it then. She sure did used to watch enough of it. But then she also watched a lot of Soap Operas, like the Guiding Light especially, and that would have been fine if she wanted to be on that. That was a good white people show to be on. White people and black people is confusing for adults and it's double confusing for kids. When you start to realize that it matters whether you're black or white all kinds of ideas start seeping into your brain. You hear things, and feel things, and form ideas on how people act based on how they look. It's a real puzzle to try to figure it all out. I was SO relieved when a black classmate FINALLY sat down and explained the whole thing to me. Now I finally understood how the whole thing worked and what rights and responsibilities I had. I was very eager to get home and try them out. That afternoon the first time my grandmother tried to tell me to do something that I didn't want to do, I calmly turned to her and explained to her that I didn't have to do what she told me because she was a nigger, and I was under no obligation to listen to niggers. I thought that would be the end of it and she would go on about her business. I was mistaken.
Memories of 107 (written Feb.11.2004) Okay. Just for fun, here's a list of other fond memories of 107 Dodge Street:
The Rest of Dodge Street (written circa January.05.2003) There were many days when I played in my backyard with my sister who wasn't really my sister and lots of days when I played by myself. Then there were other days when I ventured out into the world of Dodge Street. A crazy place. It was a big place. I go back there these days and can't believe how small it is. That little tiny block held all kinds of adventures.
In second grade we were starting to notice that there was a such thing as girls and we had a discussion about which ones were pretty and which ones weren't. My second best friend and I were in the same grade and in the same class but my best friend was a grade behind. So my second best friend and I and several other boys were talking about the girls and sharing what little we knew about them and why they were here on the Earth with us. We had all come to the consensus that one particular girl was the absolute prettiest girl in the class so then it was time for us all to decide whether or not we would kiss her. We went around in a circle and there were two or three no votes but most of us decided we weren't afraid, and if given the chance we definitely would kiss her. The very next day in the coat room I was dawdling and I was the last one left in the coat room. This girl that was the prettiest girl in the class came into the coat room with me. It seemed like such an odd coincidence. I wondered if I would now be obligated to kiss her. I had really agreed that I would kiss her because I wanted to be like everyone else not really out of any desire to kiss her. But I was a curious young guy so I would have done it if I had to. I didn't come to that though. In fact, not even close. She informed me that my second best friend had told her that I liked her. She informed me that I was ugly, and that she didn't want me liking her. And then she slapped me. Hard. That kind of set the tone for how my love life was always going to go. A girlfriend I used to have (written circa January.05.2003) Writing the details of my life in exact chronological order would be very boring. Trust me. Skipping around will be much more fun. If I wrote everything in exact chronological order, it would probably take a looooong time to get to the sex. Not that I got to be very old before I started having sex, I didn't really, but I just remember a lot of stuff from my childhood and I don't want to write all of that before I talk about sex. Because sex is important to me and a lot of this autobiographical thing is about sex, and all of my failed relationships with women. I love sex. Too much. I love sex so much, that I hate it. I hate anything that interferes with my ability to control myself. If my brain gives me a direct order I like to think that it will be carried out. I don't drink, I don't do drugs, I fear that it would interfere with my brain's ability to issue orders and have them obeyed. There have been times though, where I have decided the correct coarse of action, issued the order to myself, and watched in amazement as I do something totally different. And when that happens, it's a safe bet that there's a woman around or behind the insubordination in one way or another. Sex makes me vulnerable, and I HATE being vulnerable. A lot. That's why I hate sex. I managed to go without sex for more than 3 years. And that was not easy since I love sex so much. But it needed to be done. I have to assert MY control over sex and show it who's boss and when/if I ever finally do get full control over it... life will be good. So about this girl. I won't mention her name since she seems to recall events very differently. Let's just say she was pretty. not in a magazine cover girl kind of way, but in a cute and innocent kind of way, and very nice, in a young and shy kind of way. When I first met her she had braces and glasses and maybe not the best perm the world had ever seen, but the thing was, I was totally no prize myself. I was completely and totally amazed that a pretty girl would show any interest in me. Not that she showed a lot of interest in me at first, she didn't. But with a lot of time and effort and a lot of help from her sister I was able to slowly build an interest in me somewhere within her. We dated for a good several months. We didn't have any sex during that time. We were sort of heading in that direction but she was always very hesitant and as much as I like sex, I'm not very forceful when it comes to that. I was raised with 'no means no' as one of my core values. As much as my mother loved me, I can say with certainty that she'd have beaten the living daylights out of me if I'd ever failed to observe the 'no means no' incontrovertible rule of the universe. To me it was okay. I wanted to have sex with her sure --she was very pretty-- but just spending time with her was plenty. And sometimes we would make out and I would just feel so great about myself that such a pretty girl would make out with me. We had problems with her parents though. Her step father in particular forbade her to go out with me. For the uninitiated, "going out" with someone means dating them or seeing them. In my neighborhood it was called going out. And Carrie and I went out until she finally got sick of being yelled at and she let me know that the two of us were through. There was much more to it than that but that's a story for another time. All I could think about was that I had come within inches of having sex with such a pretty girl and now it was probably never going to happen. It was the most depressed I have ever been in my life. I have had MUCH worse things happen to me since then. But maybe it's something about the hormones that run through a teenage guy because I was feeling positively suicidal. I think I still have a cassette tape somewhere of myself talking about how life was no longer worth living without her. It'd be nice to go back in time and have a conversation with myself and just smack some sense into myself, but at the time I was convinced that I was unlovable (by women other than my mom) and I didn't want to go through a lifetime of being unloved. Then skip ahead a couple years. Or maybe it was just one year. Whatever. It was some time later. I had just broken up with a later girlfriend and was feeling a lot better about myself. I had grown into myself a little. A friend of mine informed me that she was interested in getting together and talking about old times. Well when I saw her again I was astounded. She was PRETTY. This time she WAS magazine cover pretty. No braces, no perm, no nothing but unadulterated gorgeousness. And that was what was important after all. The quality of life as you enter your twenties is measured by how good your girlfriend looks. I wanted desperately for her to be my girlfriend again from the moment I laid eyes on her. I was astounded again when she wanted the same. Now's the part where it starts to get muddled. I have very strong recollections of us reuniting and having sex. Great sex. Wild, crazy, passionate sex that would start in the early evening and end when the sun was coming up the next day. Thing was, she still lived at home, and she still had a step-father that didn't want her dating a black guy. And so she got grounded and yelled at and verbally abused for associating with me and after a time it got to be too much for her. She didn't even get to tell me face to face that it was over the second time around because she couldn't escape the house, but after a month of no contact with her I got the message. And that was about par for the course for my love life. I spent the following decade seized with the fear that I was never going to have sex that I enjoyed that much again. It's a very scary thing to be that young and think that the best sex of your life is behind you. Very frightening indeed. BUT, the latest recent development is that she emphatically asserts that we never got back together or had sex at all. Granted, our reunion only lasted for a few weeks and was confined to weekends, and happened more than 17 years ago, but still it's pretty deflating to think you've had this great sexual experience where you think you've really rocked someone's world and had them rock yours and come to find out that they don't even recall any such reunion and insist that you were never intimate. Ah well, that's about par for the course in my love life. Bees, hoppergrasses and other frightening things (circa Jan.06.2003) I'm not the bravest guy in the world but I get by. Like I said in the beginning of the book, I learned not to panic when I was 5 years old and I have found that when faced with physical danger I can rise to the challenge. I've even seen myself place myself in harms way to come to the aid of others and I'd do it again if needed. So I'm not exactly cowardly. However, I have fears of things that are either not rational or are very much out of proportion. Maybe they're phobias or maybe they're leftover traumatic experiences from when I was young. Who knows? But there's stuff, besides sex, that I'm scared of. Back on Dodge Street a fun thing for young ghetto kids to do was to wash out a mayonnaise jar and catch grasshoppers in it. I was too young to remember this story as a memory, but I remember it as a story because my mother used to tell it to people whenever she felt I needed to be embarrassed. I guess I was three or four years old and I was playing with a kid that was about two. We were catching grasshoppers in the jar and poking holes through the top with a nail so they could breathe. But even with nail holes its reasonable to assume that the grasshopper (or hoppergrass as I used to call it at that age) would be mad about being confined in a jar. So I guess that's probably why when the kid dropped the jar and it broke I fled, screaming in terror, and hid in the living room. The two year old kid came into the house to check on me and was worried about me being so scared so he opened the door and announced loudly that the hoppergrass had better not come in here because his father had a gun and he would shoot the hoppergrass if it tried to get me. I can at least function now when a grasshopper is near me. I won't run away screaming and hide under the couch, but I must admit I still don't like them much. I don't like any insects that fly. If they fly AND they sting or bite though, you might find me back under the couch. One spring morning in the summer time my best friend, my second best friend and I were wondering what adventures we would have that day. There was a vacant lot where a house had burned down during the winter and the weeds had grown tall and there were a few flowering plants where bees liked to congregate. My second best friend thought it would be a good idea to get a whole bunch of jars and poke holes in the top and see how many bees we could collect. I was willing to go along with the plan even though, or maybe because, it was scary. I didn't really want to do most of the work, but I caught a few bees during the day in my jar. My second best friend had caught the most. He was fearless or reckless or something. I wasn't paying attention to what he was doing but apparently he had caught a few too many bees because he tried to catch one more and the ones in the jar started flying out. He flung the jar as far as he could and shouted for us to run. And we ran. FAST! We did not look back. We didn't need to. We were sure the bees were all chasing us. When we all got to my house we finally stopped and turned around to check and there were no bees. I was pretty sure there would be a swarm of bees all coming to exact revenge but I guess these particular bees weren't interested on that day. Or they were lulling us into a false sense of security. I wouldn't put it past them considering how evil bees are. Bees are SO evil that one stung my mother once. It was late evening and we were in our house on Dodge Street and she realized something was crawling around inside her pant leg. She tried to encourage it to leave but it wouldn't. She smushed it. Then she tried to shake it out of her pants. Then she screamed. My mother seemed invincible to me but here this thing had reduced her to screaming and wincing in grave pain. I felt so powerless to help her. When it fell out of her pant leg and onto the floor I examined the dead corpse of it. The yellow and black beast that was so small it could go in your clothes yet so powerful it could wound even my mom. This was a thing to be feared forevermore. I am also scared of dirty dishes. Seriously I am. I am proud that as I write this I have not one single dirty dish in my sink but for many years it was not that way. I am the kind of guy that will just keep using the same bowl over and over and over again and just rinsing it after I use it because I am afraid of dirty dishes. I've had my mom and my ex-girlfriends try to convince me that I'm not really afraid of them I just don't want to wash them. Wrong! I'm scared. I know fear, and a big sink full of dirty dishes makes me afraid. There have been years that have gone by with the same dishes in the sink, and I'm not afraid to confess that I have thrown dishes away rather than wash them. My mother used to tell me "Don't you remember when you were 3 and you used to help me wash the dishes?" Well, no. I don't remember. I don't care. I don't want to wash one now, I don't care what I did when I was three. I had the same uneasiness about dirty clothes. I didn't want to go near them. I have managed to overcome that one. When my mother couldn't walk anymore and I HAD TO wash the clothes or wear them dirty I just concentrated and through mind over matter I was able to wash some clothes. Gradually, as time went on and I didn't die from the germs, I became less afraid and now I wash clothes with calmness and serenity of mind. I am not afraid of big dogs. I was when I was little but now I am big. My best friend had a BIG dog. HUGE. And this dog had a wide area to roam because my best friend's house was next to a vacant lot. They had tossed up a wide chain linked fence around the back half of the lot and they kept the grass cut there and it was the dog's domain. The dog did not like me. At all. Not even a little. When I would go to my best friend's house, my mere appearance would send the dog into a rage. To this day I believe that the dog truly wanted to kill me. One morning he got his chance. You see, the chain linked fence was not very sturdy. The dog... the dog was very big. The fence had very wide distances between fence posts. When the dog would jump on the fence and express its hatred for me the fence would wobble and wobble and look like it was about to fall. I pointed this out to my best friend and all of the people that lived in his house on numerous occasions. They would reassure me that the fence was fine and they would shake it and lean on it to demonstrate how sturdy it was. I remained unconvinced. My best friend would even go into the fenced off area and show me what a nice friendly dog this horse of a dog was. The dog was taller than my best friend even on all four legs. They even tried stuff like letting me throw food to the dog to lessen the dog's hatred for me. Nothing worked. The dog continued to hate me. In all honesty I hated the dog back. One day I was on my way over to my best friend's house because we used to walk to school together. The dog hopped up on the fence like any other day. The dog said "I HATE you" just like any other day. The fence wobbled like any other day. Unlike any other day, the fence fell over. Maybe time just seemed to slow down but it seemed like there was an eternity where the dog and I eyeballed each other. No fence to stand between us. Just us and our hatred separated by maybe 20 yards distance from the sidewalk where I stood to the fallen fence where he stood. After eternity was over, I ran. FAST. Faster than I was capable of running. I ran all the way to school which was 3 blocks away. After I was safely inside the school I did a brief courtesy check to make sure the dog was not eating the other kids outside the school. I didn't see blood and carnage so I assumed the dog must have stopped chasing me at some point on the way to school. I know that he did chase me quite a way and was intent on killing me. I remember the sound of him getting closer and closer and angrier. I remember the sound of the old man that lives at my best friends house calling the dog. I don't remember anything after that until I got to school. Now, I am big myself. I no longer fear big dogs. Or loud dogs. But I continue to hate them. And they hate me. Still. Even new big dogs that I've never seen before express their rage upon seeing me. They know that I want to fight them. See, with flying insects, I am afraid I will be ganged up on or that the insect will sneak me and score a victory against my skin and cause me untold pain for all eternity. With dogs on the other hand, I look at them and I think I can take em. I have no desire to run, I have an irrational desire to stand and fight. Like I want another big dog to hop a fence and come at me so I can kick it in the head. It's like a rematch that I've always craved that will probably culminate in me doing something stupid one day and ending up with rabies or something like that. The R Word (circa Jan.08.2003) Of all the things I'm afraid of, none measures up to Rejection. This is another fear that I have exerted some control over, but it is by far the most intense of all my fears. I have a fear of being rejected by people in general, and a fear of being rejected by women in particular. I have learned that I can focus and exert my own will over my fears and make myself talk to women when I'm scared to and even ask them out when I'm scared to. But it takes a LOT of effort and concentration. I really have to shut down most of my brain and drag what little is left kicking and screaming to form the words. My first long term crush, fear, rejection cycle revolved around the daughter of my mom's Scrabble friend. I was in a new school, in a new environment and had a new set of friends. In school there were boys that were starting to get girlfriends and if you didn't want to be left out it was obligatory to make up a girlfriend. I made up the story that this girl was my girlfriend and it was so perfect because unlike other little boys in the class I could furnish pictures of my girlfriend and she could even be seen coming over my house every once in a while. She lived way out in Orchard Park so no one would ever be able to talk to her to confirm my story. Aside from the fact that she had no idea she was my girlfriend and would have never, ever agreed to be my girlfriend she was a great girlfriend to have. I didn't really have much more than a passing interest in girls at the time and this lie just bought me more time and kept me from being one of those loser boys without a girlfriend even though in truth we were all way too young to have girlfriends anyway and we were almost all lying about it. Most just lacked the skill to craft such a believable story. I did also think she was very pretty. That's why I picked her. I knew her photograph would impress people. I liked her mom a lot too. Her mom and my mom were friends since before I could remember and probably even before I was born. Back in the 70s when disco dancing was the rage I used to beg my mom to comb my hair like John Travolta from the movie Grease and I used to disco dance all over the house. My mom's Scrabble friend LOVED to disco dance also and often we would get together and put on disco records and she and I would dance together. She had quite a height advantage on me since I was an adolescent and she was grown but it made little difference. I was not afraid to get out there and shake it and my mom's Scrabble friend loved to get up and dance also. Everyone else just liked to watch us, except my mom's Scrabble friend's daughter. She would just shield her eyes or hide in the corner rather than watching me shake my pelvis with her mom. One day my mom and my mom's Scrabble friend were in my kitchen playing Scrabble. That's why she's called my mom's Scrabble friend because that's what they did ALL the time. Play Scrabble. I was in the kitchen feeding myself or something and to my astonishment I heard my mother tell her Scrabble friend that she thought I had a crush on her daughter. I could not believe that my own dear mother would betray a confidence of mine like that. I was mortified. My great secret was out and my cover was blown. Now anything could happen next and the world was probably going to explode at any minute. First and foremost I was worried about the immediate danger. I was afraid that her Scrabble friend was going to walk over and smack me for liking her daughter. That was what the prettiest girl in second grade had done, and that's what I was expecting from the Scrabble woman. I just hoped that she was not going to remind me that I was ugly when she smacked me. There was to be no smacking though. There was a sort of restrained kind of giggling. I had no idea what that meant but it seemed to me that the giggling wasn't much better than the smacking would have been. She struggled to make a straight face and then she explained to me in an adult to child kind of way --that really aggravated me since I was used to being talked to in an adult to adult kind of way by my mom-- that I should just tell her daughter that I liked her and see what she would say. WHAT???? Are you kidding? It just kept getting worse and worse. Now it was actually being suggested that I tell her?!? Has the whole world just gone MAD? Why not ask me to cure cancer while you're at it? Still I tried though. Really I tried. We would go out to Orchard Park to visit them and they had a creek that ran through their backyard. The young object of my affections would be out in the yard alone. There'd be plenty of opportunity to talk to her. Sometimes I would run up to her. It wasn't like she wasn't nice to me, she was certainly a polite little girl. Most kids that were a year older than me had an attitude but she didn't, she was cordial and patient. I tried very hard to tell her but I just couldn't form the words. I would usually just end up talking about Star Wars or something and she would agree that it was a pretty cool movie and then go over one of her friends' houses when I became too weird to take. Wasn't just a passing thing either. I'm talking YEARS here. For YEARS I tried to tell her. And for years I failed. So for years and years she continued to be my girlfriend without ever knowing it. That was just the way it went. Male Influences (May.19.2004) As people have read this book, their most frequent question has been: So what about your father? I really don't know about my father. From what I hear, he split when I was around two years old. My mother used to talk about him and tell me that he was a great person and a very smart person and not very excitable. Usually when she was trying to convince me not to panic about things she would tell me about how catastrophic things could happen to my father and he would react to them calmly. And she used to tell me stories about his athleticism and how he was able to climb things as though he was Spider-Man. And that was all I knew. That was plenty. My mom sounded like she respected him a great deal and thought he was smart and strong and he could climb things. Like Spider-Man! Must be a cool guy, but we didn't seem to really NEED him for anything. My mom seemed perfectly capable of taking care of me all by herself. One time when I was six, or about to turn six, he came by to bring me a sled for my birthday. I think I recall a heated discussion and I think I recall my mom asking me if I wanted to talk to him and I think I recall not wanting to talk to him. I have met him about three or four times in my life. He seems like a cool guy. But I never saw him climb anything. My mom had a few boyfriends when I was really little. There was a guy named Lou that I recall her being pretty serious about. That guy made her cry. There were other guys that came to the house that I have no idea if there was any romantic involvement or not because I was too little to have any clue. There was a guy named Sid who used to come over to scare the crap out of me. He liked to tell me it was time for bed and when it was just my mom with me I would resist going to bed but if I resisted going to bed when Sid was over he would BOOM out in this super-loud, super-deep voice "WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEARTS OF MEN? THE SHADOW KNOWS!" And I would run crying to my room and lock the door. There was a guy named Mel who was a good friend of my mom. He had a mansion and a swimming pool in his living room. Actually he lived on the basement floor of an old mansion that got converted into appartments, but still, he had a swimming pool in his living room. He used to tell me that when I grew up I was going to want to kiss a woman with my tongue! ICK! No thank you! I already knew about that and didn't want any part of it. The first and last homosexual experience of my life happened with my best friend. I don't know how "homosexual" it actually was since we were each pretending that the other was a girl. We had seen this strange way that a man kisses a woman on tv with their mouth open and we wanted to know what it was all about. We went around the neighborhood asking adults why they did that and what did it mean. We couldn't find anyone to tell us. We tried asking my sister who wasn't really my sister to volunteer to experiment with us and see if we could figure it out. She was not interested. With nowhere else to turn we went to my room and decided to pretend that the other person was a girl and try it out. It wasn't fun. It felt really gross in fact. We both decided that when we grew up we weren't kissing anyone, man or woman. I don't know about him, but somewhere along the way I changed my mind. And then there was a guy named Garfield who came over to our house most Sunday mornings to have breakfast with my mom. He really liked my mom. I'm pretty sure he wanted a serious relationship with her because I recall some times when I was very young and she would ask me these strange questions about whether I liked Garfield and whether or not I had "father kind of feelings" about Garfield and stuff like that. I always thought my mom and I were doing fine by ourselves and I thought Garfield was a swell guy but I highly doubted he could climb things like Spider-Man. And then he used to buy me toys and take me and my mom on outings and stuff. That was pretty cool. I liked Garfield. But I didn't think he needed to come over more than once a week really. Spoiled Brat (circa Jan.15.2003) Since I was afraid of the dishes and the laundry, it was a very lucky thing for me that I had a mother that just did all of the housework without asking me to contribute anything. My contribution included taking the garbage out and cleaning up after myself sometimes and I even moaned and groaned about that. It seemed perfectly normal to me that my mom should do everything and as a reward for having done everything I would let her buy me stuff too. That was just how it worked since I was little. Maybe not from the very beginning, but any system she put in place to impart discipline or show me some responsibility I quickly figured out how to get around it and work the system to my advantage. I might not have been working the system at maximum efficiency right out of the gate, but over time I learned how everything worked and how to get my mom to provide for all of my needs and then give me lots of attention and then tell me how great I was on top of that.
Did it ever even occur to me that memorizing the words was still learning to read? No. Did it ever cross my mind that the "PRIZE" I was working so hard to get was actually, MORE READING? No. I was convinced that I was winning at this game. Needless to say I showed up to pre-school as a very good reader. My mother was brilliant like that. When I say that she always talked to me like I was an adult, I mean that. She involved me in the life decisions that seriously affected my life. When I was 8 years old and my mom got a good job and wanted to move away from Dodge Street she didn't announce to me that we were moving. She sat me down and explained to me all about what moving would mean. About having to make new friends and going to a different school and having to adjust to different people. I felt fully involved in the decision. And that's the way it always was. [next: How The Other Half Lives] |
