Someone wanted this one again. Ouch.
* * *
I have had too many drinks again. So many that there are three asses on my lap, six cheeks undulating, morphing back into two and then out again when each new wave of ethyl alcohol makes it to my brain. Each wave is worse than the one before, because, as I've already mentioned, I have had too many drinks...again.
I am in the VIP room of a club in the suburbs. A stripper I have named "Tasty" for the airbrushed "tasty" on her wifebeater, a sliced up wifebeater, has taken me there as per my request. I don't think I requested actually. I think I just grabbed on to her breasts because I've always been a fan of both breasts and airbrushed t-shirts, and she took that to mean, "I would like a lap dance." I'm not unhappy about the miscommunication because it has led to naked asscheeks on my lap, a favorable outcome.
It is the day of the Sabbath, the day for worship and for rest. I neither worship, nor do I rest, and it is glorious.
* * *
It's always sunny at Southwick. Clouds cover every part of New York, cloak its benign prettiness with fog and choke its benign peoples with Seasonal Affective Disorder, but that one patch of beach on Lake Ontario, Southwick State Park, is sunny with sand like sugar. The dunes blow to twenty feet in height. Sea grass pops through, and when you're standing on a patch at the top, looking out over the lake, you'd swear that sliver of black at the horizon is Africa, not Canada.
I was atop one of those dunes the first time I heard the guttural sounds of Jimmy's car, the growling of a Tyrannosaur on Xanax with a Timpani in its nutsack. They were primal "man" sounds and I liked them. It seemed as if everyone camping at Southwick that summer liked them--the Frisbees stopped swirling back and forth, and kites divebombed into the sand as their masters turned and gaped at the Mustang. Well, I should say that everyone young enough to appreciate youthful glory at its apex liked the sounds. All the old farts made faces as Jimmy passed. I made faces back and decided that old people were silly and that I would never be one of them; bitching and moaning about noise they can't even hear through their "miracle ears."
As the car got closer, the smoke got thicker. It blew blue, and drifted to the south side of the road where it hung and dissipated slowly like jet stream in the sky. Soon the odor of various meats searing on Webers was totally obscured by Mustang fart. When the car pulled onto the grass square belonging to us, "The Tyler's Campsite" as marked by a hand-carved wooden sign on a stake my father had made to be kitschy and hospitable, Jimmy killed the engine and climbed out of the open window like a resident of Hazzard County. He was young, vital and handsome.
I ran at top speed down the back of my dune to give him a hug knowing all the way that I would be thrown onto his shoulder and spun relentlessly until I puked. I didn't care. He was my cousin and the coolest dude, ever.
* * *
I don't remember anything about my mother's father. When I was born, he came to the hospital, pinched the cheek belonging to my dimple and said, "What a cute little Murph."
He was a handsome Mick with black hair. He had green eyes, twinkly ones, and the same chubby cheeks I've inherited. I got his stubbornness too. He was kicked out of Catholic College for punching an abusive nun...in the face. A month later he was drafted into the Army and sent to Okinawa, where he did courageous things that no one will discuss, least of all him. He came home with a Purple Heart and promptly drank and smoked till his own heart got hard and stopped altogether. It stopped six months after I was born, so all I've got left of him is a nickname and cute cheeks.
I knew Grandma very well. But I should say that the Grandma I knew was the late-in-life version, the post Alcoholics Anonymous version. I knew the Grandma who had panic attacks, picked her cuticles endlessly and never let me shower for fear I would get "consumption" and die. I would ask her about her past and about Grandpa, and she would say, "He was full of piss and vinegar," and then change the subject. No one was ever better at changing subjects. I would ask her something "totally inappropriate" and she would move the conversation to her beloved grandson Jimmy, and the various things I could do to be more like him and less like me. Truth be told, he deserved her praise.
She lived in Baldwinsville, NY, in an apartment complex specially designed for seniors, every bathroom containing an emergency pull cord, which would alert EMT's and send ambulances howling into the parking lot. No one ever had an emergency, but the ambulances came regularly, and so did my cousin Jimmy. He shoveled Grandma's sidewalks, hung her picture frames and fixed her appliances.
The Grandma I knew was crippled with fear. Each time I spent the night at her apartment, it further strengthened my resolve to never grow old and become frightened by everything. I would play with her Parakeet, Peety, till I got yelled at for frightening her, play outside in the landscaping till I got yelled at for frightening her, play with board games till I got yelled at for frightening her, ad infinitum. I once took a dump on her neighbor's lawn because she wouldn't let me inside. The doorbell frightened her. She used to say I was "the bane of her existence," and I took it as a compliment.
When I was ten, she took me on a bus trip to Niagra Falls so that we could argue while taking in nice scenery, I suppose. I bought a ripped t-shirt with beads and an airbrushed Pegasus on its chest. We posed for a picture in a fiberglass barrel and pretended we were going over the falls. I still have that pic, and in it I'm wearing the Pegasus shirt. Grandma looks like she always looked, as if she'd just seen a ghost. But now that she is a ghost, I have to admit I miss her.
* * *
It is Christmas Day, and I am being swirled around on cousin Jimmy's shoulder. This is awkward because I am 27 years old and Jimmy is very drunk, again. Inappropriately, and much more so than everyone else. He tips to the left and right as he spins me, tripping slightly and nearly beheading people with my feet. When I escape, I sit down, and I do not get up again.
He is nearly skeletal. Fifteen years of Chroan's disease has not been kind to him, and as he finishes off another beer, he jokes that he has so little intestine left that its "a straight shot from m' mouth to m' 'ssshole." We laugh, but only to hide how sad we think this is. I wonder how much dead intestine is from Chroan's and how much is from drink, and I consider asking this question aloud because I am "totally inappropriate," but I say nothing because Jimmy is a sweetheart and I don't want to embarrass him. My mother is picking at her cuticles when she changes the subject. She is good at changing subjects.
* * *
My Aunt, mother and sister sit across from me. We are swilling Cosmopolitans and laughing, so much so that we alternately snort the Cosmo into our noses and have to blow it out. My Aunt is talking about the Grandma I never knew, the early version. She is telling a story about the time Grandma "mooned the school bus."
BunnyMommy: "Whaddya mean, 'that one time?' Dontcha mean 'every day?'"
Aunt Robyn: [choking on Cosmo] "True. She mooned my friends so many times they stopped flinching."
BunnySis: "What? Grandma? Grandma used to get so drunk during the day that she'd moon your school bus?"
BunnyMommy: "During the day? Oh, no no no. She'd be trashed before we even left the house. In the MORNING."
Aunt Robyn: [to my mother] "Remember George, the milkman?"
BunnyMommy: "Oh my God! I had totally forgotten about that."
Me: "Who the hell is George?"
BunnyMommy: "George was Grandma's drinking buddy. He used to come over to the house during the day and they would get hammered while Grandma baked shit and made Waldorf salads and stuff. But one day, she got George so drunk that he crashed his milk truck into the front porch of the MacMillan's house, and he got fired from his job. Oh his wife was so mad!"
We laugh, and choke and slap the table. We are doubled over, and I am aghast that my frightened, take-no-risks Grandma, who never got behind the wheel of a car was such a wild drunkard. Later, I see pictures of her with my Grandpa. They are laughing, smiling and dancing, and my Grandmother's smile is glorious. I realize I had never gotten the chance to see it before.
* * *
It is last Monday. I am in Baldwinsville, and it is a rather nice day. I mention to BunnySis that it's probably much nicer on the beach at Southwick, but we can't go there. We have business to attend to. We are at a funeral home watching sober people fresh from worship and rest pass in and out and pay their respects.
I am standing in a long black dress by my mother's Subaru, handing out beers from a collapsible cooler my father and I have just made a trip to the grocery store to buy. It is full of beer and ice. I hand the beers off to my family while they stand dazed beneath a weeping willow, not weeping though they need to. My uncle takes a drag from a cigarette and says, "I don't understand. Just last week he was over at Robyn's putting flower boxes up and mowing her lawn, and today he's gone." His eyes grow glassy as he says this, and instead of crying, he changes the subject, deftly, to Bill Clinton's shoddy foreign policy. And just when we think it is impossible to laugh, he says "A towel is not a hat, god dammit."
* * *
The back seat of the Mustang is tiny. My knees are twisted to the side, pushed into the leather of the seat in front of me. I am drinking a beer for the first time. My sister sits in the front seat while Jimmy drives, and she calls off the number on the speedometer with a wide smile...80...82...85. The wind whips harder as we speed along, everything shining, the console, my sister's silver beer can, the road signs we pass at what seems like warp speed. The Xanax has faded. The Tyrannosaur is raging now, it's Timpani nuts knock into each other with ferocity, with intensity like sumo wrestlers...87...90...92... RRRROOOOAAAARRRR! The landscape blurs into green swashes...95...97...99. I guzzle beer, and push my nose out the window. I am yelping with glee, my hand pressed to the roof of the Mustang so hard I fear it might pop through...100! We scream! We are faster than the fastest! We are louder than the loudest! We are wild, alive and glorious!
Posted by Tucker Max at 12:00 PM