Black Sheep - January 10, 2005

I just met the most amazing little boy. He told me this: that I am like the doll on the Island of lost toys in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. There is nothing wrong with her. Someone told her she was broken and she believed it.

Every year when Christmas rolls around I drive or fly home with trepidation. This is because I am the black sheep. I am irresponsible and messed up, flighty and incapable of getting anything done. I don't prepare for any event, and I am never organized. I would rather sit and daydream than check the weather report for a safe day to drive home for Christmas. My father is a corporate consultant. My mother is an accountant, and my sister is a media buyer/dance instructor. They have steady jobs and 401k's. They think I should be married to an Irish Catholic doctor with a high sperm count, because normalcy and good health coverage should be the basis for all of life's decisions. I try to tell them that there is nothing normal about an Irish Catholic sober enough to do surgery, but they don't listen.

This Christmas I planned to make the drive from Chicago to Jamestown, New York on the Wednesday before Christmas because I had a party to go to for Jameson Whiskey on that Tuesday. When that Tuesday rolled around, a Tuesday full of sun and dry roads perfect for driving, I showed up at the bar the party was being held at and found out that the party was the night before. The next day a storm blew in the likes of which I haven't seen in years. It followed me all the way to upstate New York. While slipping and sliding all over the road in my non-winterized tires at forty miles per hour, I thought, "This recklessness has to stop." Truth be told, I never thought I would say this to myself. I never thought I would care enough.

The normally eight-hour drive took thirteen. After laughing at my flighty, incapable, irresponsible nature, my parents took me to dinner. I watched my mother fuss and fret about making a veggie pizza for a work party the next day. She bit her lower lip and picked at her fingernails. Even for the Irish, a veggie pizza is not a big deal, but if my mother doesn't have something to stress about she doesn't feel comfortable. This is a woman who cleans her shower curtain rings once a week.

Bunny: Mom, I will do it. Just stop.
Bunny Mommy: Stop what?
Bunny: You're being snotty.
Bunny Mommy: No I'm not.
[Awkward silence]
Bunny Daddy: So Murph (my nickname since birth. It's Irish slang for potato. Apparently I looked like a potato when my grandpa saw me for the first time. Great) When are you going to do that Machu Pichu run thingy you've been talking about?
Bunny: Oh yeah. Maybe next fall, I don't know.
Bunny Mommy: Machu Whatchu? What the hell is that? [Rubs forehead] Is that a Tucker thing?
Bunny: IT'S JUST A FUCKING VEGGIE PIZZA!

The next morning my father woke me, and we set out to pick my sister up at the Buffalo airport. We waited at security for her, always a long wait in Buffalo. It's difficult to taxi in three feet of lake effect snow.

She eventually came around the corner of security in pink down and fur trim. Her wool purse had puffballs of fur hanging from it. It was perfect.

We drove home and joked about my flighty incapable nature. We also joked about getting trashed, which we could do now that my sister was in town. It's much less shocking to be caught drinking at four pm if BunnySister is doing it with you. She's the normal one.

My father dropped us off at our home and then went back to work, and my sister and I proceeded to kill a bottle of Captain Morgan and slap some paper on the presents we planned to give out. We started drunk dialing all our friends that have real jobs. We tried calling the local Applebees because the day bartender likes to sell the Colombian marching powder in eight-ounce increments, but abandoned the idea quickly. I clogged the toilet and then wrote about it in my blog, which for the most part is humiliating.

We bear hugged my parents when they returned from work. I was so trashed I didn't notice that they weren't very pleased with us and rather confused as to why my nose was taped closed with gift wrap tape. BunnySis and I went upstairs where I proceeded to break all her makeup. I suppose I feel bad about this, but if you get me trashed and put me around breakables, you can't expect any less.

This part goes a little foggy. My memory comes to in the bathroom of the club my parents belong to, a family club in which I was tossing around F-bombs looking like a chorus member of "Chicago" which two garish stripes of rouge angling into my temples.

BunnySis: "We're fiiiine."
Bunny: "Yeah. Yeah we're fiiiine."
BunnySis: "Yeah. Yeah I don get why mom'ssooooo pissed at ush."
Bunny: "Yeah. How many timesh have we pulled her drunk asshhh out of parties?" [Turns to see the blurry form of her mother opening a stall door]
Bunny: "Shit."
BunnySis: "Yeah. Yeah, sorry mom."

When we returned to the table my mother ordered us diet cokes and we protested "But mom! We'll loshe our buzzzzz!" I began to sing the "Old School" version of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," into my fork. My mother's anger melted, and she smiled. It's a good thing I'm willing to make an ass of myself at any old time.

The next day was Christmas eve. We set out in our Subaru outback for my grandmother's house in Oswego, New York, nature's shithole. It's right on Lake Ontario and so snowy and windy that people have to pull themselves from building to building with rope.

On the way there we stopped at a winery for a little tasting. I picked my five wines, got a buzz and burped far too loudly an d annoyed everyone. Then I rolled around on the floor with the standard poodle that lives at the winery. His name was Welly and he was my friend. My mother bought a few bottles of white wine with far too much sugar in it. Then she clogged the toilet of the winery. It runs in the genes. Or out of them.

We neared my grandmother's house. It was dreary outside my window. She lives in an old farmhouse that has been in my family for centuries. It lies on a few acres of land that used to be the cow salad bar, but is now overgrown with pine trees people steal during Christmas. On the inside, the house is very brown. Beige fixtures, cream carpets, taupe counters, eggshell ceilings, butternut couches, sandy curtains, etc. That is what my father's side of the family is like. Brown. The house was a dairy farm during the Great Depression, and everyone that's lived there since has suffered great depression. We can't make that "someone has to die before we can get to eat at the adult table" joke for fear it will come true. Take my great uncle Ray. He had cancer, not terminal cancer, just the regular kind. He didn't want to be a burden or a financial drain, so he went out back into a shed, put a shotgun in his mouth, pulled the trigger and died. We're not really supposed to talk about that, but fuck it.

My father is the eldest of five brown brothers, all droll but slightly witty, intelligent and handsome. They had a difficult life. At times they went without shoes and there wasn't much money for college so they had to work pretty hard to get degrees. They weren't the poorest of the poor, but nothing was truly easy. Today they are bankers, businessmen and computer specialists who wear sensible brown loafers.

When I was little I never spent much time with my father's side of the family. I was always disturbed by how sad they seemed in comparison to my mother's side, the slightly dysfunctional but loving side. No one on my father's side smiled much. When they hugged, they did it tentatively. There was so much brown. They never came to my dance recitals or school plays even though they lived just a stone's throw down the road. I wasn't supposed to talk about that. It was like my father spending ten hours in the woods chasing animals instead of going to church with us, it was just the way things were and I wasn't supposed to bring it up or challenge it.

This Christmas was fun. My cousin Kevin and I went to RIT together, and he was there with a sarcastic strumpet BunnySis and I put through the ringer. I hated her. She kept making snide remarks about my baby cousin, a boy I shared a child restraint harness with. We were hyper hypos together for Christ's sake. As soon as she left, we took Kevin and my cousin Nate to a bar to discuss the results of the interrogation.

Bunny: "Dump that cunt."
Kevin: "Yeah, I don't really like her. I'm just dating her to get to her friend."
Bunny: "Oh yeah. What's she like?"
Kevin: "She's a stripper."
Bunny: "Good work sweetpea."
Kevin: "Thanks."
Nate: "Yeah, I was pretty freaked out when she got all mad that you wanted to spend time with your cousins instead of doting on her. I nearly shit my pants when she gave you an ultimatum." [This is really funny because Nate shit his pants at every family get together till he was twelve years old. He would be really mad at me for writing this, but whatever. He shit his pants a lot]

At the bar I told a story about the time I stole a toy from BunnySis, and in retaliation she told me there was no Santa Claus. Kevin said, "My dad used to have the neighbor write us notes from Santa so we would think he was real."

____________________________

When my uncle Mark got divorced no one knew about it. My aunt Jackie didn't show up for any more Christmases and that was that. No one was supposed to talk about it, and Mark seemed fine. Kevin and his little brother lived with their mother and my uncle Mark was really involved in their life. It was hard to tell if he cared or not. But the year he got divorced was the last year he dressed up as Santa for all of us on Christmas eve. My aunt Cathy took over, and I had to admit she was a little creepy with her elaborate Santa mask, like St. Nick at an upscale orgy in the Hamptons. She freaked us out, but we did the usual as best as we could -- play, drink soda, and rip open presents. We knew it was time to go home when Nate shit his pants.

Christmas was the only time I saw these people. They were great people, but I wouldn't call them when I needed to hear a friendly voice. I suppose they felt the same way about me.

____________________________

I used to be brown too. My struggle with depression started at twelve, and hasn't really ended yet. It probably never will. In college I was very lazy about it. I lived on my own and could be as melancholy as a Morrissey song without having to answer to anyone. I stopped eating and sleeping. I never went to class and was fired from my job because I didn't feel like I could leave the house.

People who haven't been depressed would never understand what it feels like, because it simply feels like nothing. But nothing is the worst feeling of all, because you want to do nothing, go nowhere, and see no one. I couldn't handle feeling like that. I was a disgrace and a burden to my family. I could take it anymore, so I decided to kill myself. People say this is precisely the kind of thing you aren't supposed to talk about, but fuck it. People don't know shit.

I drank as much Jack Daniels as I could, and ate two bottles of pain medication my friends and I would take recreationally. I woke up a day and a half later on living room floor covered in vomit and two hundred CD cases I had somehow tipped onto myself. What was I trying to do? Play some music? I still don't know. What's more, I'm not really sure how I vomited on my back all night and the next day and didn't die of it. At the time I was livid. I was flighty and incapable of killing myself too. One more thing I couldn't do.

I held a two-day pity party at which I was the only attendee. Then I got into my car. It was a snowy day, which isn't rare in upstate New York, but on this day it was unusually icy. I was traveling south on a main road in Rochester when the idea of a head-on collision suddenly seemed appealing. I swerved the wheel of my car into the path of a large truck, hit a patch of ice and landed in a ditch at the opposite side of the road with nary a scratch on me. I suck at killing myself.

My father came to visit me on a whim. I was busted and sent home for help. I stayed through the summer and did therapy and little waitressing job, and by the next fall I felt much more colorful. That was the fall my uncle Mark came to take Kevin and I out to dinner. I had to work, so I couldn't go.

A few days later Mark sold all of his belongings, drilled a hole between his bedroom wall and garage, started his car, laid down and died. I guess he thought he was a burden.

The line for calling hours went around the block. It was full of sobbing people to whom Mark was a Hockey coach, or pit crewmember, or friendly neighbor. When it was my turn at the casket I knelt and pretended I knew a prayer, but all I could think about was the brown guy with the uneasy smile I knew from my childhood. The guy who would let me sit on his knee and go through my extravagant list of presents. The guy who would let Kevin and I get into shitloads of trouble when his wife wasn't around. The guy who gave me a chocolate bar when my mother had me on a strict ADHD diet. Here was that guy. Dead. For no reason.

I don't remember much of that funeral. Only that my father and his three remaining brothers sat in the front row, and I sat behind them. They all wore brown suits. At the end of the row was one empty chair and it was an accident. But we all saw it; four brown tweed backs in white leather chairs, and an empty fifth one.

The next day I began to write. I am the doll on the Island of Lost Toys; I am the black sheep. I will talk about things I'm not supposed to bring up, and I will be a burden, because some family traditions are bullshit.

Posted by jlgolson at 10:47 PM

Print Friendly · Digg it · del.icio.us · StumbleUpon · Netscape

Comment Policy:

Anonymous comments are allowed. All anonymous comments and comments from those not registered with TypeKey are moderated. They WILL NOT appear until they are read and approved by a moderator.

It is strongly encouraged that you sign up and login with a TypeKey account. Once you do that, your comments will be immediately posted.