THE NAKED ANIMAL

Here’s an episode from my adolescence that came back to me in vivid detail once I reported that I could barely remember anything from that period in my last post:

I was 12 years old, and I hadn’t made it to the National roller skating meet like I had the two years before, so my summer stretched aridly before me without the extra hours of practice and the anticipation of a cross-country trip in August. My dad came to the rescue with the offer of a visit to the Northeast, my and my sister’s first. I can’t remember if this was before or after he’d divorced his short-lived second wife, but the main purpose of the trip was to meet his new fiancee and her eight-year-old son in Philadelphia, then go on for a whirlwind tour of Washington DC, the Jersey Shore, and New York City.

These people were to be part of my new “family,” but I’d already banished that homey concept to the hinterlands of mass wishful thinking after seeing all the ill-will that existed between the members of my own little clan, so I couldn’t have cared less about that sector of the situation. All I wanted to do was travel. I had already fallen in love with traveling because it allowed me to let down my defenses just a bit. Everyone was usually interested enough in something else to be too worried about whether or not I was acting “effeminate,” and I didn’t have to watch my every little move. By 12, I had developed an icy, arrogant, angular facade with which I cut through assaults like a highly sophisticated prey animal eluding certain death. Whatever there was of a real me was somewhere deep inside simply operating the machinery. On the plane, my dad told me and my sister that his fiancee’s son acted “weird” (a blanket term that both my parents used to mean anything even slightly out of the ordinary). He didn’t elaborate, but from the rather queasy look on his face when he said it, I could tell that I was not to be the designated problem child in this particular combination of human elements, and my little tiny self inside all that elaborate armor took a welcome sigh of relief.

Now, my dad used to be someone who was so scared of anything that was out of the ordinary that he regularly derided everything that didn’t fit into his horribly constricted frame of reference. Another way of putting that would be to say he was a bigot. He actually didn’t want us to watch The Jeffersons during our weekends at his place because he didn’t want black people on his television set, and he would fall into a lisping, limp-wristed, stereotyped impersonation of a “homo” every time he saw a man so much as cross his legs. Real men were supposed to simply rest an ankle on the opposite knee, so as to give ample breathing room to their all-important reproductive device. My dad was pretty much obsessed with drawing a wide line between the behavior of “men” and the behavior of “women,” and anyone who didn’t fit into one camp or the other was automatically “weird,” which, coming from his mouth, was like an edict exiling them from the human race. I hated him for this and secretly wished him some sort of revenge for such repulsive behavior.

I could hardly have chosen a more effective agent of vengeance than my soon-to-be little stepbrother; because that roly-poly, not-very-attractive eight-year-old kid with a thick Philly accent still ranks as one of the most raging nelly queens I’ve ever come across in my life–no exaggeration. The first thing he did upon greeting me and my sister–he seemed so excited at the prospect of siblings!–was usher us into his room and show us a full-color, almost life-sized poster of Andy Gibb that hung over his bed. After gushing a bit about how much he loved Andy Gibb and putting on his new album, he got on his bed and carefully planted a big wet kiss on the Gibbster’s crotch shot. My sister and I had no idea what to think, so we giggled nervously and silently guffawed at each other in a swirl of shock, excitement, and embarrassment.

So that’s the kind of “weird” my dad had meant, I remember thinking. I could see that he couldn’t even stand to listen to the child talk. Every time a word escaped his lips, my dad would turn away with a red face, his neck veins straining uncontrollably. I could actually hear his teeth gnash. Ha, I thought. Ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Inside, I couldn’t stop laughing, though outside I was just as repelled by the kid as my dad was. The fact that he existed at all made my years of careful facade-building completely meaningless. He was the first overtly “gay-acting” person I’d ever been around in the flesh, and there was something freeing about it, even if he was only eight. I couldn’t believe that he was allowed to get away with such behavior, and my manufactured sense of appeasement and assimilation was brutally mangled by the total lack of repercussions he experienced for his “girly” behavior.

We went on day trips to Washington DC and New York City, but I don’t remember much except the way I was constantly charting my dad’s reaction to his future stepson’s every move and utterance. In DC, the White House was much smaller than I thought it would be, and the Washington Monument was much larger. What I remember most vividly is how my dad said something nasty about him to me every time he was out of his fiancee’s earshot (I don’t remember their names). Since it was obvious that he’d already been talked down from interfering with the kid’s girly behavior by his mother (it must have been DAMNED GOOD sex for him to put up with that), he laid into him for being fat, eating like a pig, or saying “yous,” in the old-school Philly manner, to mean you-plural. “Yous all get together so I can snap a shot,” the child would say, and my dad would go, “Listen to that, he can’t even speak English!” His remarks were poisonous and continuous, and they painfully subdued me into a catatonic silence. There was plenty of tension between him and his fiancee, too, obviously over her son, and that made for extreme emotional tautness no matter what we were doing. In New York City, near the end of our day when we were hurrying a bit to make it back to Philly, my dad started walking too fast for the kid to keep up with us, muttering under his breath, “get a move on, you little fatso,” and whispering an evil little laugh. I remember with a kind of shame the false camaraderie I felt with my dad simply because I could keep up.

My dad and his fiancee fought long into the night after we got home. I couldn’t sleep at all, but my sister was safely dreamside in her own sophisticated shell of armor, and the dear little flamer was snoring up a storm. At some point my dad came out in his underwear to get something to drink, and got very angry when he saw that I was awake. “What are you still doing up?” he hissed, as if children were supposed to sleep peacefully through absolutely anything.

At some time during the wee hours, I did drift off to sleep, and in the morning, my dad, sister and I went out alone to do errands and such so that his fiancee and her son could have some time alone. Talks were being had. Peace was being made, I assumed, by the woman in the equation. As we drove along the brick-heavy streets of Philadelphia, Jose Feliciano came on the radio singing his version of The Doors’ “Light My Fire,” a slickly produced, quietly resonant take with nothing but Feliciano’s acoustic guitar as accompaniment. My dad turned up the radio loud, and went on and on about how amazing it was that Feliciano was blind, and he sang and played the guitar like that. I remember thinking that was strange logic, like the rest of my dad’s surmises about human reality: Who needed to see to be able to play the guitar and sing?

From that point on, both my Dad and the kid were a little quieter, a little less themselves; the fiancee had succeeded in modulating their behavior around each other for the time being. At the Jersey shore, where we spent a long weekend, I took center stage by having an allergy fit during which I could barely breathe for several hours–one of many such episodes I had as an adolescent, which I now see as physical expressions of my repressed emotional state of near-asphyxiation.

When we got home, my dad told us that he and the fiancee had decided to break it off. “The kid comes with the deal,” he told us, “and I just couldn’t deal with that one.” My sister and I said we understood. But as for me, I didn’t understand a thing, and I didn’t want to, certainly nothing about my dad and his feelings. I was too filled with rancor about the way I’d been pounded into the ground all my life for being different to care about trying to understand anyone else’s paltry little emotional bullshit. Now I knew that there were plenty of people out there–even little kids–who were different, very different indeed, and they seemed a HELL of a lot happier than I did.

I’m not sure how much my queeny little almost-stepbrother had to do with it, but it was around that time that I started really feeling my anger as well as my depthless fear. That summer, I decided firmly that any mother fucking tight-assed bigoty bully, well-meaning, cud-chewing, butt-stupid housewife or pin-headed, inbred redneck twit who wanted to try force-feeding me shit about what was “normal” and what wasn’t could go to hell and choke to death on the devil’s dick. I wasn’t tough enough to back this kind of anger up physically, nor did I think physical–or even verbal--confrontation was very clever, but that’s the way I felt, and I felt it so strongly that I was constantly growling under my breath, ready to pounce.

To somewhat slake this irrepressible anger, and to fulfill my truly urgent need to deflect the constant attacks I faced, I developed a weapon far more effective than answering assault with assault. It’s one that I still use today when necessary, though most of my childhood armory has disintegrated. The weapon is simply a look, but not a simple one. It’s a quick, deep, icy stare that says the following: You are so pathetically atavistic and simple-minded that I can barely believe you exist, and if you don’t leave me alone and high-tail it out of my sight in the next two seconds, you know–you know deep down in your soul–that I could inflict some nasty motherfucking pain on you in ways that you can’t even imagine in your woefully unevolved state. It’s extremely efficient, and an indispensable tool for a post-apocalyptic (It already happened, didn’t you know?) warrior pacifist.

I don’t live anymore in a place where I have to defend myself from rabid bigots at every turn, but “the ice” sure does come in handy for deflecting Jesus freaks, crazies and rampant assholes; and it works even through two layers of glass and a rearview mirror–extremely handy for the asshole-laden streets of Los Angeles. So I suppose I should thank that dear little Andy Gibb lover for waking me up decisively to the fact that, as Andy’s more eloquent brothers (cousins?) put it, “...we’re living in a world of fools, breaking us down, when they all should let us be...”

Categories: backstory, family, travel