Me Talk Pretty One Day, Page 5

  It was my father, speaking in a loud voice to the woman seated beside him.

  “Hey, sport,” he called, “what do you charge for a shave?”

  The audience began to laugh and enjoy themselves.

  “He should probably open a barbershop, because he’s sure not going anywhere in the show-business world.”

  It was him again, and once more the audience laughed. I was spitting tacks, trying my hardest to concentrate but thinking, Doesn’t he see the Botticelli hanging on the wall behind me? Has he no idea how to behave in an art museum? This is my work, damn it. This is what I do, and here he’s treating it like some kind of a joke. You are a dead man, Lou Sedaris. And I’ll see to that personally.

  Immediately following the performance a small crowd gathered around my father, congratulating him on his delivery and comic timing.

  “Including your father was an excellent idea,” the curator said, handing me my check. “The piece really came together once you loosened up and started making fun of yourself.”

  Not only did my father ask for a cut of the money, but he also started calling with suggestions for future pieces. “What if you were to symbolize man’s inhumanity to man by heating up a skillet of plastic soldiers?”

  I told him that was the cheesiest idea I’d ever heard in my life and asked him to stop calling me with his empty little propositions. “I’m an artist!” I yelled. “I come up with the ideas. Me, not you. This isn’t some party game, it’s serious work, and I’d rather stick a gun to my head than listen to any more of your bullshit suggestions.”

  There was a brief pause before he said, “The bit with the gun just might work. Let me think about it and get back to you.”

  Eleven: My performing career effectively ended the day my drug dealer moved to Georgia to enter a treatment center. Since the museum I’d done a piece at a gallery and had another scheduled for the state university. “How can you do this to me?” I asked her. “You can’t move away, not now. Think of all the money I’ve spent on you. Don’t I deserve more than a week’s notice? And what do you need with a treatment center? People like you the way you are; what makes you think you need to change? Just cut back a little, and you’ll be fine. Please, you can’t do this to me. I have a piece to finish, goddamnit. I’m an artist and I need to know where my drugs are coming from.”

  Nothing I said would change her mind. I cashed in a savings bond left to me by my grandmother and used the money to buy what I hoped would be enough speed to get me through the month. It was gone in ten days, and with it went my ability to do anything but roll on the floor and cry. It would have made for a decent piece, but I couldn’t think about that at the time.

  Speed’s breathtaking high is followed by a crushing, suicidal depression. You’re forced to pay tenfold for all the fun you thought you were having. It’s torturous and demeaning, yet all you can think is that you want more. I might have thrown myself out the window, but I lived on the first floor and didn’t have the energy to climb the stairs to the roof. Everything ached, and even without the speed I was unable to sleep. Thinking I must have dropped a grain or two, I vacuumed the entire apartment with a straw up my nose, sucking up dead skin cells, Comet residue, and pulverized cat litter. Anything that traveled on the bottom of a shoe went up my nose.

  A week after my drugs ran out, I left my bed to perform at the college, deciding at the last minute to skip both the doughnut toss and the march of the headless plush toys. Instead, I just heated up a skillet of plastic soldiers, poured a milkshake over my head, and called it a night.

  A few of my former friends showed up at the performance, looking just as sweaty and desperate as I did. Following the piece, they invited themselves to my apartment and I welcomed them, hoping that somebody still had some drugs. It turned out that they were thinking the exact same thing. We sat around making small talk and watching one another’s hands. Someone would reach into his pocket and we’d all perk up until the hand returned bearing nothing but a cigarette. The shame was nothing I ever could have conveyed with thimbles or squirt guns filled with mayonnaise. A fistful of burning hair could not begin to represent the mess I had made of my life.

  I thought briefly of checking myself into a hospital, but I’d seen what those wards looked like and I’ve always hated having a roommate. Perhaps this was something that with hard work and determination I could overcome. Maybe I could sober up, get my personal life in order, and reevaluate my priorities. Chances were that I had no artistic talent whatsoever. If I were to face that fact, possibly I could move on with my life, maybe learn a trade and take pride in my ability to shingle roofs or knock the dents out of cars. There was no shame in working with your hands and returning home at night to a glass of ice water and the satisfaction that you’d brightened someone’s afternoon with a pock-free fender. Lots of people did things like that. You might not read their names in the magazines, but still they were out there, day after day, giving it all they had. Better yet, I decided — at the age of twenty-seven — to return to art school. They’d have plenty of drugs there.

  Twelve: I take my seat on the cold concrete floor, watching as a full-grown woman kneels before an altar made of fudge. She’s already put away a gingerbread cabin, two pints of ice cream, and a brood of marshmallow chicks — all without saying a word. The effect is excruciating, but I have no one but myself to blame. I find myself attending these performance pieces the same way certain friends drop by their AA meetings. I still do a lot of selfish and terrible things. I do not, however, treat myself to hot-cocoa enemas before an audience of invited guests. Minor as it seems, this has become something to celebrate.

  The woman onstage has tottered on stilts fashioned from empty cans of Slim-Fast. She’s taken her eating disorder on the road, conditioning her hair with whipped topping and rolling her bangs in finger-size breakfast sausages. Just when I think she’s finished with all her props and is ready to toss up an ending, out comes a bust of Venus made from cake frosting. Looking around, I notice my fellow audience members examining their cuticles and staring with great purpose at the exit sign. Like me, they’re thinking of something positive to say once the spectacle is over and the performer takes up her post beside the front door. The obvious comment would come in the form of a question, that being, “What in God’s name possessed you to do such a thing, and why is it that nobody stopped you?” I’m not here to cause trouble, so it’s probably best to remark upon a single detail. When the time comes, I take her sticky hand in mine and ask how she manages to keep her frosting so stiff. This is neither damning nor encouraging. It is simply my password out onto the street, where I can embrace life with a renewed sense of liberty. The girl standing in front of the delicatessen stoops to tie her shoe. I watch as farther down the block a white-haired man tosses a business card into the trash. I turn for a moment at the sound of a car alarm and then continue along my way, unencumbered. No one expects me to applaud or consider the relationship between the shoelace and the white-haired man. The car alarm is not a metaphor, but just an unrehearsed annoyance. This is a new and brighter world, in which I am free to hurry along, celebrating my remarkable ability to walk, to run.

  You Can’t

  Kill the Rooster

  WHEN I WAS YOUNG, my father was transferred and our family moved from western New York State to Raleigh, North Carolina. IBM had relocated a great many northerners, and together we made relentless fun of our new neighbors and their poky, backward way of life. Rumors circulated that the locals ran stills out of their toolsheds and referred to their house cats as “good eatin’.” Our parents discouraged us from using the titles “ma’am” or “sir” when addressing a teacher or shopkeeper. Tobacco was acceptable in the form of a cigarette, but should any of us experiment with plug or snuff, we would automatically be disinherited. Mountain Dew was forbidden, and our speech was monitored for the slightest hint of a Raleigh accent. Use the word “y’all,” and before you knew it, you’d find yourself in a haystack French ki
ssing an underage goat. Along with grits and hush puppies, the abbreviated form of you all was a dangerous step on an insidious path leading straight to the doors of the Baptist church.

  We might not have been the wealthiest people in town, but at least we weren’t one of them.

  Our family remained free from outside influence until 1968, when my mother gave birth to my brother, Paul, a North Carolina native who has since grown to become both my father’s best ally and worst nightmare. Here was a child who, by the time he had reached the second grade, spoke much like the toothless fishermen casting their nets into Albemarle Sound. This is the grown man who now phones his father to say, “Motherfucker, I ain’t seen pussy in so long, I’d throw stones at it.”

  My brother’s voice, like my own, is high-pitched and girlish. Telephone solicitors frequently ask to speak to our husbands or request that we put our mommies on the line. The Raleigh accent is soft and beautifully cadenced, but my brother’s is a more complex hybrid, informed by his professional relationships with marble-mouthed, deep-country work crews and his abiding love of hard-core rap music. He talks so fast that even his friends have a hard time understanding him. It’s like listening to a foreigner and deciphering only shit, motherfucker, bitch, and the single phrase You can’t kill the Rooster.

  “The Rooster” is what Paul calls himself when he’s feeling threatened. Asked how he came up with that name, he says only, “Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can’t kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up sometimes, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I’m saying?”

  It often seems that my brother and I were raised in two completely different households. He’s eleven years younger than I am, and by the time he reached high school, the rest of us had all left home. When I was young, we weren’t allowed to say “shut up,” but once the Rooster hit puberty it had become acceptable to shout, “Shut your motherfucking hole.” The drug laws had changed as well. “No smoking pot” became “no smoking pot in the house,” before it finally petered out to “please don’t smoke any more pot in the living room.”

  My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a completely different species. “I think it was very nice of Paul to give me this vase,” she once said, arranging a bouquet of wildflowers into the skull-shaped bong my brother had left on the dining-room table. “It’s nontraditional, but that’s the Rooster’s way. He’s a free spirit, and we’re lucky to have him.”

  Like most everyone else in our suburban neighborhood, we were raised to meet a certain standard. My father expected me to attend an Ivy League university, where I’d make straight A’s, play football, and spend my off-hours strumming guitar with the student jazz combo. My inability to throw a football was exceeded only by my inability to master the guitar. My grades were average at best, and eventually I learned to live with my father’s disappointment. Fortunately there were six of us children, and it was easy to get lost in the crowd. My sisters and I managed to sneak beneath the wire of his expectations, but we worried about my brother, who was seen as the family’s last hope.

  From the age of ten, Paul was being dressed in Brooks Brothers suits and tiny, clip-on rep ties. He endured trumpet lessons, soccer camp, church-sponsored basketball tournaments, and after-school sessions with well-meaning tutors who would politely change the subject when asked about the Rooster’s chances of getting into Yale or Princeton. Fast and well-coordinated, Paul enjoyed sports but not enough to take them seriously. School failed to interest him on any level, and the neighbors were greatly relieved when he finally retired his trumpet. His response to our father’s impossible and endless demands has, over time, become something of a mantra. Short and sweet, repeated at a fever pitch, it goes simply, “Fuck it,” or on one of his more articulate days, “Fuck it, motherfucker. That shit don’t mean fuck to me.”

  My brother politely ma’ams and sirs all strangers but refers to friends and family his father included, as either “bitch” or “motherfucker.” Friends are appalled at the way he speaks to his only remaining parent. The two of them once visited my sister Amy and me in New York City, and we celebrated with a dinner party. When my father complained about his aching feet, the Rooster set down his two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and removed a fistful of prime rib from his mouth, saying, “Bitch, you need to have them ugly-ass bunions shaved down is what you need to do. But you can’t do shit about it tonight, so lighten up, motherfucker.”

  All eyes went to my father, who chuckled, saying only, “Well, I guess you have a point.”

  A stranger might reasonably interpret my brother’s language as a lack of respect and view my father’s response as a form of shameful surrender. This, though, would be missing the subtle beauty of their relationship.

  My father is the type who once recited a bawdy limerick, saying, “A woman I know who’s quite blunt / had a bear trap installed in her… Oh, you know. It’s a base, vernacular word for the vagina.” He can absolutely kill a joke. When pushed to his limit, this is a man who shouts, “Fudge,” a man who curses drivers with a shake of his fist and a hearty “G.D. you!” I’ve never known him to swear, yet he and my brother seem to have found a common language that eludes the rest of us.

  My father likes to talk about money. Spending doesn’t interest him in the least, especially as he grows older. He prefers money as a concept and often uses terms such as annuity and fiduciary, words definitely not listed in the dictionary of mindless entertainment. It puts my ears to sleep, but still, when he talks I pretend to listen to him, if only because it seems like the mature thing to do. When my father talks finance to my brother, Paul will cut him off, saying, “Fuck the stock talk, hoss, I ain’t investing in shit.” This rarely ends the economics lecture, but my brother wins bonus points for boldly voicing his uninterest, just as my father would do were someone to corner him and talk about Buddhism or the return of the clog. The two of them are unapologetically blunt. It’s a quality my father admires so much, he’s able to ignore the foul language completely. “That Paul,” he says, “now there’s a guy who knows how to communicate.”

  When words fail him, the Rooster has been known to communicate with his fists, which, though quick and solid, are no larger than a couple of tangerines. At five foot four, he’s shorter than I am, stocky but not exactly intimidating. The year he turned thirty we celebrated Christmas at the home of my older sister Lisa. Paul arrived a few hours late with scraped palms and a black eye. There had been some encounter at a bar, but the details were sketchy.

  “Some motherfucker told me to get the fuck out of his motherfucking face, so I said, ‘Fuck off, fuckface’”

  “Then what?”

  “Then he turned away and I reached up and punched him on the back of his motherfucking neck.”

  “What happened next?”

  “What the fuck do you think happened next, bitch? I ran like hell and the motherfucker caught up with me in the fucking parking lot. He was all beefy, all flexed up and shit. The motherfucker had a taste for blood and he just pummeled my ass.”

  “When did he stop?”

  My brother tapped his fingertips against the tabletop for a few moments before saying, “I’m guessing he stopped when he was fucking finished.”

  The physical pain had passed, but it bothered Paul that his face was “all lopsided and shit for the fucking holidays.” That said, he retreated to the bathroom with my sister Amy’s makeup kit and returned to the table with two black eyes, the second drawn on with mascara. This seemed to please him, and he wore his matching bruises for the rest of the evening.

  “Did you get a load of that fake black eye?” my father asked. “That guy ought to do makeup for the movies. I’m telling you, the kid’s a real artist.”

  Unlike the rest of us, the Rooster has always enjoyed our father’s support and encouragement. With the dream of college officially dead and
buried, he sent my brother to technical school, hoping he might develop an interest in computers. Three weeks into the semester, Paul dropped out, and my father, convinced that his son’s lawn-mowing skills bordered on genius, set him up in the landscaping business. “I’ve seen him in action, and what he does is establish a pattern and really tackle it!”

  Eventually my brother fell into the floor-sanding business. It’s hard work, but he enjoys the satisfaction that comes with a well-finished rec room. He thoughtfully called his company Silly P’s Hardwood Floors, Silly P being the name he would have chosen were he a rap star. When my father suggested that the word silly might frighten away some of the upper-tier customers, Paul considered changing the name to Silly Fucking P’s Hardwood Floors. The work puts him in contact with plumbers and carpenters from such towns as Bunn and Clayton, men who offer dating advice such as “If she’s old enough to bleed, she’s old enough to breed.”

  “Old enough to what?” my father asks. “Oh, Paul, those aren’t the sort of people you need to be associating with. What are you doing with hayseeds like that? The goal is to better yourself. Meet some intellectuals. Read a book!”

  After all these years our father has never understood that we, his children, tend to gravitate toward the very people he’s spent his life warning us about. Most of us have left town, but my brother remains in Raleigh. He was there when our mother died and still, years later, continues to help our father grieve: “The past is gone, hoss. What you need now is some motherfucking pussy.” While my sisters and I offer our sympathy long-distance, Paul is the one who arrives at our father’s house on Thanksgiving day, offering to prepare traditional Greek dishes to the best of his ability. It is a fact that he once made a tray of spanakopita using Pam rather than melted butter. Still, though, at least he tries.

  When a hurricane damaged my father’s house, my brother rushed over with a gas grill, three coolers full of beer, and an enormous Fuck-It Bucket — a plastic pail filled with jawbreakers and bite-size candy bars. (“When shit brings you down, just say ‘fuck it,’ and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.”) There ws no electrictricity for close to a week.The yard was practicaly cleared of trees, and rain fell through the dozens of holes punched into the roof. It was a difficult time, but the two of them stuck it out, my brother placing his small, scarred hand on my father’s shoulder to say, “Bitch, I’m here to tell you that it’s going to be all right. We’ll get throught this shit, motherfucker, just you wait.”