Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir Read online

  Lisa giggled and stuck her hand up the ass of the dead squirrel. The strain had been too much for her fragile little mind. At the age of only six, she had snapped. As she shoved the fresh carcass up to her elbow, I made a mental note to start checking out the backs of milk cartons, certain that my real parents, who had most likely misplaced me at a movie theater, must be very worried about me by now. I assured myself that they were probably at a PETA meeting, making large donations in the name of their long-lost daughter. “Oh, she would have loved this,” my real mother would say consolingly to my father (the count) as they worked diligently to spread their successful prairie dog rescue mission to neighboring counties.

  Many years later, my sister had a daughter named Gabi. My father (apparently misinterpreting my need to bring up the dead-squirrel story every Christmas for the rest of my life as homage to happier times, rather than the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder) decided he should bless his four-year-old granddaughter with the never-ending therapy that resulted from the talking-magic-carcass-in-a-box. He’d tanned a raccoon body, placed the stiffened corpse in a large cereal box, and had hidden it under the guest bed (apparently waiting for the perfect moment to scar Gabi for life), and then he forgot all about it. Weeks later, Gabi found the mutilated raccoon carcass under the bed and (thinking it to be a very stiff puppet) wandered around the house playing with her new friend and freaking the shit out of the cat. She crept into my father’s room, where he was taking a nap, and quietly laid the dead raccoon on my father’s pillow, like a message from the Godfather. The dead raccoon’s shriveled paw gently grazed my father’s sleeping face as Gabi moved the raccoon closer so it could give her grandfather an Eskimo kiss. “Papaw,” she whispered sweetly, “wake up and say hewwo.”

  This is the point when my dad screamed like a little girl, and then Gabi screamed at his screaming, and she threw her hands up, and the dead raccoon went flying across the room into the kitchen and landed on my sister’s foot. A normal person would have passed out or at least yelled, “What the fuck?!” but at that point in her life, flying dead raccoons and screaming people in the house were pretty much normal, so Lisa shrugged and went back to making her Pop-Tart.

  Lisa called me to share the story later, and I promised to buy Gabi a pony for avenging us, but then later I felt a little sorry for my dad, because waking up to find a dead raccoon staring at you through eyeless sockets as it caresses your cheek is not something anyone with his high blood pressure should have to go through. Then again, giving me a mutilated magical squirrel in a cracker box is kinda fucked up, too, so I guess we’re about even.

  As an aside, I could not find a photo of Stanley the mutilated squirrel (probably because no one ever thinks to take pictures of squirrel carcasses until it’s too late), but I do have a picture of my dad bottle-feeding a baby porcupine in a spare tire, and that seems somehow fitting and slightly redeeming. I did, however, just notice that my dad is holding the porcupine up with a paint stick and there are paint drops all over the tire. So it’s entirely possible he’s feeding the porcupine house paint. Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

  Don’t Tell Your Parents

  Nearly every weekend when I was a kid, my father’s Czechoslovakian parents would pick up my sister and me, and drive us away with them to their house in a nearby town. My grandmother, whom we called Grandlibby, was one of the sweetest and most patient women ever to grace the planet. I suspect most people feel that way about their grandmothers, but this was the same woman who, when pushed, would describe Hitler as a “sad little man who probably didn’t get hugged enough when he was little,” and would say only of Satan, “I’m not a fan.”

  My grandfather seemed to view the overwhelming cheerfulness of his wife as some sort of dare, and set out to balance out her effect on the world by being just generally put-out about everything. He was harmless under the gruff demeanor, but we always gave him a wide berth as he stalked through the house, muttering angrily to himself in Czech (probably about how much he wished he had a cane to hit people with). Grandlibby would always smile lovingly at him and patiently humor whatever it was he was pissed off about at the moment, as she quietly shooed us all out of the room until he had time to watch Bonanza and calm down. I’m not sure how much of her superhuman patience was love, and how much was simply self-preservation.

  According to family legend, when my great-great-great-aunt was in her thirties, she sat down at the breakfast table and her husband drove a nail through the back of her skull and then buried her in the backyard. I’ve been told this was totally kosher at the time. The backyard burial, that is. Not the nail-through-the-head thing. Nails in the head have always been frowned on, even in Texas. There’s no real proof any of this happened, but my great-great-great-uncle’s alleged deathbed confession to killing his wife (and also to setting his father on fire a few years before that) was considered fact in our family. My grandfather said that after the confession, several members of our family dug up his great-aunt and found the nail still embedded in her skull. Then they buried her again, without informing the police, because this was before CSI: Miami. I’d pointed out that digging up a family member’s corpse just to check for skull holes is almost as bizarre as murdering someone with a nail through the head, but Grampa disagreed and mumbled grumpily about “kids today not understanding family responsibilities.” I sometimes wondered whether my grandmother was that inhumanly good-natured only because she was trying to avoid getting a nail in the head. I doubt it, though. Grampa wasn’t that great with tools.

  Deep down he was a good man. You could tell he felt uncomfortable around children, but we didn’t hold it against him, as the feeling was mutual. He’d had a series of strokes in his sixties, which caused him to blink one eye involuntarily, and he became convinced that the women of their church would think he was luridly winking at them, so he began wearing dark-tinted Roy Orbison glasses, which, accompanied by his stoic demeanor, thick old-world Czech accent, and his penchant for wearing undershirts and dark suits, gave him the air of being the head of a Mafia family. Neighbors treated him with a quiet respect, perhaps fearing that he might put a hit out on them, and more than once I heard him referred to as “The Terminator.”

  Grampa did everything at his own pace, a speed that my sister and I referred to as “when snails attack.” It was most obvious when he was driving. He was almost legally blind, and the dark glasses were helping no one, certainly not anyone sharing the road with him. He tempered these limitations by driving about thirty miles under the speed limit at all times. My grandparents’ house was only about ten miles from ours, but the ride there would necessitate sandwiches packed for the trip, and several books to keep us occupied. Once, on a particularly slow journey, my sister realized that she needed to go to the bathroom, and I tried to convince her to hold it, but she couldn’t, so Grampa turned toward a gas station. He suddenly swerved, insisting that a cougar had just darted out in front of the car. We had all seen the cougar he was referring to. It was a double-wide mobile home that had been parked by the side of the road for at least twenty years. Lisa and I calmed ourselves in the knowledge that even if Grampa did run into something, at this speed we’d probably just gently bounce off it. We often contemplated leaping out of the car and running the last few blocks to our grandparents’ house, fairly certain that we could make it there in time to try on Grampa’s spare hearing aids before they ever pulled into the driveway and realized we were missing from the backseat.

  Our grandparents’ house was like Caligula’s palace, as my grandfather was too distracted by being indignant at the existence of cats (which he trapped in his backyard and sent home with us), and my grandmother was too sweet to say no to anything. Sharp knives, chocolates, small fires, late-night cable television . . . nothing was out of bounds here. Lunches would consist of fried eggs floating on syrup, mashed potatoes mixed with whipped cream, and homemade French fries dripping with lard. For dinner, Grandlibby would make a few pans of half-ba
ked brownies, resulting in a mushy brownie-salmonella-pudding concoction that could only truly be enjoyed when eaten with the fingers . . . rolling the doughy mess into large chocolate speedballs.

  After every bite Grandlibby would repeat her mantra: “Now, don’t tell your parents about this.” I would mumble a quick assent, too jacked up on a syrup high to do more. My sister managed a nod as she sucked down a pint of ketchup straight from the bottle. Grampa would wander in, muttering disapprovingly about our poor food choices, and my grandmother would look straight at him in wide-eyed surprise and then agree sincerely, as if she had never considered that an all-taffy breakfast would be an unhealthy idea. Then she’d sweetly thank him for his good advice, and go make him comfortable in his easy chair before returning to the kitchen to quietly suggest that we make peanut-butter-and-sugar-cube milk shakes. Inevitably, my grandfather would return a half-hour later and demand to know what the hell was going on, and my grandmother would look clueless and adorable as she pretended to understand for the first time that sugar cubes weren’t a garnish. Her innocent face was irreproachable and he’d sigh deeply, walking away, while muttering that she was becoming senile. She wasn’t. She knew exactly what she was doing and had perfected the art of doing whatever she wanted to do in order to make life happy, while avoiding the kinds of arguments that led to nail attacks.

  As the night progressed, my grandfather would go to sleep, and we would sink further into our own childlike brand of debauchery. Our cousin Michelle, who was a year younger than me, would come over, and the night would turn full-force into the type of self-harm affair that only imaginative children with limited supervision can ever fully achieve.

  In spite of the fact that the entire house was rigged with safety in mind, we were able to turn this to meet our own needs. Whereas some grandparents would lay down those plastic mats in the bathtub to keep from slipping, my grandparents had taken this a step further and had covered all usable walkways in the house with a thick yellow, plastic covering for the carpeting. We’d discovered that what kept the plastic mats so well anchored to the floor was a sea of one-inch spikes on the underside, jutting down into the gold shag carpet. Once we had reached the highest plane of thought, reserved only for yogis and children deep in the throes of a sugar overdose, we would turn the mats upside down and practice walking over our homemade bed of nails. Being younger, Michelle and Lisa were required to carry large plaster urns or heavy furniture to compensate for their smaller frames. I was allowed to walk without added weight in light of the fact that I’d had both of my big toenails sheared off by broken glass while wading barefoot in the swollen storm drains only hours earlier. “Tell your parents you fell while I was reading you the Bible,” Grandlibby suggested helpfully.

  In the morning we would go swimming. My grandparents weren’t poor, but they were the type of people to save and reuse tinfoil, always certain that another depression was looming around the corner, so they met the challenge of creating a pool for their grandchildren by salvaging three fiberglass bathtub shells that someone was throwing away. We would plug up the drain holes and fill the tubs with the garden hose outside. Grandlibby would subtly suggest that we allow the sun to warm up the frigid water in the tubs, but after a night of overindulgence and general debauchery we could not yet begin to temper ourselves. We entered the tubs, breaking the thin layer of frost that was beginning to form on the top of the water, our lips and fingers turning a faint blue, assuring one another that even if this did lead to pneumonia, it would most likely strike later, during the school week.

  Regardless of how dangerous the activity, Grandlibby would always be standing nearby with a cherry Shasta, a first-aid kit, and a loving look of panicked resignation. As I prepared to leap off the roof of their house onto the couch pillows below, it occurred to me that this might not be a great idea, but I knew that I’d be much more likely to hurt myself climbing back down the rusty barbecue-pit chimney pipe that I’d used as an impromptu trellis. Grandlibby murmured something in Czechoslovakian that sounded suspiciously like cursing. Lisa’s advice was much more helpful. “Tuck and roll!”

  ONE OF OUR FAVORITE PASTIMES was to roam the neighborhood alleys, looking in trash cans and dumpsters for hidden treasures. Discarded Christmas trees, water-damaged books, three-legged chairs, love letters from mistresses, and stained clothing: These were all our personal booty. Because I was the tallest and had the most recent tetanus shots, I felt it was my duty to dig farthest into the trash, certain that if I applied myself, one day I would find a large wad of cash, a bag of misplaced heroin, or possibly a human hand.

  I knew my hard work had not been in vain the day I pulled out the stained Playboy magazine, its pages stuck together with (what I now hope was) dried orange juice. At age nine, this was my first real look at full nudity that didn’t involve a National Geographic exposé. We brought the magazine back to our grandparents’ lawn, and my cousin and I settled out in the yard to examine these women, who I was surprised to discover did not have breasts that sagged down to their navels, and who all seemed to have names that ended with two e’s. We turned to the centerfold, a well-endowed blonde called “Candee.” Grandlibby tried to distract us away from the magazine with the tempting combination of a ladder and an umbrella, but we were way too sucked into the Playboy to listen to her suggestions that the magazine was “rubbish.” My grandfather peered at us from the door and muttered loudly to himself about how little respect kids had for lawns nowadays. I have no idea whether he even noticed the torrid magazine we were engrossed in, but he continued to grumble as he stalked into the house, possibly looking for some small nails.

  “Hey, Grandlibby?” I asked. “What’s a ‘turn-on’?”

  She paled visibly, looking mildly ill. “Well,” she said . . . struggling for words, “it’s . . . um . . . the things that make you happy, I suppose?”

  I turned to my cousin. “My turn-ons are Rainbow Brite and unicorns.”

  Michelle smiled back, her two front teeth missing. “My turn-ons are Monchhichis. And Tubble Gum.”

  Grandlibby issued a terse, strangled laugh. “Yeah. I could be wrong about that. I don’t speak real great English, you know. Why don’t you just never use that phrase again, okay?” She excused herself to go into the house. We could hear something that sounded like a prayer coming from within, but we were too fascinated with these women and their flimsy-looking (and ill-fitting) support garments to investigate any further.

  Suddenly the bright, sunny day erupted into a violent hailstorm. We ran toward the porch, covering our heads with the magazine. Grandlibby stepped outside authoritatively, with one eyebrow cocked. “So. You see what happens when you look at dirty pictures?” she intoned knowingly. “It hails. And do you know where hail comes from?” she asked sweetly.

  “Cumulous clouds?” I volunteered. I had recently made a B-plus in science, and I felt moderately sure this was the right answer.

  “No,” Grandlibby replied. “Hail comes from hell. The devil sent it because he’s happy that you’re reading evil garbage.”

  Michelle and I looked at each other. It had seemed suspicious for a hailstorm to erupt on a perfectly clear day, but we sensed that Grandlibby’s logic was flawed. If the devil was happy, then why would he send hail to distract us from our newfound love of pornography? “Certainly,” we thought, “she must be confused.” But what did worry us was the fact that the hailstorm had occurred only seconds after we’d heard Grandlibby praying in the house. It was disconcerting. Did my grandmother have some kind of direct line to God? Had all those years of funneling money to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker finally paid off? We weren’t sure, but felt it was better not to chance it. I placed the Playboy back on top of the neighbor’s trash can, feeling that if we could no longer partake in its wonder, surely the next dumpster divers would appreciate my generosity and charity, qualities I felt sure God would admire.

  Years later I realized that my grandmother had been right all along about the magazine being ru
bbish, and I happily bypassed the glossy but shallow Playboys for her old, battered copies of Housewife Confessions and True Hollywood Scandals, which allowed for almost no nudity but a much stronger story line than Playboy could ever deliver. “Don’t tell your parents,” Grandlibby said with a sweet grin.

  I smiled back. She had nothing to worry about.

  Jenkins, You Motherfucker

  When I was little my mother used to say that I had “a nervous stomach.” That was what we called “severe untreated anxiety disorder” back in the seventies, when everything was cured with Flintstone vitamins and threats to send me to live with my grandmother if I didn’t stop hiding from people in my toy box.

  By age seven I realized that there was something wrong with me, and that most children didn’t hyperventilate and throw up when asked to leave the house. My mother called me “quirky.” My teachers whispered “neurotic.” But deep down I knew there was a better word for what I was. Doomed.

  Doomed because every Christmas I would end up hiding under my aunt’s kitchen table from the sheer panic of being around so many people. Doomed because I couldn’t give a speech in class without breaking into uncontrollable hysterical laughter as the rest of my classmates looked on. Doomed because I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that something horrible and nameless was going to happen and that I was helpless to stop it. And not just the normal terrible things that small children worry about, like your father waking you up with a bloody hand puppet. Things like nuclear holocaust. Or carbon monoxide poisoning. Or having to leave the house and interact with people who weren’t my mother. It was most likely something I was just born with, but I can’t help but suspect that at least some of my social anxiety could be traced back to a single episode.