Dissentery

A brief history of my young life in under 30 minutes, revised

In my hurry to type this up, I had a shocking amount of spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as anachronistic memories, so I'm going back and patching some things up.

In order to understand me, Serge love, I suppose one must understand naturally the situations that caused me to become the person I am. As I start work soon, I will try as briefly as possible to outline the freudian explanations as to how I arrived comme ca.

Both sets of my grandparents married because they had to--maternal because of a "premature birth" situation, paternal because both were too old/plain to find anyone else. Both my grandmothers married men beneath their own class, which is perhaps what caused the strange sort of man-worship in their sons and a complete disinterest in their daughters-a way of compensating by creating heros to idolize. Both sides were LDS, though my maternal family babtized in rather late in my mother's life and have never been what one would call 'active.'

Though they met and fell in love at a church dance when they were 13, my parents were not faithful during their long 7 year courtship. My mom cheated on my dad at 13, and my dad found love in the arms of several girls. When he was 16 my dad fell in love with his debate partner, a non member introvert named Glenna, and got engaged to her at 18, even graduating early to go to the University of Missouri to be close to her. My mom was engaged to 4 other men. They started writing on his mission though, knew they were meant for each other, and got engaged when my dad caught Glenna cheating on him. My parents will be the first to admit that little more than lust and gut instinct induced them to matrimony.

My parents were forbiddden to marry because my mom was 'too low class' and my father was 'a homosexual communist', but when they threatened to elope my extended family begrudingly went to the wedding, hiring a drunk photographer as a way of really digging it in. My mother did not want to have kids, as her mother was emotionally and physically abusive, but after a set of religious experiences which I will not explain, my mother made the decision to stop taking birth control and I was concieved the next day. Interesting, as one is supposed to be unable to conceive until at least 6 weeks off of the pill.

I was born in Kansas City, MO on vacation but quickly brought to California where my father was just finishing up his degree from Stanford, where he transferred after marrying my mom. Though brilliant in her own right, my mother never finished Ricks College because she hated classes and the rules the school required, such as 'no gambling', 'no swearing', 'no smoking'-about half way through her freshman year she shaved her head, dropped out, and moved back in with her parents. To put my father through school after they married she worked alternately as a groundsman for TWA (the first woman to do so) and as a cashier in an upscale hollywood grocery store.

When I was about 1 I was moved to Washington DC where I would remain 4 or so years while my father got his medical degree from George Washington University. We lived in my aunt marlene's basement. She was a child pschyologist who was docile in nature-truley angelic, but when roused to anger was perhaps the most terrifying creature under the sky. Aunt Marlene, also a Northwestern graduate, had the misfortune of being a brilliant LDS girl, and as a result could never find anyone bright enough to marry. In the end, she compromised and married the one man who was an intellectual challenge, a charming, well educated, brilliant freudian pyschologist. Though Uncle John was an atheist, he promised to have repsect for his wife's religious beliefs. He did not. A spoiled only child, John had a violent temper, an alcholic temperment, a distrust and dislike of the mind control of religion. I remember cowering from him, his drunken abuse, the way he used to beat my cousins and swear at me and threaten to do horrible things to us if anything was broken or out of place. It was later the example set by this relationship, which I remember perhaps the most clearly of any of my early childhood memories, that convinced me to never marry outside of the church.

However, both my aunt and uncle were excellent pyschiatrists. While both of them tried to heal my mother's childhood scars, I was raised in a hippie-like enviornment of organic foods and Samoean dogs. Ken Starr was my neighbor. I played with my cousins, JD (my age) and Jenny (4 years older and an excellent artist-an inspiration for my later art interest). I watched imported Japanese cartoons, unicorn movies, or shows JD wanted to watch: GI Joes and Transformers. My playmates were masculine, (Jenny was often in school), but as a result of the hippies, I grew up in a gender-free enviorment with no real sexual rules (Boys don't wear that! Girls don't act like that!), though mom did tell me I had a prediliction for giving strip teases (age 3!) to the neighborhood boys. That I blame on the high level of testosterone I must have inherited from my mother, who has an abnormally high sex drive.

Although I was young I clearly remember growing up in the basement without windows or heating. I saw a monster there-a black shape next to my bed with two bright green eyes. For the rest of my life people have tried to explain this away, but I am sure of its existance, which may help explain my interest in the supernatural. Moving away from Washington DC was the saddest moment in my life and would be the start of a pattern of uprooting, as I was always snatched away just as I was fitting in and making friends.

For a few months my parents moved back and forth between Cambridge and Paris. I remember both vividly, I remember my mother being depressed, and I remember being yelled at. I started developing a soothing and peace-maker-like personality to avoid being hit. My mother didn't get on antidepressants until I was 11 or so, so I had a lot of time to hone the skills of avoiding setting people off. I still hate tempers, and I will never allow myself to be hit.

At age 5 I moved to Tucson, AZ while my father had his residency at U of A. I remember liking the desert, liking my grandparents (lived in Phoenix), liking the quiet danger of wandering off (death by thirst, scorpians, coyotes, flash floods, etc) which made natural exploration all that much more enjoyable. There were few if any girls in the neighborhood, and the only people my age were little boys. Boys that skateboarded, liked sports, played Ninetendo. So I played Ninetendo, tried to skateboard, vandalized buildings, caught and hurt animals, got in fights, whatever, because that's what the gang did. One of the neighbor boys-Conrad, about 11, who I had a huge crush on- locked me in a closet when I was about 7 and made me take off all my clothes and lie down on his naked body until he counted to 100. For a long time I thought what had happened was molestation, though recently I have come to believe it a silly childhood game with limited pyschological trauma (no violence, no real intrusion, more like a game of doctor than anything) other than a rabid fascination with male genitalia and sex. I can never remember there being a time after that incident where I did not think of boys.

I was put in special natural science courses in school and taught myself to read around the age of 5. My father, who always lived vicariously through me, pushed me to excel at all the sciences, as he had excelled at them growing up. I won the state science fair competition for a project (which mouthwash cleans germs the best?) that was later declared a biohazard by Arizona State University because of its live samples of bacteria grown in dishes and subsequently destroyed. I won my first poetry contest at 8. Quickly mastering the classroom computers, I spent hours writing long stories about Christmas or playing math games, and often my teachers left me alone instead of participating in class. Unlike most bright kids, I dug school and wasn't bored, but rather made it fun and was thankfully given enough leniancy to make my own challenges. I had a little posse of girlfriends in addition to my boy friends, but invariably my mother felt my girlfriends were too trampy, but I always liked them because they were popular and wore cool clothes, and we listened to the same sort of bands--Madonna, Roxette, MC Hammer. My mom listened to metal like GnR and Bon Jovi, so I listened to that music too--my favorite album when I was 8 was Aerosmith's "Pump". As a result of being poor and having a lot of MTV in my childhood, I gravitated to things that were dirty, angry, scary, or new. But this desire was just beginning to percilate--it wouldn't become developed for several more years.

When I was babtized at 8, only 2 people came. The average Mormon babtism has over 10-20 people, 10 being the absolute barest. This started the beginning of a life-long fear that if I have a special gathering, people will not show up.

After Arizona my mother needed some money to help pay off my dad's debts, so we moved to California--LA area--so my mother could go back to work for TWA. We lived out there about 3 months. My aunt Rosemary came to watch me (maternal aunt). Rosemary hated kids, she hated LA, she hated work. As a result, I spent every day in a small, roach infested apartment with one old 4 channel tv that only had reruns of mash and the Brady Brunch, and I spent my days completely bored out of my mind, praying that I would be taken to the park or taken for a walk, but i never was, Rose just spent the entire time on the phone talking with her boyfriend. Half the time she would forget to feed me. The only thing of interest was a balcony I wasn't allowed to go out on. There was a tree outside with these strange fruits that looked like potatos. My mom picked one for me after work once and I played with the strange hollow plant every day until finally Rosemary threw it away. The incident in the apartment was, strangely, one of the most tramautic times in my life.

After the second grade my parents moved us to Chestnut Hill in Boston. The neighborhhod was old and Jewish, and we lived in a split level house that was over 100 years old and full of lime-green and orange carpeting. The family that lived below us had a crazy thirtysomething daughter who was obsessed with Zorro and had a black mustache, and I hated her because she would never shut up. She was like the neighborhood phantom--incredibly pale, always lurking out of every corner. The house was constantly cold and we couldn't afford heat. The basement was dark and full of long shadows. I liked the strange green trees and the strange plants edible plants--chives, onions, crab apples, and I made friends with strange neighborhood kids, but my friends were odder, less popular, more nerdy. I had to get glasses around this time which made me feel ugly and dorky, and I wasn't a dork, I was cool, all my old Arizona friends were cool. For the first time I had something to prove; I slapped some kid (Brian Epstein) who thought he was so smart because he could add fractions and was in private advanced math and I couldn't and wasn't, and one day he said something to me about how I had screwed something up and I hit him. Then I lied about it. That made the problem worse, and the resulting parent-teacher conference shook me up so badly I vowed not only never to lie again (when it could be helped) but moreover, to always be the best in everything so I wouldn't have to go around slapping people. My teacher Mrs. Struthers was a scary, tyrannical black women who had hideous breath and would always yell at me. Her violence did teach me, however, to sit still and pay attention, something the Arizona school system forgot to pass along.

My father used to have to moonlight over in a MA suburb, and the only thing to do in the whole town was go to Marshall's or go to CVS. Since I hated shopping, mom used to leave me in the car, sometimes for 4 or 5 hours. After a while, I started developing a method of entertaining myself in a locked car, through which I would tell myself stories or make up elaborate movies in my head. As you may have noticed, there is a pattern of me being left alone in places for huge periods of time with nothing to do, which for someone as curious as I am is tantamount to torture. By this time, I had 2 sisters, so I was alone, and I was babysitting, and I had to entertain myself and two children.

The most pervasive problem throughout my childhood was money. We were on welfare for a long time, we never had proper holidays, we never went to the movies or ate out or did anything. This is partly to explain my rabid desire in college to go downtown, go out to eat, go anywhere. While my parents still found the money to give me tennis lessons and occasionally go to Europe, everything was tight, and I was always hyper aware of everything we spent, as my parents often stayed up late fighting about it.

After one year in Chestnut Hill, we moved to Brookline, as a friend of my dad's rented us his house. I liked this area better, as it had a forest behind it with wild rasberry bushes and an insane asuylum behind it. I used to poke about the forest and discover dark and scary things like abandoned sheds. It was a very gothic, robert-frost place to live, and the basement was filled with strange boxes. I was always sure a murderer was down there. While my dad continued to teach at Harvard, I went to a new school. This time, all my friends were popular, but for the wrong reasons: They were black boys, and all of them intimidated the other kids in class by the way they talked. It was a cute machismo thing, and I could talk pretty mouthy myself. My white friend, Zach, couldn't control his mouth either and swore all the time. My teacher put me in the desk next to him so I could help him out, and I taught him to study, and eventually he ended up being an honor student (he called to thank me two years ago, which was very sweet). Zach was my first boyfriend--he used to take me down to the basement of his house and curl up next to me while we watched "Nightmare on Elm Street." My girlfriends were unpopular geeks like Allison, the tennis star, or popular hos, like Julia (no, not my sister Julia). I began to see that as we grew older, cliques became more firmly settled, outsiders more distrusted, and the people who would accept new people such as myself would be ore and more strange and outsider-ish themselves.

I took woodshop and played basketball. My friends dressed me up in the best of early nineties fashion and took me to a dance where no one danced with me. Boys and I were beginning our strange dance of misunderstanding. I was put in advanced reading classes where I had to skip class twice a week and take additional high school classes in english. I read the books but never participated in the conversations about said books, as I found that gay. I was placed by the school district in special creative writing classes, which I found awesome. To this day, I appreciate the public schools I went to for their ability to reach out and excite me about education. Most of these programs were later labeled elitist and cut from the curriculum.

And after two years, our families debts became to severe, and we left Boston. And as an 11 year old weed, I was uprooted again to Texas. Thus ends my young life and my thirty minutes. Time for work.

posted by Mary @ 4:08 PM