The Beautiful Kind

My new niece was born today! A month early. I guess just like with Amazon, you can request rush delivery.

My brother is fair like me, and his wife is dark complected (Cuban Spanish) and the baby was born as blonde as Hulk Hogan. On the phone my bro told me in a mock hushed tone, “We’re not sure who the mother is.”

And the call ended with me telling him, “Congratulations, motherfucker!”

I love my dad the way some people love Jesus. He’s so fucking good, so honest, loves people and animals, and best of all, loves me for who I am.

Have you noticed that just as people think their own kids are so cute, they think their parents were so handsome or beautiful when they were younger? I’m the same way - I look at this pic of my parents taken in 1966, and see my dad as an Elvis rockabilly type. My mom looks like a blonde Shelly Duvall.

I call him “Daddy-O.” He proves his love for me by offering me a cocktail within 10 seconds of walking in the front door of his house without fail, even if it’s 10am. He makes the best margaritas.

When I was a little girl, he was the one who took care of me whenever I was sick. He’d put a spell on me every night to ensure good dreams.

He has over 100 antique radios littering his house, stacked in clumps throughout. He has a thing for convertibles, new age music, electronic gadgets and Mexican food.

He’s one of the Helpers of the world. He says something nice to every person he meets, and can get along with anyone.

One time he found an envelope stuffed with cash in a hotel bathroom, and he turned it right in to the front desk without a second thought. That made a huge impression on me.

When a guest leaves his house, he always gets up and walks them to the front door. To me, that gesture is as sweet and old-fashioned as a man offering you his cloth hankerchief.

And speaking of hankies, when I’m feeling bad, all I have to do is give him a call and just hearing his voice can prompt me to cry and get it out of my system.

The other day I was driving with my mom and a school bus driver cut her off. Her reaction:

“Why you pig! I’m going to turn you in for fondling a little boy.”

I told my parents about how I’m going to cash in on this site by promoting all kinds of interesting ideas. My mom immediately volunteered one of her great ideas: “I raised a lot of kids and could never find matching pairs of socks. So I just started sending them to school in cowboy boots! That way I never had to worry about matching socks.”

Then my dad said, “New cars are coming out without ashtrays. So I’m going to REINVENT bean bag ashtrays for people who still smoke.”

My mom said to him, “Raymond, I’m not saying this to be mean, but some of your ideas are stupid.”

“Well you collect camels!” he sputtered. “That’s stupid.”

“Go hump yourself,” she shot back.

Can you find the Hitler figurines among my mom’s crap?

Here is my mom’s medical instrument collection:

One time she tried to talk my brother into taking the speculum along on his date in case he ran out of things to talk about. You know, a good conversation piece. Or a clever thing to do instead of the usual dinner and movie - “Do you want me to check out your female reproductive parts? I’d be happy to be at your cervix.”

PS: I’m so glad speculums aren’t made of cold steel anymore. And “cold steel” reminds me of Claude Steele, a psychology professor at Stanford I have a crush on, even though he has a moustache. But gosh he’s dashing and brilliant.

The other day my mom said, “You can learn a lot in true crime books. For instance, today I learned that Mister Rogers was born in the same town that makes Rolling Rock beer. We should drink some to celebrate!”

Needless to say, now she’s obsessed with Rolling Rock beer.

The other day I was sitting around with my parents shooting the shit. I said to them, “Look here. I work as a contractor 40 hours a week for a recruiting agency who pimps me out and makes money off me. Plus, I hate my job. I might as well work for myself and whore myself out to 5 rich old men, work only a few hours a week, and make twice the money.”

My dad agreed. He said, “You could get some regulars and do it right…”

“RAYMOND!” my mom exclaimed. “You’re talking to your DAUGHTER.”

“Well she wouldn’t be a hooker,” he said huffily. “She’d be high class, like a…call girl.”

“Escort,” I corrected.

I called my mom to tell her some big news, and after she politely listened, she launched into the big news on her mind - Anna Nicole Smith.

She talked briefly about semen samples and helicopters at funerals, then trailed off sympathetically, “I can understand how someone might get mixed up and take too many of their drugs…”

Um, right Mom.

(Incidentally, I was surprised at how difficult it was to find a non-nude picture of Anna Nicole on the internet.)

I did my taxes with my dad this weekend. We discovered that it is a much more rewarding task when completed with the aid of margaritas. My dad makes the best margaritas, AND he can do math and all that stuff Barbie thinks is hard. This makes him truly eligible to sport the “Number 1 Dad!” t-shirt you see so many breeder saps wearing.

This will definitely become a yearly tradition. I’ll forever associate the short form with salt on the rim. Also, the results are much better, cuz get this: I’m getting one hundred million pesos back.

So the other night around midnight, my mom had a bad dream and thrashed around and fell out of bed. My dad woke up and went to help her. He tried to get her up and back in the bed but she cursed him and told him to leave her alone.

So he did.

She remained there unmoving and unconscious until 4pm the next day, when she finally managed to rouse herself and crawl back in bed.

My sister and I would call and check in periodically. “Is she still on the floor?”

“Yessss,” my dad would report. “I thought about calling an ambulance, but I don’t feel like spending hours in the E.R., and the last time they couldn’t find anything wrong with her anyway…”

“Has she even gotten up to go to the bathroom?!”

“Welllll, since you asked…”

My parent’s bedroom door.

So the last crush my mom had was Freddy Mercury. But her “type” is not limited to Persian bisexual men with overbites. It does seem like she’s into rock stars, though. She recently discovered Tommy Lee as he did his back-to-school reality TV stint. She told me she thought he was “very sexy,” and that “he has everything that a woman could want.”

I said, “Well, he does have a big schlong.”

Here’s me my senior year of high school. Raise your hand if you think I should bring this hairstyle back. Fuck yeah!!!!!

One night my mom was so whacked out on drugs she hallucinated. She was lying in her bed, and as I stood there in the doorway of the darkened room, she pointed to the air and said excitedly, “Look! A candle!” Then she gave a shriek. “It’s a sopping wet cat!” Um, freaky. Another time the drug cocktail she had taken made her vocal cords tighten, so she sounded like she inhaled helium. My siblings and I kept asking her questions so we could laugh at her chipmunk voice.

All the drugs my mom took while I was growing up made her unstable, so she was constantly falling down, out in the yard, and in stores. She had huge bruises that would extend all the way up her arm, or cover half her face. They would swell up and turn black, and make her look positively deformed. She broke a couple of bones here and there, too.

She’d overdose and attempt suicide so often it became a joke in the family. When someone would ask, “Where’s Mom?” we’d say dismissively, “Oh, she’s locked herself in the closet. She’s trying to kill herself again.” Sometimes she would take the dog out to the garage with her for company as she attempted to succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning. She has ugly thick scars on her neck from other occasions when she’s cut it, and one time in the hospital after a drug overdose, her heart stopped, but they got it going again.

One of the worst times happened at 5am one morning. I was awoken to my dad shouting, “Call 911!” Half asleep but heart pounding, I ran into the bedroom, and discovered my mom lying in bed, glassy-eyed, arms outstretched, mumbling about wanting to die. At the inner elbows of each arm, she had cut several deep gashes from which blood issued freely. They looked like open, screaming mouths.

Blood was all over the bed, and my two year old sister, who had been sleeping with my parents, slept on, her nightie drenched in blood. My other sister and I each clamped down on an arm with towels as we waited for the paramedics to arrive. When they got there, I remember one of them say, his voice amazingly neutral, “Would someone please remove the baby from the bed?”

Once they got her loaded into the ambulance and were on their way to the hospital (several neighbors came out in their robes to gawk), she took out the knife concealed in her bra, and starting sawing away at her neck. Once they realized what was going on, then they tied her arms to the stretcher. My dad went off to work that day, and I stayed home from school to clean up all the blood and watch my sister.

One summer when I was a kid, my mom thought there were alien bugs burrowing around in her skin. So she took any sharp object handy (needles, scissors, razor blades, etc.) and dug in. She has countless scars all over her body as a result. She even dug into the corner of one of her eyes, and got a major infection, and had to wear an eye patch for a while. She thought the bugs were coming from food bought from Dierberg’s, and had big plans to shut them down. She’d point out the bugs to us, in a slice of wheat bread, for instance, but we never could see them. Very confusing for a kid. My dad finally intervened when she started trying to carve into us. She even hauled us all down to a parasite clinic in the city to be checked out.

Growing up, my mom constantly ordered us kids to do chores around the house, but the house was so filthy, we never knew where to begin. Even though she didn’t have a job, she wouldn’t lift a finger to clean. To this day, if a health inspector were to come to my parents house, it would be condemned.

The walls are splattered with old food and dirty handprints. Holes have been kicked in the walls, and never repaired. Dogs and cats pee and poop all over the place, and no one cleans it up. Parts of the carpet are ripped up, and just stay that way. They have old sheets hanging up for curtains. The place smells like rancid catbox.

They leave food lying around, and all their furniture is ripped up and covered with pet hair. You can’t find a place to sit because all the chairs are piled high with crap. Nothing in their house matches. They don’t have matching dishes, towels, or sheets. The toilets are encrusted with black filth. Faucet handles and door knobs have fallen off throughout the house, and have never been replaced. They leave things like butter and salad dressing out for days, and have no problem eating it. I think I built up quite an immune system, thanks to home sweet home.

Dinner growing up was always interesting. Mom was never much of a cook. One time she dyed the fish blue to make it more appealing, and it turned green instead. Some nights we would have corn for dinner. She did such awful things to spaghetti, that to this day I don’t care much for pasta. Many times we would be hungry, and couldn’t find anything to eat, so we would just eat toast with sugar until we were full. You should have seen the look on my face the first time I had dinner over at a friend’s house. I could not believe that they ate all their food at once! They’d have salad, meatloaf, a vegetable, AND bread!

This is my parent’s front yard garden. Can you find:
- the lobster
- twenty telephone pole insulators
- the carriage
- the horse
- E.T.
- the bleached backbone of a steer
- an owl
- a gravestone marker
- a spider
- a snake