is waif
SOBER RODEO/SMELLING SALTS
I think about an image often after I pee. I look down between my thighs and there is a teeming coral reef nestled and thriving in the porcelain. I’m nourishing the ecosystem but it’s also coming from me. Bright blue coral crawls up the side of the toilet.
I talked to my dad about this a few years ago and he has had a similar dream where he urinates in the ocean and is eaten by a whale. This may mean we are both prone to urinary tract issues, which we are, or that we are both still trying to figure out who my mother is, which I think we also are.
She was a marine biologist before she left her lab to join a non-denominational Christian cult with my father in San Diego, California.
My father was a preacher for 20-years in an infamous international church cult that has multiple 60-Minute-esque news specials that you can still fish out of the sticky YouTube bowels. It was one of the fastest growing churches of that decade, a nightmarish product of 80’s Patrick Bateman like businessmen combined with a fervent evangelical Christianity.
Naturally this led to flagrant embezzlement by the highest ranking leaders upwards of 10 million and a messy schism of which my parents, myself, and my siblings were collateral damage. They left when I was 17.
My uncle and father were adopted by an Irish family in New Mexico in the 1960’s. We don’t know as much as I’d like about their backgrounds but we grew up with constant jokes about their “Indian-blood” because they have dark skin, don’t get cold easily, and can barely grow facial hair.
Randall and Tracey adopted by Wyona and Papa.
“He had severe acne and tries to grow an excuse for a Fu Manchu mustache to hide the scarring but has recently been shaving it for his esthetician girlfriend that owns a lake yacht."
I just realized that I forgot my grandfather’s real name. He died when I was 10. My father Randy, or Randall when he travelled to the UK, has only been drunk once, has never smoked weed, was the captain of the Christian Athlete Club in high school, and received a full-ride to Harvard University but didn’t know what Harvard University was and ended up accepting a scholarship to a mostly unknown school in Colorado so he could play football. He’s short and strong with black hair that still hasn’t turned grey at 56 years old. He complains that a lot of bad guys in movies are named Randall which is kind of true. Ironically, my dad might be the best person I know. He takes in pets from his tenants that can’t take care of them and is always behind on his bills because he lets his tenants pay when they can.
We were both born in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
My Uncle Tracey, or Uncle Crazy, did not go to college, was a a rodeo star and a trash collector for the mountain town of Ruidoso, New Mexico. He’s short and wiry, simmering with energy that buckles inward after a couple of Coors Lights. His skin seems to crawl, his arms shake up and down as if to prepare him for whatever he is going to spontaneously do next. He had severe acne and tries to grow an excuse for a Fu Manchu mustache to hide the scarring but has recently been shaving it for his esthetician girlfriend that owns a lake yacht. He is sober now and more tender.
Growing up, all of our Christmas presents from Uncle Tracey were found in the dumpster. Rich families from Texas would go skiing once, and then throw away their skiis and jackets. Part of my Uncle’s job also required him to clean up road kill. Much of the meat we ate around the holidays was from those poor deer and elk, smashed by the same families driving back from the lifts to their chalets.
My dad and uncle were teased a lot growing up. They were called wet backs. They were beaten up for wearing Dickies because in 1970’s Roswell, New Mexico those were the poor man’s pants. My dad called me on the phone and he couldn’t believe that “kids are choosing to wear Dickies” and that some pants cost over one-hundred dollars now.
My favorite saying of his is, “Tough titty said the kitty but the milk’s still good.”
When it’s raining but still sunny, my grandmother Wyona says that the, “Devil is beating his wife.”
It must have been difficult growing up in a family not knowing where you come from. I think my dad internalized his bullying and became a bully for a few years, for which he has never forgiven himself. My uncle became an adrenaline seeking alcoholic.
My dad talks about my Uncle Tracey’s ears and how they were so big that he would quietly fold them into small airplanes when Tracey was sleeping. They slept in the same room until my dad went to college.
I’ve only seen my dad cry a handful of times. Once when my sister, who is also adopted, wrote him a letter on Christmas. She’s dyslexic and her birth mother was on heroin when she was pregnant and we honestly never thought she would be able to read or write. Another time is when he was trying to understand why I was gay. We were eating at a Dominican restaurant in Brooklyn.
I told my Uncle and he said he loved me and to come visit. I hadn’t talked to him in a few years because I was a coward.
“Didn’t you know that your second-cousin is like you?”
My uncle and dad both carry their sadness in different ways. I don’t know if there is a better or worse way to live when you’ve been
bullied. One of them carves his children up to understand them like filing cabinets so he doesn’t make a mistake and the other has been divorced twice and has a liver in need of a tune up. They wear the same shoe size.
Their ears are different sizes.
They are both good listeners.