It’s hard to have such a fucked up family in a town that’s so small. It isn’t even that small, but there’s always one kid that knows and that one kid tells another and another until you have people asking all kinds of questions. Everyone in this town is fucked up, really, or at least the one’s I know are, but it’s always interesting to know what kinds of fucked up everything else is and compare yours to theirs. It makes you feel better.
“I live right across the street from the Art School,” I say around a mouthful of Dairy Queen fries. “Big white house, you know, next to the plastic surgery clinic?”
“Oh, the one the cops are always at?” Asks Emily.
“Yeah… I guess you could say that…”
So much for a clean slate. I thought this girl would be a refreshing new addition in my life. She had just joined my dance class and her jaded attitude and blue hair was a breath of fresh air in the sea of giggling blonde.
“I didn’t mean that as a bad thing,” she amended. “Happens to everyone.” She smiles at me and maybe this will be better than I though.
Sometimes I see my mother shuffling down Fourth Plain, talking to herself and waving her hands in the air. She’s sure a spectacle. It’s better now that she’s just so crazy she can’t hurt anyone but herself. Meth runs rampant in Vancouver and I’m not really sure why. Or at least it runs rampant in my family. Meth over crack and speed and normal families. If not meth it’s rampant Christianism and I’m actually glad my family ended up taking the meth track.
I remember when I had just gotten out of Kindergarten and my grandma was freaking out about what to do with me. Should I go to school? Or stay at home? My future was at stake here and I didn’t even fucking care. She took me to visit all the uniformed Catholic schools in Vancouver and I cried in the car between every one. I must have known that I was a dyke even then; that I didn’t want to wear a skirt in the winter or read books I wasn’t interested in. The last straw was when she took me to the school under the Pentecostal church on 33rd Street. All I remember is a sea of washed-out brown hair and navy blue plaid in the dim light of the basement room the small school was located in. My grandpa had told me at one point that the people who went to that church had seizures and spoke gibberish while they trashed about and claimed it was the spirit of God coming through them. I told my grandma to take me home or enroll me at Washington Elementary School. She took me home.
My great-uncle Steve showed up a week later to take care of me while my grandparents were at work. He would wake me up in the morning just in time for The Smurfs, I Dream of Genie, and Bewitched and he would make me toast with cinnamon and sugar every morning. He worked as a janitor at the YWCA right up the street from our house and he would take me there every day. I would sit in the basement and hammer nails into wood and learn about building benches and stools. I could do anything I wanted, including wear a skirt in the winter and flood myself with the Holy Ghost to the point that I have a seizure, but only if I wanted to. Until I went into high school I only read books I wanted to read.
“The cops found uncle Steve unconscious in the Kiggin’s Bowl this morning with a backpack full of tall boys and porn mags,” my uncle says this like it’s the biggest joke in the world: through clenched teeth and with squinted eyes. “Write a song about THAT!” He breaks down into uncontrollable laughter.
“Is that the whole story? Really?” I’m not sure if I want it to be more or less; not sure I wish it were an accident or if I wish it had involved armed robbery or shoplifting. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about horrible and potentially embarrassing family situations, it’s that they’re funnier the further away you get from them. Sometimes even, once you get far enough away from them, you feel like they might be even funnier if they had been worse. Once I hear myself thinking this I remind myself of how horrible they were at the time and I go back to wishing it never happened at all.
“Why was he there all night? Was he just that wasted?” I ask.
“He broke his leg,” my grandma says from the kitchen. “I think he was probably having some paranoid meth-induced freak out and he ran down Main Street, climbed the fence of the Kiggin’s Bowl, and fell. The cops found him there this morning.”
“Did he wake up and just couldn’t get out? That would be horrible, waking up inside a football stadium with a broken leg…” Was it horrible? Did he deserve it?
As I imagine my ex-truck driving great uncle crawling around the Kiggin’s Bowl, dragging along his backpack of porn and malt liquor, I start to get what my uncle thought was so funny about the situation. He has a mustache circa 1976, for Christ’s sake! Screw imagining being in the state great uncle Steve was in, imagine discovering it. What if you were that security guard?
“Jesus, dude…” I say, grin starting to crack my face in two. “That actually might be funnier than that message Krissy left on your voicemail last week when she was high.”
We both break out into uncontrollable laughter.
“You know,” I say, wiping the tears off my face. “I might just have to write a song about that.”
