Why Am I Like This?
97 years in under than 2000 words.
It seems I can’t tell her story, without telling my own.
And I can’t tell my own, without telling theirs.
We are, for better or worse, tied to each other beyond his death and her dementia.
More than nature, nurture or culture, we three created each other.
Each of us would’ve been completely different, possibly unrecognizable, had our lives not intersected in the exact way and time that they did. But we did. We intersected & collided. Ran over & into each other. Pushed & dragged each other forward as much as we held each other back.
Maybe that’s the way with all families.
Maybe not.
Maybe it doesn’t matter at all.
These things happen when I turn twelve:
Judy Garland overdosed a month before I turn twelve.
It’s the summer of the Stonewall riot
The Woodstock festival
And the trial of the Chicago Seven.
It’s the year of Richard Nixon.
Maya Angelou
Sesame Street
And the Manson Family murder spree.
Chappaquiddick will be Teddy Kennedy’s most memorable moment.
And Mary Jo’s last.
And Jack Kerouac takes his last breath as well, at 47. Blame the booze, not a Kennedy or an Oldsmobile.
The year I turn twelve, Fred Hampton will be assassinated through the combined efforts of federal, state and city forces.
Alcatraz is occupied.
And the Hell’s Angels and the Rolling Stones fuck it all up at Altamont.
Other things happened, but this is what stuck to me, like walking through spider webs. Imperceptible, almost invisible, impossible to avoid or brush off.
Flashback to spring, the year before, Martin Luther King was murdered, and two months later, Bobby Kennedy.
The year before that, I’m ten, and it’s the Summer of Love.
I could tell you when I was born, but I trust you to do basic math: Woodstock minus twelve equals…Kerouac, not yet dead drunk, publishing On The Road. Trust your reader, that’s what they say, right? Don’t pander. Eisenhower was president. I don’t know if that helps, I mean it’s not like I remember him.
The flag was different. Typing that, it’s the first time I’ve made the connection and it’s a very fucking weird feeling. There were only forty-eight stars. I am, there were only forty-eight states when I was born-years-old. That feels very old.
Also, maybe it doesn’t matter when you were born, only how old you were when things happened in the world, things that shaped the world you’re growing into. Maybe that doesn’t matter either
My mother was beautiful, an enabler, born a year into the Great Depression.
That was the year that gave birth to both Scotch tape and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. That second fact’ll carry her through all the years she’ll live after my father dies.
Pearl Harbor will be bombed before she gets to celebrate her twelfth birthday.
She’s seventeen when they break ground on Levittown, where she’ll live eight years later after trading one bad marriage to a liar who made her look good on the dance floor, for another to a handsome liar with a flair for storytelling and misdirection.
My father was smart. Also both charming & intimidating.
The Coney Island Cyclone and Fred burst onto the scene the same year.
Yeah, that makes sense, you’d think as you nodded your head, if you’d ever met him.
World War II starts as Fred turns twelve.
He’ll enter the Navy at seventeen for a two-year stateside stint, and spend a good deal of it in the hospital. That fact will pay his medical bills and support him through his later years.
He’ll never see “action,” but he’ll look his best, his most rapscalliony and eventually teach me about making hospital screwdrivers with rubbing alcohol & orange juice.
Contracting Scarlet Fever in the service will be the best thing he does for my mother, who he hasn’t met yet.
And I’ll write under the name Scarlett Fever a few decades after he finally does meet her.
I would never be as pretty as she, or as clever as he was.
She’ll be sexually assaulted a few times before she marries my father, and never tell anyone.
He is either anorgasmic or suffers with anejaculation, but never tells anyone.
I’ll also be sexually assaulted a few times and not tell anyone. I was promiscuous, and everyone tells everyone else about that.
And, maybe none of that matters, either, but I think it does.
I think.
I don’t know.
I don’t know anything.
Science says: Cause and effect
Which cause equals which effect?
Harper Lee published To Kill A Mockingbird /the year The Pill became available /the year I turned three. It would be almost a dozen years before I’d need the Pill. And maybe that long before I’ll read TKAM, but it will become my favorite book. I (still) want Atticus Finch to be my father.
I grew up with the Vietnam war. The first one we could watch on television.
I was six years old when John Kennedy was killed and first-grade playmates cried
I don’t remember Kennedy either, just my friend Stephanie, crying.
The first Mustang rolled off the assembly line when I was seven. Sixty years later, I (still) want one.
I smoked my first cigarette at eight. The girl who taught me to smoke will also molest me. I will forgive her for one, but not the other.
The year they killed Malcolm.
And started spraying Agent Orange.
Medicare and Medicaid didn’t exist until I started smoking
I’m not implying anything but, science says cause and effect, right? Post hoc ergo propter hoc:
A occurred, then B occurred.
Therefore, A caused B
Laugh-In appeared a few months before my eleventh birthday and Goldie Hawn would inspire me to write funny and clever things on my body with white liquid eyeliner, which was a thing when I was eleven. Ten years later, I’ll dance topless in the same Times Square bar where she’d once been a go-go girl.
My first drink was somewhere around age eleven.
That’s how old I am when I run away. Not the first time, or the last, but it will be the time I get some distance between here and there. Before I leave, I’ll have secured a job at my destination that offers room and board, which is all I wanted. That, and proximity to the twelve-year-old love of my life—Matthew—who I’d met there the week before.
We probably watched Mod Squad as a family that night after I was dragged home.
Earth Day and the EPA were established when I was thirteen, it’s probably the only good thing Richard Nixon can claim.
My parents drove-in to see the movie Woodstock at the local drive-in. I watched from the back seat. Memory tells me I was much younger, footie pajamas young, but memory is obviously malleable and unreliable.
The Kent State shooting happened. Cue that memory, you probably don’t know their names—maybe you never did—but everyone remembers the photo of Mary Ann Vecchio screaming over Jeffrey Miller, dead at 20.
Jimi dead, at 27.
Janis dead, at 27.
I’ll hand my virginity over to a friend at age fourteen. It won’t be fun. Or romantic. Or feel like love. I can count on one hand the times that’ve been one or the other in the last fifty-three years.
Jim Morrison dead, at 27.
The Attica riots.
Werner Erhard establishes est. Five years later, I’ll show up and hold my water until given permission to pee, hoping it will make me a more enlightened person. That might be true, but mostly I did it because Kevin Brown did it and he was older and hot and that was a good enough reason for me. You have no idea who Kevin Brown is, and that’s okay. You know all you need to know.
Edie Sedgewick dies at 28, screwing that whole Club 27 vibe.
Ms. Magazine, Steal This Book and Our Bodies, Ourselves all came out the year I was fourteen. I don’t think I stole Steal This Book, but I had it and found it aspirational.
The year the Joy of Sex was published, I ran away again, with my friend Debbie this time. We’re fifteen and on our way to California when we’re caught on Day One by the New Jersey Highway Patrol.
The following year, Roe v Wade passes and I graduate high school early with a plan for life: work in a factory and live in a cold-water walk up. I had no idea what a cold-water walk up was, and after a day in a factory that moved wire from giant spools to small, hardware-store-sized spools, like making bobbins on a giant sewing machine, my right hand was swollen so badly I could neither close my fist to hitchhike, nor fit my fingers in the holes of a rotary pay phone to have someone pick me up. I remember sitting on the curb of some major street on Long Island, alone, probably trying to figure out what the next right thing was. I imagine I walked home. The fantasy of factory work lost its romance that day.
I’ve since lived in a fourth floor walk-up and there’s nothing romantic or poetic about that, either.
Patty Hearst made berets cool again.
It was Watergate. It was the DEA.
Elvis left the building for the last time shortly after I turned twenty, ten years after I’d considered mailing myself to him (with a supply of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches to sustain me) in a large box so he wouldn’t marry Priscilla.
Everyone says they remember where they were when John Lennon died. I don’t. I was twenty-three and barely remember anything from those years, the lost years.
I’d thought maybe, if I’d been able to use different colors & fonts, I could tease apart what was nature, nurture or culture. Generational trauma. The moment secrets & lies become family history. But I couldn’t. I can’t, not with fonts, colors, or spreadsheets (and I can make fucking magic happen with spreadsheets).
And maybe it doesn’t matter at all.
My friend Lyle said, “You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you get. What you do with it is the measure of your character.”
July 27th will be twenty-one years since he died and I still hear his voice, gruff, full of the ponies, cigars and a misspent youth.
All great writers have one thing in common: courage. You got it in spades Jodi!
Damn, woman. You just nail it, week after week. Thanks for making me laugh, and think, and remember. "My friend Lyle said, “You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you get. What you do with it is the measure of your character.”
Oh, Werner. I did est at 15. It was something, all right. Burned everything down, and set my parents free. A tough time.
Love you!