Ghost Dad

Plus, a visit to the ER, and Medieval Times.

Dear Diary,

It’s been a long time. When I’m not writing, as I haven’t been this past month, my mind is a hoarder’s house of half-baked ideas, real-time narration, revelations on how to change the tone/tense/angle/person of my book/s again to really make it perfect – in short, it’s a fucking mess. I lie in bed willing my melatonin to take affect before my late-night delusions of grandeur kick in and flatten me out with the latest best, life-changing literary project that I need to start writing immediately, like, now, before I fall asleep and lose the precious muse that’s lighting me up. I have to believe these late-night inspo sessions are simple mental illness. If not, they must in fact be all my best ideas, all of them lost as I never get up to write them down. To give in seems like mania. I’m trying to sleep! And eventually, I do.

Diary, the places I’ve been this past month! Let’s start with the Emergency Room of the Glendale Adventist Hospital. I didn’t choose to be cared for my religious zealots, it’s where Covered California placed me, and I guess I’m just happy there’s somewhere to go. I was not the sick one, it was my beloved child, and his – in his words – tum tum (could you die?), which had been hurting him off and on and then spiked horribly, alongside a rush of anxiety, when he learned he would have to go back to school, as one cannot stay home from life indefinitely with a vague stomach illness. Can one?

The tum tum is such a tender and mysterious area of our meat tubes. It is wholly dialed in to our intuition, and it makes a lot of space for our emotions as well. It is literally the place that facilitates what we bring into our body from the outside world – food, feelings, vibes. It took a while for my child to figure out how to talk about what was going on for him at school, a fine public school but also sadly basic, as many public schools are. My kid is super smart, has already been leaving his second-grade class to take math with the third graders. He’s been bored out of his gourd, and his unhappiness with school – which I’ve had to coax him out of referring to as prison – has been bringing him down. So much so that, when the school counselor brought social-emotional lessons to his class (Covid has left kids out of whack in the social-emotional realms, hence a sort of classroom group therapy lite), and she asked the students how they were doing, he replied with, “Dead inside.” The Scorpio cusp inside him is strong! His parents were called in for a meeting with the teacher to discuss.

But it is not simply the deep borrringness of school giving my kid a tum tum ache. An only child who lives alternately in two queer households, with adults literally schooled in nonviolent communication, the fact that the adults at his public school talk to the children in impatient, snappish, harsh tones he refers to as ‘stern’ has been affecting him, deeply. While he may also have legit GI issues (he is genetic heir to a variety of them), it seems that these stern tones have been causing stress to somaticize in his sweet little tum.

Diary, I was educated by nuns. Sister Cecilia, known widely as the sweetest of the nuns, pulled Jenny into a stall in the girls’ bathroom, lifted the plaid skirt of her uniform and spanked her ass. This was first grade. My second-grade teacher regarded the class with scorn and demanded, ‘You all still believe in the Easter Bunny?’ like we were a bunch of fucking jerks. Mrs. Orosco in third grade had it out for me and would not let me use the bathroom, having decided my request to run to the lav, occurring at the same time each day, was a hoax. (My grandfather had quipped, “What?! You’re regular, just like me!”) My fifth-grade teacher humiliated me for weeping at my desk during the darkest days of my parents’ volatile divorce. Sister Lorraine in sixth grade was an absolute sociopath, with the creepiest, deadest eyes I’ve ever seen. I was rescued, in seventh and eighth, by a closeted fag teacher, Mr. Buzzle, who ultimately got fired for doing things like calling us ‘Mary Sunshine’ and giving up on math to bring us into the auditorium to stage a version of Midsummer’s Night Dream with choreography from Cats, which he had just seen in Boston. He cast us with an evil, knowing eye for the social hierarchies and dynamics at play, and directed us with a decorative scarf flung about his neck, smoking a Benson and Hedges 100. The play was never produced.

I am glad that my child is sensitive, and knows that tone matters, that the way we speak to each other carries as much meaning as the words we say. I have to subdue the Chelsea in me (that would be the stain my rough hometown has left on my soul) and not tell him to toughen up. While I do want him to be resilient enough to be able to manage being snapped at by his teacher, I also want to raise him in environments that have more or less the same values that we all have at his homes. So we got him placed in an art magnet school where they do things like dance the solar system. A promotional video for the place features a kid talking about how, when you make a mistake, no one yells at you, they just try to help you. My kid was sold.

But, Diary, the emergency room! The staff were angels, fucking earth angels. How kindly they handled the woman detoxing from alcohol, who had been waiting to be seen for far too long for her liking and had taken to shout-talking commentary such as “I’ll just leave and die at home, then!” and “These people are all on medical! I have good insurance!,” her head lolling on the shoulder, of her quiet, long-suffering gay son. There but for the grace of the Goddexx go I. It was the 20^th anniversary of m y own sobriety on that very day, and all I had to do was add two decades of drinking to the state I was in circa 2003 to understand that I could very easily be this woman. Though I doubt I would have good health insurance, or a sweet gay son to hold me up.

It was hard to know, at the ER, who was on drugs and who was having a mental health crisis. The couple in the grimy sweats nodding out on each other? Drugs. When eventually (I was there for five hours), the femme half of the couple struck up a conversation with another patient, I was floored by the sound of her voice – so sweet, so tender, and so hoarse and gravelly, like a precious, chain-smoking child. I was reminded of how sweet so many (most? all? Addicts are, and fairly ashamed to need to be reminded. Especially considering I am one, and fairly convinced of my own sweetness.

The man moving in extreme slow-motion may have been on pills or in a particular, fugue-like state. The man who whizzed around humming and chomping his gums, swinging the cord of his phone charger like a lasso, could have been a tweaker or perhaps experiencing a manic episode. It doesn’t matter, of course – it’s all basic human sicknesses, be it the tendency of our minds to go haywire or seek a doomed relief. The saddest was the adult man next to me on the verge of tears, fighting with his father on his phone, getting up, pacing, sitting down, engaged in a humiliated power struggle, seemingly homeless, begging his dad not to throw out his high school diploma cause he needed it for college. What is this realm we’ve all wound up in? How are the workers here so kind? As the x-ray tech – gay, to my radar – led me and my son through a labyrinth of hospital beds holding delirious, occasionally belligerent elders, seemingly on the verge of death, he turned to my kid and said, “This is kinda scary, huh? It scares me sometimes, too! The x-ray room is nice and quiet, safe space.” I stood in a tiny office, behind another tech who brought an x-ray of my kid’s perfect ribs, his knobby spine, up on the computer. Look! I exclaimed when he climbed of the table. It’s You!

Why such a giant picture?

In the waiting room we sat facing a big-screen TV. We didn’t watch it, we played games on our phones and read books, snuck snacks under our masks. But when I did look up I was astounded to see it screening Grey’s Anatomy. For reals? White actresses, their thinness made-up to look sickly though still beautiful, lounged peacefully in hospital beds, trading emotions with other good-looking actors. I looked around the room, at the low-key, chronic hysteria, and back up at the TV version of the experience we were having. I wanted to laugh, but laughing in such a space seemed, frankly, rude.

My kid seems to be fine but we’ll keep following up with doctors and seeing if his new, arty school makes a difference. He spent some time recouping at his other parent’s house while me and my husband celebrated our one-year wedding anniversary at the scene of the crime, the Madonna Inn. I love the Madonna Inn so much. I first went there in, like 2000, with my then-boyfriend. We had taken what was meant to be a disco nap before dropping E, but in fact passed out for the night, waking only to glimpse a ghost who oddly resembled me, resting in between us in the bed. So, that was auspicious. Me and my husband had spent Halloween 2021 there, he dressed as a plague doctor with a terrifying, beaked mask and me as a victim, face full of pustules. We stayed in Horsing Around, a green room with a horse motif. The chandelier was a wooden horse impaled with colored lightbulbs. It is a fantastic room. For our wedding we stayed in Carin, a roomy, circular room like a giant turret covered in pink glitter. After our post-wedding after-party had been broken up by a security guard before even getting off the ground (the Inn has a strict no parties / quiet after 10:00 rule), we led a much smaller group of friends up to our room to eat potato chips and hang about on the shag carpet. The security guard, drunk on his own power, trailed us and intimidated guests, standing all puffed-up on the narrow staircase that led to our room, forcing guests to squeeze past his body. It was very yucky. We complained to the manager the next day and received two free nights as an apology. So that’s where we went for our anniversary, shacked up in Misty Falls, a stone cave of a room, the walls glossy boulders. It was very groovy except the bed didn’t have a headboard and you can’t really sit in bed reading books and drinking room service coffee with nothing to lean back against but a jutting rock wall. Hadn’t thought of that. The waterfall shower, something the Inn is famous for, was sort of overwhelming at first, to have water attacking you from two directions, but then I got into it. We didn’t see any ghosts, but I did have a very vivid dream that my dead father had come to meet TJ, my husband. It was one of those dead-person dreams that leaves you feeling like you really had communed with the departed. In the dream, I was sitting in a church pew with TJ, and maybe it was our wedding again, and my father walked up in a fantastic orange suit. Before falling asleep that night, TJ and I had fallen into an internet k-hole of Harry Styles’ fashion, looking at a bunch of Harry Styles’ 45 Most Outrageous Outfits-type articles, really admiring his Aquarian choices (though wishing he’d lay off the flares), and I think this might have influenced my father’s dream wardrobe. Or maybe he is spending the afterlife as a dandy. Either way, my father, who I was needlessly estranged from when he died, who refused to say goodbye on his death bed because, I don’t know, he felt guilty for being a shitty dad or something and thought he’d just double down on it in his final hour – in the dream he had journeyed to meet TJ, and I was happy to make the introduction. And then he left.

The last time I saw my dad IRL was when, drunk, he sat down at my table at Robert’s, a truck stop near my house in Chelsea. He was wearing a green satin Celtics jacket and his eyes were bloodshot. I was wearing black, goth bangs in my face, clown white foundation, black lipstick and widow’s weeds, as were my friends, of all genders. He just pulled up a chair and said, “What’re you supposed to be?” I remember the hot and cold flashes of feeling moving through my body. He didn’t recognize me. Even as he asked us all our names and I said, Michelle, he didn’t flinch. He was possibly in a blackout. Lots of drunken Massholes fucked with us at Roberts, and my dad actually wasn’t that bad. “What’re you, Boy George?” he said to Peter, who looked nothing like Boy George. It seemed to be a sincere question, like he was really trying to place us in the culture. You guys, that’s my dad! What a strange night.

I had located my Dad sometime in the late 00s, and written him a letter. He was living in Florida, working at a health food store – a wild destiny for anyone from Chelsea, frankly. Not the Florida bit, but the health food. Do you eat tofu? I remember asking him. “Yeah, tofu’s okay,” he said. He’d stopped drinking because a doctor told him his heart was about to crap out. He’d gone to some meetings but didn’t like them. I had quit drinking, too; the whole reason I’d contacted him was to make amends for some untrue accusations I’d lobbed at him during the height of my Lesbian Feminist Nervous Breakdown decades earlier. It is one of those recovery things that, working the steps you are likely to give an amends to a person who, arguably, owes you way more of an amends, but they, sadly, are not in a recovery program that urges the taking of personal inventories and the keeping clean of your side of the street. So my dad didn’t make an amends in return, though he had said, “I wish things had turned out different,” as vague a sentiment as could be. It was okay. By then I required nothing of him, and it was novel to be reconnected after nearly twenty years. We spoke occasionally, then fell out of touch when his phone got disconnected. When he lay dying from blood cancer I was perplexed that he wouldn’t speak to me. I knew we’d fallen out of touch, but it didn’t feel fueled by anything, just life. I interacted with his live-in girlfriend, who I learned from a Google search had called the cops on him for domestic violence more than once. I didn’t like her, and I didn’t like her daughter, whose Facebook page was all blue lives matter. These people didn’t like me, either, though the girlfriend, Pat, did ship to me a box of photos she found cleaning out my dad’s shit. I was stunned. It was The Photos.

Happy Dad

When my parents had their shitty divorce, my father meanly took every single one of the carefully curated photo albums my mother had made over the decade-plus of our family’s life. It was part of the lore of what a dick he was, that he had done this. And now here they all were, a box of pictures of my life from birth to around fifth grade. He’d carried them from the home he’d kicked us out of, to whatever place he lived in after that, all the way out to Florida and the homes he bounced between in Clearwater, where he lived the rest of his life. Alongside the photos were an envelope of baby teeth, a Xeroxed chapbook of poems I’d written in 2^nd grade, report cards. It was my mother who had saved and labeled it all, but it was he who schlepped it through his life. “He really loved you,” a couple of friends said when I told them about this, marveling at it. But I don’t think it was love. My dad was a sadsack alcoholic who alternated between violent emotions and a sort of glum martyrdom. “Wake up, kids, Mommy’s called the cops on Daddy,” he said that one night my mother optimistically let him into our house to talk, not realizing he was lugging a trash bag of beer behind him, or that he would refuse to leave. I was glad she called the cops on him. In recovery, this stance is sometimes called The Piece of Shit at the Center of the Universe, a sort of self-pitying narcissism. I could see this box, evidence of a sweet life he’s blown up and bailed on, as the catalyst for many a bender, a sort of sickly-sweet punishment he enjoyed inflicting upon himself until he died.

The Dad who came to me in my dream looked like the dad from these pictures – floppy, black hair; a full, black moustache. His hair gave the suggestion that there was balding on the horizon, but it wasn’t there yet. It probably got there. I have no idea what he looked like as a sober, tofu-eating Floridian; I have no idea what he looked like when he died. I’m choosing to believe that it was him that came to me in my Madonna Inn Anniversary Dream; the place is haunted, and my husband is a spooky sort who had just been sharing that there were spirits around him lately, how he could see them from the corner of his eye. I was in the right place at the right time and in the right company for a visitation.

Spooky Dad

My, Diary, this is a darker entry, is it not? I did quite joyful things while away from you, too! I was in a play! It was staged reading, technically, but it had blocking and movement and sound and light cues. I wore three different costumes and really pushed my comfort level, both via the execution of a burlesquey dance number and the public donning of a pair of workout pants that showcased my mum mum tum tum in a manner I normally opt not to do. The play was Femmes: A Tragedy, by Gina Young, and I played an aging lesbian burlesque dancer schooling the young on butch/femme history and, like, fisting; I also briefly played a Pilates instructor. I don’t know that I’m an actor, but I’m comfortable enough on a stage and pulled it off. I went to Disneyland, and Medieval Times! My child is getting not one but two spring breaks this season, what with the change of schools. Disneyland review: Space Mountain is exhilarating. I meditated on the big drop at the end of Splash Mountain and fully stayed in my body. Also, if you spread an umbrella across your knees you won’t get so wet. Guardians of the Galaxy is the best ride. Apple Pie Churros are worth it. Medieval Times review: The knights were all striking! We saw scab knights! We all felt badly about this and Venmo’d the striking knights. An injury to one is an injury to all! That said, we are not worthy of horses. It was great to bring my son to a place where he could yell “KILL HIM!!!!!”  and it wasn’t inappropriate. The food was surprisingly good. Our scab knight (everyone gets assigned a knight) was the most metal, with a wild, furry beard. The sparks flying off the clashing swords are undeniably cool. I felt surprisingly immersed in the world of the historic tarot – the swords! The cups! It is someone’s job to braid the horses’ manes and tails to give them maximum crimped, Stevie Nicks hair. I would like to think I’m too ethical to be a scab worker for this job, but perhaps I overestimate my morals, at least in the face of a saucer-eyed, ombre-furred, crimped-haired horse.