Moodswing - History happens

I should introduce myself because I’ve been writing this column for a month and haven’t done so yet. But in my defense I’d like to say that I’ve actually been writing this column for six years. I’m a remnant of the now-defunct and much-missed Poets, Artists and Madmen, which turned into the Atlanta Press, then folded earlier this year. After that, my column floated into these pages like flotsam salvaged from a fabulous wreck. So after all these years it feels damn dumb to say, “For those of you who are just joining us ... ” because that would mean it should matter, this catching up. “Just jump in,” I say, “and all the crap that happened in the past to put me here will surface sooner or later.” But this is the South, and even though I don’t belong here because I’m Californian, I should honor its customs, and custom calls for an introduction.
For starters, my mother was a missile scientist and my father was an alcoholic traveling trailer salesman. I am what you would expect as an amalgam of the two. I have a blue-collar job I refuse to leave even though I speak three languages and the writing gig pays OK. But in my mind, being a tri-lingual humor writer only means I might one day have an edge on a job waiting tables, and even then it’s iffy. Hands-on work is all I trust, really — a mindset that keeps me in constant panic because I’m irredeemably lazy.
That said, I never rest on laurels, having found that a person’s failings often provide much better material. For example, my parents died rather young, before I could develop a sense of sentiment, and to this day I find it somewhat agonizing to recall that my mother the missile scientist possessed broken dreams of becoming a beautician. Why didn’t I take every chance to sit at her knee and soak up what life was like for this woman who could build missile-tracking strategies but couldn’t curl her own bangs? I let her live right there in front of me without asking her to self-reflect hardly at all. She died kind of quietly, too, her biggest regret being that she wrote the word “bicycle” on her Christmas list as a little girl, knowing her parents grievously couldn’t afford to give her one.
So I write about her a lot, as well as my three best friends; two queers and a crusty malcontent whose names are, respectively, Daniel, Grant and Lary. We used to all hang out together at the Clermont Lounge on Ponce de Leon, where we would drink, tip the strippers and sit completely certain we were safe from ever meeting anyone right for us.
Since then Daniel has become a famous artist, Grant struck it rich and moved to an island off the coast of Mexico and I married a bartender. Lary is still Lary. Sometimes you can see him driving around town with three life-sized, plastic wise men from a light-up lawn nativity scene sitting in his back seat like cab passengers. My husband is bemused by my attachment to these men, but knows not to question it.
I remember Grant recalling that, when he was a child, his family hired a live-in maid named Flossie, who slept in his room on the bunk beneath him and peed in a pot she kept under the bed because she was afraid of the dark, and the hallway to the bathroom was always dark.
I say this because that hallway is a little like my life; I’m afraid to go down it but do anyway. I see things that aren’t pleasant, like the fact that my father died alone when I was supposed to be there, and later I lost his Bible when it fell off the back of an El Camino while driving down the San Diego freeway. I tried to salvage some pages but in the end left them where they lay. Looking back I wish I’d kept a few, because it didn’t occur to me that these past apathies would haunt me years later, when the chastity belt around my chest finally cracked. Those pages didn’t belong on the side of the road, just like I don’t belong here, but it seemed right at the time to leave them be.