Not liking hot ham doesn’t make a person a freak. In my opinion, it makes a person seem sensible and capable of discernment. But in my family consumption of ham equals normal. And deciding whether or not to bite into a big, hot, squeaky Easter ham covered in sweet fruit goo is the barometer that determines whether you are thinking clearly or in one of your “crazy” phases.
“Are you eating ham these days? You’re not a vegetarian right now, are you? We’re having ham, is that going to be okay, or do I need to make you one of your special ‘vegetable stacks’? How many pieces of ham do you want? Have some more ham—there’s lots! This one came special ordered from Virginia and weighs twenty-seven pounds! There’s even ham in the dessert!”
For the record, I have always disliked hot ham; spearing it with a giant meat fork and slamming it onto a platter reminds me too much of what John the Baptist’s head might have looked like, and I find it repulsive. I am, however, still able to enjoy finely diced ham products, and sometimes even thinly sliced cold ham, but only when I decide that I am in the mood for it. I am a very mysterious person, I guess, with a lot of complexities.
I can’t really blame my parents for their inability to pin me down, or their endless drive to do so. I put them through a lot. I was a scary teenager. A very scary one, in fact, whose multifaceted awfulness soured parental relations well into my twenties, and whose indiscretions are still occasionally brought up to punish me now that I am in my forties. When my parents emerged from my teen years, the scars ran deep and I was forever tragically stamped with the reputation that I am hard to handle and as changeable as a summer breeze. Every assertion I make is still viewed with a kind of bemused suspicion. I somehow warped my parents to the degree that they literally can’t believe that I am a good parent, that my husband loves me, or that I don’t have some kind of sex dungeon in my house with a bunch of dried-up scrotums hanging on the wall.
And I don’t just mean that I was a bad teenager in the usual way. I mean, I was horrible in the usual way, of course, but I was even worse in a different way. And my parents never knew a thing about it. They should have been much more scared than they actually were.
So years later, when the ultrasound technician told me that I was having a girl, I burst into tears at the thought of what she was going to put me through—because truthfully, I deserve all the emotional pain that is coming to me. I ruined my parents forever. As they read this, they are mirthlessly laughing, and mentally high-fiving each other.
Hitting puberty excavated a wellspring of evil energy in me that led me to the discovery that my parents were vulnerable and had made mistakes that could be exploited in an interesting way. Hating them with the white-hot wrath of a middle-class teenager was a full-time job that I took very seriously. But at least when I was solely occupied with giving my parents stress-related ulcers, I had a sense of self-preservation about me—a shrewdness.
Thank goodness that prior to all this, in a moment of inspiration, my mother had imposed a curfew that I blindly adhered to, at least for a short but vitally important period of time. It preserved my personal safety on a number of occasions. Only a few short months before my transformation into a bitch-on-wheels, I was as innocent as a lamb to the slaughter. And all those times I cheated a horrible outcome just by the skin of my teeth were crystallized in an instant many years later at that ultrasound appointment, as the technician located the girl parts that would mean that I, too, would never sleep comfortably again.
I’m speaking of a simpler time, when I was sweet and soft and doughy and impressionable, and I would eat my parents’ ham because I loved them and they had put a lot of effort into the meal and I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. In short, I was stupid. That’s what fills me with genuine fear as a parent. I’m pretty sure I can handle mean, but I don’t quite know how to deal with stupid. When I think back to all the times I engaged in risky behavior and never gave it a second thought, it makes me sick to my stomach imagining my children doing the same kinds of things.
Like most teenagers, I worked desperately to look older than my years, to cultivate the impression that I was willing and available, though the implications of that meant nothing to me. My girlfriends and I were obsessed with projecting the right kind of rocker image, and that meant lots of tight jeans, frosted eyeliner, and a chronic aversion to cold weather outerwear, no matter the subfreezing temperature. Being totally oblivious to winter weather was somehow considered de rigueur in our crowd. In a brave albeit dumb rebuke of fashion trends for no discernible reason at all, I would have worn my leather jacket open at the summit of Mount Everest if I thought there was a chance that a single, homely, male ninth-grader from De La Salle Academy might have been up there looking for a worthy partner to share one of his oxygen canisters with.
I had braces and a feathered haircut, though it never feathered properly, and I was forced to flip the front sides of it with a curling iron. Only the front though. Who cared what the back looked like? I couldn’t see it anyway, so I figured no one else could either. We dangled decorative roach clips from our hair and purses to signify our extreme coolness, but we just thought they were fun barrettes.
We would sit around Vanessa’s basement, listening to Rolling Stones records and weeping our eyes out at all the sad songs. We still watched The Uncle Bobby Show at lunch-time, played poker for gingersnaps, and dressed up unironically at Halloween to go trick-or-treating. We constantly debated who had the better chest, Jon Bon Jovi or David Lee Roth. Personally, I found Jon Bon Jovi too feminine and slender—translation: gay. I was a mad David Lee Roth girl; I loved his hairy chest, but wasn’t entirely sure why. I knew I wanted to rub my face in it, but that was about it. I also suffered from a relentless desire to have either Hall or Oates sing a duet with me, it didn’t really matter which one. Although in my fantasy life, all we did was hold hands afterward, while they complimented me on my natural ability and effortless recall of the words to “One on One.”
Despite my tarted-up exterior, I had never been kissed, had never come close to being on a date, and had never in a million years considered having a boy go up my shirt or anywhere else for that matter. I was familiar with all things sexual but had no desire to drink from that particular cup. So when I met Dan from Buffalo, I was oblivious to his intentions.
We were sitting near each other at the Police Picnic, one of those open-air concerts with multiple bands on the bill. My girlfriends and I liked to see live music and had been to several concerts, though we never partook in any of the antics. We didn’t drink or smoke pot, but we liked to go to heavy-metal shows and stand quietly in the nosebleeds, too self-conscious to sway or appear to enjoy the music in any way. Occasionally, we would raise our devil horns, but only if everyone else around us had done it first, and we only ever knew the bands’ number one hits. Sometimes we would see a groupie go by or someone who looked appealingly slutty and we would jealously contemplate her tight satin pants and well-feathered hair, feeling shabby in our stupid tight jeans with our stupid poorly feathered hair.
Dan was tall and tan, with a big shock of tightly curled blond hair and a wide white smile. I think he was interested in my girlfriend, but when she, paralyzed with fear, was unable to respond to his questions, he moved down the line and eventually got to me. I would do. I was sort of witty, and more “worldly” than my friends—though that’s not really saying much, since they were first-generation Canadians, and their hardworking Polish parents barely spoke English and wouldn’t pay for cable. It was difficult having to hold their hands through the particulars of the Falcon Crest family lineage, but I was a very giving person.
There is no way I could have come across as any older than thirteen. I still had braces on my teeth, for God’s sake. I was thirteen, but I probably looked eight, though I definitely claimed to be in my twenties and in college. Dan and all his friends certainly were. They had probably graduated many years earlier, in fact. When I told him my major was geography, I was unable to elaborate any further and had no reason to believe that anyone studying geography in college would ever need to elaborate. I mean, wasn’t it obvious? I was studying where all the countries in the world were, coloring in each one with a different shade of pencil crayon. It’s possible that I could have pointed to the Middle East on a map if asked, but just barely.
After the most shallow conversation imaginable between an adult and a child pretending to be an adult, he invited me back to his hotel room for a pizza party. Even his friends looked horrified, and they were his wingmen. I wanted to go so badly. I could just taste all that hot, delicious pizza and imagine all the deep adult conversation I would be having in the good company of a handsome man from south of the border in his lonely hotel room. The promise of passing for an adult was too good to resist; plus, he had a car, which was so far out of my league that it was as if he had offered to fly me back to the Sheraton Hotel on the wings of Falkor from The Neverending Story, which happened to be my favorite movie at the time . . . because I was a little girl.
My friends said no to the tantalizing invitation, which made it impossible for me to accept. We whisper-fought in front of Dan and his friends for twenty minutes, through the entire encore. They weren’t upset that a grown man was transparently trying to seduce a gaggle of thirteen-year-olds, because my friends were just as excited as I was about the prospect of eating pizza that we didn’t have to pay for. They were simply concerned that we would get in trouble if we didn’t make it home by curfew. As a mature college student in the field of “World Geography,” I would have difficulty explaining that my parents had imposed something as “retardenated” as a curfew, but fortunately, I was very quick on my feet.
“I can’t. My mother was hit by a carpet-cleaning van.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! That’s awful—is she okay?”
She actually had recently been bumped by a carpet-cleaning van at a crosswalk, but all that had materialized was a huge bruise on her hip and the beginnings of an angry letter-writing campaign to the municipal authorities regarding pedestrian safety.
“No. Not at all. She’s in a coma. She needs us to come home and check on all her tubes.” I had also recently seen The Other Side of the Mountain again on TV, so I was something of an expert on medical interventions.
“Why is she at home? Shouldn’t she be in a hospital?”
“She doesn’t want people to feel sorry for her. I think the hardest time for her is waking up in the morning . . . those moments before she remembers who she is, and thinks instead about who she was.”
I prayed that it hadn’t been his favorite “triumph of the human spirit” movie, too, but then he offered me a ride home anyway. I was actually supposed to sleep over at my girlfriend’s house, but I didn’t want him to know that because I thought only kids had slumber parties and it might give away my real age. And although technically I was staying over at a friend’s house, I still respected my mother’s curfew. I worried about the possibility that she was “all-seeing” and would somehow find out, and bar me from attending the kinds of grown-up events at which adult men would try to lure me back to their hotel rooms.
“No. My mother would get really upset if someone drove me all the way home.”
“Wouldn’t it be faster than taking the subway and then a bus this late at night?” I struggled with that one.
“Yeah, but she doesn’t like me taking the easy way out. She wants me to know about hardship and the value of a dollar and how far a dollar can take you on public transportation. And she likes to see my transfers from all my subway trips when I get home. It reminds her of how great it is to be able to travel on the subways since she can’t do it anymore herself.”
“I thought she was in a coma.”
“Definitely. I usually just sit by the side of her bed and show her all my transfers and she just tries to blink out the words ‘I love you.’ It’s really sad.” I looked sad all right, but only because I wasn’t going to a stranger’s hotel in the middle of nowhere for late-night snacks.
It wouldn’t be the last time my mother’s decision to impose curfew would intervene on my behalf. My girlfriend and I used to go to the summer carnival every year and hang around in front of the ride that went backward in a loop and played obnoxiously loud music and sirens. I think it was called the Polar Express, so named for all the Eskimos air-brushed on the walls in the tunnel portion of the loop. It was the kind of ride that would make anyone over the age of seventeen throw up in a trash can immediately upon disembarking, but for some reason, it was adored by all teenagers.
The ride was notorious for being a pickup spot. Everyone would stand around dumbly pretending not to look at one another, while they secretly scoped everyone out. No one ever seemed to actually go on the ride; nobody could have afforded the cost of all the tickets it would have taken to actually enjoy the ride over and over again. And anyway who would want to take the chance of messing up their long, badly curled, rocker side locks?
Vanessa and I were no exception to that rule. We stood there night after night. When we got into the amusement park, it was the first place we went, the only place we stayed for longer than three minutes, and the last place on our agenda for the whole night. We closed the park every night we were there, on that very spot, like so many others with us and before us. We didn’t talk to any of the people there, and they never really talked to us, though we saw them almost every day for the two weeks that the amusement park was open.
It wasn’t really clear what we were after. We were repulsed by the majority of the boys who were standing there with us, and were threatened by the girls who looked better than us. If anyone approached us, we gave them the cold shoulder and rebuffed them almost immediately . . . until one night, when Vanessa suddenly erupted with puberty and I didn’t. Her interest was piqued by two older-looking guys whom we had never seen before. They walked up to us, and as I steadied myself to coolly reject them in the usual way, I found Vanessa strangely enjoying their company. They were in their twenties, unemployed, and looking to party with two sexy single ladies such as ourselves. Never mind that we were thirteen and a half.
One of them looked like he had been the weaker, slightly withered conjoined twin of the other, successfully separated by surgeons but doomed to forever live in his handsome, healthy brother’s shadow. He looked like the smaller, uglier, slightly albino version of his friend, with less of everything, including normal pigmentation. Naturally, I got him. Even if I had been interested in anything sex-related, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to have it with him.
Vanessa and her handsome paramour began the clumsy dance of the Polar Express courtship, while I stuck it out with his albatross of a friend. She was the one pretending to be in college now, and she needed my support. By my estimation, she was doing a terrible job of faking her age; she put no effort into it whatsoever, and mostly just stood there awkwardly with him, not saying much of anything. The silence would have been deafening had it not been for the screaming sound track of the Polar Express filling the void in the background. As a good friend, I felt it was incumbent upon me to take the ball and run with it. I used the opportunity to present myself as a student of child psychology, specializing in child abuse.
I detailed a particular case that was on my mind. A young African-American girl from a low-income, single-parent family was being subjected to a series of physical abuses, and no one had been willing to intervene on her behalf so far. What was our responsibility as a society? The police weren’t interested, her teachers weren’t getting involved, even her own doctor had ignored the warnings of her benevolent neighbors, the Evans family. This girl—let’s call her “Penny”—had been burned with an iron, at the hands of her own mother, for God’s sake.
As I chronicled the entire story line from my favorite “very special two-part episode” of Good Times, the men could not have paid me less attention. Having determined that I, an annoying smidge of a girl, could somehow hinder their plan for us with my constant chatter, they chose to ignore me and put the full-court press on Vanessa.
Soon after, we were invited to their borrowed downtown condo for pizza. I’m not sure what it was about us that continually suggested that we were in need of free pizza, but there it was again, the Magic Word. But, oh no—we had this curfew we were supposed to comply with, how awful! To have the chance for free pizza and not be able to take it! Was this going to be the way things always were for us? Missed opportunity after missed opportunity?
No, sir, not this time. We were happy to jump in their car and head over to their apartment in a dangerous part of town, with one caveat: this was definitely going to have to be the kind of pizza that you could order and receive in under thirty minutes, and then we would have to go and they couldn’t give us any “guff” about it.
As soon as we got to their generically furnished apartment, they offered us Valium, which we both took. I had no idea what Valium was, but in retrospect, I’m glad I took it because it probably dulled my senses enough for me not to panic at the situation we had placed ourselves in for the simple love of food. Plenty of Valium and now liquor was on offer, but no pizza appeared to be forthcoming, and I started to get antsy about it.
I tried to plant a seed of doubt in Vanessa’s head about leaving. We weren’t getting what we came for, and it was getting to the time when we would really have to hustle if we were going to make our curfew. I was really pissed and starting to feel uncomfortable about being watched over by two grown men. Who were really, really watching us ... or rather, I presume, waiting for us to pass out so they could have sex with our lifeless bodies. Fortunately for someone of my size, I have an exceptionally high tolerance for pharmaceutical drugs. I’m like a horse that way. If you’re going to give me drugs and you expect something interesting to happen, then you better really dose me. You better get in it to win it, or your so-called drugs are just going to wake me up and make me feel refreshed.
At any rate, I had more important things on my mind at the time. I was so fixated on the idea of pizza that you’d have thought I’d just had my jaws unwired after six months of liquids-only nourishment. They claimed to have ordered it on the phone in the other room, but I was starting to get suspicious. Wouldn’t they have checked with us to see what kind of toppings we wanted first? How rude. What if they had ordered it with pineapple or olives? It would take so much time for me to pick off the gross toppings, the whole endeavor hardly seemed worth it.
There was some talk about “not letting us go,” which, thanks to the miracle of Valium, I was able to ignore completely, taking for granted that we would be able to leave whenever we wanted. For all of the random fears that ruled my life—the fear of Lizzie Borden’s ghost, the fear of gypsy curses, the fear of being impregnated by an alien—nowhere in my tortured psyche was there anything about being assaulted in an apartment by two strange men who had fed me drugs. Which actually seemed to be imminent (though I hadn’t really noticed that part yet, and I didn’t even really think about it until years later). I didn’t know where I was, couldn’t see a phone anywhere in the apartment, and had no money in my wallet for a taxi. I also didn’t know that I was the only one who actually wanted to leave. Vanessa was having a good time with those two duds and she didn’t want to go. I begged her and begged her, but she refused. They eventually let me leave, I guess because not only had I become a seriously annoying liability but my friend had stayed on to party without me.
I made it home on time, put on my flannel Little House on the Prairie-style nightgown, and settled in for a night of virginity and being thirteen years old. I found out the next day that Vanessa was officially dating both guys at the same time, and from that point forward I could never look at her face without picturing it in the throes of an orgasm. It was hard to go back to gingersnap poker after that.
Shortly thereafter, I met a much older man on the bus that I took home from ninth grade every day. His name was Alan, and he looked a lot like Dan, only his shoes were shabbier and he smelled like patchouli. I’m going to put his age at thirty. He lived in a basement apartment a few streets north of me, and I know that because I went there one day, just because he asked me to and I felt weird about saying no.
Alan had struck up a conversation with me because I always carried a flute to school and he was “interested in music.” Although my flute case clearly stated the name of my high school in bold stenciled letters, I was able to convince myself that I had convinced him that I was a professional musician for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He asked me if I would come over to his place and play him something. I agreed, and then spent the next twenty minutes sweating profusely and wondering if my woodwind rendition of “Dancing on the Ceiling” would be enough to convince him that I was for real. Our ninth-grade orchestra specialized in easy listening and ran the gamut from Lionel Richie up-tempo ballads to the classic-rock stylings of Bread.
The walls of his apartment were crowded with roughly hewn shelving units, each crammed with pickle jars and canned peaches and spilling over with baskets of onions and potatoes. But the place did not look lived in. There were no bare walls upon which to affix any posters, there wasn’t much furniture to speak of, and it was cold ... I guess to keep the vegetables fresh. Were it not for the untidy captain’s bed jammed in the corner, he could have been a mature street urchin living in some family’s basement unbeknownst to them.
What kind of grown man still slept in a captain’s bed anyway? Weren’t you just supposed to hide your Mad magazines and your masturbation glove (worn to prevent hair from developing on your palms) in it? Given the bountiful harvest lining the shelves, he was probably storing turnips and carrots in all the drawers. He didn’t seem to have any kind of kitchen in which to boil and sterilize the mason jars for all of his summer preserves either. I hadn’t asked him what he did for a living, and by the looks of things, I guessed the answer was probably going to be “not much.” My stowaway theory was becoming more and more likely. But I didn’t have time to worry that he lived in some old lady’s root cellar; I was far too busy worrying that my performance would not be impressive enough to sustain the illusion that I had so carefully crafted.
He offered me all kinds of drugs and poppers, liquors and “smokables,” which I refused on the basis of musicianship. We sat on the floor, since he clearly couldn’t afford a sofa or chair, and he rubbed my shoulders as I awkwardly tried to piece together my crappy borrowed instrument with the flair of a professional. Numb with fear of failure, I barely registered his thirty-year-old hands sliding all over my back in an attempt to be seductive and irresistible. Citing embouchure exhaustion from my extra-long professional practices, I hacksawed my way through “Pachelbel’s Canon,” while he tried to mesmerize me with his sensuous caresses.
That messy captain’s bed started looming large on the other side of the room, and I grew increasingly nervous about his insistence on helping me achieve a relaxed state. It was starting to dawn on me that I should reconsider my willingness to accompany strange men to their love caves when I had no intention of surrendering myself to them. For the first time, perhaps, I was starting to feel a bit under siege. Was there a possibility that he hadn’t been interested in hearing me play? That his “love of music” had just been some kind of crazy ploy to get me to come over to his apartment?
I shook it off. No one would make something like that up just to get someone interested in them. That would be wrong.
I began to focus on getting myself out of there without being too insulting to my host. After all, I had willingly followed him home after meeting him on a public bus, so in a sense I had accepted his hospitality, and as such, owed him some civility. Failing that, my plan basically involved defecating on myself.
I had heard a story about how to protect oneself against the unwanted advances of men. If someone is trying to get at you, the scenario goes, your best strategy for extricating yourself from the situation is to act as crazy as possible. You should shout things like “I have herpes!” and “I’m warning you, I love to bite penises in half!” and bark like a dog—basically, whatever it takes to scare off your potential attacker.
The nuclear option was to poop your own pants. Nobody messes with a girl who is willing to poop her own pants. I didn’t feel like things were quite progressing to that level, but I readied myself to pee in a circle on his floor and began making excuses as to why a mature, professional musician such as myself had to get home for dinner with my mom.
“I have to be home at five on the dot or my mother will freak.”
“Well, you’re pretty close by, can’t you just stay a little longer and then I’ll walk you home? Can’t your mother do without you for one dinner?”
“No. She really needs me. I take care of her. I have to feed her, and by five o’clock she’s really hungry. I can’t let her feed herself. She can’t.”
“Why?”
“She was born without arms. She’s a human worm.”
I had recently seen a short film in my social studies class about a woman with no arms. She lived a normal life and was able to do all these miraculous things, like drive a specially rigged car and care for her babies with her long toes. She would wear clogs when she went grocery shopping, and when she needed to check a cantaloupe for ripeness, she would just slip off one of her clogs, give the melon a squeeze, and slip it into her grocery cart. Some people in the grocery store found it appalling, but I was very high-minded and knew that she was just being proactive and handi-capable. By the look on Alan’s face when I brought up my human-worm mom, I could tell that he was narrow-minded and probably the kind of person who, unlike me, would never buy three-way lightbulbs from the adult assisted-living facility in town.
“She’s not a freak, you know. She’s a very proud person. She can change a diaper with her feet.”
“Then why can’t she feed herself?”
“She can, she just doesn’t like to. She likes me to roll her gurney out to the patio, and then we eat dinner together at five and enjoy the quiet.”
“Why is she on a gurney? She has legs, doesn’t she?”
I didn’t appreciate Alan’s interrogation tactics. I just wanted to get the hell out of there with minimal effort, but this was really turning into a tour de force. “Well, obviously she’s trying to preserve her feet, because she needs them to be soft and pliable for when she really needs them—to brush her hair or open a jar or something—like a hand model who has to wear rubber gloves all the time to minimize wear and tear.”
I was on my way up the stairs and out of the basement, and just kept going with it. “She used to have a helper ferret, but then he was strangled by the cord from our venetian blinds. You’re supposed to keep them up high so that babies don’t get tangled up in them, but there aren’t any safeguarding instructions for having a polecat ferret in the house. He was able to climb up the cord, and I guess he just got excited and then couldn’t unwind himself or something ... I don’t think he suffered. He had a very peaceful look on his face when she found him ...”
Unaware that I had now, in fact, figuratively “pooped my pants,” I congratulated myself profusely on my gifted storytelling abilities and hightailed it home. As disappointed as Alan probably was to have let such an obvious virgin and stupid person leave his grandma’s basement with her lady-flower intact, he had to have known on some level that it wouldn’t have been worth it.
Shortly thereafter, I adopted a brand-new attitude with respect to older gentlemen, known as, “Fuck you, you fucking pervert. I’m fucking fourteen years old!” I don’t really know where it came from, this proud spine that thrust upward out of nowhere, but I began putting it to good use. With my refusal to eat hot ham soon to follow.