Super Mario Brothers

From time to time my brother would get me to play video games. But I was a terrible partner. I flew the battleship through halls of stars while my brothers shrieked help from Star Fox, Star Fox; in Selenitic there was a bookcase, filled with squares of cracked vellum, green leather, each rowed with black hieroglyphs like Hebrew on a corpse's arm. How could one resist such richness, how could one look away? I slumped through ivory patios and wanted to see. My favorite was a room above the crested mud gateway to the hall of Princess Peach. The black walls were noiseless and veloursome; it was an error of code, the material bounding the room jangling with emptiness. My steps clipped delicately and deadened on the lighted picture window, an inverse, rose-soft image of the Peach; there were only twenty paces wall to wall. The Princess held a rose. The noise of the game came in from a great distance. Other people were eating mushrooms, other people were leaping three hundred feet in the air. No one else could enter. I sat under the diffuse blush of the window. The sun came from far off.

Wonderland, Part Two: Mount Olympus and The Foibles of Zeus

Just as I was falling hopelessly and eternally in love with baby dragons, the Wonderland Avenue curriculum moved on to Greek myth. My bus, traversing the moneyed community of Laurel Hills, passed by a set of golden gates every morning, as tall as houses and ostentatiously bedecked with a glittering chrome sign reading "Mount Olympus" in scripty lettering. Naturally, I was happy to learn that I lived right near the famous Mount Olympus, and I yearned to go there. I was confused when my friend Lindsay told me that all that lay inside were big mansions for rich people. "You mean mortals?" I asked. "Well, I think so," she said, suddenly unsure.

Somehow, none of the parents were fussy enough to censor the parts about Zeus impregnating different ladies while dressed up as different barn animals. Thank the Gods for that, because these parts of the story caused me no end of mind-expanding consternation. Why would the ladies want to go anywhere with some strange cow, even if it was white as snow? What were they doing over there? Did cows do that with ladies? Could they? And, most importantly, why were the babies that resulted from whatever the heck they were doing half-God, and not half-cow? I mean, we were second-graders, not total idiots. We knew how DNA worked, roughly. Brown-haired parents made brown-haired children. Cows made cow babies. It didn't matter if the cow was Zeus or Captain Kangaroo. It was totally simple, and a matter of science.

Wonderland, Part One: Pillow Talk of the Round Table

I started attendance at Wonderland Avenue Magnet School in the second grade, thanks to my mom's dogged and somewhat dishonest insistence that I be tested again and again until it was scientifically proven that I was a genius. At my last school, the only slightly-less-fun-sounding Dixie Canyon Elementary, my first-grade teacher was one crotchety and terrifying Mrs. Ishihara. Whereas Miss Chan, who I'd had the year before, had liked to do things such as make stone soup and paint our faces with butterflies, Mrs. Ishihara had a more stoic, spartan, old-fashioned sort of teacher-sense. Her most confounding punishments would be doled out to students for a crime dubbed “getting ahead of the rest of the class"--which she seemed to define, mysteriously, as being already good at something that she was attempting to teach. For such an egregious offense the smarter, i.e., the hopelessly disobedient, children would be taken by the shoulders, gripped firmly, and shaken until they cried in bewilderment--or once, to Mrs. I's increased frustration, puked all over the place. Others, like me, who were merely insolent but not yet insufferable know-it-alls, would be sent to the corner routinely, to muse silently and privately about things that were invariably more interesting than whatever we were "learning" that day.

Wonderland Avenue was not like this. At Wonderland, the first thing we did was read a book about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Garb, I whispered to myself, devouring with my eyes the armored knights in velvet tunics, the ladies in gleaming, mossy silk, the gold circlets on the wizened foreheads of the grey and reclusive wizards. Scabbard. Merlin. Excalibuuuur. We went to the Medieval Times tournament in Buena Park, where a stadium full of other eight-year-olds with their teachers chomped on roast turkey legs without benefit of utensils and gulped juice served in goblets “fashioned”(molded) by “alchemists”(factory drudges) from “sacred pewter”(glittery grey plastic). We goggled and allowed tired-looking, yet lively actors to feint and charge at one another on modern-bridled horses, swing broadswords made of the same counterfeit material as our cups, and roar "thee" to everything and everyone, although even we, second-graders on a field trip, knew that Medieval people never said "thee" to common friends or enemies, but pretty much only to their sworn leige the King, or when they were pillow-talking.

Pappy, for Now and Ever

I have a picture of my father when he was seven or so. Here he is: my Dad, my Daddy-o, my one and only ever-lovin' Pap, in a tweedy striped blazer two sizes too huge on him, gigantic, patterned satin tie knotted a little askew, looking like an old man that's been shrunken down to child-size and doesn't know it yet.

His face looks different than it did by the time I knew him. He hasn't yet been bitten by the neighbor's trusted Rottweiler after he got curious about its eyes, hopped the fence in the middle of the night, put his hands on his knees and stared, as if to kiss it, full in the face. It hasn't yet happened that he was just sitting in a diner, having coffee, minding his own business, and a cherry red Mustang shiny and well-tended as Heaven itself came barreling through the wall-sized picture window, sending a constellation of jagged glass stars sinking into the skin of his cheek. He doesn't have an inkling idea yet about the love beads, the David Bowie haircut, the hours and hours of bleeding fingers hammering out melodies from a guitar, the fact that in a handful of years he will run away from home and stay gone so long his parents will move and leave no forwarding address. He doesn't yet know about my mother, and he sure as heck doesn't know anything about me.

He's got the unrumpled face of a child, complacent and curious, not yet confused or scared but still waiting for the rather interesting story he seems to be stuck in to unfold a little more. In his face are none of the chickenpox scars, none of the lines from smiling or from smoking that he had by the time that I was born and looked up at him and knew that he was mine, mine without end. But he's the same. He looks like my brother; he made my brother, and one day I'll probably be the mother of a little kid who'll look just like him. When I look at my seven-year-old dad, I miss him like a spurned lover, because I can't pick that adorable little boy up in my arms and hold him, tell him he's the cutest thing I ever saw and that I'll love him forever. I can't because he's long gone—he's grown into a man, and then turned into my dad. All that I've got of him is a picture.

I'll be surprised when I get to heaven if we aren't all born at the same time, and get to be together for our whole lives, from beginning to end. I can't think of any other way to finally know the entirety of it all at last; I can't think of any other way not to love people so much that you grit your teeth when you look at them and miss them tragically even when they're right there, still alive.

Staying At Mom's, or, Adult Orphanism, or, The Welled-Up Woes of a Washed-Out Waitress

Once I was a waitress, and I lost my job. I was not laid off from my job. I was fired, and I deserved it.

Waitressing had given me a mysterious shoulder injury that meant that I couldn't hold a tray or do much of anything without looking like there was a wooden nail buried in my arm, which was what it felt like. I had worked in restaurants for eight years, and suddenly at twenty-five I realized that I was no longer just messing around: my job had given me a disabling injury, it had become a part of me, and soon I would be thirty and have nothing going for me but the ability to act sweet for five seconds at a time to people who I'd rather eat nails than ever actually talk to. I wanted to go to college but couldn't figure a surefire way to eat if I quit, and so I just got surlier with every fruitless, hopeless, waitress day that passed. I was fired for this: for being a surly waitress, a mean waitress, a waitress with a sneer on her lips and a jeer on her tongue, a waitress who grimaced like roadkill every time she lifted up your drink, a waitress who wanted to be a respected author/scientist instead of a waitress, a waitress who was certainly not on the fucking dessert menu, a waitress who hated her life, hated herself, and hated everybody else for looking at her and thinking, "waitress".

I made my prayers by way of snippy comments and desperate feelings. But still, my prayers were answered. Verily, the message from God could not have been clearer if a white bull with golden horns had appeared to me in the salsa freezer, and yet, because I am a human, this divine routing of my plans made me madder than hell. I was like a monkey backed into a corner. The busted shoulder meant that another waitressing job was out. The way the management had wangled my hours down to nonexistence before I was booted meant that unemployment was also a no-go. The only other thing I knew how to do was go to school, although being forced to do so had not necessarily been in the plans. So, with the kind of terror that makes you grin like the aforementioned cornered animal, I took out $11,000 worth of student loans, let go of my apartment, and realized that I'd gotten what I'd wanted. More or less. Which brings me back to the point: Staying at Mom's.

I Stay at Mom's because I have no home of my own. My things stay here--the tables, sofas, and other accoutrement of adult life--and periodically, when my boyfriend, who I generally stay with, goes out of town, I join the things. I sleep on one of the sofas, actually. I like to think of this situation romantically as a variation on Adult Orphanism; although I have two parents, both of them quite nice, sleeping on a couch in a cat-infested loft at the age of twenty-six becomes more bearable when I imagine myself as some glamorous Oliver, perhaps in a rhinestone-lapeled trenchcoat, singing for my meals and scrapping to get ahead. More cats live here than do humans, and there's cat hair, cat toys and cat food on every available space where one would wish to place one's human paw. Dogs have died in this home. Teenagers have turned into college students and left most of their things behind, cramming the closets. Adult Orphans have returned home, bringing with them sofas; they have left again, leaving sofas; they have returned to sleep on those sofas once more amongst the dander and felt mice and squeezy toys and actual cats. They return to sleep now. They are going to have strange dreams.