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I was nine-years old. Nobody ever made me do anything. I was visiting my Aunt Debbie three blocks from the arcade where I played skee-ball. Bowl it hard at the left hand corner and hit it on that perfect spot and it would go in the fifty-point hole every time. I knew that about skee-ball and I was undoubtedly competent at the game. I played for two hours a day and had no reason to stop except for the pain in my shoulder and the heat. Aunt Debbie was my father’s sister. Even though he was dead, she was not, and so I could visit her. Aunt Debbie had a pool that she didn’t use and jugs of scotch in her walkway. She was an apple-shaped person with tiny leopard skin legs and a black silk tit shelf where she rested her arms. Her hair was thin, like the smoke from the cigarette that she hardly sucked on but always had lit. There were cartons on top of her refrigerator in a neat stack of three. She sat in a chair at her dining-room table in front of a mirror where I could see her bald spots and her washed-out face at the same time. If not for her family’s money, she might have become me years ago. Because of her family’s money, I might instead become her. Light from closed windows reflected off the ice cubes in Aunt Debbie’s tall glass of scotch and soda, and back onto her pink walls like calm waves in water. She was inside a snow globe.
This was before she married a man twenty-years older, and before she found him dead in the basement with the Nintendo still on. Aunt Debbie was my favorite aunt. She didn’t make me talk. She didn’t snicker like the others when on my sixth Easter I couldn’t make my body do anything but sit backwards on my chair and make screeching and revving sounds while the ham was being passed. That’s what I wanted to do. Looking back at my childhood histrionics I suspect, as the others did, that this little girl may have been a bit emotionally disturbed. However, as a witness to many of her performances, I happen to know that she intended merely to entertain. I don’t think my aunt paid attention during my show and this fact alone made her especially real to me. The others were spectators with little ability to inspire the artist; they could easily have been replaced with cardboard images of themselves. Individually they did not matter. When I paid attention, they did little more than insult my work. My aunt was so hard to please but not at all displeased, and so my energies were focused on defining the wall that was her when I came bulldozing toward her. I would call her indifferent if that were the right word. I now think of her as half-living/half-ghost. She was always occupied by one of the two worlds, but never at the appropriate time. This may be why I found her so intriguing. I too only existed as half of what I should have been, a child-phantom who never spoke and never cried.
It’s hard to remember so clearly a childhood devoid of any true emotion. The words that would best describe my childhood state: sad, lonely, dirty, fearful, etc.; don’t do their job. Imagine a blind fold that doesn’t make you blind, or a hand always on the verge of smacking you, reaching out instead to pet you. Imagine wanting to play, wanting to kiss, laugh and be lifted up into the air by larger hands, but having no one around ever. Imagine not believing in anything anyone said, because you learned at an early age that they were most likely lying to you. Imagine these things, along side everything else. I was an ill beast, though adorable, with no help or road map out. I had a disbelief in everything; and the System, that is our modern understanding of a God figure, did not work on my side. In fact, through my mother’s determination, devout atheism to a point of near paganism, and the welfare state, I didn’t even know there was a system until I was much older. When I found out I was pissed. Mine was an existence of impulse that I was very much aware of, and the impulses were not violent or even necessarily crude in nature. They were acts of thoughtful randomness that I look on now as ritualistic. Rituals based on nonsense, but rituals nonetheless. I don’t quite understand now why nobody found it amusing that I made sound effects to the passing of the ham that Easter Sunday so long ago; perhaps they would have found it funny had it been done by somebody else. My paternal relatives couldn’t go on having a blind faith in the System with me, my sister, my mother, and the fading memory of my father within their plane of vision. A child without a childhood was an obvious glitch. Regardless, they still practiced the rituals of the System despite its flaws.
I imagine my father’s family, whom I’d assumed for so long were part of myself, forever dumbfounded and still. As I understand them now, they are capable only of effecting me in the real world, wherever that world may be. They are the kind of people who spend their whole lives investing in themselves, growing, and waiting to mature. They are American, justified in their love for money and ruthless dealings with people. Justified in seeing all people below them as things to be stepped on, and all people above them as asses that need licking. My father’s family played by rules of a class that I wasn’t part of. Aunt Debbie was much different from her siblings and siblings-in-law, and I have to guess my father was too. She invested nothing in her life.
Aunt Debbie reminded me of ham because her eyes looked salty and her skin had a pinkness that made me think of tangy sensations on the flat of my tongue. She’s not dead yet. She’s still alive, probably sitting at her table with old National Enquirers, and watching daytime TV. Aunt Debbie is always middle-aged, and even though she married once, she’s always alone at her dining-room table, waiting for a holiday to come. I can’t be sure about anything though. My family forbids me to talk to her, but I’d rather not discuss that right now.
Aunt Debbie kept me in touch with Pine Valley. Pine Valley is a fictional community of aristocrats in the series All My Children. I used to know what everybody was up to once because I watched soap operas faithfully. Cheryl never made me go to school. The strange thing about soap operas, which is also true of my aunt, is that one can neglect them for weeks, months, years, and then decide to watch again as if nothing has changed. More often than not very little has in fact changed. Perhaps a victim of the times, my aunt is motionless, but still very much made of flesh that sweats and bleeds and yearns for the things that the living yearn for.
I remember the people of Pine Valley married different people all the time, and had affairs with different people; some people died and some people came back from the dead. The fundamentals of the thing never varied. The tragedies of a specific character, or a specific type of character, could be foreseen well before the action took place. Their fate was overtly written on the actor’s brow. The very fact that my aunt had small, almost non-existent eyebrows spoke to her importance in the world. Some people may call soap operas trite. I wouldn’t. I’d call them honest, rhythmic, comedic, silly, anti-spontaneous, lacking creativity, lacking signature or identity, so poorly written that they must originate from a collective. Soap operas may in fact be an act of communism; a mural paid for by the dictatorship of the System. Agnes Nixon probably had no idea and that may be the best part. Soap operas differ from other TV shows in their reckless disregard for reality. Even science fiction desires to explore a greater human truth. Soap operas feed us things we’ve eaten a thousand times before, and though we’re always hungry for what they offer, we’re left even hungrier after we’ve eaten.
On her first widowed Valentine’s Day, I sent Aunt Debbie a bouquet of flowers with a card that said I love you! It seemed like something a good and sensitive character would do on television, plus, all the people she knew well were dead. I know that on days that have memorable dates, the lonely hate themselves for wasting so much time imagining paradise. She thought I really loved Uncle Ted because the first time I met him I stood behind him and played with the few strands of hair that remained on the top of his head. Uncle Ted was Greek and had four adult children when he married my aunt. He loved puzzles and brainteasers and scotch with water, just like my aunt. I found his silence inviting and the bald head of man such a strange thing that it needed inspecting. His scalp was oily and left a film that smelled healthy on the tips of my fingers. Such a kind and gentle man, my Uncle Ted was, and I find it altogether disrespectful that the gods made him impotent only to later kill him with a Viagara induced heart attack. Last I heard, the suit was still pending.
I was sitting totally straight on my yellow bedspread, smelling the tips of my hair when Aunt Debbie called to let me know how much she appreciated the flowers. I don’t like my habit of stuffing my hair up my nostrils, but I find the scent of smoky hair so comforting, as if my mother’s love could be located there. I think I was born addicted to nicotine, and like most of my people, began smoking at an absurdly early age. Cigarettes make me calm like a suckling pup, reminding me with every tar stained butt that I am a filthy animal. Aunt Debbie was drunk when she called and made me tell her my social security number. Now I’m her beneficiary. I never wondered why she didn’t have children.
The past few years I had gotten closer to my aunt. She liked hearing about the places I’ve traveled to, the new kinds of drugs kids do, the kinds of drugs that we both did, and she loved sharing celebrity gossip. The subject would always turn towards the dead people in her life though: Uncle Ted, my father, her friend Vinny from the old neighborhood. None of them seemed to go the natural way and I knew that this would be true for her as well. For every dead relative I have, there is a drug responsible. The drugs work as remedies and agents for disaster, leaving my people defenseless against the illness infecting us.