growing up weird

a proper inheritance

Did you ever come home from school to see your name sprawled across the small hill of your snowy yard, written in your father’s urine? ISABEL! LILY! CHRISTINE! Every first-snow my father, Pappy, became ebullient, overcome with excitement to spell out his love the way only a man can.

He had a song, extolling this art form: “I can write my name in the snow / I can write my name in the snow. / You can bloody up that Tampax, you can do your lactate flow, but I can write my name in the snow.” I’ve never felt so loved and so humiliated as I would with the first sign of winter.

I miss him all the time, even though his eccentricities caused me so much embarrassment, it felt like hives were blooming under my skin. I took for granted the rich inheritance of weirdos. The gift of believing myself an outsider, looking in.

Honestly, my reference points to the norm were few; just what I could gather from watching Full House and the Tool Man on sleepovers. We didn’t have a T.V., and it was my fault we’d been kicked out of the Eden of American culture and lost the mouthpiece of its codes.

When I was four, I snuck into my parents’ bedroom and turned on Sally Jessy Raphael. I watched, rapt, as a woman with crispy, curled bangs complained about her overbearing husband, “he won’t even let me buy tampons!” A troupe of male strippers marched out in maroon G-strings and lifted this housewife in the air and bounced her in front of her smoldering man.

Pappy walked in for the dancing. He did his own routine, lifting the television and hurling it out the window. It exploded on the lawn and lay rusting for weeks. A sign of what we stood for; what we were. Weird.

Whenever my mother was in Los Angeles (working on a television show) Pappy would pick me and Lily up from school on his motorcycle wearing one of the named hats from his collection—‘Al Gazazarat’ was his favorite: a wooly, white fez that looked like headgear from the Ottoman Empire. “Don’t you need helmets for the girls?” a teacher once asked, flooding me with something worse than embarrassment; a nauseating dread: does he know what he’s doing? Are we … alright?

The older I got, the more I asked. Wherever my father went smelled like the green leaves he rolled into paper and smoked at the edge of the woods. Other peoples’ parents did not have this perfume, I noticed. I saw the way people looked at Pappy in his rubber, orange waders, which he wore to block the wind on his bike. When they ripped, he fixed the seam with duct tape: making a giant, silver asterisk across his crotch. I saw the way they looked at me, his girl. I got vigilant, trying to detect the baseline of ordinariness so I could adopt it and assure everybody… “we’re alright.”

My life now looks about as American as Leave it to Beaver. The boys watch Saturday morning cartoons and walk themselves to school. Still, everywhere I go, I smile and think, “You have no idea I don’t belong here.” I can’t imagine living otherwise.

“Is the world crazy, or is he?” I used to wonder. Because of that, I’m an anthropologist in every room: what’s called for here? What’s taboo? I wouldn’t trade that sensitivity for the banality of constant enfranchisement. What does it mean to be alright, anyway?

I don’t worry about the outsiders, clocking the codes, slipping into costume, playing pretend. I worry about the people who assume their belonging. Nothing weakens a personality like effortlessly fitting-in. And how un-fun. Every time I see a person judging, the way I felt them do to Pappy, I want to ask: “Did you forget this is a game?”

Did you ever learn to play? Did something go wrong or weird enough for you that you had to read a room, real quick? Figure out the taboos and expectations? How often do you ask: can I make it a little weird around here? You could live a rich life like that, pass it on.

As for my concerned teacher—she asked Pappy to take her on a motorcycle ride after Lily and I graduated. I found a thank you note, years later. “I can’t believe we hit 100!” she wrote in proper cursive. Funny, how sick I felt at pickup that day, when she wanted what I had.

I feel for the normies who can’t spot the trickster among them. Who’d never dare play with the discomfort of others. I feel for everyone who won’t blush from the grandiosity of seeing their name, big and sprawling, a public honorific on a roadside hill, dribbled in cursive… with their father’s piss.

A weirdo’s I love you.

Xx Isabel