Family Feud

My feelings.

The “batman cowl” look of John Kerry’s forehead, nose, and eyebrows.

My feelings of guilt at having sold my brother out to the cops in Nevada.

The desire not to write or think about the pervasive feeling of nausea.

The desire to write about things I don’t like to think about but think about too much.

I have a coquettish relationship with myself whereby I think everything I produce is valuable, but still feel compelled to dismiss it all as worthless and trite.

I can’t tell whether I revise too much or too little.

Fantasy basketball statistic checks in regular intervals. Feverish attempts to construct pin-shaped joints out of roaches that we’ve collected in empty yellow box tops. Irregular bouts of Halo undertaken in sudden and intense moments of determination.

When the late-night programming roster begins, I feel a sense of relief. I have my choice of syndicated reruns and B-grade blockbuster movies. Roseanne, M*A*S*H, Roseanne, Bad Boys, Cops.

Earlier today I watched an episode of Family Feud, the version before Ray Combs.

The host had an alcoholic face and a full head of graying hair that he wore brushed forward all around with fat chop sideburns. He wore a polka-dot tie with a fist-size knot and ate a ripe strawberry bite-for-bite on the air with a game twenty-two year old female contestant [he asked in between bites] before he kissed her on the mouth in front of her father.

This prompted Hichem, sitting next to me on the couch and scowling at a roach he was having difficulty lighting, to take a moment and say: “This guy is like the most pimp dude ever.”

He then shuffled down a notch and kissed a tall blond on the mouth before introducing himself, breath stinking, to her husband, a stiff man with rose-colored glasses who stood to her right in full military uniform.

The first question, dating the program to a time at least two decades before now: “Children can be spanked. What can you do to discipline a teenager?”

The Middle

No one from Southern California thinks that there's any life east of Las Vegas. And everyone from the East Coast thinks that civilization ends just west of Philadelphia. The Midwest, however, is acutely aware of the coasts, and it regards them with suspicion.

After all, this is what Midwesterners tend to do best: regard, with suspicion.

The Midwestern mentality is by far the most earnestly judgmental. Whereas the Californians live and let live and leave judgment to their fine courts, East Coasters tend to be a discerning bunch. There are things they want to know, and your answers to these questions, you can be sure, will determine the way they categorize you, which is, after all, a kind of judgment all its own. To name a few, usually phrased in slightly more subtle ways: How rich are you, where do you buy your clothes, how good is your family's name, where do you ski, do you ski?, where did you attend boarding school, these kinds of things. The Midwesterner does not understand the moral and decisional limbo in which the Californian lives, and the blunt evaluative tools of the Easterner do not satisfy the Midwesterner's appetite for rock-solid truth and the harsh-if-necessary justice that is its natural consequence.

If a Midwesterner gets a new haircut or decides in some way to "change his style," or her style, s/he had better be prepared to give an explanation. The judgmental closeness that the Midwest breeds in its many clucking subgroups is reminiscent of being home again for the holidays after months or years of having been away. Things will be discussed. This is not up for discussion.

You might be able to argue that I was born in the middlest place in the whole world.

And before you get started, no, that does not mean that I, or the place I happen to be talking about, is necessarily the center of the universe in any way. My father, a stern sort who liked to smoke cigarettes, always made sure to tell me, whenever I made unreasonable requests of his time or money, in bursts of teeth-clench, rehearsed vitriol: "Son, the world does not revolve around you." And I'm here to tell you, beyond the shadow of any doubt, despite statements you've probably heard attributed to me and things that have been deliberately misconstrued by the media--that my father was absolutely right. I've leave it at that.

Now, the thing about St. Louis, Missouri, is that it's very close to the geographical center of these United States. There's a name for whatever they call the actual like center of area, but I don't remember what it is--you'll remember if you can dig up the memories of balancing precisely cut foam triangles on pencil points; look it up, let us know--but the real point is that we're talking a really central spot here. On some sort of a profound level, I think you'll agree with me.

You've heard about the four points that they have there in the Southwest, where you can go out to the borders of Colorado and Utah and New Mexico and Arizona or something like that and get yourself all spread-eagled at some highway rest stop or something and have a hand or a a foot in each one of them at the same time? That's all well and good but if you'll indulge me for a minute and think of it this way, you could walk yourself out to a spot, who knows where, in some random point probably near some field in central Missouri, and you would be--literally--in the middle of the country. Like if--at the moment you were standing on this invisible spot in this cornfield--if you took out a gigantic jigsaw and cut out the [continental] United States out of the Earth just perfectly along the lines you could see on any common map, and you turned it upside down... The whole thing would balance perfectly on your head. And it wouldn't even be like Atlas, holding the whole world up because of his great strength, or anything like that. You'd just be in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time... See what I mean? If your back could stand the pressure, the distribution of the weight itself would do the work. Kind of crazy. That's the thing about the middle.

I, myself, though, wasn't born in the middle, actually, I was born in a little place outside of St. Louis about twenty miles from the Mississippi River, a place called Webster Groves, where the first city folks who were sick of the smoke and the crowds and the encroaching blacks decided to escape to, to live in houses where they could get some space and some peace from one another, where they could put a solid twenty feet and a white picket fence between themselves and their neighbors and be a lot happier and more neighborly because of it.

They called it Webster Groves because of the larger apple orchard that was its chief geographical landmark when before the commuters took over. Initially, there was this huge debate about whether to call the new community Webster Grove or Webster Groves. Apparently--the newspaper coverage suggest that the issue was contentious and hard-fought--the vast majority of people agreed that Webster Groves sounded more elegant, more appealing, more plantation-like, and this is certainly what they all were going for in moving out to the country. But the hold up was that a large contingent of the new settlers--though not quite a majority--just didn't think it was honest, in spite of the name's obvious appeal, to name the place Webster Groves when there was only, in point of fact, one grove. In the end, of course, as tends to be the case (though not, typically, in parts like these), those who preferred to play fast and loose with the truth in the interest of painting a rosy picture won out over those who might have preferred a slightly less impressive fact.

Super Rich

Tonight, while dropping off a dozen slightly soiled and well-wrinkled shirts along with over ten pounds of loose laundry to Super Rich, down there on the northwest corner, three obese women confined to wheelchairs obstructed his entry. A body’s length to the left of the entrance they triangulated such that six gigantic knees sat pressed together, connected at their front outside edges. Slowly yet briefly they looked up, without interest, as he passed.

Quickly, efficiently, in no discernible order, they emptied the dozen or so sacks of laundry that slumped around them with loosened drawstrings.

The Korean with her shoulder to the window dispatched a pair of gray slacks with two deft swipes and added it to the stack that grew on the ledge beside her.

A brunette with oily bangs and drumstick forearms pushed together the wrists of a maroon and green self-knit collared sweater and then halved it with her chin before dropping it limp to the pile at her feet.

Laughing, her eyes darting up then down the street and lighting--occasionally--for a moment--on the stacks of her companions, the broad black woman forced a series of white undershirts into rectangles with great, dark sausage fingers.

From this angle it was difificult to tell: was it obesity alone? Or some other--unobservable-- injury to those well-nourished legs that lay gathered there between them? They strained against their armrests, hands groping, as the clothes level dipped in the bags beside them.

They folded on.

Inside, the tiny Filipino woman with the ponytail and well-fitted jeans waited and eyed his approach. She was the owner and operator. She knew that blue mesh bag, which was, impossibly, the only bag quite like itself. Memorable especially because of the semen splashed socks that spotted the bag’s interior like mines. Her eyes were tired. Bespoke long pain. Behind her, bent over a stool at the waist, her spectacled, multiply braceleted, lighter-skinned son was reading Glamour as he fingered the pencil behind his ear.

He looked up and watched Leon’s entrance with what looked, to a casual observer, like too much interest.

Hollywood & Vine

Richard Raymond Engelke owned and operated a video store called Hollywood & Vine two addresses down from my apartment building. In the afternoons after lunch he would get stoned with his friend Keith, a big black guy with Coke bottle glasses and a patchy beard who he used to hang out with sometimes behind the counter, and challenge me and Nick to rubber band fights when the store was empty. After a while he’d declare himself the victor, usually when he was winded or defeated, and pinch our asses before we went out. Funny, though, I never thought of Rich as gay. Word was he had a ladyfriend towards the end there.

He was from a small town in Missouri in an era when orthodontia was still in its infant stages. His front teeth were yellow and rodential and were separated by a wide gap that was usually filled in by something opaque and organic. No matter the company, he referred to strip clubs as “titty bars.” He often had occasion to do this.

One afternoon in early November of the year when I turned eleven, I came to him with the new X-Men videogame and placed a ten on the counter. He gave me my change all in ones. He laid out three of them one beside the other, each one folded three times to resemble a penis, with the presumable meatuses pointing towards the ceiling.

“Dicks.”

He emitted a crude chuckle, which was his trademark. It matched his appearance well.

“Use them at the titty bars. Three folds, man. Lay em out there and they pick them up with their tits.” Chuckle. “Don’t touch em though, or else they have a big guy come and throw you out.” He threw a glance at Keith, who was behind the counter watching a monitor that we could not see, his eyes transfixed, eating a chili dog. Keith did not meet his gaze, nor did he appear to hear the joke.

Chuckle.

He looked back at us with a wide grin. He was in a weight loss stage—it tended to go in cycles—and his front teeth were, for the moment, unobscured. He hadn’t had a haircut in a while and his white sideburns were curling in wide wings over his eyeglasses and behind his ears. He gestured with his liver spotted right hand at the middle penis.

“You little peckerwoods want to donate a dollar to charity?”

In front of him on the counter next to the monochrome CRT was an empty two-gallon size commercial Laffy Taffy container adorned with a scissor-slotted plastic lid and a faded neon green Lions sticker. On the back in shaky capital letters in broad black permanent marker he had written the words: “MUSCULAR DYSTROPHY.” It was roughly half full, mostly with metal and not paper. He raised his peaked eyebrows and smiled convincingly, first at us, then at the jug.

It was well known that behind the fabled counter was one of the county’s richest stockpiles of adult films. Occasionally, I’d be in there with my dad, and a guy with a worn leather jacket and dark bifocals would come in, make eye contact with Rich, point hastily in the general direction of the back room, and make a quick sweep into the privileged zone as I avoided eye contact with my dad. He always made a point to come out of the back room after we had left, because I never saw him come back out.

At this very moment, right behind the muscular dystrophy jug, two empty movie boxes lay rubber-banded together with a dot-matrix printed receipt next to the CRT. The spine of one of them pointed outwards and, in white block letters festooned with Christmas lights, read: JINGLEBALLS. Keith’s eyes remained glassy and unmoved from the invisible video monitor above Rich’s head. Beside him in a red-striped KFC takeout box were the sloppy remains of his chili dog.

After noting this, and removing his hand from his chin, Nick angrily snatched the three dollar bills from the counter and shoved them into his pocket. Self-righteous, inflamed, he pointed at Rich, who had unwrapped a wooden toothpick and was now picking absently at his teeth while he stared my brother down.

“You’re a pervert.” Unperturbed, Rich continued to probe, now nearer his molars.

His speech impaired by the maintenance, he replied, “What would you little jagoffs know about it.”

A statement, not a question. He took the toothpick and said clearly now, “Two little rich kids too good to help out some poor little homeless kids.” He shook his head in mock disapproval.

From an invisible place behind the counter he removed two pieces of Laffy Taffy and slid them across the counter to us.

“That’s bad karma,” he said, and grinned again. “Get on out of here now.”

And with that, he placed the toothpick back in his mouth, left it there and locked eyes with us dramatically before turning his the back of his customary black T-shirt to us in judgment.