Hell is for Children

OK, I'm back home and quite glad to be here. Did y'all miss me?

Well, I'd like to be able to say I had a wonderful trip, but that would likely make for a boring story, right? And one in which the word "Hell" probably didn't appear in the title. And since obviously my existence is solely for the entertainment of whatever sick and loathsome deities and masochistic mensroom attendants are in on the joke, who am I to question the meaning of it all anyway, huh?

It all started serenely enough. A visit to the family down in the Sunshine State, as they call it. They call it that because it's ostensibly sunny all the time, like Celine Dion. Actually Celine has a LOT in common with Florida -- long, flat, ugly, annoying, makes me wanna throw up, etc. Visited a couple of friends too -- both of whom moved there from the West Coast years ago for unknown and unfathomable reasons, and neither of whom is old enough to live in Florida. I think you have to be old to live there. Or retarded. I think it's the law -- you have to be one or the other. So maybe my friends are there illegally, or perhaps they're older (or more brain-damaged) than I think they are. I don't know. They both read this blog, so I'm sure we'll all hear about it.

Anyway, I hung out with them a bit, which was nice. We went to this area of Tampa called Ybor City, a contrived little "historic" district that was once an old run-down, dilapidated red-light zone that some planners decided to revitalize into a deliberately run-down, pseudo-dilapidated red light zone. It is attempting, consciously, to be a cross between New Orleans, a Santa Monica open-air mall, and Tijuana. It's wall-to-wall bars, clubs and shitty restaurants, all with scantily-clad underage girls standing outside with signs saying "cheap beer!" and "free jello shots!"

As we all know, The Sunshine State seems to be a huge tourist destination for some reason. Well, okay, the beaches are nice -- but we've got nice beaches here too, so that's a non-event for me. I guess if you live in some cold, landlocked place like the Midwest, it could seem like a little slice of Heaven down there -- but then again, so could Afghanistan. Anyhow, Ybor City is where all the Spring Break crowd goes when it's not Spring Break. The later it gets, the more crowded the streets get, and the younger the crowd gets. I don't think any of them actually LIVE there, because like I said, I'm fairly certain you have to be around a hundred years old to get Floridian citizenship. But at night in Ybor, it's post-adolescent partytime. OK, slightly post-adolescent. I swear, some of those half-naked girls walking around freezing (it's chilly at night this time of year) are barely out of diapers. Which doesn't say particularly flattering things about me, since I wandered around gawking at them.

Anyway, I suppose if I were still a teenager or twenty-something, I would enjoy the drunken, sex-crazed MTV atmosphere, but being too old for any of these girls yet not old enough to live in Florida, I felt a little out of my element. I mean, girls half my age look nice, especially when they're wearing the equivalent of a napkin and a pair of chucks. But I feel kinda creepy-uncle staring at them like that, especially when I know that the only ones smiling back are probably prostitutes. I have a feeling that the Hooker Contingent in Ybor is fairly high. You can tell the ones who aren't by the fact that they're walking around with some drunk steroidally-enlarged fratboy or three. So it's basically water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

Alright, on to the REAL adventure.

Got to see my new baby niece, which was the main reason for the trip. Cute kid, but only a couple months old, so basically a squirming larva at this point. And she cries nonstop. I mean, NONSTOP. I think maybe she realizes where she lives.

And my nephew's cute too -- he just turned two. So he doesn't cry that much. I can deal with that. Played with him a bit; that was fun. Highlight of the trip; it was all downhill from there.

Food; we should talk about food. basically, the food in Florida SUCKS. Everything is breaded and fried, even the silverware. Nobody eats vegetables. It's like one big Denny's. And yeah, we ate at Denny's once, along with several other horrid places. Grease, fat, grouper, and breading. Those are the four food groups in Florida. What's 'grouper,' you ask? Well, it's a fish. A bland whitefish that is ubiquitous down there. Everywhere you go, their special of the day is fried grouper. Anyway I came home feeling like a bloated fried fish myself, and my skin is all broken-out like a teenager's. A few dozen Miller Lites and I'd fit right in at Ybor City.

I guess living in the Food Capital of the United States has spoiled me.

OK, so now we come to the fun part of the visit. You see, like most people's parents, mine are a little bit insane. I realize that most people probably can't hang out with their parents for more than a couple of days without becoming all itchy, but I think I have an extra-special situation, as I am about to illustrate.

My mother, if she were to possess enough introspective qualities to actually visit a therapist, would surely be considered severely bipolar at the very least, and put on some heavy-duty meds. But alas, she has managed to live for sixty-some-odd years without ever having her completely psychotic tendencies ever officially diagnosed as such. And in fact, she seems to have gotten worse over the years. It takes very little to set her off, and then she just starts wildly screaming at you with a self-righteous energy that you would never guess she had (if you weren't related to her and thus didn't know better). Normally, just walking around, she's as sweet as cherry pie -- overly so, in my opinion, but the other old people don't seem to notice. She's got lots of friends down there, and I'm generally happy about that.

Except that none of them know her at all. You have to be her husband or one of her kids to trigger her psycho side. Which, unfortunately, I did.

Mom lives in a little fantasy world; a fascinating little melodrama right out of some Tennessee Williams play. She came from a pretty fucked-up family herself, and escaped into my dad's arms at an early age. Only problem is, my dad came from a pretty fucked-up alcoholic white-trash background himself, so he wasn't exactly equipped to help her. Enable her, yes. But help? Um, no. She basically browbeats him over every little thing, and has done so for so long that now he is just used to it. He might even enjoy it in some weird deep-seated way. Reminds him he's alive or something. At any rate, he can do absolutely nothing to make her happy, and neither can the rest of us -- but he lives with her, as he's done for forty-three years now, and I feel sorry for him. I only see them occasionally, at which time I'm reminded why I continue to live three thousand miles away.

So anyway, my mom has spent every dime they've ever managed to cobble together. What does she spend it on? Crap. Knick-knacks. Stuff with which to decorate every square inch of whatever house they're currently living in until there's no room left for people. She attempts to create some sort of Family Heritage. There are old tin-type pictures of SOMEBODY'S great-grandparents on the walls, intermingled with pictures of us. We have no idea who these ancient people are, because she found the pictures in antique stores. But it's obvious that a visitor is supposed to assume they are related to us. There are NO pictures of any REAL grandparents to be found anywhere.

And to make matters worse -- as I've mentioned before -- these people are Fundamentalist Christians. Well, Semi-Fundamentalist anyways. Not as rabid as they used to be, simply because they're tired, and Jesus didn't come back soon enough for them to avoid Old Age. I think they might be a little disillusioned by that. But they're still die-hard Believers and they definitely voted for Bush. Ugh.

Well, as their standard of living has gotten forcibly lowered, my parents' living quarters have gotten smaller. But that hasn't stopped my mom from continuing to cover every millimeter with overpriced junk that they can't afford. I have no idea what her monthly knick-knack budget is, but it probably approaches their mortgage, and it's all on credit. Since they moved to Florida a few years ago, her taste in crap has taken on a nautical flavor. I counted 87 tiny plaster lighthouse sculptures, which she buys every time she sees one in every crappy souvenir shop they go to, in every little town they can afford the gas to drive to. They all have the name of some little town in Florida tacked to tiny brass plaques on them, and they all have little paper tags stuck to them with a little story and the offset-printed signature of whomever designed the mold that was then sent to China for mass-production. I'm not making this up. She also has a HUGE Barbie doll collection, most of which she got on Ebay for whatever they're CURRENTLY worth. After all, what better place to put your money? Stocks? Bonds? Real Estate? Gold? Fuck all that; when times get tough, what people are REALLY gonna rely on are their Barbie collections!

OK; I could go on and on about Mom's obsessions with junk and her obvious financial savvy (after all, these are investments), but I think you get the idea.

I swore, like I always do, that I would keep my mouth shut. I swore to myself that I would do nothing; say nothing -- nothing that might have the slightest chance of pissing off Mom. But I failed. She knows how to push my buttons, and she kept pushing them until I slipped-up and actually responded. I took a deep breath, said something along the lines of "Mom, you don't have the right to say that to me. Please take it back and apologize." I really said it that nicely, because I was trying really hard to avoid the inevitable nightmare. I keep forgetting that this is a crazy woman and I should just ignore everything she says, no matter how nasty it is -- like some insane person on the street.

So, as in hindsight I should have predicted, she freaked out. You see, my mom is NEVER wrong about anything. She has never taken anything back or apologized in her life, no matter how terrible or unwarranted the thing she did or said. She's a victim, and everybody is out to get her, and she is simply defending herself from all the attacks. Therefore, how can she be wrong? It's YOUR fault for upsetting her in the first place, and once she's upset, there are no rules. All bets are off. She starts bringing up shit you supposedly did when you were twelve. Or five. She makes stuff up; twists other stuff around. She stands there screaming things that any stranger would be aghast to hear. And all you can do is stand there and take it, walk away, or scream back. Normally I have the good sense to ignore her, knowing that if I don't say anything to make it worse, eventually she'll get tired and start crying and lock herself in her room for a day or so, and then everything will be fine, as if it never happened.

But I was already sick of being in Florida, and I didn't feel good from all the bad food, and I was annoyed that I hadn't been laid in weeks and I'd just spent an evening walking around looking at underage poontang in Ybor. So for a minute I just forgot that my mom is crazy, and instead of going to my Happy Place, I did the unthinkable. I yelled back.

I didn't stoop to her level; I didn't bring up the past, or call her names. I didn't reduce her to the quivering mass of jelly I most certainly could have, by simply pointing out her massive failings over the years: how she nearly destroyed my sister to the point where she hasn't spoken to the family (except me) in years; how she cheated on my father when I was very young and totally screwed-up my trust in women for far too much of my life until (thank god) I figured out the source; how she has spent all their money on useless crap and assured that they are going to be forced to retire in squalor VERY soon. No, if I'd said a few well-chosen pointed words, I could have given her immediate kidney failure right then and there. After all, I learned this vicious technique from a crazy-woman, and I'm smarter -- and more articulate -- than she has ever been.

But I yelled back at her, just the same. I told her she was self-absorbed and mean-spirited and cared about nobody but herself. I told her she was destroying -- or had already destroyed -- her real family while displaying a fake one on the walls. I told her she needed help, badly, and soon. I said that that I knew exactly what she was going to say at any minute because I'd heard it all a thousand times and she couldn't hurt me anymore. I just told her the truth.

My mom has kicked me out of her so-called life before. There have been times when we haven't spoken to each other for as long as three years. But I do believe this time will prove to be the Big One. I could tell by the look in her bitter, pain-filled and childlike eyes. She refused to say goodbye when I left, even though I tried to say I was sorry (even though she was the one who started it). I really WAS sorry; sorry that I had a lapse of judgment and made the situation worse. Sorry that I responded at all to someone so obviously mentally ill. Sorry that I increased the pain in her bitter heart, no matter whether it was my fault or not. I was ashamed that I let her get to me, and that I allowed myself to get in a fight with a miserable old woman who simply doesn't know how to love because she wasn't raised with any.

My mom doesn't know about this blog, and she wouldn't read it anyway.

But Mom, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that your life has sucked so badly, and I'm sorry that there was, and continues to be, nothing I could ever do to make it better. I'm sorry that the only gift I could ever truly give you would have been to simply put up with your shit like my poor dad does, and that I failed so miserably at that task.

But mostly, Mom, I want to thank you. Thank you for giving me a wealth of material to write about, and an edginess that makes people seem to find my catharsis entertaining. Thank you for showing me just how crazy I could have ended up if an introspective nature and a particularly nasty divorce hadn't thrown me a serious dose of reality and sent me into so many years of therapy that, despite my aforementioned edge, I'm surely never going to end up like you.

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