Part 2  •  Old Rituals

It was a palm reader in a tent at The Renaissance Faire who’d told my father he should reveal his new lifestyle to his children. We had gone up there a few weeks earlier—just Dad and I—driving north from the city, across the Golden Gate Bridge, into Marin County’s late summer heat. “I see you much happier after you do this,” the cloaked woman advised him. I was gnawing on a giant turkey leg seated on a stack of hay outside—proudly donning my new velveteen jester hat and transfixed by the passing corseted breasts jubilantly burbling like beerfoam on a mug of ale.

My father was known for having a lifelong preoccupation with the ‘dark arts,’ which he’d turned to many times in his life. He’d spend a healthy portion of his money on telephone psychics, mostly with financial questions. Before I was born, he and my mother attended seances. When she began showing signs of clairvoyant ability—magically ciphering information from people’s personal objects—he put money into lessons to help her develop the craft. ‘No more expensive calls to psychics when you have one under your own roof,’ he must’ve calculated. 

This venture came to a head one evening while I slept in my crib. They had Warren over, their friend and nutritionist. He was a tall, young, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, ‘80s soap star type who was really into wheatgrass. My mom was in a trance and channeling the spirit of George, a higher dimensional entity that often came to her with paranormal predictions. She’d been ‘under’ for over an hour—a dangerously long time to be channeling—and beginning to slur her words. But my father was determined to get the information he needed. “C’mon George,” my dad insisted while grasping at my mother's limp forearms, “tell me what you were saying.” Warren angrily snapped at him, “John, she’s been under too long...” and ran into the kitchen for a piece of cantaloupe which he rubbed on her mouth to wake her up. She came back, and was mostly fine. But following the session she would be haunted by demonic dreams and disturbing images. 

Not too long after that, she left my father and became intimately involved with the church, which would provide her with a wealth of strange, single men. But first, she dated the nutritionist—Warren—her knight with shining cantaloupe. He drove a sun-yellow porsche 914 convertible that my sister and I called “the buggie-eyed car” because the headlamps would rise open from the front hood like the car was coming alive. When he’d come visit, he and my mother would spend most of their time in the bedroom while I sat in the living room listening to the radio.

It was 1983, I was 3, and while mom made love to the nutritionist, I was falling in love with music. The Police’s Every Breath You Take, Elton John’s I’m Still Standing, Duran Duran’s Hungry Like a Wolf, Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams, Irene Cara’s What a Feeling, Kajagoogoo’s Too Shy, Kenny Rogers’ We’ve Got Tonight and Islands in the Stream with Dolly Parton, Lionel Richie’s All Night Long, Naked Eyes’ Always Something There, Thompson Twins’ Hold Me Now, Genesis That’s All, Hall & Oats’ I Can’t Go For That, Paul Young Come Back and Stay, Yes’ Owner of a Lonely Heart, Madonna’s Lucky Star, Rufus & Chaka Kahn’s Ain’t Nobody, Herbie Hancock’s Rock It, Spandau Ballet’s True, Joe Jackson’s Stepping Out, Rockwell’s Somebody’s Watching Me, The Romantics’ Talking In Your Sleep, Bananarama’s Cruel Summer, Matthew Wilder’s Break My Stride, Double’s The Captain of Her Heart,  Micheal Sembello’s Maniac, and nearly every song on Michael Jackson’s album Thriller played on heavy rotation while my half brother Nick was being conceived behind the bedroom door.

Nine years later, I was living with my Mom, brother, and sister in a two-bedroom apartment on the border of Stockton and Lodi. My sister Alexa and I were, at this point, nemeses. We had a deep, long-standing hatred of each other that started when I was born eighteen months into her life. I was completely attached to her as a toddler, but after she pushed me off a table (literally) and continually threw me under the bus (figuratively) I rightly learned to despise her. She was a con artist, convincing everyone around her that she was a practical cherub, all the while implementing her own deviousness behind the scenes—goading me and getting her kicks. 

My brother Nick was a beautiful little boy with blue-green eyes and Norman Rockwell charm. I was painfully envious of him and was constantly conceiving of ways to commit manslaughter. I came very close to getting him to drink windex out of the bottle. If I couldn’t hurt him, I would humiliate him—catch him sitting in his towel in front of the television, his hair still wet from the shower, and drag his naked body outside onto the porch and lock the door. I can still hear his persistent whelps, begging me not to. He learned how to break into the apartment through the window, naked and crouched in the bushes. Eventually the implorations turned into exclamations, and one day, after being tormented by me, he ran into the kitchen and grabbed every sharp utensil in the silverware drawer. He chased me into our bedroom where I jumped up onto my bed against the wall and shielded my face. He threw everything he had at me, until finally a fork wedged into the drywall an inch from my thigh. “Ok, ok!,” I yelled, and I told him I wouldn’t hurt him anymore, and I never did again.

My mom, having to parent these three opposing forces, was a barely functioning madwoman. Every day she would come home from work to some chaotic drama that had unfolded. Her days were plagued by calls from either Nick or Alexa complaining about something I was doing or had done: trying to get the mentally-slow neighbor kid to drink some crazy concoction we’d blended up, or using the boombox to make dirty mixtapes, or putting insects in the microwave, or stealing eggs from the local duck population and trying to hatch them in a shoebox using a desk lamp, only for them to rot and no amount of Right Guard deodorant spray could kill the stink. 

My mother finally cracked one day when she came home from work for lunch and discovered I stopped going to school and was flunking out of the eighth grade. At home it was safe and I could eat and watch tv. If I took those two city buses across town to the middle school, it was guaranteed to be a bad day. In class, the gifted program kids would bully me, and without the protection of the group during lunchtime, I was easy pickings for the rough neighborhood kids who’d punch me, take my money, or humiliate me in front of the school. Mom called my dad and told him he needed to remedy the situation—essentially to ‘stop being a city playboy and take responsibility for his problem-child son.’