Christmas, they say, is a time for family. They say a lot of things, of course. That’s only one of them. I think for just about everyone, grandparents are a big part of the holiday season. We usually get two sets – maternal and paternal – and they usually play a role in the family festivities during the holidays. For those of us old enough to have buried our grandparents, the holiday season stirs memories of them. In some cases, whether we like it or not. The very word “grandparents” – more specifically, “grandma” and “grandpa” – tends to conjure pleasant thoughts of hugs and cookies and feelings of warmth and love. Well ... for most people, anyway. I have mixed feelings about my grandparents. Very mixed. I get those warm feelings when I remember my maternal grandparents, Granny and Papa Fletcher. Not so much from thoughts of the other set.
Papa was not my mother’s real father; he was Granny’s fifth husband. Mom’s maiden name was Millard, and her father was, by all her accounts, a terribly sweet man who laughed a lot, until he drank. Then he became mean and cruel. But he died when Mom was a little girl. After that, Mom was given the task of taking care of her younger sisters and was shuffled from one foster home to another because Granny had to work and was unable to care for them.
Granny and Papa lived in a trailer park. Over the years, there have been a lot of trailers in my family on both sides. A lot. You can follow that to whatever conclusion you like ... and you’ll probably be right. As a boy, I looked forward to visiting Granny and Papa’s trailer. They had a dog named Nipper who was always on a leash tied to a tree in the front yard. Nipper was a big dog with long legs and a coat of tightly curled white hair. I’m not sure what kind of dog he was – he was rather odd looking and reminded me of a horse. Whenever we visited Granny and Papa, Nipper got very excited, and when he got excited, it seemed he looked directly at me. He didn’t exactly bark, but he made happy whining and yelping sounds as he rose up on his hind legs, waving his forelegs at me as if beckoning me to come play. I always fell for it. I was like Charlie Brown every time Lucy held the football for him to kick. No matter how many times I’d gone through the routine before, no matter how many times it always ended the same way, when I saw Nipper waving at me with his front paws and making those excited sounds, I couldn’t resist. I rushed toward him, a chubby little boy eager to play with a happy dog. And each and every time, Nipper would wait until I was just close enough, and then he would drop down on all fours, lower his head and the fires of hell would flare up in that dog’s eyes as his black lips peeled back over yellowed fangs and a sinister growl rumbled up from subterranean depths to let me know that if I took one step closer – C’mon, kid, one more step, just one more, c’mon – he would take great delight in gnawing on my windpipe while I thrashed around in the final convulsions of my life. Then I would spin around and run away in terror.
I never learned.
Granny was the stereotypical grandmother. Sweet as honey, always happy. Every time she saw me, she instantly opened her big flabby arms and her mouth spread into a grin so wide, it looked like her dentures might shoot out and drop to the floor. I always sensed that simply by showing up, I turned her day into a thrilling experience. To this day, she’s the only person who ever reacted that way to the sight of me. Her kisses were sloppy and wet and she always smelled of whatever it was she’d cooked most recently – chicken, hamburgers, cookies.
Papa never rose from his seat. I don’t think I ever saw the man move. He sat on their ratty old couch with sagging cushions, his knees spread wide, elbows on his thighs, hands dangling between his legs. He was always dressed in pale clothes – light blue pants, a yellow shirt, maybe something with a flower print – with light-colored deck shoes on his feet and never socks, always dark, sheer hose. He looked tired and lost in thought, never quite in the room with the rest of us. He’d look at me and smile and his eyebrows would rise up for a moment as he nodded, and then he was gone again. On the floor between his feet was a coffee can. It was always there. I never once saw Papa Fletcher without that coffee can. Every now and then, he would lower his head and spit into it. I took a peek into that coffee can once. Only once. It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen in my life. That was my first exposure to tobacco of any kind – Papa’s chew.
Their trailer was quite small. Of course, I was, too, at the time. Thinking back on it now – and I can still see it vividly in my mind – I realize just how small it was, to the point of being claustrophobic. But it was warm. I’m not talking about the temperature. It was warm in the way that a favorite stuffed toy is warm. It always made me feel happy, loved and safe. Papa kept a bowl of buttermints on the end table beside the couch, and he offered me one every time we visited. He’d watch me eat it as if he’d never seen a child eat candy before, and he seemed to take such delight in it. And then, a moment later, he was gone again, staring at nothing in particular, as if he’d forgotten I was there. As I sit here writing this, I cannot for the life of me remember his first name. I’m not sure I ever knew it. All I know is that everyone called him Boy. Boy Fletcher.
Granny always had some treat to offer, the kind of treats grandmothers are supposed to have on hand – banana bread or cookies or some kind of cake. She would offer me something, and I would hesitate, because I knew I was fat and shouldn’t be eating that sort of thing, thanks to my other grandmother – but I don’t want to get ahead of myself here. In the end, though, I always succumbed and pulled a chair up to the table. It was a Formica-topped table – the kind with those shiny little specks of gold in the surface – with chrome legs and a strip of chrome around the edges. Granny would give me some milk in an aluminum cup of blue or yellow or green; those cups and the milk inside were always ice cold. I would eat my cookies or banana bread or cake, feeling miserably guilty because it would only make me fatter and more disgusting. But I enjoyed the hell out of it because not only was it delicious, but Granny’s attention was focused only on me. The smile never left her face as she asked how I was doing in school and if I had a lot of friends and if I’d done anything fun lately.
Every Christmas, Granny and Papa had the same white artificial tree. It was about three feet tall and looked like it had been new sometime around 1948. There were never any presents underneath that tree, but it was always decorated with ornaments that I found fascinating – old glass birds and Santas, icicles and snowflakes of celluloid, angels that bordered on creepy, and a garland that still sparkled even though it was thin and worn and looked like it should have been retired ages ago.
Papa died before I was ten years old. I know he died in a hospital, but I’ve always suspected that he’d actually died while sitting there on that couch with the coffee can between his feet, knees spread wide as he stared at nothing in particular – he’d died there and it had taken days for anyone to notice. Granny faded slowly. She was in and out of the hospital with Parkinson’s disease, among other things. But she never complained. No matter how sick she was, she always smiled when she saw me and asked about me, never uttering a word of complaint about her pain or sickness. She sometimes hallucinated in her last couple of years. When I visited her during one of her hospital stays, she saw the reflection of the back of my head in the mirror over her sink at the foot of her bed and panicked because she thought a muskrat was loose in her room.
About fifteen years after her death, my mother unearthed a photograph of Granny that she’d never seen before. That picture made me wonder exactly what kind of work had made Granny unable to care for Mom and her sisters. It was black and white, of course, probably from the 1940s, and it looked so ancient to me that it seemed detached from any reality I could imagine. Looking much younger but unmistakably familiar, Granny stood with three uniformed sailors. That’s right – sailors. She was by no stretch of the imagination a looker and was quite plump, but it was obvious she was having a lot fun. They were all having a lot of fun. She leaned to her left against one sailor while looking at the sailor on her right with a leering sidelong gaze that offered treats that had not been baked in an oven. The photograph made me vaguely sick to my stomach.
I kept looking at Mom, waiting for her to see what I was seeing. I should have known better. She smiled wistfully, happy to get a glimpse of her late mother at a much younger age. It wasn’t that she saw it and chose to ignore it – she was not in denial. She simply did not see it. You’d have to know my mother. The things that had gone on before and after that picture was taken – things that were clearly evident in Granny’s facial expression and those of the sailors – were not part of her reality. She remains the most sheltered, naive person I’ve ever known.
Granny and Papa weren’t around very long and died when I was quite young. That left my paternal grandparents – Grandpa Deedee and Grandma Berens. My sister, Sandy, is fifteen years my senior, and when she was a toddler, she called our paternal grandfather Grandpa Deedee. I’m not sure why. Maybe she couldn’t pronounce Grandpa Garton – I don’t know. But the name stuck. He was a big man, and I especially remember his hands. They were huge, with long, thick, ridged nails on his fingers. He always talked fast, sometimes so fast that he slurred his words together, and if you weren’t familiar with his way of speaking, you might not have any idea what he was talking about. (Oh, how I wish I could have gone through my childhood not knowing what that man was talking about.) If you didn’t understand what he was saying, that was your problem, not his, an attitude he passed on to his son. My dad’s parents were Seventh-day Adventists. They’re the ones I have to thank for the fact that I was raised in that particular religious cult, with its obsession with diet, a single day of the week and a frightening end-of-the-world scenario that so terrified me as a child that I don’t think I got a good night’s sleep until I was about twenty-two.
By the time I came along, Grandpa Deedee and Grandma Berens had long since divorced and remarried. To this day, I cannot imagine them being married to each other and living together without ripping a hole in the space-time continuum. That was because they were two of the most hateful, evil human beings I’ve ever known. The idea of them living together under one roof still makes me shudder. But that’s what my dad grew up with – the two of them married and living together and being his parents. I cannot fathom a more hellish existence. The fact that Dad was raised by those two monsters went a long way toward explaining his own violence and anger and his fondness for dragging me through the house by the hair while kicking me. He did the same thing to my sister. We lived in fear of him. One minute, he would be just fine, chatting with us, going about his business. And then the very air in the house would undergo a sudden eldritch change. It would thicken and become charged with whatever death-black mood he’d slipped into, and then ... well, you’d just better watch your step.
Dad used to tell me stories of his childhood years when he was in the care of these two demonic people. I was just a little boy at the time and didn’t understand the significance of those stories until many years later. Looking back on them as an adult, all the air leaves my lungs and I become light-headed with horror.
One day when he was a schoolboy – this would have been in the 1930s – Dad was hit by some boy on the playground. He came home with a black eye – or maybe it was a cut lip, I don’t remember. When Grandpa Deedee saw the wound, he asked, “Did you knock him down?” Dad said no, he hadn’t; he’d just wanted to get away from the other kid and avoid a big fight. This infuriated Grandpa Deedee, who demanded to know the boy’s name. When Dad finally identified the boy, Grandpa put Dad in his pickup truck and drove over to the boy’s house. He took Dad to the door with him, knocked, and when one of the parents answered, Grandpa put on the charm. He said the boys had some kind of conflict at school that day and he wanted to clear it up. The parent disappeared and a moment later, the boy in question came to the door. Grandpa asked him to come out into the yard so they could have a word. Once they were on the lawn in front of the house, Grandpa turned off the charm and said to Dad, “You will beat this boy to the ground or I’ll take you home and beat you to the ground.” But according to Dad, he didn’t want to. He was embarrassed by the whole thing and just wanted to go home. But he knew that would be a mistake; he knew what a beating he would get if he didn’t do as he was told. So he punched the boy a few times, knocked him to the ground and avoided the violent punishment from Grandpa.
Another time, Grandpa came home angry from whatever job he’d managed to get at the time. Someone at work had in some way slighted Grandpa – that was how he saw it, anyway. When he got home, he grabbed a shovel and said to Dad, “C’mon, you’re coming with me.” They got into Grandpa’s pickup truck after dark and drove to the house of the man in question. Grandpa left the truck with his shovel and told Dad to come with him. He stood inside the man’s open, dark garage and waited. Later, the unsuspecting man stepped out into the garage for one reason or another and Grandpa hit him in the face with the shovel. Dad said the man dropped to the concrete floor and went into convulsions.
“He flopped around for a while and then started foaming at the mouth,” Dad told me. “Then he got real still and didn’t move anymore.” After that, Grandpa told Dad it was time to go. They got back in the pickup truck and drove home. But the incident bothered Dad enough for him to bring it up now and then all those decades later and he always looked upset when he talked about it. “I don’t know what happened to that man,” Dad told me more than once. “He could’ve been dead for all I know. But we didn’t stick around to find out.”
These were only a couple of the ways in which Grandpa Deedee passed his values on to his children.
Grandma Berens used to remember with great fondness the day she’d gotten tired of Grandpa Deedee’s nonsense and had walked up behind him – “while he was yacking his mouth,” she’d say – and hit him in the back of the head as hard as she could with an iron skillet. Grandpa hit the floor unconscious. “I left him there on the floor of the front room,” she’d say, “and went about my business. He was there for a while, too, before he finally woke up again.” Dad was a boy at the time. He and Grandma both talked about this as if it were a common occurrence, nothing out of the ordinary.
All of this helped explain why Dad was the way he was. It didn’t excuse it, but it certainly explained it.
Grandpa Deedee dominated any room he walked into with his size, his loud voice – everyone on that side of my family seldom spoke below a shout – and his refusal to consider for one moment the possibility that someone else in the room might have something to say. Being with him in public was always a soul-shriveling embarrassment. He would talk to total strangers on the street or in stores and level some smiling criticism at them with self-righteous glee. In restaurants, he would flirt lewdly, rudely and loudly with waitresses – sometimes in front of his wife, Grandma Charlotte – and then turn to me an instant later and tell me to sit up straight because Jesus didn’t like bad posture.
Grandpa was always telling people what Jesus expected of them and what the bible demanded of them. I attended the local Seventh-day Adventist school from grade one through ten (and then went to an Adventist boarding academy for my last two years of high school), and by the time I was in the fifth grade, I discovered that I knew the bible far better than Grandpa Deedee, Grandma Charlotte, Grandma Berens and my parents combined. The bible was a popular topic of conversation in my family, but whenever anyone said the words, “The bible says,” you could safely ignore whatever they said next because it was always wrong. Always. I think the only thing Dad ever got right about the bible was Exodus 20:12, the fifth commandment: “Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” Dad had a dual interpretation of this commandment. He believed that if you did not show abject love for and devotion to your parents no matter what and do – and believe – absolutely everything they told you, either god would kill you at an early age or you would be deported from the land he had given you. I’ve always wondered what country Dad was afraid he’d end up in if he sassed his parents.
Dad reminded me of this commandment often throughout my childhood. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. He pounded that commandment into my head, usually adding that I was obligated to support and house him and my mother in their old age. I have no doubt that his parents did the same thing to him. They were far more successful at burning that commandment into my dad’s consciousness than he was at burning it into mine. This was obvious to me because Dad was so cowed by his parents. They were unbelievably horrible people who did and said appalling things to him, my mother, my sister and me – to everyone – but dad never spoke a word of criticism, never stood up to them, never even responded to them. He was a big, intimidating man, too, just like Grandpa, and you did not want to get on his bad side. His anger was a hulking monster that we feared and tried never to disturb. Through most of my childhood, there was a hole in our heavy wooden back door because something had pissed Dad off once and he’d put his fist through it. While driving us around, if someone cut Dad off or tailgated him or did anything else on the road that pissed him off, he would abandon whatever plans we had at the moment and endanger our lives in order to chase that person down, never stopping until he could return the slight. Most of the time when something made Dad angry, he was already angry about nothing in particular and seemed relieved to find something at which he could direct that rage. But around his parents, he was actually timid, quiet and kept his eyes lowered – because he feared that anything else would bring the fatal wrath of god down on his head ... or the immigration department would send him packing.
I'm all for showing your parents respect. But if your parents are Grandpa Deedee and Grandma Berens, or anything like them, fuck the fifth commandment.
Grandpa Deedee and Grandma Charlotte had mixed feelings about Christmas. To them, it was the celebration of the birth of Christ only, and Santa Claus, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman were all the direct work of Satan. They did not approve of godless, pagan Christmas trees and barely tolerated them. They were a ton of fun at the holidays. Fortunately, we seldom saw them at Christmas time, which was fine with me.
Grandpa Deedee was a fisherman and he believed that everyone’s problems could be solved simply by taking a fishing trip with him. My cousin Bob – the son of my dad’s brother, Jesse Garton, Jr. (named after Grandpa Deedee) – was a drug addict and Grandpa Deedee used to hound him about it. Poor Bob. If Grandpa’s harping had any effect on Bob’s addiction at all, I’m sure it only made it worse. It was Grandpa’s belief that Bob’s addiction could be brought to an abrupt end if he would only go on a weekend-long fishing trip with him. “I’d fix that problem right away,” Grandpa used to say. “By the end of that weekend, he wouldn’t have a drug problem anymore. All he needs is to get his thinking straight and turn everything over to Jesus.”
Along with being arrogant, pompous and self-righteous, Grandpa Deedee was a fucking idiot. As far as I know, Bob never took Grandpa Deedee up on his offer. Good for him.
Grandpa sometimes took me fishing on Shasta Lake. As with Nipper the dog, I never learned my lesson. I would always get excited about a fishing trip with Grandpa Deedee ... and it would always turn out the same way. I never caught anything. Never. And by the time the fishing trip was over, I always wanted to kill myself.
“You can’t even fish,” Grandpa would say. “You need to get good at something soon or you’re gonna grow up to be fat and useless. Far as I can tell, you’re not much good at anything but drawing pictures.” I enjoyed drawing when I was a boy, but not as much as I enjoyed writing. I was always writing something, turning out story after story for the amusement of my friends. Grandpa Deedee was aware of this, but he wasn’t impressed. “That writing’s useless unless you do it for the lord. You need to write stories about Jesus. If you’ve got a talent for writing, god gave it to you and if you don’t use it for him, you’ll pay for it. You’ll pay bad. But it doesn’t matter ‘cause writing won’t get you anywhere. You need to learn to do something useful. Don’t be like your dad. He quit school in the sixth grade and he’s been useless ever since. You have to stop watching TV, that’s your big problem. The devil knows he’s got you with the TV because you like it too much. It’s just foolishness. Your parents should be ashamed of themselves for having one. The only thing I watch on TV is the news. And wrestling. I don’t watch any of the trash you watch. Especially Batman. You’re gonna lose eternal life over Batman.”
Whenever Grandpa Deedee and Grandma Charlotte came to visit, we had to turn the TV off. They despised television. Even when it was turned off, Grandma Charlotte would look at our television set and shake her head slowly with contempt, as if we had a giant penis sculpture in our living room, or something. They called it “the devil’s box.” They criticized my fondness for TV at every conceivable opportunity, and they hated nothing more on earth than the fact that I loved the 1960s series Batman.
Referring to Adam West, Grandpa would say, “That man wearing those tights is not a hero. He’s not even a man. He’s a sissy. He’s not normal. Real men don’t wear things like that. And if you keep watching that show and admiring him, you’re gonna turn out just like him – a sissy.” Grandma Charlotte’s hatred of Batman was more passionate and visceral. The very mention of the series made her face screw up into a mask of disgust. “Awful,” she’d say with a shudder. “A horrible show. I can’t believe they allow such things to be broadcast on television.”
Grandma Charlotte was a real piece of work. She hated everything, and if she encountered something she didn’t hate, she diligently searched for a reason to hate it. During a visit from Grandpa Deedee and Grandma Charlotte, my sister happily announced her first pregnancy. Grandma Charlotte said, “And ... when were you married?” When Sandy told her the date of the wedding, Grandma Charlotte’s eyes narrowed and, making no attempt to disguise what she was doing, she counted on her fingers the number of months between the wedding and Sandy’s pregnancy. Then she nodded slowly and said, “Close. Very close.” One did not have a conversation with Grandma Charlotte – one endured an interrogation. She seemed to think the purpose of her existence on this earth was to root out evil, and she knew that evil existed everywhere, in everything, forever trying to hide from her. She made it her business to find it, and she knew it existed in you, so when Grandma Charlotte talked with you, no matter what the subject, she was really looking for that evil, and she was tenacious. She always found it. That wasn’t much of an accomplishment, of course, because Grandma Charlotte identified most things as evil. Grandma Charlotte looking for evil was a lot like Senator Joe McCarthy looking for communists.
Grandma Charlotte complained constantly. She was forever criticizing and picking at Grandpa Deedee, and this behavior worsened as she got older and meaner. For the most part, Grandpa ignored her and behaved as if she weren’t there. Now and then, he would turn to her and say something condescending, call her “honeybunch,” peck her cheek, and then go on ignoring her. I could never imagine what had drawn them together – except, of course, sex. Grandpa Deedee had been deedeeing Grandma Charlotte while he was still married to Grandma Berens. I’ve often wished I could go back in time and be a fly on the wall when Grandma Berens learned about that – what a seismic event that must have been.
Of course, Grandpa spent most of his life deedeeing women all over the place. While he was loudly insisting that everyone within earshot (which was a pretty good distance with his bellowing) do as the bible commanded and live their lives for Jesus Christ, Grandpa Deedee was incapable of keeping his dick in his pants. Shortly before finally dying at the age of 103 in 2004, Grandpa Deedee called my dad to his rest home bedside to make a confession. It seemed Dad had a brother he’d known nothing about, an illegitimate son Grandpa Deedee had conceived with one of his many conquests. Grandpa said his love child had recently died, but he thought Dad should know about him. I think he was just clearing his own conscience – and I must admit I was quite surprised to find that he had one, however small. If Grandpa Deedee really, truly believed all the crap he claimed to believe, then he believed his judgment day was at hand and he probably wanted to do what he could to make up for the appalling life of rank hypocrisy and hateful meanness he’d been leading for more than a century.
As mean as Grandma Charlotte was, she was Marie Osmond on Ecstasy compared to Grandma Berens. After divorcing Grandpa Deedee, Grandma met and married Barney Berens. I never met Grandpa Barney because he died before I was born, but I heard a lot about him. Not a single word of what I heard was negative. Everyone loved the man and spoke of him with great affection. I was often told that he and I would have gotten along well. In all the pictures I’ve ever seen of him, he looked like Floyd the barber on The Andy Griffith Show. Everyone said that Grandpa Barney was a jester and kept people in stitches. One story about him that stands out in my memory still makes me smile. Grandpa Barney had a wooden leg and enjoyed using it to shock people. During a train trip, he sat next to a woman, a total stranger, and used his pocket knife to slowly, meticulously clean his fingernails. When he was done, he took the knife in his fist, raised his arm, and plunged the blade into the thigh of his wooden leg, then settled into the seat as if to nap. According to the story, the woman seated next to him gasped, let out a little yelp, and then fainted.
I think I would have liked Grandpa Barney.
Once or twice, Sandy said – in a hushed tone, of course, because such talk was frowned upon in my family – that she never understood why Grandpa Barney married Grandma Berens. It has always been my suspicion that Grandpa Barney’s untimely death was caused by his marriage to Grandma Berens. Either that, or he faked his death and went into hiding.
Grandma Berens enjoyed attention and she knew how to get it; she enjoyed inflicting guilt and she knew how to do it. Sometimes she did both at once. For example, she never drove a car, not once in her life. “It’s my nerves,” she used to say. “My nerves are too bad to drive.” It took me years to figure it out, but I finally realized that her nerves had nothing to do with it. By not driving, Grandma Berens made herself dependent on others and this gave her another way of making her family feel guilty. When Grandma needed to go somewhere, she wanted to go then, at that moment. Not tomorrow, not later that afternoon, but then. She never bothered herself with the notion that other people had things to do, responsibilities to fulfill, or perhaps had made other plans. If no one was able to take her where she wanted to go when she wanted to go there, she began reciting her mantra: “You don’t love me. Nobody loves me. I’ve spent my whole life doing nothing but working hard for my children, and none of it matters. You’re just waiting for me to die, that’s all. You want me to curl up and die. I wish Jesus would take me. Sometimes I pray for him to take me because I know when I’ve worn out my welcome. But he never does. He’s punishing me for something. So here I am, unloved, unwanted, unappreciated.”
Grandma Berens was also a world class hypochondriac. She elevated hypochondria to an art form. According to her, she was plagued by a litany of illnesses that threatened to make each breath her last. She had a bad heart, a bad liver, a bad stomach, a bad colon, bad lungs, a bad back, high blood pressure and low blood pressure, hypoglycemia, dizzy spells, possible epilepsy and every conceivable allergy known to humankind to name just a few. Her three favorite topics of conversation – and I don’t remember any conversation with Grandma Berens in which all three did not come up at least once – were her experience with menopause, her hysterectomy and her many nervous breakdowns. Personally, I’m convinced she never had a nervous breakdown. Grandma Berens caused nervous breakdowns, she did not have them. She diagnosed all of her own illnesses, of course, with the help of the ancient medical books that lined her shelves. They were so old, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some of them recommended bleeding with leaches or exorcism. It seemed she was always taking pills of some kind, usually vitamins and minerals. Her trailer was filled with so many of them that their smell was overpowering. Her ailments had wonderful timing. They never failed to flare up when she needed something she couldn’t have; she found that being near death usually got her what she wanted. Her hypochondria was one of the many traits she passed on to my dad. He was obsessed with his many illnesses, whether he had them or not, and they possessed the same razor-sharp timing as his mother’s.
When Christmas time rolled around, she often told people not to buy her any gifts. “Don’t waste your money,” she’d say. “I’ll be dead by Christmas. I can feel it. There won’t be any gifts for me. Don’t even bother getting flowers. I’ll be dead and I won’t be able to appreciate them.” Grandma Berens was the ultimate pity party girl.
Exposure to Grandma Berens’s behavior only on occasion might have rendered it humorous. That’s how the rest of the family saw it. When she started in on them with a barrage of guilt and illness, they would roll their eyes and chuckle. But they didn’t spend as much time with her as I did. Grandma Berens lived in a trailer in our yard. Like the poor, she was always with us. For that reason, her behavior wasn’t funny.
Next door to our house lived my dad’s brother Jesse and his batshit-crazy psychowife Pat. It was not uncommon to hear screaming fights over at their house. Sometimes those fights were accompanied by gunshots. On those nights, Dad would put on his shoes and go next door to calm things down while Mom and I waited nervously, afraid we would hear the gunshot that might kill him. Pat was always the one doing the shooting. Did I mention that she was crazy? Mom’s name was Pat, too, which often confused the mail carrier when something was addressed to Pat Garton. Though she was too meek to say so, I could tell that Mom was disturbed by the possibility of anyone confusing her with the wingnut next door.
Also living next door were my cousins Kenny (Pat’s son from a previous marriage) and Todd (who Jesse claimed was his even though everyone in the family knew he’d had a vasectomy some time before meeting Pat). Kenny and I were playmates and spent a lot of time together, but Todd was an odd child and a bit of a loner. Today, Todd sits on death row at San Quentin awaiting execution for the crime of convincing a friend of his (who apparently was even more stupid than Todd himself) to murder with a shotgun Todd’s eight-months-pregnant wife. Pat, of course, insists he is completely innocent and has been cruelly framed by everyone within a hundred mile radius. But then, Pat used to tell her sons that eating snow during the winter would give them colds, strep throat and possibly pneumonia.
Grandma Berens had three hobbies: Crocheting, putting together jigsaw puzzles and manipulating the occupants of those two houses. She was like one of those guys on The Ed Sullivan Show who used to keep a dozen or more plates spinning atop tall poles. But we were her plates. She was forever pitting people against each other and then sitting back to watch the results. It seemed Grandma Berens was always angry at someone and not speaking to them, and this was a contagious virus. Sometimes she wasn’t speaking to my parents and would spend a lot of time at Jesse’s house. Sometimes she wasn’t speaking to Jesse and Pat and would spend all of her time at our place (where she lived, anyway). And sometimes my parents weren’t speaking to Jess and Pat, or Jess and Pat weren’t speaking to my parents, always because of one of Grandma Berens’s manipulations. And sometimes they were all speaking quite loudly – shouting angrily over the fence at each other about one ridiculous conflict or another. These periods of anger never lasted long, but neither were they ever resolved. The primary rule in my family was that no one ever apologized for anything because that would require an admission of wrongdoing and no one in my family ever did anything wrong. Except me, of course – I was always wrong. About everything. These conflicts were Grandma Berens’s entertainment. Well, the conflicts and her “stories” on TV in the afternoon.
Sometimes I was able to benefit from Grandma Berens’s manipulations. One of my favorite TV shows as a boy was the afternoon soap opera Dark Shadows. It came on right after General Hospital, which Mom watched regularly. Mom and Dad were disturbed by my fondness for the horror genre. If it had vampires or ghosts or monsters, I was planted in front of the TV watching it. Oddly, they almost always let me watch those shows, but to make up for that, they constantly harangued me about them, reminding me that every time I watched one, not only did Jesus cry, but I risked my chance at eternal life in heaven. I was addicted to Dark Shadows, to the daily exploits of Barnabas the vampire and Angelique the witch, and this bothered Mom. There was one episode that especially terrified me and that convinced Mom that I shouldn’t watch it anymore. When Grandma Berens learned of this, she saw an opportunity to interfere. She invited me over to her trailer every afternoon to watch it, knowing how much that would annoy Mom. It worked. It annoyed Mom so much that she decided it was okay for me to watch it after all so Grandma Berens wouldn’t have the satisfaction of providing me with something Mom had forbidden.
Because she lived in our yard, I ended up spending a lot of time with Grandma Berens. She had a lot of fun with me. I was a great source of amusement. Grandma often told me how “funny looking” I was. Depending on her mood, this might escalate into a long recital of everything that was wrong with me.
“You’re fat,” she’d say, usually while crocheting something. “Look at your fat legs and your fat fingers. You look like that doughboy on the Pillsbury commercials. Your fat gives you curves. I never noticed it until now, but you know what? You look like a girl. But even if you weren’t fat, you’d still be funny looking. Even ugly. You’re going to be ugly when you grow up. You’ll never find a wife looking like that. No woman will have you. High school is going to be real lonely for you, boy.”
I toughened to this when I got a bit older, but when I was a little child, she would keep it up until I was reduced to tears. Then she would smile and say, “Oh, stop it, you know Grandma was only kidding. You know Grandma loves you.” She would keep saying that until I got my sobs under control, and then she’d appease me by putting on a record I liked or giving me a piece of the candy she jealously guarded from others. “You’re too sensitive,” she would say. Yes, that was true – I was very sensitive. But if she was aware of that fact, if she knew I was easily hurt and reacted so strongly, then why did she keep saying such things? Why did she do it so often? The only answer I’ve ever been able to come up with is that she enjoyed it. Sadism seemed to run in my dad’s family.
Grandma Berens taught me to play gin rummy so she’d have someone with whom to play the game. Later, I learned that she had taught me the game inaccurately, ensuring that she would always win. Sometimes as we sat playing the game, she would start in on me. I was adopted; my parents had brought me home from the hospital when I was ten days old. Sometimes she would bring this up. “I don’t know why they picked you,” she’d say. “You had to be the ugliest baby there. I bet somebody paid them to take you off their hands. They say you were born there in the hospital, but I don’t believe you were born at all. I think the devil crapped you a-flyin’.” That last line is one I’ve often used throughout my life to describe Grandma Berens – and I never say “crapped.”
Those sessions of ridicule stayed with me. They took a toll. When Grandma tells you things like that about yourself over and over from the time that you’re very small, you tend to believe her, no matter how adamantly she insists later that she was “only kidding.” Those sessions created in me a resentment toward Grandma Berens that only grew over the years, and a hatred for myself that has been with me in one form or another my entire life. They also made me sensitive to her cruelty to others – to everyone. No one was safe from her “kidding,” which was quite sadistic. I grew to hate her. I kept it to myself, of course, but as I quietly observed her, that hatred intensified.
Adding to my resentment was the fact that my parents never stood up for me. No matter what Grandpa Deedee, Grandma Charlotte or Grandma Berens said or did to me, Mom and Dad never came to my defense. Dad, of course, was always mindful of the fifth commandment, and he applied that to those situations in which his parents criticized, ridiculed or condemned me. He decided it would be better to let me take it than to risk an early death at god’s hand or possible deportation to a foreign country that had not been given by god. But further quiet observation and eavesdropping revealed another reason. It was believed by my parents that Grandpa Deedee and Grandma Berens would be generous to them in their wills if they were always supportive of them and let them have their way. Even as a boy, this made no sense to me. We’re talking about people who lived in trailers. People who live in trailers don’t tend to leave behind large sums of money when they die. But this never occurred to my parents.
The resentment I felt toward Grandma Berens – the hatred – came to a head one day in an incident I’ve shared with maybe three other people in my lifetime. When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, Grandma Berens sold her trailer and moved in with her daughter, who lived in nearby Happy Valley. It was inevitable that the arrangement would end in hostility. When that happened, she moved in with us. She no longer lived in a trailer in our yard – she lived in our house.
This was not an ideal situation. My parents didn’t seem to mind, of course. But I nearly went insane. We lived in a very tiny house. You could stand in one spot in the living room and see into every other room in the house. It was so small that with just my parents and me, it was a little crowded. Grandma lived out of suitcases, which took up way too much space in our living room. I was always stepping – or tripping – over them. She slept on the couch at night, which made the TV unavailable. Sometimes she would invite me to stay up with her and watch whatever I wanted on TV. But when I did, she complained about what I watched. It was stupid, immoral and could only be enjoyed by a godless idiot. And what was I doing eating those cashews? Didn't I know how fat I was? Did I want to get as big as a house? I was already ugly, I couldn’t afford to be so fat.
Remember, this had been going on my whole life. By this time, I was suffering from depression serious enough to affect my physical health and make thoughts of suicide commonplace. I didn’t know at the time that it was depression, though – I just thought I was too sensitive, too fat, too ugly, and didn’t love Jesus enough.
One day, I was in the living room and happened to glance out the window. Outside, I saw my parents, my sister, and Grandma Berens. Something was up. Grandma Berens was gesticulating as she shouted at Sandy, who looked miserably stressed. As usual, Mom and Dad were saying nothing. I didn’t know what Grandma was saying or why she was shouting at my sister, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t need to know. It was just more of the same – Grandma Berens bullying, harranguing, harping. This time, the target was Sandy, but that didn’t matter, either. It was just more of the same. More of the same.
Something broke open inside me and out spilled every ounce of emotional pain and self-loathing that had been festering in me for years. I suddenly had acid flowing through my veins. I was storming out of the house before I was fully aware of it. I had no plan, didn’t think ahead – I just had to act. Outside, I walked over to the little gathering and stepped up behind Grandma Berens, who was still shouting at Sandy. I didn’t listen to what she was saying because I didn’t care. Standing so close that strands of her hair brushed my face, I took in a deep breath and, at the top of my lungs in a voice louder than I had ever used before when speaking to another person, I screamed, “WILL YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
Grandma was so startled that she stumbled forward and almost fell on her face. She recovered quickly, turned around and jutted her chin angrily as she said, “What is wrong with you? Who do you think you are?”
Trembling all over with rage, I said, “I think I’m the guy who’s kicking your ass out of our house.” I turned and rushed back into the house, fists clenched. I picked up the suitcase in which she kept all of her pills. She got into it so many times a day that, although she closed the lid, she never latched it. I took it out onto the porch and drop-kicked it into the front yard. The suitcase opened as it tumbled through the air and bottles of vitamins and minerals and powders and ointments and lotions flew in all directions. Before they hit the ground, I had the next suitcase. It wasn’t latched, either, and this time, clothes went everywhere.
I vaguely heard Grandma Berens ranting as she raced up the sidewalk shaking a fist in my direction. For someone who spent half her time at death’s door, that bitch could get around fast when she wanted to.
What happened next felt like a dream even as it was happening. There was even a point at which I wondered if I would wake up. I am not a violent person and never have been. Violence repulses me and always has. My dad was a violent person and I was often on the receiving end of that violence. One of my goals in life was to be as unlike him as humanly possible; it was something I consciously worked at every day. But this was the one exception to that rule.
In the house, as I went for the third and last suitcase, Grandma began shouting at me, cursing like a longshoreman. I ignored all the personal insults, the petty attacks. But then she said something that hit me hard. It wasn’t anything hurtful. It really wasn’t that bad at all. But it was like an electric cattle prod to my crotch.
“You cannot kick me out of my own house!” she shouted.
That was how Grandma Berens thought, how she saw everything in her life. She was staying in our house at the time, and that made it her house. She thought this way and behaved the way she did for the same reason that Grandpa Deedee and Grandma Charlotte behaved the way they did: No one had ever stood up to them and told them to stop. At this late point in their lives, of course, it was too late. There was no chance they would change. Grandma Berens would always be the person she was.
Somehow, that only made me angrier.
I turned on her, put my hands on her throat and backed her hard against the wall. Clenching my teeth so hard that my head hurt, I began to press my thumbs into her throat.
I will never forget the look that passed over her face like a shadow, then set in and became solid, concrete. Her reality was crumbling around her because someone was actually standing up to her. Not just someone, but her fat, ugly grandson. And worse, it looked like there was a good chance she was going to sustain some actual physical damage.
A hand came to rest on my shoulder and it was shaking – not trembling but shaking. Dad stood beside me and he leaned close to my ear. He was about fifty-three at the time, but when he spoke, he sounded old, frail and afraid.
“Stop,” he said. “Stop, or I’m going to have a heart attack.”
There was my dad, who stood a little over six feet tall and whose first reaction to anything he didn’t like was to break something or hit someone, standing beside me as I attempted to strangle his mother. This was the man who had beaten me with his belt, his fists, kicked me, and nearly pulled my hair out by the roots on many occasions. Did he push me away? Did he hit me? Did he so much as raise a hand? No. Like most bullies, when faced with a harsh reality he shook and crumbled. He threatened to get sick.
It was not what Dad said that made me stop. I think it was simply his presence. It reminded me that I was doing the one thing I wanted least of all to do in my life. I was being like my father. I dropped my arms at my sides and stepped back.
Grandma Berens ran out of the house. She didn’t limp or stagger or even walk – she ran. Like I said, the bitch could move when she wanted to.
No one said a word to me about what I’d done. Not then, not later, not ever. No one got angry with me, criticized me, or even mentioned what had happened. Thirty-three years have gone by and no one has even made a vague reference to it.
Also, Grandma Berens didn’t live with us anymore.
She died fifteen years ago at the age of 90. In her last few years, we started speaking again. Dad wasn’t the only person I worked hard not to emulate – I didn’t want to be like my entire family, not in any way. One of the things I’ve done to avoid that is take responsibility for my mistakes and wrongdoing. I apologize when I’m wrong – something that was never done in my family. But once again, I made an exception for Grandma Berens. I never apologized.
I spoke with her on the phone just a few hours before she died. She knew she was dying – for real this time – and her voice was faint so I had to struggle to hear her.
“You know I’ve always loved you,” she said.
Then why did you torture me so much, Grandma?
“Nobody loves me, though,” she said. “They never have. And now I’m dying.”
If it’s true that nobody loves you, Grandma, it’s only because you’ve always been such an evil cunt.
That's what I thought at the time. What did I say? I told her a dirty joke. I could always make Grandma Berens laugh. Along with the fun of tormenting me and making me cry as a little boy, I think that was why she enjoyed having me around so much – I could make her laugh. And she always appreciated a good dirty joke, even though she tried to pretend she didn’t approve. So I told her one. She didn’t make a sound in response, but Mom was with her and told me later that Grandma had smiled.
After she died, I volunteered to perform the task of cutting off her head, stuffing a sprig of holly in her neck stump and driving a wooden stake through her heart to make sure the bitch didn’t come back from the grave. But I was the only one who saw the humor in that. She hasn’t come back from the grave, but sometimes, like Marley’s ghost telling Scrooge that the common welfare of mankind should be his business, I still hear her words.
You’re fat ... you’re ugly ... who the hell do you think you are?
They’re her words, but in my head, they’re always spoken in my voice.
Christmas, they say, is a time for family. They say a lot of things, of course. That’s only one of them. I think for just about everyone, grandparents – or at least the memory of grandparents – are a big part of the holiday season. The very words – “grandparents,” “grandma,” “grandpa,” and even “family” – have achieved a kind of sacred status in our culture. To speak against them, to suggest they are anything less than glorious, is seen as some kind of blasphemy. Family is all that matters, they say. Your family has to love you, they say. Your family has to accept you, they say. They say a lot of things, of course. But they’re not always right. And sometimes, they’re completely full of shit.
Family is one of the reasons the holidays are so stressful and painful for so many people. One’s family can be a source of unconditional love that nourishes and strengthens one long after those family members are dead and gone. That is the ideal, but it is not always the reality.
For many people, that old song – “Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go” – stirs warm, loving memories. But not for everyone. For some, those words, or words like them, can stir up toxic sediment in a poison pond of memories. For some, family is the root of all evil and the holidays are a visit to hell. But if they say so, if they express those feelings to anyone besides a therapist, they often get strange looks – sometimes even hostile looks. Oh, sure, we joke about having to get together with our families at the holidays. But I’m not talking about the uncle who farts at the dinner table or the aunt who gets belligerent after a few drinks; I’m not talking about old family squabbles or rivalries that linger like a bad smell or petty resentments over slights long past. I’m talking about crippling emotional pain. I’m talking about the ghosts of abuse – emotional or physical or sexual or all three – that rattle their chains the loudest around the holidays, when everyone is singing cheerful songs about Grandma’s house and chestnuts roasting on an open fire. But no one wants to hear about those things. Quit whining. Get over it. Move on. They’re your family, after all. You can put up with them for a little while at the holidays.
You won’t hear any of that from me. We get one life, and it’s short. There are no do-overs, and there’s no time to waste. You can’t choose your family, but you can choose how you deal with them. Not all families are loving. No, they don’t have to love you, they don't have to accept you -- like Santa and his elves, those are myths. The fact is, sometimes they don't love or accept you. Sometimes they can be the most harmful, devastating people in your life. But remember -- it’s your life. Not theirs.
The holidays are a time of tradition. But what tradition is up to you, not your family. Make your own traditions. Make your own family. There is no law on the books requiring you to subject yourself to torture every November and December. The Constitution guarantees you the pursuit of happiness, but it doesn’t tell you how to pursue it. That’s up to you. If spending time with your family at the holidays is a painful ordeal, don’t do it. Sure, they won’t like it and they’ll bitch and complain, but hey – they should have thought of that when they were making your life miserable and creating scars.
Spend the holidays doing something that makes you happy, something that makes the people you love most happy. I have a couple of friends who wouldn’t be caught dead with their families at Christmas – they spend it together watching movies like John Carpenter’s The Thing, because that movie makes them happy. You know what everyone expects you to do for the holidays – you’ve seen the movies and TV shows and Norman Rockwell paintings. But doing what people expect you to do is a lousy way to live your life. Spend it with friends, or the family of friends, or go to the movies, or have sex in the kitchen, or ... anything you want. Make it your Christmas – or Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or solstice, or Yule, or Flying Spaghetti Monster Day, or whatever it is you celebrate, whatever it is you want to celebrate.
A man went to his doctor and said, “Doc, my arm hurts every time I do this.” The doctor said, “Then don’t do that.”
Don’t take as long as I did to learn this. Learn it as soon as you can.
