You know those times when you discover something horrifying, but you know it’s for the best to just stay quiet? That time came for me only a month ago when I walked up to my parents’ bedroom door with the intention to knock, but instead heard them having sex. This is hard to talk about, but I need to vent. After overhearing this horrid act, I left the house (with no intention of going anywhere), went into my car, drove off, and screamed for five minutes while scratching all these weird itches that suddenly sprang up all over my body. I assume they were some sort of reaction from being grossed out. And in case you’re wondering, the answer is yes – I have had trouble masturbating since then. It’s mainly because I heard my dad moaning in pleasure, and for those of you who have ever heard my father’s voice, you know that he and I sound exactly the same. So when I’m whacking it and I’m…y’know…in the zone, so to speak…I suddenly think, “I sound like dad.” And before I know it, my rocket ship has suddenly cancelled its launch.
That was a strange introduction to this article, wasn’t it?
Dad
About a year ago in “Take My Family…Please,” I mentioned my father’s road rage and his backseat driver antics, but since that time, he has grown much, much worse. I’m not just talking about driving – I’m talking about all aspects of life. He was already angry at the world, but now that he’s entering his golden years, he’s become a crotchety old man. He has become the guy who will not return a baseball to a little kid if the kid accidentally hits it into his backyard. In fact, there is so much to complain about, that I would need an entire article, nay, a series of articles to explain and analyze the mind of my father. I’ll spare you good people and just talk about one thing for now: my father’s relationship with our neighbors.
We don’t have any neighbors that my father likes. We have enemies on all sides, or at the very least, people my dad has deemed “strange.” I envy people who are friends with their neighbors, for that is a world I have never known. On one side, we have The Lush, a man my father hated from the moment we moved into our house in 1990. The guy is retired or something, because he never leaves his house. He often just stares at his yard, which leads me to believe that he is senile, but my dad said he’s just drunk, hence our name for him. The Lush and his family are also very inconsiderate. They have radio speakers in their backyard and they would just blast music at like 8 a.m. on Saturday mornings. No matter how many times my dad asked them to lower it, they wouldn’t – in fact, they seemed to play the radio more often just to piss us off. Even the neighbor on the other side of The Lush was getting angry.
Things came to a head when my father called the police to finally crush The Lush’s loud radio campaign. That didn’t work – The Lush had friends in the police department. The two that came over chatted with him and let him off with a warning, not even telling him to lower the radio. And they wonder why people take the law into their own hands!
The radio thing died down, mainly because I think the Lush’s brain was dying due to massive alcohol consumption or plain ol’ senility. It also didn’t help that he and a friend started shooting off BB guns into the windows of the people who lived behind him. Those neighbors called the police, and you better believe that the cops weren’t as nice to The Lush that time around. Did he think he would get away with that? Is he brain-damaged? No, but his son is. Yes, The Lush has a brain-damaged son in a wheelchair. He got that way after snorting all sorts of drugs with his friends and then going for a drive, in which he crashed. Anyway, on like the first day we moved in, The Lush’s son came by and asked us – very slowly - if we would mind not building a fence to separate our houses on the side, because they were planning to build a wheelchair path and needed the space. We said that was fine, of course. You try saying no to a brain-damaged neighbor.
Five years later, we were perplexed because the wheelchair path was never built. My dad also decided that he wanted to build a fence because at this point in time he hated The Lush. It’s not like we were being dicks – we gave them five fucking years and if they installed that path, we would have left it as it was. Even worse, their trashcans would constantly fall over, causing the junk to splash the side of our house. My dad brought this up to them and their response was, “So pick up our trash and put it back into our garbage cans.” Yeah, okay, assholes. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll make it our business to put YOUR fucking nasty garbage back into your cans because you’re too fucking retarded to set your garbage cans up straight. For those reasons, my dad began building the fence, but the very same day, after not speaking to us since 1990, the son came over.
“Why…are…you…building…a…fence?” he asked, with his Haitian caretaker standing behind him, looking like she just wanted to go home.
“Well,” my mom replied. “We gave you five years to install a path, but nothing ever happened. Are you still going to put something there?”
The son assured us they were still planning on building a wheelchair path, so we compromised: we would make an opening in the fence so he can use our side of the property to swing around to his backyard. He liked it, so he went back home to discuss it with his family. We never heard back from him again. Fucking weirdos. The fence went up, they probably badmouthed us to the other neighbors, and we probably look like the dicks.
Across the street, we have Stumpy. I don’t know why my dad calls him that. My dad and him get along okay (they say “hi”), but Stumpy always gives me the rudest stares. I once waved to him but he did not wave back. Now I pretend that he and The Lush aren’t around, although they both like to hang out front and stare at me as I get into my car. I would flip them off and/or moon them, but I don’t want the entire neighborhood rising up against me.
Next to Stumpy we have Missy. I have no FUCKING idea why my dad calls her that since her name is not Missy and I’m frankly sick of him calling her that. Missy is the typical rich mother from Long Island. She drives a fancy car and does really pointless things, like buy balloons that say, “WELCOME BACK!” when her husband returns from a business trip. Stupid and shallow, yes, but I’m not anti-balloon. My father apparently is because he never shuts up about it. He constantly bitches about the balloons and Missy in general, but the strange thing is that she doesn’t do anything that affects us. As far as I know, tying a balloon to a mailbox does not lower property values.
The coup-de-grace is that my dad has gotten into the habit of SINGING HER FUCKING NAME! My dad walks around the house going, “Missyyyyyy, Missy, Missyyyyyy…” Is that normal? Is that fucking normal? I’m seriously asking you people! E-mail me if you also think that’s abnormal so I can at least know that I’m not losing my mind or that I’m not stuck in the Twilight Zone.
I confronted my dad about his little song and asked, “Dad, do you have a crush on Missy?” He said no, so I responded with, “THEN WHY THE SHIT DO YOU KEEP SINGING HER NAME?!” He doesn’t know, but he just likes singing it. I woke up once at 6 a.m. to take a piss, and I heard him (our bathrooms are separated by a thin wall) singing about Missy while he was getting ready for work! The tune is so fucking annoying, and honestly, I don’t really want to hear my father singing the name of a woman who lives across the street. I’m surprised that my mom doesn’t care. If I ever get married, move into a house in the suburbs, have a neighbor named Harold, and one day my wife starts singing, “Haaaarold, Harold, Haaaarold…” you bet your ass that I would be fucking pissed off.
Next door we have The Widow, and she has an adult son who visits her sometimes. I am now going to reveal one of the main reasons I am so paranoid. Ready? Here it goes:
My father and I were out in front of the house playing basketball, when the son comes over and introduces himself to us. He seemed like a nice guy, which was a welcome change of pace because my father hated The Lush. Anyway, he was cool and even said that we could use their pool one day if we wanted. Jackpot! He eventually had to go, my dad and I went inside, and my dad turns to me and says, “Stay away from him. He’s a child molester.”
“What?!” I exclaimed. “Where’d you get that?”
“He just seemed strange. It was weird that he invited us to the pool.”
“He’s being nice!”
“No, no, the whole situation is very strange.”
That was it. We never went to the pool. We never spoke to The Widow’s son again. People wonder where my paranoia comes from, and well, there you have it.
Mom
Remember the last time I talked about my mom? I said she had been coughing for the past six years. Well, it’s now been seven years. Her coughing and constant throat clears have not gone anywhere. So now, every time she coughs, I go “SHH!” It drives her nuts and I get yelled at for being a jerk, but I need to keep sane somehow. Her condition has gotten so bad that she can’t even talk! She just coughs out words and we need to try to make sense of them, like Lassie trying to warn everyone that Timmy sprained his ankle down by the ravine. It’s either that, or her coughing blocks me out when I try to speak to her. Here is a typical conversation I had with my mom some months ago (keep in mind that this actually happened):
Me: “Hey mom, is it a new Family Guy toni-”
Mom: “*COUGH COUGH COUUUUUUUGH!* What?”
Me: “Is it a new Family G-”
Mom: “*COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUUUUGH!!!* *HAAAAAAAAAACK!* What?”
Me: “Is it a new Fam-”
Mom: “*COUGH COUGH!* *COUGH WHEEEEZE!* AHEM! What?”
Me: “Is it a n-”
Mom: “*COUGH!* I'm sorry, what?”
Me: “Is it-”
Mom: “*COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH...COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH!!!!!!!!* What?”
Me: “Is-”
Mom: “*COUGH COUGH!* AHEM! What?”
Me: “...........Is it a new Family Guy tonight?”
Mom: “Yeah.”
I made my mom go to the doctor and get checked out for her coughs. The doctor prescribed her pills that would thin out her mucus. Guess what? It didn’t work! My mom still coughed like she was a 90-year old smoker. This isn’t the simple over-the-counter type medicine that was ineffective, either. These were hardcore anti-phlegm pills that are only allowed to be consumed after a doctor’s permission! These fuckers didn’t work! She just stopped taking them and refuses to go back to the doctor. I may just have to kill my mom in her sleep.
Sister
My sister didn’t want me to write about her again. She’s lame.
Weird Cousin Charles
Let me tell you something: my great cousin Charles is weird. I’m not too sure how he’s related to us exactly. I think he’s my grandmother’s cousin, which would actually make him my great, great cousin…or some shit. Charles is over 80, he’s like 6’4”, and he looks like Judge Doom.
Charles lives in an apartment in New York City with no oven, no stove, and no microwave. The apartment came with these appliances, but Charles chose to uninstall them and just have a hotplate. One word for this, folks: weird.
We feel bad for Charles because we’re his only family. We invite him over for Thanksgiving every year, and to be honest, he isn’t that bad. He’s just weird. My dad knows Charles is weird and bullies him about it a little bit. At the table one Thanksgiving, we offered Charles a drink. He said no, claiming that he simply does not drink. Not alcohol, mind you. I’m talking about normal drinks, like water or soda.
“Well Charles,” my dad said. “I got to say that’s really WEIRD!”
Another time Charles was telling all of us about the time he thought he had cancer. He was telling the story, and then just started crying hysterically at the table. But it wasn’t like he was at an emotional part of the story or something like that. It was more like he just randomly broke out crying. He was actually telling the happy part of the story when the tears began to fall. I was sitting there all freaked out, just staring at this old man bawling. My gay uncle Lamar went, “Uh…so you didn’t have cancer then?” In an instant, Charles stopped crying, his head sprung up, and he went, “Yeah, I was just fine. Isn’t that something?”
Rose is dead. She died in 2002. She had dementia and it really messed her brain up in her later years, so we put her in a nursing home. A nursing home is much more depressing than a retirement home, because a nursing home is the last stop on the train ride that is your life. Rose’s nursing home SUCKED. It reeked of death. The people there were senile or just all kinds of sick. The only fun they had was playing Bingo, and if they won, they got a measly fucking quarter.
Anyway, my mom brought me along with her to visit Rose sometimes. It was a horrible feeling when my mom asked me to come along because I felt that Rose’s nursing home sucked the life out of me when I entered its doors. It was also terrible because I had to see the pained look on my mom’s face when Rose didn’t remember her. Rose fucking thought that I was my mom’s boyfriend! She didn’t even know what year it was! So did I act mature and correct her? No, of course not.
For example, one time she asked me what I did for a living, so I told her that I was a porn star. You would think that would be terrible, but you would be wrong. Rose didn’t even know what “porn” stood for. She acted like she knew what it was, said, “Good for you!” and then forgot what she just said. Other false professions included fireman, robot, and Cheez-It salesman.
Rose died at a very inconvenient time. She expired merely a week after I flew up to Buffalo (winter break had just ended). I had to fly back home and attend Rose’s funeral. Funerals really blow. I’ve only been to two in my entire life and it’s not so much that they’re sad; it’s just shitty having to see family members when it’s not a holiday. My dad wasn’t too supportive when the gravediggers began pouring the dirt on the coffin and my mom began to lose it. I recall he told my mom to stop making a scene because “it was just dirt landing on wood.” Good logic, dad. The person inside the wooden box being buried is only the corpse of your wife’s mother, but whatever – crying is dumb.
My dad’s words of advice to me during the walk back to the car were this: “This funeral wasn’t too sad. Everyone was expecting Rose to pass for a while now. She was old and her mind wasn’t working, so she’s at peace now. It’s really the sudden deaths that shake people up, like a plane crash. Anyway, have a nice flight back to Buffalo.”
My dad didn’t want me to say much about Louie. What I can say is the following:
1) He was my great grandfather’s brother
2) He was an enforcer for one of the five New York Mafia families
I should about wrap this up before I insult every member of my family, and trust me - there are a lot of family members who have it coming. Stay tuned for my next article, which should come in about another month and a half…maybe.
