A hallmark of any family get together in my Peruvian family is when my tiny uncle Guillermo, who stands maybe 5'1”, with heels on, waddles by, unable to speak much English, but able to offer “Coors...eeeeh... Miller... eeeeeh... Germany?” Then his son, my cousin, a refrigerator of a man stomps by, making his only cameo appearance of the night to say “It's Heineken, Dad. We're doin shots on the deck, so if you want some... I'm just coming through to get limes.” He's the kind of guy that can eat a burrito bigger than your head in less than five minutes. That's the portrait of family get togethers for me.
Through a series of miraculous events which finds me wedded to a corn-bread mid-western mister, I spend most holiday seasons in Dayton, Ohio opening presents with the original Puritan Pilgrims. Now, I could take pot-shots at Ohio, but I usually have a fantastic time, the scenery is great, I completely adore the family, and it would be too easy to mention the fifty-foot Jesus doing a permanent touch-down by the side of the freeway.
When it comes to booze, Ohio is like everywhere else, in that there are bars, people drink, and there are inevitable problems with punky youngsters not knowing their limits and crotchety oldsters tipping over in their lawn mowers. But the “mid-west” is also home to more conservative values, which can include strict views on alcohol. In the sweetheart's family, when the adults are around, the prevailing idea is “Alcohol? Well sometimes we like to have champaign on New Years! But, no.”
So imagine my delight, as a member of the euphoric-inebriated class, to discover that any trips to see the family would probably include no members of the spacial-disorientation family.
See, as far as alcohol goes for me, I'm not too much a fan. My dad's drinking when I was a kid just kind of turned me off to it, and when given the option of smoking pot instead, well, what it comes down to is that marijuana is of the gods, and alcohol is of fermentation. But to allow for social norms and airplane security, in a pinch, alcohol can provide the right “volume control” as to relieve the knots in the stomach and be able to eat properly, laugh and tell stories, and not want to just run and hide.
Ben's not blind to this fact, nor does he dis-allow me from actually drinking when the time arises, or even finding a person to buy pot from while we're there if I were that determined. But there's a subtle shyness about it that comes over Ben whenever the subject comes up. It's a squeamishness that might be associated with the idea of having sex in your own parents' bed. There's a certain puritanical sense about the mid-west, which Ben's family reflects to some degree, and when we're there, Ben reflects it too, like he's seven again; which is, you know, sickeningly cute and gorgeous. There's just something that doesn't quite want you to break that innocence. I fear any pot smoking would be met with paranoid delusions of being chased by Mennonites.
So, when the chances to drink arise while on holiday, I take them. If I'm not going to be entering the realms of the unreal, I might as well enter the realms of the stumbling, which is merely a translational codex for the realms of the Christmas-letter-updates.
This has gotten me into trouble. In what has already been dubbed (in all caps), “THE THANKSGIVING OUTBURST OF '07,” I actually spoke up for once and was clearly on the verge of having a highly emotional moment in front of Ben and all his old high school friends. And I'm sure the half-drank TGIFriday's Ultimate Mudslide looked fabulous in front of me as I fought back the tears, with those swirls of chocolate syrup streaked down the glass in a spiral.
It wasn't quite an Anderson Cooper with ear piece falling out and ribbons of text soaring by and update boxes popping up so fast you can't understand a single thing that's happening but you know it must be fantastic so you keep watching, type event exactly. It was just that I needed some clarification and reassurance on the value judgments people make, and to make my point, I found it necessary to bring up some semi-private and clearly closely felt feelings that caused a quiver or two in the voice. Oh geeze, I basically said I was afraid people thought I was a lame duck and they put up with me because Ben liked me enough. Talk about a skinny white boy whine fest.
It wasn't bloody, no one got hurt, and no one did anything they later regretted.
The brainfreeze from the mudslide hadn't even fully thawed by the time we ended up at one Aunt and Uncle's house for Thanksgiving dinner down past the highway with the five-hundred foot rock-and-roll Jesus. The Uncle of the Aunt-and-Uncle duo is either like this to all new-comers, or honed in on the baby-deer-in-the-way-of-a-mac-truck look in my eyes, and came up behind me and whispered, “There's egg-nog in the fridge behind the milk....”
“...and bat juice above the stove.”
Bingo.
I knew exactly what he was talking about. I finally exhaled after having been there for twenty minutes. The bat is the little logo on the Bacardi bottles. He was telling me if I wanted to spike my eggnog, which is the only reason he offered it, where I could find it. So I finished up whatever conversation I was in, “Uh-huh-uh-huh, college, great, yeah, okay,” and made a bee-line to the kitchen.
Upon descending into the kitchen, I encountered an obstacle.
The ma-in-law. Well, not technically “in-law,” as Ben and I are not allowed to be legally married in California, but, mom to the man I committed a life to and am getting to know one holiday at a time.
Now, she's never said anything bad when I was around about drinking alcohol, I just know that no one in her family drinks it, except for her oldest two boys, but their drinking habits are not discussed at the dinner table. And somehow, that becomes an almost impenetrable force. Even Ben is willing to “sure, why not, it's the holidays!” have some eggnog, but definitely not with bat juice, like mine. So now I am forced to face just me alone, confronting demons.
Not her, mind you. The demons are the ideas of “guilt” associated with “being a naughty boy” and “trying to get away with it.” I'm sure if you follow the psycho-pathology of any young gayster, most will have the same links to lust and shame, self expression and self repression. The archetypes then demand the question, are you escaping, or settling down? Getting comfortable, or checking out? All this because your stomach is in so many knots, the mere suggestion of eating anything pig related seems nauseating, and everything for dinner, including the salad and beans has bacon in it. I'm sure the cranberry sauce is somehow a bacon-cranberry sauce. And so, all the shiny objects and exchanges of custom begin to appear like interesting artifacts from another planet.
I can quickly over look all that and just enjoy the moment... if I could just get to the bat juice without having to act like I'm playing to arcade game “Paper Boy” avoiding on-coming cars and uncovered man-holes.
All of this, and I know she's not even going to bat an eye, really. She's not going to try and stop me, raise a scene, or otherwise say anything out of character. She probably won't even remember that it happened.
I am making all of this up. This is all in my head. This is the noise that scatters about. But it's just the set up to the dive. If you can just get your self up to the board, soon, you'll be flying. And whether you land erect or in a belly flop depends on whether or not you let the flying turn into falling.
But I can't escape this feeling that I have bucked-teeth with a piece of straw coming out of my mouth, cowboy boots, shitkickers and suspenders, and I'm wranglin into the kitchen... gonna git tore up for the night!
“Don't forget to wipe your drool up with Ben's Princeton diploma when you're done!” she yells as the cloud of flies follows me out the kitchen.
In my mind's eye, I see my refrigerator sized cousin serving up eggnog margaritas back home at my family's day-of-Thanks.
I try to remember the big grin and pat on the shoulder Ben's twin brother gave me when I started getting all emotional in front of their friends earlier, saying “Are you kidding, we think you're GREAT!”
I try to wear that confidence and remember that it was the man of the house who gave me the authority to drink his bat juice, and that's exactly what I'm going to do, and it's just too bad for my sphincter but it's just going to have to relax for a little bit and allow me to complete my journey.
I turn off the ping-pong tournament that only I can see, and break through the kitchen force field desperately trying to remember everything I'd told myself earlier. I make some series of awkward movements for cups and eggnog around Ben's mom who is doing everything in her psychic power to ensure she stays in the kitchen and be in every spot I want to be in. It's clear we're in it to win it, so I make my way over to the stove and start opening up cabinets.
“What are you looking for?”
Oh shit. Confrontation.
At this point, it was too late to hit the eject button. Auto pilot took over.
I know my mouth opened, and sounds came out. Hers did as well, and sounds came out also. But my memory is of deafening silence and the inability to consciously do anything other than my pre-determined task. Any conscious disruption would surely turn this graceful blunder into a belly flop.
I can't tell you anything that was said, or how much bat juice ended up in my cup, I was just nodding and acting like I was totally cool and everything was a-okay, because I am the accepting son-in-law of an accepting mom-in-law and we have different customs from where we come from, but that's okay because we love each other and most of all, we love Ben. Phew. Glad that was easy to deal with.
But as Ben has told me time and time again, I am awful at hiding my feelings. I wear them all over my face... well, any one feeling that I'm trying to hide that is. So I must have been looking at her like she caught me masturbating. I hope, for her sons' sake, that's the first time she'd ever seen that look.
Somehow I finished making my drink and made my exit. Somewhere between the kitchen and the “kiddie table” where Ben and I were seated, my senses started returning to me, and I realized the task had been accomplished, no violent upheavals occurred in the kitchen, and I was free to start gulping my deliciously thick cup of bat batter. I don't remember jumping off or doing the flip in the air, but I hit the water just right. And down the hatch it went.
But going through such raconteurring just for booze is ultimately a silly feat. I don't even like being drunk. It's just medicine that works but makes you feel crappy in other ways. Usually headache meds and a lot of re-hydrating is involved, as well as a constant monitoring of how much you've had of what, and it just becomes a lot of work to keep up a nice buzz. There's no sense in getting completely blitzed in front of grandparents and babies anyway, so the bottom line is:
Pot should be legalized.
Then, even if I went through all the same rigamarole's to sneak out to get stoned, it would be amounting to something... like play time with baby and the farm-animal-sounds toy, talking too much about my music-nerdom, or eating more than just mashed potatoes and rolls.
Then, I wouldn't have to run around like an idiot trying to figure out what I'm going to tell myself to feel alright while my head starts hitting the panic button.
Then it would just be there, like a poster of a kitten dangling from a branch with the caption, “hang in there, baby.”
