Family Nemeses, Part One

There has been a lot of good news lately. First, my birthday is Saturday. Second, my birthday is Saturday. Third, my office is going to let me work from Brooklyn this summer. BMW is taking me to St. Maarten's this summer, and next summer we're moving to NYC. That's right--the best news of all is probably that I am not going to AU for grad school.

In light of all this good news, I've been distracted. My friends have been quick to point me back to reality, though; one friend has been cutting people out of her life like they were malignant tumors, ridding her body of the cancer. In listening to her dilemmas and giving her advice, I thought about the people whom I've cut out of my life; and then, the people our family has cut out of our lives!

Family Nemeses, Part One: Aunt Tina

My dad's youngest sister. After 9/11, the Red Cross offered aid to family members who lost someone in the attacks. Tina thought this was a prime opportunity to collect a free ride. After all, she'd been conning others her whole life: she threw herself down a flight of "icy" steps and sued her landlord for negligence, going so far as to have surgery on her "injured" hip. Tina used the settlement money for coke and time in a recording studio, playing her demo tape of tone-deaf entropies on the cassette player for us when I was nine. She showed us head shots and (unfortunately) body shots that she'd had taken--a pink leather suit was painted on her, and her hair stuck out in white-blonde tufts at all angles. I will never recover from seeing those images.

Tina was fond of visiting us in the summer, and by visiting I mean slathering oil on her cellulite and smothering a raft in our pool, yelling at one of us to bring her more Hawaiian Tropic. Sometimes she'd take us to play mini golf, but not before asking my dad for money in her fake Bawston accent.

"C'mawn, Jawn," she'd say, "I haven't been able to work because of my hip."

When we got to Blackbeard's Cave, though, she'd rush us through the holes so we could make it home in time for her to tan her lardass out back.

She thought she struck it rich when she met her first husband, a rock star who played guitar in some garage band without a real job, living off unemployment. They'd clean out her cottage and lug garbage bags full of concert t-shirts down to our house, passing the clothes off as vintage classics. We wore them as pajamas for a few weeks before we got a better idea. We took them outside and tied them together to fashion a rope ladder from the high branch of the apple tree.

Naturally, when Tina realized the Rock Star wasn't going to make shit, she dropped his ass, but not before making sure she had collateral: her son's name was Harrison John Richard Michael Scott Paul the Fourteenth, or something stupid like that, and he became a source of guaranteed income for Tina after she got divorced. The judge allowed her to keep her house, which was a poor excuse for a bungalow and was perched on the top of a hill, quickly sliding toward the lake at the bottom. The house reeked of cat shit and cigarettes, with swamp gases wafting through the windows from the backyard.

The floors of the house were sloped at a thirty-degree angle AT LEAST, with bi-fold doors every forty square feet to form "rooms." The methane alone is probably what caused her to jump at the chance to upgrade as soon as 9/11 happened.

She filed a claim with the Red Cross, indicating that my dad provided for her (with the forty bucks he'd lend her to take us golfing). As a result, they gave her money and aided a fraud. Not sure if she's been sent to jail or not--the last voluntary contact we had with her was almost seven years ago. The last indirect contact we had was when she appeared on the evening news at Moussaoui's sentencing, with the endless pout on her face and professional tears in her eyes.

She mumbled some bullshit about not trusting planes, but we weren't fooled. We heard that she'd started seeing a shrink, whom she'd told about the time she mooched off of my dad and came to Disneyland with us. She told the shrink that she saw Arabs following us around, because what could pay out better than filing a suit against the government for causing her to develop a paranoid disposition as a result of September 11th?

So, yeah, she's on our shit list.

To be continued.