Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [15]
In response, my mother stared at me, her features frozen in an unsmiling mask. “If I can’t criticize you, what are we supposed to talk about? The weather?” she finally said.
* By “research,” I am referring to the ridiculously high percentage of yeses I got when I asked my friends who pursue comedy for a living, “Did you have a crazy mom?”
† By “lion’s share,” I mean the African lion.
‡ For “crazy,” I’m using a very loose definition that encapsulates everything from clinical definitions of insanity to dinner-party anecdotes of unstable, inconsistent, or persistently exasperating motherly behavior.
Never Again
SOMETIMES I LIKE TO IMAGINE MYSELF FLYING OVER A MAP OF my life on Google Earth. I know just what it would look like, too. There, rising out of the ocean, beyond those burned-out campfire pits along the rocky coast of Northern California, are the precipitous cliffs of my teenage years. I zoom past those quickly, scrolling, scrolling, making sure I don’t get trapped on some craggy ledge where I’ll be stuck staring down at my tenth-grade yearbook photo. God, I hate my hair like that.
Instead, I head farther north, riding over the forests and parklands of the Sierras until, on the horizon, I spot the volcano that was my twenties. Once a sputtering, lava-erupting embodiment of a million noisy unsolvable problems, now it looks placid and quaint, no hint of the bedlam it intended to spew onto the nearby townspeople.
From there I glide south toward the desert, soaring and circling like a hawk on a thermal, enjoying the vast expanses of barren terrain full of rocks and boulders. I float out over some eerie sandstone spires at the edge of a dilapidated ghost town until I spot the boarded-up entrance to an abandoned mine. That was my thirties, now covered with cobwebs and crawling with scorpions. No good reason to spend much time here, either.
So I head east, then continue in a northerly direction, enjoying the tidy geometry of nicely tended farmland until a burned-out, pockmarked area is looming before me. The contrast in topography is so stark that for a second it makes me gasp. I’m looking down on a massive, rutted field full of rusted barbed wire, shallow graves, and muddy zigzagging dugouts that resemble the trenches of the Battle of Verdun. Too high up to see the gory details, I keep clicking on the map to enlarge it until scavenging rats and feral cats come into focus. Now I can also make out all kinds of familiar-looking things mixed up in this wet toxic sludge: ticket stubs from sports events I pretended to be watching, half-full bottles of men’s toiletries that were left behind after the first grenade was launched. The closer I get, the more I can spot other familiar fragments: grimy disintegrated letters containing adorable nicknames too humiliating to acknowledge; torn pieces of playfully staged photos from assorted decades. Those clowning, grinning, muggy faces and poses certainly looked a lot more winsome at the time. Where am I? What is this icky place?
Surprise: I am hovering over the grizzled terrain of my love life, starting at age eighteen.
Ah, love. What a pain in the ass it has been since I met it.
That feeling of obsession and elation resulting from an intense moment of chemistry with a member of the opposite sex I barely knew but felt close to because we’d gone out for coffee … followed by the anxiety, the turmoil, the misunderstandings and inappropriate expectations that come from being thrust into a state of intimacy with a complete stranger.
In my checkered past, I have had four long-term (as in more than three years) “love” relationships, all vying for the title of goofiest or most delusional. So glaring were their shortcomings that at no point did I seriously consider marriage, for fear of turning the sacred