  When I was growing up, Pluto was still a planet. I guess it’s not anymore. It’s a ball of gas star glowing in the sky thing but a planet, no longer. I don’t know. Maybe I’m making that up. Maybe I only thought I heard them saying that on the news.
It’s rather funny our need to name things, to define them, as if the naming makes it somehow different. I remember making a mobile of the planets for a school project, cutting the sun out of yellow construction paper, arranging each planet in as close to relative distance as string and a clothes hanger would allow. For some reason, I remember my Father helping me. When I think of him, it’s like I am remembering a character in a book or a movie. I don’t know sometimes if he ever was real. I don’t think men know the love that their children have for them.
Or maybe they do and that’s the problem. All that love scares them and that’s what makes them leave. It is safer to be around someone who hates you I think. My memory is a collection of staccato bursts of useless bits. I don’t know why some things have stuck to my mental flypaper and other moments are gone. I wonder if they are still somewhere inside me, floating along in the plasma, waiting for some acid flashback to be rediscovered.
My memory-- I’m proud of him. Dad. Proud that my father was attractive and that my girlfriends would comment on it. Stupid thing to be proud of, your father’s good looks. Yellow ribbons. Hostages coming home.
That same year, I don’t recall John Lennon being shot, I do remember Regan and that I saw Xanadu in the theatre three times. This disturbs me. The first time I heard the word fuck: It had been written on the bricks on the playground and the six-year-old girl I was playing with pointed at it and then pointed at the teacher and said, “She’s a fuck.” I nodded dumbly. Sure. Sure. She’s a fuck, having no idea what that meant.
Even when I was six it seemed like children my own age were older than me, like they all got the secret password. I always seemed to be behind the beat, to see the world off from a distance as if I was watching everyone from the bottom of murky water. There was a time when I was seven that I wouldn’t do the homework that was assigned. On the way walking home, I would drop my papers, leaving them to mold in the gutter and when my mother asked me if I had any school work I would say no, because it was the truth. I didn’t have any with me. After they found out what I was doing, my parents took away my books to punish me.
I became a book junkie, hiding them in my mattress, pulling them out at night to read from the light of the electric blanket controls under the covers. I can’t remember how long this went on. Then again, like I said, my memories don’t feel connected to me. I could be making this up. I remember hearing about killer bees and how they would be terrorizing us in fifteen years, eating Pop Rocks, (do they still make those? ) watching Fat Albert, Emergency, Sha Na Na, The Muppets and every Friday night, Donny and Marie.
Once, I came across this book about werewolves that detailed the myth and told a couple of stories-- but the part that I loved, the part that gave me what I later recognized was a sexual thrill inside was the section on how you could become a Werewolf. I was rather disappointed each full moon when I didn’t transform. When I was nine, in the middle of mass, I had one of those existential “I exist and how amazing the odds are that I am here” moments. It sent me straight into a panic attack. We blamed my fainting on the incense. Sunday always had a feeling to it, sort of like how certain words have colors or that unnamed you just ate spinach thing on your teeth.
The Sunday feeling is the ticking of the Sixty minutes clock and knowing you need to unload the dishwasher although you don’t. Sunday is the skier that ate it on “The Agony of Defeat” part of The Wide World of Sports intro. Sunday was watching the coils in my mother tighten, waiting to see where and on who she would spark. When her migraines attacked, we would tip toe around the house trying to disappear so our breathing would not rip her brain apart. The J Crew color for Sunday would be “cigarette burn” and “bikini wax red”. In the early 70’s, I wished I was on Seseme Street.
In the late 70’s I wished that I was a character in Star Wars, maybe Princess Leia’s lost sister. In the early 80’s, I wished that I could dance like I was in Flash Dance or Fame or Solid Gold and in the late 80’s, I wished I was either Molly Ringwald or Madonna. The idea of being me was never acceptable. Sometimes, more often than I care to admit, I would steal my father’s fedora (that he purchased because he imagined it made him look like Indiana Jones) and my mother’s trench coat (that she purchased because she imagined it made her look like Annie Hall). I’d draw on a mustache with mascara, stick my hair under the hat, pop into a closet and then open the door with a flourish announcing in a very bad French accent, “I am Inspecter Jaques Clousseu! Officer of the Suitee!” Then I would trip over myself and fall.
My parents would applaud and I would jump into the closet and do it again. I would happily when asked, do this act for company. Why they didn’t test me for autisim, I am not sure. I remember finding my father’s Playboys and later how he forgot how to speak to me as up my body grew into something that could have been in those pages. Once, when I was six, my mother brought my lunch to school. A & W corn dogs.
I love corn dogs. My death row last meal would be corn dogs. I remember when, although it was often boo-scary Movie of the Week, After School Special ugly, I was in a family. I guess it’s not called that anymore. I don’t know what to name it, but that name wouldn’t change what it is. But then again, I don’t know anything.
I could be making this all up. 
