Why Argue?

When we lived in our fourth floor apartment on Rainbow Boulevard, it was my job to wash the dishes and my sister’s job to dry.  She once asked if I could make the water “as hot as possible” because she’d heard somewhere that hotter water dries faster.  “So basically, “ I said, “You want me to burn myself to make your job easier.”  She accused me of being uncooperative.     

June 16, 1986

1.   Who’s Johnny, El DeBarge

2.   Invisible Touch, Genesis

3.   Greatest Love of All, Whitney Houston

4.   All I Need is a Miracle, Mike and the Mechanics

5.   There’ll Be Sad Songs To Make You Cry, Billy Ocean

6.   Your Wildest Dreams, The Moody Blues

7.   The Glory of Love, Peter Cetera

8.   Bad Boy, Miami Sound Machine

9.   A Different Corner, George Michael

10. On My Own, Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald

Inevitably, when two people wash dishes together, the drier dries faster than the washer can wash, so my sister would often be standing there with nothing to do, irritably biting the corner of her mouth while watching me work up a sweat with cleanser and SOS pads.  Eventually she took to just tossing in the towel, literally, and letting the dishes pile up in the rack, allowing air to do most of the work for her.  This was just fine by me because oxygen was a far better audience for my singing.  

Back when pop singers still had some originality and could actually carry a tune, there was a good chance that if you were black and a female I was a fan.  Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan.  If you were a guy who looked like a mechanic or dressed like a trucker, my sister was all yours: Springsteen, Steve Perry, Pat Benatar.   

Our bedrooms were at either end of a hallway that was no more than six feet long, so if we’d wanted to, we could have stood in our doorways, leaned out, and smacked each other.  The bathroom was between the bedrooms, in the middle of the hallway, and sometimes my mother would be in there with the door open, standing at the sink, fixing her hair, while my sister and I would be in our rooms with the doors closed, she in hers listening to Springsteen, me in mine with Patti LaBelle.  A few minutes might pass before we’d hear our mother’s voice rising above the music.  “Jesus Christ!”  Opening our doors to see what the fuss was about, she’d be in the hallway with her hair half-teased, waving a comb around.  “I get one song from this side and another song from that side, and I can’t understand a goddamn word of any of it!”  

My mother never simply asked you to do something.  She was too creative for that.  Rather than say, for instance, “turn the music down,” she’d ask in a way that included an explanation of what it was you did, intentionally or not, that drove her to the brink of insanity.  But it didn’t end there.  She’d keep coming back, having discovered new ways of expressing the same thought.  “It’s not so much that I can’t understand the words,” she’d say.  “It’s the beat.  It’s this one going boom boom boom boom boom, while that one’s going boom, b-b-boom, b-b-boom!”  Where most people leave a situation and only then think of something better that they should have said, the “should have” part never mattered to my mother.  She’d actually come back and say it, prolonging the argument over the course of an hour with periodic coffee breaks.  You’d hear the quick, muted pounding of her stockinged feet on the carpet growing louder and think, Oh, no, here she comes again.  She does the same thing today, only now it’s with the phone.  “You know what else?” she’ll say, skipping the hello.  It’s as if the writer in her is constantly rewriting the argument and then coming back to see how it sounds.  

It was far more entertaining when her words were directed at others.  Throughout high school, we were, on occasion, required to have our parents with us to pick up our report cards.  The school made an evening of it, setting up tables in the gym with a teacher at each one, receiving parents and students, doling out praise and airing grievances.  The first time we attended, in my freshman year, we sat before Dr. King, my homeroom advisor, who taught chemistry and physics to the juniors and seniors and was moderator of our school’s chapter of the National Honor Society.  He slid my report card across the table to my mother and pointed out that although my grades were good, my lack of involvement in extracurricular activities would jeopardize my chances of induction into the National Honor Society come junior year.  “We like well-rounded individuals,” he said, and I suppose some parents may have taken that opportunity to turn to their son and crack a whip, to round out my apparent squareness, but my mother could see that Dr. King was hanging the threat of exclusion from an exclusionary club over my head and she wasn’t having any of it.  “Well,” she said, and she leaned forward and crossed her arms on the table, which was a clear sign that she meant business.  “Maybe if your school offered something other than football it wouldn’t be an issue.”  She argued that when a school offered nothing but sports, it left few options.  “My son is artistic,” she said.  “He’s a creative person with many interests, but tossing a ball around is not one of them.  So the problem,” she concluded, leaning back again, “is with your school, not my son.”  

My sister and I don’t have a lot in common.  Our taste in music is still at odds, and I live in the middle of Manhattan while she lives in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere.  Still, we get along just fine and we’re not much for arguing with each other.  It’s as if at some point we both realized that our mother is so much better at it than we are, so why bother?  

Just Ask

One day when I was in first grade, sitting at my desk, I wet my pants.  It wasn’t an accident.  I did it on purpose.  

Eight years later, in June 1985, as I stood in the mirror of my bedroom, adjusting my tie and preparing to graduate from St. Teresa of the Infant Jesus, the only school I had ever known, the memory of that day came back to me and I thought about how much I had changed.  I wasn’t necessarily wrong, but I wasn’t completely right, either.  I know now that my reason for doing what I did will never change.        

June 5, 1985

1.   Heaven, Bryan Adams

2.   Walking on Sunshine, Katrina and the Waves

3.   Everything She Wants, Wham!

4.   Into the Groove, Madonna

5.   The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough, Cyndi Lauper

6.   The Search Is Over, Survivor

7.   Invisible, Alison Moyet

8.   Crazy For You, Madonna

9.   Crazy in the Night, Kim Carnes

10. One Night in Bangkok, Murray Head

As a kid I was what they call “painfully shy,” although my shyness never led to  pain so much as awkwardness and, on that day in first grade for instance, a rash.

I’d been sitting at my desk, holding it in for some time, as Miss Arnold stood in front of us, her class, talking about something for what seemed like forever. It was probably no more than twenty minutes or so, but when you reach the point where it feels like you’re peeing internally, even five minutes is forever.  My original plan had been to continue holding it in for the rest of the day until I got home, but I soon realized I would need a new plan, and I was not about to raise   my hand and alert the teacher, much less the entire class, of my need to use the bathroom.  Aside from the fact that it didn’t seem like any of their business, I had other issues.  For starters, what to say.  We’d always been told to call it the lavatory, but this word meant nothing to me.  I had no idea what it looked like, how to say it, or why it was a word that meant bathroom.   The cool kids shortened it and called it the “lav,” while the dumb ones said “lab,” which also confused me, but either way I’d always been, and continue to be, opposed to getting chummy with words.  Chard for Chardonnay.  Delish for delicious.  Natch for naturally.  These all make my head explode.  “I’m making hamburgs,” my grandmother would say, and my head would explode.  Even “burgers,” though still offensive, would have been marginally better, but “hamburgs” made me want to go take a shower.  Same for “lav.”  That word was not about to come out of my mouth and the full version was beyond my comprehension, so even if I’d been brave enough to raise my hand, I would have, to my ears at least, sounded like a fool.  And the last thing a shy person wants is to sound like a fool.  Or look like one.    

So I formed a new plan, which, to my undeveloped, six-year-old mind, seemed foolproof.  Genius, even.  First, I would raise my legs straight out in front of me to a horizontal position, parallel to the floor.  Then, I would pee.  It was my firm belief that because my legs were raised, the pee would travel sideways along my pants and soak into the material before ever reaching the leg openings and hitting the floor.  I was emboldened by the fact that I was wearing corduroys.  Yes, I thought, staring at the ridges, those look very absorbent.  I knew that we wouldn’t be getting up from our desks for quite some time and by that time, I assumed, my pants would be dry again.  It was a perfect plan.  So after careful consideration and several test runs of raising my legs, I executed the plan.    

What I discovered is that not only was my brain undeveloped, so were my leg muscles.   

“Ian,” one of my friends whispered to me, “There’s a puddle of water under your desk.”  I feigned ignorance, then surprise.  “What?  What are you talking about?  Oh my God.  Where’d that come from?”  I may have been shy but I was a solid actor.   I looked accusingly at the ceiling, thinking maybe I could pass it off as a leak but even I couldn’t sell that one, so I quickly changed course and adopted the expression of one who has suddenly remembered something inconsequential.  Oh, that.  That puddle.  “I spilled a glass of water,” I said.  “From earlier.”  This is old news I seemed to be saying.  Where’ve you been?

I think some of the dumber kids bought it, but not Miss Arnold.  She made me sit with my puddle of “water” for the rest of the afternoon.  “Next time,” she said as she wiped it up after school, “Just ask.”  She made it sound so easy.  

By the time I’d reached eighth grade, year and year out with the same classmates, I’d become more comfortable with speaking in front of others, mostly by pretending to be someone else.  Not anyone in particular, just someone who liked hearing the sound of his own voice.  As myself, I could rarely take anything I said seriously.  We were once assigned to stand in front of the class and explain a step-by-step process, and while most of the other eighth-graders talked about scientific things like photosynthesis and mitosis, I opened my mother’s cookbook and explained how to make rice pudding.  

We were taught by a man named James Calire, who wore mismatched clothes and a hairpiece that was, more often than not, crooked.   His pants, exceedingly long, pooled at his feet like silk draperies, and he owned a Cabbage Patch Kid that he talked about in ways that made us question his sanity.  He was a man who obviously cared little for what other people thought of him, and I admired that.  Even aspired to that.  During a test I once raised my hand and asked him if perhaps he’d written a question incorrectly.  I knew the answer he was looking for, but as written the question had no answer.  When I brought it to his attention Mr. Calire acknowledged his mistake.  Then suddenly, as he walked away, he turned to me and yelled “Next time just answer the question, buddy,” and by buddy he meant smart ass.  I was many things as a fourteen year-old -- skinny, neat, and, according to my sister, “fucking annoying” -- but a smart ass was not one of them.  Later, when Mr. Calire apologized for his outburst, I realized that my question had embarrassed him in front of the class.   As a kid, I had always thought shyness and embarrassment were childish things, traits that were outgrown like sucking your thumb or watching Saturday morning cartoons in your footie pajamas.  But as an adult I know that’s not true.  Shyness stays with you like herpes, flaring up at inopportune moments, and the only thing you can do is disguise it.

When I graduated from eighth grade in June 1985 I thought my shyness, like my brown, wet corduroys, was a thing of the past.  But that fall when I started high school, it started all over again.  The same nerves, the same fear, it all came back to me.  And just as in first grade, I never asked to use the lavatory.  Throughout four years of high school I never once went to the bathroom.  People say there’s nothing quite like a Catholic school education.  And St. Teresa’s had taught me well.  But as I stood in the mirror, tying my tie, reflecting back on those years, it never occurred to me that one of the most important things I’d learned was how to hold it in.