gitsis
Brother came back from Alaska with a GED and a fiancée. Brother used to have a black Mohawk past his shoulders, but his new girlfriend had encouraged him to cut it short and get a job. Girl thought he looked like a geeky Q-tip, his frizzy hair a cloud around the top of his head. She liked him better with it long, but Girl’s opinion no longer mattered—she had been replaced by this fiancée and she was jealous as hell. Everything about the siblings now was oil and water, but they still kept trying to go back to how things used to be, before he moved away, before she found religion, before Stepmother became bipolar. Too much had changed.
Brother was sitting in a booth at Gitsis, his favorite diner. The place was a dive—brown, rectangular floor tiles laid in a herringbone pattern that were probably very cool in the 1970s, but now looked perpetually dirty. They served soda in dimpled, brown plastic cups; crinkle-cut fries on thick, ceramic plates; and coffee in beige mugs with one brown line drawn around the edge. Gitsis was two blocks from the High School of the Arts, where Brother used to go, and it was still his favorite hangout. He and his friends sat for hours drinking coffee, sketching in notepads, and talking about Rocky Horror Picture Show, music, girls, parents … all the usual teen discussions.
Girl had gone to Gitsis once with her uncle, and the waitress remembered him from his high school days, twenty years before. “What happened to your friend?” she asked. “The one who always ate french fries with gravy.”
Gitsis never changed. Twenty-four-seven breakfast and white hotdogs and hangover food. Girl hated it, but since Brother had moved into an apartment with his girlfriend, if she wanted to see him, she had to come here. She walked over to the table in her tight jeans and baggy sweatshirt, standing awkwardly next to the booth. There wasn’t room for her to sit. Brother reached up under her sweatshirt and grabbed her breast.
“What the hell?” Girl jumped back.
“I was trying to tickle you,” he said. “Calm the fuck down. I was trying to tickle you and I missed.”
Girl crossed her arms over her chest, willing her flesh to turn into armor. Her brother had grabbed her boob. Brother looked at her with unreadable eyes, his face tightened in his own anger. “Calm the fuck down. It was a mistake.” Girl ran out of the diner, her face a dry, closed-off mask. She didn’t believe in mistakes.
notes from the fourth wall
raised by wolves
“You say ‘I was raised by lesbians’ like you were raised by wolves,” a friend commented.
“Well, that’s kind of how I mean it,” I answered. I always identified with Mowgli from The Jungle Book.
We were our own pack, a subset of the larger world in which we lived. I wasn’t one of the wolves—I wasn’t gay—but because I belonged to them, I didn’t fit in with the rest of the society I lived in, either. I grew up straight in a gay world. I didn’t fit anywhere. As an adolescent, this not-quite-fitting only manifested in the straight world. The pictures on my living room walls didn’t look like my friends’ family portraits. There were so many questions I was asked and I had so few answers to give. But the gay community was home. I didn’t have any real extended family, and so our holidays were peopled with lesbian couples who always asked me normal questions, like what did I want to be when I grew up and how was school and did I like cats better than dogs. It was only in our group of same-sex couples that I was seen just as me, not as The Girl with the Lesbian Parents.
But once I was out of my parents’ house, I no longer fit in with the gay world. If I went to a lesbian bar with friends, I was treated like an imposter. Of course I would quickly explain that my parents were gay, and then their defensiveness melted off their faces, and I was almost one of the club. Almost. My experience was slightly different, and I didn’t fit in their circle anymore. Like Mowgli, I had to go find my place among my own kind. Even though I had mimicked the straight kids for most of my life, I still felt like an interloper. I spent a very long time trying to be just like everyone else, until everything that was beautiful or interesting about me had blended away to beige. I had to own my quirkiness and that of my family before I could ever find my place in the world.
But homosexuality wasn’t the only differentiating feature of my wolf pack. For this metaphor to work, the wolves have to have fangs, otherwise I might just as easily say that I was raised by manatees or goats or any other herbivore. “Raised by wolves” implies teeth crunching bones and snarling at one another as they fight over the dying carcass of some unfortunate dinner item. Slightly different from a herd of goats. Like a wolf pack, we had no personal space, no boundaries or modesty. We might as well have slept in a pile at the back of a cave, scratching at each other’s fleas.
Have you read about wolves marking their territory with urine? In our house it was with excrement. If my brother was pooping and Stepmother had to go, she made him get off the toilet and finish in the basement, where there was an old toilet with a pink seat. A yellow-stained shower curtain afforded a modicum
