The day after Soho House, Blaine says, “If someone didn’t know you, they might think you’re a little unstable. Surly . . . and unstable.”
Yeah, I know. Believe me, I know. It’s so annoying that other people don’t seem to have the same problems that I do when I drink. But normal people drink. I know that. So I drink, just like everyone else. It’s fun, except when it’s not. I just have to remember to keep it to two or three glasses of wine a night. I don’t know why I keep losing track.
I see some “doctor” during this time who bills himself as a healer, and I show him all my bruises from falling down. He tells me that I just need to “clean my blood” by detoxifying and not drinking for three months. I can do that, I think. Blaine is a little concerned, though. Am I done drinking forever? No, no, don’t worry, I tell him. It’s totally temporary. It’s not like I’m going to retire from ever having fun again.
When we travel to Miami for Art Basel, Blaine gets recognized by a Vanity Fair reporter who asks, “Wait, are you Super Preppy?” He looks a little mortified, then shrugs and says, “I guess I’ll have to get used to it.” Later in the year, we travel for the holidays to a fancy party with his relatives, and even though I am on my best behavior, I receive two edicts passed down to me via Blaine: “Kindly do not write about the family.” And, regarding my fitting in, “She’s not even trying.” Not long after this, I also hear back that his mother thinks I’m “a little strange.”
My strangeness is only compounded by small chat with her. When I do a story about a bad-boy New Yorker for my column, revealing this guy’s strange experiences with women, I quote to Blaine’s mom one of the lines he told me, that he once spent the evening “somewhere with an industrial-size tub of Vaseline, a dead horse, and an underage Thai hooker.” Blaine’s mom laughs along with me, but later Blaine scolds, “That wasn’t appropriate.”
“But it’s in the column,” I say. “She’ll read that exact same quote on Sunday.”
“I know,” he says. “But it still wasn’t appropriate.”
When Blaine and I make plans to fly to San Diego to meet my family, I think of all the stories he’s let slip when he was drunk. Like about one ex-girlfriend’s family he met who was so crass and expletive-prone, Blaine knew it would never work.
I anxiously relay to my parents some of this “please do not embarrass me like that one girl’s dad did” oppo research and beg them to be on their best behavior. My mom says not to worry, she plans to just “prostrate herself on the floor at Blaine’s feet when he arrives,” and I can’t help but love her for it. My parents don’t give a fuck. They never have. A huge part of me respects that.
TO SAY MY parents are themselves crass and expletive-prone is the understatement of the year.
When we were growing up, my parents let my sister and me curse as much as we wanted. They both swore in spades. As part of their therapeutic teachings, my parents studied at the Esalen Institute, birthplace of the human-potential movement, where they were taught “bad” words are “just words.” As a kid, I was allowed to say almost any obscene word or phrase there was (I once named a cat that I adopted “Buttfuck” without even knowing what it meant), and I relished the freedom. Part of me just wants to list a bunch of swear words right here because I can.
My ever-irreverent father at one point started the tradition of referring to fellow blind folks as “blindfuckers.” It somehow made the tragedy of losing your sight into this darkly comic absurdity—and banished the deep wells of victimhood and pity my dad never chose to live in. My mom followed suit in taking up his catchphrase.
“Daddy’s going to his blindfucker training today at the VA, so you guys are going to be watching each other,” she’d tell my sister and me, and we would nod, understanding. “It might be a while, because you know how those blindfuckers get.”
My parents are a gotcha journalist’s wet dream. They live their lives leaving a heavily bread-crumbed trail of self-indictments, and I’ve always loved them for their defiance. Who cares? You could get shot in the face tomorrow. Enjoy today.
“My dad is different,” I warn Blaine over and over. “So is my mom. But they are great. You will see.”
One of the more illustrative stories about my dad came early in my parents’ marriage. Walking along with my uncle Bob and the rest of my mom’s family in the airport, my dad accidentally walked head-on into a giant concrete barrier, smashing his head and crying out in pain. A major scene soon unfolded. He began yelling uncontrollably, his frustration morphing into a full, unbridled screaming session at the people who hadn’t prevented it, and at the world in general.
“GODDAMMIT MOTHERFUCKER SHIT FUCK COCKSUCKER!”
This went on for a while. Later, on the plane, my uncle Bob came over to my father and said calmly, “You know, Jerry, I think we were with you. All the way up until ‘cocksucker.’ ”
Humor, as it always does in my family, provided relief from the pain.
My dad never censored himself, including when he came to speak to my seventh-grade class about Vietnam. One of the kids raised their hands.
