He paused to give his response the maximum impact. “I think it’s pure shit.”
“They are kind of unlike any parents you will ever meet,” I repeat to Blaine.
I always tell the following story so people will know what to expect when they meet my dad. One time I watched from the sidelines as he chatted up his female boss and waxed on about how much the two of them had in common.
“We’re both from San Diego, we both have no siblings . . .” He rattled off his list, and then his supervisor interrupted him.
“That’s not true, Jerry,” she said sharply. “I had a brother. He died.”
Without pausing a second, my dad replied with a big grin on his face, “Well, fuck him!”
My dad could not see his boss’s reaction, but I could. I stared red-faced down at the concrete.
Would I have laughed if someone said this to me? Absolutely. Jarring, fearless, funny, unexpected, a reprieve from the tragedy at hand. But most people are not Stadtmillers.
“They aren’t really about fitting in,” I tell Blaine. “Never have been.”
Both of my parents worshipped at the altar of the taboo and the inappropriate.
My mom often gave jaw-droppingly honest—and specific—answers when I was a kid. In middle school, I once asked her, “What are you going to do today after the parent-teacher conference?” My mom replied casually, “I’m going to smoke a joint and masturbate.”
After I went to mandatory D.A.R.E. training in school, I confronted my mom in hysterics. Whipping out my mom’s marijuana from the refrigerator, I told her she had to throw it away or she was going to go to jail. I even threatened to call the cops, like the little snitch I was. But inside, I was really just scared. She finally relented. She even disposed of it across the street to ease my fears that the cops would catch her in the major manhunt I imagined would soon unfold.
As I write all this, I feel so guilty.
Do you know how terrible it feels to criticize your combat vet hero of a father and your emotional warrior of a mother? It feels terrible. But my parents taught me it is okay to recognize and name and examine your flaws and mistakes—and that those flaws and mistakes do not have to define you.
And for all those hypocrites who actively seek to string you up by recounting some hijacked, partisan, purely malicious curation of your worst moments?
Well, fuck them.
I ARRIVE HOME in San Diego before Blaine does, and I do a thorough sweep of my parents’ home for anything potentially embarrassing—weird New Agey magazines, crafting supplies, and the like. Meanwhile, my mom torments me by talking animatedly to her teacup poodle, Shady, who is dressed in a Santa outfit.
“Are you excited to meet Blaine, Shady?” my mom asks, glancing at me to see if I am reacting. “I know I am!”
I shake my head at first, but I can’t help but laugh at everything my mom says and does.
My mom is honestly one of the funniest, most original, most guileless people I’ve ever met. She is dry as a bone and knows how to cut to the quick in every situation.
When I asked her what she got for Christmas one year, she replied, “Well, I got a twenty-five-dollar gift card that I resented.” In a normal conversation (like that Christmas one), when I am busy journalistically extracting whatever gem she is uttering, typing into my phone, she’ll say, “Why don’t you tweet that, you cunt.” There was the time I told her all about Pussy Riot, the Russian all-female punk band creating a stir overseas, and she observed, “My pussy is a riot.” And when I eventually set up a Facebook profile for my mom, she absorbed my listing all the profile options (“Let’s see, hometown . . . relationship . . . are you interested in men or women?”) and my mom replied, deadpan as ever, “Women. It’ll be a whole new life.”
So, she is aware of how non-Blaine she is. And, more significantly, so am I. My love for her morphs into something like false concern. How will she be perceived?
“What is your poodle even wearing, mom?” I ask her.
“It’s Shady’s Christmas ‘pretty,”’ my mom says with a smile. And I can’t help myself—I crack up again. I love my mom for being such an individual, so playful and silly but also so wickedly acidic in turns.
She is the exact opposite of Blaine’s mom, who is steeped in propriety and controlled perception and by way of small talk asks me in a thick upper-crust accent, “Tell me, Mandy, are you in involved in supporting the arts?” I stammer in reply, “Um, I interviewed Jamie Foxx recently. How’s that?” Don’t get me wrong, Blaine’s mom is cool and all—funny, intelligent, warm at times—but she’s also a bit above reproach.
I look at my mom, and I love her, but I also wish I could quickly give her a makeover the same way I have fraudulently given myself one with the Lilly Pulitzer and Kate Spade costumes I am now wearing as if that’s what I totally always wear, not just because I’m dating a guy I call “Super Preppy” in a newspaper.
I get a text from Blaine. “Just landed,” he writes.
I nervously kiss my mom goodbye on the cheek, and we make plans to meet later for dinner.
When I pick up Blaine at the airport, my defensiveness is turned up to eleven. Blaine is a bit out of the loop when it comes to pop culture, so I play music on the radio, singing along, naming all the bands, trying to grab any bit of superiority I can.
“Do you know this song?” I ask, sort of ignoring him and driving straight ahead.
We arrive at a hotel that my dad has purchased a stay for us at with the thought that Blaine will reimburse him, but my dad has made the same mistake I often do about people with money. One of the
