I was hanging out with a group of buddies the other day and several conversations were going on all at once. During a lull in the chatter, I heard my friend Mike describe someone he had known all of his life as a guy who was once a world-class adventurer, but who wound up “a housepainter with hepatitis C.” Now, it doesn’t really matter what led up to this statement. What I found interesting was that no matter how many accomplishments, experiences, and successes this guy had enjoyed previously in his life, Mike had reduced his current existence to a menial job and a physical condition.
It was a twisted variation on that game where you create your stripper name by using your house pet’s name and the street where you lived as a child. In that case I would be “Fritzie Duluth,” though Mike might add, “that waitress from Mickey’s Diner with crabs.”
I shared this pin-the-personality-on-the-person idea with my husband, who was appropriately stunned to realize that he was “Tiger Burns, the Whirlpool washer assemblyman with Bell’s palsy.”
Of course, Milton Bradley could never market such a game. People are too protective of their personal myths. Deep down, we’re all terrified that not only are we frauds, but that we stink too—as in the case of my best friend, “Spooky Arcade,” who happens to be a successful stockbroker but once worked as “a school janitor with chronic halitosis.” (Spooky sez: Don’t forget to brush your tongue.)
I was reminded of our natural inclination to secretly reduce ourselves and not so secretly reduce others to the worst possible bottom line. Recently, on the telephone with my mom, the tension was running high; she was upset about something I’d done. Now, I appreciate that I couldn’t have been an easy child to raise, seeing as I spent a number of my teenage years as “a high-school dropout welfare mother with a pot-smoking problem.” Nor were my mistakes limited to youthful indiscretions. My two children were born out of wedlock by separate fathers. My first house went into foreclosure. My first marriage was a fiery train wreck; I was shacking up with my second husband before either of us was officially divorced. Yes, all this and crabs, too.
Later that day, I expressed the sadness I felt at upsetting my mother to my dear pal, “Grizzly Pinecourt,” a former “warehouse grocery packer with oral gonorrhea.” He said to me, “You know, Fritzie, sometimes I feel that to my mother I will always be the sixteen-year-old who ran away from home and ended up in the psych ward in a hospital two towns away. I get frustrated and depressed because I feel like she can’t see the best parts of me, because the bad parts for her outweigh everything else. But the serious, Hallmark Card truth of it is that I wouldn’t have arrived at the best parts of who I am without all the sketchy parts.”
I have a human-anatomy textbook with a series of transparency pages that build a whole person from the blood vessels out. As you lay each transparency down, you get the bones, organs, muscles, and skin. All parts working together to create a whole.
His sentiment and the images in that book followed me a couple of days later when I took my daughter to get her lip pierced. She was five months away from her eighteenth birthday, and I signed the permission slip. When she initially told me she wanted a piercing, she held my hand over the fire. She said coolly, “I have a friend who does piercings, so I can get it done without your permission. I’m just telling you, I’d rather get it done with your permission.” Weeeeeell. My administration doesn’t like to truck with terrorism, so I countered with a potential freezing of assets and a cell phone embargo. This amounted to pointless political posturing on my part since, for most of her senior year, she has been operating as a sovereign nation with her own income and resources.
I caved despite my misgivings and before I knew it we were standing in the waiting room of Saint Sabrina’s. My daughter was absolutely giddy with excitement and admitted to being nervous. I said lamely, “Uh, well, you know you don’t have to get this done.” A sweet gentleman with nostril grommets ushered my baby into a private room. I didn’t hear her cry out, though my heart was pounding. She came out smiling. “Bones Wabasha, the babysitter with a lip ring.”
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