The Monthly Rag

I used to always like getting the reader’s mail, even when it was scathing and critical. Most of the time, in fact, those were even my favorites to respond to. That’s not to say that I didn’t appreciate the congrats and lipstick laden perfectly bubble-written salutations, but I’m kind of a stickler for a comeback or defensive stance (just ask most of my ex-girlfriends). Receive we did our share of not so happy campers over the years, some of them well written and legitimate, others leaving a little something to be desired in the smarts department. A female reader sent in a funny rant one time about our title, calling it offensive and in poor taste. The kick was that she offered a great alternative called “The Jock Strap–Always Comes Surely and Early!” that was so brilliant I encouraged her to go out and make it herself. A few people mailed us postcards, which I would hang up all over the Memo office. Some even paid for subscriptions. The Rag was always a free paper but for twenty bucks you could get it right at your door–quite helpful if you were from out of the area. Tourists that picked it up over the summer would order them when they got back home, furthering our cause to send copies all over the map.

It was a letter not unlike many of the others that forced a big dip into our fluctuating stock, the only difference being that it was sent in from a specific person who my staff already wanted to see drawn and quartered in public view. And to him I have this to say: I tried my best to keep the guys away from a lynching rope. Sure I was pissed at you for my own reasons, but I still attempted to remain the diplomat. I never threw your papers away, or covered them up with ours, or openly declared you a socially-retarded jackrod. Until that fucking letter, I was totally okay with letting our sewage run right under the bridge.

Mr. Ink Stain’s masterpiece came in the form of two handwritten sheets, and aside from the usual remarks about our content (and one in particular about me not having the common decency most people give even to insects toward my old school teachers), his personal targeting tactics revolved primarily around the personal life of my comic illustrator. Summer had at that point indulged in some illegal stupidity, which the young rival editor saw fit to include in his open forum attack. This angered our graphic artist, naturally, so he wrote back his response and I pretty much left him to retort without any red-pen intervention. Which was my mistake, I accept. Summer’s return blasts were low-aimed sophomore humor and indeed slightly funny, but in skewering his detractor he shot down an innocent victim in the process. I won’t mention any names, but I’ll say that she was female, and that it was a quip about her embarrassing sex life with our favorite newsprint poster boy. NONE OF WHICH WAS TRUE, of course, and all of which I should have never let slip off to press.

But print it did, and damage it caused, and quite rightfully the girl’s father went down to most of our advertisers and got them to back the hell out of their partnership, resulting in a big negative CHA-CHING in the petty cash box. Take also into account that the whole lot of us were living in an apartment on food stamps (Ramen and Select cola, baby), and you have the ingredients for one el grande styled assfest. What can I say–we made our boo boo, and we paid for it. The Rag basically had to lay low an extra month or two, then quietly we went out to see if anyone could be swayed back into good favor. We got a few of our old advertisers to rejoin with us, but not near as many as we needed, so then I had to find out how to cover the rest with my own money (work for Marco, beg, borrow, steal, etc.) Penance was going to be a bitch to come to terms with.

As extra icing on the cake, Summer and I lost our home to a nasty hag of a landlady, putting even more pressure on the tiny compound fracture. With nowhere else to go, he fled his way into his girlfriend’s parents house, and I did the one thing on earth I had never wanted to have to resort to: move back in again with family.

Now when I say “family”, I of course mean the extension of uncles, aunts, and grandparents that comprise my supposed lineage. Let me also make it clear that my mother and sister and perhaps a cousin or three are truly my only family to me– most everyone else is really an alien that came out of a pod somewhere. When Summer and I lost the bachelor pad, the alternatives of where to go next were dire. I couldn’t stay with a friend and live like a bum on someone’s floor because everyone I knew at the time were also struggling for temporary addresses. My little sister was dwelling with her father, my stepdad, and that wasn’t going to happen (I’d walked out of that situation a year earlier), while poor mom didn’t even have a place for herself. As I looked for something to shack up in at low rent, I had no option left than to take up limited residence with her parents.

I had lived with them on and off before, once while I was first released from U.C. Davis (I took a little month vacation to their fine hospital for early OCD treatment when I was 15), and once long ago when I was young and my single mother and I were ripped off and forced to leave our apartment because of a psychotic roommate with a drug problem and a gun. The latter, particularly, was an unpleasant experience, but despite my vow to get as far away from them as possible, I had no choice than to hold my head low and take one in the tackle. They gave me the basement room, which was pretty nice and very un-basement like–more akin to a downstairs bedroom, complete with bathroom, instead of the usual musty cellar. There I put up all my movie posters and set up the CD player and computer. I continued to write the Rag and my first completed movie script in that room, and the rest of the time I tried to be around the premises as little as could be afforded.

To illustrate the kind of antics that went on during “full house” (and this is leaving out the escapades my uncle and his wife added in during the sheer explosion of their marriage), we have to observe the variables of the given gene-pool. I come from a long line of alcoholic depressive/obsessive compulsives/co-dependents, which had a pretty big hand in developing my behavioral tics, but as complicated as it is to try to get myself together ALONE, multiplying the problem with several of the same type of people under one roof is like lacing a stick of dynamite. Add in the well placed self medication and all kinds of lying/manipulating/backstabbing and you might as well swill cyanide and hope it takes you out first. I tried to keep the peace and do the stuff I was asked to do, since I didn’t have a problem with earning my keep, but dear Christ was there no pleasing that household. I’d have dishes done, things cleaned, bed made, and be hard at work doing something that didn’t count because it wasn’t considered “hard work” (everything I did, basically), and my grandfather would get home and yell at me because there was water on the sink edge (well DUH–you try washing your hands 1.2 million times a day and keep it all dry), or one simple glass that I had just finished drinking out of sitting on the table. Rules and punishment became a sick twisted cycle of each other, and just when it couldn’t appear to get any worse, Scrooge would pour himself a glass of bourbon. Then you tried everything in your power to get the fuck away from his sarcastic but always thinly-barbed verbal criticisms. Most of the time it meant fleeing to the basement, hoping to be left to my own space far out of sight and mind. Sometimes he would come down to harass me where there was no exit, though, and on two of those occasions it almost came to trading blows.

Which is something, sadly, not uncommon for this tribe. I don’t want anything to do with it, because I can’t stand physical violence and the immense pressure-cooker knot that goes with it in the pit of your stomach, but seriously, with family like this, who needs enemies? There’s something genuinely fucked if you have to stand up to your own blood in combat to keep them from beating you into a mentally destroyed jellyfish.

I lasted there about three months–just long enough to find an almost suitable place to live, turn 18, and pick up on a relationship with a girl that I was so totally in love with it still scares me to this day to think about.

CONTINUE TO PART 10