(Every day this November I’ll conduct an interview with an imaginary person.)
Oh, Ken and I got into fights all the time. We get along great, now, but back then it was—whew! I mean, I was never exactly a model child—not even when I was the only child. And Ken to this day can be a little vindictive. And it just plain isn’t easy for a ten-year-old kid to have his mom start inviting some guy over and the guy’s kid, who’s a total jerk towards you, and eventually tell you she’s getting married to the guy, and you’ll all be moving in together. And the flip side of that had to be rough, too.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if we’d met at school, I’m sure. But all our early interactions were forced—which of course is never a way to get good results out of a couple of early adolescents. If you as the adult let them think it’s their idea to do something, you win. Otherwise, take your Tylenol. It was as if our parents threw two cherry bombs into the same toilet and shut the lid.
What kinds of things did you guys do to each other?
More like, what didn’t we do? We knew how to push each other’s buttons—we picked up on that stuff almost immediately. I mean, when our parents started dating, we saw each other as competition, of course—and I saw his dad as competition and he saw my mom that way, too. Not just for ourselves, you know, but also for our other biological parents, who evidently were getting the squeeze. So one of the first buttons that we found on each other—and one of the most effective—was the other biological parent. His mom, my dad. That’s where we were weak. Ken would call my father an addict and a junkie, because he was in jail for the second time on marijuana offenses. At some point he started making jokes about prison rape. And for my part, I’d refer to Ken’s mom as your retarded mother, because she was manic depressive and I didn’t know what that meant.
Well, any time one of us would make a comment like that, you could expect the other to throw whatever he was holding, or whatever was nearby that he could throw. I broke Ken’s nose with a phone receiver and a glass cabinet door with a football. Ken had better aim but not as strong an arm, so I got plenty of bruises.
We fought about girls. We fought about who had the right to be in a particular room at a particular time. We stole things. We accused each other of stealing things. I threw his clothes into the rain. We drew dicks on each other at night.
How did you ever get past all that?
After they got married, they started to fight. Our parents, that is. Not constantly, but every so often—as any couple does. Well, whenever they started yelling, Ken and I would get really quiet and optimistic. We wanted to hear what was going on—we wanted to know if maybe they’d split and one of us would move out and we’d be rid of each other forever. Then they’d quiet down and we’d be at each other’s throats again. Then eventually they hit a really rough spot. They shouted all day for about a month. By the time they made up, Ken and I kind of liked each other.
Posted November 24, 2009, 11 pm
