"Halloween" (1978) I don’t generally like reading or writing little autobiographical musings about past relationships – these stories are usually so “So what?” to me, and are also usually written in the David Sedaris-style narrative that only David Sedaris should use. However, I'm writing a piece like that right here, right now, because lately I’ve started going to a video store in South Pasadena, and it’s a place that I used to go to with an old friend I’ll call Max -- it’s made me think fleetingly about the time I spent with him, which was the saddest phase of my social life. Anyway, this is more of a Shaggy Dog story. Max and I hung out for a month or so after I was done with my short outpatient stint at a mental hospital, where I’d met him but almost always managed to avoid conversation. He was the tedious type of emotionally fragile, like Norman Bates in Psycho, someone whose long stories you have to listen to because you don’t want your hostility to b...
She was mine and I was hers Gambled hard and split the purse A patient and her patient nurse She was mine and I was hers Chapter One: Wild Animal Some of the damage caused by my mother, Gloria, scorched the earth, and sometimes those who adored her wished we’d never known her, wished we’d never even been born. I adored her, but to adore her, one had to figuratively roll one’s eyes at about half her declarations, especially when they were slurred. One had to figuratively shrug one’s shoulders in a gesture like “That’s our Gloria,” though only in response to a benign destruction. Only when she was just telling white lies or asking to borrow money while joking that she’d never pay it back. “I never, ever imagined myself with kids,” she said once. “I know, you hate it when I talk about having you -- you think I sound too objective when I talk about how much it hurt to give birth and all the drugs they had to give me and everything like that. But ju...