IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
Task 53, April 17 to April 24
“You can kid the world, but not your sister.” Charlotte Gray.
Ahoy Mateys! After years of cajoling and outright begging, I persuaded my wife to buy me a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal. On the front of the box is the Cap’n himself, saluting, with a big smile and a caption that reads “CRUNCH-A-TIZE ME CAP’N!” Ha! I’m giddy. Why? Because Cap’n Crunch takes me back to Ohio, when I was a boy, when life–and certainly diets–were less restrictive, and sugar coursed freely in our veins, so this morning I dove into a bowl and I was catapulted back to Ashtabula, and suddenly I was five years old again, and the summer sun was shining and my Schwinn Stingray awaited me, and…my older sister stood over me, glaring, her lips curling menacingly, and my perfect day was ruined.
You see, my sister, the she-devil, was ten years older than me. So when I was an innocent, naive, cherubic five year old, she was an evil, hormonal fifteen year old. Plus, our mother put in a long day of work, and she was out of the house before seven and didn’t get home until five or so, which meant that the she-devil was in charge, like a warden is in charge of prisoners…in this case, my brother and I.
And my sister was a terrible taskmaster. Today I recognize her behavior as full blown OCD, which, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is a chronic mental health condition characterized by a cycle of uncontrollable, intrusive thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors or mental acts (compulsions) performed to reduce anxiety. In those days it was simply called being “mean-ass”. Even today, some 60 years later, I wake up screaming if I dream about A) the flying monkees in “The Wizard of Oz”, or B) my sister.
The she-devil ran the house like a sergeant runs a barracks. Sleeping past seven was verboten, beds were made with military precision, and Lord help the boy who didn’t clean up after breakfast. The after-school routine was just as punishing. Our school clothes had to be put away in a neat and excessively orderly fashion. Then came homework, and only then, if there was no housework for us to do, would she let us out into the yard. And if she had to make dinner? Hotdogs or fish sticks…
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Things only got worse when she was older. My brother and I hated to go for a drive with her, as she would make us sit in the front seat with her, unseat-belted, and she would fly down Jefferson Road, hitting every pothole just to see our heads hit the roof or one of us fly screaming into the back seat, which would elicit a cackling laugh from the crone’s mouth.
Such was our life.
But she did get her comeuppance, and we got some measure of revenge, when she was nineteen. Her scurvy boyfriend Dave had flunked out of college, and in order not to be drafted and end up in Vietnam, joined the air force. He was stationed in California, at Travis AFB. The she-devil persuaded my dad to drive the family out west, ostensibly to frolic at Disneyland and see the Golden Gate Bridge, but also to spend a day visiting Dave. So one morning in a hot and humid July, the five of us piled into our Chevy Biscayne and off we went.
The she-devil sat between my brother and I in the back seat. So began nearly five thousand miles of torture for her, as my brother and I, six and nine years old, stuck in the back seat of an unairconditioned heat box, unleashed an unrestrained, non-stop torrent of belching, farting, whining, pinching and general misbehavior that drove her crazy. On day one she was merely pissed, but by day three she was pulling on her hair and screaming. (And for the record, we drove our mother crazy as well. At one point, just outside of Denver, my mom ordered my dad to stop the car and she got out, walked into a corn field, and cried.)
The she-devil maintained her sanity on the way to California by closing her eyes and fantasizing about her reunion with Dave, but after the visit, which lasted maybe five or six hours, and facing another week of travel back to Ohio, she broke down. She spent the return trip staring silently staring out of the car window, murmuring to herself and cracking her knuckles.
Anyway, the she-devil was married and out of the house when I was fourteen, and my brother and I, formally paroled, were able to live out our teen years in a semi-normal fashion, dreading only her occasional visits.
Now that the years have passed, the scars have healed, and my brother and I can laugh about the miserable time spent in servitude to the evil one…but every once in a while, if I see a box of Swanson’s fish sticks, I start to cry uncontrollably.
Happy birthday Gerriann.
Task: reach out to a sibling.