This is another lesson I learned at a young age.
When I was nine years old, my Dad married a mean shameless hussy of a woman—She Who Must Not Be Named. I’m certain she was a spawn of Lord Voldemort, if not Satan himself.
My Mom called her The Black-Haired Spaghetti—as she was Italian. My Mom told me that her tribe of Italians was an inferior race of money-grubbing white trash folks with bad grammar and slutty morals. And that was the nice stuff. (I won’t repeat the other things. Well, maybe later…)
I called The Black Haired Spaghetti nothing at all if I could help it. I hated her guts. The feeling was mutual. (I have a million stories about this broad, so stick around.)
Being a child of divorce, I was forced into the every-other-weekend/one-half summer vacation visitation crap. Whoever thought this ping-pong ball arrangement is the way a kid wants to live ought to have to spend a weekend with The Black Haired Spaghetti. Or be shot at dawn, which would end up being the preferable choice.
The Black Haired Spaghetti was sweet to my face when my Dad was around. But as soon as he left to go to work or play golf, things got ugly. She tortured me. Cinderella had nothing on me!
The Black Haired Spaghetti knew the two ways to torture a kid: a.) make him/her do stuff they hate; and b.) make him/her eat stuff they hate. And she figured out what else I hated besides her: housework and her cooking.
The Black Haired Spaghetti used to wake me up at the crack of dawn to vacuum her house. Hey, I’m sleeping and it’s not my house and it’s not my dirt. But I learned quick: I was free child labor and no laws protected me.
But wait—breakfast first, which was always eggs. I detest eggs. Always have, always will. I find them (next to liver) to be the foulest food on the face on the planet. And The Black Haired Spaghetti served them to me fried—runny and cold, like a big yellow eye with glaucoma staring up at me.
I played the same chew-spit game every morning. Take a bite, pretend to chew, spit it in my napkin—until most of the egg had disappeared. I knew I wasn’t fooling The Black Haired Spaghetti. But she never said anything to me as that may have resulted in bringing my Dad into the situation. By keeping quiet, she silently reveled in her torture tactics.
During the day, as she lounged by the swimming pool—in a way-too-teeny bikini with her fake boobs hanging out and her unruly black spaghetti-ish pubic hair making a scene on her upper thighs all the way to her belly-button (which BTW is a really scary site for a little kid)—she conjured up one housework chore after another.
Then time out for lunch—how can you ruin a hot dog? More work, repulsive meals, etc. etc., every other weekend, month after month. And Frank McCourt thought he had a miserable childhood?
I couldn’t wait for Sunday evenings so I could go home. Not that my Mom was any picnic to live with. But as wacky as she was, she wasn’t evil. That’s a HUGE difference. Plus I had my own bedroom. With a window to climb out of.
I spent Sundays trying to will the hours to fly by. I was so anxious to get the heck out of there that I would get a weird stomach ache, like dread and panic all mixed together with too much pizza.
To this day, I still get a weird feeling in my stomach on Sundays. If I were in a comma for ten years and you woke me up, I would be able to tell you whether or not it was a Sunday. It’s called TBHS Disorder. It’s incurable.
After about a year of this routine I decided that I had had enough. No one was coming to my rescue, no matter how hard I wished Zorro would ride in on his trusty steed, waving a sword, and whisk me away—but not before leaving his trademark on The Black Spaghetti’s forehead, which in this case he would improvise and carve a big B.
Heck, I would have settled for Pa Cartwright, Marshall Dillon, Dr. Kildare, even Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe if they had reliable transportation. But no such luck. I had to take matters into my own hands.
How to end the torture? Simple. Kill The Black Haired Spaghetti. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? It was a brilliant idea! My method of homicide: rat poison in her vitamins.
She had “special vitamins.” No one was allowed to touch them. She kept them in a jar over the stove. Probably methamphetamines. She was always dieting. Always drinking Fresca. Always talking.
I went to the dungeon where I slept to work out My Plan. Being the writer, I wrote it down. Nice and neat on a sheet of notebook paper. My Plan also included my reasons. I had a long list. My Plan also wasn’t a perfect one, as I had no rat poison and didn’t know where to get it.
I folded the piece of paper in half, and again in half three more times. I stapled it shut about ten times around the edges. I put the folded stapled piece of paper into a coin purse. I put the coin purse in a zippered pocket of my regular purse. I wrapped my purse in a sweater. I put the sweater in my suitcase. I put the suitcase underneath the bed.
Then I forgot about it.
On Sunday my Dad dropped me off earlier than usual—yippee. He opened the trunk of the car and as he handed me my suitcase, said, “{She Who Will Not Be Named} found your note.”
She found my note? Oh, that note. Wait a minute, she found the note? In my purse? What a snoop!
My Dad said, “You need to write her an apology letter.”
I said nothing. I grabbed my suitcase and ran up the driveway. I was so happy to be out of there that I didn’t notice the extra cars in front of our house. They belonged to my relatives: Uncle Mike and Aunt Mary Lou; Uncle Toto and Aunt Shirley—my Dad’s younger brothers and their wives, nice folks who still liked my Mom and visited her.
Inside the house, they and my Mom sat at the kitchen table. I said hi to everyone. My Mom asked me how the weekend went.
I said, “My Dad wants me to write an apology letter to {She Who Will Not Be Named}.”
The adults became silent.
My Mom said, “Are you going to do it?”
I said, “Heck no!” And I expected to get in trouble but it would be worth it.
Instead, the adults erupted in cheers and applause. If it had been invented yet, they would have high-fived me. They praised me for what I had done. (Obviously they had been clued in prior to my return.) They thought it was funny. They hated The Black Haired Spaghetti as much as I did! And I wasn’t getting in trouble after all.
I never wrote the letter. My Dad never said another word about it. The Black Haired Spaghetti hid her “vitamins” where I couldn’t find them.
