End of Summer Blog

Well, way to leave my readers hanging. Readers. Do I even have any readers?

Hey – Readers! Someone please comment on my blogs, can you? I am dying to know if my words hold value to anyone other than myself. Kim, I don’t mean you Sweetheart – you have always let me know that you like my writing, and I love you dearly…for that and so many other reasons!

But still. I want some feedback. Come on, Readers, oh Readers.

Never mind. I kid. I am in a very frivolous playful mood these days. Maybe, if you are good, oh Readers….I will tell you why that is (said with conspiratorial grin).

But first, back to my Summer’s End story. (Not to be confused with Summer’s Eve.)

So last we left our intrepid heroine, she was nursing her injured, stung baby toe. She was left stranded by her spiteful little Indigo-colored car on the night of the Big NSI Show, but after several Lemon-thyme vodka drinks and silly games with great friends, she made the best of it. All of these details were a prelude, with a tense cliffhanging final sentence about Uncle Mark.

What about him.

I love my Uncle. We have been very close throughout the years. He is only nine years older than me, and a very youthful person in general, so we have shared many social interactions outside of the usual family events. And by social interactions, I mean dinner parties, going to ManRay, cocaine and alcohol, that sort of thing. For the record, I have only merely dabbled in the art of the substance, especially cocaine, and in revealing that I mean only to describe the type of informal family relationship that my Uncle and I share.

Of course, my Uncle is stark raving crazy. His nickname, when my brothers and I were little, was Crazy Uncle Mark. And with good reason, for my Uncle has lived a colorful life. He was a runaway at the age of fifteen, a street urchin in Boston in the nefarious employ of some of the city’s most notorious criminals. He lived in NYC during the disco heydey, and was one of those shirtless bartenders at Studio 54. He was in a punk outfit called Eddie Jette and the Blenders, and I can distinctly remember visiting him at his funky apartment under an overpass in Boston, drinking lemonade from frozen mugs and staring in awe at the New Wave decorative 3D sculptures he had arranged throughout the place.

Ruffian. Boy toy. Sex symbol. Art scenester.

And then, conservative corporate playboy (a paradox, I know), salesman at major corporations that thought he had a degree when he had never even finished High School. His cars – BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes Benz. He has lived sixty years’ worth of life in thirty-five.

Unfortunately, he is not well these days. An old touch-football injury from his twenties has matured into full-blown Degenerative Disk Disease. The vertebra in his back and neck are dissolving, crushing tender nerves beneath the added weight of scar tissue and his own obesity, the result of not being able to be mobile and stay in shape. His pain management is a rigorous ritual administering of the most intense pain medications available. One stop short of regular morphine treatment, he has been on these highly habit-forming meds for years and years now.

So he is depressed, naturally. Once an active person, full of stories and highjinks, surrounded by his “boys” from South Boston, he has systematically driven most collateral people from his life. He was forced by his medical problems to go on Disability, and the combination losses of his livelihood, his sainted mother, and most of his old friends and co-workers, have left him embittered, in pain and in fear of what may become of him throughout the remaining days of his life.

In recent years, he has made it clear to others in the family that he is in need of their support. He has nursed extended feeling of being marginalized. It’s true – they do minimize the attention that they show him, on one hand because he is the youngest and furthest away, geographically speaking. They also have children of their own, grandchildren in some cases, and work and community responsibilities. My Uncle, the single one with no children of his own, has traditionally been the one who has travelled to their homes for family functions, at times going extremely out of his way. He has upheld a traditional set of values, showing care and consideration to his brothers’ children, but these other family members do not extend the same courtesies to him, and my Uncle has had it with them. In his wounded soul, it has become painfully clear that he does not matter to them, now especially, in this his time of need.

I feel much sympathy for my dear Uncle, and have felt that compassionate tug upon myself to make sure I am there for him if he needs me, to try and help him if I can. It is not always easy, the social interactions with him. He is hyper-verbal, a storyteller who commands the floor in any given social gathering. He loves to entertain, and he loves to cook for guests, but his dinner parties are rife with strange rituals, domination and a conscious or unconscious (I have yet to determine if he secretly does it on purpose, a type of pathological drive to keep us there) manipulation of his guests’ time. At the end of an evening at his house, you are overfed, drunk, irritable and dog-ass tired!

I have regularly accepted invitations to visit with him, but I don’t like to accept each and every invite – it’s just too much. The thing is, and this is true much more over the last three years or so – he will drive a person nuts just during the invitation process! There are the invitation phone calls, over a month in advance (fine). Then, the follow-up calls begin a week or so later. I tend to not answer my phone during this period, since all too often, I don’t have an answer for him just yet! I don’t plan too many outings so far in advance – it’s just not my style. I don’t like to be locked down a month before something is going on, in case something else comes up or I decide to plan my own events.

This, of course, really upsets Uncle Fussy Pants. He will leave his follow-up messages, in increasing urgency and with ever more details of how the event may change, who the event may affect, optional outcomes of said event, etc. Even if it is a casual BBQ, he needs to know who is coming, how many people will be accompanying and what time their arrival will be – all of these details, weeks in advance of the damn BBQ!

Now I can understand the whole concept of preparing a meal for a specific amount of people, and getting the timing of a dinner down pat so that there is enough food and everything goes smoothly. But his concerns are so over-the-top! He anticipates disasters based upon the absence of prompt information from potential guests, but honestly, it is because his events are so rigidly planned that any slight deviation from a Master Plan will set the whole night awry! He does it to himself, and I have witnessed it over and over. The poor guy gets so flustered that his guests feel guilty and ashamed, and it’s really no fun for anyone at that point.

(Sigh) So yes, I hold off on returning those follow-up calls. Sometimes I call back, just to imply that it is possible that I may be able to come, but that ends up being an RSVP whether I like it or not.

We have talked about the issue of consideration, and prompt returning of phone calls. I listen to what he has to say about it, and agree to comply, if only for the sake of respect. But, I manage to screw up anyway! It is as if a tiny devil lives for moments during which he (or she) can bang a wrench or hammer into the parts of my brain that regulate memory and time management. By the time I remember that I have to call him back, it is too late and he is pissed off. Sometimes we can laugh about it, and sometimes it is clear that what is needed is a reciprocal acceptance on both our parts, of the habits and tendencies that the other possesses which infuriate us.

He called to invite me to a Red Sox game for my birthday. I have never been to one, and thought that it sounded great. He also wanted to know my availability for an upcoming visit by my cousin and her boyfriend. There are times when he consolidates his invitations, and really layers a bunch of extraneous information over them. This time he gave options for my cousin’s visit, all based upon numerous possible outcomes of other invited peoples’ schedules. Is that my responsibility, to intuit the availability of others and arrange my schedule accordingly? I think not. I accepted the Red Sox invite, and left the options for other visits alone, feeling that when more details became clear, I could offer a better idea of my own availability.

Then, I spaced out for a few days. I have many invitations to many events, and many responsibilities and many details to coordinate. I knew the Sox played on a Monday night, and that was all I felt the need to know. Of course, Uncle Fumey had been waiting for me to call him all week long, and had insisted, in his fevered, drug-addled mind, that we were to discuss at great length the arrival time for the Red Sox game, travel ideas and numerous back-up plans and oh yes, the cousin visit thing.

Long story short: we went to the game. We were having fun, until about the seventh inning when his meds started to wear off. Suddenly his mood shifted, he began his nonsensical overacting and strange instigation of me and those poor souls who happened to be seated near us. He’s an effing weirdo sometimes, and I laugh at first, until I get a tad fed up. I began to politely ignore his weirdness, and all of a sudden, we were arguing. The topic of the cousin visit, dormant until the seventh inning, had abruptly reared its head and my reaction, heightened now by my mounting irritation at my Uncle’s bizarre public behavior, was to become defensive and pissy.

We left Fenway and walked with the rest of Red Sox Nation, and although I had an inclination to tell him to fuck off for being such a pain in the ass, I felt that I couldn’t do that. Firstly, he had arranged the whole experience for me, for my birthday. Secondly, he was reacting in anger because I had not followed up on the damn cousin visit, spearheading the flow of angst within him in regards to the way that me and the rest of the bums in our family don’t give him the most basic signs of respect. Once his tirade began, I clammed up and let him (hopefully) get it out of his system so we could move on to a settlement.

He just kept going, and kept getting more and more vicious with each comment. According to him, I was the worst culprit of every disrespectful act one can commit to another family member. I was convinced that I was not the terrible person he said I was, but I was really hurt.

The night ended with me finally giving up on any kind of middle-ground occupation. I stiffly and politely (and sarcastically) thanked him for the wonderful evening, gave him his possessions that I had been holding in my purse, and walked all the way home. From one end of downtown Boston, across the Mass Ave Bridge into Central Square in Cambridge. Furious. Hurt. Confused and devastated, really. I have felt this way before, betrayed by a family member’s cruel treatment…..but it hasn’t happened in a long time.

There was a follow-up conversation the next day. As it turned out, while walking across Boston, I had called my Dad to vent. My Uncle tried to call me during this time, but there was no way in Hell I would have answered his call at that point! My phone died, I got home and when I pulled my keys from my purse to get into my house…..my Uncle’s house keys were there. That’s why he had been calling me.

Remember that little devil I told you about earlier? He/she has an uncanny way of twisting an already explosive situation into an unbelievable shit-storm! Talk about irony.

Uncle Mark: You lousy niece, you. You never answer my calls and it’s just plain rude!

Lousy Niece: Oh come on! Maybe I am slightly lackadaisical when it comes to prompt communication (to self: I don’t answer the phone sometimes when you call! On purpose! You are too much for me some days! I’m friggen sorry, alright?!!?) but haven’t I been there for you when you needed me, and don’t I regularly visit you and call to see that you are OK, and love you despite your difficult qualities?

Uncle Mark: Maybe, but your dad never calls! Your Uncle Bob never calls or visits! I’m sick of being last on everyone’s list, when I consistently go out of my way for all of you lousy fucks!

Lousy Niece: All I can do is try harder. I would hope that my actions toward you, my compassion and caring thoughts, would be apparent to you and make up for a slight lack of attention to phone etiquette details.

Uncle Mark: IT DOESN’T MATTER, SINCE YOU DON’T RETURN MY GOD-DAMN PHONE CALLS! What if it’s an EMERGENCY!!!!!!!

Like, perhaps…being locked out of his house on a night when a huge fight breaks out with his otherwise, possible former, favorite niece?

Summer. I’m glad you are over.