KILL YOUR INNER CHILD by Samuel Bernstein

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

The Gag Reflex

Purging. It isn't just for breakfast anymore.

My duet acting partner Wendy and I come home from our two-day speech tournaments, usually on a Saturday night, and order ten or twenty items at Taco Bell. Then we vomit every last bit in the restroom before leaving. She finds it tricky to put her gag reflex back in gear when we start doing it since she has successfully learned to avoid gagging in order to give deeper blowjobs.

I generally use a toothbrush, which I carry around in a Ziplock bag.

My friend Donna is more delicate about the whole business. She won't even let anyone else vomit in her bathroom at home, which I think is terribly inhospitable.

It is just such a perfect system. What could be better than going for lunch to the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet at Pizza Inn and taking them at their word? Donna is perhaps a tad hefty but none of us is actually fat, we are just obsessive and controlling. For me the idea that I can eat without stopping whenever I want is intoxicating; especially considering my father and step-mother's crippling food dictates in my earlier years. My years as their hostage and kidnap victim.

The Naked Dad and his bride drag us into vile smelling health food stores, buying chalky carob bars and Tiger's Milk. (I am tempted to throw a party when I later hear that their guru, Adele Davis, dies from cancer in her early 40s. Her books make my life as a hostage into even more of a misery. Her early death is not forestalled by eating things that disgust me, so why should I torture myself?)

After my release from their custody I steadily get weirder about food under my mother's benevolent reign. She tries to get me to eat well, like a normal mother, like someone other than my step-mother who doesn't shave under her arms, like someone who loves me. But I digress. I eat to stuff down everything I feel. I eat in a fever of strangely exhausting exhilaration. I eat because I can.

Ice cream is the best binge (and purge) food, acting as a soft, liquid buffer, easing the way for any badly chewed chunks of tacos, hamburgers, or pizza that might hurt a bit coming back up. How clever we are to dream up this idea. How efficient the process is. Somewhere along the line we get wind of the fact that the Romans did it too, giving the whole mess a classical seal of approval.

This is my junior year; the year that will turn out to be my last year in high school, though I don't know this yet.

Donna and I become friends the summer after my sophomore year, where I attend a school called McCallum. We are both working on a summer theatre production of "Romeo and Juliet," me playing Mercutio and she designing costumes, which she later does professionally in New York.

My two years at McCallum are successful. They have an honor there called Torchbearer, given to the graduating senior boy and girl who are the highest achievers, determined through a complicated point system. I work on the yearbook staff and see how the system is scored. At the end of my sophomore year I have more points than the senior boy who wins the title that year. My problem is R.C.P., the Royal Court Players, which is the drama club at McCallum. It is run like a Peronist military state for twenty or thirty years by a stout, mannish woman rather improbably called Lady, who slicks back her short barbered hair and smokes brown cigarillos. She is now dead from cigarillo-induced cancer and emphysema. I am in power in my other extracurricular activities (speech, choir, journalism, sex) but Lady never wants to cast me in anything, believing that my intense ambition might upset the balance of her shows. I actually like her very much, and believe her early favor toward me as a freshman will be rewarded in my sophomore year but it hasn't been, and I am pissed. I don't want to be in the chorus of "Little Mary Sunshine" singing about being a fucking forest ranger. I want to be a star.

The summer production of "Romeo and Juliet" is directed by the drama teacher from L.B.J. and she invites me to transfer. I am filled with glee. I tell everyone I have been recruited, that she has promised me artistic freedom to pick and choose, though of course she does nothing of the kind, and I prepare to leave McCallum - a complicated process since one must reside in the district of a school to attend it. My first thought is to make my mother and step-father move to the new district. They actually give it some thought before sensibly refusing.

I now refer to this refusal as sensible. At the time I refer to it as a betrayal.

Finally I engineer it so that we tell the school district that my mother and step-father are going to be traveling a lot, and I will be living with a family in the district. We have to give them power of attorney over me and everything. I am fifteen years old and I have learned from my father that gaming the system is never a crime - not if you get what you want in the end.

My speech teacher at McCallum, a lovely woman named Gretchen Bullock, a minister's wife if memory serves, thinks I am insane when I tell her my plans to leave for L.B.J. How can I be taking all this so seriously at such a young age? "I just don't want to see you at speech tournaments, completely lost in your ambition, flitting about in your green velveteen jacket, oblivious to everything important," she tells me with an unexpected level of passion. I say I can't see becoming that person. She laughs and says, "You already are."

Friday, April 21, 2006

Inventing Bulimia

Is there a connection between the deeply demented person I secretly am, and the fact that I throw up all the time?

I count and remember how many awards I win during my last year of high school at L.B.J. in Austin, Texas. Forty-nine. And I am by no means one of the biggest winners around town. Choir, Speech, Drama, and Journalism are my areas and there isn't one category where I'm not given an award saying I am one of the best in Texas at what I do, sometimes among the best in the nation.

Along the way I get cold sores, dermatitis, asthma attacks, and welts from the anxiety of it, but I never choke when it counts. I take my amphetamines and perform. When I want to be in Texas All-State Choir I face and flourish through six months of District, Regional, Area, and State auditions, knowing I haven't just learned my music, I have memorized it, including an entire Latin mass. I hammer that music so deeply into my brain that I can still sing most of those damned Latin songs from memory - a peculiar talent that comes in rather less handy today than one may imagine when I am singing in the temple choir during High Holiday services.

Of the ninety school days in my second and last semester, I miss well over half for school excused absences so I can leave campus and come back with trophies, plaques, medals, ribbons, and certificates. Not once in the years that follow do I come close to feeling as blithely confident as I do in high school.

I'm getting all embarrassed now and worrying that despite how pathetic I think this all sounds, I may be coming across like the popular girl in high school who complains about being too pretty to be taken seriously, or a National Merit Scholar ratcheting up the false modesty to let you know that yeah, quantum particle physics can be a little hard at first. You just want to slap them. Maybe you want to slap me. Screw it.

The truth is I'm positively giddy, ready to wet myself in more ways than one, from bragging about my triumphs. I love talking about them. I tell virtual strangers about the time I win first place with a Humorous Extemporaneous Speech after drawing the topic, "Are Hamsters Good to Eat, Raw and Alive?" Sam I am. I am a ham.

I'm at L.B.J. for just one year, which is my sixth year of being allowed to live with my mother again. Mom, the object of my desire, the unattainable Madonna I am kidnapped from by the Naked Dad and his Girl in Braces, my stepmother.

Despite my happily satisfied high school ambitions, I love my mother so much I sometimes cry at night because I'm not sure if she loves me. She shows me all the time but I still can't feel it.

Somehow during my junior (and final) year of high school it finally dawns on me that I am heading down a path that probably isn't all that good for me, and that my pursuits lack a certain depth; which is not to imply that I connect that in any way with my father's fears for my future. The thing is, I very much want to be considered deep. That way when People Magazine does an article on me I can wear glasses and look intelligent in a sexy, serious way. I decide to graduate a year early, forgoing my senior year which would be the most lucrative one awards-wise.

It means leaving my mother a year earlier than she imagines I will. I do weep at night about that, but I don't tell her. I don't tell anybody. I am too busy showing everyone how cool, adult, glamorous, and-- God, I'm sick of adjectives. Fill in the blanks yourself. I remain the only person I know who misses high school. Everyone else seems to have been filled with dread and self-loathing all through it. Me? I can't wait to get to school every day; vocalizing and smoking cigarettes as I drive to my early morning Madrigal class that starts at 7:30, an hour before regular school begins. I like learning. I like sleeping around with adults I shouldn't. I like bulimia.


I think I am inventing Bulimia, along with my Duet Acting partner Wendy and my friend Donna Myers. It isn't all over daytime television yet so we have no way of knowing it is epidemic and bad for us. We wouldn't care anyway.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Trophy Whore

I will do anything for gold-painted plastic and wood, and I am possibly the only Dexedrine-fueled speaker at State Finals.

My dad, Adam, keeps trying to shore up his waning influence around my junior year in high school, wanting to have a serious talk with me about my future; a proposition that makes me want to peel off all my skin almost as much as my mother's cocaine does.

Dad believes I am obsessed with all the wrong things and headed for disaster. The fact that he is right does not occur to me at the time. I am fanatically enthralled with winning trophies and plaques for extracurricular excellence. The kick of winning things is almost as cool as sex with grown-ups and under-aged drinking; almost as engrossing as fantasizing about my future life in New York as a star. Winning feels like almost being alive.

Competitive Duet Acting, the Texas Forensic Association State Tournament in Dallas: I contort my face and body, standing on a classroom chair to become the Elephant Man. Wendy Sellers, my Duet Acting partner, plays the famous actress who unintentionally breaks my heart. We are desperately serious, even in the comic moments, suffused with art and the glory of trophies; bits of marble and gold-painted plastic that matter more than life. I can't wait to get to the part where I say, "Maybe my head is so big because it's so full of dreams." I do it with every ounce of ham I have, making sure I get my waterworks going in time for one or two perfect tears to stream down my face as Wendy turns to leave.

My tastes are luridly melodramatic, so much so that for me, "The Elephant Man" is restrained. I usually gravitate toward things like "Bent," "Equus," and "Oedipus the King." There's nothing like competing against a hundred other high schools at the National Forensics League state finals in Abilene Texas, finding yourself at Abilene Christian College, and realizing that your judges, most of whom are students on the Christian campus, are not as eager as you might hope to hear your Dramatic Interpretation of "Bent" when you play both characters in the scene where the two men talk each other to orgasm; or finding out that in a semi-final round in Persuasive Extemporaneous Speaking, the topic you've drawn, to which you will give a seven-minute speech pro or con without notes in just thirty minutes time, is "Should the federal government fund abortions for the poor?" and after hastily preparing a speech where you will say, why yes, yes they should, you walk in to the classroom where you will compete only to find that your judge is a nun.

One of my speech coaches gives me diet pills to keep me going when semi-finals run very late into the night and finals are very early the next morning. I'm sleeping with her husband. She's sleeping with one of her students. We are both whores.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

My Mother and a Gateway Drug

Is it wrong for a parent to do drugs with her child? What if she has a good reason?

I try cocaine for the first time with my mother.

As the dry energy rushes up my spine, like amyl nitrate multiplied by the force of one hundred, I know immediately I hate it. My mother starts laughing as I describe wanting to rip off all my skin, a feeling that is already familiar enough without chemical magnification. I can tell she's relieved. Her own experimentation with coke will only last a few years. It is the last gasp of the '80s. Everyone is doing it. Don't your parents?

I am seventeen and graduating high school a year early to go to New York where I will study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Mom is terrified about my being on my own, and being a pragmatic person, she knows I'll be exposed to lots of entertainment and vice in the Big Apple. That's how the cocaine comes into it. She asks if I think I will ever be interested in trying it, saying if I think I might, maybe my first time should be in a safe place, at home.

People are shocked when I tell them about the cocaine with Mom, but I think she is farsighted and responsible. I do. Young adults try drugs. Some parents do them too. She isn't promoting them, she's protecting me. If you don't see it that way, don't email me or tell me, or I'll hate you for thinking badly of my mother.

I'm not sure if she knows I have already tried pot, a drug that never really takes for me. I mean, why in the hell would I want a drug that makes me want to eat MORE? It is notoriously easy to get liquor in Texas. From fourteen on I can get double margaritas at Bennigan's without so much as a fake ID. And I am not one of those hard-bitten teens who look like adults. I look like a kid until I am deeply in my 20s. Like chicken.

Mom does know (and is furious) about my smoking, which I dabble with at a ridiculously early age, but don't fully embrace until I am older, like eleven or twelve. Another bad habit picked up from doing theatre and sleeping with adults.

Monday, April 03, 2006

Winnie Gets Hard

My brother is dead. But the Show Must Go On. Then Pooh shows his honey roll.

When Gary dies, the Naked Dad's accusations are not the only ones ripping apart the family fabric, such as it is, a kind of Taffeta cum Denim cum Orlon.

My mother accuses me of not caring that Gary is dead, when, a year and a half later, I throw a tantrum over her refusal to allow me to take driving lessons - an entirely understandable reaction on her part given how Gary dies.

She says I have a cold, frozen heart.

The next morning, before leaving for work, she comes into my room and hugs me, tears in her eyes, saying she doesn't mean any of it. She loves me. She is genuinely sorry that she has said that to me, but I think at the time, deep down, she does mean it. And I think she is right. I do have a frozen heart. Later, long after his death, a deep well of pain and loneliness about losing Gary surfaces in me, but at the time on a surface level, I don't know how to feel anything about it. It isn't real. The generally accepted line of reasoning in my family, from all sides, is that I am selfish, completely wrapped up in my own accomplishments and exploits. They don't get it. It isn't selfishness. I am a fortress.

My grandmother, Beelzebubbe nee Buddie, makes the most far-reaching accusation. She blames God and the entire universe for taking away everyone in her life that she ever loves. Gary is her favorite. I am the understudy, but I am happy to have the chance to play the lead. That is when I become her favorite.

Gary's death dovetails nicely with my ongoing creation of self. I already make shameless use of my violent and strange upbringing. Now I can claim the martyrdom of a tragic figure. It is a badge of honor. It makes me special. I see it as a life-altering event that will grow into being part of my legacy and legend. Even when bad things happen, especially so, the power of self-invention and transformation prevails. I will not feel his death. I will not feel my disconnection. I will not feel love. I will teach myself to throw away happiness with both hands should it ever have the temerity to approach.

Since "Winnie the Pooh" opens so soon after Gary's death, it becomes important to everyone in the extended mess we call a family to attend in a gesture of togetherness. The effort touches me. It does. The problem is I know the show sucks and I am deeply embarrassed that some of them will be seeing me perform for the first time in it. I am right to worry. When I leave for New York three years later my uncle who with his wife sort of helps me make the move, is brutally honest about believing my chances of making it as an actor are negligible, citing the unimpressive "Winnie the Pooh."

Maybe his assessment of my comedic abilities would be more positive if time is turned back and he can see the memorable night when Pooh has a hard-on. One of the adult stagehands strokes me before I go on. I am not wearing a dance belt.

The audience who sees it falls out of their chairs laughing.