How Many Mothers Does It Take To Drive You Crazy?

It’s said that you never understand your mother until you become a mother yourself. Unless you count my helicopter parenting of my dog in 1990 I never became a mother. At least not the kind that wasn’t followed by the F word.

I grew up in Maryland, south of the Bacon-Dixon Line as my sister Lindy used to call it, and you don’t know humiliation as a teenager in the suburbs until you’re at the mall and your French mom yells across a crowded store, “Suzeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, we finally found a brassiere small eeeeenough for you.”  A French mom, just what every teenager needs to match her acne and double A cup bra.

Although Mom speaks English, it’s not her first language so some words still elude her:

MOM: If I'd had stinking balls I would have thrown zem at zose people.
ME: You mean a stink bomb?
MOM: Oui mon Dieu, STINKING BALLS.

and...

ME: How are you this morning?
MOM: Not gude, I was reaching for somesing and injured my rotating cup.
ME: You have a cup that rotates?
MOM: Don’t you know anysing about anatomy?

And she doesn’t understand idioms at all. At my 8th birthday party she told my little friends that “You can’t have your cake and eat it too” and they all burst into tears.

Talking on the phone with her requires enormous concentration and math skills. Recently she told me that "Things haven't been this bad since the end of the Civil War.” Apparently she's older than I thought. She’s lied about her age for so long that I’m now older than she is. She said she has a doctor's appointment on Dec 13, 1912. She'd better push that appointment up BECAUSE OH MY GOD HOW IS SHE STILL ALIVE?

When she makes her yearly pilgrimage from Paris to Los Angeles the first thing Mom notices is what's wrong with my hair; the first thing Mom doesn’t notice is my rage. She can never open her luggage upon arrival, the key is missing, lost, or stolen by the customs inspectors trying to make off with her 32 year-old house dress. Then she sighs and when my mother sighs, it's the sigh of a thousand failures, which the French perfected. She’s such an expert at it that once in a hotel room she sighed so loudly she inadvertently ordered room service. I always joke that I'm getting my mother a silver lining for her birthday. Really not a joke.

She stays six weeks with my sister and two weeks with me and Lindy and I live in the same city. She demands so much attention that my friends can’t reach me as I’m basically incommunicado, which is Latin for Close to a Nervous Breakdown. I’m not my mother’s favorite child, as you might have figured out by now. I figured it out after she gave me her wedding gown for my own marriage and she knows full well I look terrible in maternity clothes. I brought out my baby scrapbook one day and in a group picture from kindergarten asked Mom to pick me out. Apparently I was a Chinese kid

But the irritation goes both ways. Whereas I can sit in a chair for four days straight, mom can't sit still for two minutes. She starts dinner. At 11 am. She has this bad habit of opening a window wherever she is: a car, your home, in every room. Needless to say I'm afraid to fly with her. She snores as rhythmically as a metronome so it's really too bad I don't play a musical instrument. She always calls me by my sister's name during phone calls but when we hang up I make sure to say, "Goodbye Dad." And Mom, if you’re reading this, you can’t get Dad’s military pay because he’s been dead for ten years so NO I CAN'T CALL HIM FOR YOU.

I make fun of my mom a lot. In my act, on the Internet, and in real life. And the person who laughs the loudest is my mom. She’s a good sport about it all and I know she enjoys the attention. But it has occurred to me the reason she laughs is she probably doesn’t understand my jokes and wants to throw some stinking balls at my head.

Hi Dad

Dad is buried at Arlington Cemetery. Each year for the last 40 years soldiers from the 3rd U.S. Infantry place a single American flag at each grave at the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend. It's called the Flags-in ceremony. It takes them around 3 hours to place 260,000 flags on the graves. Then the soldiers stay in the cemetery for the entire weekend to make sure all the graves keep their flags.

I always think of the soldier who places the flag at my Dad's grave and hope that he or she is never in harm's way.

My Funny Valentine

If you want to give someone a nice Valentine's Day gift, buy this book. I have an essay in it so I might be a little biased. A lot biased, even. But there are tons of funny essays in it by other humor writers as well. They made me write that before I got my copy.

I've had my jokes published in The Huffington Post, The New York Post, The New York Daily News, The Edmonton Sun, The Calgary Sun, The Toronto Sun, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Daily News, The International Herald Tribune and Stars and Stripes. They were also featured in the seminal book on women in comedy, Performing Marginality by Joanne Gilbert.

But this is the first time an essay of mine appears in a book with pages that turn, as opposed to a download. I have nothing against downloads so stop typing your comment. And I didn't have to self-publish!! Yet. It's so intellectually satisfying to wave it in front of my family and yell, "I'M ONLY GOING TO CHARGE YOU RETAIL!"

I wish my dad was still alive because he would have bought hundreds of copies.

He followed my comedy career with an enthusiasm he usually reserved for bourbon. He often penned a joke or two and would say "You can use that if you want." It was really endearing as Dad often lamented he didn't pursue a career in humor. But his generation had to work to support families. First his own, then ours. I always feel bad for people who can't pursue what they feel their gift is, what their heart wants. As someone who did, I know how lucky I am. Even though the money isn't always there, I won't be on my deathbed saying "If only I'd..." But I will be on my deathbed saying, "Now, who can put my funeral on their credit card?"

After I'd done Seinfeld, Dad was at a dinner party at his Yacht Club in St. Petersburg. I don't recall my Dad being on any yachts in his lifetime unless the Army used them in World War 2.  He was seated next to a woman who patiently listened as my Dad went on and on and ON about how funny I was as a child.

"How old is your daughter now?" She asked when Dad stopped talking long enough to take a sip of his Manhattan.
"I don't know; she won't tell me."

He was funny. Everything I got, I got from him.

So this book is for you, Dad.



P.S. I'm signing my copy of My Funny Valentine and giving it away. Leave a comment (or many for a better chance) and I'll pick a winner by Sunday and speed it your way in time for Valentine's Day. Did I mention I'm in it? No? Well, I'm in it.

25 Things You Didn't Know About Me

1. I've never been to a costume party and if you go to them it's doubtful we'll ever be friends.

2. I have a titanium bar in my back and no it's not stocked with alcohol.

3. My favorite movie is Pillow Talk with Doris Day and Rock Hudson.

4. I left home when I was 17 but would have left earlier if my parents weren't such MEAN ASSHOLES.

5. My best friend is gay and we've been estranged 3 times yet always wander back into each other's lives. It goes without saying that we're both very stubborn.

6. I speak and read French yet got D's in French in high school and my first year of college. As you can imagine this went over very well with my mother, who's French, and my father, who was Hitler.

7. I've been engaged 3 times but was only in love once and not to any of the men I was engaged to.

8. I prefer going to the movies by myself. Although I used to put my Yorkie in my purse and take him along. Mainly because he didn't talk during the movie.

9. I have one sister and have had 4 stepbrothers and 1 stepsister.

10. There are only 2 people who make me laugh. One is my friend Jane in New York and one is my sister.

11. If I can come up with 25 things for this list I'll be amazed.

12. I never had any female friends who didn't work until I met bloggers.

13. I don't like diamonds.

14. All of my dishes are black and white but in different patterns.

15. Number 14 is kind of dumb for a list of 25 things you didn't know about me. I mean seriously, who cares what kind of dishes I have?

16. I believe in reincarnation.

17. I can't believe some bloggers make a '100 Things You Didn't Know About Me' TAB.

18. I love to travel. The more exotic the place, the better.

19. I never wanted my own children but dated 4 men who had kids. And I loved them all. The kids, I mean.

20. I've been performing since I was 14 and performing professionally since I was 15.

21. My favorite activity is getting into bed and reading. This explains why I have no boyfriend.

22. Don't ask me for my opinion because I'll tell you the truth.

23. I'm a member of SAG and AFTRA.

24. I have terrible taste in men. If there's an asshole on the loose, I'll find him.

25. I'm a great cook.

BONUS 26. After bitching and moaning I'm now on Facebook.

The Man Who Built The Truck For 9/11

As I've posted before, I was at LAX on September 11, 2001. I was getting ready to board a plane headed for St. Petersburg, Florida. My Dad had died in January of that year and I was trying to sell his two condos and dispose of all his personal items. My stepmother had died 3 years earlier but many of her things were still in one of the apartments. Plus they had a storage unit. It eventually took me until 2003 to unload it all. I told my mother to not ever die because if she thought I was going to fly to Paris and take 3 years to unload her 2 apartments plus the garage she owned, she could rethink that.

She agreed never to die. It wasn't so much a promise as a threat.

I watched on September 11 as a crowd gathered around a bar at LAX while the wounded World Trade Center still stood. A flight was called to its gate. People picked up their magazines, carry-ons and books and casually walked away from the lounge area. I thought they were all crazy. Didn't they see what was happening on TV?

There was a pregnant woman standing next to me and I told her we had to leave but she said she had nowhere to go. I suggested she get a hotel at the airport but she just stared at me. I stared back and then ran. I knew it was time to get the hell out of one of the major airports in the United States. And then Delta announced that all luggage was being returned. Their personnel flooded baggage claim. I remember a man found my bags in about 10 seconds. He threw them at my feet and said, "Now go."

Just so you know, a cab from LAX to wherever you live in LA is about a million dollars, maybe 2 if you have luggage. You either take a shuttle service or call a friend. I stood in the long line for cabs.

And I was one of the last taxis out before they shut LAX down.

I used to live in Manhattan. For 13 years. I'd had lunch at Windows On The World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, twice. Once you're a New Yorker, you're never anything else no matter where you live. It's a hard town to crack but if you manage, you wear the badge of *New Yorker* proudly. And I still did, even though I'd been gone for ten years.

On September 12 I called a high-ranking friend of mine in Washington and asked if Los Angeles had any reason to be alarmed. And if so I needed to know so I could grab my sister and our friends and get the hell out.

I received this message in return: "Beware the target an icon makes. And be careful."

Did she mean Disneyland? The Golden Gate? Or was it merely speculation from Washington? I'll never know. We've never discussed that message because it can't be discussed. Obviously.

I first heard of this truck last year. You might think I live in a cave if I'd never heard of something so large. And that tours the U.S. But I didn't. Mainly because I rarely open my cave windows.

The Rolling Memorial is painted with a mural intended to honor the victims of the 9/11 attacks. The whole story about the man who made it here.

And now, the truck:

(click on pictures to enlarge)

I read someone's blog where they dismissed people who mourned 9/11 as if it was their own personal tragedy, even though they'd not lost a friend or even lived in NY. Please.  9/11 is every American's personal tragedy. It's the world's personal tragedy because not just Americans were lost that day.

Because it changed the way we live.

Forever.

How To Pack Your Memories So You'll See Them Again

Part of the nightmare of moving is finding things stuffed into other things which in turn leads you to finding other things that you forgot you had.  Ultimately you realize you have too many things.

And that your vocabulary needs work if you can't find a synonym for the word 'things.'

I found all these pictures hidden in an album I forgot I had. Because I have too many things.

Exhibits A through D:

A. My sister and I appeared in our hometown newspaper holding balls. Prophetic.

B. Then my sister decided to grow her cheeks in earnest:

C.  This is one of a handful of pictures from a time when my hair was not stick straight. I was in the 9th grade and can't believe I thought this looked good. I'm hoping I was drunk during this era, which would also explain my math grades:

D. Lindy and I have avoided being in weddings our entire lives. The ugly dresses, the expensive gifts to a bride and groom who you'll lose touch with in 6 years and who will ultimately divorce after one of them sleeps with the babysitter. Not to mention no one can afford lobster at their reception.

But this was the one and only nuptials we agreed to participate in. Our father's 4th wedding. And that was because he paid our airfare. And wrote us each a check. And promised me a new car if I didn't swear.

I still have the same old car.

Could my Dad look any more grim?

Another Ridiculous Thing I Did For A Guy

Going through the two million things I own and have to pack has rocketed me back to some memories that make me groan. For example, the disappearance of Book Four in the Basic Reader series of children's books that belonged to my father's family.

It happened while I was living in NY and dating The Doctor. When we met I had just moved to NY from Paris and was on Food Stamps. He thought that was hilarious. The girl from Paris was on Food Stamps.

I kept the books on a table in my living room and one night he saw them and said he had them in his family too. They brought back so many memories for him. He was elated to see them again.

That cliche about what do you get someone who has everything really applied to The Doctor.

I mean, the guy had his own plane.

Sidebar: He once flew me back from New Orleans during a storm while I drank Jack Daniels straight from the bottle in the back of the plane. I was drinking the Jack not because I was afraid of the storm, I was eventually too shitfaced to be scared, but because I overheard him tell the copilot that not only was I a girlfriend BUT YOU SHOULD SEE THE PICTURE OF HIS OTHER GIRLFRIEND.

He also had a chauffeured stretch Mercedes and a 10 room apartment on Park Avenue. His shirts were all bespoke, his shoes and belts were always Gucci and he favored Armani.

So for his birthday I gave him Book Four.  I thought I'd come up with the perfect gift for him. And I was right. He loved it. Gushed over my thoughtfulness, my generosity, my creativity.

The Doctor and I went out for three years. After we broke up BECAUSE SOMEONE COULDN'T STOP CHEATING ON ME, we remained friends and a year or so later I asked him whether he still had Book Four.

"Book Four of what?"
"The books that were in your family, my family, you know, those children's books."
"Sorry, no idea what you're talking about."

That was a frequent theme in our relationship.

Memorial Day For My Dad

The caisson carrying my Dad's ashes into Arlington Cemetery, Washington D.C.

Sometimes My Brain Is On Pause

Saturday I was lying on my couch waiting to die, waiting for the Velocirapture to swallow me whole. And watching a movie called The Family Man starring Nicolas Cage and Tea Leoni. I spent most of the movie trying to keep track of Nicolas Cage's hairpieces. He had more styles and colors than a 25 year fast-forwarded clip show of Oprah's hair.

There's a moment in the movie when Cage and Don Cheadle, who plays an angel, are in a car and Cage is confused about what's happening to him. Cheadle tells him he has to figure it out. Cage asks him why he just can't tell him what's going on but Cheadle persists. "Let it come to you. It will come to you."

This is how my life has run its course. The Answer always comes to me. It pops into my head and I instantly "Know" it's the right thing to do.

Sidebar: This offer not valid with boyfriends.

It happened in Paris, it happened in New York. Both times I was miserable but then I heard The Answer and off I went. But as unhappy as I've been living at my present address here in LA, I haven't heard The Answer. That calm inner voice of The Higher Self. The voice telling me what to do, where to go. It once told me the password of someone's email account. It often gives me the result of someone else's problem. I depend on it so much that it writes the majority of my punchlines. It's never been wrong.

Sidebar Again: This offer still not valid with boyfriends. I repeat this for my own benefit.

But lately I've been obsessing about The Answer. Where is it? WHERE IS IT? And then I take a breath or seven and remember that all the other times it came to me, I didn't expect it. It just showed up.

So I'm watching Don Cheadle, one of my top 5 favorite actors ever, tell Nic Cage that the answer WILL COME. It will come, he repeats. And as much as I've been fixated over this very issue, I knew it was a message I was meant to hear as messages appear in many forms. Movies, a chance encounter, a phone call. We've all read The Celestine Prophecy, correct?

Then my phone rang.

I looked at the caller ID.

Area code from St. Petersburg, Florida. The town my father died in. The caller hung up immediately, didn't leave a message. But they didn't need to.

I heard it loud and clear.

I spent Sunday with my sister. I told her the story and at the end of it she burst into tears. "That was Dad helping you out."

Yes, I know. So, thanks Dad.

I Read This Book Before I Had Sex

We had a library in our home. I spent a lot of time in that library because that's where my father would send me when I was punished. And I was punished a lot. Not my fault I was smarter than him.

My sister Lindy never got in trouble so consequently never spent one minute in that room. I think she didn't learn to read until she was 28. I don't even know for a fact if she can read today because we only talk on the phone. Not my fault I was smarter than her.

I came to know every book in our library because I stopped sticking pins into my Dad's pictures long enough to read all the thick ones because I was sure they were the hardest. Then I would quote really big words at the dinner table. Just to punish him.

Eventually I got around to a thin book. Hardly visible among all the novels and biographies (Eleanor of Aquitaine! The Call of the Wild! Crime and Punishment!) was a pale blue hardcover called This is My Beloved by Walter Benton, first published in 1943. Inside I discovered lusty phrases like Your warm naked thighs and Your breasts are wonderfully alive under my kisses and the very disturbing Your lips cushioned the inherent murder in your teeth.

I was 15.

And had just kissed my first boy, Alain, in a town on the Atlantic coast of France called Meschers.

This is me and Alain, who was 17. Look how relaxed Alain was; look at me clutching my Kodak Brownie Camera as if he was going to steal it. You know the French. If he and I had gotten married we would have given birth not to a child but to one giant nose.

I came back from France that school year and read Walter Benton's incredibly gorgeous book of poetry. I thought I knew everything about love and the fine art of French kissing but as it turned out, apparently there was A LOT more to learn.

When I left Meschers, Alain gave me his little silver medallion from the most famous church in the world, Lourdes. Buying something from Lourdes often implies someone really needs it to keep them healthy. I hope I didn't kill him by accepting it.

But chances are good that I did.

So Happy Valentine's Day to all the boys and girls with "inherent murder in their teeth." It's a miracle I ever kissed anyone again after reading that line.

I still have that little silver medallion.

Where Did You Get Your Sense Of Humor?

After every show there's always one person who asks me that question.

In the beginning of my career I had no idea how to answer since didn't my sense of humor just come from me? Modest, over-achieving, genius me? Humble, fabulous, fashion-plated me? Outrageous, over-accessorized, well you get the idea.

But over time I've gathered enough irrefutable evidence to prove I was wrong. Here's the real answer:

My Dad in the Army. This man had access to firearms.

Dad trying to strangle his 4th wife with his eyes closed. Surprisingly, he failed.

Dad with a belly dancer hired for his 75th birthday party.

I have no idea what this was about but I know bourbon was involved. In fact, I PRAY bourbon was involved.

I Really Haven't Changed At All

People always ask me how I can believe in reincarnation when I haven’t made the round trip myself. I don't know; I just do.

This is me when I was 4. I look the same minus the pigtails and plus a nose job.

When I was 3, I started telling my parents that Cincy, Cindy and I were going out to play. That would have been fine by them only I didn’t have any friends named Cincy and Cindy. Cincy? What kind of a name was that? I'd never heard it and to this day have never known anyone named Cincy. My parents grilled me like a shishkabob over those two people. My answer was always “I don’t know; they are just MY FRIENDS you big stupid heads.”

Sidebar: If I really had said that I would be writing you from my grave right now.

Naturally I out grew Cincy and Cindy and as I aged my Dad talked to me about reincarnation. He believed in it and I think I believed in it because I guess he had a good explanation. Like, Believe in it or you’ll never get your own car.

Sidebar: I did believe in it and I never got my own car because my parents were big stupid heads and I'll write from my grave IF I WANT TO.

It wasn’t until years later that I read when children are under the age of four and start talking about people with names you don’t recognize that you should pay close attention, that these were probably people they had known in a previous life. I used to call my sister Dorothy when she was 2 and tell my parents we were moving to California. My Dad's 3rd wife was named Dorothy, her son lived in California and I ended up here THREE separate times in my life before settling here. And my sister Lindy moved here first.

When I was age range 36-43, (that’s how we give our ages in Hollywood) (That is, if you ever want to work again) I received a letter one of our distant uncles on my father's side sent my father and me. He had hired an assassin to work for him and the media was all over his place. I don't tell anyone who it is because this man assassinated a very famous person and homey don't play no witness protection games. In this letter was a diagram of our family tree. I gave it a cursory glance and filed it under Who Cares They're All Dead Now.

A few years later I was working on my first novel 'His Dead Wife" and I foraged the letter out from my files and in the many branches and offshoots of that tree I found the name ‘Cinzie,’ a woman who had died roughly twenty years before I was born. I stared into space thinking about how I had known her on the other side. Whoever she was to me then, she clearly had been very important so I dragged her into this lifetime.

I called my Dad. He totally flipped out. True, I haven't made the round trip but have MILLIONS more stories like this in my life. Research on reincarnation suggests that children under 4 remember names and places and then when they're fully verbal around 5 and "get stuff" it all disappears for them.

For me? Cinzie never disappeared because I found her in a family tree and never forgot the strange name. I still wonder if she's the one who said, "For God's sakes, child, never get married."

End of chat.

Where My Dad Is Buried

This is what used to be called The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It is now just known as The Tomb of a Soldier. It's at Arlington Cemetery in Washington D.C. and it's where my Dad is buried, under one of those ubiquitous white markers that have come to be associated with Arlington.
Dad didn't want to be buried there even though his grade of Colonel allowed him that honor. Sadly, Arlington is so crowded from recent wars that now only old warhorses like my dad, who have senior grades, can be put to rest here. Arlington is normally reserved for those who gave their lives for our country and knowing my Dad, he probably didn't think he deserved that honor since he made it through WWII. My sister and I knew he didn't want to be buried there so we waited. Dad's ashes sat in an urn on my sister's balcony overlooking the Santa Monica Mountains while we tried to decide where to bury him. People thought we were crazy. Years went by.

What we didn't know was that Dad bought four plots in Freeport, Illinois, at Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens. One for himself and one for his third wife and two for his children. His estate took me three years to go through and somewhere in the middle of that time, I discovered the deeds. Seems like a pretty big secret to carry with you but that was my Dad. He should have been named Harlan Taciturn, because he rarely spoke. So his third wife is buried there and the fourth wife is buried up in New York State. My sister and I are left with three empty plots. We found an online broker to try and sell them but so far haven't had any luck. I don't know, maybe Freeport is a charmed little town and no one dies there. Wouldn't that be nice?

But eventually we decided to go against his wishes and apply to Arlington and Dad was accepted. It works that way, unless of course you're KIA. He worked hard all his life and gave a lot to the Army so we wanted him, a man who only finished high school and then had to work to support his family instead of go to college, we wanted him to have something that we feel he would have been proud of. Even in death.

My sister and I have never seen his grave.

End of chat.

Gravesites for sale Freeport, Illinois Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens

It's Everyone Can Bite Me Friday!

And today I really mean that everyone can bite me. I went to the doctor on Wednesday. I have 6 more weeks in a cast and even though I was aware of it going in, it still plunged me into a depression. After the cast comes off the doctor said I get the black adjustable boot contraption for 3 weeks and finally get to put my foot through his face on the ground. That visit cost me $425 dollars, $125 for the pretty colored fiberglass alone. I took a Vicodin before I left the house, which I never do when I go to the Doctor, just in case it makes me weak, fall down on the crutches and go boom. But I was glad I had taken one because without it I'm pretty sure I would have melted down completely. You know that D.C. Madam who killed herself rather than go back to prison? At first I thought she was really overreacting but now? Not so much.

Then McLoserstene dropped me off at California Pizza Kitchen while she popped into Ikea and as I was waiting for her so we could have lunch, I saw this:

Those little feet sticking out from a completely hidden ten month old baby named Brian made me smile for the first time that day. I really wanted to crawl in there with him because that's how I want to finish up this recuperation. Or my life. Hidden under a blanket and wheeled about by loving, devoted parents. Psychologist, party of one.

I do not have that loving and devoted family. I think they were like that when I was younger but sometime in the last 15 years there is no love from them to me. My biggest fear for many years was that I would get famous and then die and news crews would talk to my mother.

COMEDIAN SUZY SORO FOUND DEAD IN HER HOLLYWOOD HILLS APARTMENT.

CNN: "Was she depressed these last few years?"
MOM: "Well, she never listened to me when I told her to change her hairdo."
ABC NEWS: "Was her career in trouble?"
MOM: "She never had a career."
CBS NEWS: "Did she get along with her family?"
MOM: "I'm not in touch with her family."
NBC NEWS: "But...aren't you her family?"
MOM: "Please don't mention that in the article."
MSNBC: "Did she have a lot of friends?"
MOM: "I don't think anyone liked her except her dog, and he's dead."
FOX NEWS: "Well thanks for your time."
MOM: "That's it? Don't you want to hear about my life?"

Yesterday was my sister's birthday. We haven't spoken in almost 3 years. I no longer talk to my mother either and my Dad died in 2001. After he died, the other two got strange. He left me and my sister money but not my mother. She and my sister tried to wrest control of my portion but failed. No one in my family was ever honest. Not even me. I learned it at the feet of the masters. Between my parents they had 5 marriages and my sister and I were terrified to get married, even though I was engaged three times. My mother had someone on the side for most of her marriage and my father was married once before my mother but no one ever told us until after their divorce. Then Dad didn't bother to inform us when he married for the third time. We weren't even invited. You see what I'm dealing with here? Maybe it's better they're not in my life. They're so hyper-critical that it's impossible to feel like any type of success around them. Especially of the emotional kind.

And now, all these centuries later, I feel I wasted my life chasing my career and not marriage and a family of my own. But after what I saw at home, it was obviously the last thing on my mind. I also have the worst possible taste in men so that didn't help. Due to my inability to be honest, intimacy is a huge problem for me. If I am intimate and vulnerable, only bad things can come of it in my head. It's better to let them think I barely care. Pretty fucked up, I know. And yet now I wish I had a husband who loved me and children to get on my nerves. As it is, if it weren't for McLoserstene and her family, I'd be fairly lost right now. And thanks to all my friends who have visited or written and called, I couldn't have gotten through this without you either. Even my arch enemy Jenee visited me last weekend and brought me lunch and signed my door "You're a 'funny cunt' and if you understand our profession, you know that's really a term of endearment. The word 'funny', I mean.

I picked the color yellow because it was cheerful. Maybe eventually it will work. I don't smoke or drink anymore but this last surgery, the third in five years, has tried my last addictive nerve and I swear I could start either again with not even one wee regret, that's how shitty and depressed I feel. I sometimes wonder if all the good stuff has already happened to me. Now every day brings some letdown, some sadness, some small misery I can't change. Up until 7 years ago, I loved my life. It was perfect. But then my Dad died, I lost the love of my life, Elvis, my remaining family turned into assholes and I had to watch as my body disintegrated due to a childhood disease. Is the next step me getting into a plane with a Kennedy and nosediving into the ocean?

There's a lot of things I don't talk about on this blog. Because it wouldn't be fun, not for you and definitely not for me. Over the years I've had four therapists and although they've changed my life in so many positive ways, the one thing they can't do is mend a broken heart. Even the Bee Gees can't do that.

End of chat.

Withholding Taxes - Part 2

After Dad asked me if he had suffered a heart attack, in that small instant that I had to answer him, I thought about lying. But I knew that some other dumbfuck doctor would come along and tell him so I told him the truth. I’ve often wondered if that’s when he took a turn for the worse. That the fear of a bigger attack had turned him towards the light.

While Dad was in the ICU, my sister and I started bringing a flask of vodka on our visits. Every time there was an update from a nurse or we heard another family break down crying, we reached for the flask. And I did what I always did when something overwhelmed me. I joked around. One day Dad called me over to his bed and motioned for me to bend down close to his face. “The people here like you, they all tell me how you try and make everyone laugh. But you know what? No one likes a smart mouth.”

And there you have it. Knock knock knockin’ on heaven’s door and that’s all he had to say to me.

Ever since my friend Clark died and I was not there for him, I am now the person who takes care of my friends and family if they’re in trouble. And no rejecting motherfucker of a father is ever going to take away that part of me.

Your father did the best that he could, you say. No. He didn’t.

I’m so tired of people using that as an excuse to absolve others of their behavior. I know when I’m being an asshole; a three year old knows when they’re being an asshole. Everyone knows. Everyone knows.

Dad's lawyers kept asking us where the will and the trust were and we couldn't find them. I suddenly remembered that years before he had sent me copies in L.A. I had no choice but to leave Dad and my sister and fly home to retrieve the documents. He died while I was gone. I don't think that was an accident.

I wrote a novel about my disastrous sex life and the story of my sudden addiction to alcohol after years of being a social drinker and how I eventually quit, then slipped, used it to get me through a surgery and then quit again. As I wrote it, story after story presented itself to me with the same ending. And I finally made the connection. My Dad had stayed on the East coast and yet followed me everywhere I went. The writing of the book illuminated my darkest truth; every time I had taken a drink it was to mask the pain of being ignored. It was really simple and yet totally complicated. I didn’t have a disease, I didn’t need a meeting, I needed to wake up and start issuing pink slips.

In the last two years I have finally rid my life of anyone that treated me like my father. The list was as long as it was variegated. I had surrounded myself with a cluster of Punishers because I was addicted to being ignored, dismissed and otherwise overlooked. It’s all I knew. And I carried it with me from town to town, state to state, country to country and person to person. It’s really no surprise to me that I became a standup comic. Approbation from an audience became a life’s mission, a subconscious and useless attempt to plug up a hole that could never be filled.

I’m hyper vigilant now with people I meet. In a way I’m lucky because if I’m around them for a while and suddenly I feel like drinking, I know that person is not someone I should keep in my life. In some silent sign language of the heart, they have communicated neglect and disregard to me and I’ve picked up on it. As time goes on, my reaction time gets shorter.

What if they apologized? You ask. Withholders and Punishers are not Apologizers. Because that would make them wrong and the one thing a withholding person can’t do is admit they’re wrong. They get defensive and re-explain what happened, thinking that it’s you that are dense and just don’t ‘get it’. I get that a person who thinks highly of themselves will think highly of others. They will apologize because they would want to be apologized to. But The Punisher has such self-loathing and low self-esteem that he or she projects it onto you. They treat themselves poorly, so they treat you poorly. Yeah, I get it.

I don’t blame any of the people I attracted; I take responsibility for that. I don’t believe in a random Universe, so I believe they all served to show me the way out of the deep hole I was in. The heartache over my breakup with Elvis, the love of my life, was what eventually sent me spiraling downward in alcohol. But ultimately he saved my life since I finally figured out what was wrong. And I will never, ever again have anyone in my life that ignores me. I’m all sold out.

End of chat.

Withholding Taxes - Part 1

This picture of me was drawn by my mother when I was four. She made the dress, too. Bright blue with different colored ribbons sewn around the top. She said I spent a good part of that year saying, “I want my Daddy.” I have spent my entire life saying that.

So here it is another April and whenever I see the words Withholding Taxes, I think of my father. Because he was the most withholding man I ever knew and it taxed me as heavily as a million dollar fine from Uncle Sam would have. He died in 2001 and yet it took me three years past his death to deal with his rejecting legacy. I often look at this picture of the little 4 year-old me and wonder when exactly after that did my father turn against me.

While I was living in New York City, I had a Yorkie that at eleven years of age got diabetes and Cushing’s disease and eventually went blind. I temporarily abandoned my career to take care of him and spent two years devoting myself to my little dog. One day during this time, my father called me and said, “If I’m ever sick, you’re the daughter I want to come and take care of me.”

I had to laugh at that. When I was younger I had a Harrington Rod put in my back to fix my scoliosis and in those days, you had to spend seven months flat on your back with a cast up to your chin. Bedpans, sponge baths, TV, visitors and my Mom, who took care of me. My Dad was in the house but due to the fact that I had arrived home from California with a black eye; my father decided that he wouldn’t speak to me for those seven months. While he remained in the house. My mother had to make him put a TV in my room. I can still hear her asking him to take one from another part of the house and put it in my room and him replying “Why?” In the first month of my incarceration I would call down from my upstairs bedroom to see if he wanted to play a game of chess and he wouldn’t answer. I think once he just uttered a terse “No.” I eventually stopped asking. That was the man who wanted me to come and take care of him.

Sidebar: It was my mother who eventually told me that the reason my father didn't talk to me was because he felt I needed to be punished for getting involved with someone who gave me a black eye and for bringing him into our home. He was mad at the guy too, but he showed it by buying him 4 new tires for his car so he could drive back to California. He also gave him money to buy me roses. And he talked to him.

There are days when I don’t know whether I’ll ever get over a lifetime of being ignored by him, of having questions go unanswered, of being emotionally punished long after the infraction was committed. My reaction was always to reconnect with him, to forgive, to overlook the fact that he never told me what I had done wrong. I was needy; groveling and always emotionally begging for another chance. Because I always thought it was my fault. I must have done something wrong to cause my own father to turn against me so heartlessly. Psychologists point out that the difference between physical abuse and emotional abuse is that the scars heal from the physical.

The last year of his life he called me on my birthday and I called him on his and neither of us was home for our respective calls. Neither of us tried again. Other than leaving those messages for each other, we didn’t speak. I had lived in the cold, dark hallway of his rejection for so long that I had finally had it. He had unburdened me of the need to have a father. So when he fell and hit his head, his friends put him in a nursing facility near his home in Florida and I jumped on a plane because I remembered that he wanted me to be the one who took care of him. The irony of the situation is that my father told a friend of his to call my sister with the news. Not me.

When I got there, Dad looked awful. Emaciated and pale, he looked all of his 89 years and then some. He was disoriented. They had shaved his mustache and he had had it since the 70’s. He just looked at me and said, “Can you get me out of here?” I did.

By now my sister had arrived and we combed through a PDR trying to unlock the mystery of all his meds, many of which either canceled each other out or exacerbated the others. We took him to a hospital for evaluation and somewhere along the line he had a small heart attack. A stupid dumbfuck doctor told me this in front of my father and then left the room. Dad looked at me and said, “Did he say I had a heart attack?” (to be continued tomorrow)

The Governor Of Florida Was Mean To My Dad

I heard on the news tonight that the governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, skipped the Superbowl to survey the damage in parts of Florida that were hit by a recent tornado. I was shocked. I didn't realize that Charlie had gone that far in Florida politics. He didn't go to the Superbowl because of the tornado. He didn't go because he's gay and hates sports as much as I do. Why am I outing him? Because he screwed over my Dad. And I'm not a big fan of my Dad, now deceased. Dad was not the best or kindest father on the planet but that's another post altogether. But I am a fan of gay people and to quote my out gay friend Alan, "while Crist is less anti-gay than many, he opposes gays all day long and then wants to fuck them all night; enough of the hypocrisy." And it's not such a big secret in Florida that Charlie is gay. Except maybe to Charlie. Even Jeb and George W. know he's gay.

That is our building above. It was in the downtown part of St. Petersburg, now a haven for yuppies and according to state statistics, the place to where an ever-increasing number of Texan Richie Riches migrate. Charlie was my Dad's tenant. Dad owned two condos in that building and Charlie rented out 1409 for over ten years. Dad loved Charlie, which was discouraging since he was a Republican and Dad contributed to every campaign he ran, even though we were Democrats. After Dad died, I went through all his papers and found letters from him addressed to Charlie, giving the reasons for the hikes in rent every year. Dad was always specific in his demands, the water went up, the refrigerator needed to be replaced. Always specific.

But I also found papers from Charlie to Dad where Charlie said he couldn't afford the rent hikes. He needed to keep two residences because he was the attorney general at that time and had to have two apartments, one in the capitol where he attorney generaled and one in our building. Like that was our problem. My father acquiesced and stopped raising the rent. I begged Dad to at least raise the rent $20 a month, a nothing, a pittance, but Dad didn't, he felt sorry for Charlie because he couldn't 'afford it.' Fuck that. A rent is a rent is a rent. I didn't get to be a rich kid by ignoring that logic.

After Dad died at the age of 89 and I took over the estate, I invited Charlie over one night to discuss the matter and told him that I felt that he had used my father. I said that my Dad was old and Charlie had taken advantage of my Dad's fondness for him. He demurred and didn't offer any argument. I raised his rent. He told me he couldn't afford to pay anymore than he was paying. I evicted him. I am SO not my Dad. Buh Bye.

I sold two of my Dad's condos. The first was 1409, the one that Charlie rented. The second was the big one, the one Dad and his fourth wife lived in. During one open house for the big apartment, Charlie and his stinking filthy richer-than-we-were father came by to look at it. They didn't buy it. Soon after, Charlie's father bought him a condo on the other side of our building, with an ocean view, which cost more than ours. What is totally sick is that my Dad would be so happy that Charlie made it to the Governor's office, even though he lied to him about how much money he had.

Charlie did send lovely flowers when Dad died. Maybe from all the money he saved on rent.

End of chat.