"Can you describe Dr. J's personality?"

Photo by Laura Marks on Unsplash

*sensitive content warning, again—

The tennis players got off to a good start. They moved in smears around our table, grunting from the effort of chasing the ball with strict focus. Their sneakers squeaked in bright tones that broke the day, just like Joy. 

“Can you describe her personality?” 

My bare feet dangled above the ground. We were close to one another now, positioned around the table at 6 and 9 o’clock in the shade. The ball streaked back and forth between our bodies as the tennis court was beside us, the match a poignant backdrop for a psychological drama.

Angelica mimed bringing a phone to her ear. “Ohhhhh,” she sighed like a princess in a meadow. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you,” she rattled on, fourteen times, not four, as if love were even a joke. One of the problems I ran into was —the concept of exaggeration. Dr. J was a walking exaggeration, and people exaggerate, they do, all the time, so it was another one of these reflection moments where I wanted to ask people —listening to this story — do you exaggerate too much? This is some relinquishing of control, or some spill over into some inventive area of the psyche, perhaps, and one of my questions about Dr. J had to do with her psychic makeup. In any case, Dr. J threw “I love you” at her in quick succession like happy daggers. “BULLSHIT.” Angelica was a bull, not just a bird. “The biggest — ” She got up in my FACE. “Whore, piece of shit.” I nodded, “right,” given the circumstances. It passed. She reflected that this situation was vulgar. “The fakest human being I have ever seen.” Her eyes were demonic over her beak. She froze. Bumblebees buzzed around the flower pots.

“Not one REAL thread…”

She pinched it and showed it to me as if it were real. The fire blazed in her eyes.

“…in this bitch.”

She damned that unreal strand to hell.

My mother’s fakeness was — enraging. Made of powder poof powder, Dr. J, a record that skips made of a talc — intangible and harsh.

Riiiight, of course, I thought. A situation like this would produce a violent reaction—Angelica was embodying the gore, the messy guts of the scandal. Of course she would flip out — she’s not going to remain calm. Forget that I’m a child, in fact, it appeared too easy to forget entirely,. “I am from Brazil,” she said. She reminded me many times—she was who she was, so she’s not going to be polite, chewing on her gum and flashing a NICE fake smile. She was not going to behave well, because it was not well, and a jury, in a court of law, would probably be on her side. She acted as if she’d even reject the notion that she could act “evolved.”

She actually got wrapped up in a sex scandal. My mother wrapped her up in a sex scandal over some four-year-old girl she took home for one fucking day, so she cursed. She had a foul mouth, but it was foul. She was told that a man was raping his four-year-old daughter. A situation like this — it’s similar to tyranny, it’s a mad government. It’s insane. “RAPE,” she fired that word at me many times. “Maria,” she pointed at me, “this bitch told me rape.” Her flesh burned, because sex was real, it was really really real to this woman, so you don’t go around talking about raping a goddamn four year old and acting like some Disney princess on steroids.

I supported her divine response. I made room for her vitriol, in fact. It passed, her truth. Valid. Her reaction was valid. “The biggest,” Angelica kept her voice down but not her intensity, “liar on earth!” Yet she reflected so much truth.

The ball hit the net, “no.” A fist of defeat from player one. He bounced the ball back to the service line with his racket.

Angelica tipped her head down. A tennis player prepared for the serve. She delivered the operatic exclamation that Dr. J could fire at any time silently: “AH!” She popped, confetti, fireworks, Dr. J, on the phone. “AAH!” Dr. J called her every day for a while. Angelica mimed the phone to her ear. Never asked for me.

“DISGUSTINGLY sweet,” pop, she let it rip. Angelica flicked my mother’s sweetness off her and spilled out in her chair to pop pop — in quick succession, nothing but skill — she exclaimed, quietly, “breath like death! Maria! You died.” And then, yes, her breath. “Legendary…” Angelica looked at me with EYES, practically bringing her chair forward towards me as she spilled over. 

“Maria,” she whispered down low, LOOKING at ME, “Maria, look at me. Maria.” 

I could laugh, what a performance, you see, even from Angelica, a real personality.

“She breathed, and she could kill flowers…”

Angelica paused and looked the flowers in pots, bees buzzing: “dead.”

“Is there a DEAD ANIMAL in there?” 

“Did she EAT a dead animal…?” 

“And she wouldn’t stay away,” Angelica clutched onto the arms of her chair and shot fire out of her eyes over her beak. “She would walk right up to you and breathe all over you.” Sincerely, in a red bikini, looking hot, lol, Angelica had to ask, “Why, Maria, why?” With a fist, “why is she making it more pronounced, why isn’t she staying away?” She spurted yuck from her body, caressed the air, herself, as if my mother were made of slime. She flicked her off — her body. Handsy, Dr. J. She didn’t appear to have a sense of physical boundaries — in listening to Angelica. She kicked the chair, practically, “this bitch,” in trying to rest her Adidas sandals on the edge of her seat. Her performance was sort of genius and animal in her chair, sticking her finger in her mouth, accompanied by a ghastly, deathly sound. Haunted.

She opened her legs, even, by the jacuzzi once. She opened her legs to show me how my mother smelled down there with a kind of amusement, almost a smile, on the crack of a joke. It was funny, to be fair to Angelica, like you couldn’t really help but laugh, out of sheer shock. It was graphic, important, and even art—our conversations — because we were at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. It was grotesque. That made sense as a style, huh, I thought. She gave me a fleshy idea of how loose and smelly my mother’s anatomy was. “Every man…” Angelica said it, with feeling, every time, eyes side to side, leaning toward me, “every man.”

Dr. J was a picture-perfect grotesque. A beauty, fashionable, girlie, disjointed. Her wrists were like flimsy hankies flopping at you. “Bye bye for now,” she’d say. Even the garlic cloves, “her candy,” the whole picture —  her persona was in this style. She was a grotesque creature. Her ingratiating sweetness. Was she not bathed? I peered through this scenario. Was she a product of extreme neglect? Why was she abject? I thought, if she came from the darkest, sickest of backgrounds, why would I look away? There wasn’t a darkness too dark I wouldn’t face for a child, thinking about my mother. She was one, once upon a time, so what happened from there to here?

The jets went off. Angelita, perky as a bird, adjusted her seat to face the guests who were getting into the jacuzzi with a smile. She knew them.

I moved to the sun lounger, so I could face her. A row fanned out behind me, almost like a parallax. The players congratulated one another on a game well played, nice, smiles. We all have that mask or defense or reaction — of friendliness, or that everything is okay: a smile. Dr. J led with it, and the crack of it haunted me. Plastered on her face, it was so pretty that it was hard to tell how tight it was. She wasn’t a soft or tender person. She was, in my mind, the Joker — next generation. Her mirrors, her eyes as blue as the sky… so clear…expansive… not a spot of darkness in her. The Joker card was an unusual card to find included in the deck handed to me at the beginning of my life. But there’s good in it, there was something useful in it, I thought, for its vulgarity too, because the subject was vulgar, not ethereal. And yet, Dr. J reflected that it could be treated as such.

She even looked like a Joker. But she was a beauty, you see, not a disfigured face — that came later. She ended up being a little Portrait of Dorian Grey, actually. Today, she looks visibly twisted, hard. She was always insane, but her ugliness is pronounced. Her eyes, they were always wells, but in a picture I saw, they looked as if they could devour the whole world and still be hungry. I showed it to my cousins — “does this not look like a Joker?” They didn’t even hesitate. “Yes it does, she really looks like a Joker.”

The sky above me on a sunny day, the night sky felt so clean and cool next to her. “We tend to see the path of a villain as a fall from grace…” but hero hero, another way is possible for us all, she’d say, Joy gets it. The light could be dark, dark could be light, and there was truth in it, profound, as sex is, for instance, viewed as dirty or shameful, when it’s good, our earthly nature.

The Joker today isn’t Heath Ledger. She’s going to crack a smile without a flaw on her face. She’s even Tiktok, complete with sparkles and hearts around her figure. The Joker today is surrounded by cameras, dazzling, holding up a Bible at a protest, like Trump did. She knows what the audience is. The smile is societal — why so serious? Her white fur, business suit, rushing to the IRS — it was desperate, hysterical. Our fiscal responsibility — wee, out a limo, Joy. You see? The sweetest of them all. She gagged, Angelica… she was spectacular, a kite flying high, loose, disconnected from Earth.

There’s real truth in the yin and yang, thinking about the balance between light and shadow. It’s more about how we qualify these ideas. That was the problem with Joy, I think. She’s like the priest that molests children, in that, she’s an extreme version of innocence — the most chaste woman in the world with her eyes like an erasure that wants to devour, but if you’re looking closely, this is a diluted being, who will then show up naked and throw herself on you. It is, hm, this phrase: mentally ill, indeed. There was so much truth in it, actually, thinking about the Catholic Church’s offenses, and this sensational rumor that they kidnapped an eleven-year-old girl on her way to a music lesson…there’s even a documentary about it, and is that true? Did they? Or is that just a fun story? Dr. J—reflecting more truth. How sensational it is. Then, my cousins, in Italy, discussed it at a lunch table right before we were going to eat… as if child rape, if not slavery, or murder were not the subject at hand, as she’s never been found. Did they hear what they were saying? So, in the Joker’s tone, why so serious? Some girl is locked in some Vatican dungeon… I don’t know how to describe that disconnect. Joy’s denying it, of course. She’s never had SEX, practically, only to have me.

Her personality was SO BRIGHT you had to shield your eyes, so did that indicate a very dark past? That’s what it looked like, but Angelica didn’t see that, exactly. Joy was in a state of emergency. She kept saying, “she’s SICK IN THE HEAD,” and was it in the head? Interesting language. Someone could be saying sex, overtly, even, and no one makes a connection; she might be sick, there, but no one will take it seriously because of the delivery… 

She saw that Joy was sick, but it was not an insult; it was time to get help, but she was stoning her to death. It’s not that it was not deserved, a seductive feeling, righteousness, if not true, and be careful, of course it’s “true,” but a system of punishment was fundamental, structural. This was part of the problem. 

And, well, I always saw Dr. J as patriarchal, you see. MEN aren’t typically seen as “mentally ill” when they behave in parallel ways to her. Reflections. They aren’t considered ill if they’re extreme dicks, if they skip out on their families, if they rape or abuse a child. They’re seen as criminal, even. And Angelica isn’t overexaggerating. We were in a sex scandal; my mother orchestrated a sex scandal.

Why the violence Dr. J? She wants it? She’s provoking it?

Nothing but beating and rape from this woman. It was an outrageous act thus there is, an equal and opposite reaction, though that’s not always the case when it comes to human relationships, depends, people overreact. But in this case, we’re in a sex scandal. What she did — produced this effect. 

I mean, in Angelica’s words: “Maria imagine! Maria, imagine?” She fired her pointer finger at me. “Imagine?” She simply offered Dr. J a playdate, and then got cash and child molesters and her breasts thrown in her face. 

And why did it appear so poignant to me? 

Angelica’s demonic, monstrous performance…?

I thought about it later in my pink room. Her reaction. Her guttural, vulgar reaction — it was good, you see. Sure, it’s vulgar, but it’s true, like, if it’s vulgar, it’s vulgar. But why Angelica’s performance was wise and meaningful, I couldn’t really tell. Not yet. Her demonic, but almost like shamanic, performance: did it reflect a truly gross situation? Reflections. Is that true, Dr. J? Did she actually come from somewhere gross>? Her house?

 She was, she could drink whipping cream out of the carton… Dr. J, not like you can’t, do it, but it’s a strange choice… what is that? Her eating habits were….basically nonexistent, but truly. What happened here?

It was true, you see. It was indeed sick. Wouldn’t it be? Incest? Was this what I was looking at? An abusive home? Abject poverty? Where did that come from? Now, Dr. J might have taken a turn, but my father didn’t really seem to act like she changed all that much, only that “the success went to her head,” which makes me laugh. It’s just that she was so crazy, like she was reaching for the stars. I always saw Joy sort of like an Icarus, an idiot, who thought he could literally reach the sun — burn through your existence as if you were a speck. There are limits, blue eyes. And some of the coddling I received, like, “don’t say that,” was not the just path. 

Sometimes, you gotta call it how it is. Stupid. A judge would be on my side here, calling ORDER, what the HELL was this? 

Flying a little too high there, Dr. J, why did this appear prescient to me as some warning from above, too? There was truth in it, you see. 

The TikTok filters of today, the “you create your own reality,” obsession, the manifestation techniques, the “spiritual ascent,” this desire, by “ridding one of earthly ties…” disconnection, “everything is disconnected,” people say, today, sort of disconnected, already, because you — keep saying it. The age of disconnection? Dr. J. “Wee.” That’s Dr. J to me: desperately getting into her limo, “to the IRS immediately!” That’s the real joke. She’s the keeper of taxes as a Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. “Step on it Michel,” her driver/lover. I hear my father’s voice over this imagining, when he explained what the IRS was: “Everything works,” he said. “Everyone shares,” he drew the connection with his hands between him and everyone else, “a reponsibility in ensuring society works,” basically speaking. Just picturing the version of her as a real villain, even, she could be wearing a tiny tiny top hat angled to the side… running across a street to GET TO THE IRS… in magazine clothes, as if she stepped off the pages…looking smashing… There was a lot of reality, I’m sure, driving the fantasy of her… but what? It didn’t look too pretty. That broke my heart young. 

Back in my pink room, squinting out the pink blinds, meditating on the mirror in my periphery, as this object reflected vanity, Dr. J was vain, so I didn't like it. I rejected it practically. I would live to regret it, obviously, but I had problems to work out. Evidently, it just came with the territory, unfortunately, truly. I would have preferred not having had to work out these problems — with a smile. But I did. Not wanting to get caught up in the mirror at all, actually. There was, at times, too much about her that appeared true.

I had a picture. One. Of me, as a baby, in the arms of my father’s brother and wife, at Dr. J’s family house. And my father and I were going to the east coast now, now that he was no longer a child molester, supposedly, and I was going to get the only eyes I could find that had entered this home.

When my father and I arrived to my aunt and uncle’s house in an old mining town, we pulled up to a slender street of row houses up real steps. In the inky night, winter, Adele from Malta (Queens) appeared with her simple smile. She was a black haired, black eyed, pale Italian, with “double z’s” for breasts, she even admitted, airing out her shirt, because she was sweating from cooking. She had a lovely laugh, made cannolis constantly. They were the best. She was, in our family, the star chef. Her mother was, professionally.

Gus was a carpenter, so he carved all the thresholds into curving screens. It gave the house charm. He looked like a little boxer, Gus. He was Fred Willard’s old comedy partner, appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, but he had a nervous breakdown, anger management issues, also. He was never the same. His daughters — and Adele, but mostly them — had a hard time with his touring schedule, he was at it, constantly. And then, he had a breakdown. And now, he would, without fail, leave during any family party (primetime) to prepare his stand-up routine which he delivered at the table. He would laugh, forcefully, at his own jokes. Mentally ill, yes. We were a family of comedians, we really were. I, of course, had a tape recorder that I spoke into as if this were really a show, happening before me—real life.

We were eating ziti, tomato sauce. I was a nine-year-old with seniors. My father was sixty when I was born. He was sixty eight, then, and so was Gus. I got to the point quick — sticking my fork in the rich and deep tomato sauce — that they had been to Dr. J’s — you see. “Oh yeah,” they didn’t miss a beat there. “Yes we did.” We went through the game of tennis, where they gave me a sum up of what I already knew, “wanted to meet you.” “Yeah…” I told them what had happened, “she gave me away to Brazilians…” and I suppose I heard a comedic note in it, so I delivered it as such. I was open about it, but no one heard me. And here, it’s one of these moments where my father appears as the focus of my memory, one of these, graining back, all these years later. “Did you lie?” Nick? I wondered if anyone approached him, in this family, I don’t think they did. In any case, I needed in — I needed to know about their experience at her family’s house.

“Tell me about it…”

And in front of my father, eating his ziti, they communicated how strange her home was, first sentence. “Yeah,” Adele’s nasal “yeah,” and Gus’s reply, “creepy.” That’s how he would describe “what it felt like,” as I had asked the question. “Creepy.” In this case, that’s what I was expecting. If I’m being “honest,” a word you’re not supposed to use, I also had a couple of “otherworldly” folders in my cabinet labeled “undercover investigation.”

Curiosities around the field of energy. I wondered if I might be able to feel into this house, get a feeling about it based on them. Tune into them. If I could even get a picture, not literally, though at times, I could get an image, something, as I was listening and trying to connect with their bodies, the impression it left.

“What happened?”

They spoke of walking into the house, they had just gotten there, picturing Gus’s face, as there was a freeze over his eyes, so was it cold? They were in the garage, I asked them to describe, the space. “Her sister…” walked through the door. They were still downstairs, as if they had just walked in. “Started acting strange.”

“Yeah…”

Adele had to crack up. “Yes,” I told them she could call the Mickey Mouse phone from time to time as if she were dying… this woman. “She would call you…” she began, “in a…” “yeah,” Gus interjected. “Creepy,” he said, “yeah,” she said. “Of calling you with this ghoulish sounds,” but it was a bit too involved there, they said, she acted abnormally, and I was cracking up hysterically as a baby in the next room. “Hysterically.” I still do, laugh hysterically, like, they had to leave the next day, they said. I had to stay because I could not move. They had planned to stay a few days, but no way, no way they could stay there. “12 people sleeping in the same room…” and they put THEM in the same room. “There was an uncle, a sleepwalker…”

“Uh huh…”

So fourteen people were sleeping in the same room.

That’s what I’m expecting upfront in this case. A visibly strange set-up.

I went in deep, as I said. 

*

“So listen, listen to me,” I sang on Miracle Mile, my bare feet sliding across her white carpet, “I can feel your eyes go through meeeee… do do do do do do do do…” only the best love songs scored these years, but I permit myself the right to invent, as this fictional thread helped me through the real story. “So listen, listen to me…” the passion. “You know I love you but I just can’t take this,” picturing my fists beside her, she laughed at me a lot. “You know I want to but I’m in too deep,” and I can’t help but laugh, because she was the type of person who would crack a sex joke about that… you see, like, “not possible.” She liked it, crossing her bedroom, deep baby, and then she’d dance a little… she could got carried away. We laughed, we did. But then, is that totally true? Yes, it is, I laughed at her constantly, but this situation was so strange, I was so young, that any affection I showcased for them… wouldn’t that be ill-advised? Wouldn’t I be healthier retaining distance? Nothing was appropriate or fun about it, but life turns out to be complicated, our ties, and as I write these lines, I can feel people agreeing—but were they in a sex scandal? Were they in a situation like this? I always return to this question: what would you think about it as a parent?

She was the whitest woman I have ever seen...

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

And the day broke from the mouth of Madame Butterfly…the hope that the sun will rise again … the amber waves glittered hot white as the sun moved towards the afternoon. To “Un Bel Di…” (not literally) Dr. J descended the stair in Ferragamo. This woman existed on the dimension of opera, however, literally, not a metaphor. She was an aria, classical, but buffoon, but buffoon is classical. After all, she was a prodigy on the piano and organ, a professional musician, once upon a time, according to Neiman Marcus Magazine, and a genius at it. A genius no matter what. Above all, that. Her genius was of a caliber beyond the stars in the sky, where she often rested her sky blue eyes, as she sparkled in haute couture sequins in the back of her limo. “Mama,” in her little girl/showgirl way, only wore Krizia to work, exclusively, a fashionista, as all good villains are because they exist in the dimension of fantasy, I believe—Dr J’s home. Her dusty violet Krizia suit with gold buttons was stunning. She was a chic woman, but she had a real passion, so range: ballgowns, cocktail dresses, doll dresses, and a closet of kimonos down the hall. From what I gathered, her outfits in church could sometimes be out of place. But I associate pianists with a touch of wild flair, why? I don’t know. Maybe one has to exit the mind, become one with, as classical can evoke that. Where someone is tuned into some conduit of electricity and is playing like mad, genius, as classical composers, I feel, almost occupy the same elastic headspace as mathematicians. Will Hunting, in Good Will Hunting, describes doing math like playing the piano. Beethoven, he could just play, and math was the same exercise for him. Dr. J sort of acted like BAD ACTOR trying to play the role of “genius” but uppity, girlie, flat like a glossy magazine but with her pianist hands— cultured, even classy. A pianist in Alice in Wonderland the opera, who will then punch numbers, glide across space in her chair — desperate — lives on the line…to Un Bel Di. It was life and death, for sure. “THE IRS IS COMING…” they were always coming to see Dr. J, specifically.

I’m giving you a little introduction to Dr. J to set the tone for a most unbelievably theatrical woman with a particular look and physicality… who exists in a world that dreams about these “great minds…” as Dr. J breaks glass… she looked about the air, as Russell Crowe did in A Beautiful Mind as in there were triangles in it. She was seeing equations, not empty space, Dr. J. She— was a genius. This was her objective— to BE— in ridiculous gestures — the one to rule them all: the geniuses. To “Un Bel Di.” Like, if you actually played that track over her real person moving through space, they would match, it might be groundbreaking, even, as a performance. This was her emotional state, saving the world via the IRS, accosting the priest with her rapes every Sunday, and wrapping her baby up in a sex scandal — Un Bel Di.

“Protect my baby,” tears falling down her cheeks. “Please, I beg you.”

Angelica might crack up/get angry, as Dr. J pushed a funny bone.

Once, coming back from Neimans in her cherry red Mercedes, she was high from shopping and possibly pills. She cranked up AIDA to the MAX and rolled the windows down. She began some ludicrous buffoon mocking aria over this melody at me, sort of cracking up, silly. “Ahhh…” I couldn’t make it up. I closed my ears, because she didn’t sound good, but Dr. J didn’t care—she was provocative in this way. The joke is, practically nightly, “she’s drinking, driving, and looking for sex downtown…” in the same car. She was a pathetic character, so pathos, that’s where Dr. J lives on the comic spectrum as representing some desperate need for care. There’s a function to pathos, and I didn’t need the pity, neither did she, but she did need care. I might have had a rapier, but I was wrong to put it aside, I refused to take on ANY “oh, poor you,” like, go read a book. Sorry, that’s just who I am. “This was your wish, not mine,” meaning you wanted to know. She acted as if she came from the darkest of childhoods as the brightest thing in it. And over the years, people looked at me as if I were delivering a turn of phrase.

Pathetic: it’s a condition. Not an insult. But because I spoke of it really, and I’d never use that word casually, as a joke, you see, or as an insult, it was too close to real for some people, just like the words crazy and insane. People say things they don’t really mean, I got the picture—wink. Dr. J. They speak unreally—wink again. Dr. J. I saw her in everyone and everything. Because I was being real, it discredited me, even, like this person can go around yapping pathetic because they didn’t really mean it. People could get confused between the two and discredit the real deal, because they can’t handle it. “She was a real pathetic.” Joy was a real psychological case. She didn’t want to be normal, you see, she had no interest in it. She acted like a buffoon—a genius, in her mind. This wasn’t a woman to take it easy on, and I did for the majority of my life, as I didn’t have this point of view for most of my life. What she did was unacceptable. And everyone in my life missed it.

Imagine?

Imagine!

She cried, Angelica — firing her pointer finger at me.

“This bitch told me RAPE,” she desperately tried to COMMUNICATE IT. She wrapped up this woman in a sex scandal. Let’s be real. I’m more on the LEGAL end, you see, not on the “aw she was mentally ill,” sure, she most certaintly was, but there are LINES.

In another reflection moment, would you be concerned about someone’s woundedness, someone who abuses a child? No, are you concerned about their mental health state? NO, but if that’s the case, just get it out of my face and deal with it, you know what I mean? Go handle it. Deal with it. It’s a health care issue. It needs to be treated, and not in a system of punishment. This person is sick. It’s a disease. What she did was not okay, a parent was needed—that concerns my healing from all this.

On her way to the goddamn IRS in limo driven by her lover, supposedly, getting into the limo in front of us—absurd. My mother was completely absurd. Angelica told me to “pay attention” for the very first time in her red Cadillac — it was time for my first love song lesson. She clapped and turned up the stereo… “Me Va Me Va…” as Dr. J’s limo took off — probably she went to sleep with a man, shop, and then make a stop at the IRS…

I start here, because it was the worst, just the worst — telling someone this? Trying to EXPLAIN who Dr. J is? A woman who would wrap her child up in a sex scandal. Like, were they expecting Santa Claus? Are you expecting someone who isn’t unhinged? You know? This was my mother. This is the woman who is going to do this. She was a severe case, and they do indeed exist, in fairytale tones, even, since people were ignorant to the existence of madness, abuse, um, “these people exist…” Sorry to be “the one” for you, but welcome to a world with about eight billion people in it. Next. Mirror mirror…mirrors. And not speaking this way — caused me problems. I’m not going to waste my time rummaging through your disbelief just in trying to EXPLAIN who this woman was.

And so, by nature of how gross and offensive she was, Dr. J, and I say that with the spiritual support of political theorist Hannah Arendt because she’d definitely read this, and I definitely read her if not relied on her to help me through the insanity of this story. She was a woman, dead, who supported me better than anybody alive, especially through the insanity of everything that came along with this story. She saw “the world,” as a real entity, a real structure, and I needed her understanding of it to get how much of a role that idea plays into one’s psychology: what it means to appear in the world. That was hard due to the otherworldly nature of this story. This wasn’t a political battle, but it was a battle on the personal front.

That’s exactly how Arendt would have described it. “Maria can’t exactly appear in the world with a story like that. It didn’t even seem that people could SEE her as real.” Sure, Joy’s not a dictator, but there are some acts, some crimes, some ideas, call it what you want, that should not be treated as if they were made of pixie dust—rage is necessary, spiritual, in saying no, where it must be said. It’s a little Dr. J. “This is not okay—maybe in a few generations, we could revisit the idea of a relationship.” I had to, strangely, avoid very true ways of looking “evolved” or “resolved.” It wasn’t that, “all mothers are crazy,” which someone said, to me, of all people, or “she was wounded,” the path was — what she did was unacceptable. The path was one of a parent — if you touch my kid, you’re dead. There’s a big difference between social justice and —if you touch my kid, you see—a parent will kill you. It’s — a deep relationship, typically, not in my case, but generally parents are going to lose their minds. I was disrespected, at a very young age. If you touch my kid, you see, this is the parent, not the wiseman, per se, I’ll kill you. There is wisdom in it when it’s appropriate, you see, which in my case, it was — if someone wrapped up my baby in some ridiculous sex scandal, I would be furious. No? Yet, no one thought of it.

Except, the Zen Master Sybil: the reason why I was able to make through my dark night, as I went through one when I reopened all this. She was a Zen Master psychologist with the middle name Sybil, so I called her the Zen Master Sybil, evidently. I gave her an official title — she was spiritual in her approach, and rage was most certainly that — spiritual, necessary, red. She said.

She told me to — “pay attention” Angelica, behind the red wheel of her red Cadillac. The perfect day, that was Dr. J. The brightest colors, the day. Her backyard — I remember it — it was the greenest grass I ever saw, the field of dreams we twirled upon though it might be more like belief. The field of. Dr. J sounded and acted as if she came from this realm.

What was her general impression of her? I asked Angelica. What’s the first thing that came to her mind when she saw her? I don’t know about how she was at work, but she was never normal. I tried to explain this to people. She was not a “hi how are you” person. All you know about me is: I was beaten at two to the point of being sent away. That’s Dr. J. I don’t know if she thought she was normal, but she did not seem to care if she gave a normal impression of herself….getting naked in her office to seduce a man and running into church and accosting a priest with her rapes. I can’t follow her logic. Except, need, only need. She appeared primally starved, she appeared desperate though her money produced some flouncy spin through it all.

Angelica Liebowitz stuck her fork into her club salad that came in a glass leaf bowl—chic— she made some modifications to it, I remember. I don’t think I even got lunch, and didn’t my father pay her for these visits? To hang out with her, I had to pay, but I didn’t really get lunch, did I — you see? What I noticed in retrospect—that position took me a real effort to get to, thanks to Angelica, a woman who went on and on about how selfless she was, in taking care of me…for money… regardless of the reasons. Not just a couple hundred bucks, either.

So, how did she appear to you…?

Angelica paused and received that question now at an intimate angle at the end of the afternoon. What did she notice about my mother….firstly? She turned her head and searched across the pool at 3 o’clock. She paused. She really thought about it, her eyes darting around.

“She was…” She blinked and peered over the pool as if there were meaning in it that she, herself, could not totally describe.

“…the whitest woman I have ever seen…”

I had to laugh but on the inside. I didn’t want to put her in the position of needing to apologize, and she would have, which would have been ridiculous. It was the first phrase out of everybody’s mouth. “Never seen someone so white.” That struck a chord regardless of her intention, a file in my drawer. I felt the tremble through the architecture. There was a structure that held the world up, that held up a person, and I could feel it and it fascinated me. Racism, in particular, coming out of a sex scandal, when I was four? You know, some unspeakable, unbelievable, insane situation… that people don’t…see. That affected me. That was systemic. That was clear to me.

“You could not not see how white she was.”

There might be something right in front of you that you might be blind to, which is why, it gets annoying when people ACT innocent about it—another Dr. J reflection. In that, Dr. J is REALLY ACTING like she CAN’T SEE. It’s to a pitch that might make these attitudes or behaviors stick out to someone.

You’d think, no, it’s not possible, that a mother could do that to her child, and yet, people have done much worse than that. They lost the war, even, so the winners collect slaves, and they will be used as those in powers wish them to be used…. it’s very simple, cold, cruel, and not that unbelievable. White people, sorry, Europeans, showed up to the United States of America and passed out blankets infected with smallpox to the Native Americans— disgusting behavior. To the people who were so shocked, read a history book, you know what I mean? Was I supposed to support this? Now I know—no. It’s just, people got SO AFFECTED when they could spread it around.

“She was the whitest woman I have ever seen,” but truly! Really! The eye witness in church said, she “kinda” reminded her of Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmations. It wasn’t a joke, she was sincere. “So she was a white villain who would kill puppies for a fur coat?” As this woman wasn’t white. “Yes.” As if beginning a Grimm’s fairytale, Angelica continued, “she was white, really white, strikingly so.”

“Beautiful,” she said. “Unusual shade.”

With skin whiter than snow, “she glowed,” Angelita wondered, seriously, if she glowed in the dark while making love, as Angelita only thought along these lines. Paired with her extraordinary eyes the exact shade of the sky too clear for comfort, and a red wig, real but fake, Angelita described her as “an attractive woman,” sincerely. Which she was…I saw it as part of her pathoogy, hard to explain. So was Ted Bundy. A beauty…with skin whiter than snow, Angelica said, once upon a time.

“Striking,” she said. “Features.”

“Sexy body…”

“Oh?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Very sexy body.”

“Beautiful breasts,” she said. Uh huh, as I said, I was eight or nine, confused, mostly, but I had gotten that impression. That she had an appealing figure. And, uh, “how many times did she come over in these four years?”

She flashed two fingers for “like twice.”

That’s a snapshot of Dr. J. A naked woman, didn’t matter where she was. Angelica saw her breasts more than once.

She snapped, the blue bottle hit the table, “put on sunscreen.” A fight between us since I was four. The whip came out, she practically sneezed through her six children’s names to get to mine as she always did. “My nose was getting red.” She even encouraged me to like my skin tone, a nice detail. I was the daughter of the whitest woman anyone had ever seen.  

The legend of Dr. J begins

This nice little game lasted four years, and this was the end of it. My father and I drove up to my house in the ’81 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. I looked up and out the windshield. A thunderous crash shocked me as we passed from light to shadow and pulled into the garage.

The Cutlass came to a halt before his rainbow skiers — he hand-painted them. They dashed downhill across his white cabinets. Their scarves flew freely in the wind. 

Nick clicked the gear over the steering wheel into park. He didn’t appear to hear the crashing. I fell out of the car to a frightful stillness, punched to hell with a jolt — I couldn’t explain it, couldn’t place what it was. It hooked me, even, speechless. I ducked. I froze. It sounded like, not a cup broke, but heaven above me. The air cracked, it was thick. Around his classic cars, I floated through a world I could not see without the ability to think.

I passed Nick’s workshop. He had painted a shade of blue inspired by the Blue Grotto in Naples, Italy. He had it specially mixed.

The angle at which sunlight enters the cave off the island of Capri creates an effect of pure magic. The water glows an otherworldly blue out of a cartoon. It’s impossible, couldn’t be real, just like this story. But we live in a cosmic universe where “anything can happen” where the ingredients can mix just right. I never understood what people believed in.

I don’t know how to talk about it because I absorbed way too much disbelief when I should have suggested that they read a book. Might be a touchy, sharp, but it was the quality to have. I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of the disbelief. Telling this story was an obstacle, so do I erase these lines that weren’t really mine, or do I leave them to communicate the degree to which I absorbed the opinions of others? I suppose I couldn’t believe my parents were real, for real, because they weren’t. But the anger that drove my investigation was an understanding I was not the only one. That there was worse, even…

Into his office, my eyes were wide. An ethereal blue wrapped around the wall and up the flight of stairs towards a gold doorknob as if I really came from a fairytale, but sometimes real life doesn’t feel real, that isn’t exactly novel as a sensation, but people I spoke to still linger in the fabric of this memory as I weave meaning. People told me that I looked like I stepped out of a fairytale. Dr. J most certainly did. My father too —outdated, not the same one, but my schoolmates thought he was the Fonz from the TV show Happy Days. It was unreal to them.

I turned to him as another wave of destruction crashed through his neat office. He just took a seat in his leather chair. He didn’t even look at me.

I crept up the blue/grey carpeted stairs that matched his Mont Blanc pen and Cutlass Supreme. I had no legs, no body, no mind. Nothing had — SMASH—changed in his ancient world. A poster of the Fountain of Trevi. Vincent Van Gogh’s Café at Night, Picasso’s drawing of a woman’s back, and Etruscan figures framed in gold leaf. I stood on the other side of the door, calm and staring. The cracking grew louder. Dr. J got herself a new house. We had to undo all this. The carpet had been vacuumed; the house serene. 

Turning the corner, I faced the corridor where her teacup sets once trailed on their own pedestals towards a glass panel of amber waves of light like the song about America. I saw so much of it in Dr. J: American culture, consumerism, The Society of Spectacle. Even Angelica. She stood there four years earlier and lived to regret it, but not as much as I did. She was from Brazil. She, too, is from America. People could get confused.

I floated down the hall in that same light. The curves of the waves glittered hot white. I couldn’t think, feel. I sailed over clouds. The cracking sent fractures through the air, as if the house were breaking apart on an invisible plane. Around the next staircase, a shattering of glass smacked me across the face. It sounded like a car was getting crunched.

“Filing a tax return can be terrifying…” the LATIMES began.

Once upon a time, the articles published about Dr. J led the way up the stairs to her ghostly greatness, praising her valiant fight in a red wig that a person had the right to fall apart. All that was left of them were frames of dust. The carpet was gold, a dirty shade of it.

“Out of the 10 to 15 new clients she accepts each week…” 

For a while, remembering the cracks on the stairs that I learned to maneuver around, the door opened all day. People rushed up the stairs to see the doctor, but Angelica was the only person who stopped. “She has all the right credentials and something more: a determination to salvage the lives of people she calls ‘tax victims.’”

Dr. J knew “the symptoms” such as depression and paranoia. She called herself in print, the Mother Teresa of the Tax Industry, the Dear Abby of the Tax World, the self-proclaimed “Tax Therapist.” Dr. J was saving the world even ambitiously at 200 an hour in 1988. That’s over 400 dollars today. Not bad.

I remembered the snap of the thread when she got her wigs sewn in upstairs, the curve of her blue eyes the shade of sky a total mystery to me. It sounded like someone took a bat and smashed a wall of glass. I crept up the stairs, blank.

A genius, a prodigy; these were interchangeable terms. She was licensed to practice all the way up to the Supreme Court, taught at USC Graduate School, was a senior agent for twenty years. I couldn’t believe it, at four. I demanded to be taken at once! My little legs ran down the hall at USC, tugged on his pants, to lift me up NOW. No way Dr. J could teach a subject! Nose pressed up against the glass. At USC Graduate School of Accounting? I mean, I saw the back of her head but I did not see the audience, so I cannot confirm factually that they were there. I was blown away at four. If she was a genius, why was she so stupid? She acted like a complete idiot. And it would be imperative that I speak like this, to myself, this woman was a complete idiot! Rage saved me.

She spoke of her genius as if it were the ultimate truth, with some vague undertone of having suffered an insurmountable set of obstacles to get here. No one ever thought “Mama,” she’d refer to herself in the third person to me…sort of little girl, showgirl, suggestive. She was never normal, didn’t want to be. “No one ever thought Mama would ever amount to anything…” on the crack of laughter and tears. But she succeeded in the world, by the time I was four, which provoked another set of questions about her… she was not a housewife. She was practically un-house trained. Home was some gross jungle. But, strangely, up the steps, the civilized man turns out to be the most savage…? She was a societal creature, somehow…?

What was her PhD in? Depends.

In an LA Times article, her PhD was in “The History of Tax Law.” On the back of her book about VAT: “Doctorate in the Arts.” Once she said, “Economics.” I cannot help but laugh, because this woman wrapped me up in a sex scandal. Made me wonder, remembering all these articles, or her “achievements” I called them, whether you should believe what you read and hear, and yet, everyone does. I saw Dr. J in everyone and everything. 

It’s not to say that she didn’t have a PhD. She probably did, I don’t know, she had a slippery grasp on words, on solid matter. The truth was a flimsy enterprise, even a joke. It didn’t matter. The more I look around, the truer that feels. We manipulate material, even in taking our work experience and framing to glitter a little. I saw her in everyone and everything.

She had more academic degrees than anyone. 13, 15, 18, 21 degrees. She just kept “going back to school.” She’d list them all, “a special girl,” on her taut fingers… “English, music, law…” I couldn’t help but laugh at Dr. J. She was a ridiculous person. Already, she appeared like the buffoon of our obsession with genius, even. “Genius.” Everyone is saying it. She’s still counting her degrees. “Chinese…”

“Yugoslavian…”

I say that because she claimed to “speak Gallic,” as “an Irish person.” I interrogated her young, early, “do you speak Irish?” I was four, again, I didn’t know what that meant. Of course she did. “Gallic.” “Say something,” I requested at four, in the church bathroom. She said some words…gibberish, I believe. The woman didn’t speak Gallic.

My favorite article was at the top—the last one before a client would turn to face her universe.  I would find it later in my father’s file cabinet downstairs, so I have this one: Executive Style in Neiman Marcus Magazine. It was one of her hotspots in Beverly Hills. An upscale department store. A fashionista, Dr. J. She had a closet of kimonos downstairs. Her white mink coat was a signature piece of hers, the lushest. In a terribly chic emerald green Krizia suit, she was the epitome of “Executive Style.” A professional musician once upon a time, a prodigal pianist and organist, her hands floated over a sleek chrome railing and gingerly held her timeless alligator briefcase. 

“My first client,” she stated, in this magazine, “is typically about to go to jail…”

“Criminals,” my father put it. “They made up the bulk of her clientele.”

With her eyes as blue as the sky, I could picture her assuring a journalist along this wake. “I screen out people who have been dishonest. The only thing I have going for me with the IRS is my credibility, so I won’t go in with a crook.” I could picture her hand pat pat the air. She would wave that away, “no,” she’d say. She was the sincerest human being to the point of performance, mocking it. Pure artifice.

The bathroom door was open. It was pink. It was supposed to be mine. Coca-Cola, milk, and T-Bones, that’s all she ate, a gnarled T-Bone steak on the counter, that’s all she left. Raw garlic cloves were “her candy,” she said. A witch, a real witch, Dr. J. And, once upon a time, in Salem, Massachusetts, my speech would have silenced the ecclesiastic authorities. “Garlic is her candy, hear me, please.” She would have been hanged, quick, real quick. Witchcraft, Satan, paranoia, it’s not exactly uncommon to come up with outrageous, insane ideas in the realm of fantasy. Dr. J belonged here. I saw her everywhere. She was so much more common than people tended to see. I tried to describe her, over the years, a mad king, even, they’ve existed.

I tried to wrap my head around a person who would leave only this behind, as if I were a dog. Men panted and strained and thick glass broke to pieces A shard of mirror flew into the view in the frame, the corner of my eye. It flashed a hot white light before crashing into a bin, clanking against shards. Mirror framed the bathroom door like an arch tucked into the wall with black horizontal stripes. A bit boudoir, my mother, I don’t know. An oriental decorative vase once stood in the corner with some stem shooting from it, maybe peacock. She had that hat. She had many many hats, Dr. J.

I felt like a fool not knowing what the sound was. A real fool.

*

Mirror mirror mirrors on the walls, to begin. Dr. J came out of a fairytale by Jean Baudrillard, even; the most unreal human being that even dazzled in sequins. She covered her tax law office walls in mirrors, and I had seen Snow White already, when I was four, so I made a basic connection—there’s a mirror on the wall, but there’s more than one now. I met the field of psychology in this way, in these mirrors. She was kinda like this. It was a symbol of hers that began in little round suggestions on her wedding ball gown with an antebellum cut, and took over. She said they made the rooms look bigger, which struck a chord when I heard Thomas Huxley’s warning to the USA, that size is not grandeur and territory does not make a nation.

These mirrors reflected one another. Space multiplied, fanned out like an accordion. They produced an illusion of depth but, in fact, it was shallow. The imagination appeared like a real place, in a way. Dr. J appeared to have stepped out of it. With her wrist like a flimsy hanky, she tapped, real and reflected, the top of her teacup sets arranged on their own pedestals trailing through this tax law office in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose, naming their country of origin. “England, Japan, China…”

She was an American — that general wash of a word— mythic creature, the accountant at the Mad Hatter tea party in Alice in Wonderland, another cartoon. She acted, seriously, as if she were literally on Mercury. These mirrors reflected the first computers, a fax machine, stacks of black and white tax returns, bright highlighters, and also tea cup sets…this mad fashionista was at the helm, a businesswoman. What a strange development. Was there a white rabbit… I lost track of? Now, the walls cracked at angles deep and dark like a canyon, as if a natural disaster had struck the house, an otherwise peaceful universe.

I stood at the top of the steps facing her main space, the larger of the two, no door. Four were smashing the mirrors off the tax law office walls in two rooms. They kicked their feet up onto the wall, sweating and panting. It took real effort, the kind you can’t fake, to dismantle mirrors. It was physical, difficult, a labor. They dove picks into them — stabbed them, dug behind the eyeball, just trying, muscles bulging, to break them off the walls. An ordeal. Flashing like cameras—broken shards of mirrors reflected the light wildly. It was the TV meets the broken whole on billions of screens. They cracked, broke, smashed. They pulled—with all their might— to dislodge an unspeakable weapon that drew blood in my mind, just the edges. They stepped on them to keep cracking them down, down down. Nothing was solid. Everything was reflective and flashing in broken jagged sheets. Just the sound, the crack in my ear, as if it were breaking. A monster in their hands, reflecting light, they held them over their heads and cast them down against the rim of industrial sized trash cans, crash, and again, they kept breaking them down, down, down, until they could throw them away as if they meant nothing at all. Smash, crack, break, crunch, clanking. The light went dim.

Once Upon a Time on Miracle Mile

The day the stork came to snatch a baby back, me, I was smashing barbie heads framed in the vintage TV from the film Grumpy Old Men. Angélica Liebowitz walked into my house with legs shaped by the Gods coming out of a tennis skirt. She froze upon entry. The glass panel downed her in amber waves of light like the song about America. “I am from BRAZIL,” she said, so if there’s a glacial chill, she’s going to feel it. She turned to my mother, Dr. J, a tax file in her hand, and offered to set up a playdate one day. Joy popped like a Jack in Box with confetti. “Here! Take her!” I had never seen such legs! I stood up and told her, honestly, how amazing they were, wow. Side by side in a hunter green princess dress and tennis skirt, I wondered if everyone in Brazil had legs like her there. We headed for her red Cadillac.

“The time has come for you now to pay attention,” she pointed at me. Hand on the dial, she sang love song after love song all the way back to Miracle Mile. She taught me the value of Barbara Streisand that day with intensity of a pro-coach down Pico. I had to “pay attention,” she bumped up the volume, cracked a sex joke, a driver cut her off. She turned her whole body to confront the blind spot, a dancer, stepped on it. She flipped him off like a pissed off hysterical bird. “I am a woman in love, pay attention,” she got low. “And I’d do anything, are you paying attention?” She turned it up. “Pay attention.” I laughed. She snapped, pointed at me, made a fist. “It’s a righttttt I defend.” I sign the saw: Miracle Mile. “HEY! I’m talking to YOU.”  We pulled up to a brightest patch of green grass, she was wailing, reaching the peak.

I hopped out the door before she turned off her car. I bolted across the grass to “I am a Woman in Love” because there was a world and I was in it. I pushed open her front door, wasn’t locked, not my fault. I twirled under a crystal chandelier; she tripped over her six children’s names as if she were sneezing to get to mine. I left the door open, and she wasn’t looking for a seventh child. Nicole, the youngest, appeared at the railing in ruby slippers, confused.

Angélica combusted somewhere on her lawn, POHA! She cursed at herself in Portuguese like a bull.  “Hey girl!” Green! I saw a yard — but a woman was standing in my way. So I marched right up to her and said it. “Get out of my way.” Her cousin blinked, “excuse me?!” I said it again. “Get out of my way.” Angélica grabbed onto my arm, half-laughing in shock, “what about please, thank you, sorry?” I flipped out. Her sneaks squeaked across the foyer as she backed up, looking at me, like, are you KIDDING ME? She told her cousin to BACK UP! I made a run for it through the kitchen, happier now, and pushed the screen door open.

Blades of grass so green they were real flew off my black patent leather Mary Janes. It was a time before filters, when memories impressed themselves on paper, hard to erase. A plum tree towered high into the sky, the color of my mother’s eyes. I snatched a juicy purple bum off the grass. The back door screeched open, her eyes white with terror. “DON’T EAT THAT PLUM!” “IT’S MINE!” “NO!” “YES!” “NO!” “YES it’s MINE! STAY AWAY!” I SCREAMED. “THE TREE IS SICK!!” SHE CRIED TERRIFIED. “NO IT’S NOT!” SHE TAPPED HER TEMPLE, PLEADED WITH ME. “SICK! DIE! YOU WANNA DIE?! DIE,” she said, “DIE! THE TREE IS SICK!” I couldn’t believe it, all these years later. It was almost like parable, I came from a sick tree, so the key if not the question was laid out in the beginning. Did the fruit fall far? Or did it only apply to apples?

In her paradisal backyard, the American Dream, the patch of grass was a perfect snapshot, the blades high-def, as if we really did dream the world into being. In a fit of confetti, Dr. J descended upon the scene as if the world were a stage that was really really fake with eyes the color of the sky, applied with a paint roller, flat. A demon sent from up above, she had skin whiter than snow, she glowed. In a red wig du jour and Krizia suit, she was an American myth, the brightest woman alive who spoke like an operatic tornado, whipping up sticks, sex and nonsense, “one night, 500 bucks, I’m saving a man, you don’t even know, he needs me, you’re my best friend,” scurrying into her limo. “My husband is raping Maria, please, please, protect my baby, not my baby, no, he abused me too you know. Here’s…11,000 dollars.” I convinced it to was true, artifice aside.

Across the house, I stood and watched amazed. My mother was a buffoon, the most theatrical woman in a white mink coat. But a real show unfolded before my eyes. Nicole had lost it, punching her brother with a name you cannot complete with: Jose Lieberman. Her face beet red, her teeth exposed, he winced, laughing, but she didn’t stop, and I saw it. He was about to tip into some other state, lose consciousness of what he was doing, and I wondered about Joy.

At that moment, like magic, Angélica burst onto the scene with legs shaped by the Gods and blew the fight away in Portuguese. They fled from the flames. She turned to me, a dancer. “YOU.” I tore up the house with Jose, the women holding down the perimeter, so I was used to getting a talking to. But she took her chair in her white bedroom and placed it in front of mine, different this time. I wasn’t in trouble.

In the most intimate tones, the light streaming through her window, I could never see my father again, she said. Her head hung low, her hair like feathers in a holy glow, because I wouldn’t ever see my mother again. But I wasn’t seeing her. I didn’t say that. “And you’d never see us again, do you want that,” she asked sweetly?  “No,” what else was I supposed to say? She shushed me, a finger to her lips. We weren’t going to tell him what we knew. We—were going to play a nice game with this son-of-a bitch, she spat on his name, huh? “A nice game,” she assured me like a girlfriend. We would just sit tight, the two of us, on Miracle Mile. Shush.

When the phone rang, the backyard was framed in the white windowpane like a Jasper Johns, a work of art, an American classic. She picked up. The sprinklers spit, set the beat.

“Oh…” she smiled. Just as she had predicted, looking down at me. He called. “Look who it is…” she was delighted. He wanted to play nice. He didn’t even know her.  Two can play that game, she thought. She paced the kitchen with legs shaped by the Gods seeking his balls. “How nice,” we’re pretending that we don’t know why your daughter is living with me now. “New Jersey and Italy? How nice…” She didn’t help him, she didn’t mention me, and neither did he.

I never forgot this phone call. Her performance was “out of this world,” my mother’s phrase, but the memory hovered there like a bubble in float. It never lost its clear shape, as it was singular, unique, I recorded it, even. The colors were red, green, yellow, impossible. I began to wake up to that. What am I looking at? He called her house and acted nice? He didn’t know, though, shush. He didn’t know. Why is he acting like this? In his divorce file, he wrote, I came home and Maria was living in another family, but all he had to do was pick me up. He didn’t because “I” hated him and he didn’t know why.

She wasn’t in a rush. She had all the time in the world. He really went on and on. Continuing to pace the kitchen, back and forth, loving this, really, she dropped the mask and squatted real low. She stuck her finger in her mouth at me: yuck. Popping back up to standing, she was the mother hen, her chest puffed out. “How nice…” Suddenly, desperately, she stomped, actually confused. “What?” She needed to hear to him, the warmest woman. “I did not hear you…” She needed to, “please, what?” She was so sorry, just so sorry. “Maria?!” A revelation. “Is she around?!” I was right here! She was so sorry! She blamed herself, she hadn’t brought me up, right? She laughed, she really did. She skipped over her words as if she were in a fairytale, she always keeps the babies, she said, drawing the line of sight, right where she can see them. “She’s right here,” as it were wondrous. I fiddled with my fingers. The mask dropped a little bit, “never been safer.” She meant it, you know. With her whole heart and soul, she reassured him: “don’t worry, please Nick, don’t worry…” Gazing across the grass glistening in the sun freshly watered, she spoke of wonderful times, “so many children, a dream.” She delighted at the invisible babes playing at her feet. “They love me,” she said, “…as a safe person.” Nothing but laughter these years. “Nah,” she dropped mask, she didn’t think I wanted to go.

 “Can you what? So many kids around,” none were, “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you?” She meant it, she really wanted to, hear him that is, she was so sorry. “What did you ask? Talk to her?” She pitched high, the good witch. “Of course!” She sizzled as she dug her fingers into her eyelids and shook her head—for a while. Her face rose, open, generous. “So sorry.” She was really sorry, she laughed, she was really a bull. “So many kids…” The subtext was: why wouldn’t you be able to talk to her? Not like you did anything, right????? Innocent man???? Laughing, right? She laughed for a while. “She’s right here, one moment.” She couldn’t wait.

She bent down real low and called me over with her finger. I was pinned under her beak— her eyes fell out of her face. She couldn’t even believe it, mouth agape, brows raised. He invited me to go on vacation with him. She couldn’t move, couldn’t wipe the shock off her face. No, she just shook her head no. “No,” I said—easy. I was four, five. “I love you Maria…” He reached for me. I didn’t know what to do, her face practically cartoon. I just started saying it back. “I,” she grabbed that phone—right there. She brought it to her ear. “Thank you so much for calling, really,” she said, “thank you so much, for calling…” all the way to the receiver. She hung up on him, nicely, and cursed his existence in Portuguese like a bull. “And what are you,” she pointed down at me, brightly now, “going to say to the lawyers?” “I want to live with my moder because…” I had a script, we rehearsed it, often.

“High five!” I slapped her hand. She clapped; it was time to dance! A spin on the living room dance floor. She had six kids, grandkids, so a birthday, Wednesday, soccer game, excuse, there was always a party. We switched like that. Then, he requested to visit. She wanted his dick! Maria! A chainsaw ripped open the neighborhood. She moved her finger up and down as if that’s what it did, “a dick wow,” she even said it. Up and down, up and down, she watched it full of wonder as if it were magical. A landscaper trimmed the hedges out there. She assured me with fire in her eyes. She wanted his dick! This, a child rapist, molester, abuser, struck a match within her as she danced the lambada regardless. He requested to visit.

“Sure,” she smiled, by the pitcher of Kool-Aid, “why not 8:30?”

Nicole and I looked up at the treehouse plastered against the sky side by side. “We’re not supposed to go up there.” She reminded me. Bees had taken over, but me? I saw no bees. The backyard was a picture-perfect, saturated in color, but illness lurked here, possession, invasion, in the real American dream that it was, and you wouldn’t even know it. People lied, this I knew. I snapped at her to follow me, or I would never be her friend again. In our sparkly slippers, we climbed up the ladder until we reached the top. I could see everything from up here! A map of America in plots, yards, and picket fences disappeared over the horizon under a sky like a blue eraser. My gold slippers sparkled wildly from a hyperreal land.

At the wooden door kid-sized, we were scared at a portal of a new, unknown world. You do it, no, you do it. Let’s do it together. A nightmarish creak hurt my ears as if it hadn’t been opened in years; we faced the black, the subconscious from which anything could emerge— and from the pit of despair two bees emerged as if the guardians of the colony and hovered before our faces about to scream.

When night fell, the house became the treehouse, child’s play, but the darkest vortex, so it was real and universal though not of this world and it could lurk inside some house so small in the grand scheme of things that you wouldn’t even believe it possible like the armoire that leads to Narnia where a white witch lures children with sweets. Dr. J was the sweetest, you see, which Angélica reflected back on my father.

Down dark corridors with Dorothy (Nicole), I sought to understand Joy, a woman who put mirror mirror mirrors on her tax law office walls as if she came from a fairytale inspired by Jean Baudrillard. A woman who, ran into the church “every Sunday,” according to an eye-witness I secured, and “accosted” the priest with her rapes right before his performance as a lawsuit was building behind the scenes in the Catholic Church: a billion dollars. Angélica dimmed the lights.

She diffused the play like a stage director meets sports coach with a vision. “We’re going to put on a nice show, a big big show,” her arm scanned the kingdom. “The house was ours…” We had to act happier than happy, never been happier (without you). The front door was our target. We had to be loud, very loud, laughing, screaming, playing like crazy when she gave give us the signal. “But you have to ignore him,” she said. “Pay attention,” she pointed, the good, snappy witch. Me especially. “Not one look, okay? Not one. He does not exist,” she meant it.

Her arms flew at the front door—go. Nicole and I jumped, laughed, and shrieked in glee. Hand at her ear, she couldn’t hear us, already, you see. “More,” a conductor. We unleashed our voices with nightmarish yet funny faces—ahhh!!! Her hand marked it: level one. She pointed up, we had the stars to reach. Trick or treattttt, she cracked open the door to our voices laughing and yelping in a forced jubilee. Her bird-like face appeared. She peeked over the threshold — is that you, really you? Opening the door all the way to the wall, there’s nothing to hide here, you see, I dare you even to “visit.” Like she was going to let a child molester into her house…

“Here she is Nick!”

Nicole and I flew by as if we were the roller coaster ride. AHHHHHHHH. Nicole screamed “IMMA GET YOU!!!” AHHHHHHH. AHHHHHHH. Angélica stood guard in a tennis skirt with her arms crossed. Titling her pelvis, rocking herself on her feet, she relished the sight of babes running crazy, wild, free, but most importantly, “safe.” A little bounce off her heels, oh! She popped down low and waved to us as we ran past on a thrill ride across the house. She requested that we raise our voices with her hand like a conductor and cupped her ear like a master of ceremonies. He didn’t even try to step foot into her house. He had to watch the happiest show on earth, an ecstatic nightmare. “YEAH!” Throwing fists.

And in the end, just like a show, she closed the door from the wall—in no rush. She thanked him so much for coming… what a time we had, she thanked him for “the memories we made.” It was heartfelt, even. He got the door slammed in his face more than once, nicely. Giving us her hand, we leapt to slap her palm, hard. High five!

“And what are you,” pop quiz, “going to say to the lawyers?”

“I want to live with my moder…” I blurted with fists. Another high five for me—yeah! She clapped, kicked her feet back, did a little sensual move to advance, time to dance! Legs leading the way, we were really going to get that, “asshole,” she hurled in Portuguese.

I came to on the stair one night as these “Spectacular Spectacular” performances straight out of the film Moulin Rouge had a good run, something more like years, as this show lasted four. It was the pitch of her scream. I was crawling over her legs. I had to do that. I had to keep touching these moments, like her leg. I was crawling up her legs that night, it happened. I sat up, what am I doing? I walked downstairs and stood there to take in this snapshot: a broken man at the door, that was the message he communicated, encased in the shadows of the porch and this woman standing guard. Horror.

At the time, all I could do was wonder: was it really like this, Joy? In a way? Would no one do anything even if it were real, was it that unreal? Later, I learned that families typically pretend like it didn’t happen, and that I might not have known that it was happening, so. She didn’t call the cops, she said, because she didn’t want to send me to foster care where a child is at a higher risk of being abused, even again, so was this story unbelievable? The spectacle of it?

And people poured into the house through the very same door, what a show, these sensational nights. They flocked to Miracle Mile for the music, the dancing, her rum cakes rising. The crystal chandelier cast rainbows across the foyer in a curve like the prettiest tears. I could never forget these nights. The living room became a dance floor in 1989, the year that Kaoma’s Lambada took the world by storm with a song that began in heartbreak and became a dance so close to sex it was even scandalous, and we danced it every day. It was the lambada regardless, she was dancing sexy regardless. I kicked my feet back from the hips because they were the center of the universe, to begin, laughing like a kid. I didn’t understand. Now he’s gone away the only one who made me cry. “But this is sad,” I snapped. Everyone was so happy! I didn’t understand! I was in a living room made of goo! In a forest of legs. There was always Nicole. She took my hand. Two little girls in the foyer learning to dance in sparkly slippers, sex became innocent, in a way. And in the center of it all, the sex goddess, Angélica in her kitten heels and jeans taking steps back to advance, calling everyone to dance. I couldn’t believe it, what the words meant. I had never seen such dancing.

Angelica cried under a spellbindingly blue sky. The grass so green it was so real, you know? A time before filters, hard to erase. The sprinklers spit, the beat. The sprinklers cast rainbows. I watched the misty colorful screen as she ripped open the neighborhood like a sheet and macheted it to shreds. Curse words blew like grenades. I suppose I stood there to support her. I was eight. My mother just left, bankrupt, as she paid this woman to “protect her baby.” Now, she found herself a protector. Who hung up on her face. No more money. The story spun in her mind as a woman spins on the living room dance floor in a real jubilee in my mind. “It was all a lie,” but she didn’t even know how my mother handled me, she. The sound of her chair, kicking up her sandals when she said afterward, “it wasn’t true was it?” I remembered that. The grass ripped out from under me like a real carpet. The sprinklers spit, set the beat, the sound expanded the silence, and the universe collapsed. Feeling my way through the dark, was it true? She was dancing regardless.

No matter what, I always find my way back here, these sensational nights, when we danced all night long in the living room. The unbelievable can happen to you. They were Jewish too, just a miracle. People came to watch them, dance, a real show. We honored sorrows in the next room. So one house held everything, the most unspeakable terrors, the most magical feats, an angel of death passing over doors marked in blood, and there she was, in the center of it all wearing a star of David, still lighting her Jesus and Mary candles—dancing sexy regardless. So dance, I thought. I never had an end, only that, because in the end, what was my story in the face of all that? The backyard out the back, black, a mystery. All that can happen to a person. I didn’t understand, the crystal chandelier casting rainbows in a curve. I looked up at crystal teardrops and back. How did it do that? Sweet boozy cakes in the air. Light was real. That moved me. I wasn’t sad, it’s too simple to describe the feeling of being in awe of things. She came a mother hen gawking at me to get dancing. She told me to keep my legs closed, too, at five, so there were many colors, dissonant chords, nothing but love songs. A crowd clapping. So it became about everything. A succession of images, Nicole and I twirling across that grass so green it was real… to be taken away to some magical world called home. A spin on the living room dance floor. Our fists in the air. “Love!” She cried. “The lawyers!” Clapping. “Eh-e-eh-e-ehhh!” Singing. She came to my bedside, “love.” Meaning sex. It was love to her. It’s all she talked about it, how beautiful it was. It was even spiritual. “One day, he’ll remember a love he could not care for,” the lambada predicted long ago. One day, I might be dancing upon these words laughing and crying with joy, my mother’s name.