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Maria Mocerino

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

August 4, 2025

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?

Tags sex scandal, crazy moms, miracle mile, dr. j, sex scandal memoir

Photo by Habila Mazawaje on Unsplash

The legend of Dr. J begins

June 16, 2025

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.

Tags sex scandal, sex scandal memoir, family saga, family drama, female villain, Dr. J

Behind the scenes

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