Riding home from the hospital, I sat in the back seat between Gramma and Grampa instead of up front with Mommy and Daddy. There were no laws requiring car seats, so Mommy could hold you in her arms as Daddy drove us home. You were bundled in blankets, and all I could see were a few wispy hairs on top of your delicate baby head. I had just turned three.
I got a better look once we got home. Boy, did I. Mommy changed your diaper and I saw your penis for the first time. It looked like a little pink mushroom.
So I asked. And Mommy told: “Boys are different down there.”
This revelation was as mind-blowing as it was comforting: My gender was immutable; chopping off my hair and wearing baby blue pajamas would not turn me into a boy. Despite Freud, I had no desire for a “tittle,” the word you coined for your boyhood. Remember the famous quarterback, Y. A. Tittle? Whenever Mommy heard his name on the radio she’d laugh her ass off. That was one of Daddy’s favorite expressions, “laugh her ass off.” Like so much about our young father, it made little sense to me.
Technically a “tittle” is a small diacritical mark, like the dot on a lowercase “i,” a trivial flourish that fanciful teenage girls render as circles or hearts. I did not want a tittle; I merely wanted a name for my lack of one, and after checking myself out with Mommy’s makeup mirror and seeing nothing but two hairless puffs of pale flesh, I proudly christened my nothingness a “puff-puff.” I announced my decision to Mommy, but the name never caught on.
For the first few years of our lives, Mommy bathed us together to save time and water. One day you asked her why I didn’t have a tittle. That was the day, she told me years later, when she ceased our mutual bathing. My curiosity was innocent, yours somehow perverse. I never saw your tittle again.
Mommy also told me how she went into a blind panic the first time you climbed out of your playpen. You were only eighteen months old, and now she couldn’t confine you when she cooked dinner or cleaned house. In her eyes you had broken free, like Kong unchained, to terrorize her. She told me this story when we were teenagers, after you’d developed your “reputation.” Funny thing was, back when we were tots, I was the real rabble-rouser. And I blamed you for my childish misadventures.
One day I decided we should play Hansel and Gretel. I’d seen a cartoon version on TV and was fascinated by the brother and sister duo leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in the woods to find their way back home. I didn’t use breadcrumbs because ripping up and wasting bread seemed too complicated and sinful. Instead I found a package of Sugar Pops, those fluorescent yellow nuggets that you liked but I didn’t.
I woke you up. You were wearing your flannel Popeye pajamas, or maybe the pair with the jolly, anthropomorphized cars and trucks. I poured some Sugar Pops into your moist hand. Some spilled on the hardwood floor but that was merely the beginning of our trail. I continued sprinkling them from our bedroom into the “fronchroom.” (That’s how we pronounced “front room,” remember?) You followed me like a puppy, eating nuggets from your fist while crushing the ones beneath your feet into the swirling grey furrows of our living room carpet, then down our tiled hallway and into the kitchen. The total distance was only about thirty, forty feet, and once we arrived at our destination, the futility of my quest was apparent. I was five, an age when fantasy and logic battle for control of a child’s mind. Behind me was a needless trail and entering the kitchen from the porch door was Mommy, who had run downstairs to Gramma’s for a few moments while I was watching cartoons and you were sleeping. Her eyes exploded in tears of anger.
“What did you do?!”
So I said, “Georgie did it!”
She didn’t punish you, or me. I remember her kneeling on the floor, her hair set in “pin-curls,” round spirals stuck to her scalp by bobby-pins, the precursor to curlers, swearing that odd mix of Polish and English she learned from Gramma: “Sonofabitch! Psa klew cholera!”—Dog’s blood cholera! — sweeping up the cereal with a whisk broom and dustpan. Inexplicably, I associated the pin-curls with Mommy’s bad mood, wondering if they hurt her head.
The Hansel and Gretel incident started a trend in which I blamed you for my lapses of logic. Once Mommy mail ordered a “magic” Hawaiian plant advertised by Arthur Godfrey on his Talent ScoutsTV show. It arrived as a dried-up log, like a fat cigar, that Mommy placed in a shallow pan of water. The log sprouted a tiny furled leaf, which grew larger and larger, then sprouted several more. This plant and its growth fascinated me, so I never understood why I ripped off a leaf. As I did, I felt a strange detachment, as if I were outside my body observing myself.
I ran into the kitchen and tugged on Mommy’s duster. “Look what Georgie did!” I wailed. I don’t remember much of a reaction, beyond her tossing the leaf in the trash and going back to her womanly chores.
Then Mommy went into the hospital. Gallstone surgery at age 26. The hospital did not allow little kids to visit patients in their rooms, but we got special permission because it was Easter Sunday. Mommy was alive and in a good mood, and I honestly can’t recall much beyond that except for the charts at each footboard and a strange sense of awe and otherness.
The chart concept so intrigued me that once Mommy was discharged, I decided to play hospital back at home. You were my first patient. I drew a large number “1” on the wall above your headboard; I don’t remember if you were awake or asleep or even in the room. Regardless, you had no input in my shenanigans.
Next, I drew a “2” above my doll crib. Here I lay my Tiny Tears baby doll, who had real holes drilled in her eyes and puff-puff so after I fed her a bottle of “milk”—actually water—she could cry and “wet,” a polite term for pee. Over my own bed, I drew a “3.” Here I placed my big cloddy girl doll, who was advertised as having the ability to “walk,” which only meant she had jointed legs. Finally, I drew a “4” above your Popeye doll, who, for lack of a bed, recuperated in a shoebox. I wrote these numbers on the wall with a yellow Ticonderoga pencil. I stood back and admired my work for a few seconds until reason challenged me. Wasn’t writing on walls verboten? But pencil, that could be erased, right? I wasn’t sure. Best not to take chances.
I ran into the kitchen. “Mommy! Mommy! Look what Georgie did!”
She followed me back to the bedroom to survey the damage. Either she was too pissed to yell or too tired from her recent surgery to care.
All she said was, “Your brother doesn’t know how to write.”
Oops.
Later I watched my Gramma scrub the walls with Bon Ami, relieved to see my numbers gradually fade away.
Neither of us were ever afraid of insects. Adults warned us about bees and wasps, but none ever harmed us. We caught fireflies, put them in jars, and let them go. We let ants crawl on our hands, watched crickets and grasshoppers with rapt attention. Ladybugs were special, sacred bugs, perhaps because the way their beetle-like shells, seemingly hard and permanent, became wings: they were the original Transformers.
But there was another ladybug, Daddy’s evil ladybug, an obnoxious battery-operated toy that had crawled into our lives when I was five and you were two. Dad waited until we were asleep, then unleashed it on our bedroom floor. A grinding mechanical racket awakened us. A monster was scuttling across our carpet, bouncing like a pinball, its red eyes flashing in the darkness. I quickly recovered when I realized it was just a toy. But you were screaming.
“It’s just a ladybug!” Daddy yelled above the cacophony.
This didn’t help. You began yelling “Ladybug! Ladybug!” and I quickly joined in. “Help! Ladybug!” Perhaps I was stuck in that child-space between fantasy and reason, or perhaps your fear was contagious, or perhaps I was screaming in camaraderie, hoping our combined uproar would extricate the monster sooner.
Initially Mommy laughed. Then she realized we were sincerely frightened and told my father, “Dosyc! Dosyc!—Enough!”
I remember Daddy, the next day, flipping over the ladybug and showing me its underside. “It’s just a machine,” he said. He opened it up and took out the batteries, explaining something I was too young to understand about electrical currents. Nor did I understand why, a few days later, he unleashed the ladybug again in the dead of the night, and listened to us scream.
There would soon be greater fears.
I was told over and over that I was getting my tonsils out, and afterwards I could eat all the ice cream I wanted. This seemed wonderful—until I was lying on the operating table with an anesthesia mask on my face.
“Count backwards from ten,” the doctor commanded.
“Take it off!” I shouted, even though, rest assured, I knew my numbers.
The doctor tried to help. “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
“Take . . . it . . .”
And then the mask was off. I was awake. My throat burned. My head ached. I did not want any ice cream; I only wanted to sleep, which was hard because the other children in the ward were watching Garfield Goose on Channel Nine, and the stupid goose-puppet kept clapping his beak. I’d been duped. Nobody told me I wouldn’t want any ice cream.
Then you needed hernia surgery. Dr. Hall said it was because you stretched yourself beyond your limits, lifted things that were too heavy for you, and that you were a wild and crazy boy. At least this was the explanation that Mommy understood and disseminated among family and friends. Daddy demonstrated the problem to me by interlocking the fingers of both his hands: “This, you see, is a wall of muscle.”
Then he poked his thumb through his interlocked fingers: “And this is a hernia.” He never said intestines, but he didn’t need to. I got the point. You needed to be calmed down, corralled, roped and broken, so your guts wouldn’t go popping out all over the place. But now it was too late, and Dr. Hall would have to cut you open, put your innards back where they belonged, and sew you back together.
This sounded serious. As I had no scars, I assumed that Dr. Hall had shoved her hand down my throat while I was asleep and grabbed the offending tonsils, similar to how Mommy shoved her hand down a dead turkey’s neck to pull out the little packet of organ meats. But you would have to be cut open and sewed up! You’d also have to stay in the hospital for ten whole days compared to my one, which to me meant that your illness was ten times worse than mine.
I visited you in the hospital. Mommy made a special trip because you were crying for your security blanket. You wore a blue hospital gown, like a girl’s nightgown, and your arms were tied down to the bed so you wouldn’t rip open your stitches. You were so happy to see Mommy there holding your Popeye doll. A male doctor teased you: “Why would a big boy like you need a dolly?” Mommy got peeved and said, “It’s not a doll, it’s Popeye the Sailor.” I wanted to tell the doctor that it’s not a doll unless you can change its clothes and Popeye’s sailor suit was permanent. I wanted to tell you that adults sometimes say stupid shit to kids just to make noise; they don’t mean it. But I couldn’t find the words for anything my brain could think or my heart could feel. Then a nurse undid your arms because Mommy was there to keep an eye on you. Mommy handed you the blanket.
“I just washed it,” she assured the doctor.
You nestled that blanket against your cheek like Linus in the Peanuts cartoon.
Finally, you noticed me.
You shouted, “Yawyee!” the only way you could pronounce “Laurie.”
At that moment, I took it all in: your vulnerability, both emotional and physical. My fear that you might die. My joy that you were alive. But mostly, my empathy, for I vividly imagined how it felt to be you, in that bed with a big ouchy so close to your dangly boy-parts, sleeping there night after night in the wrong pajamas, being taken care of by weird people saying weird shit to you, making you eat a Spam sandwich when all you wanted was a hot dog with ketchup. And everything I thought and felt added up to one word: love.
I loved you. I didn’t know that before, but now I did.
I never framed you for my crimes again. I didn’t have to. Soon you would have your own crimes for Mommy and Daddy to worry about. Your badass reputation started with a bug. You were five years old, a survivor of two hernia surgeries and our father’s sick, gratuitous spankings—he had said he was punishing us for “general principles,” claiming he didn’t need a reason, and always when Mommy wasn’t home. You were spanked and hit with a belt just because, what? — Daddy needed batting practice? So perhaps you needed to even the score.
Anyway, the bug wasn’t a benign ladybug but some kind of large black wasp or roach. You set the thing on fire. Held it over the gas burner with hot dog tongs and watched it burn to death. Somehow, in your fear or clumsiness, you dropped the flaming insect to the ground, where it put a nice sear into our new tile floor, in our new kitchen, in our new house.
The new house made Daddy nervous. He wanted the independence of living in a single-family home without his in-laws living below him. But he worried about money. He was obsessed with our turning off the lights when we left a room, as well as dirty streaks and hand prints on the walls.
And into this milieu, you dropped a flaming insect on our new linoleum tile floor, leaving a noticeable black gouge.
The hysteria started slowly. First, Mommy saw the mark and called me to the scene. “Do you know what that is?” she said. There was no trace of accusation in her voice, as if perhaps the house came with that black mark, and she wanted to know if I remembered it. She tried scrubbing it off with no luck. Then she asked you, and for a few brief minutes, the scene was almost comedic. You went into your bedroom, and pulled a shoe box out from beneath your bed. Inside was the dead insect, burnt to an unrecognizable crisp.
You were afraid, you told her, so you hid it. You could have said, “Look what Yawyie did” or flushed it down the toilet. But you didn’t. You confessed.
Mommy became so frantic that all she could do was make phone calls. I’m not sure to whom, but probably Gramma or her cousin Lorraine. Her son was playing with fire. He could have burned himself or set the house on fire. And why was he torturing insects? What was wrong with him?
You told Mommy that you set the bug on fire because you wanted to see what would happen. This deeply disturbed her, even though we had a fly swatter hanging from the doorknob and spray cans of Raid beneath the sink and TV commercials for the product featured animated insects dropping dead into cute little bug graves with their own tiny headstones.
Daddy, however, was more concerned with the damage to his new home. Mommy first explained what happened calmly. She told Daddy not to spank you, but I knew he would. He spanked us for far less, and now he had a big, juicy reason.
“Georgie, get over here!”
He cornered you in your bedroom. I heard your screams, the cracking of Daddy’s belt, Mommy screaming, “C’mon, George, enough! Dosyc! Dosyc!” I wanted to hide in my own bedroom, but I was afraid to pass your door, afraid if I did, I’d be implicated too. So I stood, immobile, trying to make myself invisible. It worked.
From that day on, our reputations were engraved in stone. Before, Daddy would call us “The Monsters” collectively, asking my mother, “Did the Monsters behave themselves today?” Then after the bug thing, you alone were the Monster, the troublemaker, the bad boy. My new nickname was “Useless,” as in “C’mere Useless, I got a job for you,” followed by a request to make him a sandwich or go downstairs to see if he’d left his cigarettes on the bar or help him roll pennies. I always did. And regardless, I was always “Useless.” Or perhaps, an unintentional burden: Daddy would bitch about the expense of my allergy doctor and glasses and orthopedic shoes and piano lessons, just like years later he’d bitch about your bail money.
Mommy never called us Monsters nor me “Useless.” I was lucky. Her nickname for me was “Dolly.” I was her doll, her reflection. Earning her love was as easy as lying in bed #3, looking back at her lovingly with my baby doll eyes. Not to say that Mommy didn’t love you. But you couldn’t be her reflection. She was an only child with no baby brothers; your poor tittle deemed you a foreigner, and like all men, your capabilities were potentially nefarious.
When you were seventeen, you almost really burned our house to the ground. You set something aflame in Daddy’s workroom—newspaper, rags, who knows? —in the middle of the night. I remember Daddy commanding me, Useless, to run to our next-door neighbor’s house and ask them to call the fire department.
I remember tight-ass Norm answering the door in his pajamas, and me feeling both embarrassed and hysterical.
“Our house is on fire! You have to call the fire department!”
Norm stared at me, confused, as if he wasn’t sure whether I was serious or had fallen down some drug-induced rabbit hole myself. He finally said he would call, but his voice offered no concern or comfort.
Mommy and I stood outside as the firemen walked around to the back. Sundance, the schnauzer, was at our feet. Mommy put her arm around me and sobbed—a delayed reaction. Fortunately, the fire damage was minimal. I have a vague memory that Daddy put it out before the firemen even arrived.
Whatever you were on at the time—some crazy combo of amphetamines and PCP and whatever-the-fuck your dealer handed you—contributed to your twisted thinking. You said that you set the fire in Daddy’s workroom because you didn’t want to burn my wedding dress, which was hanging on the clothesline on the other side of the basement—as if your fire could contain itself to an area you willed it to. Yet I was flattered you didn’t want my wedding dress to burn. It meant that you loved me as much as I wanted to still love you.
You OD’d seven years after that fire. You were no longer the monster. You were simply the dead son. After you died, Daddy no longer called me “Useless,” although in his defense, the moniker had been gradually losing popularity. As a girl, I could not be Daddy’s reflection, but I had to be good for something, otherwise his existential void would be too vast.
Mommy told me that after you died, she would dream about you. You were always a little boy in her dreams, full of love and playfulness. I didn’t have dreams, but clung to memories of our shared playtimes. Going to the prairie and bringing home a stinking bucket of tadpoles, watching them grow legs, then feeling like heroes when we dumped them back into the creek.
Playing Hi-Ho! Cherry-O, our first board game, a baby game. Then Sorry, Concentration, Mouse Trap, and finally Monopoly—you stole money from the bank when you thought I wasn’t looking. Watching cartoons: the Flintstones, Jetsons, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, Road Runner and Woody Woodpecker. Once we fought over possession of a Woody Woodpecker comic book and I hit you in the head with a building block. You cried and Daddy spanked me; at the time I realized that I was finally getting hit for something I deserved and felt sorry for doing.
Each December we would go through the Sears catalog, you with a blue crayon, I with pink or red, and encircle everything we wanted for Christmas. I would neatly make my mark on three or four items, but you’d go hog wild, manically looping dozens of toys—sometimes entire pages—as if somehow, by circling your heart’s desires, you could magically manifest them.
When you were very little, you hoped to manifest toy dump trucks and concrete mixers. You were fascinated by construction work. Whenever we drove near a construction site, you would shout, “Doing! Doing!” Then we moved into our own house and you were intrigued by the new home being built next door. What better treat for a four-year-old boy than to watch workmen lay a concrete foundation only a few feet from his own bedroom window, then watch them lay bricks and cement them together row by row. “Doing! Doing!” you shouted in your excitement. You allowed me the privilege of playing with your Lincoln Logs, Erector Set, and finally your Kenner’s Girder and Panel Construction set. We sat on the floor and figured out together how to build a skyscraper with a working elevator, remember that? We all thought you’d work in construction when you grew up. You did work briefly as an apprentice electrician; in fact, your fellow apprentices all attended your funeral. But most of your “doing” in the last half of your 26-year life was spent doing drugs.
But I don’t want to think about watching you shoot up at the kitchen counter where our mother only earlier had cooked us dinner. I don’t want to relive your violence, threats, thievery, deceit, and madness. All I want to think about is you lying in that hospital bed, and what it felt like loving you. All I want to think about is you holding your security blanket close to your face, desperately needing security, whether it came from a blanket, all the toys in the Sears catalog, or something far more nefarious. Wait. All I want to think about is you and that blanket. Forget everything else. I want to kill all the bad and remember only the good. But whenever I do, the bad always manages to crawl its way back in.
I don’t know about you, but I blame the bugs.
Laurel DiGangi’s work has appeared in the Chicago Reader, Denver Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and Fourth Genre, among others. She currently teaches at Woodbury University in Burbank, California. “Bugs” is a stand-alone chapter of her memoir-in-progress; other segments have been published in Ray’s Road Review, SLAB, and Under the Gum Tree.