Happy Friday from the brink!!!!!!! Crumbling institutions? We’ve got ‘em! A dying party? RIP! A tendency to disassociate as an act of self-preservation? YEP. This week marked my return to satire as, alongside anyone else paying attention, I reckoned with the newest wave of truly disastrous SCOTUS rulings. In this vein, I’ll have a new piece out in The Belladonna next week!
Besides being utterly consumed by the weight of these times, I’ve been…ok?! May Gray has passed and June Gloom is no more. Instead, I’m reeling over it being July somehow, caught in my classic perpetual fright state of But Am I Making the Most of My Time? Naturally, this general sense of panic is compounded by my pending one-year LA-iversary (July 21st!), but when I actually slow down to take inventory of the first half of this year, I’m able to be much gentler with myself (gross but true!):
In the last six months, both of my parents have continued to face multiple health crises including hospital stays and unexpected travel, my day job has regularly kicked my ass, I’ve experienced a few mental health hiccups (wheeeee!), and this recent bout of COVID took me out for a quick minute. And yet! In those same six months, I’ve continued to create a new home, prioritize friendships, grow my self-care practices, enthusiastically take up hiking as mandated by California law, study with new teachers / explore new ways of being and approaching craft (the dream!), sign with a commercial agent (self-tapes be damned!), and really dedicate more time to writing—including something big and juicy and terrifying. 👀🍊
Plus, I FUCKING MOPPED MY APARTMENT THIS WEEK! I MOPPED IT SO GOOD MY LOWER BACK HURTS! YEEEEHAWWW!
Am I now the Most Admirable Person On Earth??? Ok it’s less so giving gentle and more so giving delusion—GENTLE DELUSION???—but BBs, I’m all in on myself! Whole-heartedly recommend taking your own inventory so that you can give yourself all the flowers you truly deserve.
Something I keep coming back to again and again is the notion of essence, the idea that we have always been who we are and that to really grow in alignment with ourselves means to constantly go back to the well of who we were as children. I certainly don’t mean that we should never outgrow wounds or behavior patterns that aren’t working for us, but I do mean that by paying attention to our essential qualities—even-no, especially the embarrassing ones—we may find our paths ahead better illuminated.
Which brings me to the first time I saw a dead body!
It was 1996. Princess Diana was still with us, I was set to marry Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and because this was Florida in the 90s, my dad was recently out of rehab for crack-cocaine addiction. He’d rented a duplex in Cocoa Beach, smack between A1A and the ocean, just a few blocks from the pier. The outside boasted a chalky pink paint job and the inside extensive wood paneling. The fridge held my oversized jawbreaker, the stereo a Shabba Ranks cassette, and the living room a small tv and a well-loved deck of Uno cards. The roaches kept to the light fixtures in the bathroom, but I liked to keep my toothbrush covered just in case.
This sleepover happened Mother’s Day weekend, which sounds counterintuitive but my mom worked nights as a dancer (Florida in the 90s), so it was usual for my dad to take me Saturday night and drop me back at home Sunday afternoon. The novelty of this weekend was that Rachel got to come with me. Rachel was my neighbor, best friend, and total bitch. It’s ok, I can call her that because we were both 7.
I was so excited to bring a friend because I absolutely loved hanging out with my dad and he finally had his own place, though I have a feeling Rachel’s parents weren’t looped into his earlier tendencies to make sporadic drug runs. The last time he’d watched us while my mom was at work, he put in a Blockbuster VHS of Nightmare on Elm Street and left for a few hours with strict instructions to not unlock the door for anyone. We got halfway through the movie and spent the next two hours hiding behind the toy box in my closet until he got back.
This Saturday came along and Dad picked us up rocking his gold hoop, jean shorts, and a pack of Marlboro Reds tucked into a shirt pocket. We climbed in the truck with our Thumbelina backpacks toting our best PJs and two faded bathing suits. Nuthin' but a "G" Thang serenaded us over the causeway and a few minutes later, we got settled in while Dad ordered Papa John’s.
Mid-dinner, he gets up to go to the bathroom. Rachel confidently remarks, “Your dad’s nipples look like pepperonis.”
“NO THEY DON’T!”
“YES. THEY. DO!”
“NO THEY DON’T! MY DAD’S NIPPLES DO NOT LOOK LIKE PEPPERONIS, TAKE IT BACK!”
“NO”
“RACHEL TAKE IT BACK, MY DAD HAS NORMAL NIPPLES LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!”
“Fine, I take it back, but it’s still true!”
“PERVERT!!!!”
The toilet flushed and when Dad got back to the couch, we were sitting in silence–her smug with her little revelation and me fuming that I now have to grapple with whether or not my dad’s nipples look like pepperonis! See? Total bitch! Like most girls, I grew up seeking the approval of judgmental friends who relished in other people’s discomfort and I’m grateful everyday that this energy didn’t follow me into adulthood.
After pizza, I relented my resentment and we played Uno until it was time for bed. My dad took the Rooms to Go couch while Rachel and I filled his room with the deranged giggles of two 7 years olds. I remember feeling proud that she was having fun and I was looking forward to a morning at the beach. Body surfing! Digging for sand fleas! Getting sun! Having a bonafide sleepover at my Dad’s new house just felt really special, like a step towards normalcy, and I wanted it to be properly memorable.
Instead, we woke up to an overcast sky and rain coming down in fat, slow droplets. Dad got us breakfast from the barbecue place on the corner and by then, the sky was clearing a bit so we set out on a beach walk. Right as I was starting to worry that Rachel was bored, IT HAPPENED.
We were heading up the wooden stairs over a dune when I looked down to my right and spotted a man in the sawgrass. He had long unkempt hair and donned a mauve blanket covering his midsection and most of his legs, his bare feet visible where the draping stopped.
And now, this is the part of the story where I so badly I want to lie to you. Really. I want you to believe that I saw this man and that I was overcome with shock, with fear, with a wave of sadness. I want you to believe those things because–this man was dead. And–I knew he was dead. But my true and immediate 7 year-old feeling was one of pure and utter exhilaration. YES! Something truly momentous is happening! Rachel can’t be bored now and we shall mark this day in our collective memories for decades to come!
My dad, however, had a slightly different reaction.
“Justine, come on, he’s ok, he’s just asleep. Just let him sleep.”
“Dad! I don’t think he’s breathing. We should call someone!!”
Meanwhile, Rachel is rapidly losing color in her face and has walked intently to the end of the stairs. Who's reveling in someone else's discomfort now, Rachel??? All I’m left thinking is that she’s a baby and my dad is dumb. How can my dad, the smartest person in the entire world with nipples that definitely don’t look like pepperonis, not know that this man is dead?
Heavy with disappointment, I started to wonder if maybe he was right. Maybe this man is asleep and I really don’t want to be rude. I wouldn’t want him to wake up to find us staring—that’s impolite and I could imagine the shame one might feel when ogled. It’s not that I wanted him to be dead either. It’s just something in me wanted to get to take action — to tell someone, to spread the word, you know, honor the timeless human tradition of gossip and drama.
Our morning reached an anticlimactic end with dropping Rachel off at home. We parked outside my apartment and my dad pops in to chat with my mom and wish her happy mother’s day. I eventually hugged him goodbye and was supposed to be getting in the bathtub when I heard Bob Opsahl’s voice from the TV:
“We’re with a family in Cocoa Beach whose Mother’s Day walk came to a somber halt when they discovered the body of an unknown man.”
“MOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
“What!? Why aren’t you in the bath?!”
“I COULD HAVE BEEN ON THE NEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Y’all, I was absolutely beside myself.
It. Could. Have. Been. Me. I could have been there with a microphone, brushing my bangs out of my eyes, describing this experience straight to camera. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME!!! (Rhetorical! It’s too obvious! Don’t take the bait!)
All these years later, it is not lost on me that the crazed 7-year-old girl who desperately wanted to be the one breaking the news and reveling in the excitement is the same 35-year-old woman who loves to write and yap and stand on stages—really, to connect, and to share my shame in the hopes that you can share yours until we’re both cackling in shame’s face and exchanging tender back pats.
It’s also not lost on me, now, at 35 years old, that my dad, the smartest person in the world, also very much knew that this poor man was dead. It’s just that the last thing he needed was for the narrative to be “recovering addict with daughter and friend find naked, dead body on mothers’ day.”
For that, I am so grateful I didn’t get my demented little wish. Besides, it’s more fun to write a show about it instead. <3