i rented Riding in Cars With Boys and watched it tonight. i have to admit, i kinda put it off for the last flick (after Ocean’s Eleven, The Impostor, and He Got Game. i figured it was gonna be another Drew vehicle, but at least a pretty good one. i was wrong. it was great, and she was really, really good in it (go Drew!).
but what i wasn’t expecting was the vast similarities between the lives of the author’s son and my own. in fact, it caught me off guard with such force that it knocked me over. about a third of the way through i found myself completely in a state of shock; just fifteen minutes ago i was out in the garage smoking and nearly in tears.
for the moment, let me just say that they were right on the money. the music; the heroin; the beer bottles; the pools; the clothes; the second-hand furniture; the paintthirsty wood; the heart-wrenchingly polite meeting fifteen years too late to do any sort of good… everything. so i will spare you the painful details and trivialities of my life for now and tell you what was different about my life from Jason Donofrio’s. (…so they spared me from having to write that book i’d always bragged i was gonna write… good, i always figured i’d be long gone before i ever actually got around to writing it.)
my father was the good one, not my mother. actually, he wasn’t good. he was the lesser of the Two Evils. if Beverly had drunk and gotten into fights and landed herself in jail about thirty more times and run around with a bunch of stupid biker fucks, they woulda been much more on target. also, my dad couldn’t do it. he had to let his parents to the job for him. (yes, this was the Good One. not real good, i know.)
i didn’t have an Amelia. in fact, i hope my parents’ friends never had kids, for their kids’ sakes; they were all just as fucked up as my parents were. and my grandfather was not a cop, but an Air Force Colonel. i didn’t get too many scenes with my actual parents at all, in fact. but the ones i did get…
shit, my whole life has been this elaborate attempt to replay my early childhood. an abstraction. a really weird and complicated retroextrapolation of what i would have enjoyed had i lived the life that at least Jason Donofrio had.
i know what you’re thinking. “waaah, woe is me!” and you’re right. i am very bitter, and i suspect i will always have that as a part of who i am. who wouldn’t? instead of getting one parent who was halfway decent, if not fully, i got none. or rather, i got two amazing grandparents. so yeah, life wasn’t all that bad. not all the time anyway.
but my experience has never been an altogether straight one. i’ve always been fucked in the head; always confused as to the who, where, why, how, and whens of love. i can’t trust people, not even close friends. i don’t know when people are lying to me (this has all too often been chalked up as naivete, and perhaps rightfully so, what with the same result set and everything). i have no idea what a normal life is, or what normal love is, or even what normal itself is (in my view, a mixed blessing at any rate).
funny thing is, is that i really have always wanted to relive it. but to get it right. and maybe getting it right would mean i would have been aborted. (i’m not soliciting for empathy here, just stating the facts.)
anyway, i saw a movie tonight. i never had any home movies of me or my life. so it was just a little weird to see one for the first time.
(NOTE: at this point i was going to ask that no one reply to this post, because i’d feel all bad about not being polite and responding back, because i have nothing more to say on the subject for the time being. but then i’d feel even weirder, so if you wanna reply, then by all means please do so. just please also know that i will absolutely, positively not be responding back, since i’m pretty much out of breath on the subject. in fact all replies are warmly welcome and will be read and appreciated; i’m just too emotionally exhausted to reply back.)
p.s., please forgive me for my rampant self-indulgence tonight.
