Memoirs

Just in case you're wondering why I haven't been blogging lately, here is the first few pages of the memoir I've been working on. It might sound redundant considering my prior blog posts, but hey, you have to start somewhere... And just to remind you (and myself): The First Draft is Always Crap. I'm thinking of getting it tattooed on my forearm.

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I lived my life with the perpetually nagging feeling that I could not be normal. Not that normalcy was an impossibility for me (in fact, I always seemed to fit in quite well), but somewhere along the time line of my life I made a decision to consciously reject conventions on a daily basis with rigor and pride. If I trace my resolution in defiance, its onset would probably date back to 1999, when my first attempts at staving off the norm were made manifest by facial piercings and tattoos. Back then, the gauge of how well I was living against the grain was measured by the amount of punk rock patches and studs I could fit onto my hideous leather jacket, or the visible wear and tear on my over-sized skate shoes from doing ollies and three quarters of a kick-flip, long before Avril Lavigne made skateboarding cool. Yes, everyone, I was a punk rock rebel, and you better have damn well recognized it.

Although I would deny it at them time, my punk rock rebellion was a direct result of my father's passing. It was a slow and painful death, the kind where catchphrases like "at least you had time to say goodbye" and "he's not in pain anymore" are offered as consolation but provide no solace. I was thirteen when he was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer, before the childlike admiration one holds for their parents is shattered by adolescent dissension.

We were sitting around the kitchen table on the evening my parents broke the news. I was seated next to my older brother Dave, and across from him sat my little brother. My father was at the head of the table, flanked by my mother and eighteen year old sister. We were all seated in our quotidian six o'clock dinner spots and to a distant observer, this assembly would have appeared to be just another family meal. But being in the room, you would have been able to feel the heaviness that lingered in the air like the suffocating tangibility of Los Angeles smog, as though our family was trapped in a valley of toxic words that spewed out my mother's mouth like fumes from an exhaust pipe.

I studied the outdated maroon and turquoise wallpaper with which my father had covered the kitchen walls while the words "cancer" "terminal" and "chemotherapy" floated through the air, then landed on the floor with heavy lifelessness. I wanted to sweep up those words and throw them in the trash can under our kitchen sink, so we could all forget about them and continue joking about my father's horrible taste in interior decor. I remember thinking that for all of the enviable attributes my father possessed, style was not one of them.

The only time I looked into his eyes that night was by command, when he promised us that he would live to see each of our birthdays over the next year. We had celebrated my thirteenth birthday six days before this fateful family meeting, and I believed if I could avoid turning fourteen, my father might live forever.

When he slipped into a coma on the afternoon of my fourteenth birthday, I was overcome with an unshakable sense of culpability. By waking up on October 19th 1999, I had granted my father permission to die. I didn't want to open my gifts. I didn't want to read my birthday cards, especially the one that was signed "DAD" in an erratic and shaky script, which was so unlike what would have come from the hand of my strong, immovable father of last year. I wanted everyone to pretend it was a normal day, so that we could all go on believing that my father had years of life left and ignore his weakened and gray body.

He died three days later.

I was upset when the coroners left a rose on the bed after they loaded his body into the back of the ambulance. The symbol of life resting on my dead father's pillow seemed to mock the gray and sunken head that had rested on it moments earlier. It was impossible that such a strong, unshakable man could have deteriorated into the hollow corps that lay breathless under the beige fleece blanket in our front room before they put him in a bag and carted him away, as though his life had been readily disposable and traded in for a flower. I hated the rose, but I was glad his body was gone. The lifeless figure had only been an effigy-a tribute to what my father no longer was. He was the father you would be proud to go to the public pool with, not only because of his washboard abs and ripped biceps, but because you could point and say "that's my dad" when he did handstand inverted flips off the high diving board, or when the swim team coach called on him to fill in for the sixteen and older relay team.

And now we had this rose.

I became withdrawn and angry, although it was a silent anger directed mostly at God.

I had been raised Mormon, a religion that teaches children to pray for what they want with earnest faith. At the onset of my father's illness, I held a perfect faith that my prayers would heal him. I knelt by my bedside night after night, pleading with God to restore my father's strength so that he would no longer be a shrunken shell of the man I loved so intensely. Over the months, I saw my prayers and my father's condition adopt a hyperbolic relationship; the more I prayed, the worse he became. When we turned our living room into an at-home hospice for my dad who couldn't make it upstairs, my prayers became sporadic and uttered with less intent. When the cancer spread and rendered him paralyzed from the waist down, and we had to use a lift to get him from bed to wheelchair, I stopped praying. Three days after my father died and five days after my fourteenth birthday, I broke a cardinal religious rule and got drunk. After that, it seemed there was no turning back.

While some people turn to God in death's wake, I ran from Him in vehement spite. If God existed, I wanted no relationship with the entity that taught miracles and compassion but had no time for a young girl's earnest prayers. If He didn't exist- which at the time seemed a more viable explanation for my fruitless pleas- then there was no point in maintaining communication with a lie. And so I began my purposeful yet subconscious crusade to defy every law and guideline that had been established by society and religion.

Fortunately for my deliberate image of abnormality, being Mormon gave my rebelliousness some added credibility. The main form of rebellion that Mormons tend to celebrate is in their rejection of alcohol, tobacco, freak dancing and consequently, premarital sex. In that sense, Mormons are pretty bad ass in terms of their steadfastness against societal pressures. I hadn’t lived my teenage years living in that particular avenue of societal revolt, and in that sense I was a Mormon dissident, while paradoxically adhering to the norm of teenage rebellion. Mormons also tend to stray away from any outward appearance of rebellion (other than rebelling against sexiness through modesty). That means tattoos, body piercings and patched leather jackets are generally frowned upon. As a result, not only was I rejecting mainstream society by being a punk, I was simultaneously dissenting from my religious culture, making my insurgence the Inception-style ‘rebellion inside of a rebellion’.