It's All Relative (20 page)

My father, for once, did not take the bait, could not respond to her barbs.

“Isn't that correct, Ted?” my mother yelled at him, trying hard not to bawl, shaking, her face twisted in agony. “You answer me, you old witch, do you hear? You answer me! Answer me, Ted! I cannot lose you!”

My father looked at my mom and, in a voice that was barely audible, whispered, knowing it was what he must say for her sake, “Shut the hell up, Geraldine!”

Here, now, my father dying, my mother yelling, the one moment in life when nothing was clear, I suddenly became completely sure of one thing: My parents loved each other more than I could ever comprehend.

And I loved them more than I had ever let them know.

I called 911.

The two minutes waiting for the ambulance were the longest in my life, the longest my father had ever been silent, and so I sat holding my father on the front steps of my house in the middle of the night, rocking with him, telling him I loved him, that it was going to be okay, not at all convinced that it was.

We were both wearing tattered sweats, and Gary, who was standing at the front door, watching helplessly, would later say he could not tell us apart as we rocked.

My father was carted into the back of the ambulance, my mother following, sirens blaring, lights flashing, neighbors watching. Even now, my dad was still the center of attention.

After what seemed like an eternity, my father's physician, a Pakistani doctor who looked like an Indian Don Rickles, finally emerged to tell us my dad had suffered a minor heart attack and that a stent had been inserted; however, he had suffered no heart damage and would be just fine.

In fact, it turned out that the most baffling and troubling aspect of my father's condition, the doctor explained, was the discovery of a tick on the head of my father's penis, which had been removed but needed to be “sent away for testing.”

Following this announcement, a crowd of people waiting in the ER turned to look at my family curiously, as if we were dirty beggars in the street.

“So let me get this straight,” I whispered. “My dad's heart is going to be okay, but he had a tick on his dick.”

“That is a fairly accurate estimation,” the doctor replied.

“He's just a filthy old man,” my mother exclaimed. “I tell him to get in the tub and scrub those nasty old balls, but he never listens.”

The doctor, along with about thirty people in the ER, stared at my mother. I was wearing sweatpants, my hair sticking straight up, Clearasil dotting the end of my nose. I now realized everyone here thought that my balls were probably dirty, too, that there was a good chance I might have a bloodsucking insect attached to my penis.

“So the old goat is not dead, doctor?” my mother asked.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Rouse. I'm not following …” he said.

Their routine was still safe.

A short while later, we were allowed to see my dad. My mom went in first to spend a few minutes with him alone, and Gary followed. I needed some time. As I rounded the corner to my father's room, I stopped for a second in the hall and watched Gary holding the hands of my mom and dad, an unlikely family circle laughing. It was everything I had wanted in my life.

We were—despite our differences, our oddities—a family.

I was proud to be my father's son.

When I walked in, my dad was saying, “The doc couldn't understand a word I was sayin', and I couldn't understand a word he was sayin'!” His voice was weak but, again, filled with life. Just then a pretty nurse—a young blonde who looked like she might be hired to star in some low-budget porn flick like
Naughty Nurses
or
Fill My Prescription
—walked in to check on my dad.

“Geraldine, you've been replaced,” he said. “You serve fried taters in this place, hon'?”

“Shut up, you fat old witch, you're done with taters for a while,” my mother said, her facade finally cracking, tears welling in her eyes. She leaned in to hug my father and kiss him on the cheek. “You shut up now, sir.”

Their voices were, at last, music to my ears.

I
was hammering my mother about her smoking one summer evening while standing on the patio when she turned to me, taking a deep drag off her cigarette, and said, “We all have an addiction, Wade. If it's not smoking, it's drinking. And if it's not drinking, it's shopping. And if it's not shopping, it's sex.”

She blew a gray-blue plume of smoke my way, and I coughed.

Just to piss her off.

Or perhaps it was an involuntary response, because I knew she was right.

Come to think of it, I knew one person who fit each of her categories. I had discovered porn videos in a shoe box in the attic of a seemingly straitlaced married friend whose house I was watching while he was on vacation; I had found empty vodka bottles in the trash bin of my ultra-Christian neighbors, who refused to even acknowledge me when I waved; I even spied the wife of a friend, who had recently been let go from his corporate job, charging oodles of skirts at Ann Taylor when I stopped by the mall to buy a latte.

Yes, my mother's words haunted me, deeply, and not just because I was a modern-day Gladys Kravitz, a defect I pawned off on my background as a journalist more than any psychological flaw.

No, my mother's words haunted me because I knew I harbored a secret addiction worse than liquor, sex, and shopping: Pez.

I began collecting Pez dispensers as a kid because they were an acceptable alternative to the Barbies I so desperately wanted. Although my Pez weren't realistic knockoffs of pretty girls who wore dazzling outfits, they were cute, colorful enough characters. I started simply, collecting angels and astronauts, before building to Bambi and Batman. I added Disney characters, and then one day my grampa gave me a rather battered Indian brave he'd had for years. My grampa gave me few personal gifts, so I cherished his Pez.

Most important, though, my Pez vomited candy. And for a fat little gay boy in rural America, that was better than having James at 15 come over to babysit.

I mainlined Pez candy because I was bored, and it was fun and addictive, not because I was ever really crazy about the taste: The fruity flavors were sweet, sure, but they were chalky and fake-tasting.

“Heavens to Betsy, Wade,” my mother said, staring at me one afternoon as I overdosed on Pez in front of the TV. “It's like watching
Valley of the Dolls
.”

But it wasn't the candy I was addicted to: The dispensers were the stars, my surrogate friends.

Eventually I gathered enough Pez to cover the top of my nightstand; really, I gathered enough Pez to serve as my army of bloodless buddies. They were cute and sweet, they always wanted to play with me, but, best of all, they were mute and couldn't talk back, couldn't make fun of me, couldn't call me “Turd Burglar.”

Still, when junior high school came calling, Pez suddenly seemed a bit childish to collect. I hungered to have flesh-and-blood friends.

Sensing this, I was encouraged by my mom and grampa to switch to a more acceptable hobby for boys my age: coin collecting.

And it was a hobby that genuinely seemed to interest a number of local boys, albeit those who liked to go to the local grocery
and Laundromat and ask customers and clerks if they could look through their change.

But for me, buffalo nickels, bicentennial quarters, and Susan B. Anthony dollars just weren't as much fun as my plastic pals. And money was too dirty to stick in my mouth.

Eventually, as we all do, I packed my childhood hobbies away and didn't really give my Pez much thought for nearly two decades, until I moved into my first home and my parents saw it as an opportunity to rid themselves of the junk I'd left behind at their house.

“We want to turn your bedroom into a study,” my mother told me over the phone one night. “And we need to get rid of all the clutter. So we're bringing your stuff up next week, okay?”

For some reason this stung, even though I'd been gone nearly a decade and a half. My childhood home, without any trace of me in it? It seemed as wrong as the pope in an HRC tank top.

“What are you and dad going to
study
, mother?” I asked tersely. “Episodes of
Matlock
?”

“Sweetie, your room is still decorated as a tribute to our nation's bicentennial. Remember when your patriotic side meshed with your decorating side? I mean, the walls are red, white, and blue. Guests don't know whether to sleep or salute. You've got so much stuff here … boxes of coins, boxes of Pez.”

My Pez, I thought, my mouth instantly watering. My friends.

As soon as my parents unloaded my memorabilia and left to turn my bedroom into a study that was part French countryside and part Gloria Swanson mansion from
Sunset Boulevard
, I slowly went through the boxes they had brought, lost in time, freeing my Pez that had long been housed in an army of tattered shoe boxes. Though they hadn't seen the light of day in decades, my dispensers still looked bright and cheery.

I pulled them out one at a time, remembering the lonely kid I had once been, thanking my Mickey Mouse, Spider-Man, and Bozo for being my friends at a time when I really needed them.

Like me, my friends had aged, grown a bit rough around the edges, but they were all still intact. All except, that was, for my grampa's little Indian brave. The feather that used to adorn his little plastic skull was no longer attached, and, no matter how hard I searched, or begged my parents to comb their home, it was gone.

I decided to display my Pez on a computer desk in the space that adjoined our bedroom, a sort of home-office-slash-closet.

But when we had sex, Gary freaked, thinking my childhood Pez were watching him deflower their friend. And when he worked, he said he could feel their disdain. And when he slept, he had
Trilogy of Terror
nightmares that my Pez were going to come to life, hide out under the bed, and then stab his feet with little knives when he put his tootsies on our wood floor.

“They've got to go,” Gary said. It was his first few months of living with me, and he'd kept his redecorating bug under control. Until now. “And so does the recycling bin you believe is an end table.”

I switched jobs a short time later to work as PR director at a prep school, and found that kids were constantly coming into my office with their moms and searching for something to do while I was being castrated. So I decided to showcase my Pez in an old wood cabinet in my office, and was pleased to discover—even decades later—they still had the same mesmerizing effect not only on kids but also on their parents.

“My God! Pez! I used to collect Pez as a kid!”

“Oh, my goodness! I haven't seen Pez since Jimmy Carter was president!”

Slowly, parents began to bring me Pez: one a month, one a week, until it became a steady stream. And then a flood.

I was awash in a river of candy.

Parents brought me newer Pez like Garfields, Muppets, action heroes, and the Peanuts gang. And then I began to receive Pez that parents had unearthed at their summer cottages or found at antique
malls, like old Dumbos and Snow Whites. Even Gary's mom began to buy me Pez at every holiday: I received Pez chicks for Easter, Pez pumpkins and scary goblins for Halloween, Pez Santas and snowmen for Christmas.

But when I had finally accumulated a hundred or so Pez, my collection suddenly seemed puny and pathetic.

I wanted more. As many as I could get.

I wanted Pez no one else had.

I began to plead for Pez.

I began to shop online for Pez.

I realized that my pulse would race with each new Pez I purchased or received.

Something had clicked, something bad. Acquiring Pez was a rush, like porn, although the only hard things I was interested in seeing had bright plastic tubes and oddly shaped heads.

This obsession was silly, I realized, but in the blur of work and life I had trouble understanding why it had become so consuming.

Then, one Christmas, Gary's mother bought me a
Warman's Pez Field Guide
, a thick encyclopedia to all things Pez, including their monetary values and unique identifying characteristics.

I opened the guide and my mouth dropped, just like my beloved companions. I realized I was sitting on a fortune.

It seemed, according to my guide, that I had collected a lot of Pez without feet. In the early days of Pez, the dispensers were made without that little extra piece of plastic at the bottom; in the late eighties, the plastic feet were added to help the dispensers more easily stand upright without tipping.

Over the next few months I tried to calculate how much my booty was worth and came to the rough estimate that I was sitting on enough Pez to redecorate my dining room, or go to Punta Cana for ten days.

“Cash them in!” Gary said.

But I couldn't.

And then I heard on our local TV that the annual Pez Collectors Convention was coming to town.

My people!
I thought.
This is a sign!

I headed to the convention one June day—nervous, anxious, but excitedly toting a few of my most prized Pez. I walked inside and realized I had stumbled into Pez Paradise. There were Pez everywhere: locked cases of rare Pez dispensers worth thousands and thousands of dollars; old, uneaten candy packs worth thousands and thousands of dollars; antique Pez that were being sold for thousands and thousands of dollars.

Things that had been purchased for pennies were now virtual plastic Picassos.

My mouth watered. My eyes glazed.

I was a genius!

Perhaps, I thought, as I stared at a rare soft-head version of Dumbo on display in a bulletproof case that was more highly valued than my car—and, most likely, my home—Gary was right.

I should sell.

And then I heard: