Mussolini for the Holidays
May. 2nd, 2008 01:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonI was seventeen when I first shaved my head. I had just made the Junior Varsity wrestling team for my high school and wanted to commemorate the occasion with some form of intuitive ritual scarification. After all I was now counted amongst the ranks of the Stranahan Dragons, a title that had a certain butch pseudo militaristic grandiloquence to it, imagery of poetically named third world death squads or one of those singing, dancing street gangs out of West Side Story came to mind. Puberty was kind to me in it's final stage of adolescent metastasis. It gave me some extra mass and a last minute growth spurt to play with. I was aggro 24-7. If I wasn't weight lifting or getting stoned I was trying to get laid or working off the energy in manic bursts of onanism that would make even the most fervent hentai junkie blush. I went out for the team in hopes of burning off some of the rage and learning some moves to boost up my fighting skills (... because there is nothing more dangerous than an opponent versed in the art of the Fireman's Carry). I have no idea why they allowed misfit me into their little homo-erotic fraternity... and I didn't care. I was a Dragon now.
So there I was crouched over the toothpaste green colored sink of our home in Fort Lauderdale and one by one, began exhausting my father's supply of disposable orange and white bic razors. I had Black Flag's My War cranked as loud as it could go blasting through my speakers from my room and I sung along under the whitenoise of the faucet running. It took me just under an hour to clog up the sink with chunks of my hacked, slashed and scraped mohawk. My previous incarnation as a suburban teen anarchist was literally going down the drain. When I was done the dome of my head was flushed red and a series of scars, slashes and cuts criss-crossed into a rough map of the canals of Mars. I was aiming for this sort of Heavy Metal magazine, Richard Corben virile anti-hero look... what I got instead apparently was a man who had survived cranial surgery by a team of disposable razor wielding monkeys!
I stared for awhile at this man in the mirror, desperate to convince myself that he was anyone but the man he was actually looking at. This man, after all, wasn't some awkward punk rocker with vague notions of a nebulous revolution. No, this was someone new. This was a savage poet who wrote his verses with both fist and pen. This was an unstoppable zen fuck-machine. This was a man who would go skinny dipping in the 'shadow of the valley of death'. This was a postapocalyptic buddhist combat monk ready for any and all suckers. Most of all though... this was a man.
Or so I would have had myself believe.
In fact it turned out most folks didn't see it that way at all.
I was accused by my classmates of being 'White Power' by the shaved head alone. I was public enemy number one with a bullet. I had all my pussy privileges revoked. Cops pulled me over walking to class on a weekly basis. I found the metal heads I got stoned with at lunch were uneasily quiet in my presence. All of a sudden I wasn't invisible anymore. I was now a foreign exhange student from the country of Hitlervania.
This should have alarmed me but instead I found being hated much better than being ignored. I reveled in the irony that I was judged by my appearance as someone who judges people by their appearance. I took a perverse delight in the looks of terror or revulsion my very presence engendered. I was a Marvel comic monster-hero, I was Ben Grimm ugly with Bruce Banner mood swings. Mainly though I was a pretentious jackass who found being a self-inflicted pariah to hold some form of Byronesque mystique.
No one reacted worse than Granpa Babalon though.
Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma's trailer up in Seminole County. My parents argued the whole way there. It's a Thanksgiving tradition that spans back to the first Babalon's to step off the boat, whose first words in English would be to curse vehemently their in-laws who arrived right behind them. We pulled in and my uncles were already drunk as hobo's and wrestling half-naked in the driveway. Dad would have just kept driving if Mom didn't hop out of the car to begin kicking the shit out of both of them right there and then. The neighbors of the trailer park knew about this annual tradition of brother versus brother and as such had been watching the spectacle the whole time from an assortment of lawn chairs and improvised milk-cart seats.
Dad parked in Grandma's cactus bushes by the time Mom was dragging my two uncle's back inside. We followed her in and the whole Babalon clan was there and ready to eat an hour ago. My family has always believed that a polite guest is one who always arrives late and strives to leave as early as possible. What some would call misanthropy we called simple manners. My three aunts were there, with their bored evil cat eyes peering at my new 'do' with bunched up faces. My four female cousins, almost of all of whom had contributed to my sexual education at one point or another were there, as well as my Grandma who despite being half way into a bottle of Jameson's had prepared a scrumptious feast and of course Grandpa who sat at the head of the cramped table with all the majesty of a king who has forgotten he was overthrown years ago.
I had no sooner shrugged out my greeting to the Felini-family reunion when Grandpa suddenly took one look at me, dropped open his jaw, did a quick double take, bolted out of his chair and pointed his finger at me in horror. If you ever saw the 70's version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers where at the end the guy turns out to be a pod-person after all and when he finds the last human survivor he releases this horrible alien shriek. It was just like that only without the inhuman wail or Donald Southerland's moustache.
"What is it Henry?" Grandma asked nervously as all eyes fell on me.
"It's him!" he shouted and jabbed the air between us with his extended finger.
I looked around, hoping I'd catch that someone had snuck in behind me but no dice.
"Who Grandpa?" all four of my cousins asked in surround sound synchronicity.
"Mussolini!" Grandpa shouts, his spittle flying all across the tupaware dishes of cranberry sauce, stuffing, 'taters and turkey.
"Mussolini?" My uncle asked the other, eying me with confusion from under a pack of his papertowel bound ice-cubes.
"Benito Mussolini, perhaps" my father offered casually as he took his seat at the table, oblivious by choice to the mounting drama around him.
"Yes!" Grandpa slams his fist into the table sending all the glasses to jump at attention as if they were surprised out of their beds sleeping.
"No, Grandpa... it's me... Jack... remember you bought me my first He-Man doll?"
"I thought I killed you?" Grandpa grumbles the words through a miasma of beer breath, his eyes bulged out in animal terror and his teeth barred through a jungle of nicotine yellow beard.
"When'd you kill Jack?" my other Uncle asks from an identical ice-pack that is covered over the opposite eye of his brother.
"He didn't kill Jack, genius... Jack's right there" Uncle number two counters.
"Oh yeah... so who'd he kill then?"
"Mussolini apparently" my father answers disintrestedly reaching for one of the few surviving dinner rolls.
"You never killed Mussolini, Dad!" Mom speaks up wrapping her swelling knuckles in an ice-pack. This was true. It was also true that Grandad was there for the Allied invasion of Sicily in '43. Somehow age, boredom and senility had changed the events of the war for him. In this new revisionist history, Mussolini was strangled to death by Grandpa after he fought his way through a garrison of Brown Shirts.
"Are you sure?" Grandpa's piss & vinegar settle dilute into the waters of uncertainty. He looks around confused almost as if he's not sure why he's here. To be fair every member of the Babalon Clan has this look at family get togethers. He scratches his head and I give him a weak smile in return.
"Yes Dad... we've been over this a hundred times" Mom makes her way towards him, slowing down only to deliver a passing smack to both her brothers.
"Well..." Grandpa blinks as if coming out of a long dream then suddenly snaps off the left drumstick of the turkey and charges at me from across the room with it, "I'll get that fat, facist bastard once and for all!"
Before I knew it was being clubbed to death by my own grandfather, who now had the strength of a graying grizzly bear boosted by an adrenalin burst of pure insanity. I tried to run away but ended up tripping over Trixie (Grandma's cat) and crashing on my ass as Grandpa hovered over me, drumstick whipping me mercilessly and ranting something about the '7th Army kicking yer ass once and fer all!'.
Everyone was yelling all around me. Grandma was the loudest releasing this blood curdling howl that couldn't possibly come from a human throat but somehow did. Well...everyone that is except dad, who had helped himself to the other drumstick and was eating his Thanksgiving meal in relative peace. Finally Mom and my two uncles managed to pry him off me.
My cousins in chorus informed me that it would be best if I ate dinner outside, as far from the trailer as possible too please. I ended up eating Thanksgiving off a paper plate in the front seat of my Dad's car.
Later years would see the family attempt to find a way to bypass Grandpa's suspicions. The next year I had to don a wig. It was to no avail though. Grandpa became convinced it was Mussolini in disguise. The next year after that I tried to grow my hair back some but Grandpa wasn't buying it. "Them Nazi's got all kinds of tricks to fool a man!" he declared before trying to stab me in the throat with a turkey baster. I found myself reduced to participating in the most ludricious masquerades possible to allay his 'Mussophobia'. One year I dressed as Abraham Lincoln... stove pipe hat, beard and everything. The following gathering I was the Statue of Liberty (which pacified Grandpa but then Grandma thought I was gay... "First the Navy, now this!" Christmas time saw me wearing a custom made Charlie Brown shirt and for my Grandma's birthday I found myself dressed up as an Ice-Cream truck driver.
Through each mask though, each uniform, each clever disguise, Grandpa saw right through it... he could smell the 'Mussolini stink' wafting off of me. It smelt like rotten milk and fear he claimed.
Finally we gave up on the game. It was agreed that my parents would take a 'proxy son' with them at all family gatherings. His name was Robert Something. Nice kid really. My parents paid a neighbors kid who was about my age a few bucks to pose as me. The idea was a hit. Grandpa adored 'me' all of a sudden. My uncles found a new respect for their nephew (who was much more well versed in automobiles and the NFL than I was) and even Grandma would find herself admitting (after she had a few) that her grandson was inexplicably less creepy than before. Even my kissing cousins enjoyed 'Jack 2' as he was much more attentive to their needs than I was.
Eventually I ended up moving up here to Terminus, Georgia. I was now finally free to reinvent myself... leaving behind in Florida my prodigal doppelganger to give my ghost a good name.
So there I was crouched over the toothpaste green colored sink of our home in Fort Lauderdale and one by one, began exhausting my father's supply of disposable orange and white bic razors. I had Black Flag's My War cranked as loud as it could go blasting through my speakers from my room and I sung along under the whitenoise of the faucet running. It took me just under an hour to clog up the sink with chunks of my hacked, slashed and scraped mohawk. My previous incarnation as a suburban teen anarchist was literally going down the drain. When I was done the dome of my head was flushed red and a series of scars, slashes and cuts criss-crossed into a rough map of the canals of Mars. I was aiming for this sort of Heavy Metal magazine, Richard Corben virile anti-hero look... what I got instead apparently was a man who had survived cranial surgery by a team of disposable razor wielding monkeys!
I stared for awhile at this man in the mirror, desperate to convince myself that he was anyone but the man he was actually looking at. This man, after all, wasn't some awkward punk rocker with vague notions of a nebulous revolution. No, this was someone new. This was a savage poet who wrote his verses with both fist and pen. This was an unstoppable zen fuck-machine. This was a man who would go skinny dipping in the 'shadow of the valley of death'. This was a postapocalyptic buddhist combat monk ready for any and all suckers. Most of all though... this was a man.
Or so I would have had myself believe.
In fact it turned out most folks didn't see it that way at all.
I was accused by my classmates of being 'White Power' by the shaved head alone. I was public enemy number one with a bullet. I had all my pussy privileges revoked. Cops pulled me over walking to class on a weekly basis. I found the metal heads I got stoned with at lunch were uneasily quiet in my presence. All of a sudden I wasn't invisible anymore. I was now a foreign exhange student from the country of Hitlervania.
This should have alarmed me but instead I found being hated much better than being ignored. I reveled in the irony that I was judged by my appearance as someone who judges people by their appearance. I took a perverse delight in the looks of terror or revulsion my very presence engendered. I was a Marvel comic monster-hero, I was Ben Grimm ugly with Bruce Banner mood swings. Mainly though I was a pretentious jackass who found being a self-inflicted pariah to hold some form of Byronesque mystique.
No one reacted worse than Granpa Babalon though.
Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma's trailer up in Seminole County. My parents argued the whole way there. It's a Thanksgiving tradition that spans back to the first Babalon's to step off the boat, whose first words in English would be to curse vehemently their in-laws who arrived right behind them. We pulled in and my uncles were already drunk as hobo's and wrestling half-naked in the driveway. Dad would have just kept driving if Mom didn't hop out of the car to begin kicking the shit out of both of them right there and then. The neighbors of the trailer park knew about this annual tradition of brother versus brother and as such had been watching the spectacle the whole time from an assortment of lawn chairs and improvised milk-cart seats.
Dad parked in Grandma's cactus bushes by the time Mom was dragging my two uncle's back inside. We followed her in and the whole Babalon clan was there and ready to eat an hour ago. My family has always believed that a polite guest is one who always arrives late and strives to leave as early as possible. What some would call misanthropy we called simple manners. My three aunts were there, with their bored evil cat eyes peering at my new 'do' with bunched up faces. My four female cousins, almost of all of whom had contributed to my sexual education at one point or another were there, as well as my Grandma who despite being half way into a bottle of Jameson's had prepared a scrumptious feast and of course Grandpa who sat at the head of the cramped table with all the majesty of a king who has forgotten he was overthrown years ago.
I had no sooner shrugged out my greeting to the Felini-family reunion when Grandpa suddenly took one look at me, dropped open his jaw, did a quick double take, bolted out of his chair and pointed his finger at me in horror. If you ever saw the 70's version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers where at the end the guy turns out to be a pod-person after all and when he finds the last human survivor he releases this horrible alien shriek. It was just like that only without the inhuman wail or Donald Southerland's moustache.
"What is it Henry?" Grandma asked nervously as all eyes fell on me.
"It's him!" he shouted and jabbed the air between us with his extended finger.
I looked around, hoping I'd catch that someone had snuck in behind me but no dice.
"Who Grandpa?" all four of my cousins asked in surround sound synchronicity.
"Mussolini!" Grandpa shouts, his spittle flying all across the tupaware dishes of cranberry sauce, stuffing, 'taters and turkey.
"Mussolini?" My uncle asked the other, eying me with confusion from under a pack of his papertowel bound ice-cubes.
"Benito Mussolini, perhaps" my father offered casually as he took his seat at the table, oblivious by choice to the mounting drama around him.
"Yes!" Grandpa slams his fist into the table sending all the glasses to jump at attention as if they were surprised out of their beds sleeping.
"No, Grandpa... it's me... Jack... remember you bought me my first He-Man doll?"
"I thought I killed you?" Grandpa grumbles the words through a miasma of beer breath, his eyes bulged out in animal terror and his teeth barred through a jungle of nicotine yellow beard.
"When'd you kill Jack?" my other Uncle asks from an identical ice-pack that is covered over the opposite eye of his brother.
"He didn't kill Jack, genius... Jack's right there" Uncle number two counters.
"Oh yeah... so who'd he kill then?"
"Mussolini apparently" my father answers disintrestedly reaching for one of the few surviving dinner rolls.
"You never killed Mussolini, Dad!" Mom speaks up wrapping her swelling knuckles in an ice-pack. This was true. It was also true that Grandad was there for the Allied invasion of Sicily in '43. Somehow age, boredom and senility had changed the events of the war for him. In this new revisionist history, Mussolini was strangled to death by Grandpa after he fought his way through a garrison of Brown Shirts.
"Are you sure?" Grandpa's piss & vinegar settle dilute into the waters of uncertainty. He looks around confused almost as if he's not sure why he's here. To be fair every member of the Babalon Clan has this look at family get togethers. He scratches his head and I give him a weak smile in return.
"Yes Dad... we've been over this a hundred times" Mom makes her way towards him, slowing down only to deliver a passing smack to both her brothers.
"Well..." Grandpa blinks as if coming out of a long dream then suddenly snaps off the left drumstick of the turkey and charges at me from across the room with it, "I'll get that fat, facist bastard once and for all!"
Before I knew it was being clubbed to death by my own grandfather, who now had the strength of a graying grizzly bear boosted by an adrenalin burst of pure insanity. I tried to run away but ended up tripping over Trixie (Grandma's cat) and crashing on my ass as Grandpa hovered over me, drumstick whipping me mercilessly and ranting something about the '7th Army kicking yer ass once and fer all!'.
Everyone was yelling all around me. Grandma was the loudest releasing this blood curdling howl that couldn't possibly come from a human throat but somehow did. Well...everyone that is except dad, who had helped himself to the other drumstick and was eating his Thanksgiving meal in relative peace. Finally Mom and my two uncles managed to pry him off me.
My cousins in chorus informed me that it would be best if I ate dinner outside, as far from the trailer as possible too please. I ended up eating Thanksgiving off a paper plate in the front seat of my Dad's car.
Later years would see the family attempt to find a way to bypass Grandpa's suspicions. The next year I had to don a wig. It was to no avail though. Grandpa became convinced it was Mussolini in disguise. The next year after that I tried to grow my hair back some but Grandpa wasn't buying it. "Them Nazi's got all kinds of tricks to fool a man!" he declared before trying to stab me in the throat with a turkey baster. I found myself reduced to participating in the most ludricious masquerades possible to allay his 'Mussophobia'. One year I dressed as Abraham Lincoln... stove pipe hat, beard and everything. The following gathering I was the Statue of Liberty (which pacified Grandpa but then Grandma thought I was gay... "First the Navy, now this!" Christmas time saw me wearing a custom made Charlie Brown shirt and for my Grandma's birthday I found myself dressed up as an Ice-Cream truck driver.
Through each mask though, each uniform, each clever disguise, Grandpa saw right through it... he could smell the 'Mussolini stink' wafting off of me. It smelt like rotten milk and fear he claimed.
Finally we gave up on the game. It was agreed that my parents would take a 'proxy son' with them at all family gatherings. His name was Robert Something. Nice kid really. My parents paid a neighbors kid who was about my age a few bucks to pose as me. The idea was a hit. Grandpa adored 'me' all of a sudden. My uncles found a new respect for their nephew (who was much more well versed in automobiles and the NFL than I was) and even Grandma would find herself admitting (after she had a few) that her grandson was inexplicably less creepy than before. Even my kissing cousins enjoyed 'Jack 2' as he was much more attentive to their needs than I was.
Eventually I ended up moving up here to Terminus, Georgia. I was now finally free to reinvent myself... leaving behind in Florida my prodigal doppelganger to give my ghost a good name.
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on 2008-05-02 10:02 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-02 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-02 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-02 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-02 01:06 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-02 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-02 07:34 pm (UTC)Monday it is! Yay!!! Maybe I can peep at the book???
xxx
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on 2008-05-02 09:55 pm (UTC)I'll see you Monday:)