Queer

My perfect epithet. Queer non-reduces me to a series of what I’m not while rolling out of my mouth a whole lot easier than “a complete Yin and Yang combination of gender, nature, and spirit.” It also encapsulates my other queer-duckness—I’m not non-normal by gender alone! My non-herding knows few bounds.

When a middle-school teacher told me, “We need to find a way to get your daughter to be more normal,” I didn’t know what to do with such an absurd remark, so I… quacked. Quack, quack, quack, in her face and over my shoulder as I walked out the door. Almost thirty years later, my daughter still hasn’t forgiven me.

I once barked a hellova conversation from inside a roadside diner with a dog in the parked car outside our window. It at least got the waitress to come over and refill my coffee mug, after ignoring me holding it on my head. My daughter was mortified by the whole thing. My husband popped a Xanax.

We were in the emergency room once waiting for a doctor to take care of my daughter’s bloody hand. She didn’t step on things like her mother; she had her father’s proclivity to hit or slam. The shower door had apparently had enough already with the slamming that day so it shattered, leaving her with what I proclaimed to be a two-stitch gash. The ER was busy, the injury minor, so we waited a long time, and I repeated it was only a two-stitch gash ad infinitum as the punchline to one joke after another. When a doctor finally showed up to unwrap and examine my daughter’s wound, she said, “Oh, it’s just a two-stitch gash.” My kid and I burst into laughter. My husband popped a Xanax.

Back in the day when my husband and I were on the road as a keyboard-drum duo, I  literally tripped over the change in a carpet pattern. I broke the big toe on my bass-drum foot and my husband had to figure out how to mic the thing so the audience could hear my feeble thumping that night. “Only you,” he said, accustomed by then to me cutting myself on thin air, making involuntary friends with door frames, and my bare feet miraculously finding long-forgotten shards of glass, used-to-be plates, and stabbily stiff wires. Sadly, all that was before Xanax.

I joined the military the day I turned eighteen because all the advertisements promised, “Go in a boy, come out a man.” Not so much for non-boys. I had to pull out one of my mother’s “girl” lessons to extract myself from that all-girl-barracks nightmare. My mother was bereft because I left all my government-issued accoutrements behind, most specifically the hideous girl-recruit hat she would have loved to try on. The discharge psychologist I saw asked, “And how do you feel about that?” when I claimed I didn’t feel like I fit in. I felt just fine now that I was out, thank you very much.

How could I explain that I might look like a duck and walk like a duck, but I felt like a non-duck. Especially since non-duckery wasn’t even a concept in those days. So when I consequently stood in front of a college biology class and asked, “How do you know you’re a guy?” I took the laughs but had nowhere to go with the eye-rolling theory.

I was only in that biology class because I’d dropped out of the 100-percent-girl nursing school when I realized the profession was, well, 100 percent girl in those days, and switched to pre-med. This despite spending my sole high-school science class watching a hunk do push-ups in a prison cell. I had no idea the teacher was pouring some kind of acid the day hunk finally hit 1,000 and I—utterly non-aware of where I was or was supposed to be doing—gleefully shouted, “1,000!” 

Theoretically, my brother, a science-department darling, got me a passing D by telling the teacher, “You know, if you flunk her, you’ll have her again next year.” That story may not be true, but it’s easy to remember… even though I forgot it when I signed up for pre-med. Serendipitously, I saw no more through a college microscope than through a high-school one—black, nothing but black—so that wrong-way career bit the dust. My mother was incensed a year or so later when she read about a blind guy who graduated medical school, but for once being non-boy worked to my advantage. A non-girl like me didn’t have a chance.

It may seem as if my queer-duckery came on suddenly in adulthood, but nay, nay, as the great John Pinette used to say. The first time I met a globe, probably in first or second grade, my a life perspective suddenly flipped to world-wide/anthropological and never went back. So the next time my mother insisted (as she so frequently did) that, “Everybody does it that way!” I snapped, “Really? Everybody in New York does it that way? Everybody in India? Everyone in Borneo?!”

Okay, so that retort played in my head, not my mouth, but logic dictates I must have vocalized something similar at some point, because I can still feel the sting of her response, long buried though it is in the overstuffed lost-and-gone-forever reservatory of my memory bank.

To be honest, my memory lapses don’t actually bother me—probably because I consider “I already told you about that!” and “Oh, for heaven’s sake, I just explained that last week!” to be a someone-else problem, not mine. “Memory problems getting noticeably worse” my husband wrote all over my Social Security Disability application when I was thirty-three… which, come to think of it, may have something to do with why he always kept a supply of Xanax handy.

Short-term memory loss? Senior moment? Early onset dementia? Pshaw—I learned early to do my homework as soon as I got home or I’d forget what the assignments were or how to do them. My intermittent amnesia, as one wank put it, started way back in my formative years—a fact I somehow, contradictorily, remember.

Scene: My first non-family party. Age: six or seven. I go down the stairs into a finished basement, a first for me; ours had a concrete floor, non-insulated walls, and bare pipes hanging from the ceiling.

I knew I’d only been asked to this birthday party because the girl’s mom (BGM) made the birthday girl (BG) invite everyone in our class. It didn’t dawn on me until I got there that a pajama party would be all-girl. I didn’t actually know BG and still primarily non-talked, but I managed to man up and ask someone to point her out. Then, after handing her the gift my mother had picked out and wrapped, I sat off to the side as the clowder of girls talked about clothes and dolls and school and other girls.

I didn’t know clothes. I didn’t know dolls. School was a non-subject as far as I was concerned and gossip made my insides squirm. But none of that mattered because I simply non-conspiciuized myself so I could listen and watch. Watching and listening was my jam.  

I’m sure we did the cake and ice cream thing; I don’t remember. What I do remember is that when we all changed into pajamas, BG’s tummy pouched out.

And I was dumbstruck. Absolutely non-oriented. How did it do that? Why did it do that?! And how was it even possible that BGM wasn’t embarrassingly calling attention to it, shaking her head with tight lips, and commanding her daughter to stand up straight and pull in her tummy?!

When BGM hugged BG, my mental hard drive crashed. I had gone blue screen of death, thirty-odd years before Windows was born.

I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to cry. I wanted to go home. Wasn’t it time to go to bed? It was after eight o’clock already!

But nay, nay—this was a real birthday party, and it wasn’t a school night, so we all had to stay up for games and entertainment.

The entertainment: A fortune teller who elicited squeals of delight as she read girl palms one after another,

“You’re going to marry a rich man and have three children! You’re so bright and capable…your IQ is 152!”

“Let me look…oh—you’re going to meet a wonderful man and live in a big, beautiful house with your four children. Your IQ is 146!”

“Ah, look at that life-line. You’re going to have a long, happy life, surrounded by five loving children and an adoring husband. Your IQ is 142!”

I knew it was all phony. I’d seen my mother pretend to be a fortune teller at the school’s last Fun Fair and overheard her tell someone the trick was to “jazz it up” as they reported whatever the person wanted to hear. So I watched and listened until everyone’s palm had been read—not a single IQ under 138 in this particular bunch of privileged white girls; amazing—antsy to go to bed.

But nay, nay. BGM apparently felt a mission to not let me be non-included. “Your turn!” she said brightly, nudging me toward the lady in dress-up.

I held out my hand. The soothsayer bent over my palm. Everyone stood around waiting.

Uh oh. Turned out my future, unlike everyone else’s, was Unclear. Cloudy. And my IQ was only 124.

I knew it wasn’t true… but then again it might be true because, after all, BGM hadn’t said anything about BG’s pouch and I knew that was true—or at least I thought I did.

And there it was, my biggest queer-duck secret. I often non-distinguished between what was real and what wasn’t. What was fact and what was non-true. What my ears took in and what my mother said she’d said. My being not-girl but also not-boy. My—

Hey, forget about my non-clarity! We still had games to play!

I re-donned my cloak of invisibility, blur-listening as whatever game got played before another one came up. I tuned in a bit more when they got to the TV game—“What commercial is this popular slogan from?”—because I knew most of the answers almost before someone called them.

“Home of the golden arches…?”

“McDonalds!”

“Good to the last drop…?”

“Maxwell House coffee!”

“You should have a Hubert Doll…?”

I looked up. BGM had thrown that slogan directly to me and was positively beaming with anticipation. “It’s a bank,” she offered. “What bank gives away Hubert Dolls?”

What made her think I knew? I didn’t. Go ask somebody else…

“It’s a bank, right?” BGM prompted again. “What bank gives away Hubert Dolls?”

How the hell did I know?

“Harris Bank, you idiot!” some girl finally blurted.

I non-recall which I found more disconcerting: that I didn’t remember the commercial I’d seen a gazillion times, or that I didn’t remember my last name was Harris.

Next scene: fourth grade French class. Everyone had to stand in front of the class with a partner to recite that week’s question, “Bla bla bla bla bla bla?” (Blah blah blah blah blah blah?) so the other person could answer, “Bla bla bla bla bla bla!” (Blah blah blah blah blah blah!). Switch roles, repeat, sit down.

My articulation was blurry and my accent lousy, but I dutifully mumbled through the exercise and returned to my seat. The next duo spoke their lines. I had no idea what they were saying.

Finding the right page in my French book, I stared at the words. Nothing. Naught. Nada. It might as well have been Greek. Elvis had left the building, along with all meaning and comprehension. My mother’s reaction to what, to me, felt rather mind-blowing was, “When will you ever need to speak French, anyway?”

It never came back. After five years of earning mostly Bs and As, I can say hello and goodbye in French, count to ten, and ask what time it is. I won’t understand the answer. “Avec noir” runs tough my head now and then—I don’t know why, and I never remember what it means, no matter how many times I look it up.

Last scene: a theme-park theater. My husband onstage playing ragtime between corny comedy bits. Me in the audience with our daughter. Star calls to audience: “Anybody here been happily married for more than ten years?”

No response—a tough, mid-day crowd. Star repeats the question. I know the bit, so I stick my hand up.

“Yes! You! And how long have you been married?”

“Twenty-five years!”

“Wow! Twenty-five years! That’s incredible. What’s your name?”

“Uh… damn, I forget.”

“And that’s why we’ve been happily married for twenty-five years,” my husband quips, landing the laugh. Our daughter drops her head and groans, “Moommm!”

So, yeah, I’m a queer duck, but you can just call me queer for short.