One day, when I was about ten or eleven, I was riding in the car with my mother. We were in the family's 1990 Chevy Lumina Euro driving along Highway 92 towards home. I can't remember exactly where we were coming from, but I can recall how boring the trip was. The drive between my rural hometown of Treynor and the more condensed city of Council Bluffs, which rested on the bank of the Missouri River the same way a greasy turd rests in toilet water, was one of utter dullness. Terraced fields of corn and soy beans stretched to the horizon a full three hundred sixty degrees. Small farms dotted the landscape like pockmarks on the face of the terrain. Unless one could be completely enraptured by the sight of an ocean of blue sky, perhaps with a few clouds sailing along with it, or view the slow, mechanized movements of a lumbering combine stripping through stalks of corn with prehistoric tyranny with utter amazement, the ten mile trip was terribly boring. Although there was only a fifteen minute pause between civilizations, to my adolescent mind this seemed like hours. I had made this trip countless times before, and usually spent the time in the back seat with my brother and sister staring hopelessly out the window into a nothingness much too stylized by Grant Wood. Sometimes I was blessed with the ability to sleep through the monotony and be given a brief respite from the ceaseless timidity. My father was not a fan of the radio, so the car was mostly filled with silence, especially if I knew that some kind of punishment awaited me at home, as was often the case. But usually there were only sounds of breathing, minor commentaries, a protest from my mother if my father happen to curse at a fellow driver. Things were a little better when there were less people in the car. This afforded me the opportunity to sit in the front seat, which provided a much fuller view of the bland surface that surrounded me. My mother was much less conservative with the car, and would allow the radio to be played, albeit only on one of her preferred stations. I'm not sure if the radio was on on this particular day, but I do remember staring listlessly out the window while my mother talked into her cell phone. Now, this would have been about 1995, so it's important to remember that this cell phone was roughly the size of a brick, and came in a box as big as a cinder block. The phone was a large gray mass of plastic, with a mouth piece that flipped out and a long black antenna that pulled out from the top. The buttons on the face were large and rubbery, and the screen was a small strip where numbers showed up as ugly orange digits. If my brother and I wanted to walk around the mall by ourselves, my parents forced this monstrosity upon us, and Dale would make me carry it in my pocket, which most likely made me look like a shop-lifter wherever we went. And although my family thought this cell phone was the height of mid-nineties technology, I was sure it wasn't. My family, much to my chagrin, always came late to the electronics party. When most of my friends were getting Sega Genisisesesses, I was getting Nintendo. When my friends got portable CD players, I got a cassette player. We didn't have a personal computer until I was in junior high and we didn't convert to DVD until I was in high school. Even that Chevy Lumina lasted up to 200,000 miles. So there I am, strapped into the passenger seat, the blue belt resting over my pudgy belly, and my mom driving mindlessly towards home. I wasn't paying attention to her conversation. As with most adults at the time, if they went on for too long I had a tendency to drown them out with my own thoughts. Unless the conversation pertained to me exclusively, most adults sounded like the stuttering trumpets of Charlie Brown's teachers. At some point, though, my mother ended the conversation and dropped her cell phone into her purse, which sank immediately to the bottom like an adventurer in quick sand. "Eric, honey," my mother said to me, pulling me out of whatever prepubescent reverie I used to occupy my time. "Get in my purse and pull out my calender." By "calender" my mother meant her small date book with the flowery plastic cover. I hated going into my mother's purse. I had to sometimes to get things like car keys, money, gum, but I hated it. A woman's purse can be a veritable minefield of privacy that I always thought was too intimate to explore. I can recall one time going through my mother's purse and finding a loose group of tampons. At first I thought they were intricately wrapped cigars, until it slowly dawned on me what I was really holding. On that day a gulf between mother and son had been irrevocably breached, and no matter how many times I wiped my palms on my shorts, it still felt like I was holding those tampons. So when my mother told me to go fishing into her purse for her calender, a small window of dread began to open within me. I gently peeled open the zipper and gazed inside. Gingerly, I moved the different items around in her purse, hoping I would not have to catch a glimpse of anything that might forever alter my already fragile psyche and bend me to a Norman Bates-like route the rest of my life. Fortunately I retrieved the small date book without incident. "Get a pen," my mother told me when I showed her I had fulfilled my duty. Once more into the breach, my fingers searched until finding a blue ball point in one of the many pockets of the purse. I remember sitting there stupidly as I was wont to do. I was the type of child who only responded to explicit step-by-step directions, falling into idleness if not given a specific task. When my mother saw that I had completed her tasks, rising pridefully to the herculean occasion, she told me to find a specific date. I can't recall the date, but I remember flipping through the calendar and seeing how busy and organized my mother was. There was something written on nearly every page, in every square box that represented a day. Finally, I found the correct date. "Now," she said when she saw that I had gotten to her day, "write in two P M, Dr. Black, pap smear." At first I hesitated, not entirely sure what she had said. I got the time, and I got the name, it was that last thing that was bothering me. Pap smear? I wasn't sure I had heard her correctly, but somewhere within the deepest recesses of my brain I also knew not to have her repeat herself. Because somehow, some way, I managed to realize just what in the fuck a pap smear was. Well, not entirely I suppose. Being ten years old, I was starting to become grossly enamored with the female body, and with no formal training I relied mainly on my older brother and friends for information, not to mention the fact that my mother talked to herself more often than a paranoid schizophrenic I was sure I had at one time or another walked into the middle of a one-woman conversation. At any rate, I realized that I kind of knew what this pap smear thing was. I knew it had something to do with a vagina...more specifically, my mother's vagina. I moved the pen across the page, battling the small borders of the selected day and the jostling of the moving car. Slowly I wrote down my mother's words with the solemnity of one decoding an ancient text. But oh how I hated that word smear. It held such disgusting connotations, and all sorts of horrible images leaped into my mind as I wrote it. Smear, I thought. That's what bugs do on your windshield when you drive. So that was me, still a few years from becoming a teenager, and already working as my mother's personal gynecological secretary. To this day I am repulsed by those biological functions that separate males from females, and the store-bought products related to such issues. And although the memory of that fateful day is still hard to stomach, I'm still unsure of how I was able to escape such an oedipal maelstrom that would have certainly made a believable origin story for a serial killer. Somehow I managed to ward off the majority of the psychological assaults on my normalness...though with my parents, it certainly wasn't for lack of trying. There was a day, a few years before that car ride with Mom, that I went into a pet store with my old man. I was probably seven or eight years old. At this time in my life, trips alone with my dad were special occasions. My father was a much more patient man when not burdened by the incessant demands of all of his children together at once. Now when I say "patient" I mean that his abusive and obscenity-laced rants may not go on for as long as they did when he was with the entire family. I don't know the specifics as to why we were in the pet store. My brother and my sister each had a fish, the only pet my father would allow inside the house, so I am assuming that our expedition to the store was something fish-related, like my mother's doctor appointment. Anyway, as my father marched purposefully through the store in search of whatever ends he sought, I was drawn to a small glass case containing two white mice. At the time, my favorite movie was The Witches, the theatrical version of the Roald Dahl classic. In the movie the main character had a pair of pet mice. So, when I saw these two cute white mice I was immediately drawn to them. I parted from my father's trail and wandered over to the case. These two little fellows were scurrying around in their cage, drinking from a little tube of water or running over a small wire wheel. I watched them run amok in complete awe, so much so that I did not hear my father calling after me. "Eric! Eric!" Finally, my father's angry shouts blared like a trumpet in my ear and I hurried off to find him. He was walking down an aisle with snakes lining both sides of him, making his angry demeanor even scarier. "Where the fuck did you go?" My father was extremely tight with his money, so he made up for it by sharing his swear words generously. In fact, he swore so much that words like "fuck" and "shit" had long since lost their mystical appeal to my adolescent ears. "Dad, can I show you something?" He rolled his eyes. My old man was always in a hurry, no matter where he was or what he was doing, he always acted like he needed to be somewhere else. "Jesus Christ, what is it?" I managed to get him to come to the glass case containing the two white mice. "Can I have these? Please!? I'll take care of them, I promise!" I begged and pleaded for my dad to buy the little guys for me. But to no avail. "Fuck no," my dad insisted. "You don't need any goddamn mice!" My dad said the word "goddamn" so many times I thought it was a brand: we owned a Goddamn stove, a Goddamn fridge, a Goddamn car, a Goddamn T.V. I followed sullenly behind my father as he walked up to the cashier. During the transaction the clerk casually asked, "Is there anything else I can get you?" I remember distinctly my father telling the young clerk, "My son here wants a couple of mice to shove up his ass, but I told him he ain't Richard Gere." At this both the clerk and my dad burst out laughing, while I stood in stunned silence. Not because I was offended or embarrassed, but because I had no idea exactly what my ass, two mice, and Richard Gere had in common. In fact, I don't think I even knew who Richard Gere was. On the way home I asked my father what he had meant, as I had grown genuinely curious. "Richard Gere," he replied, "the actor. He likes to stick mice up his ass." Of course my father was relating to me the fictional story perpetrated by Sylvester Stallone that said the actor Richard Gere had once gotten a gerbil stuck up his ass. At the time, however, my father's explanation only served to further confuse me, and it intrigued me even more when I asked my brother, my own personal oracle, what Dad was talking about, and Dale had no clue. In fact, it wasn't until years later when this episode of South Park aired that things finally became clear. I wanted to relate these two stories to you as a way of explaining what it was like growing up in my household. It was strange, because I seemed to be both underling and peer at the same time. Young enough to make mistakes or misunderstand something, but old enough to take the punishment or realize a harsh truth. I suppose it kept me grounded, which is why when I was a little kid I didn't dream of one day growing up to be a famous athlete or the President, I wanted to be a garbage man. I wanted to ride on the back of one of those big, stinking trucks and handle other people's shit all day. Of course since then, my occupational fantasies have matured, as now I dream of one day becoming a fixer for a shady organization, like George Clooney in Michael Clayton. I want to bribe Supreme Court justices and get rid of dead hookers for U.S. senators. Anyway, if you ever ask me why I have to triple check every lock in the house before I go to bed, or meticulously have to arrange my Blu-Rays by genre, or why I am convinced I have cancer after viewing a rerun of Scrubs, the stories above are your answer.
The Moore You Know: The other day I went to my friend's house and he was washing his car in his driveway. As I approached him, he flipped the hose quickly in my direction and sprayed my shirt and pants with water. And I thought to myself, is there anything more gay than a man spraying another man with a hose? Fuck no! There is something about the jovial frivolity and flirtatious nature of playing with a hose that makes it extremely gay when one man sprays another man. Is it the phallic nature of the hose? The metaphor of ejaculation with the spraying water? The playful yet sexual undertones of the act itself? Probably...I mean, in my mind a dude getting a beej from another dude is somehow less gay than a dude spraying another dude with a hose. I would say that a man getting an army of dicks violently shoved into every single orifice on his body is less of a homo than a man teasingly spraying a hose at another guy. If I had a hose and another dude was walking down the sidewalk, and with a quick flick of my wrist I got him a tiny bit wet, and then I dropped the hose and ran over to him and began to greedily gobble up his dick with my mouth...the blowjob would be the second gayest thing I did to that guy. So, I let my friend know how he just did the gayest thing in the world to me. And since we got past that I jerked him off without feeling weird about it.
© Eric Moore - 2012
