Before the Rant-O-Wheel show at PHIT a couple of weeks back, Alex asked me how I managed not to take it personally the fact that none of my friends were in attendance (aside from folks that had already been in the room). I told him that I’d dealt with enough rejection as a kid who was so actively unpopular that committees were formed on the subject that this was nothing. I meant it at the time.
But last night, there was no audience. Not a single person came.
One Thanksgiving, thorough a series of miscommunications and misunderstandings, my father forgot us. Per the custody arrangement, my brother and I waited on the porch with a pair of hand-me-down children’s suitcases, in blue and brown 70’s floral sitting safely with us. He was due to arrive any minute, in the hulking, powder blue car he’d ended up with. Unless I’m remembering the wrong car, because it was a long time ago, and this memory has only three colors to it, it was the one with the wide, oversoft velour seats that could not prevent my nausea from reading all the way down the New Jersey Turnpike. We stood, shivering in our mittens until it got dark, while our mother watched from inside where it was warm and she was safe from confrontation, until it got dark, and she finally called him. He answered the telephone in New York, five hours from the blue gray dusk on the front porch and our cold hands and those matching suitcases. He wouldn’t be picking us up any time soon.
Tags: Disappointments, Second Stories