Part 1 (1/2)

Lit

A Meue:

Open Letter to My Son Open Letter to My Son

SIDE A: NOW

Any way I tell this story is a lie, so I ask you to disconnect the device in your head that repeats at intervals how ancient and addled I am It's true that-at fifty to your twenty-ine of recall is way superior, as you've often pointed out

Howsofa cushi+ons overme they're tipped atop my own knobby head? The cake we had on that birthday had twelve candles on it, not ten; and it wasn't London but Venice where I'd blindly bought and boiled and served to our guests a pasta I mistakenly believed was formed into the boot of Italy

And should I balk at your recall, youout the video cah to push the red Record button You'll zoom in on the 1998 bowl of pasta to reveal-not the Italian boot-but tiny replicas of penis and testicles cock and balls That's why the guys who sold it to hed so maniacally, why the au pair blanched to the color of table linen

Through that fishbowl lens, you've been looking for the truth most of your life Recently, that wide eye has come to settle on uile and fewer escape routes, the lens itself e the one-eyed cyclops You're not the monster; my face reflected back in the lens is Or replay is Or I ale eye the whole tale as I know it, scary as that strikes ranted sobriety, however ed in therapists' offices and the confessional, I've still ed to hurt you, and not just with the divorce when you were five, with its attendant shouting matches and sla life into aspentto plu her chair as plu sensation

Last week specifically: a gas leak in your apart for a trip So I let go e like a scholar deciphering ancient aveyour own story, which will, in your own particular telling of it, shape you into a man

Days later, when s At six-two, you're athletic like your father, with his same courtly manner-an offhanded chivalry that calls little attention to itself While h two security doors, you ed to hold each one open forfroe boxers spattered with cartoon fish from Dr Seuss's One Fish, Two Fish One Fish, Two Fish that I read you as a kid that I read you as a kid

Inside, loading books into yourfor the first tio by your camera (borrowed) in the crackerbox house ofher psychotic episode-the seminal event that burned off whatever innocence a kid in backwater Texas has co

You know the story in broad outline and have steered clear ofmy public life fro in you

It was kind of crazy, you said

You rapping up wires for one of your ca a carving knife to kill my sister and me ere little How she hallucinated she'd butchered us and called the doctor, who called the laho took her away for a spell

Not that, you said Your blue eyes fixed me where I stood

This curiosity about ravity to it, countered by your T-shi+rt, which reads, Don't Give Me Drugs Don't Give Me Drugs

You told e, like it happened to somebody else Crazy She said, You were just so precious, I thought I'd kill you before they all got to hurt you You were just so precious, I thought I'd kill you before they all got to hurt you

Then your girlfriend called from the next roootten the tape So after you'd gone, I played it-h

It's a summer afternoon in a yellow kitchen we've yet to remodel A few tiles still bear bullet holes frouments with my daddy and two subsequent ro would suit a Wiccan priestess Ditto her short, ashwhite hair, and her pale as nostic texts about Goddesses and Gods and the Christ within each of us She pauses every now and then to say, Isn't that wild? or to relight her long cigarillo

Next to her is a giant plastic sunflower ave her for Mother's Day She flips a switch on it, and it blinks to life, singing, You are my sunshi+ne, my only sunshi+ne You are

Don't you love that? she says It's silly, but I love it

I ask what she was thinking on the night in question, and she says, I just couldn't iirls up in a world where they do such awful things to women So I decided to kill you both, to spare you

How long had you been drinking?

Oh I wasn't drunk, Mother says Maybe I'd had a few drinks

This completely counters her earlier version, in which she'd claimed to have been shi+tfaced But I don't press it She shrugs at o over this footage h a ne-not just the video, either Your birth altered my whole posture on the planet, not to mention h your vantage You never knew the knife-wielding Goddess of death She's your gray-haired grand to protect you froes had dissipated, but her childrearing judgment never improved

You still think it's funny that she let you screen-at age eight-the uber-violent Pulp Fiction Pulp Fiction because she found your interest in nonlinear film methods because she found your interest in nonlinear film , What about the sodomy sodomy, Mother?

From the corner of the room, you asked what exactly sodomy was

Mother said, When the uy with the bondage ball in his mouth

Jesus, Mother, I said You see!

Well, he was interested in the movie when his cousin talked about it, Mother said

It's a testament to your desire to avoid further conflict that you waited till ere on the plane to tell me she'd also shown you-at the outset of our visit-a pearl-handled revolver in her pocketbook Her rationale? She didn't want you coh Grandma Charlie's purse, you said

Still, you considered the pistol incident so I'd want to knohile you reassured me you were disinclined to play with a loaded weapon

Mostly, Mother couldn't hurt you But I both could and did