Comedy Sex God

We knew the fight was over when my mom would come upstairs and my dad would turn the TV back on, loud, and we’d hear my mom go into her bedroom and cry. This wasn’t like a gentle weeping; it was full, heaving, dramatic sobs. Heartbroken, and with no one else doing anything, I would go down the hall and climb onto her bed and hold her until she calm

while we watched TV until we heard the sound of my dad’s oil truck pulling into the gravel driveway. That was our cue. Without speaking, my brother and I would turn off the television and head upstairs, closing our bedroom doors behind us, feeling like townspeople nailing boards to our windows in preparation for a coming storm.

I was looking for a downer, and each roll and glass of milk dragged me out of my higher, less pleasant emotions and into the more manageable stupor of digestion. This is why I was such a soft kid. People who grew up in families like this know that there are levels of tension that can only be sopped up with bread.

His mind would always be somewhere else, on some project or job that gave us food and a Sega Genesis and a roof over our heads, but emotional availability wasn’t as big in those days as it is now.

So much so, my dad once told me that at his funeral he wants me to stand up and tell everyone, “He did it his way.” That’s my dad. Even in death, it will be important for people to know that Jay Holmes didn’t take shit from anyone. Not that this stopped my mother from trying.

my brother was off somewhere being a normal teenager having girlfriends or going to parties or whatever it is that normal teenagers do. I wouldn’t know. I was an indoor cat.

My mom loved me, and apparently very few other people. It felt good, like getting a finicky cat that’s only ever scratched at people’s eyes to sit on your lap and purr. My dad, the dog, off somewhere, happily licking everyone indiscriminately.

Lithuania, having lost her brother to World War II, then living in a refugee camp for three years before immigrating to the famously-racist-even-to-other-kinds-of-white-people South Boston—where her father, who also happened to be her best friend, told her, “No one in our family likes us, but at least we have each other”—then promptly died in a men

has never, ever, had Chinese food without pretending that his fortune cookie says, “Help, Chinese cook locked in kitchen.”