1981-1982

MAY  — This summer I am going to Oklahoma to see my dad. I haven’t been there in a couple of years so I have no idea what to expect. He’s got an apartment there and I guess it will be okay to be around him without my mom and sister. They’re the two who drive him crazy the most. I’m pretty good at keeping my persona under wraps so as to not set him off. In other news I am 12. My troubles with Math persist. I have to go to a tutor now because they have us doing Algebra 2 in the 6th grade and I can’t quite get my head around it all. We have very advanced math in the schools in Florida because they want to train us for the aerospace industry. Not a bad goal, really but still — I’m not a math person so… sucks to be me, I guess. My straight A’s in everything else don’t really count for much here — the only thing they care about is math. Well, math and sports.

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JUNE — My dad lives in a depressing divorced dad apartment on the outskirts of Tulsa. It’s a lofted studio apartment which would be okay except that I have to sleep on the couch. He got me a cool digital watch though. So that’s nice. Unfortunately David Letterman is pre-empted by Wimbledon coverage every night so I missed all the episodes and instead got to see John McEnroe scream at the umpire(?) What’s the name of the tennis judge? That guy. My watch chirps every hour on the hour. It wakes me up at night. I had an amazing dream last night that my parents were both dead and for some reason Ricky Schroeder’s family adopted me. Then I got to be in a TV show where I played his adopted brother. It was one of the best dreams I’ve ever had. I’ve been thinking about it all day to cheer me up. I think the reason I had the dream is because last night before going to bed dad was really drunk and he was showing me all his guns and he pointed one at me. I tried to play it off like it was no big deal but inside I was shitting my pants. I thought he was going to kill me. I’m not sure why he did that. Was it just to show off or was he trying to tell me something?

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JULY — Back in Miami. I was out with a group of kids who live in the neighborhood riding bikes. We followed the canals dug by the Army Corps of Engineers to drain/destroy the Everglades so that Domino Sugar could grow sugar cane in Florida. Anyhow, we were at this one canal over by 134th and I looked down into the water and could see oil and bubbles coming up from below. I looked deeper and could see that there was a car in the canal. It seemed like maybe someone had dumped a car in the canal — or maybe someone had gone off the road into the canal? We called the police and they came out with a tow truck and pulled the car out. There was a dead guy in the driver’s seat. The cops told us to go home — so we did. When I was on my way home, thinking about the dead driver, I suddenly rode into a swarm of bees. A tree trimmer had disturbed a hive and now they were swarming all over the place. They weren’t killer bees so I only saw one dead body today.

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AUGUST — I am dreading going to school next month. I’ll be attending Arvida Junior High. My sister was there and she said it’s a nightmare. For one thing the kids are even meaner than in Elementary school. She said they’ve had fifteen different kids put on suspension for bringing guns to school. They also have a big problem with flying roaches in the building. Something about it being close to one of the canals — which is where all the roaches live. My mom is really tired of me complaining about Florida. She says, “but Florida is B-eau-ti-ful!” Lying to my face about this mildew streaked hellscape won’t change reality. Florida is not beautiful, it’s a nightmare. It’s not fit for man nor beast. There was a headless body found in the dumpster behind Kmart today. Ask him if he thinks Florida is beautiful.

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SEPTEMBER — Well Arvida is a nightmare. Not that I was expecting anything else. Mostly I’ve met a lot of mean Cuban girls who smoke and do their make up with Sharpie markers. I do like my architectural drafting class though. That’s cool that they offer these kinds of skills. Electives. I like that I have a locker and I go to different rooms for different classes. I picked out a special “first day of school” outfit. It is Nike tennis shoes, black parachute pants and a diagonal striped black and white T-shirt. I’m still getting called “faggot” but fortunately there are a lot of good hiding places at my new school.

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OCTOBER — I have two new friends from Seventh Grade: Mike Portnoy and Evelio Zurrian. They don’t like each other but I like both of them for different reasons. So Mike is this fat Jewish kid and his father is a Rabbi. His parents are very cool. I love to go over to their house. His dad has taught me a lot about table manners — which I very much appreciate. Mike is into movies like me. Currently our favorite film is “Mommy Dearest” which has been running non-stop on the Movie Channel. Sometimes Mike and I will watch the movie together while on the phone with each other. Evelio is Cuban American but he doesn’t speak Spanish so I’ve been teaching him and helping him talk to his Grandmother. Evelio said that in order to survive I needed to take Tae Kwon Do lessons. Not so much because I needed to learn how to fight, but because once people find out you’re taking lessons they leave you alone. It was really great advice. I take classes with him at a studio way the hell out on the edge of Calusa but it’s the best thing because since I started taking lessons and wearing ninja slippers to school no one is calling me “Faggot” to my face. Only behind my back. This is a huge improvement.

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NOVEMBER – Are you as obsessed with the Space Shuttle as I am? The initial launch was amazing but this re-launch has completely captivated my attention. I was begging my mom to take us up to Cape Kennedy for the launch but she said she didn’t want to take off from work. It’s like the only good thing happening in Florida and I can’t go watch it live. To be fair, you never really know if the launch will happen or not because they’re constantly having to reschedule due to weather. Why would we put a space station in a state with such shitty weather? My mom’s work is keeping her really busy. She’s been selling houses all over the city. Last night I went with her to look at a house that she’s going to sell. She wanted me to go with her because she was scared to go by herself. The previous owners were murdered in the house and large chunks of the walls and carpet had been seized by the DEA for blood spatter analysis. I get why she wanted me to go with her but I’m not really sure what help she expected me to offer. If the murders came back she’d be on her own. I’m wearing tennis shoes and she’s in high heels.

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DECEMBER – UGH! WHY IS HE HERE? Dad came home for Christmas. Can we please end this charade? So here’s what’s super weird about all of this. My mom and dad don’t even talk about getting back together but when he comes to Miami for Xmas he STAYS WITH US. He sleeps in my mom’s room. With her! SO GROSS, right? He’s been whoring around with all his Oklahoma floozies then comes to stay with us, bringing all kinds of VD into the house. My mom is going to 100% lose her nose to syphilis if she’s not careful. How does a 12 year old know about syphilis you may be asking? Easy, I live in gross, gross Miami and everyone here is a prostitute. There have already been seven girls who had to have abortions in my Junior High this year alone.  That’s way more than in elementary school. I think there were only three abortions — but I guess it has to do with the fact that very few of the sexually active children in my school had gone through puberty.

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JANUARY 1982 — I’m so into Garfield. I have all the Jim Davis books and can pretty accurately draw Garfield now. Evelio is very into drawing and I pretty much copy him. He’s one of the actual “cool kids” at my Junior High and has been really kind to me. It’s nice to have a friend who can help me navigate. The reason he’s so good at all this stuff is he’s also a mean kid. Like at his Elementary School he was always in trouble and would get in fights and stuff. So he decided he wanted to not do that anymore but he knows how it works and can warn me whenever I’m about to walk into a trap. He knows who is secretly plotting to pull some shit and can tell me. Very valuable skill. I’m also friends now with this kid Nevill who is probably the smartest kid in school. He’s black and lives in our neighborhood so his parents are really, really strict. He has to study all the time. Nevill and Mike Portnoy are two of my closest friends right now — but are in a different friend group from Evelio. Evelio is mostly obsessed with Joanne Tsotsos — and since I sit next to her in Advanced Orbital Calculations, I talk him up a lot.

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FEBRUARY — Oh wow. So something really crazy happened. Our shop teacher (I never took his class but he taught here) went nuts and shot a bunch of people at a repair shop. He had brought his lawn mower in for repair and when he got the bill for $20 he went nuts. He came back an hour later and shot eight people before the police killed him. My sister had warned me not to take his class because he was famous for going on racist rants during class and sometimes just chanting U.S.A. over and over. I told my mom about seeing this on the news and she didn’t believe me. “Michael why are you always fibbing about things?” Then I showed her the newspaper this morning and she didn’t say anything. Not even sorry for calling me a liar. I asked her why we live here. It’s like I’ve seen so many murders since we moved to Miami. We’re the murder capital of the US and everyone in Florida is on drugs or crazy or both. She said it wasn’t true that Miami is the murder capital of the US and so I read her the last paragraph in the article about my school’s teacher murdering all those people and how this would ensure Miami’s status as murder capital. Does she have eyes? What is wrong with her?

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MARCH — I’m going to Oklahoma for Spring break. Ugh. Why? So my dad wants me to come visit him. He has a house now in the middle of nowhere. He said he’d get me an Atari 2600 if I’d come visit so I guess so. I woke up this morning with roaches on my face and legs biting me — it’s going to be one of those days I suppose. My sister likes going to Sunset High School but she’s around all these druggy kids. She’s been listening to Jim Morrison a lot and says he’s so deep. His music sounds idiotic. That same dumb electric piano and his filthy caterwauling — this is not good music. Now that dad is out of the house I can listen to whatever I want. When he lived her I only listened to the records he and mom had bought in the 50’s and 60’s. It’s not like you can listen to the “My Fair Lady” soundtrack that many times. Anyhow, now I’m listening to the Eurythmics — they’re pretty much my favorite band. I’m super into the new wave sound. It’s like music from a perfect future where no one goes to a school that would hire a rampaging murderer to teach shop class.

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APRIL — I am in the hospital where I was born in Oklahoma. While my dad was out of the house I got bored and went for a walk around his ranch. He has pump jacks on his property, which are the things you see pumping oil out of the ground whenever you’re around oil wells. I had the bright idea of trying to climb up on a pump jack that was running and I fell off and my leg went into some of the machinery and was partially “de-gloved.” De-gloving is just what it sounds like. It’s when your skin is ripped off like a glove. A 22cm by 8cm rectangle of skin was ripped off my right shin and my leg was broken in the process. After I got my leg out of the machine, I crawled away from the pump jack and back up to the house. Dad was gone out to a bar and there wasn’t a number where I could reach him. Also, his ranch doesn’t have a street address so when I called 911 they really couldn’t do anything to help me. I managed to staunch the bleeding until my dad came home and he drove me to the hospital.  They think I’ll be able to keep my leg as long as gangrene doesn’t set in.