But there were two family trips that really made us feel like upper middle classers: We went on a tour of the U.S. in a van, and we flew to Hawaii.
The van trip had everything but Lindsey Buckingham singing “Holiday Road”. We had just bought a chocolate-brown van, which was what people used instead of SUVs back in the ‘80s when we wanted to waste gas quickly. It was carpeted inside with plenty of space to lie down in the back, which was great for making sure you threw up upon opening your eyes—the ride wasn’t exactly smooth.
Like any fat kid, my spirit animal was Garfield, so I brought along the requisite branded notebook into which I scribbled my appropriately catty—or, considering my young age, kitty-catty—observations as we drove from Michigan across the country to California and back for two weeks.
My sister was an early victim: “Idaho reminds me of Melissa: dumb!” I guess I’m not a western U.S.A. kinda guy: “90% of South Dakota is just as bad as Iowa!”
I was Dorothy Parker in a parka.
The trip was fraught with tourist traps, everything from a Corn Palace made of corncobs to Wall Drug, the world’s largest drug store. That’s about as exciting a tagline as world’s hugest mailbox, but we still drove fifty miles out of our way just to get a gander.
The only reason that trip wound up impressing me was that we actually hit California, the place where things like the TV movie
High School U.S.A.
with Michael J. Fox and Nancy McKeon were filmed. California was the ultimate destination for any Midwest kid, so I was just happy to be in the state, recording in my diary the moment we crossed into it with a multitude of exclamation points.
First up was Old Sacramento, a 28-acre landmark district in which every business is designed to appear like the California Gold Rush is still happening. Ah, the good old days, when most of the prospectors lost their minds searching for gold, found nothing, and died ignominious deaths a continent away from their kin.
Unfortunately, I was sick to my stomach and had a pounding headache from sleeping on the floor of the damn van, which was about as steady as a vintage military transport plane. I vividly remember being so nauseated I had to excuse myself from the table at the old-fashioned eatery we’d found to ralph all over the wooden boardwalk. Later, my mom uncharacteristically noted that the cute young waiter had been flirting with my dad, which made me sick again for not having paid closer attention. Was our server trying to order some Old Sac? I needed to know, but never would.
For the rest of the trip and, I’ll keep you posted but it’s looking like for the rest of my life, my family made “I Heaved My Guts in Sacramento” (set to the tune of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”) my theme song.
Speaking of which, San Francisco was pretty mind-blowing for me, even if we stuck pretty close to Fisherman’s Wharf, it was freezing cold, and everything smelled like fish. In writing about our trip to the McDonald’s in San Francisco—we hit the Golden Arches at least twenty times in two weeks, a pre-
Super Size Me
record—I archly noted: “40% minorities, 20% gay, 10% bums/derelicts and 20% tourists.” Notice how I stifled my excitement at seeing people I could tell were gay, pretending I was writing some kind of Stormfront-funded field guide.
But the gay shit hit the fan (that sounds like a video I saw listed on eBay pre-Meg Whitman) when we drove through West Hollywood. I recall several flamboyantly gay prostitutes in cut-offs and skimpy tanks walked in front of our van, my eyeballs and their ball-balls threatening to pop right out. No one in the van said a word.
The rest of Hollywood was the highlight of the trip, making our use of the communal Port A Potty in the back worth it:
“The greatest experience so far is Universal Studios. Oh! Saw HOWARD HESSEMAN (
WKRP
). Saw houses of the Cleavers, Welbys (M.D.), and all of
Harper Valley P.T.A.
”
Getting to see Barbara Eden’s short-lived hometown trumped the
Psycho
house,
Jaws
re-enactment, and even the demonstration of special effects from Steven Spielberg’s enduring classic
1941
. And by enduring classic, I mean to say, a movie I’m sure they discontinued from the tour within weeks of our visit.
The trip back wasn’t as fun; sure, we saw the Grand Canyon, which I imaginatively called a big hole (foreshadowing something I’d write in a review of a porn DVD in the ‘90s) and met up with relatives, but for me, the ultimate goal of the trip had been to get as close to the stars as I possibly could—and I had. Now, whenever my older cousin Cathy and I would read teen magazines, doing
Eight Is Enough
and
Laverne & Shirley
-dominated quizzes, I could tell her I’d been in the same city where they were made. I’d shared air with Willie Aames.
I’d even lost some weight, thanks to the frequent vomiting.
At the end of the year, apparently not satisfied with the use we’d gotten out of the van, we crawled back into the brown monster, along with two dudes from my dad’s baseball team and a beautiful girl who was the daughter of one of my dad’s friends. We were driving to a baseball camp in Lakeland, Florida, where the boys would get tips on their game and Myrna would meet up with her family. I think her family was well to do, an impression I have because Myrna’s affable dad sold Herbalife, a get-rich-quick scheme my dad tried on us as well. As appealing as it was to me to drink shakes all day long, if you’ve ever tried one, it’s like eating chalk with the benefit of a straw.
I was fourteen and I have to assume the boys were not much older, but again, when it came to my dad’s jocks, they always read as adult men to me, and I was the sexless wiseacre. When Dave entered, he was a dark-haired beauty who locked eyes on Myrna in a way that was unmistakable to me—hadn’t I seen that expression in the porn I’d been consuming for years? I’d also seen
The Blue Lagoon
, or at least the stills from it in
Playboy
’s impossibly erotic “Sex in Cinema” feature.
The other guy, Bud, was more clandestine with his urges but a real cut-up and not as sexy as Dave. Given the choice between hilarious and humpy, I chose humpy. They sat on either side of the lovely Myrna, with me cuddled as close as was socially acceptable to Dave’s thigh. The jocks knew Myrna attended a Catholic high school, all the better to stoke the public school boys’ hormones. Myrna was a sweetheart to me, and led us all in our ironic pastime of coloring in Garfield, Smurfs and, God save us,
A-Team
coloring books, as if the juvenile time-killer would act as saltpeter.
We stopped at some dumpy restaurant or gas station (there was no using a Port A Potty in mixed company) and when Myrna, my parents, and my sister were out of the car, Dave was grabbing his crotch through his sweatpants, showing pubes in the process (this was when men reliably had them) and moaning to Bud about all the un-Catholic things he wanted to do with Myrna, with Bud’s assistance. They didn’t care that I was there—and couldn’t know these were all images that would haunt my self-abuse for years to come.
I assume Myrna never knew she was a lust object for them, and I know they never knew they were lust objects for me. What never happened in the brown van
stayed
in the brown van.
The van trips were trumped (and the gas-guzzling van itself dumped) when I was 17 and my dad, who in spite of being an unnervingly popular high school teacher and coach—a trip to the mall with him was like Reagan entering the Senate chamber to give his State of the Union—had given up his day jobs to sell insurance and was rewarded for his sales record with a family trip to Hawaii. Most everyone in the office got to go and the whole insurance experiment failed miserably when the boss and my dad got embroiled in a messy lawsuit. My dad was likable enough to sell insurance, but too nice a guy to sell unnecessary insurance, the bread and butter of the industry. I don’t think he enjoyed having to give the hard sell to people who admired him, but it was funny participating in his practice sessions, when he’d memorize hopelessly cheesy tapes in the car while driving me to or from a Dungeons & Dragons game and I’d play the role of the reluctant consumer. I thought it was hilarious, but he probably thought he’d made a big mistake quitting to sell insurance so he could better support this sullen teen who kept saying in a thick accent, “No wanta thee insurance!” It was my second favorite thing we did in the car, after spotting fat people…or at least, any fatter than us. “Would you look at that girl? She’s as big as a house!” he’d declare. And she literally would look like a good starter home for a small family. It wasn’t out of cruelty; it was all about measuring ourselves against others. Or something.
When we finally flew across the whole dang country to Hawaii, I was most impressed with the food. My scrapbook from the era contains original menus from places we ate (no McDonald’s on Maui???) and I was blown away by the preponderance of seafood salads. I was too fat to swim without a T-shirt for modesty, but I was in heaven. The weather was beautiful, there were whole pigs being cooked for no reason at all, and I even found a kitschy store that sold hundreds of posters of the latest popstars. As Pet Shop Boys and The Art of Noise blared over the store’s sound system, I acquired posters of Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, and more that would be
impossible
to take home on the plane. I bought keychains and postcards (avoiding the ‘80s staple—shirtless hunks holding babies) and other useless trash. Even some killer T-shirts with totally slimming Hawaiian prints. Some of it I needed to buy anyway, since I’d lost half the things I’d brought in my suitcase due to the fact that air-cabin pressure and 1980s-era mousse cans did not play well together. Chernobyl happened soon after we landed, but my tears were because my
Monster Manual
was soaked and stank of L’Oreal Free Style Mousse.
I think Hawaii was where I first got the idea that I might be a shopping addict, or at least that I could not and should not be trusted with money. I spent everything I had and more; thankfully, I was too young to have a credit card. (Where did I get this money, by the way?) It was during that trip, on that shopping spree, that I started to think of spending my money as a way of expressing myself. Buying a Corey Hart poster was supposed to show how cool I was—wasn’t it obvious? Spending $5 on seeing the Rosanna Arquette thriller
8 Million Ways to Die
while in Honolulu was meant to express that I was edgy. Buying Marilyn Monroe and James Dean tchotchkes revealed me to have an appreciation for what had come before.
While all the other ‘80s kids were expressing themselves via their wardrobe, I stuck to about five sweaters and two pairs of jeans and never varied my hair or shaved the fuzz that had slowly grown in under my nose. I was trying hard to be cool with inanimate objects while unconsciously trying hard to stay uncool where it counted.
Hawaii was a true luxury and was exposing me to my dad’s coworkers and their batshit-crazy wives, who Seth MacFarlane would’ve found far-fetched without meeting in person. Once, one of the insurance wives was walking down the sidewalk with my mom when she suddenly grabbed her by the elbow, forcing her to cross the street with her.
“What is the matter?” my mom asked. She is
not
a person you grab and is
not
a person you surprise. The time she and my dad went to a fellow coach’s house party and discovered porno was playing in one bedroom, she walked out of there faster than you could say, “Ohhh...ohhh…ohhh!”
The insurance wife was scared to death. “That woman coming toward us looked like a
lesbian
,” the silly cow hissed. Apparently, lesbianism is contagious. My mom wasn’t as liberal as she is now (she once told me, when I was around thirteen, that if I were gay I shouldn’t tell her—something I’m sure she won’t remember, didn’t really mean, and that I in no way hold against her since I’ve been telling her far worse ever since), but she knew a moron when one grabbed her.
Another of the wives ditzily talked out loud at a luau about how her horny hubby made her go skinny-dipping in the water-filled hole in the ground out back of their house. She went along with it, but wondered about the rashes she kept getting. Were they from the “pond,” or was it something hubby was bringing home?
This was the kind of dinner conversation that went well with poi.
Speaking of rash decisions, Hawaii was also the first time my lack of a love life became an issue, and my dad was pushing to fix it. I was seventeen and had never been on a date, so my dad and his boss were hoping I might hit it off with the boss’s daughter. The boss made sure I was sent a photo of her—a slim, cute girl with dark hair and a nice smile, she was also Michigan-rich. I thought she and I would have a big laugh over the arrangement our parents sought, so when I met up with her, I wasn’t shy about bringing it up.
“Parents are so stupid, right?” I offered. She looked crestfallen. I didn’t get it. She looked like a young Ann Blyth while I looked like an age non-specific Victor Buono. I’m not being hard on myself; I honestly was, like those girls my dad would point out, “As big as a house!” But I do think that while a few (dozen) spare pounds don’t turn me off of guys I want to sleep with (hey, chubbies), they repulse me in myself to the point where I’ve never been 100% comfortable believing anyone might not consider any extra weight on me a deal-breaker. I also think I’ve always been unwilling to grade myself as fairly as I grade others. I’ve often found myself pouring compliments on people I barely know because they’re the truth and because I know people like to hear positive things. It’s like a submissive dog lying on the ground and peeing when a more dominant beast comes along.