This Way to the Anders Museum!

Twenty years have passed since the glory days of the Anders Museum.

Back then, it was really a labor of love for the three of us: me, my brother, and some kid named Eric who lived down the street. Anders wasn’t actually Eric’s last name, but he’d given up his museum naming rights in exchange for the official title of “Lead Snake Wrangler,”  which was an irresistibly impressive title to a nine-year old.

And over the door of my parents’ garage, we put up a sign that read, “Museo de Anders,” which we thought was Latin but turned out to be Spanish. We charged the neighbors four bits to come inside.

Now, what that four bits bought you was a chance to have a peek at some of the coolest animals native to the Texas Gulf coast region.  We had snakes! We had toads! We had turtles of every kind: big red ear sliders and little red ear sliders, alligator snapping turtles, three-toed box turtles, and soft shells. You could also see a lizard, some garden spiders, Eric’s pet gerbil, and the bones of a cat we’d accidentally dug up in our back yard.

Totally True Tales of Dana, Chapter 1

There once was a young girl whose name was Dana.

Dana lived in a big grey house with her mom, her two sisters, her four brothers, and a three-legged bulldog named Trigger. Their big grey house sat beside a dry red road made out of dirt which ran into a slightly bigger road made out of gravel. And the road made out of gravel ran into a road made out of concrete, and the road made out of concrete ran into a convergence of streets, and this convergence of streets was the town square of a place you’ve never heard of, right in the middle of Oklahoma, which is equally far from everywhere.

The town where Dana grew up was a curious sort of town where the dogs outnumbered the people, and the snakes outnumbered the dogs, and the tumbleweeds outnumbered the snakes, and the churches outnumbered the tumbleweeds, and nothing outnumbered the churches except tornadoes.

Now, it might seem strange to you, or wrong, or it might even seem to be a lie that there exists such a town where churches outnumber people, but in the town where Dana grew up there was exactly the right number of everything. There was the right number of people and the right number of dogs, the right number of snakes and the right number of tumbleweeds.

Something's End, Part 1

I have been giving a lot of thought to endings lately.

I believe I have been giving a lot of thought to endings lately because for me, a lot of things have been ending lately.

Relationships done. School finished. My lease ended. “Lesbians in My Soup”  ending…

So much around here has been going, going, gone.

Then this morning, which was Sunday morning, I was out on Montrose Boulevard, dumpster diving like I do every Sunday morning. I had just come up for air with a box fan in my left hand and a brown corduroy Stafford suit jacket in my right. I admit that I was really pleased with myself because, I mean, who wouldn’t be? A brown corduroy Stafford suit jacket goes with almost anything and it can be casual or  formal.

And that was when I saw it. Across the street.

I saw that old office building at 3400 Montrose.

Travolta

If only my parents had been more fucked up, there’s no limit to what I might have been by now.

I might have been a great artist or an inventor or the world’s youngest CEO, if only Mommy and Daddy had not wanted me. Or if Mommy had but not Daddy, or if Daddy had but not Mommy. Or if they had wanted me at first but then, for reasons no one could ever quite put into words, one day suddenly changed their minds.

I mean, I am gay and a little creepy-looking. Plenty of children have been rejected for less.

Or else my folks could have wanted me way too  much, leading them to that kind  of unnatural clinginess and dependency that goes on way past the age at which such a thing is really healthy. That would have been a way to screw me up something awful. 

If my parents had died before I ever got to know them at all, I might have had a hole way down at the very center of ME that I’d always try and fill with a parade of slightly self-destructive but incredibly interesting things.

Dead Doors

Ray Manzarek is dead.

A long, long time ago, way back before I was born, he played keyboards in a rock and roll band called the Doors. “The Doors”  was short for “The Doors of Perception,”  which was short for “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

I never met Ray Manzarek. I was not a fan of the songs that Ray Manzarek used to play with his rock and roll band. On those exceedingly rare occasions when I thought about Ray Manzarek at all, I invariably pictured him, in my head, as the actor Kyle MacLachlan.

But Ray Manzarek is dead now and I am writing about him, and I am writing about him because he is on my mind. He is not on my mind for his art – for his keyboard playing – which sounded the way cracked carnival lights look.

He is on my mind because a movie about the Doors, called “The Doors,” was the first R-rated movie I ever saw.

I am going to talk about that for a little while now. I hope that’s okay.

The Skinned Knee Blues

Now, Rachel, she walked on up to us, moping along with skinned knees. Stiff-leg staggering like a Frankenstein, flapping her hands to stay balanced or else stay away the pain, I can’t tell. I don’t know.

And she said moms, I can’t wear pants today and moms, I can’t wear jeans ‘cos… skinned knees.

From where I was sitting, there was not a single drop of blood… or at least none that I could see. Maybe two little matching shiny spots, you know, like where the skin kinda got rubbed away?  Maybe, if I turned my head just so, maybe… Well, it was nothing to call the paramedics over.

But still she was holding back the tears and none too well. And then the color, it drained right out of Dana’s face, and I could see what way things were headed, so I swept up the girl in my arms and I rushed her into the bathroom like she’d come to us with her arm severed or with a sucking chest wound and massive head trauma, instead of just with these… skinned knees.

And I fell back on what I knew. I reached on back into my own past and I brought out what I had seen when it comes to skinned knees. And what I’d seen was that Neosporin and a Band-Aid can cure pretty damn much anything. It can yank a body right back from the very precipice of certain death, hanging on by the fingernails, breaths shallow, whimpering low or screaming out in pain if they’ve still got it in them by then.

But if you’ve got yourself some Neosporin and a Band-Aid or two or maybe three, you slap ‘em on there and then give the tyke some attention and they just might be as right as rain and as good as new to go.

It is something that’s always worked when it comes to skinned knees.

Thing is, it only sort of worked with Rachel.

I said Rachel, have you never skinned your knees before? And she stared on down at the Band-Aids – one on each knee – standing there vacant like she couldn’t walk out and was going to need crutches or hell, I don’t know, a full-body cast or something, and she shrugged.

That’s right, shrugged! This nine-year old girl… Precocious. Boundless energy. Athletic, even. Yet she did not know… she could not recall… she was unsure whether she’d ever before suffered from that old ubiquitous childhood affliction known the whole world over as the skinned knee.  

I spent all my early years running around with skinned knees. Half my life, and every time they’d almost heal to where I’d have those dark, horizontal scab lines coming in, I’d pick them off and let the healing start all over again.

It was the circle of life.

I said as much to Dana, and then Dana said Katy, what the hell were you doing as a kid that you were always getting hurt?

And I thought it over a little and well, I hadn’t really been injured per se. They were only skinned knees. But looking back it seems now like back then it was a whole lot of skinned knees.

What in the world had I been doing?

How does one, in the normal course of one’s daily activities, so to speak, happen to come by quite so many skinned knees? D’I have some kind of balance problem? An equilibrium thing that was never properly diagnosed?

And to be honest, that started haunting me – for a day, for two days, for three days – I’d lie there at night and try to reconstruct in my mind the circumstances leading to those skinned knees of my childhood.

And then, wouldn’t you know it? Roundabout the fourth day of this, they all started coming back to me. All those knees. The skinned knees. I recognized some of them. You were summer of ’91, weren’t you? Or Hey, June of 1994, how ya been?

They’re all kind of like snowflakes, I suppose. No two skinned knees quite the same.

Like there’s I-thought-that-branch-was-strong-enough-to-hold-me skinned knees.

Lookin’-back-to-see-if-that-dog-is-still-chasing-me-while-I’m-running skinned knees.

There’s climbed-up-one-side-of-the-fence-no-problem-but-had-some-trouble-getting-down-the-other-side skinned knees.

And who-the-heck-loosened-my-bike-seat? skinned knees.

No-no-the-side-of-the-bayou’s-not-too-steep-for-me-to-run-down skinned knees.

There’s the my-brother-unexpectedly-launches-a-basketball-at-the-back-of-my-head skinned knees.

Can’t forget the at least fifteen variations on your classic treehouse skinned knees, which I would be glad to chart out for you someday by sub-class, height and time of day incurred.

And then there’s the skateboard skinned knees. All told, I probably I left a pound of flesh and three quarts of blood on various Houston-area half pipes before the day that I turned fourteen. And you know, skateboarding was probably just a bad idea for someone like me. We oughta take some time and compare scars when we get a chance…

But there’s also got-shoved, got-kicked, got-pushed-down-the-stairs skinned knees, and fell-while-doing-various-blatantly-stupid-things skinned knees, not to mention the unicycle, pogo stick, dirt bike, big wheel, and trying-to-ride-the-dog-but-the-dog-doesn’t-want-to-be-rode-today skinned knees.

Why, after a few days of all this recollecting, it was starting to seem like there were more ways for a knee to get itself skinned than there were for a knee to remain unskinned. Like unless you were living some kind of boy-in-the-bubble, padded hallways, Little Lord Fontleroy existence, there was just no way for your knees not to look like the remains of some eighteenth century battlefield by the time you hit puberty and started giving some serious thought to wearing skirts.

Like if you were doing anything at all that was worth the doing, it was practically an inevitability that your knees were going to bear the brunt of it.

And this led me, in turn, when I followed the bouncing ball, to two distressing questions: One was with skinned knees being what they were, how was it my own daughter missed out on them altogether? Two was what had happened to me that I’d now gone so long without skinned knees?

Don’t we take chances? Don’t we do anything outside our comfort zone?

Don’t we ever try and ride the dog?

So here’s a little something, I guess… A little tribute or maybe a toast of sorts in honor of skinned knees and the knowledge that tomorrow, my daughter and I are taking a sheet of cardboard down to Buffalo Bayou so we can sled down its banks.  

Our knees don’t stand a chance.

I have stocked up on the Neosporin and Band-Aids.