I sleep.
I wake.
What’s Kathi Kannon doing right now?
When I was a kid, I would play a game called What’s Madonna Doing Right Now? I would close my eyes and imagine at that very second where Madonna could be on earth and what she was doing. There was something special about imagining Madonna heating a Hot Pocket or using the bathroom.
What’s Madonna doing right now? What’s Kathi Kannon doing right now? I close my eyes. Is Kathi on the phone with Michelle Pfeiffer or Goldie Hawn? Is she making her bed? Is she putting on jewelry? Is she in her bedroom? Her red room? Her living room with Mateo the Moose? Is she watching TV? Is she planning her next book or her next adventure around the world? Is she smoking e-cigarettes with her new assistant, the one who must have stolen the job from me, who’s better than me, more charming, more clever, more apt—even if he does like sports? Is she laughing and waxing about meeting me, the other guy—groovy, unqualified, “a little odd”?
I spent hours of childhood lost in imagination, play, dance—any and every fantasy that could one day get me on my father’s television. When I was thirteen, I choreographed an entire routine I fantasized would be my audition for Ed McMahon’s Star Search. I was dancing to the 1961 song “Mother-in-Law” by Ernie K-Doe. (My dad only let me listen to oldies, which were part of a collection of cassette tapes in a plastic case shaped like a jukebox.) I wanted a costume with a pop of flair, so I wore a black sweatshirt and black sweatpants and a pair of my mother’s pink socks. She had been dead a year by this point, but her clothing was still in her dresser, everything like she left it except for the few things I dared disturb, sometimes just to smell them, to remember her.
In her pink socks, I was spinning in a circle, my arms free, my head rushing, the song’s simple melody imbuing me with drunk abandon as I spun, spun, spun, and then came crashing down onto the floor with a thud as part of my finale. Dad was instantly yelling.
“WHAT THE HELL IS ALL THAT BANGING AROUND UP THERE? CHARLIE, GET DOWN HERE NOW!” He was screaming for me from that recliner, with that crushed green material, I can still smell it, a football game blaring on the TV—football, his other passion, second only to TV news. Fear crept into me like a venom, but in my dizzy euphoria I assured myself: I can take care of him, don’t worry. I was thinking, I’ll just appease him, apologize, and be back to my routine for Ed McMahon in a few seconds. Funny, the times we feel brave. Funny, the moments we think we’re strong. I didn’t even have hair in my armpits yet, but so earnest was I in my artful mission that I wasn’t careful. Young courage—not always helpful.
Before going downstairs, I pulled the legs of my sweatpants as far down to my ankles as they would go to cover up the pink socks. I put on slippers to cover the rest. I was thinking, even then, that I needed to hide things from him, to protect myself from him.
I approached his recliner like the hand of the king approaches the throne, massaging the space closing in between us as if it were a living being. Finally before him, his gaze turning to me, I realized suddenly I was not an agent of a royal court but more like the jester, a clown, and the balls I was juggling scattered at my feet, rolling quickly away from me, away from him, smartly saving themselves.
Dad looked down at my socks as if they called out to him, as if bait on a fishing line, as if the hook were caught painfully deep in his gums. “YOU LIKE DRESSING IN GIRL CLOTHES?!” he screamed. He stood. He moved toward me.
Walking backward, I felt the socks, those pink terrors on my feet, moments ago sliding me across the floor in ecstasy, in another life, now sandpaper in my slippers.
“COME HERE!” Dad yelled, grabbing my Star Search wardrobe by the shoulder and lifting me slightly, bullying me to his bedroom. “UNDRESS!” he yelled. The same voice in my head that inspired my dancing had now turned on me, was now dark and cruel, and I obeyed it as it told me to obey him. I pulled off my sweatshirt, ashamed anew that I had no hair on my body, that I was nothing like the other kids at school who were growing their tufts of masculinity here and there.
When I stood shirtless before him, he yelled, “ALL OF IT!”
I pulled off my slippers and socks. I pulled off my sweatpants. I stood before him in my underwear, tattered, old, tarnished tighty-whities. He stared at me, the pores of his face so clear, and I knew he meant it. All of it. And I awkwardly slid down my underwear. They hooked on my right heel and I nearly toppled yanking them off. I couldn’t look up at him.
“Go get a pair of your mother’s panties,” he said.
I turned away from him and toward Mom’s dresser, the drawer where I borrowed her socks still open the slightest bit. I knew her underwear drawer was the bottom right; I knew where all her things were, my tears having dotted them like breadcrumbs in my secret visits to this dresser in the months after she passed. I chose a pair of her panties.
“PUT THEM ON,” he said.
I slipped them onto my body, eager to hide my nakedness. I had to hold them up so they didn’t fall off my thin frame.
“YOU LIKE THAT?” he yelled. “YOU LIKE DRESSING LIKE A GIRL?!”
I was utterly paralyzed.
A football game blaring.
And he left me there, crying.
He left me there, seeds of failure and disappointment and separateness not just planted inside me but blossoming, with roots stretching out, reaching deep.
And I never did make it onto Star Search. Another of my life’s failures. Now my literal star search—for Kathi Kannon’s employ—seems ended in flames, too.
I’m deep in expensive therapy about all this. Every session is a buffet of my childhood, my career, my suicide fantasies. My therapist is a petite woman, mostly a listener—rarely does she give me advice or conversation, preferring instead to stare at me, even after I ask a direct question, waiting for me to find the answer on my own. She has a habit of, occasionally and without impetus, quickly glancing down at her clothing, pulling her sweater closed, brushing flat the folds of her dress, clutching her collar, as if by some act of God one of her breasts or an edge of her nipple may be randomly, mysteriously exposed. Perhaps it’s her clue, her signaling what she really wants most from me. She wants me to bare my vital organs, my breast, or what’s beneath it, my heart. She’s my Therapista, a warrior of my inner world.
Therapista says what you don’t discuss is what you fear most.
Therapista says everything comes out eventually.
Therapista says everyone we meet is a teacher.
In our weekly sessions, I sometimes play her own trick on her, staring at her as if I’m confused or mute, waiting for her to elaborate. “What I mean,” she says, “is that the slow driver in front of us is teaching us patience. The stressed-out waitress is teaching us the merits of inner peace. The broken heater is teaching us to find other ways to stay warm.”
I don’t mention to her that a broken heater can be deadly.
Therapista wants me to journal, to track my thoughts and feelings. “Get a little notepad,” she says. “Or take notes in your phone. Just to get thoughts out of your head.”
Hey, Siri, take a note. Are you there? Are you the one person listening?
Therapista says it’s a friendly universe, that things happen for you, not to you, that if I don’t get the Kathi Kannon job it’s only because something even bigger and better is waiting for me.