A STEUBENVILLE DIARY

JOURNAL 2 (THANKSGIVING)

TUESDAY

I’m spending a week in Steubenville, Ohio, for Thanksgiving.

I flew into the Pittsburgh airport and my dad picked me up at 11AM. My mom had lately been making a big stink about my filial negligence (cause I wasn’t spending Christmas with her this year), but she didn’t come to the airport, nor was she home (due to vague errands) until 7PM that night, though she did leave a gift waiting for me: a Grinch sweater, as a token of my shirking her Christmas.

My dad took me to a Greek restaurant in Weirton. I ordered a gyro—overcome with anxiety about how to actually pronounce that word. It came with a fly embedded in the tzatziki sauce, which I picked out fusslessly; I was in Appalachia now, I couldn’t be on my metropolitan-sissy time.

I idled about for most of the day reading Gargantua and Pantagruel (in the Thomas Urquhart translation) which opens up with a dedication to us “most noble and illustrious drinkers” which spurred me along the ebrious path on which I need no prodding: reader, on this night, and all of the following, I got shitfaced.

It started at Texas Roadhouse, with my dad, for dinner. They give you a basin full of bread rolls and literal icing to slather them with; it’s a horror, we were begging them to take it away from us. We were drinking humungous mugs of Michelob Ultra, the bland dreck of which is the only beer my dad drinks now cause advertising has seeped so deeply into his brain that he thinks it’s a manly beer for athletes.

When we got back home he popped open a bottle of wine. And then another. My mom got home and she started drinking too.

My family can be a little chaotic. My mom was agitated for several reasons: this ongoing drama with her niece in Brasil; the fact that I was planning on visiting my dad’s mom tomorrow (who has legitimately said awful things about my mother); and this friction I’ve had with my twin sister for the past year; [redacted etceteras].

So she kinda flipped on me a bit. Which statistically was going to happen at least once, and it was better to get it out of the way early.

But I cleared up my loyalties and we came to a peaceful understanding.

WEDNESDAY

My paternal grandma, Nana, lives 10 miles North following the Ohio River in the town of Toronto where my dad grew up.

She is 96 and extremely loquacious. I think she regrets her absence in my life and what she’s put my mother through but only in so far as those things have diminished the devotion and adulation she feels I ought have for her, so she spends most of her visits trying to “sell herself” to me, as if me not knowing that she once went to the Playboy Club in NYC to sing an acapella concert (unverifiable) is the real reason for our distance.

I spend most of the visit trying to make my dad laugh. I asked Nana if she ever had a threesome with my grandfather, Papa.

She asked what?? a dozen times pretending she didn’t hear the question then stared out into space and changed the subject. Thus it will remain a mystery.

Though, I think, he was more of an extracurricular lover; Nana did tell me once that, “Dirty-ass [her little nickname for my grandpa Darius] would fuck whores at the bowling alley.”

After that we went out to the Wintersville Looney Bin to see my dad’s old friend Paul Karr. There is simply too much to say about Paul. He was a local bookie and one day after the Super Bowl somebody pistolwhipped him, knocked him out, he hit his head on the sidewalk, and now he got early-onset-water-brain and lives in AN assisted-living home.

Some brief stories to illustrate Paul’s character:

He met his wife on a flight to Las Vegas. They talked for 20 minutes, deplaned, and got married. They had two kids and stayed married for 20 years, up until his internment.

(One time when I was very young, six maybe, I heard his son, Austin, who was about my age, got a scooter, and I called him up on the house phone and I said,

“Hey Austin! Do you wanna go ride scooters?”

And he said,

“No, I sprained my ankle, retard.”

And I never forgot that.)

Once my dad lost him in Vegas for about a week, and on New Year’s Eve ran into him drunk as a skunk in an alleyway making out with a homeless woman, and when he saw my dad he said, “I hope 1989 is as GOOOOOD as 1988!” and he planted another kiss on the lady.

He defrauded innkeepers all over the state of Florida under the pseudonym Paul Cheese.

If he heard a band he liked playing at a bar, he’d sign them to a record deal on a napkin and pop champagne. (He was not the head of a music label, obviously.)

He often got big comped suites in Vegas, either cause of a Steubenville connection, or thru the force of his swindling. He’d take hookers up there and he had a slew of fake Rolexes. He would say he needed to go grab the money somewhere and tell them to hold the Rolex as collateral, assuming they’d just take the Rollie and dip. Which they usually did. But one young woman caught the trick and found him at the bar later and slapped the shit out of him.

They tried to pin a murder on him in Steubenville. Dragged him out to the police station where he ended up signing a confession for something else: calling and harassing over 300 women, which he also didn’t do. Eventually he got off that, but while he was at the station found out he had a warrant out for insurance fraud. Which they actually ended up pinching him for.

I could really go on and on.

But when he ended up in the Looney Bin, many thought it was his way out of having to square up his debts.

It’s really fascinating to talk to him now cause he almost seems completely normal. I pull up and he’s like, “Hey Harold.” But then he’ll be like, “my wife dumped me bout four or five days ago, cause she had 3 out of 5 losers on the round robin. Can’t Paul win one?!”

When I tell people about Paul they always say, “that’s so sad.” I disagree.

There’s absolutely no sadness in his life. He struts around the place like the mayor, shaking hands, making people laugh, in a perfect state of equanimity. There’s no sadness, no chaos in his life. And for the first time, his moral balance is squarely on the right side.

He’s happy all day long, and he don’t hurt nobody.

Wednesday before Thanksgiving is a big drinking night. I went out with Jacob and his wife Olivia.

There’s a new place at the rinkydink abandoned Fort Steuben Mall that’s trying to revitalize the joint and it’s like a Dave & Buster’s vibe. It’s a cavernous place with an arcade, a few bars, and a bowling alley.

The fun part about being out on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is seeing all these randos you used to know but never ever see. Like the Kuntupis twins and Carlo Fabian. And you get to hear the Steubenville accent in its sharpest relief.

There was this one kid who literally that same day me and Jacob were making fun of in a group message because he got his son’s footprints tattooed on his neck: a truly atrocious tattooing feat (no pun intended). And we got to see the tattoo in person which was a treat.

Whenever I’m out with Jacob without Gaby I make a vlog for her of him: he just rambles mundanely, digressively, and it cracks us all up.

AND NOTHING CRAZY HAPPENED THAT NIGHT.

THURSDAY

My mom and my brasilian grandma (who’s been staying with my parents for the last six months) cooked up an enormous feast.

My sister, Rhiannon, arrived with the felicitous anodyne gringo she’s dating: Jim Gag (future MD).

My girlfriend Gaby didn’t come thru for Thanksgiving because of we’ll say… logistical reasons. Rhiannon and I live and work together. The last two years, but especially the last six months, we’ve been in a strife-filled attritive essentially cold war because of we’ll say… logistical reasons.

It’s a war that my mother keeps trying to settle, but everytime she meddles, it becomes much, much worse.

As cordial as we are, at the moment, our beef was still a shadow looming over Thanksgiving.

Before dinner, my dad’s friend Big Sam stopped over. Big Sam is a …businessman… from Aliquippa. He is a strange cat. Decades ago he was dating this woman but he wouldn’t commit to her and she was gonna marry another guy. He flew out to Atlanta and convinced her to leave the guy at the alter. She did. He didn’t marry her for another 17 years.

Immediately after they got married she cheated on him with her boss. Which sent him into a depressive spiral where he almost killed himself. Thankfully he didn’t.

Now he’s dating my mom’s friend Maria. The relationship between Maria and Sam was a hot topic all week. They’re both very stubborn, very Italian. Big Sam is the most laconic person I’ve ever met and he has such a grumbling deep voice that whenever he garbles out anything it sounds important enough to be written in stone. He said Maria was “cool” and we were all bowled over by such extravagant gushy praise.

My mother has difficulty understanding why Maria would wanna be with Sam. But Sam told me that now when he ejaculates, ain’t nothing come out. Maria’s a neatfreak. So it’s perfect, he fucks her; no clean-up.

Big Sam had about four glasses of wine and then went over to Maria’s for Thanksgiving dinner where she was hosting about 50 people. (She was furious at him, we found out later on, cause the first words out of his mouth when he got there was, “Where’s the wine at?”)

Another guest was Dave Starr, a grimlucked double widower (and another serious girlfriend he had—that didn’t die—stole 20 grand from his savings and dipped), who recently successfully got his cancer operated out (he didn’t go to the doctor for the first 66 years of his life until a heart attack forced him there; he was shitting blood and didn’t wanna get it checked out, but my dad made him), so he was in absolute jovial spirits.

I should also say something about the dogs. My parents have two dogs, Lucky and Millie. Lucky, my mom bought for 20 reals from a homeless woman when he was a 10 day old puppy basically dying out on the hot sidewalk in Copacabana. So he’s Lucky cause he was born to be a brasilian street mutt but since those first 10 days he’s been living in the lap of luxury.

Millie was out in amish country and they were about to put her down when my mom swooped in. She is very long and very strange.

Hopefully my mom don’t read this cause it’s the only part she’d object to so far: the dogs are very ill-trained. Maybe that’s the problem with getting dogs that were initially defective, but they really do whatever they want: Millie don’t respond to her name and solely goes to the bathroom inside the house. Lucky will jump and try to bite your face off when he sees you. He has given me black eyes with his forcefulness. They do whatever they want and they’re so spoiled.

Needless to say, I got super trashed on Thanksgiving. I drank ALL DAY LONG and took several edibles. By the end of the evening; there’s a little piano in the house cause my sister played growing up, and, under the guise of my all-encompassing-avantgardism, I was banging on it like a mad man to the absolute terror and dismay of everyone in the house.

My mom said, “God you SUCK!”

I ended the night having a long, wonderful conversation with my mother about various topics. And then my grandma joined in.

My vovó, Lucia, always ends up telling these long very erudite historical stories where she mixes up figures and eras and imbues everything with her Spiritist ideology; it’s always extremely interesting, and I think I get my propensity towards idiosyncratic mythography from her.

FRIDAY

Me and my dad went to get Paul some clothes at Gabe’s (a thrift store in Weirton). His pants and shirts weren’t fitting. We needed some big clothes. Like 4XL. We brought it back over to him and my dad cleaned out his closet.

I mean, he spent a lot of time cleaning out his closet. To the point where I was a bit annoyed, like what does it matter if his closet is a mess and full of clothes that don’t fit he don’t know nothing anyway. But, I guess, that is truly treating someone with dignity.

Afterwards I went to downtown Steubenville to walk around. I think it’s beautiful and picturesque; some of it. Some of it is dilapidated, razed, abandoned. But it’s further confirmation to me that in the period between 1830 and 1930, Steubenville was the Bee’s fucking Knees.

There was a period of time when Lincoln’s Secretary of War: Edwin Stanton; the first Black baseball player in Major League Baseball, Moses Fleetwood Walker; and the only american male catholic saint, John Neumann; were all living in town together, right before Dean Martin was born there!

Now Steubenville is being revitalized by serious, serious Catholics.

Last year cause Tropicália’s release, I did an event at a bookstore on Fourth Street, BookMarx. The owner is a nice, smart fellow. Though I find him more than a bit off-putting. And it’s probably due to our extreme religious differences. He is a fierce believer that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and that the truth of Catholicism is real and important, and I absolutely do not believe that.

He has five children and when I walked in, he was holding one of those children who had a face full of the most snot I’ve ever seen on a creature. To be fair, him and his wife were trying to wipe the snot off and not having much success.

He told me that he was just looking at a picture of Rio online, and I said, “I bet you were like, Fuck I wish I was there!”

The F-word fell like an anvil in that store packed with Catholics and children. He goes, “sounds like a line from your book!”

Meaning, the fuck-filled Tropicália.

Catholics are moving into Steubenville by the droves and it was eerie listening to him talk to a family that walked in (a family that just moved to town)…; Steubenville is already a Catholic Mecca thanks to Franciscan University, and the Catholic families intermarry and breed and are making something of a Super Family. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 20 years Steubenville was a domed theocracy, outside the bounds of American law.

Anyway, he’s a nice guy and the selection in the bookstore is good. I bought a copy of an Oxford World Classics edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and a trade paperback of Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.

That night I went to the wine store and bar Jacob’s mom owns and we gossiped and hung out. Jacob was being very funny.

SATURDAY

Our only full family outing was planned for Saturday. We were going to go to the movies in Pittsburgh to see Wicked. Though I’d already seen it with Gaby the previous week, I went in a spirit of down-for-anything-tag-along.

We piled into my mom’s car. My dad drove and Rhiannon sat in the front. Me and Jim Gag were in the back with my mom in the middle seat in between us (she refused to wear a seat belt).

On the way up, my dad and Rhiannon were quibbling about directions and she started roasting him. She’s at her absolutest funniest when she’s roasting my dad. I was cracking up.

My mom and dad were in rare form as soon as we walked into the movies. Nitpicking every aesthetic decision of the theater set-up, complaining about the dirty bathrooms, the trash, logistical annoyances. They both were in perfect concord saying the exact same thing without even hearing one-another talk about it.

The theater was packed with maybe 200 people with the lights on during the previews. My mom, apparently, didn’t know you weren’t allowed to talk during the previews and she was being very loud. My sister shushed her, and in responsive to that, about every 20 minutes during the course of the eternal movie she would glare at my sister and whisper fuck you! It was hilarious, her and my dad were in rare form.

There was a light debacle cause the lights were full-on when the movie started. Everyone was whipping their heads around pissed like is someone gonna do something? Someone walked out to get an employee and he came in and apparently there was a light switch right there in obvious view, anyone could’ve flipped it, but there would’ve been a riot before anyone noticed it was there.

My parents were making so much noise during the movie. They were passing the popcorn bucket back and forth and huffing it down like hogs. And my dad was CACKLING, he laughed louder than anyone at the theater at EVERYTHING.

Me and my sister were sitting next to eachother and whispering and laughing about it. It’s difficult, sometimes, with her, for me to see her as an individual and not solely the locus of my anger and frustration, as my thwarter; and I think she probably feels the same way, I mean we’ve known eachother very closely for 27 years and there’s a lot of baggage that stems from our chaotic upbringing and countless feuds and also the fact that we come from generations of siblings that ended up despising eachother on both sides of our family tree (all the instances of estrangement are too numerous to enumerate), so it’s heartening and good, as infrequent as it’s been lately, to get a glimpse of her baggage-free, as just my friend.

After the movie—which honestly on second-watch I thought was fine but suffers greatly when you get into the details; and I don’t wanna hear an argument on this: the whole society of fucking Oz is devoted to the color green, it’s their sacred fucking color! they got an entire GREEN city! and this woman comes out green and they think it’s WEIRD? and ostracize her? It don’t make any fucking sense!—we went and got pizza at Primanti Bros, cause my mom wanted pizza. It was terrible.

On the way home we missed a deer on the highway by an inch. Phew!

SUNDAY

This shit has gone on too long. You ain’t reading still are you? I’ll cut it off here. My grandma’s leaving Monday, and Lucky is so depressed he got into her suitcase.

So we threw him and Millie a joint birthday party cause their birthday is in late december. Rhiannon kept telling my mom the cake was gonna make the dogs sick. Millie ate the cake, and she threw up.