A few years after my parents’ divorce, on one of his Sunday visits, completely out of the blue, our father told us that he was going to be getting married again, to our aunt, to his dead brother's wife, so that my Aunt Helen was now going to be my stepmother and all my cousins were now going to be my step brothers and step sister.
So now suddenly, I had 4 cousin-brothers, and a sister-cousin, and an aunt-mom. And instead of 3 of us kids, there were now 8 of us, and our dad was now their dad too, and now he lived in a house, instead of in his office with a pistol and instead of opening Christmas gifts next to a blueprint machine that left us dizzy and smelling like ammonia, we actually went to celebrate holidays in his home, a house with multiple hot rods backed up into the driveway, tables laid end to end, groaning under the weight of food and where the phrase “loud enough to wake the dead” was born…Holidays at Dad’s were wall to wall, it was raucous! A decibel level one might be subjected to in a major sports arena, now compressed down into a two-story tract home in Northridge, California. One Thanksgiving, I found my father in the garage, smoldering near the recycling bin. I asked him if he was okay and he answered with: “There are so many people…in my God damned KITCHEN right now!”
The holidays at Dad’s always followed the predictable pattern of a feast that devolved into a dessert orgy that inevitably ended in a death match disguised as the board game Trivial Pursuit, a perverse table top tradition seemingly designed to tear at the very fabric of the American family. One year, the very last question that would lead his team to victory, was asked of my father, who, having never attended Sunday school apparently, had no freaking idea whose image adorns The Shroud of Turin, but in his growing frustration at the increasing volume building in the room as the last grains of sand slipped through the tiny hourglass, muttered under his breath, “Jesus Christ” and he, completely confused as to why, was hoisted up in his chair like a pharaoh.