Happy Family

by Lloyd B. Abrams

There were three things Roy and Jenna Crawford couldn't escape: death, taxes and their matching pair of Listerine bottles filled with cheap vodka in the upstairs bathroom cabinet. They even used old Robitussin plastic dosage cups to take their own swigs of medicine throughout their 25-hour days.

There was also one other thing they couldn't escape: the constant presence of their thirty-seven-year-old son, Harry, who hovered over them, pestered them, and whined at them about their drinking, but who ultimately was the one who slipped on paint-stained overalls and got into the Chevy pickup to drive down to the package store at the junction where he'd cash their social security checks and splurge on another case or two of Smirnoff to keep their mouthwash bottles refilled and their death marches on schedule.

Not only was Harry a constant annoying presence, he was also a morbidly obese cross-dresser with the tackiest of tastes. His daddy called him, alternately, a hag, a nag, an old bag in drag. Harry insisted on wearing his mother's cast-off muu-muus over size eleven Vanity Fair granny panties, an ill-fitting size 46 double-A brassiere and mauve faux-fur bed slippers that showed off his glistening pink-painted toe nails, while flittering about their dilapidated house-farm mini McMansion singing doo-wop love songs in zero-part harmony in an agonizingly poor rendition of Diana Ross and the Supremes doing "Baby Love, My Baby Love."

"Mama, please put that bottle right down," Harry'd falsetto. "Daddy please ... you don't really need that little drinkie right now." Of course, they'd just keep on swilling, just to spite their pitifully garish, messed-up, muu-muu wearing enabler. Bleary-eyed Roy made it very clear how he felt about Harry's entreaties when he gave Harry the finger, saying, "Up yours, and down the hatch."

There were actually five things Roy and Jenna couldn't avoid. The fifth was the dog, which Harry, in a fit of pique and a stab at humor, named Mistress Bunny. This slow-witted, constantly hungry, perpetually horny St. Bernard-Basset Hound mix appeared one day and pushed through their falling-apart rear screen door to ravage a raw chicken awaiting Jenna's belated placement in the oven. When Jenna waddled down the stairs from yet another visit to the medicine cabinet, she swore that the dog both laughed and sneered at her and then tried to hump her leg. Harry loved that dog because it became two against two, despite the globs of saliva that Mistress Bunny shook off on his muu-muu and slippers, on the walls, on the bed spread, and everywhere that Mistress Bunny's saliva excrescence could reach.

But wait, there's more.

There were actually six things Roy and Jenna couldn't avoid. It had to do with Harry, who was devotedly growing a third nipple with the combined action of high estrogen doses and his custom-made Electrolux vacuum attachment. But it wasn't just your common, everyday vestigial nipple strategically located between the other ordinary two for Harry. Always the extravagant one, always the drama queen, his had a ragingly huge areola. Instead of being supple and inviting and in a come-hither shade of pinkish brown, his was tattooed with the multiculturally multicolored rainbow hues of World-Wide Transgendered Terrorism & Activism, also known as WWTT&A..

Then there was that seventh thing that put it over the top for Roy and Jenna. No, it wasn't a five hundred pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the living room, though by now, it could be what one might expect. It was actually Harry's rogue chimpanzee, Ricky Ricardo, who slept on an Ethan Allen four-poster bed in the extra room. This 120-pound, four-foot tall-mini-person had acquired a taste for Pabst Blue Ribbon and had even learned to pop open the cans if Harry was off touching up the tattoo with glue and glitter. With Ricky Ricardo around, you were never sure which side he'd take. He was a free thinker and a sooth sayer. Or so they believed.

Such was their happy family.

Rev 2 / May 9, 2008

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May, 2008…Copyright © 2008, Lloyd B. Abrams