Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Chapters 12-16)

Half way through the book and we’ve moved into his early adult life.  We get a closer look at Hugh, apparently David’s soul mate (husband?).  As effeminate as David intends to depict himself, Hugh appears to be the emotional one, as we examine their respective reactions to a romantic move (chick flick?).  “I asked if he always cried during comedies, and he accused me of being grossly insensitive, a charge I’m trying to plea-bargain down to simply obnoxious…  Looking back, I should have known better than to accompany Hugh to a love story.” 

Our author is introducing his family to us one by one, camouflaging the fact with chapter titles that throw us off the scent.  After his father and his mother, next up is Lisa, his older sister.  He has already admitted to being somewhat OCD, but his descriptions of some of Lisa’s foibles paint her as being even worse.  She is particularly nervous about how she will be depicted in a movie that is to be made of some of David’s writing, having been appalled at some of his revelations of her and other family members in his books.  I have to admit, I would be nervous, too!  The passages regarding his sister’s pet parrot, Henry, are particularly fun.  Who kisses their pet parrot?  “She stuck out her tongue, and he accepted the tip gingerly between his upper and lower beak.  I’d never dream of doing such a thing, not because it’s across-the-board disgusting but because he would have bitten the s__t out of me.” 

Sandwiched in between Lisa and Paul, David’s younger brother, is an exposition on the cultural differences regarding the Santa Claus myth.  He finds that the Dutch version of the story doesn’t include elves (“…Oscar denounced the very idea as grotesque and unrealistic”) but “…six to eight black men.  I asked several Dutch people to narrow it down, but none of them could give me an exact number.  It was always ‘six to eight,’ which seems strange, seeing as they’ve had hundreds of years to get an accurate head count.”  As mentioned in the last post, the phrasing and word choice of such quips are a large part of the humor here.  It makes you wonder if his speech is peppered with the same verbal gems – as I suspect that it is. 

We really have to wonder if David’s brother Paul is really as redneck crude as these anecdotes claim.  If a boy grows up knowing that his older brother is gay, does he make a special attempt to be a crass, loudmouth opposite of his sibling?  We have already seen that the father has some rather rough edges along these lines, but Paul’s testosterone level reminds us of some of the cruder scenes in the movie “Deliverance.”  When Paul left home to go out on his own, it “was like releasing a domestic animal into the wild.  He knew how to plan a meal but displayed a remarkable lack of patience when it came time for the actual cooking.  Frozen dinners were often eaten exactly as sold, the Salisbury steak amounting to a stickless meat Popsicle.”

 

And more about Hugh.  Here one might be reminded of Oscar and Felix, of “The Odd Couple” while apartment hunting, with Hugh being excited and “seeing the possibilities” of each apartment while David is gagging on the smell of stagnant urine.  The real estate agent they worked with “sensed my lack of enthusiasm and wrote it off as a failure of imagination.  ‘Some people can see only what is in front of them,’ she sighed.”  She later referred to his misgivings over their selection as buyer’s remorse.  “’But don’t worry, it’s perfectly natural.’  Natural.  A strange word when used by an eighty-year-old with an unlined face and hair the color of an American school bus.”





Next week: Conclusion.