Dysfunctionality

"I guess you're wondering why I'm hanging here like this. It's a really long story and it's hard to talk when you're dangling like this so I'll make it short." His voice sounded stifled, like he was being strangled. "Actually, as far as the long and short of it, I'm trying to make things longer."

A single twenty-five watt dust-covered light bulb hung from the ceiling inside the old cedar closet. The smell of cedar was overpowered by mothballs permeating the air. The room itself was dark save for a lit candle on the dresser. It was quiet enough to hear the wax sizzling as the flame marched down the wick. Joey is hanging from the horizontal wooden pole with clothes draped on either side of him.

He swung off the pole and out of the closet landing on his feet with a soft thud, bending his knees like a spring to soften the noise. Thank God for the rug or his mother would have come up and pounded him a time or two. He walked front and center, directly across from the mirror in his bedroom, pacing back and forth, hands in his back pockets. He catches a glimpse of his reflection. He takes a moment to size himself up as if he has never seen the person looking back.

"Okay, le'me explain," he says to the mirror in his Bronx-Italian accent. "I gotta lotta hang-ups (no pun intended if ya know what I mean)," he said thumbing in the direction of the bar he was just hanging from. "Beverly Place will be here any minute and my mom's frenzy is a category F5 right about now," he says.

"No, Beverly Place is not a new reality TV show or sitcom, nuthin' like that. In my world, here in reality-land, it's my mother's name for her mother, my dear grandmother. My mother can't stand her. That's not it exactly, she hates her is more like it. She hates her so much she calls her by the name of the street she lives on instead of mom, or mother or anything as respectfully endearing as that. Can you believe it?" He goes on, not waiting for an answer.

"I'm not really sure how this ridiculousness came about, I'm only familiar with the shrapnel that flies around this place because of it. It's like stepping on a land mine when she visits. Pieces of human dignity and self esteem are flung in all directions. You gotta scrape the walls for weeks to get rid of it.

"Y'see, Beverly Place is about as critical as a person can get about other people, other people's families and just about anything else in life. It's her way or the highway. She ranks on my mother constantly about how she is raising me and my sisters. I don't know how mom survived her childhood really. Although, there are times it doesn't seem she has. Beverly Place ranks on my dad and how could her daughter have married the likes of him? She constantly compares us to her precious son's family. They're all tall, dark and handsome, even the girls. Mostly she ranks on my mother, then the rest of us in order of our arrival into the world. She's really been diggin' her claws into my kid sister lately, too, and she's not even old enough to get all of her remarks yet. Fresh blood, I guess. Wait till that baggage gets opened a few years from now!

"Anyway, last Christmas Beverly Place blurts out that I'm way too short for a guy. I should be ashamed of myself. After she left, mom told me that Beverly Place expects me to hang from something until I can grow to a respectable height. It's like she expects gravity to take over where our genes left off or something. My mother doesn't want anycrap from her, so she expects me to carry out her wishes. I was hurt sure, insecure, too. But the thing of it is, for awhile I thought it might be working. I actually felt taller, until I measured myself and found it really wasn't working at all. The lifts in my boots and the higher heel are working fairly nicely though. And, they look cool, too. I'm a muscian, so looking cool is, well...cool."

Joey glances down at a pair of black boots covered just so by a pair of slightly worn blue jeans. His hands are in his front pockets now and he is bent over just a bit, head up and grinning at his reflection in the mirror as if it were an audience. He begins to rock back and forth heel to toe on his boots. The muscular ripples of his trimly toned upper arms and shoulders are looking quite nice in the flickering candle light. He then turns on his heels and heads toward the door, reaching for a yellow, man-tailored shirt hanging on the back of the door and flings it around him in one sweep, slipping it on over a black Guinea-T, and letting it hang open. It brings out his dark olive color. In spite of his insecurities, he is admiring his look. He ruffles up the front of his hair because Beverly Place doesn't like it like that and starts humming a tune from the fifties he recalls hearing in his dad's car as a kid, only in his version the words go more like this:

"When you got dys-functionality/ya get, dat-casuality/dys-functionality, and then you get a great big shri-ink bill...well, oh what else can you do/when you got dys-functionality...yeah, you are roy-a-lly screwed." Joey stares at the mirror again and mumbles something admirable to himself, building up his guard. "Ready or not, here I go, like David to the lions," he says as he hears his mother's yelp from downstairs in that voice that Beverly Place has arrived. He hears his sister reciting a prayer of some kind as her doorknob slowly turns and she dares to step out into the eye of the storm. She watches admirably as Joey slides down the banister sideways on the way to a thirteenth birthday dinner for her that is sure to be chocked full of memories packed inside more baggage than she'll be able to carry.

"C'mon, sis. Let's party!" he says nearly knocking over the strategically placed statue of Mother Mary at the bottom of the railing. His sister, Anna, blesses herself with the sign of the cross a few more times before making her inevitable descent into the bowels of hell.