Jokes My Father Never Taught Me by Rain Pryor

Author:Rain Pryor [Rain Pryor]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061745966
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

7.

GET OVER IT

About a year after my father’s failed suicide attempt, my mother tried to upstage him. I came home from school one afternoon, and the house seemed dark and eerily quiet.

“Mom?” I called out, but there was no answer.

I moved toward her room, past the creepy photograph of Bela Lugosi, and found her in bed, moaning. Then I noticed there was blood everywhere.

“Mom! Mom! Wake up! Please wake up!”

It looked as if my mother had slashed her wrists, but apparently had had second thoughts about dying, because they’d been ineptly wrapped with scarves. Terrified, I called my grandparents. “Mommy tried to kill herself!” I screamed, trying to stay coherent. “Please come quick!”

An ambulance arrived in record time, and Bunny and Herb showed up a short while later. Herb drove me to the Marina apartment, then went off to the hospital to look in on his daughter.

The following day, Mom was back home.

“I’m a mess,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” I said.

“I’m a total fucking mess.”

Of course she was a total fucking mess! She knew it and I knew it. But I didn’t think we needed to belabor the point.

I remember promising myself that from then on I was going to be the best little girl in the world, Jewish, black, or other. It was an instant replay of what I’d just been through with my father. If I loved my mother enough, maybe I could save her life. And maybe—just maybe—she’d love me a little in return.

Man, talk about fucked up!

I don’t even know if my father ever acknowledged my mother’s suicide attempt. She had been there for him, and she’d even gone to the hospital to give blood, but I don’t think she got so much as a phone call from Dad. Life is easy when you don’t give a shit about anyone else, and that was Daddy all the way. Super Narcissist. He was lost in the black hole of self-absorption.

By this time, Dad and Deborah, wife number three, were history, and I found out that Dad had jetted off to Hawaii with Jennifer Lee and married her. I honestly don’t know what he saw in her, and I guess he wasn’t too sure himself. A few days later, he said he wanted the marriage annulled. I don’t know whether this actually happened, though; she didn’t exactly disappear. She had started out as an employee, and she was determined to stick around, and that’s precisely what she did. It was a very strange arrangement, and I’m not sure any of us—Dad included—ever understood it.

I hated Jennifer from the very start, and she hated me, but in the years ahead I had to tolerate her nastiness. In the summer of 1982, for example, Dad took the whole family to Hawaii, Jennifer included, and one night she got drunk and in her incoherence accused me of sleeping with my father. I was thirteen years old and absolutely devastated, so I ran to my father and told him what she’d said.

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