Beautiful

Chapter 16 Beautiful

As a small child I was very inquisitive and quiet.  This was during the days before the bar. Before I would become self-conscious about my weight, looks or what people thought of me.  It was before the days of Keeping up with the Kardashians, and The Jersey Shore.  I was just a boy. 

My mother would always tell me stories about how I, much like MacGyver, would always try to figure out things very quickly.  The only difference between he and I was that I would get frustrated easily, quit when I got fed up and end eating something sweet.  In reality I was never really like him, I mean I never had the attention-span to build anything and it would be years before I had a mullet.  My mother said that I always would create new ways to climb out of my crib as an infant.  This was a difficult thing to accomplished be since I, also had to sleep with a brace, intended to cure my severe pigeon-toe.  This brace was a metal bar holding both of my feet outwards.  The brace was heavy and gave me something to complain about from a young age, every Jewish person’s dream.  This brace really just worked as leverage to help me climb out of my crib or play-pen and to create a comedian.

I would keep calm while supervised, then during naps I would study the crib for new ways to escape and nearly give my mother a heart-attack every morning as a result.  Often these missions would lead to success in terms of surprising her, not the heart-attack part.  I would find a way to move my soccer-sized head with legs over the edge of the crib or playpen and somehow end up making my way safely to the ground.  As a child I looked much like Stewie from Family Guy, all head and a little body, a real caricature type of kid.  The climbing out of the pen, during the age of innocence, was before I learned what fear was, before courage had to be earned.  I just did what I felt like.  This, partially, is the mentality that has remained with me through my adult life.  Just as an adult I learned to drink and curse like a sailor.  As a child I worked with this mantra: do what you feel like, find out how things work, maybe taste them and that’s it.  When I was younger though, that concept was followed by, how can I get things to work and get people’s attention on me? 

Once, when I was around 2-years old, my mother awoke to me looking like I had just came out of an alien movie.  This child-like creature who resembled her baby boy was standing near her bed. My mother’s reaction when she first saw me was one where I think she thought she was hallucinating.  After a few blinks and getting the sleep out of her eye, she just stared for a few seconds like she wasn’t sure what was going on.  After about 3 seconds of being awake she yelled my name at this volume that probably broke a window.  “YURRRRRAAAAAA?!?” It was around here that she realized that I was covered in what looked like blood.  I was like a baby swamp-thing, but red, which was appropriate since that comic would be big a few years later.  Her heart sank and she was ready to take charge, call an ambulance, lift a car from off of me, if she had to, all within a heart’s beat.  It would be any mother’s nightmare to see their child drenched in blood.

After a second or two I whispered in Russian, the only language I knew at the time, “I am pretty.”  This was before I knew how to sound jaded, or roll my eyes after every sentence.  By this point I had already learned that the world had a concept of beautiful and that I wanted to be just that.  It was at this moment that she began to smell fumes like formaldehyde.  She then realized that the blood-goo was actually globs of a dark red nail polish bottle in my hand.  Was she upset about the mess or disappointed in my color choice?  That I will never know.  I had splatter-painted all over the small infant-size body I once possessed. 

She immediately didn’t miss a beat and went into fix-it mode.  She started a bath while she went for the nail polish remover before the nail polish stopped my skin from breathing.  I got a fever as a result of this whole ordeal.  My skin couldn’t breathe and there were fumes, on top of fumes, a freshly filled diaper top of that.  I never heard this story until I was in my 20s.  Why my mom hadn’t mentioned it, I don’t know.  She recanted the story to me over a glass of wine cause well she’s a light-weight.  One glass an she is gone.  When she told the story she had a confusing mixture of laughter with a calm, serious tone.  Not sure if it was the booze that made it seem that way or just a part of the story.  The interesting thing was that this was all done to be “pretty.” This would be just one of many missions during my childhood where I would aspire to be that one which one viewed as pretty or handsome.  It’s funny how then the concept was so simple.