“All right, family,” I said to the crew sitting around in a tight circle of chairs in my 18th Street flat just north of Castro, “you may begin reading.”
They opened their copies of the manuscript and began devouring the pages like vultures would a pig carcass on a sun-scorched desert highway. My mother’s lips froze when she turned to the second page. My brother scrunched up his brow until it looked like a Christmas danish. My sister let out a little squeak after she skipped ahead to the devirginization chapter. How’d she know where to find it? Perhaps someone had been reading my blog, after all. And my father popped his mouth open and groaned when he fingered his way through the last pages of the last chapter.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Dad always read the newspaper from the back to the front. I can remember him, sitting on the toilet Saturday mornings, reading the sports section, stinking up the whole house after French toast and bacon breakfasts.
And then came the onslaught. Mom went first.
She pointed her index finger at me. “I did not have sex with my husband before marriage!”
“How’d you know about the Nancy Smith incident?” my brother said. “I never told anyone. And no one was home. And those Cheetohs, you’re the one who stole them from my underwear drawer.”
My sister whimpered, on the edge of tears. “I think this is all really insulting and disgusting. You’ve laid out our lives for the whole world to laugh at. I did not go around the world with Bobby Boulder!”
“Relax, everyone,” Dad finally said. “It all ends happily in the last chapter. The family convenes at the artist’s San Francisco apartment and they smoke a joint to celebrate the youngest’s smashing exhibition.”
Exhibition, indeed.
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