Self Defense for Paranoid Lunatics

       “Do you want me to be on top or do you want to be on top the first time?” I cringe as my already sweaty neighbor looks at me, awaiting an answer. I say nothing, frozen by the mere thought. “You don’t want to do this, do you?”

       “Gee, what gave it away?” All around me couples have paired off and are on the floor with each other. My husband would likely suggest that I’m barely heterosexual, let alone homosexual. “And it’s great that you decided to work out first so that you’re good and sweaty when I have to touch you.” She only laughs and calls the teacher over.

       “She won’t do it with me. You’ll have to do it with her.” A cringe threatening to become permanently frozen on my face, I lie down. And so I find myself with a not-unattractive man between my legs on a Saturday afternoon. His wife stands by, patiently waiting her turn. His infant daughter can be heard in the adjoining room.

       Of course, I can’t get it right on the first try. We try again and this time I remember to get my arms up through the center. It’s an unpleasant sensation. My sweaty neighbor is watching. I want him off me. I need to get him off me. I struggle and manage to rock my hips up and gain enough leverage to kick him off me. “Kick him,” my neighbor is shouting. I cannot do this.

       “I’m wearing a cup. You have to kick me,” the teacher says very patiently. So, I do. And it is really quite satisfying. Who knew self defense could be so much fun!

       Admittedly, I wasn’t as successful at landing a blow on a dummy as I was at kicking the instructor in the cup. Grab whatever you can and use it as a weapon. Common sense, right? Should be easy enough to follow the instructors’ example. Strike down, strike down, I kept repeating as I ferociously swung at the dummy. Who’s the dummy, I laughed, as the Billy club slipped up and into my shoulder, rather than the dummy’s. I looked around, but no one seemed to think that the fact that I was turning into my own attacker was as funny as I did. Likely they were thinking, pity the poor girl and envisioning how badly things would turn out if I was attacked.

       My second attempt at striking powerful blows to the dummy was equally frustrating. This time the stick actually flew out of my hand, narrowly missing a few of my classmates. I knew by now that nobody would laugh so I could only cringe as I retrieved the stick, which really could provide quite a wallop I had learned, and again attempted to take on the dummy attacker. At this point, likely fearing lawsuits from injured students, the teacher came over and suggested, “you’re aggression is great, but maybe try not to swing so hard”.

       I am pleased to report that my skills with the knife went much more smoothly. Perhaps because I frequently threaten to stick a knife in my husband and make the motions at him when he is being obnoxious. I mentioned this to a classmate who smiled encouragingly, much as you would to a simpleton that manages to close a door without getting their finger caught, when I managed the knife skills without injuring myself or anyone else. However, she looked seriously concerned when I made the knife comment about my husband so I felt I should explain. “You know, like when you’re in the kitchen, making dinner. The dog is underfoot hoping you drop something, a wailing child is balanced on your hip, the garlic bread is burning, and you’re attempting to chop vegetables with one hand when your husband saunters in, scratching himself, and says, ‘Wow! You should’ve seen the goal I just saw on T.V.!’ So you thrust the knife in the general direction of his abdomen, only half jokingly?” Yeah, I could see she just wasn’t following me so I felt it best to just be quiet before I was deemed too psychotic to remain in the class.

       Which brings me to the part of the class that I knew I excelled in. Paranoia. ‘It’s good to be paranoid. The best self defense is staying out of a potentially dangerous situation,’ the instructors preached to us. I knew I was in the choir. Sometimes, when I’m out running after dark, a large dog at my side, my phone in my hand, I’ll see a lone, female runner oblivious to the world around her thanks to the i-pod securely attached to her body via her high-tech, ultra cute, little runner’s outfit that has a nifty pocket on the arm for said i-pod. And I’ll think, are you really that stupid? I want to jump out of the bushes at her, just to scare some sense into her. I don’t, of course. I just run faster, as the thoughts of what could happen to her make me slightly more paranoid.

       My siblings and I all have an abundance of paranoia, mixed with latent aggression, to call upon if attacked. Perhaps some of it comes from having a cop for a father. More likely it comes from having a mother stand outside the bathroom door while you wallow in a peaceful, long soak (something very rare in a house with six kids). Suddenly, you hear scratching at the door followed by a low, guttural, heart stopping moan. The large splashing noise you create as you nearly jump out of your skin is followed by peals of hysterical laughter.

       Repetition was not Mother's style. She liked to inject a little fear into all kinds of situations. One night, when I was home alone with Mother and a sleeping Sibling #6, Mother thought it would be highly entertaining to go downstairs and stand quietly in the entry hallway long enough for me to forget she had gone down there. Then she started screaming like she was being hacked into a million pieces. Terror stricken, I managed my way to the stairs and gasped, my voice shaking in panic, “What’s going on?!” She was literally laughing too hard to speak. What type of mother does these things to her children?

       Regardless of where this innate paranoia comes from, we’ve all got it. Sibling #1, who no longer lives in Chicago, has been known to make his family practice car jacking drills in preparation for his short return visits to the family homestead. Sibling #2 is fond of weapons, and usually travels with one. She lives in a very rural area so I can’t blame her. I’m always a bit freaked out when I visit and run down lonesome country roads, wondering if the car that passed is going to come back and kill me and toss me into one of the corn fields. I much prefer running in an urban setting - - a stray bullet is somehow more comforting than a cornfield.

       While Mother is not the direct cause of Sibling #3’s night terrors, which greatly contributed to my paranoia, she did help push her towards the precipice of insanity. About five a.m. one Sunday morning, a red haired man tried to climb through Sibling #3’s window. I recall Sibling #3 scooting, low to the ground, out of her bedroom like a possessed woman, shouting, “Dad! Dad!” The self defense instructors would have been proud of how she maintained such a low center of gravity. I saw all this because my bedroom was the first floor dining room. (Again, six kids.) Then, I saw Father, dressed in his customary white t-shirt, but wearing only his briefs instead of his standard tan pants, go flying out the front door with his gun. At that point, I think I drifted back to sleep.

       Around the same time, someone was leaving stalker type notes under the windshield of her car, which she would then get in and drive home late at night from her waitressing job. Not being quite the normal, supportive family, the notes were dismissed as a harmless prank by one of the drunks she encountered in her bar hang out. Then, next thing you know, someone’s trying to climb through her window. Go figure. One late night around this time, Sibling #3 was hurrying through our dark yard from the garage to the house, when the Christmas tree that we had left out for the birds to roost in, started to follow her. Mother, who happened to be out looking for a cat when Sibling #3 arrived home, thought it would be a hoot to pick up the tree and have it follow the burgeoning lunatic that was her daughter. Mother is fond of retelling how poor Sibling #3 took one look at the moving tree and was off like a shot through the yard, never looking back, never mentioning it when she got in the house. At least, I think that’s what happened. Mother is always laughing so much it would be hard to fully understand the story.

       It was shortly after this that the night terrors started. One night, about midnight, I was sleeping comfortably in my dining room. I was awakened by howls and screams so unimaginably awful coming from Sibling #3’s room, that I awoke to the knowledge that my sister was being brutally murdered just feet from where I lay and I was next. I heard what sounded like extremely heavy objects getting thrown around and I couldn’t move. I absolutely froze in terror, and could do nothing more than begin my own terrible screams.

       Fortunately, Sibling #2 was upstairs sleeping in her room. Sibling #2 wouldn’t need to be lucky enough to find a stick on the ground if she was being attacked, she always had a weapon of her own to rely on. As the screaming escalated, Father, who had been snoozing on the couch upstairs in front of the T.V, ran into Sibling #2’s room and began marching in place, as terror stricken as I was, shouting over and over, “Something’s going on down there! Something’s going on down there!”

       Sibling #2, a reliably cool head in a crisis, shouted back, “Well, get the fuck down there now!” and sprang from her bed, pausing only long enough to grab her stun gun which was always close at hand, before coming to our rescue.

       What did they find? Me, almost dead from the fear, crouching in my bed. And Sibling #3, looking a bit dopey eyed from sleep, surrounded by a room that had been completely trashed. The attacker had only been in her dreams, or nightmares as the case was, but her response was quite real. When she began screaming, she tossed aside the huge wooden desk, piled high with very heavy law school books, like it weighed nothing. She still screams in her sleep sometimes. We never warned her husband about this and the first time he heard it, he was walking in the door from a stressful night of police work. He ran to the bedroom with his gun in his shaking hand. This story always makes us laugh, even though we admit she’s lucky he didn’t accidentally (or maybe not so accidentally) shoot her. But then, I suppose we laugh at the night terrors that are probably evidence of a deep, unresolved psychological issue. If Sibling #3 takes to wearing a homemade aluminum foil cap in the future, well, I guess we’ll all have had a hand in it. By then, though, we all might want our own aluminum foil caps.

       Knowing that my first instinct is to curl up and scream, a little extra paranoia is good if it keeps me wary and out of potentially dangerous situations. But I am comforted by the borderline psychotic aggression I demonstrated in self-defense class when I was trapped in the instructor’s vice grip. I was never one for small, enclosed spaces. And just for a little extra added protection, it might not be a bad idea to add one of those aluminum foil caps to my nighttime running gear.

Raised by Lunatics

       Sibling #3 and I frequently remind each other in the course of our conversations, that we aren’t normal. For example, we were discussing today whether or not we could deal with a family gathering at Easter. Our parents will arrive in their gang banger mobile (a 1970s Ford Granada, with plush, maroon velour interior, low riding seats, and a pimpin’ glass knob on the steering wheel that you can use to steer that bad boy like a boat), park at the end of her block, and ‘parade down her street’ like the Muensters. We have this conversation every holiday. In the end, we feel guilty, have a gathering, and our parents park at the end of her block and parade down it like the Muensters. I always like to point out that I have a lot more in common with Marilyn Muenster than just my first name.

       Well, we don’t have to do anything for Easter, I say. After all, we never did anything when we were kids. Yes, she’ll point out, but we weren’t normal. And then we grow silent, reflecting on just what that means. This is new for us. We always sensed the lunacy, but we never actually verbalized it. Not until I was in the hospital, after having given birth to the daughter, that is. My sister came to visit and we talked about things normal people likely don’t talk about after having given birth. Like, should we have a family gathering for whatever the next holiday was. And, do you think the poor baby’s head really looks like the statue someone made in homage of our father’s bald, lumpy, slightly alienesque head?

       A very nice nurse came in and tried to talk me out of going home after only one day. Somehow, not surprisingly, the conversation turned to family. She was raised in a traditional Muslim family. We, I said in a moment of post-childbirth clarity, were raised by lunatics. And it was, in truth, almost a moment of Zen. Suddenly, the order of the universe seemed to make a whole lot more sense.
Now I understood. A normal mother would never say to her youngest child as they drove past the woods, “that’s where your real mother lives.” Or say in a sing-song, lullaby voice, “poor (name of the child here), lost in the woods, all alone, and the birds will come and cover you up with leaves” and then laugh when the child would express fear at the darkness of the woods. A fear, might I add, she never quite outgrew.

       Normal families, I’m learning, ate canned vegetables, took family trips to places like Disneyworld or Six Flaggs Great America, and had a microwave. They shopped for new clothes, drank Pepsi, and made a big deal out of each other’s accomplishments (even something as arcane as a birthday - - I mean, who cares if it’s your birthday? Right, that’s not how a normal person thinks. Sorry, it’s hard to retrain oneself to think like a non-lunatic.)

       I’ve realized it was not normal to take Sunday drives through the most dangerous parts of town. Nor was it normal to drink Hydrox pop, eat flavor of the week generic ice cream specials with names like cherry cheesecake that looked like the spinal surgery that happened to be on non-cable TV when you were eating it. I’m guessing normal families also didn’t have a sibling that needed extra credit in the cadaver lab so she stayed after class to help cut the cadaver into more manageable pieces. Then she came home and sat down to a spaghetti dinner without first changing her sweatshirt that had cadaver juice on it that looked a little too much like spaghetti dinner stains.

       Normal families didn’t have a child get mumps during the infamous mumps outbreak of 1986 when, count ‘em, a total of 46 people in the state of Illinois, myself included, got them. A normal, caring sister wouldn’t come home to find her mumps stricken sibling, glands so swollen she couldn’t swallow anything despite the fact that she was starving, and say to her, “What’s the fucking incubation period? I’ve got finals next week!” I envision instead, a normal sister perhaps painting the fingernails of the mumps victim, while they shared a juicy Tigerbeat magazine.

       I’m guessing normal families have normal friends, that dress stylishly, are skilled in basic social graces, boast about the accomplishments of their family members, carry around a huge cache of photos in their wallets or now on their cell phones, and when the difficult subject of funeral planning comes up, never utter the phrase, “just burn my dead ass”. A normal family probably never had a hand out of food delivered at the holidays, not because you were actually in financial need, but because you looked like you were one step away from homeless. Of course, my siblings and I then attacked the bag like savages to see if there was anything good in it. We were too young to realize someone might actually be going hungry because luck had landed a sack of donated food on our front porch.

       To be fair, we would always stop at the bank on the way to the zoo to get a roll of quarters. These were then passed out to the homeless that congregated there so they could get a cup of coffee out of the machines. This was back when the zoo still had coffee machines and the homeless still hung out in Lincoln Park. We also took in countless strays, so that one of any number of cats was likely to jump on you if you were one of the few people crazy enough to visit the family homestead. And you couldn’t leave without sampling the cheese, cookies, and really thick coffee my father insisted you have. “Don’t ask, just give it to him!” He would repeat this over and over until you broke down and ate.

       Being raised by lunatics does have its benefits. Running becomes an integral part of your life - - all the endorphins helps combat insanity. Instead of visiting Mickey Mouse, you have the opportunity to curse and spray holy water on your sibling while visiting a sacred shrine in Ireland. (Fortunately, your mother is too busy praying her downs syndrome daughter will somehow no longer be downs to notice your sacrilege.) You develop a worldview very different from that of your normal American. You get to take the Granada for a coveted spin around the block. And your children are taught to take pizza phone orders from their dead great, great uncle. The exercise they get as their grandfather demonstrates how they have to spin their arms really fast to lower the pizza down to hell is an added bonus.