Third Helpings

Part 3 in the Guido trilogy.

1. The newsletter below is third in a three part series. Here’s

   Second Helpings

2. Here’s Part 2, titled Second Helpings, Twice Removed

3. And now we have come to the finale of the Guido Trilogy, Third Helpings.

Things changed between us during our college years. I fled Los Gatos, up north, out of state. You stayed close, but moved “over the hill,” attending college and starting on the business plans that your father had created for you and your sister PegErin.

I came back from college for the summer. You were living in a giant house in the woods with a bunch of roommates: other white kids, who looked poor but were actually from wealthy Los Gatos families. It was a known location for ragers, all-night parties with kegs of Anchor Steam, the red Solo cups, and lots of really good weed; sucked through intricate blown-glass bongs, preferably made by Snodgrass. Your band would be playing, all plugged in and loud for hours, the soundtrack of our youth. People tended to spend the night in the giant, drafty hippie den rather than drive the harrowing Highway Nine back down the hill after consuming alcohol and such.

I made a complete ass of myself at one of those all-night ragers, or rather, the morning after, when I found my “boyfriend” in a sleeping bag with another girl. Out of unhinged teen girl reflexes, I poured cold water on him, drawing a bunch of negative attention to myself and, ironically, empathy for cheater boy.

Always nice to go back to college after shit like that. I was doing my thing up in Oregon, enjoying not being around people I went to high school with, pronouncing our last name the correct way, writing feminist opinion columns for the college daily, taking Women’s Studies, doing full moon circles. To be honest, I was always wondering if I was going to seem too weird to the people back home, but you, and your presence used to calm me in the returning. You, your house, your friends, and your scene was a soft, albeit smoky, place to land.

You were the bridge between our family and the Promised Land.

Maybe that’s why I was surprised that when your one female housemate wanted to have a women’s full moon circle of her own in the hot tub at your house, you were so hurt.

When you told me it was happening, I said, “that’s awesome! Good for her!” You looked at me in a way that made it clear I had missed the point.

You couldn’t understand why you couldn’t go. It was not obvious or even palpable to you why she would want a woman-only space.

“But, I love women!” you reasoned, “and it’s my house! What if I had a guys-only hot tub party?”

“I would say, good for you! And also, don’t you just call that ‘Tuesday night?’”

Fresh off my women’s studies class, I explained that sometimes having a man there for your all-woman, nude, full-moon hot tub ritual can change the vibe.

You sighed. You didn’t get it. You often found yourself in the midst of a bunch of girls. Our family for one! It’s amazing how six boys and one girl can have so many daughters and only a handful of sons. That made you really great to hang out with as a cousin, and you fit in well with a group of girl friends. We braided flowers into your glossy, long, wavy black hair and put our hands to our hearts when you blinked your long lashes.

I dropped the subject at that point in the full moon women’s only hot tub ritual, and secretly rooted for your roommate.

The next time I saw you, you had cut your hair. The long, soft, wavy black mane gave way to a spiky, gelled porcupine helmet as you aged into your early thirties. It made you look more like our dads, swarthy men who made noises when they ate. You started busting out the weird sexist jokes, or maybe my education made me more aware of what you were already expressing. This essay is starting to feel like a Jim Croce-meets-Ani di Franco tune, but I’m two-and-a-half deep into a trilogy here, so I gotta keep going.

You’ve always done me solids. You let me tag along on all sorts of outings with your friends and bands. You came all the way to my college graduation.

You never complained. You visited me in LA and we invented the most stoner pasta ever: edamame, garlic, broccoli and sausage. You brought your guitar. You let me sing when it was the two of us. You seemed more yourself when away from the family. Around them, I was another face in the crowd, if you can call a big family a crowd. I do.

When I moved back, we had some more great times. You helped me drive all over the mountain looking for cool places to photograph redwoods for my therapy website, when it was a brand new business. You and Husband got along wonderfully. I asked you to be in my wedding, and you took on huge responsibilities and executed them wonderfully. But…

Things did change when we both met our significant others. Serafina didn’t like me much, but I plunged ahead and thought my wedding and yours would bring us all closer. You did me a huge favor, doing all that work, plus being a liaison between myself and our conservative family.

Yet, uncannily just like our dads, you also found ways to make me consciously aware that you were doing me a solid. So maybe that wasn’t a solid as much as a liquid favor. Or maybe we are both full of gas.

You were going to invite me to be a part of your wedding too, but due to a misunderstanding and fuckup on my part, I ended up flaking out on visiting you on the time you were supposed to ask me, so, according to my sisters, you canceled me in your brain and never brought it up again. You told me my sisters were liars. You were seeming more and more shut off emotionally towards me. I figured you must have found out I was pregnant and didn’t want to tax me with a role in your wedding. Or that Serafina said no.

Your wedding was lovely. I did not know the reason why I wasn’t a part of it, my sisters hadn’t told me what they later told me. I was surprised when you performed with a guitar while singing to your new wife while she sat in a chair and looked at you. But she was into it, so that’s what counts.

That was before I cut contact with my father and ghosted the entire family. I didn’t really mean to do the ghosting everyone else part, but the panic attacks were so bad by the time I did so, I couldn’t really reach out to you or any cousins to explain. I just knew nobody would be sympathetic and I couldn’t risk being guilted out of cutting contact, on account of the panic attacks.

I was having ongoing, crippling anxiety about not wanting to go to Thanksgiving and knowing that I would be expected to cram into Pop’s tiny apartment: so I sent my no-contact letter in the beginning of November. Then I grabbed my husband and baby and split for San Diego for Christmas, mostly to avoid questions, visits, or guilt trips.

Providentially, you reached out, and asked me to come have a special cousin holiday, with the five of us cousins the same age, and our kids, at the beach. It was a little olive branch of kindness in an otherwise bleak and tense situation.

Finally I reached out and asked you to meet so I could tell you my story.

All through the storytelling I had a sour feeling in my stomach and it wasn’t from the grande drip. It was a risk for me to be there, to talk about my mental health with a Cazzata, even a modern one. I was talking about anxiety and depression— my own, even.

When I had become a therapist, the tepidity of the reaction from the family saddened me. I knew a lot of the older ones didn’t “believe” in therapy, but surely they would be happy I was attaining a professional career? That was way, way before I knew what the fuck was going on.

Basically all of them were gearing up for what would ultimately become Christian nationalism, Trumpism, and all the attendant beliefs—especially that educating a daughter was flashy and tacky of my father, and he shouldn’t have “let” me get all of “that school” on account of me being such a raging cunt, in their estimation. Plus, I was exposed to women only full moon rituals!

On that particular day, however, I just knew the rest of the family—especially your dad— hated me, as indicated by rude comments, pointed remarks, relational aggression, and the cold shoulder.

I knew you were the only person who could even begin to get it.

Help me Ben Kenobi, you’re my only hope!

I hoped the risk of being vulnerable to you about my feelings, my mental health symptoms, my messiness, would pay off and we could be close and at least I wouldn’t lose everyone.

Then you dropped the bomb.

You had just had me to alternative Christmas because my dad asked him to try to reach out to me to gather intel. That’s the only reason you had alternative Christmas. “Your dad reached out to me and asked me.”

So probably, I’m just realizing now, everyone there at this little gathering besides myself and my husband knew the real reason that the gathering took place. All the same people who wouldn’t answer my calls and texts and pleas for advice and someone to stand by me when I was starting to flail and notice my anxiety around “the fold.”

It’s like the veil tore down from that moment causing me to question every time you and I had spent together since childhood. The girl cousins were cruel and dominant towards me, and left me out.

Was it all because my dad asked? Is that why you hung out with and colonized, no doubt with your superior charm, my friends? Is that why you never asked me to be in the band, even though it was so obvious I wanted to be?

Definitely, I can see how I was careless, flaky, scattered and emotional all through my wedding, pregnancy, and the downfall of both of my parents, and that resulted in annoying behavior, such as being late, misinterpreting the seriousness of plans, and showing up places puffy from crying. I get that it was exasperating.

But I had no idea that I was on such thin ice.

You met up with me, heard me out, and then told me that the elders would never accept me back in the family; but that if I came around, people wouldn’t really mind.

When I asked if they truly wouldn’t understand anxiety, panic attacks and depression? You squinched up your face into that fish pout that I have seen, again, on both our dads. Once that pout was out, I knew I was in trouble and had made a huge miscalculation in meeting up with you and telling you my story.

A few months later, my sisters told me that I wasn’t part of your wedding because you were disgusted with me. You remained disgusted and distant when I told you I was crushed (sorry you didn’t like my text, and sorry about all of the unhinged texts after that, though they accurately described how I felt) and that was that.

You broke my heart more than my siblings did. With them, I saw it coming.

You didn’t come to my mom’s funeral.

A month after, I guiltily didn’t go to your mom’s funeral, but I was too afraid I’d get a panic attack. When I tried to hug you at Carla’s wedding, you remained stiff. When I called you out, I was met with a smiling, gracious brick wall.

And when you said my father would never give me the time of day, your fish pout looked just like his.

At that last coffee date, I had started asking questions, and making statements about my Pop, and the Bad Thing he mightv'e done. For just a second, I saw something pass across your face, like a decision. Then it went blank.

At that point, the coffee was done. You had to get going back over the hill before the traffic. You had driven to me, which was generous.

I missed out on years of Wolf Brothers, Bob Weir, and Dead and Company shows because I was too afraid I’d see you there and start crying. Or get asked about you. (Dude, I still get asked about you, it is like being related to a local newscaster.)

Because you brought me into the world of this music, I thought that it belonged to you.

But lately, I am remembering who I am.

You don’t own the Dead and you don’t own Gnocchi. You don’t own shrooms, and if we are really going to get ridiculously petty, my dad is more Sopranos than yours. And I’m disappointed in you for becoming the very thing I thought we were fighting against when you gave me that Bob Marley album.

One of the last times we made a plan to hang out, we went to the restaurant in Campbell, and some method-out retired dancer from the Brass Rail did a cigarette-and- chair-twitch performance at the window table, before bringing her tweaky little self over to our table and plopping into your dad’s lap. Everyone sat there like an assshole. My dad, your dad, you, your pregnant wife, me, my husband, the lady, until finally I said, hey sweetheart (I really try not to trot out that word but if there’s ever a moment to trot out “sweetheart,” this is IT,) I said, hey sweetheart, can you please give us some privacy? This is a family dinner. Then whoa, she gave me the stink eye, your dad and my dad would not make eye contact with me, and gave that stupid, apologetic chuckle. Later they will express their displeasure at my “outburst” and apparent snobbery towards a poor woman who had had a hard life.

It’s not that she was a drug user or a dancer that is the problem, I wanted to yell to the table that night, the problem is that she is stimming on your dad’s lap and everyone is just like, yeah, this is fine. No balls, no boundaries, no bad guys, except for the bitch who says something.

I didn’t realize that I had already lost.

I don’t know why I would think you’d be protective. You weren’t protective when your buddy “dated” me, you weren’t protective when your dad was being an asshole to your sister. Do you protect your daughters from the type of boys you used to be and hang out with? Do you connect not wanting your daughters to be treated poorly to the ways other women are treated poorly? I’m glad that during the summer of 2020 you played music at a Black Lives Matter rally, but I also wonder if you would have gone to the rally had you not been a featured performer.

It was all there for me to see, how I didn’t behave right or toe the line. I didn’t pick up the indirect, nonverbal expectations that were imparted through blood. I didn’t realize that what we did was child’s play and growing up meant being on your dad’s side, formulating his empire, and soaking up the perks as well as inequities. I forgot how much more you benefitted from the status quo than I. It will all be worth it when it’s yours, right? It’s good to be close to family. I bet it’s nice to have that support network around you.

This is a lot. I’m tired. You’ve already been tired. But I would kick myself and remain forever wondering if I didn’t ask just one more question.

How the heck did you become a featured performer at a Black Lives Matter rally?