Home for the Horrordays

Dorothy said there's no place like home, but I would say that wartime Yugoslavia can't be all that different. No, dudes, I'm not a homebody. My thoughts don't turn to charming holiday gatherings around the fire with the ones I love since it usually involves a lot of alcohol and the fire involves the firecrackers someone tried to light by cooking them in the oven.

I would say my family's strange, but that's everybody's family. My family is homicidally manic-deppressive—there, that at least sounds more original. Seriously, my family is always happy when I come back to Bellmont for Christmas, but catch any of them on the right day and they're happy when the mail shows up. They're fundamentally unhealthy enablers of every drug habit you could name and they derive pleasure from each other's pain. Which is all fine, since that's how I am, but it's real dangerous to put us all in the same place.

First, there's my dad, Fozzy Coleman—dad somewhere got the impression that he was black, and even more odd, that he's Ike Turner. Dad rules the house with an iron thumb, an iron thumb being some gardening device he got for Christmas 20 years ago that spreads mulch. My favorite holiday memory of dad was that year we converted to Judaism. Mom made soggy cornbread and accidentally poisoned the turkey gravy with make-up remover, and when dad found out he was so pissed he threw the menorah like a trident and it stuck in the wall. The bright side was that it worked so well we use it to hang the Christmas stockings still.

Then there's my mom, who's great when she's sober, if you can be there during that time from 8 to 8:15 a.m. When she gets drunk she says all the things normal moms only think, like, "I had plenty of chances to drown you, Clarissa," and, "By my calculations, you still owe us about $359,000—oh, what, you thought the room and board were free rides?" My mom's name is Bunny, but dad always calls her Bunny Coleman like it's one word. Like, "Bunnycoleman, who ate all my fucking French toast?" Or, "Get my bath ready, Bunnycoleman."

It's hard to complain about my brother and sister, they're not really to blame for anything—between having my parents for their parents and having my shadow to live in all their lives, it's amazing they aren't screwed up.

My brother, Randy, doesn't let us call him Randy anymore since he joined that cult in the compound next door to mom and dad. At least he didn't have to go far to get brainwashed. He prefers to be called Toot now, and he's actually pretty nice, the nicest one of the bunch. He curls up in a ball and chants whenever mom and dad fight now, he tells them they have bad Chaka Khan or something, some kind of karma rip-off the cult made up, and the worst thing he does is steal from mom and dad to give to the cult so they can build that glass temple of theirs. Which is all fine by me, I never take more than $20 home when I go anyway.

My sister's a bit more peculiar. She never had the looks or talent to be an actress like me, so she was driven into this weird-ass obsession with grades and scholarships and stuff. She went to Harvard like that Good Will Hunting guy and majored in lawyering. Now she works for the ACLU and writes books on feminism in her spare time, really spaced-out shit. She doesn't come home too often, actually, but she sends self-help books and fruit baskets.

I guess, more than anything, this time of year is about forgetting your family is clinically sociopathic and learning to keep your temper in check long enough to sit down for a single Christmas dinner. To gather around the tree, open up crappy presents, and pretend you like at least one of the things. To sleep in your old room and act like you don't hear your dad getting nasty with your mom, shouting, "Take me to town, Bunnycoleman!" in the room right next door. But at least when you hear that, you know it's just another ten minutes until everyone gathers in the living room around the kitchen fire and opens their presents. And that's as much family as anybody gets these days.