The Thing: My Crazy Family

—Poisonous ideals …

Robert Haas and Brenda Hillman

Who needs a Pillsbury-Dough-Boy daddy nice-nice-ing sunshine up your assets? Or a doo doo doodoo Martha Stewart mom making you Snap! Snap! to her will, double-sticking it to you about her doo doo doodoo goody-goody good things? The Addams Family taught memy crazy family

had it right! We live in dungeon dreams of Brady-Bunch belonging. Better to Snap! Snap! off the reeky rose heads of a Hallmark Card life— all that Father Knows Best doo doo doodoo others televise they have. Caress, instead, like Morticia, the thorns— those lush dependable claws of lust, sloth, greed, envy,

hate, and grief that last, unlike petals, and last. Snap!Snap! out of your float-down-the-River Denial and be free. Confess! Surreal and funereal is realer than real. Your doo doo doodoo grandmama is Snap! Snap!-ing daggers at her son, her daughter-in-law, her grandchildren. Daddy would rather stay home sucking a doo doo doodoo

Cubanito rolled in stocks. Your uncle is a festering conduit of charges—a remake of Betty’s boop-oop-a-doop Grampy flashing— light bulbs. Are you saying “my crazy family is going to make me Snap! Snap!”? Then, you are, as I am in my crazy family, the official Thing T. Thing, this give-us-a-hand jane- or jack-in-the-box, dismemberment—this member meant

for delivering doo doo doodoo ego rubs, for dusting secrets off the table? Come dirty! Fess up! It’s a Snap! Snap! to make-wrong, to back-scratch only to be back-scratched (with a two-handed back-scratcher), to bitch and snarl my crazy family. Harder to be, as I am, as thing as Thing. But I have no skittering (dee dee de) Itt; no Lurch intoning

You rang? You rang? and being that someone to turn pages for, to play for me, pay for me. To secure your place in the family all you need to doodoo doodoo is make a face irrelevant, a voice— Snap! Snap! Unnamed and unnameable. Be the one hand doo doo doodoo-ing them on. But keep the other

to yourself—out of the boxed-in, dangling a dervish spin-spinning yourself into the beloved, the beloved. Conduct yourself, as I do, one hand firmly on the Bible of my crazyfamily, the other a floating cursor on my PC, an illusionist detached, prestidigitating my crazy family to appear and then, doo doo doodoo . . . .