Soppho

My parents divorced when I was four, and since I’m accustomed to seeing them as two separate entities rather than a pair, I also tend to think of myself as pieces of the two of them—haphazardly stapled together. Maybe sewn together, with awkward stitches that leave visible seams. In fact, I don’t think their genes actually touch each other anywhere in my body, but rather hang out in their own separate cliques. Dad’s genes chain smoke in the corner while Mom’s neurotically scan the room while swilling Cosmopolitans.

I accepted the fact that I inherited my father’s terrible sense of humor a long time ago. It is horrible. It is unmistakable. It’s the kind of humor that makes people roll their eyes up into their heads and groan so loudly that you instinctively dive to the floor beneath them, arms outstretched, ready to catch the baby water buffalo they must be giving birth to at any moment. Hopefully someone nearby is boiling water and ripping up some old sheets.

Like so:

Y Chromosome, washing the dishes before breakfast: Can you push the bacon around?
Me: Give me your lunch money! Take this test for me! Your mama’s so fat, she has her own zip code!

Fine, so the sense of humor was unavoidable. I’ve known forever that resisting would be an exercise in futility. But I refused—refused—to inherit my father’s musical tastes.

When he would play the oldies station in the car, I would sit in the back seat and loudly announce how long it had been since they played a particular song, my thesis being that they really only rotated between a couple hundred songs, in spite of the fact they were drawing from three decades worth of music. I kept track on a couple of sheets of paper stowed away in one of my books.

When he would play his Conway Twitty and Roy Orbison tapes, I would plug my ears and whine.

Around the time I was ten or so, a commercial for a compilation of Conway Twitty’s greatest hits played on the stations on which we watched our cartoons. My sisters and I would gape in horror at the old man with the crazy sideburns and wild eyebrows and his strange, outdated clothes. He was, to us, the pinnacle of uncool. The eminent creepy old guy.

When the commercial cut to a clip of Conway crooning, “She wants a man with a slow hand,” my sisters and I would shriek in unison. Since the commercial was on all the time, hearing damage was almost certainly done, which we figured could only be a good thing. We didn’t know exactly what that slow hand was used for, but we knew if that hand was coming anywhere toward us, it would be met with a fast kick to the crotch.

As a freshman in college, I suddenly started craving the oldies I used to hear over and over in the car. I started building my music collection, and it didn’t seem complete without them. I was horrified that my college boyfriend didn’t know any oldies at all, and set to teaching him everything I knew. I even started listening to country music—Dad’s latest obsession. Conway, however, was still subject to my derision. Even when a clip of one of his performances made it onto Family Guy, I shook my head, declared that they had officially run out of good material, and clicked over to another channel until a safe amount of time had passed.

And then I spent 20 minutes online yesterday, trying to figure out which version of Mr. Twitty’s “Hello Darlin’” I wanted to buy. And these “versions” hinge on the variation of two words. In one version there’s an extra “guess” and in the other version there’s an “and” missing. People, I cannot deal with it. Every time I hear the song with the missing “and” or the one with the extra “guess” I start writhing on the floor, and pretty soon I have a little water buffalo of my very own.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF AN EXTRA “GUESS”? Think of it this way: it could be the difference between “Oh, darling, I love you!” and Oh, darling, I love you…I GUESS…” And then the next thing you know, he’s packing up all of his stuff in YOUR suitcase and walking out the door, off to pursue his first love: the art of jazz clogging. And I will not have this baby water buffalo growing up without a father!

So you must know, of course, that I didn’t end up purchasing either version of the song. But I did spend an additional 30 minutes griping about these here interwebs and how you can never get what you want on them. What with the series of tubes and all!

Wait! Do you hear that? That’s the sound of Mom and Dad’s genes giving each other high fives.

Well, Dad’s genes anyway. Mom’s went in for the butt slap.