Scenes From the Spitznagel Family Reunion

I've only been here for two days and already I want to punch my 15-month-old nephew in his fucking mouth.

It really isn't Teddy's fault. He is, as I mentioned, just a spit over a year old. You can't expect a kid with his dearth of experience to be a clever conversationalist. But even so, I think the other adults have been giving him too much credit. Teddy's latest linguistic brain-tickler involves pointing at a random family member's head and announcing, "Hat, hat, hat, hat, hat..." This would at least qualify as adorable if he were occasionally accurate. But more often than not, he'll point to somebody who isn't actually wearing a hat. And even more embarrassing, he'll scream "hat, hat, hat" while pointing at the dog, or a tree outside, or the front tires of our car. The odds that what he's gesturing towards and the words coming out of his mouth having any correlation whatever are just slightly better than winning the lottery.

"Hat, hat, hat, hat," Teddy howls proudly, his arms flailing wildly as he gazes up at the nearest adult for approval. I give him no such satisfaction.

KEEP ON READIN'

His parents aren't nearly as concerned as I am by the inconsistencies. They're more interested in whether Teddy can recognize actual human beings - like, say, his mother and father. Every few hours they'll lead him on another drill, pointing to each other and asking, "Who's that? Who's that?" If he correctly identifies them as either "mama" or "dada," they squeal in delight and award him with applause and hugs. When he points at a lamp and say "dada," they laugh as if this is some shared joke.

Once satisfied that their son could pick them out of a lineup, they throw the rest of us a bone. My mom, they remind Teddy, is his gramma. And then they turn to me and say, "And that's Eric."

For some reason, this gets under my skin. I'm just "Eric"? Don't I deserve a familial moniker too? Why not Uncle Eric? It at least gives me a context. Otherwise, how does he know that I'm not just some college friend crashing with an overly generous foster family while I "work my shit out"? Is that not the most obvious conclusion, even for a kid who sees hats everywhere? They might as well be the Cunninghams and I'm the Fonz. I'm the dude who lives in the guest apartment over their garage.

"Oh, don't worry about him," they'll whisper as I raid the refrigerator yet again. "That's just Eric. He's been here so long, we almost consider him family."

When I confess to feeling slighted, they're quick to apologize and make up for lost time. The rest of the afternoon is spent grilling Teddy with this new information.

"Look, there's Uncle Eric," they say, feigning delight every time I so much as get up to take a piss. "Look, look! Uncle Eric is here! Yaaaah! Uncle Eric!"

Teddy barely notices, but when they manage to get his attention, he glares at me with a raised eyebrow, as if my very presence offends him. He looks at me like I'm a drunk at church. Actually, no, that's not quite it. Have you ever been at a college party and there's a guy there who is clearly too old? He's not a professor and he's a little too gray around the temples to be a student. Nobody tells him to leave, but you and your friends are a little creeped out by him and you try to avoid any direct eye contact. When you do glance in his direction, you give him an icy stare that makes it abundantly clear he's not welcome.

That's how my nephew looks at me. Like I'm a 30-year old guy at a fraternity kegger.

I suggest that it might be time to leave the insular confines of the family cottage and visit the rest of our relatives. This is, after all, supposed to be a reunion. We've come up with flimsy excuses to avoid them over the last several days, but we can't keep shunning them forever. Tom, my mother's brother, has invited us over for a chili cook-off, which sounds like it could be mildly entertaining. Tom and his wife spend their winters in New Mexico - where he's purchased several buildings and is well on his way to becoming, by one sibling's estimate, a slum landlord - so we're unreasonably optimistic that the chili will contain at least one spice.

The Larkins (my mother's side of the family) are not known for their culinary talents. They want their food the way god intended it: quick and uncomplicated and without any fancy extras like, say, flavor.

Dinner, we're told, is at 5:30. We arrive at 5:40 and they've already eaten.

"Where've you been?" They ask us. "We waited as long as we could, but we were starving."

I shouldn't be surprised. My family has never understood the concept of leisurely dining. They eat every meal as if somebody intends to take it away from them. They're like raccoons perched over a trash can. They cram as much as they can into their mouths, certain that at any moment somebody is gonna run over with a flashlight and chase them away.

We're directed towards a pot in the kitchen, which contains just enough chili for each of us to have a very, very, very, very small bowl. We're scraping the pan for sustenance, and I'm grateful for every spoonful. Because I know these people, and I know that it's not a personal insult that they've invited us over to consume the nutritional equivalent of U.N. rations at a refugee camp in Sudan.

But what does confuse me is why they still bother trying to deceive us. Why call it a chili cook-off? A cook-off implies that there'll be two or more chefs competing for a prize, which couldn't have less to do with this gathering. Given that only one man - my Uncle Tom - spent any time in the kitchen, and judging from what I tasted of his chili concoction, his efforts involved opening a can and heating the contents over a lukewarm stove, what exactly is the "off" part of the equation? Or is it just a title they came up to fool us, or maybe fool themselves, into thinking the evening would be more fun than it actually was?

I wouldn't be surprised if it was self-deception. My parents used the same trick to coax my brother and I into washing the dishes, convincing us that it was a competition. Well, they'd convince me. My brother never bought any of it.

"Ha-ha!" I'd yowl at him, polishing the last of the crusty pots and pans as he sat in the corner. "You totally forfeit! I win! I win!"

He'd just roll his eyes. "Whatever, dude."

After finishing our thimbleful of chili, we retreat to the car and return with our contribution to the feast: the dessert. We decided on S'mores, partly because it required no preparation, and partly because Larkins are always impressed by S'mores.

"How faaaancy," they tell us, their expressions somewhere between delight and indignation. "Who won the lottery?"

During our first few reunions, I just assumed they were mocking us. Bringing S'mores to a party is basically saying to your host, "Oh wait, is this not a summer camp? Will we not be eating mac-and-cheese and learning how to make Native American wood carvings? My bad." But I eventually learned that there isn't even a hint of insincerity in their reactions. They honestly believe that S'mores is a treat reserved solely for multimillionaires and Hollywood celebrities. To this day, I'm still flummoxed by their confusion. What ingredient in the S'mores recipe puts the confection out of their economic reach? Is it the graham crackers? The marshmallows? Maybe the chocolate which, last time I checked, was still affordable to people who don't wear monocles and Monopoly-style black top hats?

If I'd thought about it for more than a few seconds, it wasn't really a mystery. The Spitznagels and Larkins don't resist S'mores for financial reasons. We avoid desserts - even desserts readily enjoyed by people who live in swamps and enforce their property lines with a shotgun - because our DNA is wired to be wary of anything pleasurable. Whether it's food or sex or wealth or vacations that last longer than 24 hours, we're just not genetically comfortable with anything that might tickle our ventral tegmentum. It's the only thing about our family that's even remotely religious, except our denial of earthly pleasures doesn't come with the promise of an afterlife or a place at the right hand of an omnipotent creator. We enjoy misery for the sake of misery. We're a family of piss-drinking Gandhis without any of the social conscious.



I still don't entirely understand the origins of our self-inflicted deprivation. Is it cheapness? Well, sure. Give us $20 and we'll bury $19 in the backyard and then use the rest to buy a big jar of budget mayonnaise from the local dollar store. Does it come from a fear of judgment by our peers? Oh, hell yes. I have been told, on more than one occasion by every single member of my family (except my brother and his wife), that it's unseemly to let a stranger see you using the expensive jam. Because.... what exactly? They'll report us to the jam police? Because jam should be saved for the coming apocalypse? Because someone will catch you or, more alarmingly, punish you for rewarding yourself with fruit preserves?

I wonder if that's the definition of hell for my family, to have some outsider witness us taking more than our share, or hording anything that a sensible person would immediately stuff into an airtight pickle jar and hide in the basement?

But above all else, it comes down mostly to a terror of retribution. Nothing that feels good can possibly be healthy for us, either morally, legally or physically. And if we required proof, we need only look at Uncle Bob. Asthmatic, diabetic, overweight, his body riddled with cancer; Bob exists as the family's cautionary tale. He ate too much and drank too much and smoked too much and just look at what happened to him. At every family dinner, they watch Bob's gluttony and exchange disapproving glances. But they also love his excesses, because he gives strength to their willpower. "There but for the grace of god go I," their forlorn eyes announce to the room. And so they pick at their food like sparrows, certain that even one bite too many could result in cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes.

Over the years, I’ve learned that there are two ways to survive my family get-togethers. The most obvious – favored by my brother because it draws the least amount of attention – is to tune out the craziness. Let your mind wander and think about something more pleasant, something far, far away from this clan of dysfunctional carnies and their Manson Family values.

Or you can just do what I do and make a lot of smart-ass remarks at the expense of your relatives.

There was a time when I was given free terrain to mock anyone and anything. My jokes weren’t always in good taste, but even the more thin-skinned of my relatives would say nothing, as if I was the cousin with Tourette's that they had to tolerate. But this summer, they've stopped pretending that I'm funny. They don't even smile anymore when I make a perfectly valid observation like, "Have you noticed that when grandma holds Teddy, she looks at him like the elderly villain in a German fairy tale where children are eaten?" And heaven forbid that I tell Uncle Tom that his cowboy hat makes me think about how he'll soon be on the receiving end of Jake Gyllenhaal's saliva-filled palm.

I'm sure it doesn't help that I've been teaching Bob more dirty words. The man is like an obscenity parrot. He has a staggering memory for filth. He can barely remember whether he or my mother is the eldest sibling, but he can still recall the exact day that I told him about rusty trombones.

"Anybody got a toothpick?" Bob asks. His yellow eyes have the glint of somebody about to say something really, really horrible. "I think I got some smegma stuck in my gums."

The entire family turns and glowers at me, their expressions practically screaming, "J'accuse!" I suppose I should apologize, but honestly, I'm not sorry for teaching him that word. Everybody else in this damn family just comes down on him. "Bob, stop smoking so much!" "Bob, don't eat that stick of butter!" Not me. Let Bob be Bob, I say. I have sympathy for a guy with purple legs who can't stand up without grunting like a Tauntaun. If learning an unnecessary fun fact about genital secretions makes his life a little brighter, then I'm proud I could be the guy to make it happen for him.

Before long, the family has ostracized me. Some are inside washing the dishes, and the rest are huddled around the remaining S'mores like farmers in some crappy sci-fi flick, poking at a smoldering hole in the ground with equal parts fascination and apprehension. I've been left alone to sip the rest of my flat beer in privacy and, I can only assume, get the hell out before the cops come.

"You know what'd be a great idea," I say to nobody in particular. "Let Aunt Cathy have another glass of wine. Then she can tell us more about how much she enjoys being naked in a hot tub."

I hear laughter behind me, and I realize that Teddy has wandered outside to find me. He's laughing so hard that spit is bubbling from his mouth, and he's having difficulty maintaining his balance.



We look at each other, and it's like that scene in a movie where the childless middle-aged guy is forced to hold a baby and they stare at each other with mutual curiosity and the middle-aged guy sees something of himself in the baby or realizes something profound about himself for the first time in his otherwise jaded and self-involved life and a once popular Baby Boomer song plays in the background to signify that this is a pivotal moment of character development.

It's just like that. Except for me, unlike the movie, I ruin the moment by saying something really inappropriate.

"So have you picked a favorite great-uncle yet?" I ask him. "Let me guess, is it the guy who thinks that New Mexico real estate must be a good investment because it's so cheap? Oh, wait, no, no, it's gotta be the guy who is currently eating a frozen pie over the sink with a wood spoon."

Teddy laughs again, almost doubled-over he finds me so funny. I know he probably doesn't understand anything I'm saying. But I secretly want to believe that we've forged a connection, bonding over the mutual understanding that our family is off their fucking nut. I imagine a time, in the not-so-distant future, when Teddy and I seek each other out at these stupid reunions and make commentary from the sidelines, perhaps sitting in matching lawnchairs, passing a flask and making snarky comments that nobody finds nearly as funny as we do.

"Hat, hat, hat, hat," Teddy says gleefully, pointing at my hatless head.

"I hear what you're saying, old man," I tell him, sliding down to the ground with him and putting an arm around his tiny neck.

Actually, I have no fucking clue what he's saying. But for now, it doesn't seem to matter. I'm like Bogart at the end of Casablanca, except my Louis is a midget prone to shitting his pants and possessing the conversational skills of a stroke victim.

Still, it feels like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.