Vacationing on Planet Xanax

By P.A. Lewis

Vacationing on Planet Xanax: Vacationing on Planet Xanax is the story of P.A. Lewiss evolving relationship with her dysfunctional parents and immediate family members. Beginning in early childhood, Lewis catalogs pivotal events and moments that resulted in epiphanies and sometimes painful learning experiences. Vacationing on Planet Xanax will have you rolling with laughter at some points, and crying with sadness at others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493163403

P.A. Lewis

P.A. Lewis is an American daughter, mother, wife, cook, philosopher, animal lover and author who writes anecdotal stories based on her own personal experiences and observations about her life and the people in it.

Book preview

Chapter 1

THE ROAD TRIP

One day Alice came to a fork in the road

and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree.

Which road do I take? she asked.

Where do you want to go? was his response.

I don’t know, Alice answered.

Then, said the cat, it doesn’t matter.

—Lewis Carroll

We fought over the window seats because the person sitting in the middle always got sprayed with beer spittle from the almost-empty cans that frequently flew at us from the front seat. Dad couldn’t drive unless he was drinking beer. It made for interesting road trips.

And we only took road trips. I didn’t ride in an airplane until I was in my twenties. From Texas we had driven, the five of us, to Colorado, San Diego, Oregon, and everywhere in between and back. Months of my life were spent in those hellish road trips. Months that I will never get back.

This was a short trip to Houston to visit my mother’s mother—my grandma. As usual, Mom had packed enough food for all of us to eat for a week, despite the trip only lasting five hours, with dozens of McDonald’s Restaurants along the way. The rationale was that of a person expecting a food shortage or a holocaust. That was my mother’s motto—never enough food.

We had not been on the road an hour before Mom began popping the tops off the cans of vienna sausages. Here. You want some?

No, I said. The potted meat cast an overwhelming smell of salty dog food throughout the car cabin.

She thrust the can in front of my sister, who grabbed it and dug her fingers into the gelatinous goo and fished out a miniature wiener and ate it. We didn’t have napkins. We never did. We were expected to lick our fingers clean—a circumstance that, I am sure, has allowed me to stay thin throughout adulthood. I would rather not eat than to have dog-food-scented salty goo on my fingers.

We also always had the second most pungent food in the car—Fritos. My dad considered Fritos to be a food group of their own. I would eat those. At least they didn’t smell like dog food.

And for dessert Mom packed a dozen Snickers bars. This was standard road trip fare—vienna sausages, Fritos, and Snickers. Astronaut food for really fat astronauts.

Arghhhh! yelled my brother as an emptied beer can flew from the front seat and hit him in the chest.

My dad chuckled. Stay alert, he said. You had plenty of sleep last night.

My brother wiped beer spittle from his face. I wondered how many five-year-olds smelled like beer when they got out of a car.

My father was a very talented man. Not only could he drink a dozen beers and still drive, but he could do it while holding a lit cigarette at all times. And he could see the road despite the smoke-filled, unventilated car cabin. Dad refused to crack the window because the air conditioner was on and all the cold air would escape. So would the smoke, but we had priorities.

So we drove for five hours eating stinky food and inhaling secondhand smoke; all the while my brother and sister and I fought over who was touching whom until we reached Grandma’s house.

I stepped to the floorboard, and beer cans crushed below my feet.

Wait, said Mom. It doesn’t look like she’s home.

I gotta pee, said my sister.

Yeah, I said. I gotta pee too.

Go knock on the door, Betty, said my dad as he put the car in park.

We all watched pensively as Mom knocked on the door and waited. Then knocked again. Then she walked to the side of the house and opened the gate to the backyard. After a few minutes she returned to the car. She’s not there.

Goddammit! my father said.

I gotta pee, Mom, said my brother.

Shut up! my father yelled, and then he stared ahead for a few seconds.

Get in, he said to my mother.

And we drove to a Mexican food restaurant, where the three of us kids sprinted to the restroom. And then we ate cheese enchiladas and refried beans and Orange Crush—Mexican astronaut food.

When we were finished eating, we returned to Grandma’s house, and her car was in the driveway. We went inside and my mother said, We were here earlier but you were gone.

Oh, I know, said Grandma. I didn’t want to have to feed you all, so I went to run some errands. She said this with a smile.

I’ll be damned, said my dad.

You’ll not swear in my house, said Grandma.

We’ll not be staying long, Dad said.

Then we listened to Grandma talk for a few hours, hopped back in the car, and went back home.

Sitting in the middle was rough on the way home because there was no window to lean upon. It was difficult to sleep sitting up straight. That night I managed.

Chapter 2

GRANNY

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

—Blaise Pascal

Little kids have a fine-tuned dog-language sensory system that gets gradually replaced by the ability to communicate, manipulate, and later deny this innate gift altogether.

Fear, dominance, anxiety, love—all things felt and not spoken. By the time a child learns to say I’m afraid, he has no doubt also learned the counter rebuttal Don’t be afraid. Thus, the denial begins.

I remember being afraid when I was a child. Not afraid of the bogeyman or of heights or bugs. I was pretty fearless in those aspects. I was afraid of my parents. Afraid to tip their volatile states of agitation into the negative.

Now that I am a grown-up with a huge vocabulary, I can label their behavior as a lack of coping skills. But from a defenseless child’s perspective, it required no label other than fear. The idea that the person(s) you depend on for your personal safety might lash out at you and leave you defenseless is frightening and isolating for a child.

And I am grateful that I had my Granny then to protect me.

Granny was my father’s mother. She was a large woman with big hands and a large lap. She was the oldest girl of eleven siblings raised during the Depression. She was the kindest human I have ever known, but she had no tolerance for nonsense. My father claims that she was the only person to have ever knocked him out with one punch. And he admits he deserved it. But I never feared her. She was my rock.

Granny worked at a sewing factory near our house, and she stopped by every day on her way home, just to check on the kids. My mother stayed home with my sister and me, and she was pregnant with my brother.

I remember waiting anxiously for Granny to come by. I was too young to tell time but knew by the time certain television programs were on that Granny was due to show.

But on this day I wasn’t looking out the window. This day my mother’s coping skills had failed her. I can’t remember what or who caused it, but my mother had gone into hysterics and was sobbing on the floor while my sister and I squatted next to her on our haunches, like monkeys staring from cages. We had failed to insulate Mom from herself, and her panic was contagious. My sister was crying.

That’s when Granny came by. She let herself inside and stood above the spectacle, and I remember her saying to my mother, What are you doing down there? Get up. You have children. But Mom could not.

So Granny scooped up my sister and me and put us into her car and drove us to her house. And my father came by later to pick us up.

I miss Granny terribly.

Chapter 3

PAINT CANS

To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady

of the ignorant.

—Amos Bronson Alcott

One of my mother’s favorite things to do if we had guests over was to regale them with humiliating tales of my past while I sat there blushing. The evening schedule of events would go something like this:

One of Mom’s all-time favorite embarrassing tales was of the time that I poured green paint on my head.

Mom used to plaster her trademark shit-eating grin on her face before she would gleefully tell the room full of whoever hadn’t yet found a tactful way to leave, of how I poured green paint on my own head when I was three years old.

Her version of the story goes something like this: "Pam was in the bathroom, and I heard a bloodcurdling scream and went to the bathroom, and she was