Don't Piss in the Gene Pool

Don't Piss in the Gene Pool

All the persons, names, places and events depicted in

Jan's stories are fictional.

Any resemblance to actual events, persons or locations is purely coincidental.

My grandfather worked as a courier for the Chicago Mob clear up until the day he disappeared. Grandma made bathtub gin and sang in a “speak easy.” It’s hard to reconcile that image with the old woman who fussed at me for jumping on the stairs all the way down when I was a kid, excited that I was losing my first baby tooth.

I don’t remember her too well. We thought of her as the “good grandma,” probably because she didn’t live with us or spend enough time around us to get on our nerves. She was sixty-two when she died from complications of diabetes. She seemed so old then. Not anymore. I’ll be fifty-two in January. These days, sixty-two seems younger all the time.

As for the other grandma, well, she lived with us and she was hell on wheels.

“Come back in this house right now! Don’t be out there playin’ with those hoodle-lums!”

That’s how she said “hoodlums”. In fact, I was in my teens before I learned how the word was really pronounced.

“Grandma, they’re not hoodle-lums! They’re my friends.”

“Hoodle-lums! And don’t you be playing with them.”

I dutifully obeyed my grandmother. Okay, so I only obeyed her when there was a peach cobbler in the oven. Otherwise, I did exactly as I pleased and tried not to let her catch me at it.

I guess she was worried about me growing up to be like one of the kids in the neighborhood. Or marrying one of them, to make matters worse, contaminating our precious gene pool.

My cousin, her second son’s child, has done so much prison time that when he’s free, he still walks like he’s in leg irons. He used to terrorize me when we were kids. I was afraid of him. Really afraid. He grew up proving that my childhood fears concerning him were well founded.

His brother was a Chicago cop. A good guy. But, since he was, technically, my uncle’s stepson, I guess the only swimmer in that side of the genetic pool was Lloyd. Or as we fondly refer to him, “KY40384”. I hate it when he receives a new prison sentence. We have to memorize a whole new set of numbers.

My grandmother’s oldest son was my father. What a piece of work that man was. His concept of providing for his family could be stated in two phrases: “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine, too.” Can you believe he owned a Piper Cub? We ate watered down beans with sliced onions in them for flavor so he could fly his plane.

“Yesserie, Gram! That’s one genetic pool in need of preservation.”

I wonder what my grandmother would have said if I had “come out” when she was alive. My father was dead by the time I did. Nevertheless, I, his third daughter – that we know of – paid tribute to his contribution to our genetic pool in my own special way. I married another woman on his birthday.

Some genetic pools could stand some backwashing, if you know what I mean. Mine included. Few of my brothers or sisters made it to adulthood without doing something either immoral or illegal. That includes me, if you count underage drinking and my one attempt at smoking when I was seventeen. By the way, if you accidentally set your hair on fire with a lit cigarette, consider that God’s way of telling you to stop.

I guess my little genetic swimmers are the ones with the water wings and nose plugs.

My grandma viewed the neighborhood kids as if she was the lifeguard at the public swimming pool and they were the kids with the weak bladders.

“Well, Grandma, you can stop worrying. I moved away from those kids when I was fourteen years old, a year after you died. Or as we prefer to say, ‘The year after you retired your lifeguard whistle.’

I got into most of my trouble with the upscale pond swimmers in the nice parts of California. You know the ones I mean. They went to Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, UCLA, and were probably too high at graduation to notice whether their names were on their diplomas.

“Just so you know, Grandma, I had a kid of my own. But living with the sperm donor was a bitch!”

My little contribution to the family genetic pool turned out to be a wonderful girl who would make any mom proud. She has her moments, but then so do I. And if she has to put up with me, then it’s only fair that I put up with her, too.

“I didn’t raise no ‘hoodle-lum,’ Grandma. You’d have let me play with her.”