I Don't Have a Happy Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

it was in the closet behind a stack of Richie Rich comics. The briefcase was black, a Samsonite, with nubby skin and two slick silver locks flanking the plastic handle. I don’t know how he’d gotten that briefcase, but it wasn’t mine, and that was all the reason I needed to fish around in there any chance I got. Plus, I’d once overheard my mother call it an attaché case, which just made it sound even more like it should be mine.
    I’d been covertly visiting it for a month, if for nothing else than to delight in the clicks as I engaged the silver locks. If my brother was at hockey practice and my parents were deep into The White Shadow , I could be found placing the case on the bed, clicking open the locks, and saying something businessy, like, “I have the microfiche . ”
    When I first began snooping inside, there was not much of interest in there. Some hockey cards, birthday notes from Nana, a Cheap Trick ticket stub. In years to come, I’d discover a sandwich bag filled with crunchy greenish leaves and a small wooden pipe shaped like a corncob, the likes of which I’d never seen before. For that reason, I felt it my duty to march downstairs and show my parents. Later that night, I’d hear my father say behind Ace’s closed door, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” followed by the whoosh and slap of the Gucci belt. After that night, Ace barely made eye contact with me. The case would be locked forever and my time with it done, but not before I made another discovery.
    There was no way Grandpa Solly would venture upstairs, so I seized the opportunity and opened the case. To my delight, there were two new items inside.
    (1) A book: familiar to me, because I had its companion squirreled away under my mattress. Recently, we’d found these illustrated hardcovers marooned at the foot of our beds, with no notes from our parents, no further mention or subsequent confab whatsoever. The point of my book, Where Do I Come From?, was to explain how babies showed up in the world so my mother didn’t have to. There was no shortage of cartoony penises and swimming sperm in top hats holding flowers. These were distressing enough, but the capper was the main character, who was naked on almost every page and looked an awful lot like Ziggy. And while I had no interest in seeing anyone’s penis, Ziggy’s was one I really would have preferred to keep under wraps. (Ziggy’s wife, I should mention, was also a bit of a nudist and no vixen either.) They also gave us an education on how to spell penis, even though they said it sounded like pee- nus (“ peanuts without the t !” it stated, which completely ruined Snoopy for me).
    My brother’s book, the one staring at me from the case, was entitled What’s Happening to Me? ,and I decided right then and there that I didn’t care what was happening to him. I pushed it aside. Underneath lurked other bait.
    (2) A magazine: glossy, with smiling ladies on the cover—a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. I knew instantly where this periodical hailed from. I’d been to my father’s office three times, and with each visit I was too panicked to enter the bathroom due to the neat stack of Playboy s weighting down the top of the toilet tank. At home, Ms . magazines were piling up on the kitchen counter, while across town my father’s magazines boasted headlines like, A P ICTORIAL F IRST : O UTER S PACE S EX ! I NTRIGUING !
    Those magazines irked me, and not for the heaving bosoms on the covers, but for the little white strip on each issue with my father’s name and work address typed in black ink. The mailman would tote this magazine around the neighborhood in his mailbag, forced to handle it as he took out stacks of letters and birthday cards from nanas all over the world. And then, upon reaching my dad’s office, he’d know that it was my father receiving this magazine with