TRANSCRIPT
I was recently looking through some of my old childhood home videos. Videos that I actually took. Most of them. This goes back to the mid-1980s. I think I was about 13 years old when I filmed this one. And this particular one disturbed me so much I can’t share it here because there’s different people in here who wouldn’t want their faces shown, wouldn’t want to be known to have been part of this. But I’ll describe what I saw. It actually put me in a really disturbed funky mood for a couple of days just to realize how painful and how horrible this actually was.
Well, in this video, we were visiting my grandparents for Christmas, and they were having a dinner party. And this was the party before dinner. Upstairs, they were having pre-dinner drinks. There was about maybe eight people, ten people that I shot. I walked around. I was just like a clueless kid, just with a camera, just filming everyone. I thought it was fun, but what I was filming wasn’t fun.
The first thing I saw is I was filming my mom, and she was high. High on marijuana. She was high on marijuana a lot of my childhood. I never knew that until later on when I figured out what marijuana is, when I caught her, when she talked about it, when she later admitted some stuff about how much she had smoked marijuana with my dad. She was a real pothead. She used marijuana to distance herself from her feelings, and her feelings were very, very overwhelming and painful. My dad did the same thing, perhaps a bit less so. My mom also sometimes got really trashed on alcohol when marijuana didn’t work well enough or she didn’t have a supply. But in this video, she was high. She was walking around. Hey, she was really out of it yet normal, such that at the time I didn’t realize she was being anything other than my mom. Now with hindsight, I can realize this was high.
Well, and then there was my dad. My dad was anxious. He never felt comfortable around my mom’s parents, especially my mom’s father, for reasons I’ll get into. What I saw in the video, so my dad was sitting there anxiously doing this stressed out, and he was telling a sexual story. A weird, uncomfortable, inappropriate sexual story. And nobody was really listening to him because in my mom’s family, pretty much nobody really liked my dad that much. So they kind of humored him a little bit. They let him tell his story, but there he was, and I’m filming this. He’s telling us in front of me, age 13, an inappropriate story. So that was part two.
Part three, there’s my grandfather sitting, drinking, having a drink, a good stiff drink. I don’t know what he was having, gin or vodka, something like that, straight with a little bit of ice in it, just drinking, looking very important, holding court, completely ignoring me. Everybody, by the way, was ignoring me. Sitting next to my grandfather is not my grandmother, but my grandfather’s girlfriend, who was his former psychotherapy patient. My grandfather had been a psychologist and a psychotherapist, and he ended up seducing one of his clients, who incidentally was 35 years younger than him, younger than my mother, actually. And there she was, sitting next to him, also having a drink, and she was sitting in the position of importance and power next to him, right at his side.
And then there was my grandmother wandering around, so out of it, probably had been drinking already. “Oh, Daniel, it’s so wonderful that you have a movie camera and that you can film everything.” And in the background, you could see sculptures because my grandfather, after he quit being a therapist, became a sculptor. And what would he make sculptures of? His girlfriend nude. So there was nude sculptures around. All around their property was nude sculptures. I have video of these nude sculptures. I have one video that same trip where my mom’s saying, “Come on, Daniel, be sure to film, be sure to film his sculpture garden. Get the sculptures. They’re really good sculptures.” And it’s like my mom is wanting to film sculptures of my grandfather’s girlfriend naked with her boobs sticking out like this.
My grandmother put up with this. They thought it was a good thing, except secretly my grandmother hated it, which is why my grandmother, every night pretty much, especially when his girlfriend would come around, would get drunk. She was probably already a bit drunk by then, like I said, but certainly if I’d filmed this two hours later, this is what we would have seen with my grandmother. “Oh God, I love you so much. You’re so, you’re the best grandpa I’ve ever had.” And sometimes she would cry and cry. This went on well into her 90s. So this is the dynamic.
Oh, also, by the way, as my dad’s telling the sexual story, he’s smoking a cigarette inside. There’s smoke everywhere, which I’m breathing. Then they had four friends over, young people, people who were cool and hip and young, basically people who all accepted this extremely bizarre, inappropriate, disturbed dynamic. And what’s going on is everybody’s hanging out like this is the most normal thing in the world. And what’s so sad is for me as a child, as a boy, pre-teen, teenage years, even after I was a teenager for a while, I felt this was normal because this was what I saw all the time. And in hindsight, I realized this goes to show just how absolutely sick normal can be.