The rager at my enchantingly lunatic cousins’ house in Detroit that Friday night was special as always. Our artistic tendencies combined with our genetic eccentricities are influenced by the phases of the moon, and every March full moon we come together at an intimate dinner party / salon for four, my three cousins and me, at their place.

Why do I do this every year, you may wonder. And I wonder myself since I hate traveling and have even been accused of being agoraphobic. But I do this for my mother, the connector. I do this to please her cause I love her with all my heart. Nothing makes her happier than to see me get off the couch, out of my house, on the prowl. Ever since I divorced my now-dead alcoholic husband, she has urged me to shop for a cucumber instead of a pickle. 

Maybe you think it’s a bit weird my three cousins live together. Two of them are brother and sister, and the third cousin who lives there is married to the sister of the brother, who by the way, when we were in third grade, told me he was going to marry me. “Well, I’m not going to marry you,” I told him. And what did he do to get back at me? He shittified the red-carpeted stairs in the house in Pasadena where I grew up. Grandma Rose told the story many times, how she was not happy using her embroidered hanky to pick up those foul smelling Kisses. Guess we were out of toilet paper back in the sixties, though this was way before hoarding toilet paper became popular.

That brother of the sister has a mustache and a pet squirrel who sits on his shoulder, nuzzling into his neck, breathing in his ear, as he strolls through the house or down the street to the turmeric shop on the corner where, earlier today, before I arrived, he bought 4 yodeling pickles for our dinner along with a gift for his squirrel, a lovely extra large bejeweled hamster harness sparkling with rhinestones in shades of blue attached to a long thin gold chain leash.  He always wears a bulky overcoat, my cousin, maybe to protect himself from the squirrel’s sharp claws, and you can tell he gets really warm, as evidenced today by the rivulets of sweat the color of the Berry Blue Typhoon flavor of Hawaiian Punch dripping down the sides of his face. You might not wonder why.

It’s because his sister, my dear cousin, is obsessed with 03 Greedo the rapper and especially his Blue People avatar song. On the one day a year when I fly from San Diego to Detroit to have dinner with them, before I arrive she will have brushed blue mascara into her brother’s sideburns. Like she’s got it bad, blue people envy, a psychological problem which makes her jealous of the blue people who live on the banks of eastern Kentucky’s Troublesome Creek who are afflicted with the methemoglobinemia genetic condition. It all started with Cousin Blue-People-Envy’s increasing obsession with Smurfs when they got popular. Fun fact: a sociologist once described the Smurf world as a totalitarian and racist utopia. Today Cousin Blue Envy wears her hair parted not quite down the middle and her tamed black roots are paired with deep blue curls along with two tight black and blue ringlets stuck to her forehead in a style of the 1800s she probably copied from her collection of daguerreotypes.

Their pink tile bathroom with red velvet brocade wallpaper deserves its own ode, one waxing fancy on the bordello-chic sheer red ruffled curtain draped over a window through which the worm moon shines as I sit on the modern toilet kegeling to hasten my drip drying, necessary due to the lack of toilet paper. To wile away the time, I push the curtain aside to see what’s behind it, besides the window, and find a medicine cabinet missing its door. It’s stocked with Aleve Liquid gelcaps, three boxes of Smurf bandaids, a blue mason jar with shrooms, bottles and bottles of Milk of Magnesia, and a baggie filled with blue pills of unknown origin, at least to me.

The Bohemian tango-Americana sounds of Tin Hat Trio play in the dining room, with Tom Waits singing the Helium Reprise song. I love the eerie line “I dissolve into the wax of a flickering candle.” The accordion, the violin, the banjo, they give me chills.

Like just wow, their dining room, wall-to-wall faded avocado-gold shag carpet, it’s gotta be OG from the 60s and reeks of cigarettes and old urine as it rests stickily, stiffly under a chippy midcentury carved wood dining room set painted off-white which sits under an already set table with placemats and gold plates which sit under a dusty chandelier strung with spiderwebs, reminding me of home.

The huge hole in the dining room wall and spackle patches everywhere make me wonder. Has Cousin Blue Envy’s husband developed an anger management issue? Hubster’s sleazy sloth voice and rectangular bulging ice blue eyes suck you into his psyche. Maybe Cousin Ice Eyes has a violent streak occasionally leading to his sledge hammering the wall, say when Cousin Blue Envy gives him one of her smirking sulky looks on account of him telling her the white dress she always wears is filthy. Or maybe he’s pissed at her brother on account of the squirrel screaming or wandering around the house at night when they’re sleeping, pooping and peeing on the shag carpet. It is hard to get that shit out of the carpet even if, like me, you’re lucky enough to have a Kenmore Elite 31150 pet-friendly bagged upright vacuum.

We hardly spoke a word about the vegetarian lasagna cooked up by the hubster, but he has always been quite the chef and it didn’t disappoint. The stupid sandwiches I made, with a pickle on the side, were stuffed with a special kind of bicycling fish mixed with the type of veal jerky that makes people sad. I thought the sandwiches were just okay, though sweet Blue Envy said they were smurftastic. If you’re thinking Blue Envy is a creative neologizer, you are wrong. She did not invent Smurf + fantastic and, for that matter, she is also not a sadistic punster, though some of my relatives are.

Simultaneously we four each bit off hunks of our respective pickles, and as we chewed, from out of our mouths came the strange cries of a yodel from low register to high falsetto, the same distinct sound of the yodel in Hocus Pocus, the 1971 song by the band Focus, and we didn’t sound half bad!  A gulp of my watermelon-flavored sparkling water, and I swallowed my pickle, thus ceasing my warble shortly after it began.

For dessert there was homemade lemon marmalade, a gift I had received from my brother who made it himself. I decided to bring it from San Diego and regift it to my cousins as a thank you for hosting our cozy gathering. Cousin Ice Eyes served it straight up in vintage Bauer primary colored custard cups I covet to this day. I couldn’t help myself and went for the blue cup as did Cousin Blue Envy, who pried it out of my hand and slammed it down onto her placemat. Our tussle was for naught since although the jelly part was tasty, the lemon rind was a bit too chunky and uncooked and ruined the fruity finish.      

The after-dinner brie, stuffed with ecstasy (MDMA), led to in-depth conversations about politics and our fantasy sex lives. Though I declined the cheese since I was too full and too paranoid to try the hug drug, I confessed that I wanted to kiss Zelensky once this godforsaken war in Ukraine is over.

I did throw back a couple after-dinner Kamikaze shots, which got me on the subject of Nikita Khrushchev, a former Soviet Union premier born and raised in poverty in Ukraine where he tended sheep from the time he could walk.

Cousin Squirrel Master interrupted the squirrel’s nibbling on a piece of brie protruding from between his master’s lips, to ask me, “Hey cuz, since you know so much about Nikita, would you know whether he ever loved a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow?”

“Great question!” I said. Since I didn’t know the answer, I steered us to December 1962 when Khrushchev viewed an art exhibit with some avant-garde works and described the artwork as dog shit and said a donkey could make better art rubbing its ass on the canvas.

As we talked we assembled our sculptures. Mine was shaping up to be headless Barbie in a bullet bra with the body of a squirrel and a big bushy tail. “Meet Torso Twitchy Trixie," I said to my cousins. “She’s looking forward to tailgating in her cone bra while munching on acorns before the Constitution Avenue parade in June.”

I pulled up a quote on my iPhone 10 and read it to my cousins, “You’re a nice-looking lad,” Khrushchev said to painter Zheltovskii, “but how could you paint something like this? We should take down your pants and set you down in a clump of nettles until you understand your mistakes. You should be ashamed. Are you a pederast or a normal man?”  Shortly thereafter, Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, issued a call for artistic purity.

Next thing you know we were all using our cell phones at the dining room table, searching for the definition of pederast and images of Zheltovskii’s art, trying to find the painting that would make Khrushchev think the artist was a pedophile. We never did find anything even after the squirrel flew off Cousin Squirrel Master’s shoulder onto the dining room table, swiped my iPhone out of my hand, banged on it with her paws like she could type 60 words a minute only to find that images of the painting are not available.

The Bee Gees “You Should Be Dancing” song came on and Cousin Squirrel Master grabbed my hand, yanked me out of my seat, snatched my other hand and spun me, your ultimate awkward dancer. Next thing you know we were step tapping together and French kissing like I was 18. As the final words of the song faded out, “dancing, yeah,” I eased my hands out of Squirrel Master’s pants where I’d been playing with his Priapulida, jerked my phone out of the squirrel’s clutches, and summoned an Uber to take me to the airport to catch my red eye back to San Diego.

The worm moon, which just might have got its name due to earthworms appearing as the soil warms in spring, well one more time it didn’t disappoint. And I knew it wouldn’t. After all, the fake news New York Post said, and I paraphrase here, this lunation will be intense, promising vivid dreams, sudden revelations, and emotional breakthroughs and breakdowns. Flying back to San Diego, I couldn’t get my make-out session with Cousin Squirrel Master out of my head. Though I wondered if the New York Post had a typo and meant lunatic instead of lunation, they got everything else right. What would Mom think?

E. Friedlander graduated from University of California San Diego with a BA in Literature/Writing. Some Saturdays she leads a writing-from-prompt group via Zoom.