TRYPANOSOMIASIS

n. African sleeping sickness. "Trypano-" is African for "lazy" and "-somiasis" is South African for "bastard."

Weekend at Vinny's

Saturday afternoons in some homes in America are dominated by college football. In some homes, light DIY projects are planned, executed and completed. In my home, there was no Saturday afternoon past time more sacred than the two and a half to four hour nap. It was a special time for my sister and me. We used this time of weekly reflection and rejuvenation to bond and do some of our best work as up and coming performance artists.

My father always lay flat on his back with his chin in the air and his bulbous nose pointed skyward. You would almost laugh out loud and wake him up if you looked at him straight on because he always looked as though one of the Three Stooges had set him up for a wallop to the throat by pulling his nostrils up from behind his head.

He slept with his eyes half open like some sort of semi-amphibious jungle animal that only needed to moisten its eyes once every half hour, but kept them open continuously so as to better detect predators. Naturally this animal's deviated septum would have necessitated the evolution of half-open eyelids, due to its impaired sense of smell.

We often made sport of this somnolent quirk of his; waiting until his eyes were as open as they could be, such that he appeared to be awake, and then giving him the finger. With clenched teeth, we vigorously pumped our upturned middle fingers right in his face until the terror-filled consequences of him actually being awake made us laugh so hard that we had to leave the room. Eventually this grew to be passe, however, and we would get so used to it that we would have to stop ourselves from giving him the finger to his face while he was awake.

At other times, my sister and I put on plays with him as the main character. He would either be the beautiful sleeping princess over whom we would faun like Snow White, or he would be a hairy evil passed out ogre who had had too much mead. I would hold my sister back with one arm and slay the demonic suspended ogre with my sword. Hand gestures demonstrated his curly stinking guts spilling onto the floor. The fluttering of my sister's tiny fingers would indicate a light rain falling on his now pathetic deanimated corpse. We would pity him. I would then revive him with great surges of my extended fingers and we silently rejoiced and hugged each other as his breathing returned. My sister would run into her room and fetch a fake flower from one of her dolls and put it on his chest, indicating that he was now a good ogre who could be trusted. I would then gingerly put it behind his ear to indicate that he was now a coquettish and dainty Hawaiian ogress who was looking for a big strong Hawaiian ogreman.

Sometimes we put on a variety show. We would enter the living room from different sides waving lime green plastic top hats from St. Patrick's Day and executing a well coordinated number involving high leg-kicks, jazz hands and sometimes a knee-spin or two. The routine would always end with the presentation of the star of the show, The Entertainer of All Entertainers, The Human Firecracker, That Real Go-getter, Mr. Bright-eyed and Bushy Tailed, The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, THE IRISH LIBERACE! He WALKS! He TALKS! He SLIDES ON HIS BELLY LIKE A REPTILE! With our brightest show-biz smiles and shiny Paddy's Day hats we directed the invisible crowd's attention to the star of the show, who once let out a towering snore right at the moment of his curtain call, causing my sister and me to double over and knock heads. We had to go to the other end of the house and scream our heads off from fright and laughter.

As children, our aunt and uncle got similar enjoyment from the pall of silence that was draped over the living room during our father's nap time. One afternoon, they decided to cover him with playing cards. They went through almost two decks before one got away and hit him squarely in the nose. My aunt, then a preteen character who affectionately carried cats around by their necks and knew every commercial jingle on television (and some of the jingles on the Spanish channel) almost wet her pants. My father opened his eyes for one complete second, and then rolled over, shedding the cards from his paunch and rolling over onto his side. My uncle put my aunt over the edge by grabbing her and holding her over my father, squeezing silent hissing pleas out of her to not drop her.

On some Saturdays, my sister and I would attend his funeral. We solemnly dressed in our finest church clothes and proceeded into the funeral parlor arm in arm. The grief would be unbearable. It was an open casket wake, and we always whispered to each other about how good the body looked. He looked so young. We admired the various flower arrangements sent by members of the family, Senator Ted Kennedy and Pee Wee Herman. The half-dead plants on our windowsill were the most beautiful and expensive arrangements imaginable. While I was whispering his eulogy, Celia would show up in her Annie wig and feather boa as the woman with whom Dad had had a secret affair for forty years. Brutal silent fistfights took place between Yolanda (Celia) and my mother (me). Then Yolanda and Mom would decide to make up and be friends after my mother admired her boa and they would both kneel before his sleeping corpse and pray that his soul would be taken to heaven.

On the Saturdays when Celia was away at Disney on Ice or She-ra on Ice or whatever other on-ice perversion she went to with my aunts, I was pressed for a story line. Someone who slept so much was clearly depressed and needed therapy. I pulled up a chair and decided to be my father's psychoanalyst. His innermost thoughts and conflicts were recorded on a red Transformers notepad from Chinatown. He recounted the childhood trauma of being sent to fight the Germans in a unit of child-commandos. He saw a lot of his buddies die at the hands of vicious German ninjas trained in the Phillipines. Complex nightmares about bats and the jungle kept him awake at night.

I nodded with empathy and mock took his hand when he told me about being dumped by Maria from Sesame Street because he was insecure and threatened by Gordon's raw mustachioed masculinity. I raised my eyes to the heavens in condemnation of a god who would allow the Entenmann's baked goods company to abandon my father in his time of utmost need by only producing their cherry pies when cherries were in season. As my sleeping patient, my father was Job and I was Job's psychiatrist.

He would awake on these Saturdays with prescriptions scrawled on Transformers paper that read:

Don't worry. Gordon Sucks.
Rx: Eat More Cake
The Office of
Dr. Optimus Prime

or

Its okay. Plenty of people have pee-stained underwear.
Rx: 400 CC's of Orange Juice 2x Daily
The Office of
Dr. Optimus Prime

He rightly figured this was some sort of sick game my sister and I had concocted and would immediately appeal to my mother. She would demand to know what these pieces of paper meant and what twisted mind game we were playing with our innocent father who was just trying to get a few hours of rest after his long work week. We would play it off as a goof, but would still get a stern finger and an order to "knockitoff." We retreated to our rooms and concocted even sicker games.

Revenge would be ours the following Saturday afternoon, however, when Dad would unwittingly assume the roll of the American pilot shot down over Vietnam. We had pulled him from the wreckage of his jet fighter and dragged his nearly lifeless body to our Viet Cong POW camp deep in the jungle. Our faces would transform into those of fiendish Vietnamese pinkos glistening with sweat and baring our rotten jungle teeth. We brandished our rubber hoses, which we fashioned from orange Matchbox race tracks. As our alter egos Dao Jones and Nam Penn, we would give him a savage silent beating. We rained blow after savage blow on him as he lay there helpless waiting for Chuck Norris and the Delta Force to crash through the windows with their M-16's blazing. Until that unlikely intervention, no fake blow with our rubber hoses would be spared, no matter how pathetically he snored for help.