Moodswing - YELLING

I got yelled at at Doc Green’s on Ponce yesterday, and not because I did anything wrong. No, they just yell at people as a matter of course the instant you enter the door. It’s like a policy or something. “Come on in!” they holler, or I think that’s what they holler, because it’s not like they do it all in unison, and I don’t think they’re all saying the same thing. You can even kind of tell they don’t really enjoy doing it, or maybe that’s just me. Because I know if it were me working there, I’d rather rip out my own kidneys with a rusty crowbar than be forced to holler gay greetings to people all day.

Which makes you wonder what the hell is happening to Ponce, which up until now used to be the city’s center for mumbling drug addicts and surly service. Now it’s attracting all these suburban franchises, though there is still plenty of flotsam shuffling around on the street. Yesterday, the legendary Wild-Eye Crazy Mary, who is surprisingly lucid for a crack whore, tried to bum two cigarettes off me as I sat on the patio of the Local, though her efforts might have been more fruitful if she approached someone who actually smoked. “Try Doc Green’s,” I told her. “They yell hello at you there.”

“I certainly will,” she said, and she ambled away. I hope they do yell hello at her there. I’m sure getting yelled at is nothing new to her.

Getting yelled at is nothing new to me, either.

Growing up, I don’t think I can remember a day I walked in the door of our house without being greeted with an outburst of some kind. And ducking. Ducking was essential, because you never knew what you were gonna get hit with. Once I got hit in the face with a wooden spoon covered in brownie batter, which my big sister had hurled at me from across the kitchen because, at that moment, she’d remembered that five years earlier I’d thwacked her in the head with a tennis shoe while she talked on the phone, which I’d done because, a year before that, she’d thrown a lamp made of deer antlers at me while we were visiting my uncle the hunter.So, both figuratively and literally, stuff was always swirling around in the atmosphere of our home, but at least there was the yelling to precede it, otherwise you’d be caught unprepared.

But sometimes I was unprepared, anyway. It depended on what was being yelled. Once I got yelled at for being late, which was really unexpected because I was always late. That was just something my family knew about me, and it had never garnered anything more than exasperation before.

Then one day I walked through the door no more tardy than I always was, which was the equivalent to complete punctuality if you ask me, but for reasons that I cannot explain, except to say that they had something to do with my brother falling out of a tree and needing to be rushed to the emergency room because he was bleeding out of his ear, I got yelled at but fierce when I finally made it home.

It was not like my parents were even waiting for me, either, because they hadn’t finished rushing around grabbing towels and whatnot to sop stuff up, because my gray-faced brother was lying there on the hardwood floor of the foyer, having just been carried there by the father of the friend he was visiting when he fell out of the tree, and my brother was shaking and spewing like a busted beer keg.

He must have fallen far, I thought, because he did not look good. Then there was the blood coming from his ear, which had everyone yelling like panicked plane wreck survivors.

After my parents wrapped my brother’s head in a bedsheet, we all piled into my father’s Corvair and sped to the hospital, with my mother holding my brother in her lap in the front seat, which I remember looked funny because by then he was 12 and almost as big as she was. When they pulled up to the hospital, the doctors made everyone back away so they themselves could pull his limp body with his bloody mummy head out of the car and carefully place it on the gurney, then they wheeled him through the swinging doors with my dad by his side. My mother stayed behind, standing there in the headlights of our car, her blouse covered in blood and vomit, wringing her hands.

When she returned to us, she noticed that my little sister had peed in the back seat, which normally would have set my mother off yelling like a crazed street preacher, but instead she saw that and just sank to her knees outside the car door.

Curiously, she reached for us and gathered us to her like we were little life preservers in a rough sea, and held us that way for a long while, my sister and I, even though we were wallowing in blood and puke and piss. She didn’t let us go until my dad came back to tell her my brother would be fine except now he was deaf in that one ear. “He’s the same boy,” he said, hugging her, “except now if we want him to hear us, we’ll have to yell.”

Hollis Gillespie is the author of Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (Harper Collins), now available in paperback. Her commentaries can be heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”??