I’m Down (Memoir) Blog 10

For the last blog, I originally planned to write about the very last section, however, I feel like this is more interesting and shows more character. Mishna weird friend Marni (who always wears a long sleeve shirt) invites Mishna to stay at her house. Mishna accepts the invitation. However, prior to her previous thoughts about rich people, she finds that they have way worse problems and issues. Marni’s mom is an alcoholic while her dad openly mocks and yells at her. Mishna begins to understand why she is always so catatonic at school and is greatly perturbed by her friends problem. This shows how caring and naive she can be.

“…. That was until I was awoken in the middle of the night by Marni’s dad coming into her room, flipping on the light, and yelling at Marni about how he had to move her bike in order to park his car, which quickly escalated back into the earlier conversation about her lack of character. Marni was rattled again and went into her bathroom, while I put the pillow over my head and tried to go back to sleep. But then I had to pee and, think Marni was just smoking, thoughtlessly barged into her bathroom. I flung the door open to find Marni was not smoking. Marni was cutting herself. She was slumped over the title floor of her bathroom with an X-Acto knife making a series of short marks in her left forearm. I was too stunned to say anything, but I think my face said it all because Marni immediately got defensive and said, ‘It’s okay. I’m just relieving some stress.’ And from the looks of her arm, she wasn’t new to this form of pressure release… ‘I’m gonna stay. But you gotta give me the knife.’ She silently handed over the knife. ‘Don’t tell anyone.”

I found this to be one of the most shocking parts in the book simply because I didn’t expect it. I can image Mishna’s face at finding her friend cutting herself, something she has no exposure to. As stated in previous chapters, Mishna grew to hate some of the kids at her school because she thought they didn’t have really problems. Later on in the book, she says she wishes they could just have money problems. One thing I like about this book is how Wolff can be cracking jokes on one page, and on the other have some serious heavy issues. I think because most of the book is light hearted, the dark parts are emphasized. However, the dark parts are quickly covered with funny moments so the overall mood of the novel isn’t too heavy.

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A few more months have past and Mishna is still swimming and doing very well at it. Problem is, things at home aren’t going very well. Her step mom Yvonne feels stressed because she is the sole provider of the family. Since this is towards the end of the novel, things are getting more serious although there are a few comical parts. This isn’t one of them.

“Three days later, I was woken up in the middle of the night. Yvonne stood over my bed leering angrily until the searing heat of her rage woke me… ‘Where is my shirt?’ Yvonne demanded. I stared at her blankly… ‘What?’ I asked. ‘My white shirt!’ Yvonne said. ‘Don’t act like you don’t know.’ ‘Mishna,’ Dad said. ‘Just tell her where the shirt is and we can all go to bed…’ ‘It’s not just the shirt!’ Yvonne said. ‘It’s your entitlement!’ You think you can just walk around here and get into anything you want. You have no respect for other people’s property…’ It was too much all coming at once. I started to cry again… I had no idea what this shirt was. I had never worn her shirt, but none of that made a difference. I was supposed to be wrong. ‘I’m sorry about your shirt,’ I cried. ‘You’re right, I stole it. I don’t know why I did it…’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I care. I love you, Yvonne! I really love you so much.’ ‘You make it very hard for me to love you back,’ she said, the tears starting to roll down her face… ‘I’m sorry, Yvonne,’ I said, ‘I’m really, really sorry.’ I was apologizing for my father.”

Mishna is really a good person, she wants the best for the people around her and she wants to please everyone. This is one of the more tender moments in the book. This past paragraph was the last straw, she didn’t want to be yelled at, she didn’t want to be blamed for everything, she just wanted to be loved. On the next page, she ends up packing her things and moving into her mom’s apartment which makes this barrier between her and her father. A large chunk of the rest of the book is about her father trying to come to terms with her and them being father and daughter again.

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As stated in the previous blog, Mishna’s satanic acts changes her life. Once her father hears that she and her friends tried to summon the devil, he is outraged by her childish actions. To straighten her out and discipline her, he makes her join a basketball team. Unfortunately, Mishna has never played basketball before and is the only white person on the team. Both her and her father know the straightening-her-out was just an excuse to get her involved in sports, something her dad used to do.

“On my first day of practice, Dad and I walked into the gym where my teammates were messing around before practice. Underneath the hoop were five six-foot-tall blacks girls who must have had a ball in their hands as soon as they pried the tit out, and one five-foot-three point guard who must have shared the womb with a Spaulding regulation.”

Mishna is only playing basketball for her dad whom she just wants to please. Even though she has grown up in the hood and is used to being the only white kid in a group, it takes courage to try something you’ve never done especially when everyone else looks like they’ve done it all their life. Mishna plays on the team for a while but finally quits because she feels like she’s holding the team back (all of the players are trying to get basketball scholarships). From here, she tells here dad that she wants to play football so she can get a scholarship to a good school. Her dad tells her that she has to bulk up first and to try swimming. Turns out she’s a natural at it. Its because of her swimming she finally makes peace with her dad.

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As time passes, Mishna makes more and more friends at her rich school. Because of her circumstances, people feel badly for her and often invite her to their house so they can take care of the “poor kid”. Mishna of course can’t care less and loves going to people’s houses. Going to sleepovers gave her a break from her family. (Her father remarried to a 24 year old black women with 2 children, the eldest being four).

“Sleepovers were like minivactions for me. I got to step out of my family responsibilities and into my friends’ homes where I was catered to like a crippled person. Dad wasn’t in the habit of asking if he could make me something to eat, or if I wanted him to rent me something while he was at the video store. In fact, the last time I’d had Zwena over, he got her to clean the kitchen after I made dinner.”

When Mishna gets invited to a seventh-grade sleepover, she is disappointed when she finds out who’s house its at. A girl named Oksana whose mom is a chilled artist who makes interesting sculptures.

“The lure of Oksana’s was that she had the most lax parents of all my friends-when she was staying with her mom, the artist. By the way, her mom’s art was intricately hand-beaded penis sculptures. The whole of her house from top to bottom was beaded penises in various stages of construction. You couldn’t look and not see a beaded penis…”

If this didn’t make for a funny story, Mishna and her friends trying to summon the devil is.

“Marni was giving Eileen the world’s most boring tarot card reading and I was designing a city in my mind made out of toothpicks. That’s when Lilith had an idea. She closed her spell book and said in a really creepy voice, ‘Hey guys, let’s try to summon the devil.’ The air in the guesthouse changed, and suddenly the party came to life. ‘How do we do that?’ Marni asked. ‘I have a spell right here,’ Lilith said. ‘A conjuring spell’… I was beyond skeptical about Lilith’s magic abilities, but after The Exorcist. Anything concerning the devil creeped me out… We got some chalk and candles and sauntered over to the church parking lot across the street… Lilith drew a pentagram on the pavement, and Oksana decorated the middle of the pentagram with one of her mom’s penis statues.”

I found this part hilarious, I mean, what kid hasn’t tried summoning the devil? Maybe not as extreme as having a conjuring spell and decorating a pentagram with penises but I can somewhat relate. Its interesting stories like these that keep the reader interested. I’ll have to admit, I was reading pretty intensely to find out whether or not the spell worked (which it didn’t). However, this is a very key story because it sets a chain of events that change Mishna’s life for the better.

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The story is filled with irony and an example of this is Mishna’s father’s sudden flow of income. As Mishna spends more time with her preppy friends, she begins to want more in life. Her father (after being divorced for a number of years) beings to date a rich black women named Jackie who has a nerdy son. Mishna loves Jackie because she makes food and takes her skiing. At this point, the entire family is happy and doing well.

While at home, Mishna is told not to go into her dad’s office because he has delicate work in there. However, its Christmas and Mishna see’s Toy’s R Us bags and wants to see what she’s getting for Christmas. To her surprise, this is what she finds.

“I knew I had to be quick, and I past the washer and dryer to the pressboard door of the makeshift office that my dad spent so much time in. As I cracked open the door, I was immediately blinded by bright light. And when my eyes adjusted I saw that the floor of the ‘office’ was a forest of marijuana plants. Thirty or more marijuana plants in perfect rows with grow lights poised over them like it was time for their close-up… So that’s why Dad’s so happy and everything is taken care of, I thought. It wasn’t because Dad had gotten his shit together at all. He’d just gotten better at selling drugs. I thought about a series of items that had been around the house for as long as I could remember. The scale in Dad’s bedroom. The plastic baggies everywhere. The fact that we always had extra electronic equipment lying around that people had brought over… God, I felt so stupid. The anger welled up in my feet and worked its way up to my head, which I thought might pop off. And I started to cry. I stood there crying for a minute.”

Its really heartbreaking to see Mishna cry after she thinks that maybe things had just gotten better. This is another example of a serious and heavy event that adds to the plot and keeps the story interesting.

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Although the majority of the book is about Mishna and her unfortunate yet funny life, parts of it do deal with the fact that she’s poor. Mishna is given a scholarship to a “rich” school where all the students go away to London, Paris and Whistler during their vacations and complain how boring it is. They seem spoiled and complain about nothing (although we find out they do have problems later on) such as food. Being on a scholarship, Mishna gets a different coloured ticket at lunch which she feels badly about. She also feels pressured to conform to “rich people” ideas. These next two paragraphs are about her wanting to eat the food but also wanting to fit in.

“When it was my turn, she would file through the perfect aqua-coloured tickets until she got to my ghetto peach-coloured ticket, while I used my body to hide our transaction from the rest of the kids… My special different-coloured ticket served as a reminder that the city thought I needed some extra parenting… It was such a torn in my side that I would actually skip lunch on days I wasn’t feeling strong enough to answer the question… ‘What’s up with the pink ticket?’ Once, in frustration, I told Catrina Calder it was because I was alleric to raisins, to which she responded, ‘Bummer… raisins are good.”

“Lilth was pushing her spaghetti with meat sauce around her plate like maybe it was poison. She took a few bites of the salad, which she deemed ‘edible’ so that she wouldn’t catch too much flack from the lady that scraped the food off our trays while reminding us about the drought in Ethiopia. While Violet just looked at the spaghetti and meat sauce and let out a long low sigh, Lilith speculated, ‘It’s gotta be horse.’… My turn. ‘I think maybe it’s just really bad beef.’ ‘Beef?’ Lilith said amazed that I was defending the meat… The truth was, I love my lunch and would have eaten two lunches if I could have… Yet, sitting there with my friends, I was agonizing over the fact that I would have to throw away some food no matter how much it killed me.”

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Not only are the events actually funny, its because Mishna’s father doesn’t take them serious. What we might be appalled by, he simply thinks is funny because he’s so used to that kind of behaviour. Mishna’s sister Anora got in “trouble” at school and how does her father punish her? By making her a sandwich.

"What’s going on?’ I asked. ‘What are you doing home?’ ‘Well,’ Dad said, licking the mayo knife, ‘I had to pick Anora up from school. She got in a little trouble today. No big deal.’ ‘How much trouble could she have gotten in?’ I asked. ‘She’s in kindergarten!’ ‘S’true,’ Dad said, handing Anora her sandwich and not giving me information. ‘So what’d she do?’… Dad readjusted his Kangol and said slowly, ‘She got caught smoking. But learned her lesson’… ‘How did Anora get a cigarette?’ I asked. ‘I got some big girls to give it to me.’ She bragged… God she was cool."

I find it humours that when Mishna’s father find out his six year old daughter was caught smoking, he makes her a sandwich (the running gag in the novel is that Mishna is always hungry). Another theme of the novel is the sibling rivalry. Anora is cool and “down” and makes friends easily. Mishna is the smart one who isn’t really accepted by her father. Mishna is always trying to be more like her younger sister.

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The main tool the author uses to draw the reader in is humour. I’m Down does have it’s heavy issues and heartbreaking moments but overall, it is a comical book. The way in which events are described make it easy understand and laugh at. The language that is used also helps to communicate that Wolff is from the “Hood”. As such, her father enjoys games of dominos which he cheats at. This passage is about one of her fathers friends calling him out on his cheating.

“Eldridge stood up and shook his finger, shouting, ‘Oh no, John! No way… Lil’ girl Wolff, you saw that shit! You had to-you’s right there… Even your girl saw it! Shame on you!’. My dad retorted, ‘Eldridge! You trippin!”.

The kind of language and slang make the scene more detailed and makes it easier to feel what it must have been like. This next passage describes what happens when Eldridge asks her if she saw her father cheat. He reminds her that Jesus is watching. It contains a fantastic humourous line.

“He lowered himself so he was looking into my eyes and said, ‘Jesus is watching.’ Dad glared at me across the table-he might as well have been sitting there actually opening a can of whoop-ass. It was Jesus or a can of whoop-ass… ‘I didn’t see anything’ I said. ‘See,’ my dad said to Eldridge. ‘You got nothing.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘Mishna, why don’t you come up here, play this round.’ ‘Play dominos with you guys?’ I asked. ‘Well, you know how,’ he said, and pulled up a chair next to him, which was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me.”

The last part plays into the theme of her trying to please and be accepted by her dad. She wants to be “down” which is what the book is about.

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Although the following paragraph may seem awful and cruel, its also funny because you can imagine Wolff’s innocence. The reason it works is because she’s good about her mistakes and takes them lightly and as learning experiences.

In the pages leading up to this passage, her father told her to go play with the neighbourhood kids while he finished his game of dominos. Mishna see’s a group of kids and asks if she can play with them. The leader of the group, “Nay-Nay” says that their playing with Barbie’s. Mishna doesn’t know what a Barbie is but runs to her house and grabs her favourite doll, Tommy the turtle.

“The neighbourhood kids were all standing in front of Latifa’s house fully into some sort of Barbie orgy. Hot, wild, Barbie-on-Barbie action, complete with sound effects like, ‘uh, uh, uh.’ And besides discovering lesbianism, I found that what I was holding could not have been further from a Barbie. ‘What’s that, whitey?’ Nay-Nay asked, point to my doll.
‘Tommy,’ I said. ‘He’s a turtle.’
‘You thought you could bring your broke-ass turtle down here to play Barbies?’
I shrugged.
And with that, Nay-Nay began cackling in a way that quickly caught on with the rest of the group. I just stood on the corner holding Tommy the Turtle as five black girls holding plastic white women laughed at my stupidity. I was desperate and argued, ‘Mine’s a Barbie doll, too… Its just a different kind of Barbie!’
To which Latifa, a girl a year older than me, exclaimed, ‘That ain’t no Barbie doll! That’s something out of the Good-will goodie box!’”

From an early age, Mishna learns that she has to stay on her feet and that other kids will take a shot if they get a chance. This idea is repeated throughout the book with many events and problems happening because she talked without thinking. This passage also makes reference to her family’s poverty which is paralleled in later chapters.

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I’m Down by Mishna Wolff is a comical memoir of white girl living in an all black neighbourhood. Humor is a major tool used by Wolff to keep the reader interested as well as interesting storyline.

“I AM WHITE. My parents, both white. My sister had the same mother and father as me-all of us completely white… However, my dad, John Wolff, or as the guys in the neighbourhood called him, ‘Wolfy’, truly believed he was a black man. He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esqe sweater, gold chains, and a Kangol,-telling jokes like Redd Foxx, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson. He walked like a black man, and he played sports like a black man. You couldn’t tell my father he was white. Believe me, I tried. It wasn’t an identity crisis; it’s who he was. He was from ‘the neighbourhood’-our neighbourhood.

There is a certain amount of tension that’s created throughout the novel, just because of the Wolff’s situation of being the only whites in an all black neighbourhood. It makes for a good story because its usually the opposite, one token black family in an all white neighbourhood. Normally, it would be a heavy issue but Wolff manages to make it funny and humourous.

“That was before school busing programs, when middle-class white people started moving out of the cities and into the suburbs, because, ‘you know’. My grandparents were too cheap to be racist. You don’t sell when the market is down. And as the neighbourhood got blacker-so did my dad. He was in high school when he started to help the Black Panthers with the breakfast program. He played sports and he made his friends. They were the brothers and he was cool.”