Everything Is Wrong with Me (2 page)

Don’t judge—my brother, Dennis, and I were star students, so we could enjoy a cold one every once in a while. My cousin Lindsay, however…let’s just say that she had her battles with the bottle.

Back in my apartment in New York City, the time for the book still had not yet come. Looking around the apartment, at my clean bedroom and my living room with the theater seating, I realized that my physical environs had been readied. And though I was very tan and healthy-looking in my complexion, I had been feeding on a steady diet of steak and expensive to semi-expensive alcohol since I had received my advance for this memoir. My body now softer than ever before, I followed the old axiom “Sound body, sound mind” and joined a gym. After all, now that I was writing full-time, free to make my own hours and no longer a nine-to-five slave to The Man, I figured I could spare an hour a day to get in shape. Exercising my body would help me exercise my mind, and when I accepted the Pulitzer Prize for this book in a few years, I’d thank my parents, my girlfriend Carmen Electra, and my trainer, Mercurio. Then Carmen and I would go have sex in the shower, and I would actually take off my shirt, no longer ashamed of my pudgy torso or growing quickly tired from both standing
and
thrusting at the same time. It would be wonderful.

But sadly, the gym did not last. I found the place to be too suffocating. Working out only made me tired and sweaty, and being around all those in-shape people hurt my self-esteem. And the last thing I needed when I was writing the story of my early life was low self-esteem (or rather,
lower
self-esteem). With nowhere else to turn, I looked outside myself for strength.

In 1989, at the age of ten, I went through a brief lesbian phase. Brief, but
intense.

During this book-writing ordeal (really, there is no other word), I relied heavily on my friends. They helped me through my writer’s block by taking me out, spending time with me, joining me for drinks, and allowing me to pay for all of it with my large and glorious book advance. I’d also pay for any people that came with my friends, especially if said people had nice boobies and/or daddy issues. This cost me thousands of dollars, but it was worth it. I felt good, happy. More important, I was on the way to changing literary history forever. Eventually.

Every week I’d get a call from my editor, who was always “just checking in.” The calls followed a rote formula that went something like:

Editor: “Hey Jason. I’m just calling to check in. How’s it going?”

Me: “Good, but I’m pretty tired. I was up until like five
A.M.
last night learning how to play the first Clapton solo from “Crossroads”—you know, the live version from
Wheels of Fire
. I think I have it down pretty good and am going to start on the second one, which is a little harder and longer than the first. Then this afternoon I went to brunch with Nicole, Annie, and Ben for like six hours, so after all the banana French toast and the vodka tonics, I’m pretty wiped out. But in two hours I’m going to pregame at Jeremy’s place before we see Joseph Arthur tonight, so I’m thinking of taking a quick nap.”

Editor: “Um, right. And how is the book coming?”

Jason: “Oh—that’s coming along well. Really well, even. How’s the book coming on your end?”

Editor: “Well, we’re just sort of waiting for a manuscript from you and then we’ll move from there. So…”

Jason: “Totally bro, I understand. I’ll have something for you soon.”

Editor: “Great. I’ll give you a ring next week then.”

Jason: “Perfect. Oh, one more thing—do you have a pot connection? I think my guy’s in jail or dead or something because I can’t get a hold of him.”

Editor: [
silence
]

[This exchange more or less repeated itself every week for over three months. If I can give any advice to first-time writers, it’s to be prepared to deal with your editors. They can be a major pain in the ass and occasionally entirely unreasonable.]

Eventually, I got up the gumption to ask my editor for those two little words that every writer adores:
ex-tension
. I had changed my environment, traveled, and (tried to) change myself physically, and through these trials it had become obvious that stress was the biggest obstacle for me. I figured that once the extension was granted, the stress would go away and the book would come easily. My editor sighed, then was silent for a few minutes, then sighed again, then said he’d think about it and get back to me in a few days. Content with myself and knowing that my request would be granted, I went to Cancun to get fucked up for a week.

When I came back four weeks later, I had several messages on my cell phone from both my editor and my agent. Since my editor sounded pretty upset about me “disappearing,” as he called it, I decided instead to call back my agent, who sounded only slightly less upset than my editor did. Apparently, the publisher was pretty pissed off that I left the country and this was in bad faith and I was defaulting on my contract and yada yada yada blah blah blah and my request for an extension was denied. The publisher came back with another two words that were much less pretty than the two I suggested:
law-suit
. So I decided to get writing.

What you hold in your hands right now is the result of sixteen days of blood, sweat, piss, more sweat, and tears. Sixteen days that were at once the best and worst of my life. Sixteen days that, most important, have passed.

This is my book. I hope you enjoy it, because I worked very hard on it. If not, well, that’s fine, too. I mean, I wrote this thing in two weeks. Jerk.

Chapter One

A Break, a Beginning

I
t was the summer of 1973, a great time to be young, dumb, and in my father’s case, full of Budweiser, Quaaludes, and reheated pizza. That lost generation—born too late to be hippies, too early to be disco freaks—strutted up and down the streets of my parents’ South Philadelphia neighborhood, a grid of row-home-filled streets filled with working-class Irish Catholics and some Polish Catholics, bounded on the south by the Walt Whitman Bridge, the sports stadiums, and the Navy Yard; on the east by the mighty Delaware River; on the north by fancy Society Hill and, farther north, Center City; and on the west by the worst border of all: the Italian neighborhood that, thanks to
Rocky,
South Philly would become famous for in a few years. Sporting impeccable Afros and now-ridiculous but then-cool hair-styles—the men looking like Rod Stewart or Eric Clapton and the women like “Crazy on You”–era Ann or Nancy Wilson, but without all the trappings of fame and talent and good-looks—and in their hip clothes, members of that tween generation joined friends hanging out on the corner, drinking beers, and listening to Bad Company, Derek & the Dominoes, and Mott the Hoople. After getting done with work, there wasn’t much to do aside from getting drunk and listening to music. Which was fine for just about everybody involved.

My dad, Dennis Mulgrew, had just graduated from St. John Neumann High School, on Twenty-sixth and Moore streets. He was tall and lean, slowly beginning to collect tattoos, and was without his trademark mustache that he would wear throughout my lifetime. He wasn’t my dad at the time—he would be “blessed” with his firstborn six years later, one year after marrying my mom—but rather just some guy who liked to drink, chase women, listen to rock ’n’ roll, work on cars, and look good. In short, your typical teenager, fresh out of high school, not quite ready to embark on adulthood, instead occupied with more pressing and immediate matters, all in some capacity relating to narcotics and/or pussy.

He had recently gotten a job on the waterfront in Philadelphia, where he and pretty much every guy he knew worked as a longshoreman,
*
but on the weekends during the summer my dad would head “down the shore” to North Wildwood, a small island off the Jersey Shore, exit six on the Garden State Parkway, where his entire South Philadelphia neighborhood transplanted itself every year from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
*
There, in this quaint beach town filled both with large Victorians and kitschy and colorful motels, united by a miles-long boardwalk dotted with fudge and taffy shops, pizza parlors, and of course, all the carnival games and rides, he shared a shore house with a dozen or so other guys from the neighborhood, guys with names like Franny, Billy, Frankie, and Mikey and nicknames like Shits, Tooth, Flip, and Porky. Neighborhood guys, solid guys, genuine guys; guys who had known each other since kindergarten, guys whose fathers had all grown up together, guys whose understanding of the world outside their neighborhood was limited to the names of things they were smoking (Acapulco Gold, black Afghani hash, Hawaiian indica, etc.).

Just hanging out by the fish tank in a three-piece suit, jacket off, about to pour a can of beer into a little glass. You know, normal, everyday stuff.

On this Saturday afternoon in July of ’73, my dad and his friends, being good blue-collar young men of Irish Catholic descent, were taking part in the preferred activity of their fathers and their father’s fathers and their father’s father’s fathers before them: getting messed up and doing stupid shit. This could take various forms, such as:

• getting drunk and starting fights (usually with each other)
  
• getting high and stealing cars for joyrides
  
• taking some pills and breaking into friends’ houses to steal household appliances and throw them in the ocean or bay
  
• something involving poop (human or animal)
  
• all of the above
  

Despite being a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, my dad had made plans to spend that Saturday drinking with some friends from Third and Durfor, a corner hangout back in the city, at Moore’s, a bar on the inlet that sat atop jagged rocks that jutted out into the Atlantic. But he was broke. The night before, he had loaned his buddy Charlie [pronounced
CHA-lee
] his last twenty dollars, which Charlie had promised to repay first thing Saturday [pronounced
SAH-ur-dee
] morning. But Charlie never showed up. So instead of going to Moore’s, my father joined his friends in a much cheaper activity: jumping off the pier into the bay. That was the plan, at least. Never mind that they had been drinking (and probably doing other impairment-inducing things) since they had woken up. And never mind that the distance between the pier and the water below was not insignificant. And never mind that no one in their group had ever done this before. None of these facts was deemed a deterrent.

I’m not exactly sure about this, but I think that in the early ’70s a man’s manliness and testicular fortitude were symbolized by the pomposity of his hair. My dad was fortunate in this regard. The Mulgrew genes guaranteed that he and his four brothers sported the biggest and baddest white-boy Afros their side of Girard Avenue, huge auras of kinky hair that extended straight outward and upward, looking not like they had accidentally stuck their fingers in electric outlets and had been shocked, but rather like they
intentionally
stuck their fingers in sockets because they looked
that. fucking. good
. So when the group, now gathered on the dock, lingered there—looking over the water below them, tacitly waiting for someone to step forward and offer to make the first jump off the bulkhead into the green-blue deep below—his Afro firmly in place, possibly touching it up while Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” blared on the radio, my dad happily volunteered.

Never much for oceanography (or really any
graphy
, except perhaps pornography), my dad didn’t realize that as he was preparing to make his jump the waters of the bay were receding with the tide. He was aware of the existence of tides in general (probably), but at the moment he was more concerned with turning up the rock ’n’ roll and “Boy, do Shelly’s tits look great in that bikini” than the moon’s gravitational effect on our oceans. Therefore, it probably didn’t cross his mind, as he was taking off his shirt and pulling one last swill of beer, that the water below might not be very deep, possibly not deep enough to accommodate a diver, possibly not deep enough to accommodate a diver as tall as him. In fact, at five o’clock on that Saturday afternoon, the water was only about four feet deep. My dad is and was then six feet, two inches. Four feet of water, a six-foot-two-inch human being. That math doesn’t exactly work out.