Everything Is Wrong with Me (3 page)

But then again, my father didn’t know much about math, either, except that it was for nerds. Without a second thought, and to much less fanfare than he had hoped (what, no cheers? no hoots?), he stepped onto the bulkhead and dove off the pier into the shallow water below. I like to think that he looked like an angel as he fell,
*
descending gracefully toward the rich, dark waters of the bay, each ripple glistening in the sunlight on a beautiful summer afternoon. However, I realize it was probably closer to a gangly drunk seventeen-year-old awkwardly falling headfirst off a pier.

And then
THUD
. A small splash and then
THUD
.

Inebriated as he was, as he first hit the water my dad somehow had the presence of mind to use his arms and forearms to partially break his fall. Before his head broke the plane of the water and lodged itself into the muck at the bottom of the bay, his arms hit first, lessening the blow on his head and neck. I don’t know if this was a conscious decision on his part or a primal reaction to that horrible overpowering feeling of dread that arises at a moment of crisis when the voice in your head screams “Do something, you asshole!” but either way, it saved him. After that initial splash, his body knifed through the surface of the water and his arms, forearms, and head planted in the bottom of the bay, like a boot stuck in mud; for a brief moment his legs stuck out of the water ramrod straight like a totem pole. Once the force of the impact had subsided and gravity began to take its toll, the muscles in his legs and lower back gave way, and his body crumpled and splashed lamely and limply into the water.

The next thing my dad remembers is standing under the outdoor shower of his shore house, several minutes after the dive, washing the black bay mud out of his ears, his hair, and his clothes. He had no recollection of coming out of the water, climbing the pier to rejoin his friends, words spoken among them, or walking back to his house. But he was no stranger to the occasional blackout and, standing under the shower, everything appeared to be okay: he could see, he could feel his hands and his legs, and he still had his dick and his balls. With this much, life could go on.

Once back in the house, the afternoon wore on and my father kept drinking on into the evening with his buddies, despite a nagging pain in his neck. As the evening progressed, after dinner was served (the usual: several boxes of spaghetti and two jars of Ragú, split nine ways), the pain also grew. This was something new; usually the more narcotics he consumed, the less pain he felt. After all, that was the whole point of drugs and booze, wasn’t it? Not only that, this was a new kind of pain. It wasn’t a throbbing, it wasn’t a burning, it wasn’t a bruise, it wasn’t an acute sensitivity. It was a deep pressure that started in the base of his neck and spread slowly to his head, shoulders, torso, and arms. The more he moved, the more it hurt, so he made a makeshift neck brace out of a sweatshirt, hoping that it would both provide support and restrict the mobility of his neck. But despite his ingenuity and the solid C+ he had received in biology his junior year of high school, his neck brace didn’t alleviate his pain. Worse, despite his drinking, the pain got so bad that eventually he had to retire to his “room” for the night, which was not a room per se but rather a low-traffic area of the upstairs hallway, as all the beds had already been claimed for the night.

When he woke up the next morning, the pain was unbearable. His neck and shoulders had swollen and it was nearly impossible for him to move, talk, or even breathe. Realizing that his home remedy of sweatshirt neck brace and dozen beers hadn’t been the panacea it had been in the past, he reluctantly decided that he needed medical attention. Yet there was a small problem. He couldn’t drive to get this medical attention. Not because he didn’t know how, and not because of the injury, but because his license had been suspended due to a run-in with the law when he was fifteen, two years earlier.
*
After his father beat him within an inch of his life for that debacle, he knew to stay away from driving. Drinking, drugs, and fighting were fine, but no driving. No sir.

Surveying the passed-out bodies strewn about the house around him in the early morning, with their bearlike snores and their hobolike breath, he knew that no one was going to drive him to the hospital. Calling 911 was out of the question entirely, because, as my dad would tell me over and over again through the years, “911 is for pussies.” After mulling it over for more than six seconds, he “borrowed” his buddy Paulie’s car and was shortly zipping up the Garden State Parkway, heading back to Philadelphia. It’s not like he was joyriding here, he reasoned—this was a good excuse. And besides, it helped take his mind off his neck. Instead of focusing on the pain, he fretted about whether his father would find out about him driving illegally and punch him in the head. Several times. Hard.

When he finally arrived in Philadelphia, almost two hours after he left North Wildwood, neither his mother nor his father was at home. He called his aunt’s house around the corner, assuming his mother, Anna (the former Ms. Anna Bodalski), would be there. When she picked up the phone he said, “Mom, I think I broke my neck” and explained what happened. My grandmother, arguably the most rational woman ever put on the planet and easily the most intelligent person to share DNA with me, could do nothing but laugh. Not because she didn’t care or was unkind, but a broken neck? It wasn’t possible. She assured him that Dennis, you did not break your neck. If it were broken, you’d know it and you wouldn’t be talking on the phone, let alone sleeping and driving. Being the mother of ten children, she was used to assuaging worries and calming fears, so she promised him that she’d be home shortly.

When she got home a few minutes later and saw her son sitting upright on the couch smoking a cigarette, she, a Polack so logical she almost single-handedly eradicated the Polish joke in America, began to cry. His neck, which had been swollen for hours now, looked like a water balloon ready to burst. It was badly bruised, with a purplish hue that extended from his neck up to his hairline and down over his shoulders. They got in the car in short order and were at St. Agnes Hospital within minutes.

At this point in the telling of the story, my dad is at the height of his glory. This is where he’ll slow it up a bit for dramatic effect. He’ll lean forward in his chair, take a long drag from his cigarette (a Marlboro Red, which he’s been smoking two packs a day of since he was twelve), and tell you how when he and his mother got to St. Agnes, the doctor immediately took X-rays but, upon examining them, ordered another set to be taken. “Because the doctor,” he’ll continue, his Celtic cross glimmering, hanging just above the paunch that protrudes from his getting-ever-tighter white wifebeater T-shirt, “thought that the X-rays were a mistake.” In his professional opinion, no person with such extensive damage to the vertebrae of his neck could be moving around, talking, and functioning like my dad was. Then my father will lean back in his chair, the now-faded tattoos on his forearms and biceps loosening with his recline, and continue on about how the doctors at St. Agnes rushed him to Hahnemann Hospital, at the time the finest in Philly, because of the severity of his injury. When he got to Hahnemann, the doctor there didn’t believe the story about how he had broken his neck, how he had jumped into the shallow bay but kept drinking, then slept, then drove, then came to the hospital. So the doctor asked my grandparents about it. When they confirmed his story, the doctor, shocked, told them that in his twenty years of practice, he’d never heard of anything like it.
*
Amazing, he said. Then, turning to the anxious parents, “Mr. and Mrs. Mulgrew, it is a miracle that your son is not paralyzed. There is no other reason. It is a miracle.”

With the story wrapping up, my dad will say, “So that’s how I broke my neck and that’s why I got this scar,” pointing to a six-inch scar that runs from the base of his hairline down to just above the middle of his shoulder blades. If I’m in the room, or my younger brother, Dennis, or my little sister, Megan, is, he’ll point us out and add, “And that’s why you’re gonna be rich some day,” explaining to all those present that in order to “meld” (his word) the bones of his neck together, the doctors used three ounces of platinum wire, which is still in his neck, and which he has made abundantly clear numerous times over the years we can remove and sell to a jeweler upon his death. So I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.

Right about now, any reasonable listener would expect a moral to the story. Perhaps something like “Don’t jump headfirst in shallow water when you’re drunk” or at least “Be sure to measure the bay before you get bombed and dive into it.” But my dad spins it a different way, concluding, “And you know what? To this day, I never got that twenty dollars back from Charlie Edwards. If he hadn’t borrowed that money, or at least given it back to me on time, I would have been down at Moore’s drinking with the guys from Third and Durfor. I wouldn’t have been sitting at home and never would have broke my goddamn neck. And he
still
hasn’t given me that damn money. Christ.”

[
smokes cigarette, watches television
]

“Son of a bitch.”

[
shakes head, smokes cigarette, watches television
]

Stories like this one are the kind of stories I grew up with. Many of them started with “I remember one time when we found this box of horse tranquilizers…” and ended with “And that’s when I learned that it’s good to know Spanish in jail.” Unlike a lot of my people my age, I never heard about my dad’s high school football glory days and his big interception in the Catholic League championship game. I didn’t learn about how my Uncle Joey won the science fair in eighth grade with his project about the moons of Jupiter. My mom never told me about how she and my dad met at the local ice cream parlor and over a root beer float fell madly in love. I didn’t get the stories about how my grandfather worked hard at the mill after the war to support his growing family.

Not the best way to spend a summer, especially with twenty less dollars in your pocket.

Because none of this happened in my family. My dad did play high school football, but he was more interested in booze and petty crimes than the nickel defense. My Uncle Joey never won any science fair, but he did get arrested on Thanksgiving—
twice
(I’m not sure what that has to do with science, but it’s pretty impressive nonetheless). The first time my mom laid eyes on my dad, he had just been stabbed and was bloodied but was too drunk to care or really even notice. And my grandfather, God rest his soul, was officially a small-time grunt running numbers for Philly’s Irish mafia and unofficially one the greatest entrepreneurs in the whole neighborhood.

Growing up, I thought this was all normal. I didn’t know any better (hey—I was just a kid) and my friends’ families, though maybe not quite as colorful as mine, certainly had their fair share of characters and stories. That was just the way it was. It wasn’t until high school that I began to realize that my situation was unique. Because I was a nerd,
*
I got a scholarship to a private high school outside the neighborhood. It drew students from all over the Philadelphia area—students whose parents were pharmacists, lawyers, teachers, and bankers; who lived in houses with lawns and swimming pools; whose families didn’t steal cable and who had never seen their father fistfight another man at a sporting event or on a random Tuesday. Hell, their parents didn’t even say things like “motherfucker” and “prick” and “This shit is
for real
” in front of them. Strange, but true.

But life was never boring because we always had stories. And really, isn’t that what it’s all about in the end—the story? the memory? the ridiculous experience that you lived through, that you rehash to hungry audiences at parties and in bars and in holding cells? Stories that make everyone around you gape in delight, howl in amazement, buy you drinks, and yell for more? I think so, and I’m sure my dad does as well. And I hope you do, too, especially if you just shelled out money for this book. Because otherwise, you’re totally beat for that cash. So let’s just try to make the best of it, okay?

Chapter Two

Love, Second Street-Style

M
y mom, Kathy, feathered hair, dark hair, dark eyes, comes in to wake me up while it’s still dark out. Depending on how old he is, she may wake my younger brother, Dennis, as well, but for me each year is the same, and has been for as long as I can remember.

The bedroom, the room I share with Dennis, him on the bottom bunk and me on the top bunk, is very cold, just like the rest of the house. My mom was always a firm believer in the “just enough” theory of climate control; in summers, the living room was air-conditioned just enough for us to survive without sweating through the furniture, whereas in winter the house was just warm enough that we couldn’t see our breath.
*