Everything Is Wrong with Me (7 page)

And me, I didn’t mind, either. After that introduction to the Irish brand of Catholicism, I’m actually looking forward to my next sacrament. Spending a night in jail doesn’t seem like a bad trade-off for getting drunk and high and watching a girlfight with my dad and Eddie Foley. I just hope that girls fight in Guatemala as much as they do in South Philly.

Chapter Four

Divorce

I
want to go on record and say this right now: my parents got divorced before it was
cool
to get divorced.

Sure, they didn’t beat the curve by much, but they were certainly the first parents that I knew that were getting divorced. Admittedly, my world in 1985–86 was limited, consisting of my friends David and Jimmy the Muppet who sat next to me in Ms. Puglia’s first-grade class and Chris and Anthony [pronounced
ANT-nee
] from up the street. But things seemed okay with their parents. Well, that’s not entirely true—I never met Chris’s dad and I’m not sure if he ever did, either. Once when we were arguing, probably about whether the telephone pole or the tree was a foul ball in our Wiffle ball game, it got a little heated and I said something to the effect of “Well, at least I have a dad!” And Chris, forty pounds of hellfire, hit me harder than I’d ever been hit before or have since. He stormed away as I sat awkwardly on the pavement trying to regain my composure and figure out what the hell had just happened. Of course, six-year-old boys are not typically known for their ability to hold grudges, and we were playing Wiffle ball again in an hour. But I learned an important lesson that day: People can be sensitive about their parental problems. That, and I should probably not argue what was a foul ball and what was a fair ball with Chris anymore.

It seems to me that the divorce rate in America was at its highest not in the mid to late ’80s but in the early to mid ’90’s. Of course, I have absolutely no statistical evidence to back this up. One day I’d love to really dig in and do a sociostatistical study on this, but I don’t know how I’d be able to fit it in among all the projects I’m working on right now, namely playing solitaire on my cell phone and getting high and watching prison shows on MSNBC (and I’m pretty sure
sociostatistical
isn’t a word anyway).

Sometimes, even for two really good-looking people, it just doesn’t work out.

However, I do have a fair amount of empirical evidence to support this claim in the form of my friends. As I grew older, I found that I naturally gravitated toward people with divorced parents. This wasn’t a criterion for choosing friends; indeed, I’m not exactly an easy person to be friends with, so I have to take my friends where and when I can get them. But having divorced parents (or what I like to say when I’m feeling especially melodramatic, “coming from a broken home”) puts you in a kind of fraternity. When you have a shared vulnerability with someone, you can’t help but have a connection with that person. I imagine it’s akin to people who have served time:

Guy One: “So your parents split up?”

Guy Two: “Yup, back in ’91. I was fourteen. Daddy loved the bottle more than Momma.”

Guy One: “Me too—’89. Mom had another man, Dad found out, and that was it.”

Guy Two: “That sucks, brother. You wanna go get a beer and maybe start a fight?”

Guy One: “I like your style.”

[
Guy One and Guy Two high-five
]

Of my friends whose parents split, most seemed to have had parents who got divorced later in their lives. These guys were in junior high, high school, and in some cases college before their parents’ marriages ended. I’m not sure what’s better—to have your parents break up while you’re younger, at such a formative time in the development of your psyche, or later in life, after you’ve heard them fight a million times—but that’s not worth arguing here. (No matter what I tell women when I’m drunk at bars, I’m not a therapist, so I won’t get into that now.) I suppose I just want to give my parents proper credit not only for cutting their losses early—soon after they realized that it definitely wasn’t going to work—but also for starting a trend that would later be copied by many of my friends’ parents.

I tell you this because we all know that nothing is cooler than being the first at something and to stress that as my parents’ marriage was falling apart I didn’t really have any precedent in my life to explain what the hell was happening. All (or rather, most of) my friends seemed to have normal parents. Hell, I had like nine hundred aunts and uncles and none of them seemed to fight with each other or were divorced, so I didn’t know where all the arguing and strife between my parents would lead. I knew what a divorce was and that it meant that your mom and dad would no longer live together, but that wasn’t going to happen to me. That kind of stuff was for
All My Children
and the other soap operas that I watched too often on weekday summer afternoons.

I can’t say that I remember a time in my youth when everything was “good” between my parents. I don’t say this to discount the entire tenure of their relationship, but from the time I started to remember things, they were already not getting along. Sometimes it was little spats that lasted only a short time, followed by a few hours or a night of icy silence. Other times the arguments were longer, louder, more outrageous, ending with one of my parents, usually my dad, walking out and returning long after my brother, Dennis, who was a toddler, and sister, Megan, who was an infant, and I had gone to bed. But again, I didn’t know what the hell was happening. Looking back, I don’t think I was capable of processing exactly what was going on (nor should I have been able to, seeing as, you know, I was a kid and all). So while I would get upset when my parents would fight, I also knew that it’d be over soon and eventually everything would be normal again.

That worked for a while, but I was about six years old when the fighting really picked up. At that age, my world consisted of my family, my toys, and school. When one of those three wasn’t working, that was a problem. Typically, everything was great in my house as long as my parents were never in the same room. Even though we lived in a small row home, my parents became very good at avoiding each other, moving with ninja-like quickness through the halls, slipping in and out of rooms without notice. Maybe this wasn’t exactly healthy, but at least it worked and preserved a certain degree of household peace.

But when my mom and dad
had
to be in the same room at the same time, that’s when the trouble started. One such reason for real-live cohabitation was holidays, which for some reason were always hosted by my parents. I’m not sure how it came to be that every year my relatives would descend on our rapidly deteriorating home life to celebrate and spread goodwill. I don’t know if my parents offered to host, perhaps hoping to put up appearances and show that everything was just fine, or if this was some masochistic decision by other relatives:

Aunt: “Who’s going to have Christmas this year?”

Other Aunt: “Let’s let Kathy have it.”

Aunt: “Ooh—good idea. Last year when Dennis spilled his eggnog on the couch, I thought she was going to light him on fire!”

Other Aunt: “I know. I’m bringing the camera this year!”

Or maybe it’s because my mom always made the best pastries. Hopefully, this was the reason.

Things came to a head on Christmas Day in 1987, when I was eight years old. On the plus side, my mom and dad
did
make it through the evening without arguing and throwing deviled eggs at each other in front of the guests. So that was good. It was after our friends and family left that they started fighting. I have no idea about what, but it developed into a big one, a real knock-down, drag-out molly-whopper. Standard procedure during one of the blowouts was for my father’s parents, Grandpop and Grandmom Mugs, who lived just around the corner, to come to the house to try to calm things down. My mother’s mother, Grandmom Brennan, who lived a few blocks away, would also show up. This wasn’t an attempt to rally the troops, as if my mom and dad had each tried to bring their allies to the battlefront. To my knowledge, my grandparents were there to a) act as referees/counselors in the argument and b) try to do some damage control with my brother, sister, and me.

I often retreated to the porch outside the house during these big fights. Not only was I upset, I was trying to distance myself from the situation, as far away as possible. For someone like me, who didn’t have the guts to pack up my stuff in a red bandana, attach it to a stick, and run away like the kids in the movies did, this meant going to sit on the porch. There was another reason I hid out to the porch: I was
embarrassed
by the whole situation. There were my mom and dad, yelling at each other in front of my grandparents like goddamn unmedicated mental patients—on
Christmas
, no less—and the whole thing made me at once sad and ashamed. I just wanted a normal holiday: some gifts, some eggnog, and a shitload of ham. Again, like the movies and TV.

Grandmom Brennan came out to the porch and told me to pack some things because we were going to stay with her tonight (she had already gathered things for my little brother and baby sister). Doing as I was told, I went into the house, trying my best to ignore the yelling, bouncing around the living room collecting my new toys like a pinball among the raucous fighting. Grandmom got my brother and sister together, and we packed into her hatchback, a tiny black Geo Metro, to head up to her house. As the car pulled away, I remember looking out the window of the hatchback at the blinking blue and white Christmas lights on our house and thinking they looked pretty retarded. My mom had gotten them a few weeks before at Kmart because, as she explained, they were nice and “different” (translation: they were on sale). I don’t think she realized that blue and white were not Christmas colors and our decorations made us look like the only Jewish family on the block.

I’d fall asleep that Christmas night with my brother and sister on the top story of Grandmom’s house, a big old three-story row home that scared the hell out of me with its creaks and groans and that was across from an equally scary park the size of one square city block. Sometime during the night, I pretended to be asleep when my mom came into the room and lay down to bed. The four of us—me, my mom, Dennis, and Megan—would live there on the third story of that house for the next two years.

I don’t want to get into some he said/she said debate about who was right and who was wrong in my parents’ relationship. That knowledge is entirely out of my grasp and to speculate on it would be unfair. I don’t understand the complexities of my own relationships, so I’m in no position to analyze my parents’. Of course, most of my “relationships” consist of a few beers, a forgotten name, and a drunken make-out session in a bar parking lot or nearby alley, but you understand what I’m getting at.

Nor do I feel the need to provide all sorts of maudlin details about those years when my family and I lived with my grandmother, away from my father. Of course it was difficult, and I didn’t see much of my father in that time, nor did I see much of his side of the family. Two years passed in my grandmom’s house until the divorce was finalized, at which point my mom, brother, sister, and I moved back into our old house and my dad moved out. There was some residual bitterness between my parents, but slowly, over time, things started to get better. My siblings and I got used to our parents living apart, and even came to benefit from it. It was a pretty easy choice for me. When my parents lived together, the house was unstable; when they were apart, it was quiet. Routine replaced drama and we were able to move forward as a family, albeit a “broken” one. Their separation, at least in this regard, was not all bad after all.

And this separation allowed my parents to (slowly) warm to each other. Eventually, the fights between my mother and father dissipated. My father started hanging around more. By the time of my eighth-grade graduation, he was a familiar face not just in my life, but in our house. Soon he was coming over for dinner. Then he was just coming over after work. By the time I graduated from high school, we seemed almost like a normal, two-parent family, except that my dad didn’t live in the house. As I prepared to leave for college, our household was as stable as it had ever been. In a matter of a few years, there had been an almost complete turnaround.

During my senior year of college, I got a call from my dad. My dad and I have always gotten along as well as two very-different-but-still-closely-related people can, but we’re not exactly phone people. Once we run through the weather, the family, and Philadelphia sports, there’s not much left to talk about. When I studied in London for a semester during my junior year of college, I spoke to my dad only once, probably because he didn’t realize that they had phones in England until a few weeks before I returned to the States. Either way, we were both totally okay with that frequency of conversation.