Everything Is Wrong with Me (8 page)

This call started with a familiar angle: my dad discussing what was going on with my mom, specifically what she had him doing that week (putting in new cabinets, carrying the treadmill down to the cellar, putting new carpet in the hallway—typical man stuff). Usually, this was introduced with some halfhearted complaint like, “Yeah, your mother’s got me running all over again” and then my dad would go on for a few minutes about how she was pissed at him because he had picked up the wrong kielbasa for my Aunt Maureen’s party that weekend or how he had gotten the wrong kind of eggs from Pathmark for her chocolate chip cake. Oh, the joys of domestic life.
*

Following this formula, my dad said on cue, “Yeah, your mother’s mad at me again.” Knowing the drill, I responded automatically, half listening, “Yeah? What happened this time?”

“Well, you know we’ve been dating on and off for a few years now, right?”

[
long pause
]

What I said: “Of course!”

What I meant: “Of course not! I had no idea! And I can’t believe you’re nonchalantly mentioning this! I think I might be having a stroke! You might as well have told me you were Jack the Ripper! Holy shit! Holy shit!”

(Really, holy shit.)

I don’t know whether my parents were actually dating, postdivorce. I did not bother to seek confirmation from my mom, seeing as that conversation would, if possible, be even more awkward than the one my dad tried to initiate with me. Nor could I observe their relationship on my own; after graduating from college, I traveled for a bit and then moved straight to New York City, therefore restricting my trips back to Philly to the once-every-three-months-to-recover variety. So I approached the whole situation with a “best leave it unsolved” mentality, remaining blissfully and willfully ignorant. At any rate, my mom has since remarried, so the point, to me at least, is moot.

A few years ago, I went to therapy for a brief stint. I did so in part because my always present but often manageable hypochondria was becoming increasingly problematic, but more because I couldn’t sleep. My lack of sleep was beginning to interfere with my life and my job and my penile ambition. I went to my doctor and asked for sleeping pills, but knowing my proclivity for such things, he said that I should talk to someone instead. Desperate to find a solution, I begrudgingly agreed, but only after my threats of setting his car on fire and/or sleeping on his lawn every weekend didn’t move him to write me a prescription for Ambien.

When you start going to therapy, the psychologist or psychiatrist will try to get your gist in the first session. Once introductions and small talk are out of the way, the first question is “What brings you here?” I jumped at this and went into great detail about how I couldn’t sleep, about how when I did fall asleep I’d have crazy dreams, and about how I regularly woke up hours before I had to go to work and would lie there unable to fall back asleep; I’d save the hypochondria for another day. Trying to guess her next question or series of questions, I assured her that I was not depressed, not unhappy, and not a (serious) drug user or (major) alcoholic. I just couldn’t sleep.

Her next question: “Have you experienced any traumatic events in your life? An accident, a death, a divorce?” I didn’t want to tell her about the divorce because I wanted her to delve into the mystery that was Jason Mulgrew, to find a special, complex, and often brilliant mind under all the layers of hair, flesh, and lunch meat. If I told her that my parents had split when I was a kid, it would be her excuse for all my subsequent problems.

And that’s exactly what happened. I revealed that my parents were divorced, and session after session, after I would complain about not being able to sleep, she would ask questions about the divorce, trying to pry deeper when I assured her that my parents’ split fifteen years prior had little to do with my lack of sleep the previous night. I think I could have gone in and said anything and she’d have blamed it on my parents’ divorce.

Week Four

Therapist: “How are you?”

Me: “Okay, I guess. Oh, but last week, I tried to rip my penis off. I almost got it, too, but I gave up because I got tired.”

Therapist: “Hmm…Why don’t you tell me how you felt when you and your mom moved out of your house?”

Week Seven

Therapist: “How are you?”

Me: “Not great. I learned recently that I get aroused when I watch shows like
Cold Case Files
and at funerals. I’m pretty weirded out about it, but part of me loves it.”

Therapist: “Do you think it might have something to do with your parents’ relationship?”

Week Eleven

Therapist: “How are you?”

Me: “I took a handful of pills on Sunday and beat up a traffic cop, two dogs, and a fence. To be fair, she was a really big and very strong traffic cop and she started it. Although I
did
accidentally rob her house and her car. The dogs and fence were just innocent bystanders.”

Therapist: “What was your mom’s biggest problem with your dad?”

Week Sixteen

Therapist: “How are you?”

Me: “I burned down some churches and threw a hooker off a bridge. Then I got all coked up and ate most of a couch. Also, I’m not coming here anymore.”

Therapist: “Do you think your relationships with women have been affected by your parents’ relationship troubles? And please keep coming. I’m putting a library in my house and I’m making a killing off you. It’s cedar.”

I’m generally a fatalistic person, I think in large part because of this experience. Everything happens for a reason, my parents’ divorce being the prime example. The ends justify the means, and the end in this story is pretty good. Now older and (supposedly) wiser, I have a very simple and stripped-down view of my parents’ relationship and divorce. It was bad, they split, it slowly got better, and now everything is fine. They are friends and both remain a major part of my life and my brother’s and sister’s lives. Case closed.

It would be at this point that my therapist would ask why I use such simple clichés and sparse language to describe a complex series of events and emotions. “Don’t you owe it to yourself,” she’d probably say, “to explore these feelings rather than dismiss them with something as trite as ‘Everything happens for a reason’? A divorce is a traumatic experience for a child and yet you seem to be brushing it aside without a second thought. Why do you think that is? And anyway, aren’t you writing a memoir? Don’t you think this is something important to dig into for the book? Or have you reached your required word count and are just looking to wrap the whole thing up?” Hearing this, I’d look up at the ceiling, let out a big sigh, and then put my head in my hands for the remaining time left, cursing the science of psychology under my breath. But since I have not, in fact, reached my required word count, I’ll explain myself.

My buddy Will, himself the child of divorced parents, jokes about his parents’ failed relationship, rhetorically asking them, “How could either of you have
ever
thought it would have worked between you two?” I feel the same way about my parents. To me, it’s fundamentally simple. They were (and still are) two very different people incapable of living with each other. While my dad would probably describe himself as “laid-back,” my mom would call him “indifferent.” My mom might think of herself as someone who “takes care of business.” My dad might say she’s a total nag. Opposites may attract, but differences more than likely will ultimately divide.

This may sound too cut-and-dried and it may make me sound closed off, but that’s how I feel. If you were to ask the eight-year-old version of me how he felt about his parents splitting, he would probably feel much differently from how I do now. My life is not defined by my parents’ ill-fated relationship, nor was my childhood defined by it. My life has been
divided
by it, meaning the history of my childhood is split into three parts: before the divorce; during the divorce, when we lived at my grandmother’s house for those two-plus years; and after the divorce. But ultimately, it is something that happened and it was something that was overcome.

My parents got married because they were in love. They got divorced because they couldn’t live with each other, which may have caused them to fall out of love. Now they’re friends. There is no great mystery here. I remember everything. I carry it with me. I don’t obsess about it. I don’t even think about it. And I won’t use it as an excuse for how I turned out, for my behavior, or for any flaws that I might have.

And tonight, I’m headed out to party with my new buddy, Carl. I met Carl at a recent mixer organized by the New York Society of Damaged Individuals and, as it turns out, his parents are divorced, too. He suggested that we hit up a titty bar. I like the cut of his jib.

Chapter Five

Athletics, Sports, and Crap

F
rom an early age, my dad encouraged me to get involved in sports. My dad was an athlete himself—though not an exceptional one—and he realized the importance of athletics and wanted to make sure that sports played a large role in his own firstborn son’s life. My mom supported him on this, mostly because she wanted to get me out of the house, and to make me stop watching cartoons and/or playing video games. But the first sport that my dad would try to teach me about was not outdoors. Instead he and I would head down to the basement, where a blue punching bag hung from one of the beams.

Boxing, my dad reckoned, was the best sport to teach a young boy. Not only would it keep him fit and in shape, it would teach him self-defense. Learning the art of boxing wasn’t so that I could hurt others, however. And it wasn’t really about making me a tough guy. Just as he wasn’t an exceptional athlete, my dad wasn’t really a tough guy—at least compared to the some of the other dads in the neighborhood who’d go out drinking on Saturday nights and get in fistfights with guys they’d known since grade school, only to make up a few hours later. It was very important in the neighborhood (and by extension, in life) to not take shit from anybody. Neighborhood logic went something like: “If you take shit, you aren’t respected. And if you don’t have respect, you don’t have anything.” So you’d better learn how to throw hands.

When I was about five, my dad and I went down to the basement for the first time to face that punching bag. There he would teach me (or at least try to teach me) about the mechanics of pugilism. The goal was that after two years of weekly sessions, I would be a lean, mean fighting machine.

My lessons lasted five weeks.

“The first step is learning how to throw a punch,” my father said in the first week. “Let’s see what you got.” That was my cue to unleash a hail of mania and fury the likes of which that punching bag had never seen. I started punching with abandon, tiny fists flailing in rage, but after a while I got tired of the punching, and would kick, elbow, shoulder, and bite the big blue bag, while my dad stood nearby, smoking a cigarette and shaking his head. He had his work cut out for him.

Over the next few weeks, my dad tried to impart his boxing wisdom to me.
How you move your feet is just as important as how you use your hands. Be sure to properly follow through with your punches—you maximize your energy this way. Never buy cocaine from a man with one testicle. Make sure to twist your fist just slightly as your hand makes contact with his face—this tears the skin on impact. Learn to read your opponent’s face and body language for the first sign of pain or weakness and take advantage of that. The man who invents a toilet for a motorcycle will become very rich, but will die alone. Boxing is 75 percent mental and 25 percent physical; street fighting is 90 percent intimidation and 10 percent ability. Determination trumps all.

But there was just one problem: I didn’t care about boxing. I didn’t see any practical use for it. Whenever I got in fights with my friends, short skirmishes over toys or other stupid stuff, I followed a simple plan: Grab and squeeze until the other guy says “stop” or lay on top of him until he gives up. If I were on the losing end, this tactic would change to “Try not to let him hit you in the face. After he walks away, throw something at him and run into the house.” Why then did I have to learn all this stuff about keeping my feet moving and using a frequent lazy jab to lull an opponent to sleep so that I could throw a thunderous combo? At the age of five, the only “combo” I cared to know about was a tube-shaped cracker filled with cheddar cheese.

So my interest in boxing quickly faded, if it ever existed at all. This was a crushing blow (no pun intended) to my father. He tried to show me the ropes of other sports, but I didn’t take to them. I liked football, but it seemed too complicated, what with all the plays and different positions. I also liked to shoot hoops, but actual basketball games required way too much running. To this day, I still don’t know how to skate, so no hockey. And no one played golf or soccer or any of those rich-people sports in my neighborhood; I don’t even think I knew those sports existed until I went to high school.
*

By the time I was six, and most likely because he figured I was a lost cause, my dad had given up teaching me about sports. Perhaps he realized that in order for me to truly become interested, it would have to happen organically. Or perhaps he was just lazy. Whichever, really.

But fortunately for him, there was one sport that I was drawn to on my own. What started as a passing interest grew first into an obsession and then into a lifelong love affair. After taking in a few games in person and on television, I made a simple decision: baseball was the greatest of all sports. And I wanted in.

Prior to actually playing Little League baseball, I was certain that Little League was simply the necessary first stop on my inevitable trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame. At the age of seven, I already had the rest of my life figured out, and Cooperstown was one of its last stops. After a successful stint in Little League, I’d move on to high school baseball, where I would break no less than six school records and be the first player in school history to start varsity all four years. My incredible baseball prowess would be responsible for my first sexual encounter, which would come during my freshman year after class in the biology lab with two sexually adventurous seniors: April, a redhead who bore a striking resemblance to Tawny Kitaen, and May, a blonde who bore a striking resemblance to any chick from any Poison video (or, I suppose, to one of the guys actually in Poison). They would pull me into the lab and ask, their breath sweet with green Life Savers, “So…what’s your favorite month?” I’d look back at them slyly and say, “June.” They’d laugh, but their laughter would dissolve into a hushed awe as they looked down at my bird, standing straight and proud in my baseball pants, which they would then take and do whatever it was that girls did with guys’ birds (I hadn’t figured that part out yet). Then they would tell the rest of the school what an incredible lover I was, and the remainder of my time in high school would be filled with make-out sessions and masterfully unhooked bras, perfect grades and perfect SATs, and game-winning hits and adoration, adoration, adoration.