CHAPTER 1
Kooks
Itâs hard to pinpoint a precise start date for my weirdness. It is, as most things in life, inextricably linked to my parentsâtheir successes and failures; their choices and fate. In order to share my story, I need to share theirs, at least for context.
My mom was sixteen when she met my dad. She was skinny and tall, a second-generation Italian American girl with angular features and dark hair nearly to her waist. She wore baby-doll dresses over bell-bottom dungarees and was tough, smart, and young-Cher pretty. She was poor, living at the time with her mother, my grandmother, a struggling single mom. My grandfather was an opera singer but mostly a grifter, mostly a cheat. When he left, my grandmother experienced severe bouts of depression that sometimes led her to severe situations involving straitjackets and electric shock treatments and, finally, lots and lots of Catholic God. My mom was the only one around to deal.
When my parents met, my dad was a seventeen-year-old high-school dropout hauling around a set of torment baggage perhaps even heavier than my momâs. He was a runaway and a bit of a thug, hanging on corners at night and during the day, working at a deli in the southwest section of Philly, where they sold cigarettes, which my mother came in and bought. My parents started dating. They went to see Play Misty for Me. Their song was Roberta Flackâs âThe First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.â They escaped into each other and fell deeply in love. A year later I was born. A few months earlier, at their wedding in my grandmotherâs living room, my dad wore the same suit he had worn to take my mom to the prom.
We lived in a rickety row house on a run-down block in a poor part of Philadelphia next to a dive bar called Texâs Tavern. My parents fixed up the house with spider ferns and macramĂ© and a blue shag carpet, and at some point we got a dinged-up white piano, though no one could play. We had a dog named Puppy for a time and an aquarium with a wide-eyed catfish who grew to be bigger than my arm. We had an iguana named Nighta whom we fed bananas until he died one day behind the couch. We had a turntable stored in a cinderblock shelving system my dad built where we played Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Jethro Tull albums on repeat, and a round dining room table that was rarely not strewn with ashtrays and wicker-wrapped Italian wine.
Teenagers are impetuous and passionate. Teenagersâ brains are not fully formed. My parents were no different. My parents and their friends lived a teenage-appropriate life: they drank too many things, they smoked too many things; they had impromptu dance parties and inappropriate jealousies. They made terrible impulsive decisions and wonderful impulsive ones too. Our 1970s life was extremeâextremely happy, extremely sad, and sometimes extremely violent. My parents tried new drugs and new diets and new politics and then, when they grew tired of these things, went on spontaneous road trips with their friends. I went on these road trips too. I was the only kid around.
We shared motel rooms at the beach, we shared cabins in the mountains. Women wore caftans and men brought flutes and bongos, guitars and weed. When we got home, I played in a fort weâd made out of a cardboard refrigerator box. At night, in bed, I pulled the covers over my head and staged my stuffed animals in a pile over them, disguising the lump of my body so no one would know I was there.
On Sundays my parents and I got dressed up and drove deep into South Philadelphia to my great-grandfatherâs house for family dinners. He was an off-the-boat Italian, red horn in the doorway of his row home, red tomatoes growing in buckets in his cement backyard. Downstairs, in the basement, he made fresh linguine, pizza, and barrels of red wine. He sculpted birds out of iron. He played the violin. The house smelled of flour and disinfectant and dried peppers. He spoke broken Italian and broken English with a thick Old World accent. He called me Jen-o-eff and Jen-o-fee. He was an orphan who came to America after World War I. No one really hired Italians back then, they said; heâd never really had a job. My great-grandmother had supported the family as a seamstress, but that was before. Now she sat in a wheelchair in the corner of the room, by the window, overlooking the narrow South Philly street where they lived. She called me âMommyâ; she gave me quarters and folded-up dollar bills. She asked me to pick up thread and crumbs and fuzz she saw but couldnât lift from the ground.
There are stories I remember from these years and stories I donât. They are told today around big tables in the suburbs where my parents and their friends catch up and talk and where I am treated like I am the child of all of them. Some of the stories are mild, and some are cool: I met David Bowie when I was just over a year old. My mom was a Bowie super fan; the song âKooks,â about a baby born to two free-spirited misfits (Bowie and his wife, presumably), was a kind of family anthem. My mom had seen Bowie in concert several times but was desperate to meet him. At a show one night in the city she and I waited outside the back entrance of the stadium for hours. When Bowie finally emerged, he paused at my mom. He stopped and signed her album. He touched my face and said I was cute. Everyone was excited, everyone was delighted.
There are other stories too, like the one where weâre all on a summer road trip in rural New Jersey, driving in separate cars. My mom and I and some friends are in a van, and my dad and his friends are driving in another car, and somehow in the bustle of stopping at a rest stop, unloading, and getting back in the cars, Iâm left behind as everyone drives off. They realized their mistake a few miles up the road, Iâm told, shouting at each other, at high speed, through open windows: âDo you have Jennifer?â âNo, do you?â
When my parents returned, they found me off to the side, sitting under a tree. I had been there less than a half hour, but even now, I imagine it as a full day.* I was four.
Who knows how we become people, how we map our patterns of joy and loss and failure into one walking-around-the-planet human. Who knows whether I understood loneliness for the first time that day or whether I understood it through the hundreds of subtle around-people-but-inside-yourself seconds that happen throughout a life, all lives, seconds the hypersensitive can rarely escape. But I know this: that day at the rest stop is one of my first vivid memories of being alive. I have felt other, like an outsider looking in, since.
Sometime after the rest-stop day, we all started to grow up. My parents, now in their early twenties, buckled down and started becoming more adultâmy sister was born, they now had two kids to feed. My dad, who was always smart and resourceful, became more so, leveraging his position in the stock room at the local grocery store into viable self-employment and beginning to build a business that would eventually get us up and out of poverty and into a comfortable middle-class life. My mother worked tooâin a department store in a posh part of Philly as a makeup counter girl, later as a hairdresser. Once my dad started his business, she took over the accounting, staying up late every night, counting and wrapping stacks of bills and rolling change into neat circular sleeves, tapping away at her bookkeeperâs calculator while sitting cross-legged on our living room floor. I could hear the numbers clicking long into the night.
My dad started every workday at 3:00 a.m. He drove his beat-up Chevy Nova to Philadelphiaâs blocks-long Wholesale Produce Market because that was the time when you got the best stuff. My mother stayed up every night, after nursing and cooking for and feeding and bathing two kids, cleaning and washing and folding and putting away everyoneâs clothes, to pay bills, to balance profits and losses. She couldnât make mistakes; there was too much at stake. She was twenty-two. My parents were high-school dropouts with no education and just a great deal of common sense and tenacity; they created professional lives out of nothing. If there is any secret to my success, it is them. I learned more from watching them work hard than I did in all my (many) years of school.
Friends Donât Let Friends Get Perms
When do we start to understand that weâre different? How do we know weâre weird? For me, it began when I was nine. Weâd moved to the suburbs, to an old farmhouse on an acre of land, some of it wooded. We were city folk in what felt like the country. My sister and I climbed trees and picked flowers from the honeysuckle bushes and ran through neighborsâ yards and tried to make friends and tried to fit in. My brilliant, forever-attention-grabby brother was born, diluting our familyâs parental resources and leaving less acute guidance to go around.
Around the same time, I got bad glasses and a bad perm. Then I got braces. The dorkdom trifecta. My best friend, Clayton (a fellow misfit who would go on to become one of the worldâs most beautiful men, but at the time was a chubby kid with a mullet), and I rode bikes around the neighborhood and called our enemies âblank headsâ like the true toughs we were. I played with Barbies until I was thirteen. I nicknamed myself Rambo and tagged my name all over school property while wearing an oversize denim jacket adorned with suede cowgirl tassels and a pin that proclaimed, menacingly, âI love everybody and youâre next!â
Neither focused enough to be a nerd nor brave enough to be a rebel, I was unpopular at school and had a hard time making friends. I was a mediocre student with a mess of limbs I did not know what to do withâwhen we played dodgeball, I often would get hit so hard I had to be sent to the nurse. Sometimes, either from the stress of PE or the exertion, I just passed out. On my school picture from sixth grade, someone affixed the sticker âTurn out the lights!â
My mother chaperoned my seventh-grade class field trip wearing high-top red Reeboks and tight acid-wash jeans. I overheard a kid on the bus say, âJennâs momâs cool, what happened to Jenn?â It wasnât just my mom. I was born into a family of beautiful Italian Americans with Italian American swag. They strutted around in leather jackets and drove sleek Cadillacs. They were brazen, charismatic, Goodfellas charming; they could talk to anyone in any room. I did not possess this same physical presence or confidence; I didnât really even understand where my body was in space. I was a sensitive, awkward overthinker with zero chill; I never met a chair I could not manage to fall out of, a sidewalk I could not trip upon, a person waving at someone else at whom I would not mistakenly wave back. My Italian American cousins were slick, dark-haired clones of their parentsâtough, loud, self-possessed. I was out of step with my cultural identity, and it showed.
But my foundational weirdness didnât end there. As my parentsâ partying days mellowed, as they grew less interested in intoxication and escape and more into meaning, we became a family of spiritual and emotional contradictions. At our core, we were aggressive working-class Catholic Italians, but we were journeying into a late-1980s New Age. Our house was filled with Marianne Williamson tapes, Shirley Maclaine books, incense, and aura-clearing crystals, but this somehow failed to stop us from regularly gritting our teeth in rage, screeching expletives, or chasing each other around the dining room table with plastic knives. At this time, my parents relied on the principles of reincarnation and positive affirmations the way some families leaned on after-work martinis or kitchen-cabinet Valium. They temporarily masked our problems, but didnât solve anything.
We blamed things on karma, we lit chakra candles, yet my mom would regularly get so angry with customer service reps that sheâd scream into and bang the phone. My dad carried both a bat and a machete in his car âjust in case.â There was a general sense that âgiving them a piece of my mindâ was a good way to resolve conflict, but also that maybe someoneâs motivations came from a past life.
Perhaps as a response to all of this, or more likely, a response to puberty, I developed into an extra-moody, extra-maudlin kid. On summer days, while my father worked and my mother ran errands and everyone else was outside playing and sporting and hanging and being cool, I stayed inside, loosened my braces with a butter knife, and watched soap operas. I can essentially tell you all of the plot points from The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, and As the World Turns from the years 1983 to 1987. At night I watched reruns of Dynasty, Falcon Crest, Dallas, and Knots Landing. I was obsessed with rich people, middle-aged people, and dramatic, cosmopolitan stories of adulthood, different from the one around me.
My favorite films at this time were late-1970s and early-1980s movies you could catch at odd times on the Home Box Office channel, which I taped on VHS. My library included Only When I Laugh (with Marsha Mason and Kristy McNichol, about an alcoholic theater actress and single mom trying to raise her daughter in Manhattan); Kramer vs. Kramer (with Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, a story of divorce set in New York City), and The Four Seasons (with Alan Alda and Mary Tyler Moore; four middle-aged couples go away every season together until one couple divorces because of the manâs midlife crisis). I watched these movies again and again. I cooked boxes of instant Stoufferâs stuffing, ate it out of a pot, and whiled away hours on the couch. I was lazy. And I lived with industrious parents.
Starting at age thirteen, they put me to work.
Happy Holidays, Hon
Every Easter my dadâwho now owned three fruit and vegetable markets around Philadelphia and southern New Jerseyâwould set up a flower stand outside his main store in Philly to attract customers, and because I had the week off for spring break, every Easter he brought me in to work it. On the first morning, heâd show me the inventory: pallets of bright flowers, hundreds of them, which would be moved around the back warehouse throughout the week by men driving forklifts. I liked the smell of the warehouseâpungent and rotting and earthy, like counter tomatoes bought hopefully and then gone bad, culinary hopes taken with them. I liked walking into the deep refrigerator, filled with bananas, peppers, and lettuces, with its heavy door and ribbons-of-plastic entrance, which looked like spaghetti or the long soapy snakes at the car wash. I liked the bustle of the men who worked for my father, their roughness and thick, vowel-ing Philly accents, how they listened to Howard Stern in the morning and classic rock in the afternoon and made dirty jokes all day (at least when they thought I wasnât around). I even liked the warehouse bathroom, filthy in a way that would never come clean, a kind of filth that suggested that this was a different land with different laws, with signs and slang on the walls that I did not understand.
After the big inventory reveal, my dad would explain each plantâs wholesale and retail costs so I would know how much I could lower the prices while bargaining with customers and still turn a profit. If we turned a profit, he would split the revenue with me; if we didnât, he would take the loss. He didnât really care about making money from the flowers (which I understood to be a losing inventory anyway); he just wanted an attractive display and a friendly person outside to bring in foot traffic.
We started on Mondaysâoptimistic with dozens of perky, multihued potted tulips, hyacinths, azaleas, and liliesâand ended Saturday, unless things were really slow and we had a ton left to sell, when I came in for one last push on Easter Sunday morning to capture the after-church crowd. Depending on the heat and quality of that yearâs stock, the flowers usually started to wilt by Wednesday. By Thursday afternoon they were drooping in earnest, and by Saturday morning my stand was mostly an unholy mess, and I was propping limp buds up with Popsicle sticks just to make them appear alive. As my flowers became more obviously listless, some passersby laughed and some appeared concerned. The cantankerous complained. Still I made deals. I made funny signs. I offered buy-two-get-one-free specials. When married men said they could not bring half-dead flowers home to their wives, I suggested that they take the dormant tulips and plant them as a surpriseâthey were bulbs! They were perennials! They would come up next year! Sometimes I was outsmarted by old Italian ladies who would unburden me of a case or two; Iâd agree to anything to get flowers out of our warehouse and more money into our pockets, only realizing when I checked the math that Iâd been totally ripped off. Middle-aged moms would take pity on me, grab a pot of sa...
