5.
KRISZTINA
BY SEPTEMBER 1973, MY MOTHER HAD HAD IT WITH New Jersey—and of being isolated for much of the time with me and Kathy and a few neighbors with whom she had little in common.
For about a year, there had been a plan afloat for my parents to buy into a loft building in the still incredibly cheap SoHo area of New York with other members of the Lampoon staff. That plan had to be modified a bit when the friendship between my father and Michael O’Donoghue fell apart. He told my mother point blank that he might trade a word or two with her if they met by chance, but “I will never speak to your husband again in my life, Judy.” So the plan was revised to include only Henry Beard and Sean Kelly. My mom, perhaps in her desperation to get out of New Jersey, traipsed around SoHo looking at places. But organizing a group of satirists to do anything, let alone buy an entire building, proved fruitless.
By the fall of 1973, my mother had abandoned the plan to buy in the city but not her efforts to escape Glen Gardner. She found a loft on East Fourth Street that she thought we could afford to rent. It was $300 a month for a 2,000-square-foot space that had been used as a glass-cutting factory only two years before. It was narrow and had twelve-foot-high ceilings and windows along the front and side walls. In those early days of loft living, anything with a bathroom and a semblance of a kitchen qualified as inhabitable. This loft had the added luxury of a “bedroom” in the front. It didn’t have a door or anything other than a half wall, but it did have a water bed sunk into the floor. Kathy and I thought the water bed was one of the strangest things we had ever experienced. We went to check out the loft with my parents one day before we moved in and spent the entire time rolling around on it. I couldn’t imagine anyone sleeping on such a thing. I got slightly seasick just lying on it for ten minutes.
I had mixed feelings about moving. On one hand, I knew that my family would definitely fit in better in the city. Everyone had long hair and wore jeans in the East Village; everyone looked like my parents. I would no longer be troubled by the fact that we were the weird Hendras. On the other hand, I loved living in the country and playing outside, and I was much happier at my new school. I didn’t have a lot of friends, but the ones I had I’d grown used to. I was scared of all the things kids fear—changing schools, being the “new girl,” having to make friends. But I didn’t have a choice. The loft had been rented, and we were moving. The only good thing was that we were not going to sell the New Jersey house. We would keep it and use it on weekends and in the summer. My father promised we would hold on to Fifty-five Red Mill Road whatever might happen. It was like the scene in Gone With the Wind when Scarlett O’Hara’s father tells her, in his Irish brogue, never to give up Tara. “Land, Scarlett O’Hara, land!” Never mind that our Tara was a fraction of the size of the O’Hara spread. In the few short years we lived there, it had become our ancestral home.
My dad might have had a few misgivings about the whole family moving to the city. The fact that my mother, my sister, and I were out of the way in the country had made it easy for him to carry on with his extramarital affairs and drug and alcohol binges. Perhaps having a family to come home to would put a damper on all of that. As it turned out, he just carried on. He never felt compelled to offer explanations to any of us for his long absences, whether we lived in New Jersey or waited for him at the dinner table in the loft. If he was two or three hours late—or if he didn’t come home at all—we just accepted it as part of our family life, no questions asked.
One clear problem with moving was our beloved dog, Freckles. At first, my mom and dad thought we would leave him in New Jersey during the week. A neighbor would feed him, at least until the weather got cold. Kathy and I hated the plan. But my parents were convinced that Freckles was a country mutt who would hate life in the city. The day we left, he chased our Scout down the road for as long and as far as he could until his lungs and legs finally gave out. Kathy and I watched from the back of the car, sobbing at the sight of poor Freckles chasing behind us, his tongue hanging out, his ears back, his black-and-white fur rippling in the wind. A few days later, we began getting phone calls from neighbors begging us to come home. Apparently, Freckles had limped back to the house, planted himself on the lawn, and howled long and loud for two days straight. We drove back to get him, and Kathy and I were delighted. Why wouldn’t we be? After all, we weren’t the ones who had to walk him, who had to hold him back as he tried to fight with the Doberman pinschers guarding the gas station on the corner. We weren’t the ones who had to keep him from sniffing the homeless who slept on our street or restrain him from lapping up the vomit left in the gutter by one of the methadone addicts who visited the clinic a few blocks away. Those jobs were left to Mom.
The loft sat on East Fourth Street between Lafayette and the Bowery. When we arrived, it was one of only a few residential buildings in the area; many of the other spaces were still being used as factories or warehouses. Twenty-five East Fourth Street was a tall, gangly, slightly awkward eight-story building. Its front lobby was shabby with peeling paint, cracked dark green tile, and a worn linoleum floor. There were one or two mouse holes, and sometimes in the evening, a little creature would scurry past our feet. Facing the front door was a wide elevator doorway with a tarnished gold bell at the side. The bell served as the way to call the elevator to the first floor. But when it arrived, the real adventure began.
Using the elevator required learning a protocol so sophisticated that only those who lived in the building could truly appreciate it. Visitors never seemed to get the hang of it, and for the most part, were not supposed to “drive.” The elevator was manually operated with a lever that had to be pushed to one side to make it move. It had sliding metal-cage gates, and it wouldn’t budge unless they were shut correctly. Once you figured out how, you still had to master the timing of starting the elevator and letting go of the lever in order to stop at the right floor. The elevator opened directly into any of the eight floors of the building, and there was one large loft space per floor. But if you let go of the lever too late, whoever was getting off had to jump down into their loft. If you let go too early, passengers had to climb up to their door. This was complicated by the fact that if the operator let go of the lever too quickly, the elevator would short the electrical system. The elevator ran on twisted cables that looked ancient, and the contraption would sometimes groan, creak, and sway in the most horrible fashion. Because it required an operator, whoever had the elevator on his floor had to drive it down and pick up the passenger on the ground floor, who would, in turn, return the person who had come down for them to his floor and keep the elevator himself until someone else came in. It was a good way to get to know the neighbors. The old merchant marine who lived with his graphic-designer wife on the fourth floor used to run the elevator in his boxers, suspenders, and slippers. The artist on the seventh floor came down in paint-covered clothes and wild hair; the woman on the sixth floor opened the elevator door with an oven mitt on her hand. Often, guests would want to try running the elevator. The desperate shouts—“Help, help, get us out of this fucking box!”—told us of their failures. I preferred the five flights of the dusty stairwell.
The only walls that divided our loft enclosed the small bathroom and separated the front room that held the water bed. To create a bedroom for Kathy and me, my dad got some six-foot slabs of sheet rock that stood exactly half way to the ceilings. He made big box rooms out of them, forming what he called our “holding pens.” Our mattresses went on the floor, and we didn’t have money to decorate, so Daddy made much of the furniture. Kathy and I liked accompanying him to the lumber store to buy wood for the kitchen counters. He loved to create. Once, he fashioned a table from one side of a huge wooden spool that had been used to coil electrical wire. He “borrowed it,” he told us, from Con Edison by going downstairs late one night and hefting it off the street and into the elevator (which seemed completely overwhelmed by its weight and creaked even more than usual). Then he cut
off one side, sanded it by hand, and stained it, propping it up with metal legs. It became our kitchen and dining room table.
New York proved an adventure. The second floor loft was used as a studio by a masseuse who specialized in Rolfing. At night, she held primal scream therapy and rebirthing sessions. Kathy and I looked at each other in amazement as we listened to the screaming adults: “Help me mommy!” Or: “I don’t want to come out!” It was as though they were just outside our door.
Then there were the huge cockroaches to contend with. Some days it seemed like they were everywhere, crawling out of the bathroom, lying dead in the sugar bowl, whizzing around beneath the bed. Daddy made up stories about how they came out at night in hordes to play loud cockroach music and dance, sing, and party in the sink, feasting on crumbs and spilled juice. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I imagined going into the kitchen to find the big black bugs standing on their hind legs, spinning and dipping, rotating their cockroach bodies in an ecstatic frenzy.
If you walked out the front door of our building, you were sure to come across the locals—stocking-capped sailors with the names of girls tattooed on their arms who sat on the Bowery asking for change. There was a men’s shelter down the street, and many of them slept there at night and hung out on the block during the day, trying to get drunk. I had one favorite: a black guy with wild eyes and a crazy laugh who held a sign that read, “Forget the whales. Save the winos!” My family, which had always seemed so different, was now just a part of this hodge-podge of people who had only one thing in common: They were all New Yorkers.
Having a washing machine of your own was the luxury of luxuries in New York. Most apartment buildings had laundry rooms in the basement but few loft buildings did. The basement of Twenty-five East Fourth Street had cobwebs and some rats but nothing else. So once a week, Kathy and I helped my mom gather all our dirty clothes, stuff them into pillow cases, and cart them off to the Laundromat on Second Avenue. It was the only one in the neighborhood. The couple who ran the place chain-smoked and ate sardine sandwiches with tomatoes and garlic as they ran their fluff-and-fold service. The place reeked. Once, my mother got fed up with sitting around for hours and gave the fluff-and-fold service a try. The clothes came back stinking of salty fish and Marlboros, and with a few new grease stains to boot.
The city screamed. Sirens wailed. Garbage trucks stalked the streets in the early morning, rumbling and making a terrible racket as they crunched up the trash. The Hell’s Angels kept their headquarters a few blocks away, and they often rode up and down our street gunning their motors all night. My father made a habit of leaning out the huge window in the front room to implore them to “Shut the fuck up!” To which they sometimes yelled back that they were going to frigging kill him if he didn’t mind his own goddamn frigging business. Once, one of them even tried lobbing a brick up to our floor. I worried that my father would tumble out the window, that the Hell’s Angels would pounce on him and finish him off. But he reassured me that he could protect himself. He rode his bicycle everywhere and always slung an enormously thick metal chain around his neck to lock the bike up—or fend off attackers and punish the taxis that cut him off. As always, I couldn’t help but be scared that something might happen to Daddy. At breakfast, he might assure me he was coming home early, but by 10:00 P.M. he’d be nowhere in sight. Living in the city made my fears worse. His frequent absences were more apparent, and now I saw firsthand the frightening world into which he would disappear.
“Mommy, when will Daddy be home?” I would ask as she sat reading George Eliot on our makeshift brown sofa. Silence.
“Mommy, where’s Daddy?”
Louder this time. My sister and I were accustomed to having to repeat questions two or three times before we would get a response from my mom. It was as if we needed to call her back from some other place, perhaps nineteenth-century England or her own dark imaginings about where her husband might be.
“I don’t know, Jessie. I’m sure he’ll be home soon.”
Then I would lose her again. Home soon. I began to know what that meant. My mother had no idea where my father was, whom he was with, whether he would even come home that night or just show up again in the next few days.
Still, she went to bed each night seemingly unperturbed. I learned only years later that Mom wasn’t indifferent at all. She just realized what took me years to learn: No one could control my father, and there was simply no point in trying. I, however, couldn’t sleep and stayed up for hours, listening for the creak of the stairwell door (there was no calling the elevator after eleven), the loud plunk of the bicycle chain tossed on the wooden floor, the sound of rummaging in the fridge for seltzer water. And when and if he did come home, I was filled with relief and anxiety. He was safe, yes, but was he drunk or stoned? I didn’t know exactly what those terms meant, but I knew the behavior that went along with them. I knew the glint in my father’s eye when he was stoned, a kind of “fuck you” look. I knew the sniffing and the tiny flecks of white powder around his nose. And if he were drunk, I knew he could be argumentative and then suddenly maudlin. He had told me that what happened between us was because he was “a drunken asshole,” and I was scared that when he was drunk or stoned, it might happen again. But despite everything, I still adored my daddy. Even now, I don’t understand precisely why.
There were times when my father put us all in terrible peril. On Friday nights we often drove out to New Jersey for the weekend. We might wait for him for hours, and I’d pray that the plan to go to New Jersey would be abandoned when he came home drunk or stoned. Driving with him then was terrifying. But even if my mother summoned the courage to suggest we postpone leaving until the morning or that perhaps she should take the wheel, he would always insist that he was “fine to drive” and be pissed that anyone had intimated he couldn’t hold his liquor. Once, when he got us all in the car at around 10:00 or 11:00 P.M., he tore down Sixth Avenue and into the Holland Tunnel, changing lanes, swerving and careening off the guard rails. Kathy and I screamed and sobbed, and even my usually stoic mother was hysterical. In New Jersey, we stopped for gas, and Daddy reversed the car into a lamp post.
If he were sober, however, the rides to New Jersey were great. He told us stories of the “Tunnelkins,” creatures who had a wheel rather than legs and spent their days rolling from place to place, hiding behind the metal doors that line the sides of the tunnel. Of course, there was an evil ruler of the Tunnelkins, who was forever torturing his subjects.
There had always been much after-hours socializing among the Lampoon staff. A lot of it involved drinking together, a component that my father insisted was vital to the creative engine of the magazine. One of the favorite hangouts was the Coral Café, a bar in a hotel across the street from the Lampoon. Kathy and I went there once—very briefly. I remember finding it pretty swank at the time. In truth, it was a complete dive. The conversations that took place there were, in my father’s words, “extreme. Sometimes, the talk was of dead babies. Sometimes it was about Nixon. The level of verbal sparring was such that if you did not hold your end up you were discarded,” he said years later. Being eight at the time, I failed the test. Kathy and I were duly discarded and did not go again. Nor was my mother welcome at these cutthroat sessions. Few women ever were present, except perhaps Anne Beatts, who, as far as I know, was the Lampoon’s only female editor. The Coral Café became a kind of Lampoon boys club where, in the tradition of all good boys clubs, the only women were the ones serving the drinks or getting fucked on the side. The alcohol itself was cheap, and, as my father wrote, “The drinks cost the same as subway fare, so there was no point in going home.” Especially if you had no particular interest in spending the evening with your family.
But my dad is a complicated man. He often felt guilty about the drinking, the drugs, the affairs, the betrayals. One night, I went into the kitchen and found him lurching around the loft. He flung himself down on the sofa and started to sob. I offered to sing him a song
—the only thing I could think of to make him feel better. And so we sat on the sofa, and I sang him all the lullabies I could remember while he sniffed and wiped his eyes and eventually feel asleep. But the guilt didn’t stop him from replaying the same scene the next night. My father’s feelings of regret drove him to try harder to cover up his chemical abuse, and his shame became just another part of his drug and alcohol problems.
That’s why I tried to stop him from going out at all. Despite what had happened in New Jersey, I still felt compelled to keep him safe. When I heard my father opening the stairwell door after everyone had already gone to bed, I flew off my mattress and ran to him. I just couldn’t bear the anxiety of wondering all night where he had gone—and if he were safe.
“Daddy, please don’t go out now, please!” I was almost crying, and I quickly slipped between him and the door.
“I’m just going out to get some cigars, treasure. I’ll be back soon,” he promised. I refused to budge. I had heard the cigar line before.
“Jessie, I promise. I am just going out to get some cigars. I will come right home.” I relented and moved away from the door. What could I do? He went past me down the dim stairwell, and I stood there, listening to his footfalls until they went silent. I shut and locked the door, then tried to stay awake. Finally I abandoned my vigil and, like all the times before, swore never to believe the cigar story again.
The mornings after a binge were the worst. My father was in a horrible mood, and, if he had been doing a lot of coke the night before, the sniffing, snorting, coughing, and spitting were deafening and non-stop. And there was always the morning weigh in, a ritual more usual than the yawn-and-stretch. Daddy would stand naked in the middle of the kitchen on an old postmaster’s scale. I feared the weigh-ins. The results would either produce elation or, more often, a black fit that included screaming, throwing things, and, on occasion, bashing holes in the bathroom wall. At those moments, the thin wafer crackers came out, food logs were kept, and Daddy officially began a diet again. Watching my father’s rage if he gained weight reinforced the sense I already had that being fat was a terrible, terrible thing. Poor Kathy. She had become a target of my father’s because she was chubby. Even at eight, I grew very self-conscious about my body, especially after what had happened with my dad. I instinctively wanted to hide myself, to stay small, to never grow. I felt awkward and clumsy and went into a panic one day when I overheard my mother telling a friend that I had “a swimmer’s build.” To me, that meant I was getting fat. And if I got too heavy, I knew Daddy would despise me.
How to Cook Your Daughter Page 9