“I just feel so fat and disgusting.”
“You’re not fat,” she reassured me. “You’re perfect. Don’t worry.”
I tried to listen to her, but it was hard. I felt nervous when Vinnie and I got home early that night. The four of us been at a club, and Krisztina and Steve had insisted on staying, clearly part of the plan to leave Vinnie and me alone.
Sex was okay. Not good. Not awful. I was too uptight about my body and too ashamed about what had happened with my father to really enjoy it. But at least I had gotten it over with. I went out with Vinnie for a few more weeks and then decided to move on. After all, I was almost sixteen and no longer a virgin.
Besides plain luck, I figure there were two reasons I survived my adolescence. One, I hated drugs. Two, I was too ashamed to have much sex—at least compared to some of my friends. I have my childhood to thank for both. I had seen too many stoned and fucked-up adults to ever view drugs as anything but stupid. And the kids I hung out with were too poor to buy anything but some grass and maybe a little speed. I smoked pot once or twice but hated it. I got nothing but more paranoid than I already felt, and I walked home with my heart pounding. I spent the next two hours holed up in bed waiting for the experience to end. I still remembered seeing my mom slip under the New Jersey dinner table after too much hash, panicked as she cried, “I’m disappearing!” I figured I had inherited her tolerance for drugs rather than my father’s. His beloved cocaine, the stuff I had mistaken for confectioner’s sugar, had made me think I was going to explode. I wondered how my father could ingest so much of it without feeling as if he were going to rip his own head off. But this was the 1980s, when coke was the King of New York. My father suffered a heart attack when he was thirty-nine, a tremendous scare for him considering that his father, Robert, had died from heart failure when he was in his fifties. One of the doctors in the ER suggested that my dad might cut down on the coke if he didn’t wish to die the next time. He followed the doctor’s advice—for a week or two. If I had wanted to do coke, I could easily have pilfered it from his stash. I just wasn’t interested.
There were always rich kids doing lines in the bathrooms of the more trendy clubs, and once I almost lost my life to a coked-out chick with purple hair and a nose ring because I bumped into her in the ladies’ room and spilled her store. As I fled, a transvestite in high heels and a red wig, high as a kite, stopped me. “Now which bathroom do you think I should use?” Then he—or she—collapsed onto the filthy floor in hysterics. Most of the kids I knew stuck to cigarettes and drinking. I drank too, sometimes too much, but I drank more out of a feeling that I should than because I liked the sensation. As with drugs, I had too many bad associations with drunks to ever want to be one myself. What did I want to be? I had no idea. All I knew was that I was getting tired of clubs and cutting school but didn’t really know how to get back on track. In the fall of 1980, I wrote this in my diary, already world-weary at fifteen:
The first days of clubbing were good, everything was so new, it was all so exciting. Now going out, dressing punk, seeing bands, even cutting school, is more an obligation in a weird way. Sometimes I want it all to go away. I mean sometimes I want to never go to a club again, do well in school like I used to, dress totally normal, even dress kind of pretty.
I had come to identify myself with a certain life, and I was reluctant to change. Besides, my father would take credit for me straightening out. It would be like going back to him. It was as though I’d been saying to him, “You messed me up, and now I am going to mess up my own life to prove it!” If I got my act together, wouldn’t that be like admitting that everything was okay when I knew it really wasn’t? I had changed schools again, this time to a small liberal private school in Brooklyn Heights, and I began going to class more often. Krisztina’s brother had gone there, and when she and I actually managed to graduate the ninth grade at our public school, we were offered places at St. Ann’s. The fact that we managed to graduate shocked everyone, especially the principal, who told my mother in a conference that he was sure Krisztina and I were, and I quote, “dope addicts and no doubt shacking up with college boys,” neither of which was technically true. The staff at St. Ann’s was less fazed by our appearances. There were even a few other kids who looked like us, among them the Beastie Boys, who were already performing. I knew how much the tuition was; my father berated me constantly about the bills. I also knew my mother (and Olga) had gone to considerable effort buttering up the principal to get us in. I spent a lot of time hanging around bars in Brooklyn playing pool instead of going to class. But because I was not completely, as Dad called me, “an overprivileged Manhattan teenage bitch,” I made deals with myself. I never cut English or History and managed to get As on book reports and history tests. I could only cut French twice a month, science once, and math three times. I kept track of my eating habits just as rigorously, counting calories and how many times I vomited. And I discovered, simply by actually going to class more often, that St. Ann’s had some cool kids.
Just as I had begun to emerge from my most reckless period, Dad seemed to be entering one of his, marked by the end of his tenure at the Lampoon. He and Sean Kelly left in 1978, disgusted with the effect of Animal House on the magazine. My father deplored both the movie and the gross-out jokes that had started to characterize the Lampoon. My dad was essentially ousted, and he took the rejection—of himself and his particular brand of humor—hard. The Lampoon had been more than a job; it had been, creatively and socially, his entire existence. My father is an intense man. To be satisfied, he must be passionately involved in something. When he was young, he had the Catholic Church and his quest to become a monk. That gave way to the world of satire, and I think he viewed the early Lampoon and its (almost exclusively male) members as a band of brothers fighting against social and political conservatism. Whatever terrible damage he did—to my sister, my mother, or me—was, as he has claimed, excusable in the face of his “precious mission to save the world through laughter.” His weapon was the pen, and in his mind, it was always mightier than the sword. Now, he saw P. J. O’Rourke and the remade Lampoon as instruments of Satan, bent on destroying what he had helped create.
My father always thought in terms of good and evil, black and white. Even during his self-imposed exile from the Catholic Church, he viewed the world that way: holy fathers (from the order of Saint Satire) versus devils (P. J. and fart jokes). Most of the brothers had already abandoned the Lampoon. When Henry Beard sold his founder’s share, my dad was devastated by the ingratitude of Henry’s exit line: “I have not felt this happy since the day I got out of the army.” Doug Kenny walked off a cliff in Hawaii a few years after leaving. It was either a suicide or drug-induced fall. Michael O’Donoghue continued to score big with Saturday Night Live. And then there was my father, left alone with his satirical mission and his contempt for television, the medium that made the fortunes of many of his contemporaries. Stuck between drugs, affairs, and a few successful freelance projects, Dad thought about going back to the church. In 1981, he wrote a careful but desperate letter to his former spiritual mentor, Father Joe Warrilow, asking Joe to “get his faith back for him.” I don’t know if he ever sent it, but it wasn’t enough to get him to Mass on Sundays.
Depression made my dad angry and temperamental, and it was then that I feared him most. But what did I fear exactly? Certainly not that he might hit me. My father hit me only once. I was eight, and it was a slap on the face. It shocked me more than it hurt. And he felt very remorseful, so much so that he brought me home a present the next day.
It seemed as if he felt more remorse over that slap than over the sexual incidents. But I’d still wonder, when he grew angry, whether he might try something sexual again. How could I not? When my father was livid, it seemed as if he took up the entire loft. And not just with his screaming. He became a veritable arsenal of weaponry. There seemed to be a rage that emanated from his body, like a glow of radiation that, if you got too close, might
kill you. He was like a grenade ready to explode, his face red, his huge, blue eyes boring holes in his target. His words became bullets that flew from a sniper’s rifle, chosen carefully and aimed to kill.
The simple truth was that Dad was always smarter than me—smarter than anyone I knew. That meant he could fight, using words anyway, with great precision and effect. Maybe he would employ some well-chosen phrase about the way I looked. Or he might mock my accent (American, not English, as his remained). Maybe he would ridicule my friends or confirm the fears I already had about myself—that I wasn’t much good at anything but being a lazy bitch and would amount to nothing. And he was relentless, a pit bull that would lock its teeth on your throat until you simply stopped struggling. The only way to end a fight with my dad was to concede, absolutely and unconditionally.
That meant that Dad was never wrong, not even remotely. If you chose not to concede, he had two ways of ending a fight: He’d either storm from the house, or, if the fight were by phone, hang up. Countless times he’d say, “Just go away and think about it, Jessie. Go look at your navel and think about exactly what you have done to me!” And then a slam—either of the stairwell door or the phone. Usually, our fights dissolved into me going silent, and my dad going ballistic. An icy teenage stare was often my only (futile) defense against his verbal artillery.
Why did I care? Hadn’t the damage he’d done been enough to make me never love or trust him again? I never saw it that way. Yes, I was trying to create an identity separate from his, trying to escape his suffocating influence and dominating opinions. But I still wanted him to love me. I needed him to love me. I was even hesitant to be angry with him, as I wrote in my diary:
I am sorry, I mean I really don’t want to feel this way, but Daddy is really starting to get short with me—temper-wise. Maybe I deserve it, but there are times when I really think I don’t. He’s such an ego-maniac. Total hot shit. I love Daddy and all, but sometimes he is very hard for me to stand. He’s so self-centered. If anyone but him is in a crummy mood, it is always unjustified. Well, might as well turn the other cheek. I can never win a fight with him.
Not long after I wrote this, the fights would stop, and Daddy would be gone.
PART III
JUNE 2004
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, I DID JUST AS RUDY SUGGESTED: I wrote everything down—everything that came to mind as I read Father Joe. I told Kurt what I was doing. He agreed with Rudy. “Just get it all out on paper first,” he said. Julia and Charlotte weren’t happy. Their mom had locked herself in the office—their playroom!—to write or have intense, muffled phone conversations with friends. Charlotte didn’t understand what was going on. But I overheard Julia say to Kurt, “Why is Mommy so upset about a stupid, old book?”
What could he say? I just thought back to that night at Charlotte’s preschool, and how I had resolved right then that they would someday understand exactly why I was so upset.
“As a little girl I worshipped Tony Hendra, my father,” I began.
He was—and still is—brilliant, funny, and charismatic, as demonstrated by his involvement with the National Lampoon and Spy magazines, as well as the cult movie This Is Spinal Tap. If I had not loved him as much as I did, what happened to me might never have happened. And I doubt that I would have kept silent for the past thirty-two years.
But with the recent, celebrated publication of my father’s book, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul. I cannot remain mute. He has made sin and redemption his cause celebre, his raison d’être.
In his book—which a front-page review in the Times’ Book Review anointed as belonging “in the first tier of spiritual memoirs”—my father confesses that, “No father could have been more selfish—treating his family like props, possessions, inconveniences, mostly forgetting them completely in his precious mission to save the world through laughter.”
He writes that he was a “neglectful” and “terrible father,” his self-indictment apparently the result of brutal honesty and self-examination encouraged by his relationship with his spiritual mentor, Father Joe Warrilow of Quarr Abbey in England.
But my father was so much more than terrible and neglectful. He was, in fact, criminal. And after reading his book, I decided I had to write the whole truth.
When I was seven, my mother, father, older sister, and I lived in rural New Jersey. My father worked for the National Lampoon magazine in New York City, living there part of the week. He also drank heavily and abused drugs, two habits he describes in Father Joe. He sometimes went on binges, driving into Manhattan and disappearing for hours or days, once returning home with head bandages after an unexplained pistol whipping landed him in an emergency room.
I grew up with a terrible fear that someday he might never come home. One night, as I was falling asleep in my bunk bed, my older sister fast asleep below me, my father entered my bedroom and told me in a whisper that he was going out for a bit. I asked him not to do that. He said he would come into my bunk and lie with me until I fell asleep.
He squeezed into my bed, and I snuggled into his arms. As I drifted off to sleep, he asked me to take off my underwear….
I had thought for a long time how to tell what came next and finally decided to just write it matter-of-factly. What happened spoke for itself. It was why my father could not mention it in the book. No publisher would have touched it. I read through those paragraphs again and remembered how that night unfolded. After a few minutes, I continued reading:
For years, I never told anyone. Maybe I believed that was what people do when they love each other. Maybe I was afraid that my father would stop loving me. Maybe I believed he really would go to the city and never return. Because, as a child, what happened never made me stop loving him.
In retrospect, what followed wasn’t surprising. For months I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I didn’t want to go to school. There were two other times when I was older—nine or ten—when my father told me to take a shower with him and again put his fingers inside me; both times, he pronounced me ‘too small.’ I kept my silence. As a teenager, I had truancy problems and became bulimic…
The letter continued for ten more paragraphs that traced my efforts to talk to my father and how he deflected each one. Then, this last page:
I appreciate that God’s love transcends all, that sins can and should be forgiven, but somewhere in that message don’t other people exist and isn’t there some accountability? “The details” that Father Joe reportedly did not want to, or did not feel the need to, hear are the nexus where other human souls live and breathe in pain, emotionally mangled by my father.
Father Joe offered unconditional solace to my father, who appeared before him filled with torment. This was a great gift. Unfortunately, it’s not a gift my father passed on. And that is what I find difficult to forgive. To read a book praised by reviewer Andrew Sullivan as having “spare[d] us no detail of his own iniquities as a parent,” when I know Tony Hendra’s writings are far from complete disclosure, seems to me a final act of disregard from a father.
In the last confessional scene, my father writes that he’s afraid his misdeeds somehow resulted in the miscarriage of the unborn son he conceived with my stepmother. He also expresses guilt over my mother’s miscarriage—though he left her months later and has never mentioned any remorse to her.
As I read the passage, it occurred to me that my father, apparently racked with guilt over what he has done to his unborn children, seems not to have come to grips with the sins he committed against his seven-year-old daughter. Or others, for that matter, though those stories are not mine to tell.
At the end of the book, my father walks away from Father Joe a free man, contrite, confessed, and apparently forgiven. But I feel certain that were Father Joe alive today, he would have lectured my father once again on the sin of selfishness. I don’t think Father Joe would have been content just to know that only my father is healed.
It would have been extremely difficult for my father
to have written about his sexual molestation of me. But to write a book about how he’s come to terms with his sins—without having dealt with the victim of what I hope is the most serious he’s ever committed—makes his book a fraud. In my book, my father hasn’t earned the spiritual credits to tackle the subject of redemption. His is a facile book that should not have been written, and including me on the dedication page only made me an unwilling partner to his self-deception.
When I finished looking it over for what must have been the twentieth time, I took a deep breath and e-mailed it to Rudy. He called me a few hours later, crying. When I heard his tearful voice, I felt guilty.
“I’m sorry you had to read all that horrible stuff,” I told him.
“Don’t be silly, Jessica. No father could read this and not cry. The question is what do you want to do with this? I can get it into the right hands. But are you really up for what that will mean for you, for Kurt, for your mom? Are you up for thousands of people knowing this kind of thing about you? I am not saying don’t do it, but if you do, all of you have to be prepared.”
I paused. “Do you think my father might sue me for libel?” There was always the possibility, he said, but he didn’t think my dad would be that stupid. But Rudy was right; this was a decision that was going to affect Kurt, my mom, my sister…all of us. Before I did anything more with what I had written, I needed to make some calls.
First, Kathy. She was at home, in Massachusetts, and I told her the whole story. As with my mother, I had alluded to things in the past. Now, I gave her the details. And like my mother, she asked the question that I couldn’t answer: “How could you be in the same room with him after that?”
I said I didn’t know.
Kathy seemed supportive but hesitant. As far as she was concerned, I should do whatever I thought best. Just leave her out of it.
How to Cook Your Daughter Page 14