In support of my first book, I made a promise: if your book club read my book and held its meeting in an accessible location in New York City, I, personally, the author himself, me, would attend that meeting and discuss the book with your group.
Some people called me crazy. “What if,” they asked, “you showed up and it was all a ruse, and you were robbed or stabbed or worse?” So be it, I said. An artist must suffer for his art. And anyway, if any shit went down, I can shriek like a banshee. Loud. Very loud.
I had limited experience with book clubs, and did not know what to expect. Though not concerned with my personal safety, I was worried about the level of awkwardness that might come with sitting in a stranger’s home, talking about a book that (at best) only half the people in the room had read. So in order to facilitate conversation, I devised a list of discussion questions, which I’d pass around at the start of the meeting. If nothing else, perhaps it would expose those freeloaders who didn’t read the book and showed up only for the dip.
Though the discussion questions were for the most part successful and inspired some conversation, I learned quickly that there isn’t much book discussion that goes on in book clubs. Sure, for the first fifteen or twenty minutes people might ask me about the book and we’d go over the questions. But once the alcohol kicked in, I’d find myself sitting silently in the corner, plowing through bean dip and drinking wine, listening to book club members (mostly women, with a number of gay men here and there) talk about weird sexual things their significant others tried to pull on them after they came home from a night out drinking.
So, obviously, it was a blast, and a worthwhile experience. I plan to make the same crazy promise for 236 Pounds of Class Vice President. But this time, I present to you the discussion questions in advance. Good luck.
1. What is the tenth word on page 89? No looking, please.
2. What kind of dog was D’Ogee?
3. What combination masturbation technique was not possible, because of too many moving parts?
4. Starting on page 51, I describe Mr. Kearney, the disciplinarian at the Prep, as follows:
If Miss Piggy were a man—a really, really pissed-off man—and one bad motherfucker, she’d be Mr. Kearney. Country strong, with heavily pomaded hair and thick glasses that gave his eyeballs a bulging appearance, Mr. Kearney told us how things were going to go. With his face alternating between the various shades of red and pink you’d find in a Hallmark store in early February, he said we were to adhere to the dress code (blazer, shirt, tie, slacks), we were to be on time, we were to be respectful, and we were to be Christ-like. As he said each of these things, he pounded his cantaloupe-size fist on the lectern, showing off a class ring with a purple stone larger than either of my balls. With his multiple Christ references, he struck me as some sort of goddamn Catholic vengeance warrior; I could see him in a fit of rage suddenly breaking a chair over a student and screaming “May Christ have mercy on your soul!” in Latin.
Pretty good, right?
5. Why is it that I was the firstborn, but my younger brother Dennis was named after my father? Please be brutally honest in your assessment.
6. Creamed chipped beef. Not a question, but I just wanted to remind you guys that it’s terrific.
7. What is the thirteenth word on page 89? Again, no looking.
8. After being introduced to and falling in love with the Beatles, I wrote that my appearance started to change, and I started to look like John Lennon—if he had let himself go and moved into a ______ for four years. Please fill in the blank.
9. What was your favorite song in high school? If you lost your virginity to a song, what song was it? While we’re on the subject, please discuss how you lost your virginity, regardless of whether or not a song was involved. If you could describe your deflowering while wearing this Ronald McDonald wig, I would really, really appreciate it.
10. God, I love wine. You guys look great, by the way.
11. What the fuck was my dad thinking when he got me a motorcycle? I mean, seriously? It was such a blatant and misguided attempt to “man me up” that he might as well have come home and given me a handgun or a tiger for my sixteenth birthday.
12. When was the last time you had a Kahlúa and Cream? They really are quite good.
13. What was the name of the Mouseketeer with whom I was briefly in love?
14. How weird is it going to be the next time I see Alison? She’s, like, a real person, with whom I still keep in touch.
15. But c’mon—when you were in high school, would you have considered dating a guy who wore a cape?
16. And why did I wear a cape in high school, anyway? (Note: There is no real answer to this question. I would just like your opinion/help.)
17. Why was it that I chose vice president over the other student council positions?
18. Do you guys have any Pepto?
This wine is giving me some killer heartburn. Are my teeth purple?
Read on
An Excerpt from Everything Is Wrong With Me
Chapter One: A Break, A Beginning
It was the summer of 1973, a great time to be young, dumb, and in my father’s case, full of Budweiser, Quaaludes, and reheated pizza. That lost generation—born too late to be hippies, too early to be disco freaks—strutted up and down the streets of my parents’ South Philadelphia neighborhood, a grid of row-home–filled streets filled with working-class Irish Catholics and some Polish Catholics, bounded on the south by the Walt Whitman Bridge, the sports stadiums, and the Navy Yard; on the east by the mighty Delaware River; on the north by fancy Society Hill and, farther north, Center City; and on the west by the worst border of all: the Italian neighborhood that, thanks to Rocky, South Philly would become famous for in a few years. Sporting impeccable Afros and now-ridiculous but then-cool hairstyles—the men looking like Rod Stewart or Eric Clapton and the women like “Crazy on You”–era Ann or Nancy Wilson, but without all the trappings of fame and talent and good looks—and in their hip clothes, members of that tween generation joined friends hanging out on the corner, drinking beers, and listening to Bad Company, Derek & the Dominoes, and Mott the Hoople. After getting done with work, there wasn’t much to do aside from getting drunk and listening to music. Which was fine for just about everybody involved.
My dad, Dennis Mulgrew, had just graduated from St. John Neumann High School, on Twenty-sixth and Moore streets. He was tall and lean, slowly beginning to collect tattoos, and was without his trademark mustache that he would wear throughout my lifetime. He wasn’t my dad at the time—he would be “blessed” with his firstborn six years later, one year after marrying my mom—but rather just some guy who liked to drink, chase women, listen to rock ’n’ roll, work on cars, and look good. In short, your typical teenager, fresh out of high school, not quite ready to embark on adulthood, instead occupied with more pressing and immediate matters, all in some capacity relating to narcotics and/or pussy.
He had recently gotten a job on the waterfront in Philadelphia, where he and pretty much every guy he knew worked as a longshoreman,* but on the weekends during the summer my dad would head “down the shore” to North Wildwood, a small island off the Jersey Shore, exit six on the Garden State Parkway, where his entire South Philadelphia neighborhood transplanted itself every year from Memorial Day to Labor Day.* There, in this quaint beach town filled both with large Victorians and kitschy and colorful motels, united by a miles-long boardwalk dotted with fudge and taffy shops, pizza parlors, and of course, all the carnival games and rides, he shared a shore house with a dozen or so other guys from the neighborhood, guys with names like Franny, Billy, Frankie, and Mikey and nicknames like Shits, Tooth, Flip, and Porky. Neighborhood guys, solid guys, genuine guys; guys who had known each other since kindergarten, guys whose fathers had all grown up together, guys whose understanding of the world outside their neighborhood was limited to the names of things they were smoking (Acapulco Gold, black Afghani hash, Hawaiian indica, etc.).
Just hanging out by the fish tank in a three-piece suit, jacket off, about to pour a can of beer into a little glass. You know, normal, everyday stuff.
On this Saturday afternoon in July of ’73, my dad and his friends, being good blue-collar young men of Irish Catholic descent, were taking part in the preferred activity of their fathers and their father’s fathers and their father’s father’s fathers before them: getting messed up and doing stupid shit. This could take various forms, such as:
getting drunk and starting fights (usually with each other)
getting high and stealing cars for joyrides
taking some pills and breaking into friends’ houses to steal household appliances and throw them in the ocean or bay
something involving poop (human or animal)
all of the above
Despite being a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, my dad had made plans to spend that Saturday drinking with some friends from Third and Durfor, a corner hangout back in the city, at Moore’s, a bar on the inlet that sat atop jagged rocks that jutted out into the Atlantic. But he was broke. The night before, he had loaned his buddy Charlie [pronounced CHA-lee] his last twenty dollars, which Charlie had promised to repay first thing Saturday [pronounced SAH-ur-dee] morning. But Charlie never showed up. So instead of going to Moore’s, my father joined his friends in a much cheaper activity: jumping off the pier into the bay. That was the plan, at least. Never mind that they had been drinking (and probably doing other impairment-inducing things) since they had woken up. And never mind that the distance between the pier and the water below was not insignificant. And never mind that no one in their group had ever done this before. None of these facts was deemed a deterrent.
I’m not exactly sure about this, but I think that in the early ’70s a man’s manliness and testicular fortitude were symbolized by the pomposity of his hair. My dad was fortunate in this regard. The Mulgrew genes guaranteed that he and his four brothers sported the biggest and baddest white-boy Afros their side of Girard Avenue, huge auras of kinky hair that extended straight outward and upward, looking not like they had accidentally stuck their fingers in electric outlets and had been shocked, but rather like they intentionally stuck their fingers in sockets because they looked that. fucking. good. So when the group, now gathered on the dock, lingered there—looking over the water below them, tacitly waiting for someone to step forward and offer to make the first jump off the bulkhead into the green-blue deep below—his Afro firmly in place, possibly touching it up while Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” blared on the radio, my dad happily volunteered.
Never much for oceanography (or really any graphy, except perhaps pornography), my dad didn’t realize that as he was preparing to make his jump the waters of the bay were receding with the tide. He was aware of the existence of tides in general (probably), but at the moment he was more concerned with turning up the rock ’n’ roll and “Boy, do Shelly’s tits look great in that bikini” than the moon’s gravitational effect on our oceans. Therefore, it probably didn’t cross his mind, as he was taking off his shirt and pulling one last swill of beer, that the water below might not be very deep, possibly not deep enough to accommodate a diver, possibly not deep enough to accommodate a diver as tall as him. In fact, at five o’clock on that Saturday afternoon, the water was only about four feet deep. My dad is and was then six feet, two inches. Four feet of water, a six-foot-two-inch human being. That math doesn’t exactly work out.
But then again, my father didn’t know much about math, either, except that it was for nerds. Without a second thought, and to much less fanfare than he had hoped (what, no cheers? no hoots?), he stepped onto the bulkhead and dove off the pier into the shallow water below. I like to think that he looked like an angel as he fell,* descending gracefully toward the rich, dark waters of the bay, each ripple glistening in the sunlight on a beautiful summer afternoon. However, I realize it was probably closer to a gangly drunk seventeen-year-old awkwardly falling headfirst off a pier.
And then THUD. A small splash and then THUD.
Inebriated as he was, as he first hit the water my dad somehow had the presence of mind to use his arms and forearms to partially break his fall. Before his head broke the plane of the water and lodged itself into the muck at the bottom of the bay, his arms hit first, lessening the blow on his head and neck. I don’t know if this was a conscious decision on his part or a primal reaction to that horrible overpowering feeling of dread that arises at a moment of crisis when the voice in your head screams “Do something, you asshole!” but either way, it saved him. After that initial splash, his body knifed through the surface of the water and his arms, forearms, and head planted in the bottom of the bay, like a boot stuck in mud; for a brief moment his legs stuck out of the water ramrod straight like a totem pole. Once the force of the impact had subsided and gravity began to take its toll, the muscles in his legs and lower back gave way, and his body crumpled and splashed lamely and limply into the water.
The next thing my dad remembers is standing under the outdoor shower of his shore house, several minutes after the dive, washing the black bay mud out of his ears, his hair, and his clothes. He had no recollection of coming out of the water, climbing the pier to rejoin his friends, words spoken among them, or walking back to his house. But he was no stranger to the occasional blackout and, standing under the shower, everything appeared to be okay: he could see, he could feel his hands and his legs, and he still had his dick and his balls. With this much, life could go on.
Once back in the house, the afternoon wore on and my father kept drinking on into the evening with his buddies, despite a nagging pain in his neck. As the evening progressed, after dinner was served (the usual: several boxes of spaghetti and two jars of Ragú, split nine ways), the pain also grew. This was something new; usually the more narcotics he consumed, the less pain he felt. After all, that was the whole point of drugs and booze, wasn’t it? Not only that, this was a new kind of pain. It wasn’t a throbbing, it wasn’t a burning, it wasn’t a bruise, it wasn’t an acute sensitivity. It was a deep pressure that started in the base of his neck and spread slowly to his head, shoulders, torso, and arms. The more he moved, the more it hurt, so he made a makeshift neck brace out of a sweatshirt, hoping that it would both provide support and restrict the mobility of his neck. But despite his ingenuity and the solid C+ he had received in biology his junior year of high school, his neck brace didn’t alleviate his pain. Worse, despite his drinking, the pain got so bad that eventually he had to retire to his “room” for the night, which was not a room per se but rather a low-traffic area of the upstairs hallway, as all the beds had already been claimed for the night.
When he woke up the next morning, the pain was unbearable. His neck and shoulders had swollen and it was nearly impossible for him to move, talk, or even breathe. Realizing that his home remedy of sweatshirt neck brace and dozen beers hadn’t been the panacea it had been in the past, he reluctantly decided that he needed medical attention. Yet there was a small problem. He couldn’t drive to get this medical attention. Not because he didn’t know how, and not because of the injury, but because his license had been suspended due to a run-in with the law when he was fifteen, two years earlier.* After his father beat him within an inch of his life for that debacle, he knew to stay away from driving. Drinking, drugs, and fighting were fine, but no driving. No sir.
Surveying the passed-out bodies strewn about the house around him in the early morning, with their bearlike snores and their hobolike breath, he knew that no one was going to drive him to the hospital. Calling 911 was out of the question entirely, because, as my dad would tell me over and over again through the years, “911 is for pussies.” After mulling it over for more than six seconds, he “borrowed” his buddy Paulie’s car and was shortly zipping up the Garden State Parkway, heading back to Philadelphia. It’s not like he was joyriding here, he reasoned—this was a good excuse. And besides, it helped take his mind off his neck. Instead of focusing on the pain, he
fretted about whether his father would find out about him driving illegally and punch him in the head. Several times. Hard.
When he finally arrived in Philadelphia, almost two hours after he left North Wildwood, neither his mother nor his father was at home. He called his aunt’s house around the corner, assuming his mother, Anna (the former Ms. Anna Bodalski), would be there. When she picked up the phone he said, “Mom, I think I broke my neck” and explained what happened. My grandmother, arguably the most rational woman ever put on the planet and easily the most intelligent person to share DNA with me, could do nothing but laugh. Not because she didn’t care or was unkind, but a broken neck? It wasn’t possible. She assured him that Dennis, you did not break your neck. If it were broken, you’d know it and you wouldn’t be talking on the phone, let alone sleeping and driving. Being the mother of ten children, she was used to assuaging worries and calming fears, so she promised him that she’d be home shortly.
When she got home a few minutes later and saw her son sitting upright on the couch smoking a cigarette, she, a Polack so logical she almost single-handedly eradicated the Polish joke in America, began to cry. His neck, which had been swollen for hours now, looked like a water balloon ready to burst. It was badly bruised, with a purplish hue that extended from his neck up to his hairline and down over his shoulders. They got in the car in short order and were at St. Agnes Hospital within minutes.
At this point in the telling of the story, my dad is at the height of his glory. This is where he’ll slow it up a bit for dramatic effect. He’ll lean forward in his chair, take a long drag from his cigarette (a Marlboro Red, which he’s been smoking two packs a day of since he was twelve), and tell you how when he and his mother got to St. Agnes, the doctor immediately took X-rays but, upon examining them, ordered another set to be taken. “Because the doctor,” he’ll continue, his Celtic cross glimmering, hanging just above the paunch that protrudes from his getting-ever-tighter white wifebeater T-shirt, “thought that the X-rays were a mistake.” In his professional opinion, no person with such extensive damage to the vertebrae of his neck could be moving around, talking, and functioning like my dad was. Then my father will lean back in his chair, the now-faded tattoos on his forearms and biceps loosening with his recline, and continue on about how the doctors at St. Agnes rushed him to Hahnemann Hospital, at the time the finest in Philly, because of the severity of his injury. When he got to Hahnemann, the doctor there didn’t believe the story about how he had broken his neck, how he had jumped into the shallow bay but kept drinking, then slept, then drove, then came to the hospital. So the doctor asked my grandparents about it. When they confirmed his story, the doctor, shocked, told them that in his twenty years of practice, he’d never heard of anything like it.* Amazing, he said. Then, turning to the anxious parents, “Mr. and Mrs. Mulgrew, it is a miracle that your son is not paralyzed. There is no other reason. It is a miracle.”
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