How to Cook Your Daughter (15 page)

I watched Krisztina's sexual adventures explode. Once she had started, it seemed she couldn't stop. It wasn't as though she enjoyed it much, either. Sex for Krisztina was like vomiting for me.

Olga caught her sneaking out one night, just as she was disappearing off the balcony with a rope around her waist. Understandably alarmed, Olga locked Krisztina in her room. To retaliate, Krisztina wrote a poster-sized sign and put it up to the window: “MY MOTHER HAS LOCKED ME IN MY ROOM PLEASE HELP!” It caused chaos among the neighbors, who knocked on the apartment door with questioning concern. Upon her release, Krisztina still managed to roam the city, sleeping with this guy or that, even showing up one day with whip marks on her back. She told me they had come from a lunatic on a street corner. I listened to her exploits with outward disapproval and secret envy (though the whipping was hard to embrace). And I worried about her. I went to clubs with her and made my way home alone after she went off with someone new. Once she even brought a guy to the roof of Twenty-five East Fourth Street, something I did myself a year later.

I became more and more determined to catch up with my best friend and “went for it” a few months later. He was a roommate of Krisztina's new and somewhat steady boyfriend, Steve. Steve seemed to be a stable, responsible guy and really loved Krisztina. He worked on Wall Street, standing on the stock exchange floor all day in a suit. After the market closed, he came back to his tiny downtown apartment, put on Doc Martens and torn jeans, and went clubbing. I'm positive Steve never knew her real age. I wasn't remotely in love with
his roommate, Vinnie, but he seemed as good a person as any—and a relatively safe choice—for my first time. His only glamour in my eyes was his Britishness. Vinnie was a nice guy—and not bad looking, in a pallid English way.

I knew I needed to prepare for it. I remembered the conversation I had overheard between my parents regarding the anonymous woman in need of an abortion, and I had accompanied one irresponsible girlfriend no less than three times to an abortion clinic and heard the details of her “procedures.” I knew Krisztina was “taking care” of herself, and I went to the Planned Parenthood Clinic on Third Avenue to get a diaphragm. I also had a conference with Krisztina the night before I expected it to happen.

“Tell me what to do. I feel so nervous. What if I mess up?”

“You won't mess up. You'll know what to do when it happens.”

“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:

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:

Not long after I wrote this, the fights would stop, and Daddy would be gone.