Official Book Club Selection (3 page)

Even though I didn’t have a name for this ritual, I knew it was wrong, because I would never throw away the garbage from my private feast in the kitchen wastebasket, or even our garbage can in the alley. I knew a savvy CIA operative like my mother would have nailed me. So I actually gathered the hollow Pringles can and the empty Jiffy boxes, put them in a bag, walked down the alley, lifted the metal lid of the Schumachers’ garbage can, and placed it in there. I owe the Schumachers an apology. If Mrs. Schumacher was any bit as astute as my mom, one of those poor kids probably got grounded for nothing.

Looking back, I know I was “filling the void,” as a psychologist might term it. Part of it was surely the feeling that in a house with five kids, I could have this thing that nobody could take from me. My own secret. When I’d go to somebody’s house, and there’d be a cake made a day or so earlier with only two slices missing, I’d say, “How is that still standing?” At our house, we’d turn into a pack of dogs. We’d be lucky if the plate wasn’t lying in shards on the floor after we were done with it. But I’ve always had a low tolerance for loneliness, too, and binge eating was maybe a result of that loneliness.

The photographer asked me to say “cheese,” but my word was “cake!”

Thankfully, I was a skinny kid, so nobody really noticed these indulgences. I didn’t barf it up, either. The binge eating was definitely symptomatic of my not knowing when to stop, though, an affliction I still suffer from today. Verbally, that is. I wish this was one of those stories that ended on a self-help note, kind of a he’s-just-not-that-into-you tale about cakes. But it’s not. I was and am into them. I’ve dealt with food issues my whole life, and eventually I acquired the tools to deal with them, as you’ll find out later. But I’ll admit it, last November 4—I reveal with no small amount of shame—I asked my friends for one thing for my birthday: my own cake, one that they were not allowed to touch, eat, or look at. That’s right, last November 3, I could barely sleep because I knew the next day I was getting my own cake that said “Happy Birthday, Kathy,” that I could eat with one fork while watching Oprah. I was even tempted to put the empty cake box down the street in Forest Whitaker’s or Drew Carey’s garbage can. By the way, did I mention they’re my neighbors? Snap. I’m famous.

When it came to the dinner table of my childhood, though, or family parties, it was probably more important to be full of knowledge and snappy comebacks than food. The great thing about growing up Griffin was that you had to have all your ducks in a row to keep up with everybody’s rapier wit. All of my family members were smart, and they all read the Chicago Times, the Tribune, and the Daily News. They watched all the television news programs. At dinnertime, they would wipe the floor with you if you didn’t know which alderman was on the take, what was going on in the country, state, city, or neighborhood, or what the leading religious issues were. I don’t recall a single relative from my immediate or extended family—and that’s a lot of people—who wasn’t up on everything. And that includes Hollywood stuff. I have an eighty-five-year-old aunt Florence who can name all the Jonas brothers, plus the release date of their next album. She just likes to keep up with it all. So I may have been into The Brady Bunch like every other kid, but I also wanted to watch John Lennon and Yoko Ono on The Dick Cavett Show, and every minute of the Watergate hearings. It was fear of the dinner table that got me hooked.

In addition to sweet-and-salty binge eating, television dominated my life. I was into total pop culture consumption, but I have to say, when it came to my passion for showbiz, Mom was not only a great enabler, but an eager and willing participant. Back then we weren’t aware of any studies that said kids shouldn’t watch eight hours of television a day. Mom openly talks about the advent of television and how wonderful it was to just stick the kids in front of it. And I was happy to oblige.

I lived and breathed movies and television. Rona Barrett was the big entertainment gossip columnist of the day and we always had her magazines around. Kitty Kelley’s scandal-packed books, too. Mom was the ideal audience for Hollywood dish. To this day, her dream gift for Christmas is some kind of juicy, unauthorized biography, preferably about Princess Di or any of those damn Kennedys. Uncle Maurice had a joke that he hated the Kennedys so much, he wanted to go to Washington, DC, and pee on the Eternal Flame until it went out. Can you believe it? Irish on Irish crime. Oh, Uncle Mo, how you loved the drunk tank.

But I digress. I remember one night at home when Mom and I watched the movie Suddenly Last Summer, that outlandishly dramatic Tennessee Williams adaptation starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. Mom kept a running commentary on the stars’ lives.

“Did you know that Monty Clift had a gorgeous face? And then he was in a car crash, and poor Liz Taylor was in LOVE with him, and kept making sexual advances? But he was one of THOSE men!” My mom really felt like this had happened to one of her friends.

“Really?” I said.

She’d set the scene for you, clearly putting herself in Liz’s shoes. “Can you imagine being as beautiful as Liz Taylor, with that tiny waist, and Monty Clift just turns you away in the bedroom? Can you IMAGINE?”

“Um … no?” (Gays weren’t on my radar yet.)

We loved to watch medical shows together, too—Medical Center with Chad Everett, and Marcus Welby, M.D. with Robert Young—and again, what she’d read would dribble in as we were transfixed by all the on-screen illness and healing. “Did you know that poor Robert Young cannot sleep at night because as big a star as he is, he’s afraid his show is gonna get canceled?”

Me, again, entranced: “Really?”

“That’s right. So just think about that, when we’re watching Marcus Welby next week, and Consuelo comes in with the appointment sheet, that Robert Young didn’t even SLEEP last night.” Then, because she knew where my career interests lay: “That’s how cold show business is. Be careful, Kathleen. Be careful of the biz.”

Mom’s a hypochondriac, too, so the best part was that every week she would get the disease that the medical shows were dramatizing. I’ll never forget, they did an episode on sickle cell anemia, which as far as I know, is almost exclusively an African-American affliction. But Mom was convinced she was the first white person to get it. It’s not like we could just Google it in those days and clear her mind, either. She would just walk around until the next week’s episode, thinking, Aaugh! I got this sickle cell and it’s really wearing me down. I gotta call Lena Horne about this.

Mom thought she had debilitating diseases, but I wasn’t immune to delusional thoughts, either. Yes, I had my television crushes, like every starry-eyed girl. But they weren’t obvious ones. Dark, brooding, and handsome Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, anyone? Mom would make fun of me for that one. “Who the HELL wants to marry that crazy Rod Serling? He looks like a SERIAL KILLER!” But I thought Rod in his leisure suit was the sexiest, most badass thing I’d ever seen. Actually, I was torn between him and David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, that poor, innocent victim of blind justice on the classic chase series The Fugitive. I didn’t really get into trouble as a child, but when I did, it was usually for staying up late because The Fugitive reruns were on at 1 a.m. I would drag my sorry, tardy ass into school the next day because David Janssen had me up way past my bedtime.

Excuse me, but I had priorities. The three things I still live my life by: television, insomnia, and delusions of grandeur.

Mom must have spent a fortune on these three carnations for my eighth-grade graduation.

Let’s just get this stuff out in the open: As a kid, I was ugly, I was freckly, I had short, wiry orange hair, and when I walked down the street, boys in my class would bark. (To this day, when my dogs do it, I turn my head.) And the torture didn’t end when the school year did. One summer, my parents treated my brother Johnny and me to a horseback-riding lesson. The instructor said to Johnny, “Let me get a smaller horse for your little brother.” Ouch. It was a blur after that, because I literally became hysterical and cried at him, “I’m a girl! I’m a girl!” for about twenty minutes straight. That guy really earned his five bucks. It’s why I wear lots of makeup and fake eyelashes today: I know that there’s a horse instructor walking around somewhere who thinks I’m Andy Dick. I’m a girl! I’m a girl! I have my period and everything!

And it wasn’t as if I was going to find comfort and solace at Catholic school for being different from all the other girls. At St. Bernardine’s the nuns never liked me. Especially Sister Mary Bitch-and-a-Half. I think that was her biblical name. She really tortured me. I’m telling you, she was out to get me. It really gave me an education in how to deal with people in authority who have it in for you, something that would occur again years later when I started doing plays and had a director who really hated me. But I can thank those nuns, just like the lyrics of that Christina Aguilera song, for “making me a fighter,” because they knew how to pick on someone. If it wasn’t me, it was Brian Czech, the shy kid who’d spend his time drawing all day. This nun would gun for him just because he was vulnerable. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like organized religion of any kind. They have too much authority. There was no oversight committee. No Barney Frank.

Now, I never saw a kid get physically abused by the nuns and priests, which my siblings claimed to have witnessed, but I do remember something that happened to one boy that really chilled me. He was being rambunctious, and the nun said, “Go get your coat.” He had a winter jacket with a thin fabric hook on the back, and she hung him by that hook in the cloakroom until lunch. And there he was, just hanging by his own jacket, and nobody questioned it. No parents ever came and said, “Did you really hang my kid in the cloakroom?” At that time, it was, “Whatever you say, Sister.”

Never mind a nun coming to a kid’s defense against other kids. It was a dog-eat-dog world at St. Bernardine’s from the get-go. Starting in first grade I had to band with other outcasts to protect myself from the cute, straight-haired mean girls. I may have been a dork with Bozo hair, but those girls were vicious. I remember getting my ass kicked by them one time when I’d said the wrong thing to piss off a couple of the mean girls. I don’t even remember what it was, but when they decided it was payback time, you were done for. This was on the school premises—on the stairs—that I was being roughed up, and I swear a nun nearby did fucking nothing but watch. I mean, they were kicking me in the ribs. I’m not saying I had to go to the hospital, but when I could see an adult—who could have stopped it in a second—wasn’t going to do anything, I had what Oprah would call my “lightbulb” moment: “Oh, I see. Nobody saves you.” Then immediately I started thinking, I have to see them in homeroom tomorrow! It was like learning a tribal mentality. How am I going to survive with Mary O’Hanrahan and those bitches?

I knew I wasn’t physically strong enough to fight back. I couldn’t kill them with kindness, because that doesn’t come naturally to me. I couldn’t kill them, either. Which really felt natural. But I did think I was smarter than them, and was pretty sure I was more clever. So I decided I was going to be openly sarcastic, and make a joke to their faces in class. I did my homework, too. I remembered that once in class, Mary had been chosen to answer what the capital of Romania was and had gotten it wrong.

So the next day when my ass kicking was being savored by Mary and her gang, I said loud enough for all to hear, “Well, Mary, I guess I’ll have to move to a place you’ve never heard of … like Bucharest?”

It was my EF Hutton moment. Remember that old commercial? “When EF Hutton talks, people listen.” There was a beat of silence, and then her friends laughed. The class laughed, too.

(Very important point, by the way. Everyone has to laugh. Otherwise you just get your ass kicked again.)

There was something like a tacit agreement after that. They never made me their friend, but they did something better. They left me alone. And in return, I would occasionally make them laugh, and not necessarily at their expense. But I just thought, If I can keep them laughing, they’ll get off my back. And they did.

Brian Czech, the boy who sketched all the time, who I swear didn’t talk for eight years, became one of my good friends in grade school, and he had his own way of protecting himself. He would draw guitars all day on thick pieces of cardboard, cut them out, and put them on his pens with tape or a rubber band, so they all looked like guitars. And he did it for all the kids in the class. Even the most popular kid would come up to him: “Hey, Brian, would you make me one?” He would just nod, and then produce this incredibly ornate cardboard guitar for the kid to put on his pen.

To this day, if I have a type, it’s quiet guys. Guys like Brian. Turns out, I do enough talking for both of us. Of course, back then I was determined to get Brian Czech to talk to me. I just persisted until I found out our common ground was that we both loved Night Gallery. (Perhaps you remember my crush on Rod Serling?) Brian would come in on Monday and I’d say, “Did you see the new one? With the twins? The dead sister who had the tap-dancing school and you could hear her tap dancing after she died?” (I never did see Brian after St. Bernardine’s. Hey Brian, if you’re reading this, you can find me on Twitter. Twat me!) I make fun of my mother for her sympathy illnesses from Marcus Welby, M.D., but like I should be talking. After that disturbing Night Gallery with Laurence Harvey as the guy whose murder plot with a brain-penetrating caterpillar backfires on him, for ten years I thought I had an earwig. AND IT LAID EGGS!!!

I can explain. I was in a play. Honest.

Did I mention I watched a lot of television?

My dream to be in showbiz took all forms from a young age. If there was any reading aloud in class to be done, my hand shot up first. Even the corny Nativity pageant bullshit every year got me all psyched. Outside of school, I was always dragging kids from the block to do plays with me in the yard. Anything for attention.