Official Book Club Selection (2 page)

It gets better. As my grandpa on my dad’s side got older, he took ill. So the woman he abandoned, my grandmother, actually took him back, and took care of him! Then they had to tell the town, “Oh, right, he’s … actually … not dead.” But the best part is, when my grandparents reunited, they vowed never to speak to each other until the day they died. She nursed him in silence all the way to his deathbed. How sweet a deal did he get?

When his dad returned, my father was still living at home, and he had begun dating my mom. According to my mom, their first date, which took place at the blindingly romantic setting of his family’s home, went something like this:

“Tell your mother to pass the butter.”

“Tell your father to get his OWN butter!”

“Tell your mother I want some more soda bread.”

“Tell your father he can have the soda bread when I’m good and ready!”

Maggie just looked over at the son of these two, and ten minutes later realized, “So this is the gig.” But when she tells the story now, Mom makes it sound as if it were par for the course. So freakin’ Irish Catholic.

Before they started dating, my parents first met at the Formfit bra factory. Dad was a stock boy, and Mom was a secretary. Somebody introduced them, and as the story goes, that somebody said, “John, you know Maggie, the second prettiest girl at Presentation?” And he said, “No, I don’t know her.”

My mother was incensed. “What do you mean you don’t know me? I’m the second prettiest girl at Presentation! And by the way, you’re not that hot, anyway. How can you be related to a beautiful sister like Mary, the prettiest girl at Presentation?”

Well, the sparks flew. Mom was very intrigued that Dad wasn’t just following her around drooling. But he really got her with his sense of humor. He did the smart thing in the beginning: He would go out on a “date” with her and a few of her girlfriends or sisters. It wasn’t heavy dating. They didn’t have any money, so a night out was a bottle of booze and a trip to the park with plastic cups in the middle of winter. Now, this is Chicago. That’s a fucking cold night out. It was usually Dad, my mom, her friend Rae, and her sister Irene, and they’d all just get hammered. Then, it would be too cold to walk home so they’d go from building to building, and Dad would ring the doorbell of each one. Then they’d be let into the foyer, warm up some, and then he would ring the bell of every apartment as a joke, and the girls would be mad at Dad but they’d laugh anyway. “Johnny, stop it!” they’d say, and he’d promise not to do it, and then do it again. Just so you know the level of entertainment we’re dealing with here. This was a hot Saturday night for them.

According to my mom, she and Dad dated almost two years before getting married. Dad was home on furlough from the war for just a few days, right before Pearl Harbor, after which he had to get back to his base right away. Mom went to meet him in Denver, hoping they could get married on St. Patrick’s Day, but due to some army regulations, they had to wait until March 20 (at that time, soldiers kinda had to get approval, or so Maggie says)—lucky for them the army approved! They had their first child, Kenny, nine months and four days after they got married. We kids like to tease Mom: Perhaps she was a naughty girl? But she’s very proud that that four-day window proved Kenny wasn’t an “accident baby.” The rest of us came afterward in four-or five-year increments: Joyce, Gary, John, and then me, on November 4, 1960. Right next to Election Day! (I then went on to retroactively elect my mother the prettiest girl at Presentation.) I’m the baby, just like my mother and father were in their families, and I never heard the end of it. I got away with everything, according to my siblings. But Mom doesn’t think I was spoiled. Precocious, okay. Annoying, yes. But not spoiled. She will also happily admit that I was an accident baby, and that by the time I came along—eighteen years after their first child was born—Mom and Dad were too tired to worry about me.

Dad hams it up even on his wedding day.

This is me after my second face-lift.

But get this: When my mother was pregnant with me, it turns out she was on amphetamines. That’s right, speed. This was a time when doctors thought a woman shouldn’t gain more than fifteen pounds during a pregnancy—and when doctors spoke back then, mothers listened—so to keep her weight down they gave my mom amphetamines! She took them while she was pregnant, and after she had me to lose the few pounds she had gained. Plus—I love this—she’s actually guilt-ridden about it. She thinks that’s what made me crazy, or shall we say, the accomplished person I am today. Let’s just take this in for a moment, shall we? In 1960 there were two doctors in Forest Park, Illinois, who were just doling out methamphetamines to pregnant Irish Catholic women with part-time jobs. Where’s my Dateline episode? I like to picture my mom with a baby on the way, bouncing off the walls, scratching her neck, and fiddling with the rabbit ears on the TV set in a frenzied manner. This, by the way, is how I write my act: I get an idea in my head and I run with it. So granted, I was a fetus at the time, but I was there. You can’t deny that. Also, the way I tell it is probably funnier than the way it actually happened. But in any case, she now believes I’m her crack baby.

I love holding it over her, too. It’s really the only thing I have on her. “Well, maybe if you hadn’t been taking DOLLS all day!” But in my mind, she’s Judy Garland and I’m Liza.

Really, my mother wasn’t alone about crazy ’60s and ’70s parenting. I remember the excitement about the DDT pesticide truck, how its arrival on our street was a big event. The parents on the block would alert us: “Hey, kids, the DDT truck is coming!” Then we’d all go knock on our friends’ doors, because the truck would come and leave this giant haze that smelled awesome, like incense and Fourth of July. We’d run around in it and yell, “We’re in clouds! We’re dancing in clouds!” Later on I saw Meryl Streep on a commercial talking about the dangers of pesticides, scrubbing fruit vigorously with soap, and I thought, Oh, you mean dancing in the clouds was bad? Meryl, pass me the scrub brush.

In any case, we were a very typical middle-class household. When I was in kindergarten, we moved from a small house in Forest Park, Illinois, to a bigger house in Oak Park, and I remember my mother thinking our new place was very grand: four bedrooms, a sun room, wood floors, a galley kitchen with a breakfast area. There was a fireplace that may not have been operable but could be made to look like a working fireplace, and that was fine by us. I’m pretty sure my parents got the house for under $30,000, and Mom thought it was the Taj Mahal. They worked hard for it, too. Dad was managing a hi-fi stereo store six days a week, which meant all of us kids each had full-on stereo systems, with woofers, tweeters, receivers, and everything, and that helped us seem cool to our friends. Mom, meanwhile, worked as a cashier at Oak Park Hospital. It was really the administrative office, but back then it was “cashier,” because this was when people would actually pay for their hospital stay in cold, hard dollars and cents.

Easter Sunday! Candy! Do I have to go to church?

Obviously I wasn’t around when my parents got married or were starting a family, but I can tell you they were a great couple. They have many stories about singing songs around a friend’s piano, going to block parties, and attending the occasional pancake breakfast at church. I honestly never once heard them fight. They yelled at us kids all the time, but never at each other. My siblings and I joke to this day about how the reason we have trouble in relationships is because we never learned how to fight from our parents. However they worked out their problems, they kept it between themselves. My dad had such respect for my mom, even though she was only the second prettiest girl at Presentation. He definitely taught me the old cliché, that a sense of humor really is the most important quality in a man. That, and how to mix a nice Tom Collins.

Which brings us to the drinking portion of our show. My parents never thought they were alcoholics, but they sure got used to me calling them that in my act. Drinking was so prevalent in our home, it was a daily thing. Now my parents would argue that it was a different time back then, but as a kid, I definitely remember them having beer and “the hard stuff” on a regular basis. My mom still loves to say, “It’s five o’clock somewhere!” Often at noon.

Did I ever see my parents wildly drunk? No. They never fell down. They never missed work. They never yelled at me or embarrassed me in front of friends, none of those classic stories. Did they drink every day? Absolutely. It was really my older siblings Gary and Joyce—who would, in typical teenage fashion, have beer bashes—who exposed me to what being visibly drunk looked like. Their keggers were legendary. Just ask the Bowens.

The funny thing was, we all only thought of my uncle Maurice as the “real alcoholic.” I vividly remember my parents talking about how hard it was for Uncle Mo and his wife, because he couldn’t get off “the drink.” Dad would even take me to visit Uncle Mo in the “hospital.” I didn’t know at the time that that was code for rehab. I don’t think they even called it rehab in those days. He was a Chicago cop—he once worked on the famous Leopold and Loeb case—and the legend in my family is that Uncle Mo is what we used to call a bagman for the Chicago police department. Allegedly. A bagman was a cop who went to the local merchants and collected payments from them to look the other way about certain legal issues. But in any case, for a cop to have to go to “the hospital,” he must have been drinking a lot.

I saw all different kinds of drinking going on at our house, from my brother John’s occasional beer to Uncle Mo teaching me how to make him a Manhattan when I was in grade school, something my parents never would have condoned. But when Uncle Maurice had me assemble a drink for him in the kitchen, it did make me feel like a grown-up.

I’m halfway to a bad sunburn, and Uncle Maurice is half in the bag.

I, on the other hand, have never had a drink in my life. Never. Voluntarily, that is. Once when I was about ten years old, I was choking on something at the dinner table, and my mom yelled, “Give her something to drink!” My dad grabbed the closest thing, which was his stein of beer. I took one big sip, and while it startled me out of choking, it also led me straight into thinking, My throat is burning. This tastes disgusting! Why would anyone want to drink this stuff? That really was my first and last taste of alcohol.

When my pals in high school were starting to drink, it always looked unappealing to me. I would be at a big party and see one of the popular girls or football players completely wasted and puking and acting a fool, and think to myself, There’s nothing cool about that. I never wanted to be that out of control.

I had friends who would drink because they were nervous, or they were shy. I wasn’t really nervous, and I certainly wasn’t shy. It’s weird the way many guys over the years have said to me, “I’m going to be the first to get you drunk!” I’d say, “Why? What are you possibly going to gain? I’m going to loosen up more?”

But I also remember thinking, with so much alcoholism and addiction around me, that I didn’t need to be starting any vices. An inner voice was telling me, “How are you not going to become an alcoholic with all these drunken micks around you? Don’t play with fire. If you have one drink, you’ll be an alcoholic in a week.” I still think that.

Because both of my parents worked, I was the classic latchkey kid. When you’re in a family with a bunch of kids, you never get quiet time. So when it was just my older brother John and me still in the house—Kenny was married, Joyce was teaching, Gary was at college—I made the most out of this unsupervised time. I would get home from school at around 3 p.m. and have the house to myself for about two hours. I was in fourth grade then and that’s when two things started: my eating disorder, and my love for all things Hollywood, a lethal combination that has skyrocketed many stars to fame, from Tracey Gold to—allegedly—Calista Flockhart.

We didn’t really use the term “eating disorder” back then. It was just eating. We also didn’t have the term “BFF.” But I had one, and it wasn’t Paris Hilton. My BFF was a lady named Food. I wasn’t the kid who came home and made a sandwich or had a few cookies. Instead I had a routine that was, I have to admit, particularly sick. Binge eating is all about the rituals. It began after school. On my way home I would stop at Certified Groceries, the mom-and-pop grocery store on Madison, where they all knew me. It was kind of like my Cheers. I would get two staples: Pringles and a blue-and-white box of Jiffy cake mix, with a frosting mix kicker sold separately. Because, when binge eating, I felt very strongly that it was important to combine salty with sweet.

Food technology was moving at such a rapid pace in those days that potato chips had been remolded to conform to one shape, so they could be stacked vertically in a can. Their scientific name: Pringles. Pringles are not even potato chips. I believe they’re actually called potato crisps. They are to potatoes what McNuggets are to chicken. I had a can-a-day habit.

Now, on to the sweet. Oh, Jiffy cakes. Jiffy used to have these cake mixes that came in little boxes. They weren’t Duncan Hines big, but they were really for people who essentially want to eat their own cake, even if the package claimed to serve four.

On these specially designated days after school, I would run home with my stash, turn on an afternoon movie on the tube, and start with the Pringles. When I had finished off my last Pringle, the Jiffy box on the counter would catch my eye. My favorite flavor was white cake with chocolate frosting. Yellow cake was okay, but I thought the white cake was better. I put a lot of thought into it. I can tell you, there were tense times when Certified ran out of white cake, and I had to get the yellow with chocolate frosting. That made a great day into just an okay day. Keep in mind, a Jiffy cake was one layer. That’s what made eating an entire one in a single sitting seem normal to me. Believe it or not, in my mind, it would have been really weird to bake myself a two-layer birthday-style cake five days a week. However, you’d have to be a pussy not to be able to comfortably slam a Jiffy cake a day. Right, fellas? Who’s with me?