deadbeat fathers, with their posters on subway walls, a picture along with his name and how much he owes.
(As it turns out, my father wasn’t in hiding at all. He was living on Cape Cod, writing theater reviews for the local newspaper. Not hard to find. In the past year he named Richard Gere the best young actor on the Cape for his work in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Provincetown Playhouse.)
An hour or so later that same day I pass the church again, this time on my bicycle—the funeral just ending, a long black line of cars leaving the parking lot, headlights on, snaking their way to the graveyard. I’m riding beside my best friend, and I tell him, in the same offhand tone my mother had used, That’s my grandfather’s funeral , and he looks at me as if I’m insane.
pear
By the time I’m nine I know the world is a dangerous place. I’ve heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family. But no one is offering any clear information. Lately I’ve been studying horror movies on tv, my favorites being The Creature Double Feature on Saturday afternoons. But even better is when my mother’s latest boyfriend takes my brother and me to see zombie and mayhem movies at the drive-in— Scream and Scream Again, Bloody Mama —the more gruesome the better.
One night, walking through the Harbor at dusk with my grandmother, where we’d gone to buy yarn for her crewelwork, we stop at the musty bookshop run by Isabel and Rose, the spinster sisters. I thumb through a new edition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while my grandmother scans the murder/romances. She likes her books fat and lurid. I’ve never bought a book before, but for some reason I have to have this one. Under a streetlight outside I try to read the first page, but know instantly I’m over my head—I can decipher maybe half of it. When I get home I try again, then put it aside, knowing I’ll be able to read it in a couple years, if I apply myself in third grade. I’ll pick it up again in fifth grade and read it through in one night. That same year I’ll memorize Poe’s “The Raven,” and draw coffins and bloody curved daggers in my notebooks. I want to be a writer, a horror writer. This is before I learn that my father considers himself a poet. I’ve only met him once that I can remember, the day he appeared in my grandmother’s driveway with his second wife and my half-sister. This is your sister , he said, say hi . He looked like the Cowardly Lion, his wife looked like Cher. My half-sister was a swaddled infant, indistinguishable from her blanket. Hi , I said.
There’d always been books around our house—my mother and brother were voracious, compulsive readers. Henry Miller’s Sexus was hidden in my mother’s lingerie drawer, alongside her gun and painkillers. She bought the gun the year before to protect herself, but she never said from what. The painkillers were for her migraines, which kept her in bed some days, all day. A family story was that my brother was found reading the newspaper as a toddler, before he’d uttered a word, and to see him, all those years, with a sci-fi book hidden in his lap at the dinner table, his head bowed, it seemed possible. In my grandmother’s attic were stacks of books salvaged from her marriage, only accessible by tightroping along the joists between the pink insulation. Forbidden and dangerous, I spent hours up there, poring through these treasures, looking for answers.
In the early 1970s, when I was eleven or twelve, my fascination with horror led me to the occult. The new bookstore in town had an entire section devoted to Anton LaVey and Alistair Crowley—real live warlocks, with shaved heads and scary beards. I’d sit on the floor reading them for hours. One afternoon I looked up and realized I was alone, that the cashier had locked up, gone to lunch, forgotten me. The door opened from the inside, I looked up and down the street, looked back at
(As it turns out, my father wasn’t in hiding at all. He was living on Cape Cod, writing theater reviews for the local newspaper. Not hard to find. In the past year he named Richard Gere the best young actor on the Cape for his work in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Provincetown Playhouse.)
An hour or so later that same day I pass the church again, this time on my bicycle—the funeral just ending, a long black line of cars leaving the parking lot, headlights on, snaking their way to the graveyard. I’m riding beside my best friend, and I tell him, in the same offhand tone my mother had used, That’s my grandfather’s funeral , and he looks at me as if I’m insane.
pear
By the time I’m nine I know the world is a dangerous place. I’ve heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family. But no one is offering any clear information. Lately I’ve been studying horror movies on tv, my favorites being The Creature Double Feature on Saturday afternoons. But even better is when my mother’s latest boyfriend takes my brother and me to see zombie and mayhem movies at the drive-in— Scream and Scream Again, Bloody Mama —the more gruesome the better.
One night, walking through the Harbor at dusk with my grandmother, where we’d gone to buy yarn for her crewelwork, we stop at the musty bookshop run by Isabel and Rose, the spinster sisters. I thumb through a new edition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while my grandmother scans the murder/romances. She likes her books fat and lurid. I’ve never bought a book before, but for some reason I have to have this one. Under a streetlight outside I try to read the first page, but know instantly I’m over my head—I can decipher maybe half of it. When I get home I try again, then put it aside, knowing I’ll be able to read it in a couple years, if I apply myself in third grade. I’ll pick it up again in fifth grade and read it through in one night. That same year I’ll memorize Poe’s “The Raven,” and draw coffins and bloody curved daggers in my notebooks. I want to be a writer, a horror writer. This is before I learn that my father considers himself a poet. I’ve only met him once that I can remember, the day he appeared in my grandmother’s driveway with his second wife and my half-sister. This is your sister , he said, say hi . He looked like the Cowardly Lion, his wife looked like Cher. My half-sister was a swaddled infant, indistinguishable from her blanket. Hi , I said.
There’d always been books around our house—my mother and brother were voracious, compulsive readers. Henry Miller’s Sexus was hidden in my mother’s lingerie drawer, alongside her gun and painkillers. She bought the gun the year before to protect herself, but she never said from what. The painkillers were for her migraines, which kept her in bed some days, all day. A family story was that my brother was found reading the newspaper as a toddler, before he’d uttered a word, and to see him, all those years, with a sci-fi book hidden in his lap at the dinner table, his head bowed, it seemed possible. In my grandmother’s attic were stacks of books salvaged from her marriage, only accessible by tightroping along the joists between the pink insulation. Forbidden and dangerous, I spent hours up there, poring through these treasures, looking for answers.
In the early 1970s, when I was eleven or twelve, my fascination with horror led me to the occult. The new bookstore in town had an entire section devoted to Anton LaVey and Alistair Crowley—real live warlocks, with shaved heads and scary beards. I’d sit on the floor reading them for hours. One afternoon I looked up and realized I was alone, that the cashier had locked up, gone to lunch, forgotten me. The door opened from the inside, I looked up and down the street, looked back at
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