How to Cook Your Daughter (7 page)

I asked Mom if Daddy had written the book. “No,” she answered, “but I wish he had.”

Jockeying for the best spot on the bed to watch TV was just one of the squabbles Kathy and I had that spring. My special stay-at-home privileges did nothing to improve the already competitive relationship I had with my sister. We were so close in age that some fighting was inevitable. But it became more than just the normal sisterly button pushing. When we fought, I sensed that Kathy truly disliked me. She did all the things that siblings might do, twisting my wrist to give me an “Indian burn” or digging her nails into my arm until little reds marks appeared. But she did it with a gusto that made me think her anger was deeper than any mark she left. Kathy saw me as prettier, even though I always felt too awkward to be pretty, with my floating eye and pigeon toes. But to Kathy, thin defined pretty, and thin I was. She, however, was chubby, and my father made sure she knew it. When he wasn't calling her “Thunder Thighs,” he made jokes about her “extra tires,” grinding her self-esteem to dust. Weight had always been a tremendous issue with my father, and the
Lampoon
years were
his thin time. But he would go on and off diets and (when he wasn't too hung over) made a point of working out. He equated fat to weakness, and despite her smarts and determination, Kathy was simply a fat kid to my dad. She assumed he preferred me because I wasn't, and perhaps she was right. In the end, her weight might have been her best protection. Yes, she resented me. But she never knew the consequences of being Daddy's girl.

When Henry Beard took over the Forge, he brought with him something that came to symbolize all that was wrong in my household: a croquet set. My parents and their friends saw it as a chance to exact revenge. It wasn't so much about going from hoop to hoop. Instead, it became about the opportunity to smash another player's ball far off into the bushes. And so rivalries, jealousies, and personal vendettas played out on our lawn.

Members of the
Lampoon
staff (and their assorted significant others) came to get away from the sweltering city and took full advantage of the nastiness of Henry's croquet set. Kathy and I looked on while the adults became monsters. Matches routinely ended in cursing and tears. Forget what they taught us in school: that it didn't matter whether you won or lost. For my parents and their friends, winning
was
everything, but how they won—and who they hurt along the way—meant even more.

I had seen this kind of game-playing before. Michael O'Donoghue had started it by bringing his Monopoly set to our house during the winter. He, my father, my mom, and sometimes one of Michael's girlfriends used to sit up all night playing and smoking grass. Even from my room, I could hear the gleeful shouts as someone cleared someone else out. Sometimes they would get too tired or too stoned to play any longer, and they'd leave the game lying there, in
mid-play. Kathy and I knew better than to disturb the Monopoly board in the morning.

But Michael no longer came to the house, given his feud with my father, and warm weather and croquet supplanted cold nights and Community Chest. If Kathy and I joined in a game, we were treated with some mercy, but only if it wasn't too late in the afternoon. By evening, everyone was so drunk or so high that no one cared whose ball was sent skimming out in to the far reaches of the garden.

One evening, the croquet had gone on even later than usual. Lunch was a distant memory and dinner nowhere in sight. All the adults had been drinking since three in the afternoon, and the mood had grown nasty. Sean Kelly, a
Lampoon
editor, had brought his soft-spoken girlfriend, Valerie, to our house for the weekend. And in proper Hendra form, she was welcomed by becoming the croquet target of the afternoon. After her ball was sent off the course one too many times, Valerie finally crumbled.

Wielding her croquet mallet over her head, she ran toward the barn and began pounding it over and over again as tears of rage poured from her eyes. I watched Valerie's delicate arms, as though in slow motion, swing the wooden mallet toward the wall with all her might, letting out the repressed frustrations amassed during a weekend with these ruthless satirists—men for whom a show of emotion was cause for ridicule, for whom the joke was always the most important thing.

I was fascinated by what she was doing. I fantasized that I was there next to her, banging my mallet against the barn, screaming and crying too. I didn't know exactly why, what it was I wanted to scream out of my body, but I knew I felt something there. Now, of course, I realize it was confusion over what had happened with my father. I no longer felt safe. And I had begun to feel angry. I had just turned seven,
but there wasn't an adult around me who cared that I was a kid—or who had any idea that it mattered. But I didn't run over and join Valerie. I knew that if I did everyone would only laugh at me, just like they were laughing at her.

That summer, for the first time since
Heroin
killed my parents' friend, I became very aware of drugs. Sure, there had always been drugs around my family, but I began to make a real connection between what the grown-ups put into their bodies and the behavior that came out. I started to notice when the rolling paper appeared. Or when the coke was lined up on a mirror with a razor blade. The grown-ups would come and hover over whoever was setting up the drugs. The look in their eyes—the anticipation—reminded me of the look my father had showed me the night that he crawled into bed with me. And I would grow nervous.
Why did they look like that? Why did it mean so much to them to pull smoke so deeply into their throats? And why were they sniffing white powder up their noses?

After the smoking and the snorting, the music would switch from Brahms to the Beatles, and the volume would rise. Meals were put on hold. Often, the group would gather along the river, where everyone would strip and plunge in naked. Kathy and I never did. We would stay behind in the house, running upstairs to change into our swimsuits before joining everyone by the water. No one told us to put on our suits; we just preferred it that way. In fact, we wanted everyone to wear one. Nude adults were supremely embarrassing, even to kids like Kathy and me, who had grown accustomed to having their parents walk around naked. In this upside-down world, my sister and I were the uptight and responsible ones, the square, boring guests who sat in the corner of the sofa while the hip people partied.

During these skinny-dipping sessions, I was especially concerned
that our neighbors might walk by. It was easy to see the stream from the road. Just a few low trees and bushes could obscure a direct view of the Hendras and their pals—and all their private parts—from the eyes of anyone taking an afternoon stroll. It wasn't as if the stoned and naked grownups were quiet, either. They splashed and giggled and cursed almost as much as they did while playing croquet.

I sat on a rock one afternoon, watching the red glow on the end of the joint that was making its way around the group, when I heard the familiar voices of Becky and Jeremy Bradford. They were closing on us fast, so I knew they must be on their bikes. I scurried up the river bank and looked down the road. To my horror, they weren't alone. Walking behind the bikes were their mom and dad! Doug wore a white T-shirt and jeans, Connie a sleeveless, blue shirt and matching Bermuda shorts. They had clothes on and just plain old regular cigarettes between their fingers. And every step brought them closer to the spot where they would be able to see my parents sprawled out on the river rocks—naked, naked,
naked
with all their naked, naked friends. The bright summer sunshine streamed down like a spotlight, highlighting the sets of protruding breasts, the shocks of pubic hair, and—most disturbing to me—the dangling penises. They would see it all. There was no way they would just walk by. How could they with all the racket going on? Inside my head I was screaming,
Shut up! Shut up! All of you shut up!
But the splashing and cursing only seemed to grow louder. I began to pray:
Please, Lord, don't let the Bradfords see us. Please, oh please, don't let the Bradfords see us
….

GOD MUST HAVE LISTENED TO
RADIO DINNER
BECAUSE
he did me no favors that day.

Becky and Jeremy saw them first. They stopped dead in their bicycle tracks, frozen, staring across the bank at the scene on the river rocks. I hid in the bushes, an instinctive but pointless reaction because, of course, my neighborhood friends knew that these were my parents. Doug and Connie came alongside their stunned children and followed their stares. Not knowing that anyone was on the road, my father, in a moment of terrible synchronicity, stood up on one of the rocks and unwittingly modeled every inch of his nude body to the Bradford audience. Without a word, Connie grabbed Becky's bike, yanked it around, and started pushing it back up the road as fast as she could, Becky still on it. Doug followed his wife, lugging Jeremy and his bike.

I stayed hidden in the bushes for most of the afternoon, wondering how I could ever show my face at the Bradford house again. I never
told my parents that our neighbors strolled down the road that day. Why bother? They would have thought it was hysterical or that I was being too uptight. The Bradfords never said a word about what they had seen, at least not to me. In fact, the next evening, Connie called to very kindly ask Kathy and me if we would like to go with them to the Dairy Queen. My mother had never heard of the place but said we could go if we liked. We did, and it was heaven.

Even Henry Beard, a relative conservative among the
Lampoon
crowd, succumbed to the spirit of treating Red Mill Road as a small nudist colony. He shocked the passengers of a passing car one morning by walking casually from the Forge to our house in nothing but loafers. He arrived at our door, borrowed a book, and lay down on the lawn to read and smoke his pipe, like a professor on holiday.

While everyone was experimenting with taking off their clothes, Kathy and I were busy putting them on. Our craze that summer was dressing up. And like my obsession with the Victorian dollhouse, dressing up in long party dresses and playing prince and princesses became a way to escape. While the drugs and drink flowed freely downstairs, we wore white gloves and set up tea parties on the second floor. Despite the scene her parents had witnessed, Becky Bradford was still allowed over and joined in the tea parties too. We even held our dog, Freckles, prisoner, stuffing his front legs through the sleeves of dresses and tying bonnets on him. He tried to walk around our bedroom with his back legs completely bound in a gold, 1950s prom gown and a flowered hat rigged to his head with yarn.

Freckles was a stray who had wandered on to the New Jersey property when we were in Los Angeles. When we returned from California to reclaim the house, Freckles was part of the package. He was a medium-size mutt, with a white face, a mostly black body, and two-
toned legs. The little black dots on his snout were what earned him his name. My dad considered Freckles a reincarnation of his own father. “When he looks at me with those eyes, I know he's really dad,” he once told us. I wasn't sure exactly what that meant. I just knew Freckles was a good ol' country dog and a frenzied guide. If you went for a walk, he'd follow for a time, then take off running ahead before running back to urge you onward, panting and wiggling all the while. He also kept a sharp eye on his territory, barking wildly and chasing every car that drove by the house until his legs gave out.

And as he had done with the rest of us, my father wanted to use Freckles for a piece in the
Lampoon
. The cover, no less. The concept was simple, my dad explained (though I don't think he bothered to tell Freckles, reincarnated father or not): Freckles would be pictured, his tongue hanging out, with a gun to his head. The caption? “Buy This Magazine or We'll Kill This Dog.” Freckles, however, was no professional, and the
Lampoon
's art director wouldn't even give him the chance to audition. Of course, we still loved him, and we thought the art director was wrong. After all, he submitted to being dressed up without so much as a whimper, unlike the cat that scratched and clawed whenever we tried to dress her in doll clothes and put her in a baby carriage.

Our dress up clothes came from a junk shop about a mile up the road. It was owned by Mrs. Kruger, who stood out in my mind as the neighbor who, by comparison, made my family look good. Not normal. Just better. She seemed a bit like Granny on
The Beverly Hillbillies
—about sixty with wire-rimmed glasses and rotting teeth. She lived next to the junkyard, in a shack that no longer aspired to be a house, with her twenty-something boyfriend and a girl she had all but adopted. Yes, her boyfriend was more than three decades younger,
and yes, he was about as much of a wreck as the shack where they lived. But Mrs. Kruger was friendly and let Kathy and me have discarded New Jersey debutante attire for a quarter a bag. She might have done well saving some of it for herself. I never saw Mrs. Kruger in anything other than jeans. And Missy, the girl who lived with her, sported cutoffs, flannel shirts, and an array of baseball caps. The outfit seemed about right for Missy, though. In the woods, she shot anything that moved and was often seen carrying something dead—a rabbit, a woodchuck, sometimes a raccoon. Once, Kathy and I met her with a lead-filled squirrel in her hands. She told us about the fresh squirrel pie she had made for dinner the night before and seemed a little insulted when we refused the slice she had left in the kitchen.

Dressing up proved an escape from the adult world that frightened me, but the other games we played were imitations of things I had seen and experienced. I had walked in on my parents having sex and had seen guests sneak off into the woods or lie on top of each other in the grass. And, of course, I had seen plenty of nakedness. So I began playing “Lady and Man” with the daughter of one of the few New Jersey friends my mother had. I was the man, she was the lady, and we went off to the Forge, unused during the week, and lay in one of the guest beds. I would tell her to take off her clothes. Then I would touch her body all over and give her hugs and kisses. I knew I was bad, that I shouldn't be touching her “privates.” But I still invited her to come over to the Forge with me. By the end of the summer, we had stopped playing the game—mainly because my friend didn't want to anymore. But my simultaneous fascination with and horror of anything sexual continued.

I began to feel like I had asked for what happened with Daddy, as if my interest in sex had encouraged him. One day while playing
Barbies at Becky's house, I put Barbie and Jeremy's Batman figure in bed together with Batman on top. I poured through my father's R. Crumb comic books staring at the exaggerated breasts and genitalia. The
Lampoon
issues that lay around the house had “Photo Funny” sections with naked people in bed. I wanted to look but felt guilty when I did. I couldn't talk to my mom because I was sure that I already knew too much for a seven-year-old. And I couldn't talk to Daddy. I was scared that if I did, it might happen again.

In the fall, Kathy and I started at a new community school. It was much more progressive than Lebanon Township, and the teachers took the time to coax me into class. Not finishing first grade had taken its toll. I was behind in reading and math and needed extra help to catch up. But at least I consented to go.

The situation between my father and Michael O'Donoghue was making it hard for the
Lampoon
to function properly. Michael made it clear that any friend of my father's was no friend of his. People found themselves having to sneak around so as not to be seen as allying themselves with one side or the other. My father's office was moved away from Michael's.

The
Lampoon
's first recording,
Radio Dinner
, had done very well, and the magazine's publisher, Matty Simmons, thought it would be good to put together another album.
Radio Dinner
had been produced by my dad and Michael, but they clearly were not going to be working together again. O'Donoghue had gone so far as to suggest that Daddy be fired, or at least that his work and my father's not appear in the same issue of the magazine. Henry, probably sick to death of the whole thing, told him not to be ridiculous. Everyone was uncomfortable with Michael and my dad being in the same building. It seemed to Matty Simmons that it would be an excellent idea to
separate them, and so he put the recording project in my father's hands.

The new project would be a musical called
Lemmings,
and it was conceived as a parody of Woodstock, taking on such rock icons as Joe Cocker, Bob Dylan; John Denver; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; and James Taylor. My father, Sean Kelly, Paul Jacobs, and Christopher Guest would write most of the lyrics, and I listened as they gathered in the New Jersey living room to hash out the John Denver parody:

I sang along to most of the lyrics of “Colorado,” but I always skipped one part:

I had had enough of eating kids with “How to Cook Your Daughter.”

Lemmings
opened in New York on January 25, 1973, and it seemed a big event in my life—mainly because we got to stay overnight at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. My father cursed
Matty Simmons for being cheap. But I was incredibly impressed by the Roosevelt. I stood on the red carpet in the lobby and didn't mind that it was threadbare. And when we left for the theater, we took a wonderfully bumpy cab ride down to the Village Gate on Bleecker Street, a no-frills venue that seemed less theater and more enormous basement.

In true
Lampoon
style,
Lemmings
was packed with “bad” words and overt references to sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. But it was much too late to protect us from any of that. Not that anyone suggested we should have been left at home. Instead, Kathy and I sat drinking Shirley Temples and watching the show. I had a wonderful time. Although every joke and parody flew over my head, I responded to the energy of the show and to the obvious enjoyment of the adults watching it. Besides, the music was fun. I liked when Chris Guest put on a hat and played the harmonica in a Dylan parody. I giggled watching Chevy Chase act crazy in a motorcycle jacket. And, along with most of the audience, I fell in love with a fat, bearded guy named John Belushi. He threw himself around the stage and made noise with an energy that I related to—more like a kid than an adult. He stumbled and screamed his way through a Joe Cocker imitation, falling down and springing up again like an insane jack-in-the-box. I had heard the real Joe Cocker many times, coming out of the speakers of my parents' stereo. But I didn't recognize that John was doing satire. I just thought he was adorable as he stood there and yelled into the mike:

I made no connection between “doin' coke” and the white powder I had seen around my house.

During the next few months, Kathy and I became child groupies of the show and begged to see it as often as we could. I learned all the words to songs I couldn't hope to understand. We scampered backstage, star struck, but recognized none of the problems brewing—the predictable squabbles between actors and Belushi's increasing drug use. All that winter and spring, I listened to the
Lemmings
soundtrack and sang along as if the songs were from
The Little Mermaid
.

The success of
Lemmings
meant that my father was working much less at the magazine. And though I loved the show, I missed the Saturday visits Kathy and I used to make to the
Lampoon
offices, when we'd drive into New York with him, so he could finish some project there. Kathy and I would roam the empty hallways, testing out the chairs and desks. I liked Matty Simmons' chair best. It was big and soft, and I sat at his desk and drew on spare scraps of typing paper.

On one of those Saturday trips, months before their friendship came to a terrible end, my father took us to Michael O'Donoghue's loft on Spring Street. I was startled to find that he didn't have a bathroom. Not in his place anyway. You had to go all the way down the hallway and look for a closet that had a toilet in it. The loft was dark and crowded, and Michael had a bizarre collection of ragtag toys littering his home. I shrieked as I sat on the severed leg of a mannequin he had tossed on a chair. Kathy and I haltingly inspected scores of decrepit dolls. Their stuffing oozed from ripped bodies. Tattered and dirty stuffed animals seemed to leer from the loft's dark corners. It felt as though the loft were a toy graveyard, full of the former friends of children who had, willingly or otherwise, abandoned their dolls and animals to Michael.
Where did he get this stuff?
It felt so creepy, as
though there was some story, some message in this apartment of misfit toys.
Maybe Michael doesn't like children…. I'll bet that's it! And if Michael doesn't like children…and he and Daddy are friends…and Daddy sleeps here…then maybe
Daddy
doesn't like children either!
I was stunned. But then it started making more sense.

Many of the pictures of children I had seen in the
Lampoon
made me feel this way, especially the ones in Michael's stories. I poured over his parody of Eloise looking for clues. There she was, this incorrigible little girl, who didn't live at the Plaza but in a downtown fleabag full of junkies, transvestites, and dirty, old men. Then I found his
Vietnamese Baby Book
with its sentimental illustrations of a baby in a diaper with missing arms and stumps for legs. And his
Children's Letters to the Gestapo
. It seemed as if Michael made a point of going after childhood the same way my father went after Catholicism. It sometimes scared me: These were the people in charge; these were the adults.
They'd better like me. They just
had
to!
I looked around the loft again, at the rotting toys that didn't look happy. I just wanted to go home. Instead, I sat quietly, watching my father and Michael smoke a joint that seemed to burn forever.