CHAPTER

1

I was always my mother’s favorite. For most kids, that might sound all right, but for me, it was a special kind of waking nightmare. I was born on October 31, 1959, and would spend the first years of my life in a ratty, crackerjack colonial with slanted second-floor ceilings and so little space you had to go outside to change your mind. That was the way it was for my family. We spent years following my mother’s romantic whims around the state of New Jersey, always moving from tenement to dump to the borderline condemned. For a while anyway, we had each other, my older siblings and me. There but for the grace of God.

My parents met on a double date at the Hearth in North Brunswick. It would be like any standard love story, were the two of them not seeing other people at the time. My mother’s husband was a man named Harold Dean, while my father’s girlfriend was Harold’s sister Doris. It must have been love at first sight, because my parents crossed over and had an affair that led to my conception. I would like to blame it on the era of free love, but the truth was, my mother just did that sort of thing. She latched onto men. Harbored obsessions. Really sunk her claws in.

It was in this way that the state came to record Harold Dean as my official father. My birth certificate even bears his last name—Joseph Adevai Dean was what it read. And it gets odder still. For a while there, my mother, father, and Harold all lived together in that little colonial on Oak Road. I’m not sure how it must have been for my brother David and sister Debbie, but then, they were only five or six at the time, so they probably didn’t think anything of it. Harold lived in this arrangement long enough for me to start calling him “Dad.” This is more than I can say for either my mother or my father, to whom I never felt close enough to regularly use terms of endearment. I always appreciated and respected Harold, and to this day I wish he had gotten a better shake in all this. He was a good guy, and the only person ever to give me a Christmas present when I was a child. He just got a raw deal.

I guess the last straw for Harold was when I got old enough for people to start commenting on how strange it was that I had tan skin and dark hair—the squarest of pegs compared to the rest of his fair, blond family. Eventually it became obvious to everyone that I wasn’t Harold’s. So he packed his bags and took David and Debbie with him part time. My father wasn’t far behind, although he did remain with my mother long enough for the two of them to have two more kids together, a younger brother and sister for me.

That left me and my four siblings to make our way in a rundown place with an always bare pantry and under the care of a mother who was at times smothering in her affection and at times so distant we wouldn’t see her for days. As a professor in the psychology department at Rutgers, she had a proper and intellectual job, but her true focus—her blinding obsession—was the men in her life. When she wasn’t harassing the men she adored, she poured much of her love into me. Looking back, I recognize how this is the last kind of love you could ever want, but at the time, it was all I knew. She was my mother. And she had carefully manipulated us all to believe that she was the only person in the world we could trust.

I’ve never had the kind of constitution that would compel me to kill myself. My mother had different ideas. I can still see her there at that rickety old table, the pill bottle rattling in her quivering hand, the kitchen knife gleaming just to her right. In the memory, she’s telling me how easy it would be, how much peace we would find if we just swallowed these pills, how there was no way out of our problems, save for this way. I was impressionable then. Twelve years old maybe. I didn’t want to hear any of this. Didn’t want to do it. Didn’t want to be the hand she held as she crossed over from this life. But I was always my mother’s favorite.

Let me back up. I’m always jumping to the end. What matters here isn’t that I sat at that table with my mother, head in my hands, and nearly took those pills. What matters is how I got there.

I guess I should have seen it coming. I mean, what kind of house must I have lived in if even the cat went insane? I always hated cats. Or maybe hate is too harsh a word; let’s say I strongly disliked them. Whatever word you choose, there’s no denying that they’re lazy and ungrateful. Plus, they poop in a box in the bathroom. There’s nothing normal about that. We had a couple of cats. One was a Himalayan Persian that lived better than we did. Another was an alley cat we called Rags. The usual stressors were swirling in our lives that day we learned that even cats can get it bad, and we were dealing with them the only way we could: retreating into the television.

My younger siblings and I were sprawled out on the dusty floor of our sometimes living room, sometimes bedroom, watching Lost in Space, when Rags padded down the stairs, his eyes wild and teeth bared. This wasn’t the first time I had seen the cat looking aggressive, but it was the first time I had seen foam frothing from his mouth.

“Hey,” I said to my brother Stacey, tugging at his shirt.

My brother was so engrossed in the sci-fi cheese that he ignored me at first.

“Hey!”

“What?” he snapped, fixing me with a glare before his eyes followed along the line I was watching.

The cat snarled unnaturally—a savage, uncaged thing.

“Something is wrong,” my brother said.

“I mean really wrong,” I agreed.

Rags began to pace to the bottom of the stairs and then halfway back up again, his wild red eyes never wavering from us. Our pet, the same one that ate better and more often than I did, the same one that slept wherever he wanted, the same one that defecated in the same space I defecated, was sizing us up. He meant us harm. I had no idea what to do. My brother was backing toward the far wall. My sister had gone white.

“Help!” I called. Normally a child might call out to his mother in a situation like this, but by then, I had experienced enough disappointments from my mother to know that calling to her directly might not produce her presence. She might not have been home, and even if she was, she was about as likely to help us as the postman. No, with a feral cat bearing down on us, a vague cry for help would be far more effective.

Maybe sensing that his time to pounce was fleeting, the cat finally broke from the stairs and stalked into the room. I had hated Rags for long enough to know his usual look. He looked like a cat. This wasn’t our cat anymore. Something had happened. This cat was possessed by some vile demon. This cat’s mind had gone.

When my mother finally answered the call, she proved no help. She squealed, panicked, and shooed us all up the stairs, where—fittingly—she holed us up in the bedroom, quivering in fear of a deranged house cat. This is when things got strange.

The cat started going crazy, bouncing off the walls in the hall and screeching in ways that sounded less like an animal and more like a miter saw. My mother bellowed and pulled us close, the four of us shoving together in the corner of the room farthest from the door. By the time the sawblade of a cat started clawing at the door, I thought my mother was going to squeeze my head clean off.

“We have to do something,” she said as if understanding this fact for the first time. “We have to call the police.”

Karen and Stacey nodded in that numb, zombified fashion of the terrorized. We were all very much in favor of our mother taking charge. We always were. On that front, she nearly always let us down.

“Who’s going to do it?” she asked.

We all looked at each other in pallid surprise. Why was it a question who would go? The phone was downstairs; we were upstairs, locked in a bedroom with paper-thin walls and a flimsy, hollow-core door. Between us thrashed a tabby-turned-hellcat, all bristling fur, razor-wire claws, and hypodermic teeth. In any other household, there wouldn’t have ever been a question about who would brave the mad, weird path to the phone, because it would be Mom.

In my household, our mother looked first to me, then to my siblings, her face full of wide-eyed questions. When all of us shook our heads no, she shined the briefest glance at the ceiling before finally finding her head. “Okay,” she said, puffing up her chest. “I’ll go.”

We three children wrapped into a ball of limbs in the corner as our mother threw on a pair of thick jeans and a hefty sweater. She put on some shoes and then wrenched a pair of socks over her shoes. After wrapping a scarf around her neck, face, and forehead, another pair of socks went over her hands. She looked like a Sherpa on laundry day.

“I’m going in,” she said, looking back at us like maybe she expected a fond farewell.

Quaking anxiety was all she got in reply.

I guess she must have made it, because twenty minutes of nervous sweating later and we were listening to the sound of male voices grunting in struggle with a squawking feline. I was the first to brave the door. When I opened it a crack, I saw two burly men wearing police uniforms and large mitts on their hands. They were, with a long hook, stabbing in the direction of the cat, which by now, in its erratic rage, had become something more like furry lightning. It looked to me like the hook was making little progress, and it didn’t take long for the cops to agree.

“Back up,” one of them said. “I have an idea.”

When I saw them again at the base of the stairs, they were shielding themselves with the coffee table, using it as a movable barrier as they got back to flailing. They advanced on the cat, eventually cornering it and snatching it with the hook. We all breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

Then they took Rags outside and put two bullets in him. It kept me up a few nights thinking about it because, I mean, who shoots a cat?

Shootings weren’t uncommon in the various terrible neighborhoods we called home over the years. Always in connection with my mom’s desire to hound some man or another, we would move from the lowest of low-life places to places that were somehow lower still. By the time we moved from North Brunswick to Remsen Avenue in New Brunswick, my parents weren’t living together anymore. My father kept his own place. I’m sure he had his reasons.

Most of my earliest memories of their relationship involve the two of them fighting on the lawn. By then, the marriage had become untenable, so they broke it off. At least my father did. My mother apparently couldn’t accept the notion that it was possible for her husband to move on, because she would harass him in ways I still can’t believe. She would have David and me spy on him. She would send him threatening letters and phone calls. She called his employer once to tell them that he was homosexual—and back in those days, even a rumor about being gay was enough to get you ostracized or even fired. So I guess it was only natural that my father would come around yelling and making threats.

The most vivid memory of one of these fights came on a day we had spent huddled together, freezing in the living room because we hadn’t paid the heating bill. I was just enjoying one of those fleeting moments where a spell of shivering finally works and you feel momentarily warm when I heard his voice howling from outside. My parents said many foul things to each other that day, but my childhood recollection has censored the language.

“They arrested me!” he was hollering by the time we got to the door.

My mom was already outside, posturing, her arms flailing wildly as she screamed something incomprehensible back at him.

I think I was too young yet to be embarrassed by the notion that my parents were causing a scene in the yard. There was a light dusting of snow, I remember—the kind that, because it was so improbably cold, looked thin and grainy, like sand.

“How could they have believed I stomped you and broke your ribs?” my father wanted to know, his breath like a smokestack on the chilly wind.

“Because that’s what you did!” she screeched, blowing smoke of her own.

He paced, his swarthy face warming over in disbelief. “Look at you!”

“Yeah, look at me!” my mother said as she gestured at her apparently alluring form, still slender despite the heavy coat she wore. Her replies weren’t always sensible.

“Your ribs aren’t broken,” my father pointed out.

I’m not sure how that one resolved—or even whether there was any truth to my mother’s claim that my father would abuse her—but that’s how it was. As my father cursed and gesticulated and stomped back to his truck, my mother would drag us back inside spouting invectives about how we had to keep down and stay out of sight because my father had a shotgun. I don’t know whether that was true, but I do know it terrified us and drew us ever closer to the woman who kept us in constant need and consistent fear.

My father was basically a stranger to me then. The only impression I had of him was the one my mother painted for me. He was an imposing presence during those fights on the lawn, and as the version of himself that lived in my head, he was a frightening person. My mother claimed that he never had steady employment. This might be in part because she was always calling his employers and telling lies about him. Either way, he mostly did odd jobs and worked as a mover. What was clear was that, even though he cared about us enough to risk his jobs, his well-being, and his reputation, there comes a time when any man realizes there are battles he can’t win. Eventually, my father stopped trying to visit us.

We chose to move to Remsen Avenue right around the time of the race riots of 1964. As a member of the lone minority family in the neighborhood, I was the only white kid in my class. This was a frightening time and place to occupy. My classmates were so adept at intimidating me that they could even turn their threats into nursery rhymes. “White cracker, white cracker, you don’t shine,” one of the songs went. “Bet you five dollars I’ll kick your behind.” The rhymes weren’t empty either. They would beat me up all the time. It led me to become quite gifted at changing my routes home, sneaking through yards and alleys instead of walking the sidewalks, and keeping quiet in class. I tried not to answer questions, even when the teachers called on me, because I knew if I spoke a word, I would pay for it later.

At home, I stayed home. There was no sense in venturing out of the house, day or night. There was just too much racial tension at the time, and to begin with, the neighborhood wasn’t the safest anyway. That didn’t always stop the trouble from coming to us, though. Those rare times when we had food, people would walk right in and take it. Once, some people threw a dead fish through our window, I guess as a thinly veiled threat about the Jewish look we had about us. We weren’t practicing Jews, but that didn’t seem to matter.

There was a camp across the street, all rotting wood and bright cloth and old trinkets. Before I saw that camp, I had no idea what a Gypsy was, but we wouldn’t live in that neighborhood long before I got plenty familiar with them. It wasn’t an intentional run-in that brought us together—at least not on my part. I guess my little brother Stacey was just too pretty to ignore. Rightly or wrongly, the Gypsies in my neighborhood had developed a reputation for taking things that didn’t belong to them. They treated the world like one communal free-for-all. If you weren’t actively using it, or it wasn’t nailed to the floor, they would help themselves to it. One day, I learned that this practice applied to human beings, as well.

Stacey was about three at the time. His beauty extended well beyond cuteness, mostly because of his enormous and arrestingly blue eyes. Since we were almost always unsupervised as we played in the dirt plot that passed for our yard, people would often just come up and marvel at my brother.

“Oh, what an adorable little boy,” they would say—even the ones that hated us to the point they would steal our food or make violent gestures in the direction of our house.

“Cute kid,” others would say, a little more tersely.

I guess it doesn’t matter what kind of neighborhood you live in; beauty gets appreciated everywhere, and by everyone.

Especially Gypsies, as it turns out. The Gypsies from across the street were particular fans of Stacey’s eyes. They would come over and marvel at him nearly every time we worked up the courage to brave the outside world. Many times, they would just stand in huddles and kind of leer at him. For a kid—and for a poor kid most of all—sifting through dirt can be a riot of a good time, but sifting through dirt is less fun when you have an unwelcome audience. Sometimes, that audience would want to join the action, too. They would sort of inch-and-flank their way closer to Stacey, moving almost like a pack of wild dogs. Then, the moment one of us spotted them, they would shift to fawning and cooing over my brother. They would put their hands on him to the point where it made us all uncomfortable.

Then one day, I was in the house making a ketchup sandwich when my mother burst through the door, her face pale and searching.

“Where’s Stacey?” she asked, sounding nervous.

We all started hunting. Stacey had a way of finding a corner somewhere and just playing quietly with whatever household item most resembled a proper toy to him that day. But after checking all his usual haunts, we realized he was gone.

“Where could he be?” my mother was asking as she paced around, pulling at her hair. She had assumed that glassy-eyed look that had become more frequent in those days. It was unsettling enough to see this expression when the house was relatively calm, but on a day when our brother was missing, it unhinged us all. We started freaking out, stomping around and yelling at each other about nothing helpful.

Then our mother finally called the police. I’m not sure how, but the cops quickly discovered that the Gypsies had him. I’m not sure whether his kidnappers intended to leave with him—maybe drifting to another neighborhood camp or, who knows, maybe even another country—but fortunately the police got to them before they had a chance to do anything beyond swaddle him up in some bright cloth and pack him away in a tent.

I guess that was when my mother decided we needed adult supervision whenever she was away at work or on one of her trysts. On the question of who would serve the role of “adult supervisor,” as was almost always the case, my mother made a poor choice.

We lived in a single-family home that had been converted into a two-family home. This doesn’t mean there were two separate entrances to the place—merely that we shared the space with a pair of young men we called “the college kids.” We occupied the downstairs portion of the home while Edwin and Carlos, a pair of Puerto Rican kids I’m not entirely sure were actually in college, kept a place upstairs.

This was my mother’s idea of hiring a babysitter: “Hey,” she would say. “Mommy has to leave for a bit. Go hang out upstairs.”

I’m not sure how willing Edwin and Carlos were to have a scrum of small children invading their space at random points in the day, but I do know that, at first anyway, we liked going up there. Their apartment was cool. They had an actual TV—not that piece of garbage we kept where you had to hit it every time your show went to snow. There were couches and chairs and tables and a bed for every person who lived there. It was almost like a normal home, and to us, that normalcy was exciting. It was great hanging out with Edwin and Carlos because Edwin and Carlos had things.

Never mind that it wasn’t the greatest environment for children. Never mind that Edwin and Carlos partied frequently, or that they had a black light and the dope that tends to come with those things, or that they must have been handsome, charming guys because they never had trouble getting girls to share their beds with them.

It was fun for a while. But then Edwin took the party too far.

My mother wasn’t home. I was hungry, but there wasn’t any food for me, so I did what any six-year-old kid who lives in hunger learns to do to cope with the pain: I decided to go to sleep.

“I’m tired,” I said to Edwin and Carlos.

They looked up from whatever seedy thing they were doing, their eyes bloodshot and their faces sallow and shiny with sweat.

“Why don’t you go take a nap?” Carlos said.

“Yeah, do it in the other room,” Edwin said all too eagerly.

I wasn’t sure about the idea. I had my own room downstairs. Sleeping there seemed like a better idea to me, but for the first time since the arrangement began, Edwin was adamant that I stay at his place until my mother returned.

“It’s fine,” he urged. “My bed is comfortable.”

“We’ll wake you up when your mom gets back,” Carlos said before returning to his various indulgences.

So that’s how I came to be in the bedroom of a young man who amounted to a total stranger. I hadn’t been curled up long before I realized I wasn’t alone. After the slightest creaking of the door, I could feel a presence behind me. I rolled over and saw that it was Edwin. Something in his eyes said he had changed in the few minutes since I saw him last. I never much liked the way Edwin looked at me to begin with—especially during those times when he had enjoyed himself enough to be all red-eyed and frantic. On that day, he had those eyes, but the rest of him was almost gentle. He eyed me up like a precious thing.

I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t speak. As a young boy, I was too afraid. When first he touched me, I tensed, curling up tighter in an effort to shut him out. But then his hand slid over to my stomach, down to my thigh, and over my prepubescent manhood. I straightened up, clenching every muscle as if he might leave if I made a board of myself and pretended he wasn’t there. I don’t know how long he stayed, or exactly where and how he touched me, but I do remember a searing white fear causing my body to prickle and harden. I clenched my teeth so hard they hurt. My fingernails dug into my palms, leaving bloody scrapes inside my hands.

Then finally he left.

When I think about that moment in my life, I don’t find embarrassment, even though this is the first time I’ve shared the memory with anyone. I don’t know that I find disgust either. I feel only confusion—confusion and a sense of wonder about how a mother could possibly put her children in harm’s way like that. But then, that was my mother: a desperate, selfish, lonely sociopath. There were only two people in the world she truly cared about at any given time: herself and whichever vile man she happened to be with. A possible third was me—but then, I was always Mom’s favorite.

If I hadn’t been, maybe I wouldn’t have been so careful about preventing her suicide.