The Asiatic Flu

There will be much more about finally being allowed, at the age of eleven, to live with my mother again; more stories; some deaths; shoplifting; sex; cocaine. But I want to jump back first. I want to finish some of the travels and hold onto my anger for a while, the anger with my father that eats at me still, though only occasionally, in the middle of the night perhaps, or when my mind wanders as I'm stuck on the freeway.

On a trip to Asia when I am seven, our dad, Adam, tries unsuccessfully to get us into Red China. This is the '70s. Carter may be following Nixon's let's-be-friends-with-China example but it's still very difficult for Americans to get the permission to travel there.

To me, it's hard to imagine my father in a totalitarian state unless he is the totalitarian.

He does manage to get us permission to go to Vietnam even though the war's effects are still being felt. My passport from that time even has a visa for Vietnam stamped in it. Before we board the plane, though, someplace at or near the airport in Saigon is bombed by someone or other and we can't go, but I don't mind. The hotel in Bangkok has a petting zoo, and the cooks in the restaurant there knew how to make scrambled eggs the way I like them, hard, nothing gooey or wet like the hotel in Cairo. Thankfully I am not aware of Thailand's burgeoning trade in boy prostitutes. If someone tells me I am sure to run away and sell myself. Give myself, really, for free to all comers.

Instead of going to Vietnam we end up in Hong Kong, where every one of our dollars is worth five! I love that. I feel very lah-dee-dah at the mall there, spending $50 on a Corgi car set, my first experience with actual cash in many a moon. The hotel provides guests with silk robes my father tells us we can take with us when we leave, though it is unclear to me how the hotel management feels about it.

My half-sister Betsy (I just call her my sister) has been born by then and is tagging along. Traveling with a baby is a drag, especially since her mother, Laura, my step-mother, insists on breastfeeding her everywhere. Laura's breasts don't bother me, but the fact that when she does it people can see her hairy underarms mortifies me. And the diaper situation is dire. Laura will only use cloth diapers which means stinky diaper pails and a faint odor of ammonia wherever we stay. I don't care if landfills kill the planet, I don't want to live in a world without disposable diapers. Or air-conditioning.

The Asian travels go on for a couple of months, and seem pointless in a way. Most of the time we sit around the hotel. Dad goes off and does things that I have no knowledge of or concern about. We aren't even tourists really. Just odd Americans ordering a lot of room service and stinking up the place with dirty diapers.

Our return to Blanco, Texas is to be temporary as my dad is building the first of his ranches and we are in town waiting for the houses to be constructed.

My aborted attempt at running away still resonates through our household. A war of attrition is beginning. Adam often tries to talk me out of wanting to leave, to explain, patiently, hypnotically, how his influence is so crucial to my development, how his superior knowledge and far thinking genius is what will make the difference in my life, how it will turn me from the selfish materialist that I am into a caring, brilliant adult.

I think he's full of shit. But all I do is nod and repeat over and over to him that although I know he is right, I still want to live with my mother. Occasionally my hatred and resentment bubbles through and I forget to preface my request with the requisite "I know you are right," but those times are rare.

The ranch makes it all worse to me since to this day I hate the outdoors and anything rustic. Adam and Laura are to be in the main house with my sister Betsy. It is a strikingly designed building with a soaring cathedral ceiling on one side of the house and a glass bridge going over to the bedrooms that occupy the other side of the second story.

My brothers and I are to live in what we call the bunkhouse, so named, one assumes, since we sleep in actual bunk beds.

I may be unhappy about living with my dad and step-mother, but my unhappiness is mitigated by the prospect of having my own house. I think of it as mine, even though it is shared. This is not an unusual reaction for me to have. Adam calls me selfish. Others will echo the judgment. I think of it as just trying to stay alive.

Inventing Sammy Picow

When I am eleven I finally get to live with my mother. The dreamlike, momentous event, the holy grail, the miracle of all miracles starts with a collapsing ranch.

My grandfather, Zadie, has his third heart attack. Adam, the Naked Father, takes over the cheese business during Zadie's illness, and quickly branches out, opening a classic motor car company and building a huge dream-ranch with an elaborate plan for an indoor/outdoor pool.

This is about two years after running away and after learning that my mother is mine alone (see January 17 "Inner Child/Inner Oedipus" and January 18 "Bernstein Hot in Fem Bowling"). I am in the midst of my overly complicated, mechanically unmanageable plans to fake my own suicide. I start making my feelings more pointedly known. Over and over, like a daily mantra, I tell Adam I hate him. That the only thing I care about is being with my mother.

There are so many allegations about what happens business-wise around this time, and years later the whole troupe will end up in court bickering over it all, but what is unimpeachably clear is that in short order the cheese company is out of money, the car company goes out of business, and a rain storm makes the ranch construction site at the house and pool collapse into a sea of mud.

For the 26,469,328th time I tell Adam I want to live with my mother. He is so stressed out he finally says yes. Just like that. Magic. I pack everything, Mom and her new boyfriend, soon to be husband, David are there by that night to pick me up, though they have to wait because my father, bizarrely, insists that I pick tomatoes before being allowed to leave. (Yeah? Well, better than stripping cedar posts.) I pick a couple of tomatoes, throw a bunch of them on the ground, smash them into bits, and tell him I'm done. Completely, irrevocably done. One of my older half-brothers, Aaron, decides to come with me after Adam opens up the situation by turning to him and my other half-brother, Gary, and sneeringly asking if either of them wants to abandon him as well. Aaron votes himself off the mud island. Gary stays. I don't really know exactly why either one of them make the choices they do. Aaron still doesn't know. I will never find out with Gary since he's dead now.

But as I pack to leave I am uncurious about them, about anyone, about everyone except my mother. All the years of wanting her have by then confused the issue. I don't want to be with her so much as I want to become her.

Before we leave the ranch, David, Mom's new main squeeze, gives me a t-shirt from his new clothing store, David's Station. I put it on with pride. I'm already starting to imagine myself taking his last name. Picow. I will be Sammy Picow. I have no middle name so I add one: Samuel Leonard Picow. Jordan Samuel Picow. Putting on the t-shirt is a direct salvo at my father. I want him to see the new man in my life. I don't remember saying good-bye to anyone. We just drive off.

I am free. From and for what I'm not sure. My double life, the fantasies, the autistic-like breaks from reality; these are what I know, and I hold fast to them, in retrospect, blowing the opportunity to truly experience living with my mother.

Once I get what it is I want, Mom, it all becomes about escape from Adam rather than a return to her. I know the double life so completely that I don't know how to open myself to living just one life, where it is safe to love and be loved.

Mom and I certainly get on all right, and I love the routine and relative quiet of life with her and David. We just don't become very intimate. She is busy, working six days a week at Dillard's department store, and David is involved with his store, and they are newly in love with each other, building a life together.

There is a lot of fun in the house; Neil Diamond on Sunday mornings while Mom makes hot sauce; spaghetti dinners; the continued ritual of eating on the bed together.

I use her curling iron and cut my bangs when she is at work one day. She came home and is furious to discover bits of my hair throughout her make-up drawer. She yells at me that if I want to be a woman I should go have a sex change operation. Then later she tells the story in my hearing, leaving out the part about the curls and the sex change, laughing at how I give myself a haircut and there is hair everywhere. She has two faces too. Like me. The thing is, no one really knows about my two personalities. My thoughts, dreams, and hopes have been volatile and often ugly, monstrous even, for so long, but people see me as sweetness itself. I have an easy manner. Dimples. My brothers and I are alarmingly polite. ("Because they’re scared to death, my cousin Edy tells her husband Bernie when he comments on how fabulously well-behaved we are.)

My evil twin carries a full plate, what with the long cold war against my father, my recognizance missions for information to use against him, my fantasy life as a murderer, and my fantasy life with my mother.

Which is probably why people don't notice my becoming a pre-teen sex addict at the age of ten when I am nearly done living with Adam and Laura, still hating my life, and still maintaining the visage of a little gentleman. Living with Mom doesn't change that part of my life a bit. I just find new partners.

In a Piss-Ant Place

Six years-old. We live seventeen miles from Johnson City, Texas, birthplace of you-know-who, in an even smaller town called Blanco, a piss-ant place with little more than a bowling alley and cafe, a post office, a small grocer, and an old courthouse falling down in front of everyone's eyes. There is a Dairy Queen and a laundromat at one end and another burger joint at the other.

We will leave in six months, though I don't know that yet, and then three years later we will return, after living in Egypt and visiting Lebanon when I am still six, leaving for a long trip to Asia before I can finish second grade when I am seven, then Hawaii when I am eight, and back to living in Blanco at nine. Got that?

I hate Blanco. On the first go-round my first grade year started there badly as I am intensely bored by my schoolwork at Blanco Elementary. We are expected to study reading from workbooks with no cohesive characters or plotlines. Many times the teacher wants us to read aloud, and the other kids plod along in barely audible monotones. Where is their feeling for drama? For color? After several experiences with a Dick and Jane primer I walk up to the teacher, Mrs. Stowbough, and smile sweetly. "I really don't want to read this shit," I say with no comprehension of how negatively this simple declarative sentence will strike her. She sort of cuffs my ear a bit and tells me she will call my father about the incident. When I get home I tell my father that my teacher hit me. He storms down to that school and tears the poor woman a new asshole. Adam is actually great about things like that, insisting we must never follow authority blindly. It doesn't occur to him that I will turn that logic against him sooner rather than later.

Back to Beelzebubbe

For a moment I want to get back to my grandmother, Budie a.k.a. Beelzebubbe.

On the record, hand on Koran or whatever: My feelings about her are not negative, not in the least, even as I recognize her limitations. I should be appalled, I know that, and I am, but I'm also not.

I tell stories about her and am gleeful when listeners at the dinner table gasp, eyes popping at the extent of her outrageous behaviors. But when I am a child she has the gift of making me feel like she is letting me into the most exclusive club in the world, since it is a world basically defined by making fun of everyone who is not us. Heady stuff to a preteen. With her I believe I can be omnipotent, I will always be able to strike first before someone has the chance to attack. Without having any depth of character she becomes the largest character of my youth and early adulthood. I always take her side and she usually takes mine, except when it comes to spending money. I am a chemist. I make shit out of money. She also decides later, in my very late teens, to tell everyone I am an alcoholic for no particular reason, though I am not now nor have I ever been a habitual great big drunk - which is not the same as saying I haven't even been a great big drunk on the odd occasion.

Saying I am an alcoholic is a lie but everyone believes her. Later, by her eighties, her convolutions with truth get out of control. She accuses a houseguest she doesn't particularly like of having taken a crap in her bed, ruining the expensive bedspread. An astonishingly audacious lie. She bends the universe to her world, to her truth, believing her lies the minute they come out of her mouth.

I want to bend the universe too, see it through the jaundiced glasses of righteous rage like she does. She becomes my talisman when she starts confiding in me; reliving the gruesome blood when my half-brother's natural mother, Helen, tries to kill herself, opening her eyes wide as she tells me how my older half-brother Aaron, Helen's youngest, beats his head against the side of the crib when he is an infant, giving himself cuts, bruises, and once, a black eye; accusing Adam of being a wife beater, melding stories I tell her of life with him and my step-mother with stories she tells from when Adam and Helen live at home with her and my grandfather Zadie after Gary is born. The stories usually come to some conclusion where she is proven right, or where she gives someone his or her comeuppance.

Yet there is magic and transformation in her back-story. She isn't particularly pretty, but with money, grooming, and flair, she makes herself into a high class dame. Her guileful skills will rub off on me. I will transform from a lumpy child into a swan. I can will it into existence. She is powerful as I will be, willful as I will be, feared as I will be, funny as I will be, and deeply unhappy. That is okay. Unhappiness is also inherited. Pour a scotch. Tell a joke at someone else's expense. Go for the jugular and when they cry snort in their face: "Come on! I'm kidding! Can't you tell?!"

There is a picture taken at the bar mitzvah of her younger son, my uncle. Every other woman there is dowdy by modern standards. Their undefined bosoms sag down to their waists in shapeless dresses that give their waists and hips the impression of being the same size. They are respectable. Dutiful. The mother of the bar mitzvah, only later to be called Buddie and Beelzebubbe, sits apart from the others. She wears a strapless yellow silk dress, her firm breasts pointing out, creating a right angle beneath them down to her tiny waist. She is blonde, her hair is artfully arranged, and a cigarette is casually draped between two of her long red nails.

She stares blankly out at nothing in particular, looking like she has no idea how she ended up in this room, with these people, in this life.

Barbed Wire and the Violent Vegetarian

We are in Texas. It is winter. I am nine and being kept out of school by my father Adam who does not believe in school. He is building the first of a number of ranches and often puts us to work stripping cedar posts. It is complicated. Some of the bark comes off easily, in big flaps, but the rest has to be cut off with a knife in jagged, small sections, leaving your fingers feeling arthritic and gnarled. I'm not sure how it gets into my father's head for my brothers and me to be unpaid, outdoor slave labor. Retribution for running away the summer before? Does it qualify as our home schooling? We are sent off early each morning with someone else driving us since our father is too busy screaming on the phone to strip cedar posts.

When we arrive at the ranch I often steal the keys to the pickup truck and lock myself inside, refusing to peel posts. I wonder when someone will think to get an extra set of keys but they never do. We need hundreds of stripped cedar posts, thousands it seems like, to use for the barbed-wire fences that circle the acreage we are calling home that month. This is why I want to go to school, this is the kind of day labor I want to avoid. It is like sweatshop work without the shop, and what the government has in mind in the early twentieth century when they ban certain child labor practices. The only relief is losing myself in the grim satisfaction of ripping apart the bark, peeling it back like flesh, stabbing it with my knife, seeing his face.

I really can't imagine what my father is thinking. Maybe he is farsighted and getting us ready for the new global economy, for foreign outsourcing, though now that it is here, I think rather than outdoor work I would prefer being on the phone in India for America Online. I already have the skills to be as unhelpful as any of their customer service reps.

Many years later I become friends with a woman who is a childhood friend of my half-sister's, who is born when I am eight. Her friend is a witness to the Bernstein household long after I have any contact with it. Apparently Adam goes vegetarian at that point. My sister's friend laughingly tells me how when her mother first meets Adam she comes away saying he is the most violent, psychotic vegetarian she has ever met and refuses to be in the same room with him ever again.

Shattered Glass and a 200 IQ

After the chest burning, after learning I am loved by my too-often naked monster, I start trying to solve the technical problems of faking a suicide attempt.

But I am notoriously poor at working with my hands. I score in the 25th percentile on the portion of an aptitude test that covers spatial and mechanical reasoning. The practical aspects of how to manage a noose, how to let a chair fall without actually killing myself, and then how to make it all seem like a near-miss, while giving the performance of my life when found by my father, proves overly complicated.

I'm ashamed for never having the guts to go through with it. It might have worked, bringing me back to my mother a couple of years earlier than it happens.

At least my discovery of His love emboldens me to be more forthright about wanting to leave. It's so hard to get any time away from Adam, the naked father, even on just a daily basis. He keeps my brothers out of school because he thinks it will be bad for them. Attempts by our step-mother Laura at home schooling are haphazard at best. I not only like to read, but rebel-with-a-cause to the end, I always insist on going to school. I demand it. No matter how much he tries to sweet-talk me out of it. How else could I get the hell out of the house?

Once we move out of Blanco and to a ranch some seventeen miles away, I have to get up very early to catch the bus for school, to go on a two-hour ride that snakes through miles of country roads. I often go out an hour or so early, even before sunrise, to the highway, Ranch Road 165, in front of the gate and the cattle guard that leads to the road on our property, and I wait for the bus, happy to be alone, singing, dreaming of how famous I will be one day.

Maybe Adam thinks we don't need school because his brilliance will rub off on us through osmosis. He tells me he is the smartest person I will ever know in my life. I want to laugh, knowing I shouldn't, but not knowing why. Family lore has it that his childhood IQ score is over 200.

Adam enjoys telling a story about what happens when his parents, Buddie and Zadie, send him to military school hoping to gain control of the little fiend in their midst. One day when he and his fellow military students are in formation outside, my dad becomes obsessed with the idea that he has to quench his thirst immediately with orange juice. He does not raise his hand or ask permission, he just breaks rank and begins making his way back to the building. His commander, or whatever such people are called at military academies, orders him to stop. Adam doesn't respond, just keeps going. The commander then orders several of the older students with some sort of defined older student responsibilities to go after Adam. My father outruns them, refusing to stop. As the chase becomes more in earnest he just runs faster, making his way to the building, tearing down the hall, and sprinting across the mess hall to the kitchen. It is locked. He breaks the glass with his fists, lets himself in, and right there, bleeding all over the floor, pours himself his glass of orange juice.

We all laugh a lot when he tells this story, like trained monkeys. We knew we are supposed to find his sort of "Billy Jack" iconoclasm worthy of respect. I think of it now and I want to peel off all my skin and throw myself into a vat of boiling oil.

The Monster Under the Bed Loves Me

Finding out my dad Adam loves me happens quite by accident when I burn myself badly. We live in Blanco, Texas, population 1,022. I am seven. I'm looking for ice in the freezer and my step-mother Laura has placed a boiling hot pot of tea on the top shelf to cool. I pull it down, searing my entire torso with the boiling tea. It is bad. My dad races me the seventeen miles to the hospital in Johnson City, and for once I am not afraid of his speed-demon ways in the car. He keeps up a steady stream of conversation with me, about nothing at all really, just hoping to keep my mind off the pain, which is agonizing. He's great in that kind of crisis, knowing just how far to joke, when to pull back and offer soothing sounds of empathy, when to shut up. He and my step-mother give me nothing for the pain before we leave for the hospital. Their organically inclined household isn't like mine now, where I have an embarrassingly large collection of pain pills and tranquilizers on hand. Adam and Laura don't believe in aspirin.

At the hospital the doctors do whatever they do to fix me up. I don't much remember much, though I do recall them wheeling me out to the car and not listening to me when I tell them that I want to shift the hospital gown so that my seven year-old penis isn't hanging there getting cold.

My realization about my dad loving me comes on the drive home. The first thing he does is stop for gas, telling me that the whole way to Johnson City, to the hospital, terror filled him since the gas gauge was on empty. He tells how he is frightened on the trip he might run out of gas but stopping for gas is unthinkable with me in so much pain. That's when it dawns on me that he loves me. He is not remotely a man given to confessing fear or confusion - in fact I don't remember him ever doing it before or since - but his reaction here to me being burned is unmistakably that of someone who is worried about a person he regards with actual love.

I am astounded.

I have given him little consideration beyond wanting to get away from him. Escaping Adam. A Lifetime movie title. I make him a villain without ever thinking of him as an actual person. You don't stop to ponder the humanity of the monster under the bed, you just stab him and run away.

Along with his booming roar of a voice, filled with damning expletives, I now most remember his smile, a sort of shit-eating grin - a self-satisfied smirk that sometimes shifts into a deep, striking kindness before inevitably at some point dropping back into something challenging and ugly. Violence comes even in the quiet times when a word of encouragement can somehow morph into a character autopsy. I am frozen around him. My heart stops. Time doesn't exist as I generally smile and chat away, presenting a face to the world so false it takes my breath away when I think about it now.

On the drive back to Blanco from the hospital, even with the pain of the burns on my chest rekindling and starting to overpower the drugs, thinking of my father having feelings and fears about me blows my mind. I use the pain medication as an excuse, consciously looking like I'm zoning out so I can ponder what I've learned. Adam loves me. The bad man loves me. I turn the realization over and over in my mind, looking at it from every side, wondering if I can turn it to my advantage. The answer hits me with a blinding, scarily adult sort of clarity:

If he loves me I can use that against him, since I don't love him. I know instinctively that not loving holds the tactical advantage over loving. I look at the situation from an emotionless, businesslike perspective, pondering how I might use this new information to gain my freedom from him. Rage may have threaded itself throughout my childhood self but this isn't like that. Realizing that our imbalance of affection will become a weapon of war is a coolly strategic observation, made without rancor. On some level I'm aware this is not the normal observation of a well-adjusted seven year-old.

Shit For Brains

I think of my grandmother, Buddie, a.k.a. Beelzebubbe born fifty years later. She will start Microsoft or build the Luxor in Vegas or rub out a leader of the Jewish Mafia so she can steal his empire. Hers is a life defined by a kind of misdirected nuclear energy. Maybe having a family is her biggest mistake but doing anything else isn't an option in her town, in her social circle - even as she bolts that circle the first time she and Zadie made a buck, never really looking back except to dredge it up once in a while to prove how she and Zadie are morally superior to everyone else who doesn't know the value of a dollar.

She and a childhood friend save the nickel the streetcar costs, and walk all the way to the movie theatre downtown so they can have both popcorn and a pickle. When I was a child we didn't have feet.

Buddie's favorite place in the world is Vegas, never once said with the preceding "Las." In some years she goes as many as nine times, never winning or losing more than a few thousand, which keeps it from seeming like an addiction. What appeals to her is the timelessness. No phones, no sunlight, no children or grandchildren, and usually no husband. She likes secrets and she withholds information for no real reason, things that don't matter to anyone but her. It has its advantages sometimes. Toward the end of his life Zadie is getting a bit forgetful. It isn't Alzheimer's or even senility, just a general lessening of his mental prowess, like only being able to recognize the abbreviations on the Dow for stocks he owns personally rather than the abbreviations for every single company listed. Buddie has planned a trip to Vegas with a friend. This is completely normal. Zadie no longer wishes to accompany her anywhere. But she keeps the trip secret if for no other reason than because it gives her pleasure. At the last minute her friend backs out, selfishly deciding to stay in San Antonio when her husband has a heart attack. It may be a cliche, but Buddie's actual response is, "Everything happens to me." Later that night Buddie is playing gin with her niece, my cousin Edy. Zadie walks into the kitchen and Buddie turns to him impatiently. "Are you packed yet?" she demands. He looks confused. "Where are we going?" She turns on him violently. "I told you! I told you we were going to Vegas tomorrow! What? Do you have shit for brains now? Is that it? I told you! I told you! I told you all about the trip!" She slaps her hands on the table for emphasis several times, going so far as to disturb the deck of cards next to her placemat. "I told you!" In a bit of a fuddle Zadie mumbles that he will go pack, that he's sorry he forgot. When he is gone Buddie turns to Edy with a laugh. "I didn't tell him."

Black Market Cheese

My grandparents, Buddie a.k.a. Beelzebubbe and Zadie, are both from very poor families. Zadie leaves school after sixth grade in Chicago so he can help support his mother. He likes to tell us how he once sells a newspaper to a man who takes it over to a car with Al Capone sitting in the back seat. Zadie's main income as a kid is from selling sandwiches to prisoners in the local jail, splitting the money he makes with the guards, greasing the wheels even then. He meets my grandmother not in the jailhouse as certain wags suggest today, but on a job-seeking trip to San Antonio, Texas. Courtship leads to marriage and before he knows it my grandfather is borrowing his father-in-law's bread truck every day at the crack of dawn to make milk deliveries before the bread comes out of the ovens at the bakery.

Zadie is a humble milkman. A mere fifteen years later he has his own thriving cheese and dairy company that grows to the point of being one of the largest distributors of store-labeled cheese in the business. That means his cheese is rarely sold under his company name but instead is packaged to be the Safeway brand, the Kroger brand, or in Texas, the H.E.B. brand; H.E.B. being the most dominant grocery chain in Texas, initialed after its founder, Howard E. Butts, though a Jewish friend of ours gleefully points out that H.E.B. can be construed as standing for Heeb, and I can't think of it any other way now.

How Zadie gets from rags to riches remains murky, though he does admit that one of his biggest breaks is figuring out how to sell black market cheese during World War II, when rationing is in effect. He boasts that the government never bothers him because he always pays taxes on whatever he makes, even the cash that comes in under the table. There are also some incredibly well-timed stock transactions that might now be called insider trading. By the late '40s they are rich. If he were to know now how the business will fall apart years later at different times under the care of his sons, he'd die all over again.

The loss of the business under his descendants might be shocking to him, but he probably would not find it surprising. He avidly enjoys turning to total strangers in restaurants, telling them, "My sons are chemists. They make shit out of money." Later it is our turn, and he says it about the grandkids, much to our annoyance. He is right but we all hate hearing it.

Buddie and Zadie come from nothing and make something of themselves, financially at least, and they see one another as true partners where the money is concerned, neither begrudging the other much of anything, particularly since they are both actually quite frugal a lot of time. Much of her more valuable jewelry comes from Zadie foreclosing on personal loans he makes to people they know, and keeping the jewelry he is holding as security. Imagine the small talk at Hadassah when Buddie flashes a jewel on her finger that everyone there knows actually belongs to some other financially strapped mahjong partner.

Buddie probably gets a big kick out of waving her ill-gotten rocks under their noses. She likes to cackle and then confide to me in her deep baritone, "There's nothing I hate more than a bunch of women."

Felony Fraud and the Ugliest Sable Coat in the History of the World

We all inherit the seed of larceny from my grandmother Buddie a.k.a. Beelzebubbe. There are many, many illegalities over the years: stealing china in Aruba, smuggling pearls from Hong Kong, taking a loaf of bread from Jerry's Deli in Los Angeles on the night my first movie premieres - but the incident involving her sable coat turned her into a career criminal to me.

My grandparents are married for almost sixty years before the death of my grandfather, whom we call Zadie. Talk of divorce first surfaces in about 1934. They hate each other. You know how you sometimes go out with a couple who fights? How you sit embarrassed in a restaurant while they snipe at one another, each turning to you for confirmation of how idiotic, misguided, and just plain wrong the other one is? Now imagine that couple armed with semiautomatic weapons. Buddie and Zadie are at war from the time I meet them.

The sable is a by-product of a particularly nasty separation when she throws him out of the house. "Let him go live with his mistress," she shouts to me over the phone, her baritone going bass. This is where she mentions the bleeding from his penis thing. To me it isn't too much information. I'm fascinated.

She is so angry at his betrayal, his bleeding putz aside, that she goes out and buys a full-length $14,000.00 sable coat. Money is not a normal flashpoint for them, so her act of economic revenge is kind of weird. Every other couple in the world might argue about money, but my grandparents, the most contentious married people in history, are surprisingly fair-minded about it. Both are from very poor families. When they strike it rich they figure they both deserve it.

So Buddie buying the sable coat as an act of retribution is an aberration. She can buy a sable anytime she wants, no questions asked. She starts hating the coat once they reconcile - well, they're living together again anyway, if not truly reconciled. That crappy sable really is phenomenally ugly, and there it is, day after day, hanging in her closet, reminding her of the recent bad blood between them. That just pisses her off.

The sable is fully insured of course, so she takes to wearing it out to dinner and casually leaving it draped over chairs, hoping someone might steal it. No takers, which gets her even more pissed off. Buddie is defiantly adamant about not wanting to keep that coat. "Why should I have to look at it? Tell me! Why?!" Like that explains everything that follows.

My cousin Edy, Buddie's niece, gets a terse phone call in Northridge, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. "There will be a package for you at the Greyhound bus terminal arriving in three days. Don't ask any questions." Then a click. Edy and Buddie are very close, but becoming a criminal accessory has never been part of my cousin's role in the relationship.

Back in San Antonio Buddie calls the police. "I came home, the door was open, the coat was gone." She sticks to that story no matter who asks the questions. "I came home, the door was open, the coat was gone." When the police point out the lack of signs of a forced entry she remains nonplused. "Maybe they stole a key." She has actually planned it all out rather well. Two days previously she takes most of her jewelry to the safe deposit box, using an upcoming trip as an excuse, reasoning that if she is going to say her coat was stolen, the first question will be about whether anything else is missing, and she knows not to push her luck. One of her diamond rings is worth $75,000.00. As tempting as it is, she can't go there. "Thank God my jewelry was in the vault, or they might have gotten that too." Clever girl.

It gets worse. The man who facilitates her insurance policy is married to Edy's brother's ex-wife, a woman who despite not being a blood relative remains loyal to Buddie, serving as chauffeur, gopher, and schlepper for decades, until my grandmother angrily drops her for no good reason a couple of years before she dies, breaking the woman's heart. But Buddie wants to get rid of that damned sable, she wants her money back, and the force of that desire obscures the idea that committing felony insurance fraud might be wrong, or that screwing over people she considers family isn't very nice.

A few days later Edy drives all the way to downtown Los Angeles and picks up her box. In it are the sable coat, two or three old sport coats of Zadie's, and a broken travel alarm clock. "They also took some of my husband's clothes and a few electrical appliances. I came home, the door was open, the coat was gone."

Everyone knows she is lying but it's impossible to prove. These days they could send a pert medical forensics specialist to locate the trail of sable hairs between Buddie's house and the Greyhound bus terminal in downtown San Antonio, linking the crime to my cousin, and tracing it to the thrift store where well over a decade later Edy finally disposes of it.

I have no doubt Buddie imagines she is doing Edy a good turn by sending her the coat. She urges her to sell it and keep the money. But how exactly does she envision Edy fencing a custom-cut, full-length sable coat, with my grandmother's name embroidered in large silk thread along the lining? The coat sits in the closet, making my cousin nervous for fifteen years. Her house is destroyed twice, once by the Northridge quake, and once by a city bus jumping the curb and knocking off three rooms, but that coat survives. Round about the fifteen-year mark Edy calls me. "I finally got rid of it!" she says. We probably haven't spoken of the sable coat for a few years, but I know immediately what she's talking about, and I knew it's a huge relief to have gotten rid of the burden, no matter how many years has passed.

"I came home, the door was open, the coat was gone."

Scotch and Sympathy

Once my grandmother, Beelzebubbe, starts giving me the dirt on my brothers' crazy birth mother, the floodgates open and she begins sharing with me the details of her various lawless escapades. She even involves me in minor ones, like shoplifting from supermarkets and filching bits of dishware from restaurants. "Here," she cracks , handing me a stack of sheets and towels from the maid's cart at the Parker Meridien in New York, "Stick these in your suitcase. And could you get some boxes of Kleenex in there too?" I was nervous about it at first. "What's the big deal?!" she says, "They want you to take it!"

She loves breaking the law but never considers herself guilty of anything as serious as stealing, insurance fraud, or international customs violations; which is, properly speaking, what she actually is guilty of. The next time your grandmother starts stuffing Sweet n' Low into her pocketbook at McDonald's, remember, it could be a gateway crime.

Much later, when I am seventeen and move to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, she calls often, cackling over the phone, "Have mink, will travel!" to let me know she wants to see me. I think she's great. She gambles, drinks, bleaches her hair, says "fuck" a lot, and wear an eight carat diamond ring. On her visits to New York we sit up all night playing gin and eating brisket sandwiches from Wolf's on 57th Street.

She's tough. Game. A real broad. I believe she is capable of killing, like Barbara Stanwyck in "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers." I like that. I adore her for all the wrong reasons. I'm embarrassed to admit that it's only just now occurring to me how much she resembles Helen Lawson, the boozy, cruel, beast of Broadway, a viciously funny caricature of Ethel Merman in "Valley of the Dolls" - but then for me everything does somehow loop-the-loop back to Jacqueline Susann.

When I am very little, as young as five, Beelzebubbe has cocktail hour, pouring me a large glass of water with a small amount of Dewar's scotch in it. She believes that an early introduction to alcohol will demystify it enough to keep me from overindulging once I come of age. In actual practice it gives me an incredible tolerance for alcohol. Before I turn fourteen I can drink any adult under the table.

Meet Beelzebubbe

I now call my dead grandmother Beelzebubbe, which is a combination of "Bubbe," the Jewish word for grandmother and "Beelzebub," another name for Satan. I say it with love. Really. But it is a recent name. For most of our lives we call her "Buddie" instead of Bubbe, since we aren't really Jewish about being Jewish.

When I am insatiably curious about the woman who has emerged as the secret mother of my older brothers it is Buddie who gives me all the gory details, breathlessly recounting in her cigarette rasp of a voice her version of how Helen tries to kill both children and tries to kill herself, before ending up confined to the loony bin, whereupon my father meets my mother in a bowling alley and marries her.

When the court gives Helen's family custody of Gary and Aaron anyway (apparently her dad is a judge) our father steals both kids, then just babies, and whisks them, along with his new wife Sally, destined to be my mother, to Mexico, where they hide out from American authorities for a year or two.

So... He steals the two kids from their mother and leaves. Is it just me, or is a pattern emerging here?

My grandmother’s voice is a throaty cross between Bea Arthur, Marlon Brando in "The Godafther," and Harvey Fierstein. A few years later, after her favorite grandchild, my brother Gary, dies, I will move from second-best into the number one slot. But at the moment I am eager to please her, eager to bond somehow. Her bile at Helen, my brother's birth mother, proves a way in.

When I visit her alone a few months after the running away incident, she isn't particularly upset or surprised that we bolted. Nothing ever really surprises her. We shop for clothes and go to the all-you-can-eat Pizza Hut buffet where I flirt with bulimia while she sits glamorously, just having coffee, pouring out the cold remains in my water glass when the waiter comes to refill her cup, leaving lipstick stains, clicking her long, polished nails against the rim of the coffee cup.

For her the story of Revelation and our running away is about how much of a little monster Adam has always been, and how he was always out to give her as much grief as possible. "He and Helen put me through hell,” she says, "Absolute hell." She does not tell me to respect my father. She calls him a bastard, warming to how much obvious delight I take in her storytelling skills.

She tells me about my grandfather's mistress, bellowing, "I don’t know what he does with her, since with his kidney problems he's bleeding from his goddamned penis." Cool.

I revel in our new closeness. We were equals now and I want more than anything to light one of her cigarettes and smoke it just like she does, taking deep, elegant drags, blowing the smoke away from the table, in between shocking disclosures.

Valley of the Dolls

I spend most of my time wanting to be someone else. A vague idea at the age of five when we are living in Phoenix, that I will one day be a famous actor, blossoms full-blown at the age of seven, in Texas, when I find an old, dog-eared copy of "Valley of the Dolls" and read it for the first of many times. Masochism, mass love, and misery leap off every page, feeding and paralleling my own sense of drama and martyrdom. These women eagerly accept punishment for wanting so very much from the world, but they also call the shots and Live Large. Their despair is glorious, inevitable, rapturous. Neely O'Hara, Jennifer North, and Anne Wells, my id, ego, and superego. I read it over and over again, some thirty-nine times in the coming five years. I count, marking each reading. I buy into every bit of it, the heartache, the sexual humiliation, the boom/bust cycles of wild success, incapacitating failure, and spectacular rebirth.

Somehow my fantasies about one day being allowed by my father to once again live with my mother get intertwined with my fantasies about living in the world of "Valley of the Dolls." Mom is breathtakingly glamorous to me. Being allowed to live with her is as achingly impossible as Neely, Jennifer, or Anne finding happiness. But I will be like them. I will give up everything to make my dreams come true. My mother and I will be together. We will have whatever we want. I will be loved by the masses and by her as well. I'm such a little freak.

The Irony of the Unintended Fist

Here is my first crappy memory of my father, Adam: I am three since my parents are in the same bed. Our grandmother, whom I will call Beelzebubbe many years later, gives my brothers and me these small timers on key chains. It takes us a while to figure out how to use them, there is some sort of trick, I don't remember what. But once we understand how we each set our timers for a minute, they tick until time is up, and then they loudly ding. Mom has made some sugar cookies the day before, the kind with colored sugar on top, and we're happily setting our timers, and then eating a cookie at every ding. Eventually we run out of cookies. For some unknown reason I then get it into my head to show the timer to my parents. I toddle into their bedroom where they are lying naked, Mom awake, my father asleep. He is very hairy. Her breasts are very large. She covers them up. I show the timer to her and she smiles. Then I want to show him, Adam, my father, Dad. I creep over and hold the timer to his ear, so he can hear the ticking. The dinger goes off. Adam is startled. His fist shoots out like a boxing glove on an accordion extension in a cartoon. I fly across the room. Then I run back into the kitchen and sit under the table screeching. Both of my parents are mortified. It is an accident, and one of the few times I remember Adam being absolutely sorry about anything. First memory. Unlike many of my generation I earn rather than inherit the right to see the world as a place of immeasurable irony.

Dreams Die Hard

My fantasy world is one of two extremes - the Eden of what I imagine my life will be like if I can ever live with my mother again, and the Hopped Up Hell of various revenge fantasies, the most common of which involves a faked suicide attempt and my father, Adam's realization of how wrong he is to keep me away from her.

I never find the technical wherewithal to make good on that plan, as my mechanical reasoning skills are notoriously poor.

My favorite idea of revenge, as opposed to the daydream I have most often, is rather more vivid and violent. I am scary inside, like the kid in "The Omen." We're in New Mexico, where the gunman with the rotten aim shoots up our living room, aiming at Dad (see "Magic Bullets and a Fairy Princess"), and I'm five years-old, when I start having a recurring dream: My dad is naked and tied to a metal bed frame. (I will insist for years there is nothing sexual in the scenario, but like, how dumb is that?) Adam struggles wildly. Slowly I advance, straight razor in hand. I start slicing away at bits and pieces of him, making him beg for mercy, for forgiveness, and finally for death. But I keep going slow. I don't want him to die too quickly. If he does he'll miss feeling the pain.

I start having this dream a while before starting first grade. See spot run. See Dick and Jane cross the street. See Dad Die. That sounds like a movie for Lifetime. I should pitch it to Lifetime. Melissa Gilbert can play my mother, Adrian Pasdar can be Dad, and some Disney Channel brat with a pretty pout can be me.

I actually think that particular fantasy is healthy under the circumstances. Stop laughing and hear me out. It's about control, about forcing him to empathize with what I'm feeling, and about a deep-seated belief that what's happening to me is wrong. I mean, it's not like I ever actually try to make the fantasy a reality. Clearly, if I can't manage one little pseudo-suicide attempt, how in the world can I get him naked and tied to a chair?

Of course, if I actually had sliced him to ribbons, selling the story to Lifetime would be a slam dunk, but I would hold out for a feature film. Then Hilary Swank could play me and win a third Oscar for playing a boy. Actually parts of it already are a movie, my first, a gritty drama called "Silent Lies" that wins some awards at festivals in 1996, miraculously gets picked up for distribution, and starts me on my way to the Hollywood High Life.

I am now a very different kind of prisoner.

Note: Actor Michael Harris, above, as "Carl Saltemier" in a still from "Silent Lies."

We love You

The Lawman and the Little Boy

I have it all planned out: Aaron and I will run away and Gary will stay behind to tearfully explain that we won't ever come back unless Dad agrees we can all stay with Mom. My mother. Forever. I am willing to share her with my nowhalf-brothers since I know she belongs to me alone. I'm so generous.

Aaron and I trudge over ten miles, following the freeway access road, back toward the airport, to an apartment complex Mom lived in when she first got to Austin. There is a friendly neighbor there, someone we think can help us, hide us, maybe even feed us. The neighbor isn't home. We sit, waiting on the outdoor stairs that go up to the second floor of the complex. Several other tenants demand to know what we're up to. We decline to answer, only saying we're waiting for the neighbor to get home, that we are expected. One of the bastards calls the cops, and next thing we know a sheriff's car pulls up.

A sweaty, muscle-bound redneck in uniform ambles over. I think he's pretty cute but thankfully I resist offering to become his one and only little boy right on the spot. Such an offer might further complicate the trouble we're already in. There is a lecture at the station, along with dire warnings of what happens to evil children who break the law. Twenty years or so later the Travis County District Attorney indicts an eleven year-old learning-disabled African-American girl for a murder she decidedly has not committed. They are a serious bunch. I often think of the officer over the next few years in private moments - a delicate way of saying I close my eyes and picture him when I play with myself.

The dreamboat lawman dumps us back at Mom's house. She looks miserable. Gary has probably screwed up his part of the plan, I think, so I'm not sure if she quite gets that we ran away not from her but from Adam. Later I know she knows. Just not at the moment. Adam interrogates us, which is terrifying. God, his voice. If a razor could roar it would sound like him. I am not sorry and I don't pretend. Usually I am very good at pretending. I don't know about the Stockholm Syndrome yet but I think I instinctively understand that hostages who at least act like they identify with their captors have a better shot at making it out alive. I know how to give a reasonable facsimile of identifying with my captor but sometimes the pressure builds up too far, and without warning my head cracks open, splattering the room with bile and pus. My father's interrogation is one of those moments. I know I should act like I'm sorry but his every accusation infuriates me further. Gary and Aaron are crying. I keep my head down but suddenly the words, "Fuck you," come out of my mouth, aimed in his direction. I am in terrible danger. My captor sees the truth, his outraged, "What did you say?!" scaring me straight. I cry out, lying, screaming that what I said was, "I'm sorry!" which Dad isn't fool enough to believe. He picks me up like he wants to tear me in half and takes off down the hall with me hanging from his shoulder. My mother shudders like she might break apart but does nothing to stop him.

Once he has me, though, he doesn't quite know what to do with me. Maybe I freak him out too much. Maybe he senses how my thoughts revert to other father figures, to my cop, to men. Finally Dad takes me to the bedroom my brothers and I are sharing that summer and unceremoniously dumps me on my twin bed. I melt into the cool feeling of the blue leatherette bedspread against my cheek as I check out, privately losing myself inside a world of my own creation.

I am a princess. My own personal lawman rescues me.