Read Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography for Free Online

ever-present sense that something bad can happen at any minute.
    I escape by bus to the theater and throw myself into any play I can find, like Oklahoma! , The Time of Your Life , and Stop the World—I Want to Get Off (what an apropos title for me!). My dad, always the one looking to have fun and making sure we did the same, arranges for me to appear on a local cable-access kids’ show, Clubhouse 22 . I’d watched it for years and loved the host, a hip guy named Malcolm and his sidekick, Duffy the Dog. Walking into the television studio, I feel an electric charge I still get sometimes today. The bright lights, the smell of paint and freshly cut wood, and the thrilling disconnect between fantasy and reality that you feel when you behold a TV or movie set and its unique mixture of beautiful fakery and practical, unexpected reality.
    On the air, I help Malcolm and Duffy the Dog pick a prizewinner from the mailbag and am shocked when Duffy later removes his giant dog head to reveal a very beautiful blonde woman. (Years later, when I discover that my dad had been secretly banging Duffy the Dog, I don’t think I was ever more proud. If that’s the connection that got me onto my first set, so much the better.)
    I’d also finally found a gang of neighborhood kids to hang out with, building forts, throwing mudballs, and playing tackle football. Although they thought I was a “freak” for my “acting,” we bonded over our love of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Pete Rose, and the Big Red Machine, and ignored our differences, like their proclivity for petty theft and the killing and eating of neighborhood squirrels. (I often found skinned, bloody squirrel bodies in my friend’s kitchen sink. His family was from Appalachia—“briar” is the local pejorative for them—and squirrel meat was a traditional food source. It was all very Deliverance .)
    Soon Mom was pregnant again, and in keeping with my tradition of harsh judgments on such matters, I thought, Pregnant? You’re so old!
    She was thirty-three. Micah was born that summer and I hoped it would make our house less volatile. It didn’t. My mom and Bill repainted their bedroom walls black-brown. Even an eleven-year-old knows that this can’t be a good sign. The thing was, I had a good relationship with my stepfather, and I wanted their marriage to last. Bill and I listened to talk radio, cheered Senator Ervin at the Watergate hearings, did door-to-door campaigning for everyone from George McGovern to Senator Howard Metzenbaum.
    When Micah was a couple years old, my mother began to retreat to her bedroom for hours a day, every day. She wrote short stories and poems and kept a daily journal (which she would do for the rest of her life). But her mysterious illness was gaining a grip on her. She began to feel that Chad was also suffering from what she thought were “allergies.” And so she checked Chad and herself into the country’s leading hospital for universal allergics, Henrotin Hospital in downtown Chicago. There they were to fast, having nothing but water for two weeks, and then eat nothing but blueberries. The doctors would see how they reacted. Another fast would follow and another single food would be introduced, each more exotic than the next, culminating in caribou meat. Chad, seven years old and feeling perfectly fine, was terrified, but off he went, the first passenger on the first of my mother’s grand expeditions into the rising dawn of self-fulfillment, self-help, and self-obsession.
    Upon their release from the universal allergy hospital, both my mom and Chad seemed exactly the same. What had changed was our refrigerator. It was now stocked with buffalo and caribou meats, and we were regimented to drinking special water. We consumed handfuls of vitamins that made me want to vomit. Chad and I looked forward to the weekends when we got to be with our dad and gorge on hamburgers, milkshakes, and pizza. Not surprisingly, on those carefree weekends, Chad felt