I have never been one to pay much attention to gender identification. We had – well, we still have – a cat named Penelope who lives with my mom, but she has both paws in the grave at this point. I named her Penelope before we learned she was actually a boy, but we didn’t change her name and we still refer to her as a “her” to this day.
Other stuffed animals have come and gone over the years. I have a two-headed bear that I never named. It was a gift from an ex-boyfriend. It was a pretty perfect gift. Soft and disturbing, which is how I would describe myself. I still have it. It’s too perfect, which is also how he would describe himself. I’ve gotten a lot of stuffed animals from boyfriends over the years. I’m someone who likes to erase all record of an ex as soon as we break up. I try to Eternal Sunshine them from my life. I erase all pictures from my cell phone and throw away all gifts. I save printed pictures, but in a box in the closet.
The same ex who gave me the two-headed bear gave me a huge – and I mean huge – stuffed gorilla for Valentine’s Day. We named him Carlos. And don’t look into that for some racial undertones. I just liked the name Carlos. We’d joke about how he got me huge gifts even though I had a tiny apartment. He’d buy me giant things that didn’t fit in it, sometimes on purpose. Once he got me a huge plant, more like a tree, which made my apartment look like a place Jane Goodall would want to hang out. I had to drag it to the backyard area, which in New York City is really just a frightening alley for rats to frolic in and eat whatever you’re storing out there – in my case, boogie boards.
The last stuffed toy I got from a boyfriend is a little stuffed horse. When my two-year-old niece first saw him, she started to call him “Neigh,” which is the sound a horse makes, in case you grew up in a city. She now sleeps with Neigh and I have to play the waiting game until she moves on from him, but they’ve been going strong for a while now. I hope she isn’t like that with dudes when she grows up. Or chicks. Or maybe she won’t identify as female. Whatever she does will be fine. Or he. Damn, it’s hard to write a book and not get yelled at.
I know you just started reading this book so you are still getting to know me, and maybe you are questioning my commitment to these animals. You think I’m writing a fanciful flight about these odd and amusing creatures. But I am 100 percent genuine in my devotion to them. Where does my obsession with them end? Not in a disgusting New York City garbage can where I once made a boyfriend rescue them after we discovered the movers had made a terrible mistake and thrown them all away. (To be fair to the movers, Pokey does look like she belongs in a dark alley in a war-torn village and not in a nice grown-ass woman’s bedroom.) You might be thinking of asking me, Amy, did you commission Tilda Swinton’s life partner, Sandro, to paint a portrait of your stuffed animals to commemorate them forever and ever? No, that would be taking it too far – oh wait, no, I mean fuck YES I did that.
They’re worth it. Each one of them is a ratty, pilled pile of fabric sewn together precariously, but I love them more than most of my family.
When I was fourteen my dad shit himself at an amusement park.
It all went down one fine summer morning when he took Kim and me to Adventureland, which is exactly what it sounds like: an amusement park filled with adventure, as long as you’ve never been on an actual adventure or to an actual amusement park. I’d fantasized about the trip the whole week, dreaming about my two favorite rides: the pirate ship and the swings. Granted, they were two of the tamer rides at the park, but for me, they were at the absolute outer limit of my comfort zone. I liked the rides that gave you that feeling of weightlessness that shot from your stomach right down to your vagina when the ride dropped, but I’d never enjoyed a ride that went upside down or spun around until I puked, and I still don’t. I guess you could say I have a low tolerance for fear in general.
The movie Clue terrified me beyond belief as a child. I slept with a pillow on my back because the chef in that movie was stabbed in the back with a huge kitchen knife. Not gonna happen to this gal; just try to get a knife through this pillow, I thought. As if a murderer would enter my bedroom at night intent on stabbing me in the back, see that there was a pillow there, and cancel his plans. I used a similar tactic after hearing about (but not seeing) the movie Misery. I slept with pillows covering my legs in case Kathy Bates got a late-night urge to drive out to Long Island, break into my home, and beat my legs with a mallet. Maybe this is why I always slept with (still sleep with) all my scary-looking horror-show stuffed animals. For protection.
Suffice it to say, I was a major scaredy-cat. In fourth grade, I had a talk with the school psychologist about all the things that actively terrified me. I wasn’t sent to see him by a concerned teacher, I actually asked to see him. I was probably the only nine-year-old in history who requested time with a shrink. After our session, he handed my mom a list of all my fears. This list included earthquakes and tapeworms, which didn’t usually come up much where I lived, but my brother was learning about them in school and he couldn’t resist the urge to convince me I was nothing more than a sitting duck who was 100 percent going to get eaten alive from the inside by a worm. Highest (and most memorable) on the list, however, was the specific fear that I’d accidentally churn myself into butter. This was inspired by a creepy antique children’s book called Little Black Sambo, which is one of those stories from the simpler, more racist times of yore when people wrote frightening, insulting tales to help children fall asleep at night. It was highly popular back in the day and has since been rightly banned or taken out of circulation. But my mom had a copy lying around. It’s about a boy who goes on an adventure and ends up getting chased by tigers, who circle and circle around a tree so fast that they churn themselves into a pool of butter, which the boy then takes home for his mother to use to make pancakes. Like ya do. Anyway, I was always riddled with fear that I’d somehow be transformed into melted butter, which now doesn’t really sound like that much of a bummer. It sounds more like how I’d like to spend my last twenty-four hours on this earth.
Anywhoozle, the morning my dad was going to take us to Adventureland, I woke up and got dressed in denim shorts that stopped just above the knee (crazy flattering) and a long T-shirt with the Tasmanian Devil on it, to let people know what was up. The shirt had to be knotted at the side because it was the early nineties and that’s how you rocked out then.
It was not usual for my dad to take us on fun outings, but our parents had recently divorced, so we’d started spending solo time with him. This way, we could sneak in some fun, and he could sneak in feeling like a parent. He picked us up in his little red convertible around ten a.m. (even after he lost everything, he still always drove a convertible). I sat in the front because the back was too windy, and I convinced Kim that she’d like it better. It was about a forty-minute drive from our house, but it felt like four hundred because of the anticipation: the dozen or so rides, the limitless Sour Powers, and the arcade games just inside the park!
My dad always made me feel super loved and did the best he possibly could, but when I was a kid, his identity confused me. He wasn’t the golf-playing, beer-drinking family man I saw on TV or in my friends’ kitchens. He wasn’t so easily labeled – or so easily understood. When he was younger, he’d been a wealthy bachelor living in 1970s New York City – when it was also in its prime. He’d shared a penthouse with his best friend, Josh, who was a well-known actor at the time. He did drugs and slept with girls and enjoyed every moment of his life. When he met my mom, he said good-bye to that lifestyle. Kind of.
Throughout my childhood, he was always in shape – tanned and well-dressed. He was an international businessman, frequently traveling to France, Italy, Prague, and I’d know he’d returned home from a trip before I saw or heard him as his smell was so potent and gorgeous. I thought it was a mixture of expensive European cologne, a faint smell of cigarettes, and something else I didn’t yet recognize but later discovered was alcohol.
I never knew my dad to be a big drinker. I never saw him and thought he was even a little buzzed. If you don’t