CURSED FROM
THE START

My Life Started by Exploding Out of My Father's Balls, and You Wonder Why I Work Blue

Like most children, I learned to swear from a parent. But most children learn to swear by mimicking moments when a parent loses self-control. That is typically followed by the parent stressing that such words are bad and shouldn't be repeated outside the home. When I was three years old, I learned to swear from my father, but he taught me with every intention to do so. It was like he was teaching a "cursing as a second language" course for one.

"Bitch! Bastard! Damn! Shit!" I proclaimed with joy, if not necessarily wit, in the middle of Boys' Market in Manchester, New Hampshire. Random shoppers stopped in the aisle, and watched me with delight-or at least curiosity-as I regurgitated this mantra. Dad stood by with genuine pride, beaming through the mock surprise on his face.

Dad and me circa 1975. I believe we were laughing at a comment I made about how his nipple is reminiscent of Van Gogh's Starry Night.

My guess is that when something is so easy, so greatly rewarded, and bears so few negative consequences, it's a recipe for addiction. From that moment on, everything I did was in search of that rush. So I guess I'm saying that I'm, in most ways, my father's fault. He filled my mother's vagina with the filthy semen that consisted of me, then filled my head with even more filth.

* * *

When I was four I sat coloring a piece of typing paper during a dinner party at my Nana and Papa's house in Concord. It was a white ranch house perched on a hill with long concrete steps leading up to the front door. The living room had bright turquoise carpeting under a long white couch. A blue-and-white candy-filled bowl rested on a thick-glass coffee table. Nana, a fashionable woman in her late fifties, who rocked hot pink lipstick under a swirly mane of salt-and-pepper cotton candy, came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of her famous brownies.

"Sarah, Nana made brownies for you!" she beamed in the third person.

I looked up from my drawing, glanced over to my father, who gave me the nod, then turned to Nana.

"Shove 'em up your ass," I said.

The tide of the guests' laughter quickly swept away any anger Nana had toward Dad. She had to smile. Remembering this very early time makes me nostalgic for the days when naked obscenity was enough for a laugh, and didn't need any kind of crafted punch line to accompany it. It was good to be four.

It strikes me that, in this story of a little girl telling her loving grandmother to shove baked goods up her ass, I might come across as a monster. But allow me to place this anecdote in a cultural context: It was the 1970s. Countless friends of mine who grew up in that decade tell stories of their parents giving them liquor, or pot, or buying them Playboy magazines, or letting their boyfriends sleep over at very young ages. Or having "key parties" and orgies while they believed their children were upstairs sleeping. Like oversexualized retarded adults, the 1970s had the distinction of being both naive and inappropriate. For a naive and inappropriate girl to be born from it, it's really not so crazy.

What I said to my grandmother yielded a strange kind of glory, and I basked in it. The reactions were verbally disapproving, but there was an unmistakable encouragement under it all. No meant yes.

He Farts in the Face of Strangers

My father, Donald Silverman, is a black-haired, dark-skinned Jew who walks exactly like Bill Cosby dances. A little bounce with each step, elbows bent with hands dangling at the wrists on either side of his chest. When you see him approach, you might think, "A ridiculous man is walking toward me." And you'd be right.

My dad is pretty much fearless, which makes him a natural showman and public speaker. He's always the one asked to make a toast or a speech. But a perceived fearlessness can sometimes be mistaken for what is actually gall. This is clearly exemplified by my father's willingness to steal all his material. He would lift bits from comedians, songs, sitcoms-anywhere-then tweak them to fit and claim them as his own. He once spoke at the Bar Mitzvah of his friend's son David.

"Today, David, I find in being Jewish a thing of beauty, a joy, a strength, a cup of gladness, a Jewish kingdom as wonderful as any other. Accept in full the sweetness of your Jewishness. David, be brave. Keep freedom in the family and do what you can to make the world a better place. Now may the Constitution of the United States go with you, the Declaration of Independence stand by you, the Bill of Rights protect you. And may your own dreams be your only boundaries henceforth now and forever. Amen."

Tears. Not a dry eye in the house. People flocked to Dad to tell him how moving and brilliant his words were. Evidently, they had never seen the play Purlie Victorious by Ossie Davis, because that's where those words were first heard. On Broadway. Other than changing all the instances of "black" to "Jew," my father stole the passage pretty much word for word.

* * *

My dad was born in Boston, Massachusetts, before moving to New Hampshire where his family settled. His Boston accent is as thick as a stack of ten lobsters and he is almost entirely impossible to understand. My sisters and I became adept at translating what he said into English. Caaah was "car," shaht was "short," etc. This was a good system, though one that occasionally backfired, causing us to say "parker" or "sofer" in places where he actually was pronouncing something accurately, like, "Get your parka off the sofa." My father says fuckin' the way people say, "like" or "totally." He might say it in anger like the rest of the world, but what makes him special is he evokes it in everyday talk. "I had such a fuckin' great time." "I'm such a fuckin' lucky daddy." Or, referring to his favorite HBO series, "Is that Ahliss [Arli$$, the HBO classic] fuckin' wild o'ah what?"

Happily, Dad found a career that perfectly suited his personality. He owned a store called Crazy Sophie's Factory Outlet. Much like a certain "Eddie" of legend, who perceived the unlikely connection between psychiatric disorder and retail sales volume, Dad did his own radio ads as "Crazy Donald." They were highly spirited-and like everything else that came from his mouth, unintelligible-pitches which went something like,

"When I see the prices at the mawl I just want to vawmit. Hi. I'm Crazy Donald, Crazy Sophie's husband."

Dad would list all the brands of jeans he had in his store-brands I've never since heard of, like Unicorn. At the end he would say either,

"So, spend you-ah time at the mawl, spend you-ah money at Crazy Sophie's!"

or:

"So if you cay-ah enough to buy the very best-but yo-uah too CHEAP, come to Crazy Sophie's!"

In fact, Dad was not Crazy Sophie's husband. Sophie did not exist. He invented her. He wanted a woman's name because he was selling women's clothes. Dad's mother, my Nana, Rose, yelled at him after he named the store, insisting, "You named the store after my friend Sophie Moskowitz, and she will be very insulted!" Dad insisted, "I did not name the sto-ah aftah Sophie Moskowitz. If I named the sto-ah aftah Sophie Moskowitz, I would have named it Ugly Sophie's." Classic.

* * *

When my father first came home from college, he sat my grandparents down to tell them some very serious news. They followed him quizzically into the living room, and from the bantam couch stared up at their nervous, pacing son.

"I'm gay," he announced.

They sat stunned for a moment, and just as his mother started to cry he said,

"Just kidding. I smoke."

Genius.

* * *

The neighbor's dog was repeatedly shitting in our yard. For a common problem like that, there's a sensible solution: to drop by the neighbor's house and ask, "Would you mind curbing your dog?"

But Dad didn't say a word to the neighbors. Instead, he got up in the middle of the night, gingerly maneuvered the feces onto a piece of cardboard-careful not to disturb its signature shape-tiptoed to the neighbor's driveway, and transferred it onto the pavement just below the driver's-side door of our neighbor's car. It was worth it to him to be nearer to this canine excrement than one would ever need to be, in exchange for the possibility that our neighbor would step in his own dog's shit on his way to work.

* * *

My parents were enjoying hot fudge sundaes at an ice cream parlor called Rumpelmayer's in New York City. A man at the adjacent table was smoking. Since my mother was eight months pregnant (with my eldest sister, Susie), my father asked him if he'd put out his cigarette.

"Fuck off," the man suggested.

My father kept his eyes trained on the man as he instructed my mother to go wait by the front door. He then sidled up to him as close as he could, lifted his leg, and twisted as he sang, "Puff on this," which was followed by the most putrid blast of human gas known to man at that time, and was not exceeded until the late '80s by the great violinist Yo-Yo...