Jason Mulgrew - Everything Is Wrong with Me: A Memoir of an American Childhood Gone, Well, Wrong

Everything Is Wrong with Me

A Memoir of an American Childhood Gone, Well, Wrong

Jason Mulgrew

Contents

A Break, a Beginning

Love, Second Street-Style

Intermezzo: Faith, Baptism, Prison

Divorce

Athletics, Sports, and Crap

On the Relationship Between Genetics and Hustling

Uncle Petey

Intermezzo: The Top Six Most Influential Songs of My Adolescence

My Bird: Inadequacy and Redemption

Guns. Fucking Guns.

Did I Ever Tell You About the Time I Got Arrested for Attempted Murder?

Hooker Hunting

After creating a formula that combines the amount of alcohol involved, the number of years passed, the character/integrity of the protagonists, and my distaste for fact-checking, I have determined that the following is between 94 and 97 percent true. Thank you for your support.

W riting a book is a fantastical exercise in manic depression.

The highs, when they come, are magnificent. Throughout my life, Ive rarely experienced such surges of adrenaline. I dont really play sports, mostly because they seem like a lot of work. I dont particularly care about my job, although it allows me to make lots of personal phone calls, because like many people my age I have forsaken inspiration for a steady paycheck. Nor do I do anything that I can be particularly proud of. Volunteering seems like a scam to me. (Work for free? Really?) I am not a member of any organizations, fraternities, or brotherhoods, because all the bonding creeps me out a little bit. And I have no children, or at least none that I care to acknowledge; Im no Gregor Mendel, but when you mix Irish Catholic and Asian youre not supposed to get a child that looks like a Chinese Rudy Huxtable, so Im not going to be the one to pay $450 a month.

Previously, my greatest accomplishment came when touring Europe as a college student several years ago. In one glorious stretch, I consumed so much alcohol, so many barbiturates, and so much skinke It was difficult, but I was determined. And I have a drinking problem, so that helped. And yes, I was single at the time (and as of this writing, still am).

Not to belittle my accomplishment, which was and will always be extraordinary, but the thrill I got from peeing in all those foreign countries does not compare to the rush of writing a book. I have learned that in the spectrum of adrenaline rushes, creating far surpasses urinating . There are moments in the writing process when all of your research, your outlines, and your preparation come together and you are just doing it. Your fingers work like pistons pummeling the keyboard and the words fly onto the page so quickly that its hard to keep up. You zone out everything else and you just see itthe characters, alive; the setting, before your eyes; the story, just as you had experienced it; all the different words you can use for poop, preferential treatment given to the simple and effective poo and its magic. Youll even run out of beer but be so into the writing that you cant stop and wont stop to get another. So youll scream at your roommate Brian to bring you one. When he doesnt, youll realize its because Brian moved out over two years ago and you no longer have a roommate. So maybe you dont need another beer. Slow down there, tiger.

When you finally stop typing, youll bolt up from your chair, your hands quivering, tears of joy streaming down your face, sporting a decent half erection because, really, its a miracle you can even get a halfie going with your high blood pressure. Then youll read over what has just poured out of you and youll say, Yes, I have done it. I have fucking done it. I am a great writer. And I still need a beer. But because your roommate Brian is being a dick and still hasnt brought you one, youll have to get it yourself. Or again, maybe its because he moved out. A long, long time ago. Semantics. Probably should get some water instead.

These are the best times: Youve written something that youre proud of and you can be happy, truly happy with yourself. The feeling is not unlike falling in love with someone new, but without all the nervousness and the sex. Actually, there may be sex involved for some writers, but there wasnt with me. Which sucked.

But sadly, these moments of intense joy are few and far between. They represent probably less than 1 percent of the book-writing experience, since it is hard to sustain such stretches of inspiration, especially when TNT is almost constantly running a Law & Order marathon. And when these fleeting instances of productivity escape, they are replaced by dark, dark times. Seconds of pleasure give way to hours of staring at a blinking cursor on the blank page, wondering where and how to begin. This is one of the most overwhelming and intimidating feelings a person can have, right up there with taking your drivers license test, or making a marriage proposal, or the first time you go to a gay club, or the first time you realize you like and possibly even love being at a gay club.

Three people who have very little concept of parenting. Two people who drank too much that night and later vomited because of it.

And when the moments of clarity are slow to come, self-doubt creeps in. The thoughts come at you in rapid succession: What the hell am I doing? Im not qualified to write a book! It took me a month and a half to find the S on the keyboard, so in most of my first draft I used $ instead! and Why cant I figure this out? What the hell is wrong with me? How hard can it possibly be to throw my family under the bus so that I can buy a high-def TV and force them to cut off contact with me for the rest of my life? and Holy shitI just realized that I havent showered in four days! Something smells like hot-dog water and I think its coming from my pants! Sadness sinks you. Depression takes over. And the only thing you can do is get drunk, troll the Internet for sex, and hope it turns around.

I was warned that many first-time authors have difficulty with the enormity of the task of writing a book, so I tried to be prepared. I took a leave of absence from my full-time job to write this memoir, so I had plenty of time to record anecdotes from Little League, when I spent my time on the bench learning about sex from the older players (and no, not in that way). I had months to write down the memories of those first few Christmas mornings when my dad would wince when I made a bigger deal about getting Grease on VHS than now owning every single [expletive deleted] He-Man guy. Weeks and weeks to recollect the halcyon days when I was thin, mostly hairless, and handsome, those days that I miss so much when every Saturday night I look at myself in the shower and realize that yes, I, Jason Mulgrew, now a grown-ass man, look like a fucking bear when Im naked.

No, the first task was to take stock of my life in the more immediate sense. Like a general in wartime, I looked at the situation, immersed myself in thought and cheap vodka, and came up with a battle plan. If I was going to write a good book, I needed to create the proper environment in which to write this book. Once I felt comfortable in the physical sense, the words would flow.

I had to clean my room. My bedroom was where most of the writing would take place, and to be successful I needed to feel successful, to give the impression of success. I threw out all the empty beer cans and half-eaten mozzarella sticks that had accumulated on my desk over the past few months, as I needed a proper workspace. Then I turned my attention to the closet, which was a nest of such horror and depravity that I dare not speak of it in depth here, as I am just now getting over the night terrors it caused me (lesson: just because after you masturbate into an old pair of boxers you throw it into the depths of your closet, that doesnt mean that it magically disappears). Then I cried. Then I made the bed. Finally, I was done. And it only took two weeks.