Josh Peck - Happy People Are Annoying

Heres what I know. My father was a semihandsome, older, curly-haired man who owned an apartment in Manhattan and a home in the country, which, anyone who grew up in New York City knows, is the sign of someone with disposable income and their shit together. In the dog days of summer, there is nothing more coveted than a friend with a country home and an open invitation, so that you may escape the smell of hot trash and traffic, if just for the weekend. My father had it all, a thriving business, a wife and kids, and at sixty-two, the makings of what should have been a triumphant victory march toward convalescence.

Until he knocked up my mom, that is.

Getting pregnant is both easier and harder than we think. As teens, were conditioned to believe that a mere glance could get someone pregnant, that the safest course of action is to seal oneself inside a giant condom indefinitely, until we have permission from God, our parents, and the president to procreate. As we get older, of course, were met with the reality that procreating can be quite difficult for some people, and an entire billion-dollar industry is devoted to those for whom getting pregnant is challenging. And while people are having kids successfully later and later these days, there is still the assumption that after forty you might just want to adopt.

My mom was forty-two. She had always wanted kids, but biology being the cruel arbiter it is had decided she had missed her sell-by date. Want is one thing. Being a fit candidate to spawn new life is another. And the sands of time were not moving in her favor. It was a dream shed given up on, an agreement one makes when theyve crossed that invisible line that says, I suppose Ill just have to sleep in, every day, forever.

So how, you may ask, how did the egg of a forty-two-year-old woman and the seed of a sixty-two-year-old man, having hooked up only once (or so she tells me and also, gross), intermingle to produce the icon writing here before you? HOW did this miraculous bit of birthing occur, second only to the immaculate conception of Jesus himself? The answer, simply, is deli. It must be deli.

The Carnegie Deli was a New York landmark for more than seventy-nine years. Opened in 1929, it served its loyal customers oversize portions of pastrami and corned beef slathered in Russian dressing, and sometime in February of 1986 it served my mother and father a late-night postcoital feast. (I hate that sentence a lot.) And while yes, its reasonable to think that deli, having no known reproductive qualities, had nothing to do with the miracle of birth that occurred that night, I still like to think that the sodium of the pickles, or the bubbles of the cream soda, were somewhat responsible for pushing the puck past the goalie.

My mom and dad knew each other, kind of. Before the deli, they were acquaintances, business colleagues, the kind of people who meet twice a year for lunch and at the end say we should do this more often but never do. They werent close enough to share a sandwich, let alone a baby, and Im sure when my father found out my mom was pregnant, similar thoughts came crashing through his philandering head. Now, Im not one for slander, and while Ive not named this mysterious man I call Dad, Ill give him the benefit of the doubt when he told my mom he was separated from his wife the night I was conceived. And hasnt he paid his karmic debt anyway? I mean, gosh, nothing gets in the way of a well-intentioned affair like impregnating a person whose middle name you dont know.

I dont know a lot about my dad but I do know a lot about being a man, and while I can only speak for myself, I know what it feels like to be blinded by the thrill of a romantic interlude. I also know the feeling you get once its over, realizing that perhaps there was more to be considered before engaging in such a consequential act. All that to say, Im sure my dad was just trying to get some. And get some he did, some illegitimate son, that is. Sure, it was irresponsible of him to disregard the realities of a possible pregnancy, but thank God he did! Thanks for throwing caution to the wind, Dad, happy to be here!

So, youre probably asking yourself, Who does this? Who sleeps with a man who is supposedly separated, after she was summoned to his high-rise apartment for some business advice (oh, Mom), gets pregnant, and decides to keep the kid, knowing full well she might have to do this alone. That woman is Barbara Peck, and shes my mother.

My mom is an enigma. A once-in-a-generation type of person, a tigress, an empath, a counterculture Jewish priestess who has been sticking her middle finger up to societal norms since she was a kid. Simply put, she gives very few fucks, and until I was born, made a habit of breaking convention in how she worked, lived, and loved. It was not an odd occurrence for her to jump in a car, drive the twelve-hundred-mile trip to Florida, cut hair on the beach all summer for pocket money, or get fired from being a waitress for sitting down with customers and picking food off their plates. One of my favorite stories is when she opened up an employment agency at twenty-six, only to be held up by robbers a few weeks into starting the business. When I asked if she was scared she replied, Scared? No, I mean no one likes getting tied up, but I tried to offer the guys a job, seemed silly that they would rob an employment agency, they should have just filled out an application. Thats my mom. Fearless.

So there she stood, pregnant, unmarried, in her early forties, and ready for whatever came next. It shouldnt have happened, the odds were not in her favor, so the fact that she was pregnant seemed like a cosmic confluence of events.

My father, on the other hand, was, lets just say, less excited about this whole cosmic confluence. Heres the thing, I dont blame him for not wanting to be in my life. Majority rules someone once said to me when I told them that I didnt know my dad. It took me a minute to digest what that meant. They went on to say, I mean, ya know, he had a wife and three kids who were already grown, a whole other life. So when given the choice between them or you and your mom, I guess majority rules. Simple. Brutal. True?