Running with Scissors

My mother stands before the mirror smelling of Jean Naté and lipstick, a poet preparing for a reading. “Something isn't right,” she says, fluffing the shag haircut she got to look like Jane Fonda. She peels the paper from two Kotex maxi pads and, with a flash of brilliance, sticks them under her dress for instant shoulder pads. “You have a very creative mother,” she tells me. I am fixated on her high heels, the way they signal her departure and my own rising dread. My father is a highly functional alcoholic professor, a man with the personality of petrified wood who smells of vodka and psoriasis. Their fights are the soundtrack of our glass house in the woods, arias of rage that end with my father chasing my mother with a fondue pot or my mother hurling the Christmas tree off the deck. I find my own order by polishing my jewelry until it gleams and keeping my hair as smooth and perfect as a mannequin's.

My parents' unraveling leads us to Dr. Finch, a psychiatrist who looks exactly like Santa Claus and carries balloons in his pocket. His office is a dusty, chaotic suite of rooms, and his therapy sessions are bizarre theatrical events. When my parents' marriage finally detonates, I am twelve years old, and my mother informs me that for my own safety from my “homicidal” father, I will be staying with the doctor and his family. I arrive at his house expecting a doctor's pristine residence and instead find a sagging, pink Victorian filled with squalor. The furniture is overturned, animal fur coats the floors, and the air is thick with the smell of wet dog and something else I can't name. This, I am told, is my new home.

Life at Sixty-seven Perry Street is an education in chaos. There are no rules, no bedtimes, and no clean plates. The house is a revolving door of Dr. Finch's eccentric patients and his equally eccentric children. I meet Joranne, an obsessive-compulsive who has lived in an upstairs room for two years, terrified of germs, surviving on food wrapped in aluminum foil and secretly eating the caulking from around the bathroom sink. I play with the doctor's old electroshock therapy machine with his daughters, Natalie and Vickie. We learn a new language, a clinical vocabulary of dysfunction: projection, denial, repression. Fights are not just tolerated but encouraged as a “healthy expression of anger,” and every argument escalates into a group therapy session where psychological labels are hurled like grenades.

In this madhouse, I shed my old self. The navy blazer and pressed slacks are replaced with a pair of ripped jeans. My obsession with perfect hair gives way to an unruly mess of curls. I become partners in crime with Natalie, the doctor's youngest daughter, who is as sharp and wounded as I am. And then I meet Neil Bookman, the doctor's thirty-three-year-old adopted son. He is the first gay person I have ever known, and when he corners me in his room, our first encounter is a confusing violation that morphs into a desperate, clinging affair. He tells me I have a power over him, that he would kill himself if I ever left. His neediness is a drug and a poison, and our relationship becomes a dark vortex of manipulation and longing that consumes my teenage years, until the night he vanishes into thin air, leaving nothing behind but a ghost.

While I navigate the Finch asylum, my mother spirals through her own universe of madness. She finds a lover in Fern, the minister's wife, before moving on to Dorothy, a suicidal art student with a trust fund who becomes her loyal, chaos-loving companion. My mother's psychotic breaks become a seasonal event, each one more spectacular than the last. One episode lands her in a motel in Newport, Rhode Island, where Dr. Finch attempts to treat her himself. She covers herself in baby powder, eats the popcorn ceiling, and accuses the doctor of raping her before being rescued by a sassy, rhinestone-clad waitress named Winnie Pye, who gives her a dramatic makeover and becomes her new best friend.

The final break comes when my mother, lucid and medicated, declares that Dr. Finch is a sick, dangerous man who has been manipulating her for years. The world splits in two, and I am caught in the middle. Natalie, my best friend, demands loyalty to her father. My mother demands that I sever all ties with the family that raised me. I am seventeen, and I realize I belong to neither of them. In the middle of the night, I pack a bag and leave, moving into a slum apartment and taking a job as a waiter. I have no education, no money, and no family to speak of, but I have survived. I have earned a Ph.D. in chaos, and I know, with absolute certainty, that I am ready for New York City. Whatever waits for me there, it cannot possibly be crazier than the world I am leaving behind.