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  The McCarthys and the Baruchs joined Father Patrick and stood on each side of him while my mom and Janet Baruch exchanged competitive grins.

  Father Patrick continued: “The holiest family on the South Side of Chicago, who has never missed Mass and who best displays purity of truth, love, and devotion, is …”

  My mom’s eyes grew large, but mine grew smaller as I scratched my itchy nose with my middle finger, catching Diana Baruch’s stare.

  With a perfect American Idol dramatic pause, Father Patrick continued. “… the McCarthys!”

  We all jumped into the air and screamed as if we had just won $2 billion. The parish applauded us. As I turned around to look at the Baruchs, they had already gotten off the stage and disappeared. Part of me felt bad. Even though I hated them, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for people when they were sad.

  When the parish officials delivered Mary to our home, I couldn’t have been more embarrassed.

  As a teenager in a poor family, I was already incredibly ashamed about my house. Now throw a four-foot Mother Mary statue into the mix and, well, it’s darn right humiliating. What made up for it, though, was how proud my mother was.

  She put Mary on a table surrounded by flowers she handpicked. She felt so proud, and she loved opening her door to strangers to come inside and kneel in our living room to pray all day and night.

  Living in a house with strangers praying the rosary out loud for a year is really not normal, though.

  I tried to get used to it, but there were so many old people that our house started to resemble the set of Cocoon.

  Right around this time, I met a boy who I really, really liked, but I knew I could never let him know where I lived. A Virgin Mary statue is not an aphrodisiac. He went to a public school.

  In the past, I would be terrified to talk to any kid who didn’t attend a religion class, but when I hit thirteen, I wanted to make out with all of them.

  “Hey, Derek.”

  “Hey, Jenny. Can I come sit in your basement and hang out with you?”

  “Um, no,” I said. “Why don’t I just come over to your house and we can make out?”

  “That’s dope,” he responded, using the perfect 1986 slang term for “yes.”

  I went over to his house.

  I hardly got past the door before he jumped on top of me. He did something I hadn’t experienced yet at the age of thirteen—he kissed my neck.

  It felt naughty. He seemed to either be really enjoying my neck or just not confident yet about his ability to French kiss. It’s kind of like when a guy tells you he doesn’t like going down on girls, but it’s really because he has no idea what the hell he’s doing.

  Anyway, after about an hour of necking, I was getting bored, so I pushed him off me.

  Derek began laughing at me.

  “Why are you laughing?” I said.

  “Don’t know,” he responded.

  “You’re weird,” I said.

  “Later,” he quipped.

  And with that, we broke up. I wish it were that easy to break up in my thirties.

  I went home and saw more old people filing into the house. I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. I wanted Mary to go away—now. I walked inside and was pulled by an old lady to sit next to her and pray.

  She handed me a rosary and I began to recite a Hail Mary.

  I spotted JoJo doing what I had taught her to do, which was to sell rosaries to old ladies as “blessed rosaries” and we would split the money seventy-thirty, because it was my idea (even though I had JoJo do all the work). This was an early sign of the incredibly sinful entrepreneurial skills you will continue to read about throughout this book.

  “Psst, JoJo.” I waved my hand for her to come over and save me.

  As she walked closer to me, her eyes widened. She quickly sat down next to me and whispered, “What’s wrong with your neck?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  She then grabbed my arm and pulled me into the bathroom.

  I took one look and screamed at the top of my lungs. “Aahhhh!!!!”

  That asshole Derek had given me hickeys. Not just a couple of hickeys. He gave me thirteen huge, bloodsucking hickeys.

  “Why would you let someone do that to you?” JoJo asked. “You look so stupid.”

  I defensively cried back, “I didn’t know what he was doing! I thought he was just really into my neck. I didn’t know! What am I going to do?”

  “Well, now I think is the perfect opportunity to ask for a raise,” JoJo said. “I want fifty-fifty for the rosary money.”

  “JoJo, stop that. I’m in a crisis right now!”

  “I’m in a crisis now too! Christine Szarski is about to get her eleventh Cabbage Patch doll! I can’t let that happen! I need to go buy three of them right now!”

  If it were anything other than a Cabbage Patch doll, I would have fought her, but I was sympathetic to JoJo’s problem. I caved and gave her the fifty-fifty split, even though I knew she would never tell my mom about the hickeys anyway.

  The next day at school, word got out that I had thirteen hickeys on my neck. I was terrified of only one person in school finding out. That’s right—Diana Fucking Baruch, who was one grade older than I was.

  “Jenny, Diana just found out about your hickeys,” said Ann Krybus.

  I ran to the school bathroom and threw up. I was so scared. We were supposed to be the holiest family in the neighborhood, with the Virgin Mary as our prize.

  I had no doubt that if my mom found out about this, she would either return the Mary statue or make me live at the altar reciting Hail Marys until I died.

  I got home from school and ran upstairs to put on the thickest sweatshirt I owned, which happened to have Mickey Mouse on it. It was 96 degrees outside with 100 percent humidity. I didn’t care. Cover Girl makeup did nothing to cover my hickeys. My Mickey Mouse sweatshirt was the only solution that worked.

  I went downstairs, sat in the kitchen, and tried to act nonchalant as sweat dripped off my nose.

  My mom walked in and said, “Jenny, it’s ninety-eight degrees outside with one hundred percent humidity.”

  “No, Ma, it’s ninety-six degrees.”

  “Get out of that sweatshirt. You must be dying.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  JoJo was sitting at the table with me and saw that I had started to panic. “Ma, it’s the new thing in school. Big sweatshirts, even when it’s hot outside.”

  “Oh, really?” my mom responded. “Well then, where’s yours?”

  JoJo quickly answered, “Oh, I couldn’t find mine.”

  “It’s in the closet, inside the box labeled winter clothes,” my mom said.

  “Oh, thanks. I’ll go put it on.”

  Moments later, JoJo returned to the kitchen wearing a large, thick sweatshirt. Beads of sweat started pouring down her face too. She leaned into me and whispered, “Now I want sixty-forty.”

  “No way,” I whispered back. “How about I buy you a Michael Jordan poster?”

  “Deal.”

  I knew I had JoJo’s lips locked, but my instincts were telling me that Diana Baruch had yet to play her hand.

  Ring, ring.

  “Hello,” my mom answered the phone.

  My eyes watched every social cue on her face for a change in behavior.

  A second later, I didn’t need to watch her face. It all came out in her voice. “What are you talking about? Jenny doesn’t have thirteen hickeys on her neck.”

  My whole body started trembling. This was it. My life was about to end.

  “Who is this?” my mother yelled.

  I wanted to run away, but I had made a total of only two hundred dollars in the rosary business and now I had to give JoJo half of it. My mom slammed the phone down and walked over to me.

  I had a sweat mustache and my armpits were squirting water like hoses.

  “That was a priest who suggested that I not allow you to go to school t
omorrow with hickeys.”

  “That’s crazy. There are no priests at our school.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking. It must be some prank caller.” And she walked out of the kitchen.

  JoJo and I sat there stunned and soaked, like we were swimming with our clothes on.

  “I hope you learned a lesson in all of this,” JoJo said to me.

  “Yes. I did. Only get hickeys in the wintertime.”

  11

  Monkey See, Monkey Do

  There was a new priest in town. A hot one. His name was Father … well … let me think of a good alias. His name was Father Andrew.

  Imagine one sexy beast of a hot priest turning up on the block of Desperate Housewives and rattling the minds and bodies of all those sexually deprived women. Well, my neighborhood turned into that. You could see the abstinence in the eyes of every housewife and the amount of days since they were last humped practically written on their foreheads: 17, 65 … 481.

  Father Andrew was about thirty-five and resembled a younger Tom Selleck—mustache and all. He was in amazing shape and had the same spunk and charisma as Zack Morris. He was like one of those characters you see in movies: the hot young teacher who bonds with all the schoolkids and plays dodgeball with them in the parking lot.

  All the students thought Father Andrew was cool.

  But to all the moms, he was prime meat to salivate over.

  It was survival of the most predatory animal in the wild. Women and closeted men alike would go to great lengths vying for Father Andrew’s attention. One mom dropped off a homemade lemon meringue pie she made especially for him and she literally fainted as she walked to the back of his house, exposing a secret corset that cinched her waist and squeezed her torpedo tits together and pushed them up to her chin.

  I was only in seventh grade when Father Andrew came into our lives.

  I didn’t really understand sexual fantasies yet, so my daydreams of him would be me falling and him picking me up in his arms and carrying me all the way home. I can only imagine what all the moms’ fantasies were, but who wants to think about that? Gross.

  Anyway, Father Andrew’s popularity became obvious when his 9:45 A.M. Sunday Mass would sell out like a Justin Bieber concert. The women would even clap and dab the sweat off their bodies after his homily. I remember looking around at all their faces thinking, Really? Women were in a trance, swaying back and forth with their blouses unbuttoned in the hopes of Father Andrew sneaking a peek at their new brassiere.

  It was an outrageous spectacle.

  When Father Andrew would clock in for confessions, I would always get so pissed off because the line was so long. I was a regular customer, so all these newbies were totally ruining my quick stop just to come and flirt with the priest. They treated confession like an audition for an episode of Red Shoe Diaries. With confession, you had a choice of doing it face-to-face or going behind the screen so the priest couldn’t identify you. Needless to say, every mother in line chose the face-to-face seat.

  I can only imagine how many of them were complaining about how awful their husbands were as they pulled Kleenex from their heaving bosoms to wipe the crocodile tears of loneliness from their lying bedroom eyes and Bambi lashes coated with waterproof mascara. What a scene it was.

  A few months into Father Andrew’s debut, a wickedly entertaining competition started to unfold. Which family would Father Andrew choose to become close friends with? The rectory in the church soon became filled with Bundt cakes, oatmeal cookies, rum cakes, and a multitude of other confectionary fancies to tempt him into people’s homes.

  But Father Andrew was no dummy. He was Irish. He went where the booze was running thick—my house. The McCarthy house was filled with laughter and the smell of scotch.

  I remember thinking, Wow, this is really fun. I also remember being a bit confused by the fact that gluttony was considered a sin, yet alcohol and desserts were given to win someone’s affection. It was just one of the many contradictions in my childhood.

  Once word spread that the McCarthys were in the lead, the Baruchs decided to throw a welcome party for Father Andrew. Yes, the fucking Baruchs. I even caught word that they hired a Christian rock wedding DJ. When someone hires a DJ to a party on the South Side of Chicago, it’s like the Holy Grail. It doesn’t get more classy than that.

  The neighborhood was all up in arms as to who would be invited. Clearly not us. So, being the clever and competitive woman that my mom is, she decided to throw a party on the same night. Now it was up to Father Andrew to choose where he wanted to go. Being the dignified diplomat that he was, he promised both families that he would make an appearance since we lived only a couple of houses away from each other.

  Oh no, I thought. Game on.

  Remember the movie Annie when Annie and the other orphans scrubbed every inch of the orphanage while singing “It’s the Hard-Knock Life”? Well, that was my sisters and me. We scrubbed and scrubbed the house in preparation for this party. My dad even erected a new bush outside our home that had been recently destroyed by a drunken uncle who fell into it.

  The McCarthys were going all out.

  As the day grew closer, Father Andrew came over to talk to my mom.

  He tried to encourage her to bury the hatchet by extending an olive branch to Mrs. Baruch. I remember peeking around the corner to eavesdrop and covering my mouth to keep from laughing out loud. There was no way in hell my mom was going to give in to that wench of a woman.

  With clenched teeth and a fake smile, she said, “Father Andrew, I would really enjoy that and would love to have her join us at my home to have one celebration instead of two.”

  I heard that Mrs. Baruch was given the same speech by Father Andrew. But, as expected, the parties stubbornly remained on the same night in separate houses. When I woke up for school the day of the party, there was a buzz in the air.

  Parties were given only for graduations, but seeing that this was a special occasion to keep up with the Joneses, everyone was invited.

  During school, I ran into Diana Baruch in the hallway. She had her usual “don’t fuck with me” look on her face. She snarled and said, “Just so you know, I invited the entire class to my house tonight, so don’t be expecting anyone at yours.” Then she flipped her hair in my face as she walked away.

  Could she be right? Would everyone go to her house instead of mine? This would be a huge blow to my social status as a seventh grader. It was scheming time. Think, Jenny, think. Then it hit me.

  I ran through the hallways looking everywhere to find Blaire Starecki. She was more Polish than a Polish sausage and I knew her grandma had a stash of Polish liquor in the attic. I never drank liquor—well, except for church wine—but I knew a lot of my friends were already experimenting with drinking.

  I quickly found Blaire and talked her into going to her grandma’s house after school in hopes of scoring a bottle of the Polish stuff. Blaire liked the idea, so I quickly spread the rumor to my friends that I would get them some alcohol if they came to my house for the party. Needless to say, everyone RSVP’d quickly.

  After school, Blaire and I successfully pulled two bottles of liquor from Blaire’s grandma’s house. I had never heard of this kind of alcohol. It had a homemade label on the front of it with a handwritten word: MOONSHINE.

  I ignorantly asked, “Is moonshine some type of vodka?”

  Blaire replied with an equal amount of naïveté, “Hell if I know.”

  Then we made our way to 7-Eleven, stole ten Big Gulp cups, and took them back to my place.

  I had never seen my house so clean. You could have performed brain surgery in the living room. My mom had her best church outfit on while preparing her famous cocktail meatballs. I could tell she was nervous and excited about hosting this very special event in the neighborhood. It was like Vanity Fair’s Oscar party vs. the Acme party. My mom wanted ours to be the Vanity Fair party, of course. It had to be.

  The Baruchs’ party was first up that
night. All the neighbors could be heard dancing and singing with the DJ. Even though we had two hours before our party was scheduled to start, my friends who had RSVP’d for alcohol were already at my house.

  My mom was freaking out that her Vanity Fair party was looking more like a Nickelodeon party, so she shooed us all to the basement, which was fine with me because I had some bartending to do. Once down there, I passed out the Big Gulp cups to my friends and filled them all up to the rim with this moonshine stuff. I also topped off my own cup and proceeded to drink. The next thing I remember, I was standing in our now-crowded living room with my friends and neighbors, violently puking everywhere. And by everywhere, I mean everywhere. Furniture, walls, people—even Father Andrew. I remember people screaming because all of my friends started riding the puke train, and soon enough the entire room was Jackson Pollock’d in vomit. It looked like a scene from The Exorcist.

  Then I faintly recall waking up from being dragged away by my hair. I’m pretty sure it was by my dad. I also remember puking all over him and the bathroom for what seemed like two days. I definitely remember my mom giving me a bath and not enjoying the realization of that.

  That night, I cried myself to sleep like a baby.

  To say my mom was mad at me was the understatement of the year. She was humiliated and furious. I completely ruined her night to shine.

  I tried my best to throw everyone else under the bus to lighten the punishment, but it didn’t work.

  Once I recovered from liver failure, my mom made me go apologize to Father Andrew and confess my sin.

  As I sat with him experiencing my first and worst hangover ever, he wanted to know why I would think that getting liquor would make my friends like me.

  I replied sincerely, “Well, that’s why you became friends with our family in the first place. I saw my parents buy you liquor and it worked. So I thought it would work for me.”

  The sheepish look on Father Andrew’s face made me realize how dumb he felt. Children do learn from watching adults, and no doubt he was guilty himself.

  We sat in silence for a minute, and then he said, “Looks like I need to be doing a penance rosary with you.” He knelt down next to me and recited the rosary with me.