Official Book Club Selection Page 4

  LA may have been the home of movie-star mansions, big studio lots, and the expanse of the Pacific, but the Griffins found a way to live there like Depression-era Irish. We were all enmeshed in a run-down apartment building at Pico and Lincoln, to this day a hinky area of Santa Monica. I was living with my parents in a two-bedroom apartment, Joyce was in the unit closest to the street, and in between us lived a guy named John who worked for the General Accounting Office and who I ended up dating for five years. Yes, men, you could have had me as your girlfriend if you’d lived close enough.

  It really was some fucked-up white version of Good Times. I had just come from such a typical suburban environment that our street in Oak Park, Illinois, was called, if you’ll remember, Home Avenue. Medium-sized middle-class houses, children, dogs, block parties, relatively quiet. Now, we lived across the street from Santa Monica High, so urban teenage rowdiness was a daily fact of life. Occasionally we’d go downstairs to the communal washer-and-dryer room and find some Malibu trust fund ne’er-do-well or poor Mexican teen smoking pot. Then there was the homeless contingent in Santa Monica. Being a beach town, my mother’s theory was that we shouldn’t spend money on air-conditioning. She would prop open the front door to our apartment and plug in the Builders Emporium box fan to cool the place down. One time a big, scary-looking, stanky-smelling vagrant just walked into our apartment and started yelling at my dad, caught unawares in his boxers and Sears T-shirt.

  “I wanna take a SHAWAH! I wanna take a SHAWAH!”

  He did actually need one, by the way. He was filthy. But that doesn’t mean you do what my dad—who wasn’t having any of it—did next. My five-foot, six-inch, roughly sixty-year-old father, without batting an eyelash, took this guy on. He repeatedly poked an angry finger in the homeless guy’s chest. “You’re not takin’ a shower HERE, pal!” The guy backed up and Dad slammed the door in his face.

  I’m not saying it was the hood, but it definitely wasn’t the safe suburban enclave to which we’d become accustomed.

  No matter, though. I was in California. I was excited. And I had a plan. I was going to work as an extra, take acting classes, then become a professional actress! I was going to get in the door! I was going to pound the pavement! I was going to go from agency to agency! I was going to be a star!

  I ended up living with my parents till I was twenty-eight. (Sigh.)

  That’s Dad and me and Kenny, taken at the first Thanksgiving I had in LA.

  Moving out to LA meant that my family and I were going to be in close proximity to my oldest brother Kenny. My memories of Kenny are perhaps the most difficult part of writing this book. My recollection of him just doesn’t line up with those of family. What follows is my version of my relationship with him, and I’ve decided to get it out in the open for the first time. He was really the dominant male figure of my formative years, for reasons that started out good and eventually turned very bad.

  Early on, Kenny was living the life I hoped to one day lead, and as an impressionable young girl with a dream to be in show business, I looked up to him for that. It was clear as I was growing up that Kenny was the star of the family. He was very bright and very charming, and he became something of a minor celebrity as an actor and musician. He was in a band—okay, a cover band, which back then seemed glamorous—but when I was a kid what was more important to me was that he had the lead in a celebrated production of Hair at the famed Shubert Theatre in Chicago. That was a big deal. At the end of the musical, when the song “The Age of Aquarius” segues into that chorus of “Let the sun shine in,” they would have the audience come up on stage. I remember I was too young to see the play, but one night Kenny brought me up anyway and I got to dance in the finale with everyone, and that’s one of those bitten-by-the-bug moments I’ll never forget.

  I would hear about Kenny getting to meet local celebrities, actors at the Playboy mansion (which was then a Chicago hotspot), and he was getting offers to sing commercial jingles. It all seemed so fantastic. Part of me really did have a bit of idol worship with him. And when I was a snotty little kid who annoyed the family by singing and dancing around in the house every night, he was the encouraging one. He’d say, “You know, you could do this if you want to.” A comment like that, as simple as it sounds, can really fuel the optimism of a starstruck kid.

  Kenny’s behavior at other times, though, offered up contradictions. He had a terrible work ethic, for instance, which really burned itself into my brain as something very negative. He was an “artist,” he’d claim, so he always felt he was above a regular job, and because he was a charmer, he could always find a hot chick or girlfriend to support him. His attitude, though, would shock me. I remember one time when Kenny was between road gigs and staying at the house, I was in my room and someone called the upstairs phone. It was an offer for Kenny to do a voice-over. The job was short notice, though, as in, happening in a few hours.

  “What? I’m not going to do some stupid voice-over! I’m in a band!” he yelled into the phone.

  I overheard that the pay was $300, which seemed like an instant windfall to me. I gasped and thought, Get out of bed and go do that voice-over for three hundred dollars! What are you thinking?

  But he hung up. Then he got into a big fight in the hall with Mom, who also couldn’t believe he was turning down that kind of cash. Then of course two months later he’d be asking her for money.

  As talented as Kenny was, he was a troublemaker from as early as I can remember, always causing Mom and Dad a lot of heartache. He was getting arrested for one thing or another, and because our family knew the local cops, he’d be let off easy, after which Mom would go off and cry somewhere. He was always asking for money from Mom—never Dad, who would just explode on him if he tried—but instead of just borrowing it like a normal person, he’d turn it into a confrontation that would end with him in her face screaming, “I don’t want your goddamn money!” and then throwing it on the floor. He could be physically frightening in every way, and easily spin out of control.

  But sure enough, he found a beautiful, sweet girl to marry him. Her name was Kathy, a red-haired knockout who wore fashionable clothes and was really cool, and I thought she was a superfox. But shortly after they got married, she would take me aside and tell me that Kenny beat her. I know: There’s a boundary issue here, and you can debate the appropriateness of telling an eleven-year-old these things. She would tell me about the time Kenny threw her out of their apartment naked in the middle of winter to humiliate her. But Mom and Dad would say, “Oh, she’s being dramatic.” I’d look at the tightly wound Kenny and easily believe it happened.

  Then it happened in front of me. We were hanging out in Joyce’s room upstairs, and Kenny and Kathy got into an altercation. They started yelling, and in an instant, it seemed, Kenny threw his wife across the room. She hit the wall and slid down to the floor. It knocked the wind out of her. I was horrified. Joyce tried to stop it, and I ran into my room, terrorized. I couldn’t stop shaking. My brother Johnny came in, asked me what was wrong. I was trembling, too scared even to talk at all, fearful of escalating the situation. After a few minutes, I stammered out the words, “Kenny beat up Kathy.”

  As a result of all the shouting, Mom and Dad ran up the stairs and Kenny was already in the hallway. But what surprised me was that the commotion afterward focused on me, the crying little girl, and not the woman who’d just been abused. I was overcome with guilt, and I remember thinking, No, look after her! I saw her get thrown across the room! But Kathy didn’t have a mark on her, and she was quickly tamping out the fire with “I’m fine! I’m fine!” Kenny, meanwhile, wasn’t saying anything, just tapping his thumbnail repeatedly against his teeth. My father went off on him, of course. “How do you hit a woman?! What the hell are you thinking?” But they kept making a fuss about me. “Is she okay? Is she going to be okay?” Even Kenny’s wife, the victim here, was taking it upon herself to comfort me by saying, “I’m so sorry you had to see this.” By the end of that ni
ght, everybody in the family was acting like Kenny had shoved his wife a little, there was some hysteria, and it would never happen again.

  But Kathy continued to tell me about beatings. And when they got divorced, and Kenny got another girlfriend, she told me privately about his being violent with her, too.

  Then there was the extremely inappropriate sexual energy that came from Kenny. This older brother I worshipped would crawl into my bed and softly say to me over and over things like “You’re so pretty” and “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.” If you saw this, if you’d been in the room, you’d stop it from happening. He never molested me, but a twenty-eight-year-old guy whispering sweet nothings into his ten-year-old sister’s ear like a lover is out of line in any sane person’s book.

  Another incident occurred with a creepy friend of Kenny’s when I was around thirteen. Our house was always pretty welcoming, and friends staying over was never an issue. So Kenny brought home a guy he knew. When he and Kenny were in my brothers’ back bedroom, I was singing and dancing in front of them and being a general show-off. My brother left the room, and in two seconds this grown man pulled me onto his knee, and before my preteen brain could even process what this was, he jammed his tongue down my throat. Our teeth tapped. It’s odd, the details you remember. It was over in a minute maybe, and my thoughts ran to Bleeccch! What was THAT? I stood up, and then he casually went downstairs like nothing had happened.

  This guy ended up cooking dinner for my family that night. Tacos, I recall, which we all thought were pretty exotic. This guy had it down. The whole family liked him, which is what pedophiles know how to do: charm everyone. Meanwhile, as the evening wore on, I started getting angrier and angrier, reliving in my mind what had happened upstairs. I wanted revenge. After dinner, when it was family talk time in the living room, he was sitting on a chair, and I deliberately chose to sit on the arm of his chair. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I could at least start to make him uncomfortable. At one point he was holding court, telling a story, when out of the blue I made a fist and punched him in the stomach as hard as I could.

  “What are you doing, Kathy?” everyone yelled.

  I’m sure this asshole knew what was up, because he tried to laugh it off, to make sure I didn’t talk about what he did. “Oh, don’t mind her!” he joked. “Look out for little Attila the Hun here!”

  Later that night, I was too scared to be in my bed alone, so I told Mom what he did, and insisted on sleeping in her and Dad’s room. Mom, to her credit, kept saying, “Oh my God,” and told me that this guy would never be allowed in the house again. But she couldn’t bring herself to say anything directly to him, so he spent the night. This upset me for so many years that in my twenties I confronted Mom about it, and yelled, “How could you have let him spend the night in our house after what he did?” My mom burst into tears and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know what to do. We didn’t really know what that was!” She was trying to explain to me that that kind of behavior was something you saw on the news, or happened to other families. She obviously didn’t know how to process it.

  I do remember that she had the wherewithal to protect me that night, to the extent that I got to sleep in my parents’ bedroom, and I specifically remember her locking the door. But she wasn’t able to confront this guy. She later told me that she wanted to tell Dad, but she knew a chain reaction would start, and this is where Kenny comes in, as an unstable force that nobody wanted to unleash. It was the fear of the wrath of Kenny that prevented her from doing more. If Kenny were to be upset—God forbid—Mom knew this would lead to one of his inevitable rages. The cops would come. Somebody would end up in jail or the hospital. With Kenny you never knew. It was a call she made. Maybe not the best call.

  Plus, how do you prove what had happened to me? That was when I began thinking, if Kenny’s friend is doing this, then Kenny might be doing it as well. When Kenny’s wife told me later that during the production of Hair she came home to their apartment to find Kenny hanging out with two thirteen-year-old girls, I started to put things together.

  Later, after I’d moved to LA and was performing regularly at the Groundlings theater, I had a conversation with my brother John and mentioned the incident with Kenny’s friend. John said he didn’t know about it. “Really?” I said, surprised.

  He said, “Kathy, I would remember if you’d told me that.”

  So I filled him in on what had happened. Then John did something I’ll never stop loving him for. From Chicago, where John lived, and totally unsolicited, he tracked the guy down in another city and confronted him by phone. The guy’s response was that the call caught him off guard and he’d have to get back to him. Which is a sure sign of guilt, don’t you think? If someone asked you if you’d molested a child, you wouldn’t reply, “Um, I need a minute,” if you were innocent. Anyway, John called me back and said, “That fucker, he did it.” But he also told me that the guy wanted to take me and my mother out to lunch to explain. This threw me into a tailspin. I didn’t want to see the guy. I thought the request was categorically weird.

  Well, that Friday I performed at the Groundlings, and afterward I got flowers backstage with a note from the guy saying, “I’m here, and I want to take you out for a drink after the show.” This seriously creeped me out. Naturally, I was dating some loser at the time who wouldn’t go outside for me and find him and ask him to leave. So I had to walk out in front of the theater and confront the guy. I was shaking from head to toe.

  “You want to talk this out?” he said.

  “No,” I nervously replied. “Please don’t ever contact me again, and certainly don’t contact my mom.” And that was it. I never heard from him after that. John and I may have fought a lot as kids, but I love that he felt protective enough of me to stop everything in the middle of his workday and freakin’ cold-call this guy from years ago.

  Hearing that Kenny was a pedophile, though, was what set me on the path to cutting him out of my life. Again, his alleged pedophilia is something that there is no record of, as is sadly the case with many passed-on stories like this. No child has come up to me, either, and said, “Your brother molested me.” But here’s what I know: independently of each other, women deeply involved with Kenny—his wife Kathy, and then later a longtime girlfriend—told me about his being caught with minors, then his admitting it to them and crying.

  Kathy once told me about a phone call she got from a guy who wanted to kill Kenny because he’d caught Kenny with his underage daughter, and by underage I mean a child. These women I knew had graphic stories that, coupled with how I knew he’d been with me in bed when I was very young, were convincing enough for me. Kenny would eventually get locked up for drug charges and theft, but I wanted him to go away for being a pedophile. For ruining lives.

  “How can you be so hard on him?” I’d hear from members of my family, who just didn’t believe me.

  I couldn’t get these kids out of my mind. You think fucking a kid doesn’t ruin their life forever?

  Those were the crying, screaming arguments I’d have with my family. Unfortunately, the cheese stood alone.

  It was so difficult for me to understand why the rest of my family wouldn’t consider the possibility that Kenny was a pedophile. My mom and dad would constantly say, “Kathleen, that’s a horrible accusation to make.” And I think it’s a worse crime to commit than an accusation to make. This caused a great divide between me and the rest of my family, resulting in everything from separate holiday gatherings in one day—one where Kenny saw the family, and a later one that I attended—to the mere mention of his name by anyone else in my family, setting me off.

  The final straw for me came a couple of years after my parents and I had moved to Los Angeles, when I was in my midtwenties. Kenny, as you know, had been in LA already. I gave Kenny the benefit of the doubt for a couple of years. Then, I heard another story from his longtime girlfriend involving my brother confessing to sexual relations with kids. On sepa
rate occasions, he had molested one boy and one girl in the apartment building he managed. His explanation, according to the person who told me, was that they were coming on to him. Typical pedophile logic. In any case, I had the apartment numbers of the victims, and this may sound odd, but I actually tried to get my own brother arrested. I never told my family this. Blood is not thicker than water, not when it involves the abuse of kids. I was dating an attorney at the time, and he checked LA county arrest records for me. Kenny had never been arrested for molestation. There was no record of anything. I called the LAPD, and I told them that my brother was molesting kids—and then I provided the addresses. To my surprise, they told me that unless the children or the parents themselves contacted them, they could not investigate it.

  It was frustrating to me that there was no recourse for these accusations that I believed to be true. Though this led me to cut off all contact with Kenny, I stepped up my crusade with the rest of my immediate family. You have to understand that they simply didn’t want to believe that he was a pedophile. They still don’t. They would say things like, “You’re exaggerating,” or “You’re being overly dramatic,” and about my break with Kenny, “He’s the only oldest brother you’ll ever have.” But I took a hard line. My crusade continued in the form of years of arguments with my parents.

  Cutting off contact with Kenny wasn’t the answer, though. It didn’t get him out of my life, as I hoped it would. It may have been easy for me not to have contact with him, but because he was my brother, I was still hearing about what he was up to from the other family members, whether intentionally or not. When you’re dealing with someone as dangerous, damaged, and volatile as Kenny, it shouldn’t have surprised me that his life spiraled even further downward, very quickly. He was living with a woman who was a registered nurse—of course, he’d found a woman who could take care of him—and he started using drugs while he was with her.