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its entire day’s contents onto the bricks.
    There was a hideous, muffled screaming and pounding coming from inside the shit sarcophagus. Hawaiian Punch’s wife came running towards the fallen thing with her hand on her face, but stopped short when the stink choked her away. The cops held their breath, righted the thing, and H.P. came stumbling out, looking for someone to kill. Starchild was long gone. Half the people in the immediate area were laughing, the rest too horrified by the scene to move to or fro. I was in full paroxysm and looked guilty as hell, so Keith and I bolted to the Cambridge Common.
    In the middle of the Common, a park across from Harvard campus, stands a monument with Abe Lincoln standing inside. All around this monument, several thousand well-heeled WASPs milled about with their pet names and trust funds as the sun went down.Keith and I laughed hysterically over the horrendous spectacle we had just been privy to, as we clambered up into the monument. I don’t know how no one saw us do it; the park was packed with alumni-ratti, but we crawled under the old president’s bronzed legs, and fucked like kids without a future.

B y the time I turned sixteen, my brothers and I hardly went to see Mom in the hospital anymore. We wouldn’t even go to bring her home. She would get rides back to our house from friends or just take a cab.
    We barely spoke to her parents anymore, either. There was no official conversation between them and my father about Mom’s staggering health-care costs, but after the separation was official and divorce was imminent, they were finally helping with her bills. Which was nice, since my father, a teacher, was struggling and mom’s parents were multimillionaires.
    My brothers and I always felt that our maternal grandparents—we’ll call them the Banks—blamed us for Mom’s troubles. God knows what Mom told them about us when she was with them. She probably sang her favorite, my children hate me song, but what she told us of herlife with them, she made it sound like she was raised in an evil yacht club full of stiff-jawed, overprivileged rapists who made her young life a silk-upholstered hell.

    Mom was adopted a little before her fourth birthday, from an orphanage near Yale University. Mr. and Mrs. Banks were a wealthy couple from Snob-Ascot, Connecticut, and had one natural son, Dicky. It might have been because of Mrs. Banks’ delicate health they adopted a little girl instead of having another baby. Mom was about seven or eight when Mrs. Banks number one died of brain cancer.
    Enter Mrs. Banks part deux. The second Mrs. Banks was a gourmand and a highly paid interior decorator. She did a room in the White House and bought tchotchkes for the Shah of Iran. She was a friend of the family, and recently widowed, so she and her natural son, Claude, moved in. Daddy Banks has his son, Mommy Banks, hers, and then there’s little Suzi. The girl the dead lady wanted.
    Now, everything Mom told us about her life, growing up a Banks, was clearly mommified. It’s not so much that it was all total delusional bullshit, but so much of what came out her mouth about anything was baloney, that one had to take it with a grain of salt. Or maybe, a ton of salt, like, as much sodium as one might find in baloney. So I can’t really say much about her childhood other than the obvious: She was raised with loads of money, was a debutante, sent away to schools, given horses and French tutors, and then sent to Paris to study dance, where she met my dad. I can’t really speak to the alleged abuse, rapes, neglect, and satanic nannies who drugged her, or any of the other colorfully horrific things that supposedly happened to her at the Banks house. However, I can tell you about my personal experiences with the Banks.
    Mr. Banks was a hoity-toity CEO or some such thing for a fancy hospital in New York City. I have no idea if my uncle Dicky ever actually