Suburgatory Read online

  SUBURGATORY

  SUBURGATORY

  Twisted Tales from Darkest Suburbia

  LINDA ERIN KEENAN

  Guilford, Connecticut

  An imprint of Globe Pequot Press

  Copyright © 2012 by Linda Keenan

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  skirt! is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Text design: Sheryl P. Kober

  Editor: Lara Asher

  Project editor: Meredith Dias

  Layout: Joanna Beyer

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book is dedicated to the best man I could have

  ever chosen to have a son with, Steve Mendes, and

  the now boy-man who made life in Suburgatory a

  daily joy amid the madness, Frank Keenan Mendes.

  Also to my late Daddy, Joe Keenan, and my beloved,

  irreplaceable Mommy, Marie Thibodeau Keenan.

  If only you were here to see this all, Mommy.

  The individuals and situations described in this book are composites based in part on the author’s experiences and in part on her imagination. In some instances, names and other information have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved. No resemblance to specific individuals is intended or should be inferred, unless specifically stated otherwise. This book is not and should not be construed as associated with or endorsed by any of the individuals herein named.

  Introduction

  Behold, in graphic detail, the career suicide note of one Linda Erin Keenan. Each year since having my son and having the luxury to stay home with him, the Social Security Administration has quite graciously let me know, with this, my lifetime earnings statement, that after a decade of steady raises at work, I have gone from Hero in 2003, to pregnant and disabled with severe nausea in 2004, to Big Fat Zero in 2005 and beyond. Well, I prefer the term, “Unpaid Mommy, Raising America’s Future,” you woman-hating bureaucrats!

  Every year when I find this hateful scrap of paper in the mailbox, I once again see the clearest evidence I have of how I tumbled so hard and fast from a trash-talking, urban CNN news writer in New York City to an unemployed, depressed, suddenly suburban, and still trash-talking stay-at-home mom. I do have an unstoppable potty mouth as you’ll see in this book, and I’m not talking about diaper chat here.

  This Career Suicide Social Security Earnings document, in a way, was my ticket into an utterly foreign place I now call Suburgatory, where potty mouths (and minds) like mine are about as rare as black people—in the 1 percent range, I’d say. Actually there are probably more black people than potty mouths, now that I think about it. In this strange land, I had a new baby, no friends, and not much more than a prescription for Zoloft to keep myself afloat. Apparently, the ticket was one-way, because I’m sure as hell still stuck in Suburgatory.

  The original proposal for this book was picked by Warner Brothers in 2010, and you can see their imagining of Suburgatory on the ABC show of the same title, which debuted in Fall 2011. But while the TV series focuses on a transplanted teen from New York City, my book offers a vision of suburbia and contemporary American life that I witnessed when I myself was transplanted from the city after having my son. It is satirical local news that skewers mostly upper-middle-class American pieties and parenting obsessions (not least, my own). I also target racism, sexism, mommy wars, body self-hatred, sublimated suburban sexuality, and class warfare; willful ignorance to the broader world along with an America in decline; and the all-around bad behavior that I have seen raging underneath the surface of those obsessively tended suburban lawns and bikini lines.

  Do those “isms” make this sound like that annoying late 1980s sociology class you skipped, or worse, a women’s studies course?! Well, fear not, there’s lots of swear words and dirty talk all over Suburgatory. (See later, my combination of both obsessions with the lawns and the bikini lines, in my fake ad for Suburgatory’s new, hot landscaping service: “The Lawnzilian.”)

  Tessa, the teenage character created by ABC’s Suburgatory, was forced by the man in her life—her dad—to leave her beloved city life for this supposed suburban utopia, which the show creator says was inspired by her own experience as a teen. As I wrote about in my book proposal, I followed the same trajectory—with my husband, Steve. Steve couldn’t imagine raising our son in New York, which had become too unimaginably scary to him once he gazed upon his new, miraculous baby boy clone. I did not feel this way. But I couldn’t imagine handling my scary-intense job and being a mom at the same time. (Several mom friends could handle it—though not most—it must be said. Sorry, bra-burning, second-wave feminists disgusted with their weak, pathetic daughters! You can ask my weary shrink and ­pharmaceutical-battered liver: I simply couldn’t cut it.)

  OK, here’s the point where you might be thinking of flinging your book or iPad or Kindle across the room, and saying to yourself: Oh my God, I’ve bought another whiny white mommy book. What was I thinking? Here she goes, complain, complain, annoying, spoiled whiny white mommy. I’m toning her! Well, let me explain precisely what this whiny white mommy is complaining about.

  I fully acknowledge that I am among the luckiest of women in the luckiest place anywhere on the planet. I chose to stay at home and that’s not a choice most can make. That Big Fat Zero on my Career Suicide Note did not bankrupt me. I made good money for a handful of years, and have a husband with a good salary, and we are also both pathologically cheap.

  How cheap are we? So cheap that we could swing living in modest homes in expensive suburbs with great schools. But full disclosure: This luxury was subsidized by money I inherited when both my parents died (by the time I turned twenty-nine). Considering their modest salaries as teacher and career guidance expert in my hometown of Albany, New York (black/hispanic population near 40 percent—take that, whitey-town suburbia!), the fact that they amassed any savings at all after sending three daughters to pricey colleges amazes me. Clearly they were cheap, too—or, to use my technical term, “Super Crazy Mega Cheap.”

  My problem, and of course it is a problem only in the upper-middle-class sense of the word, is that abruptly leaving my career for suburban mommyhood made me a foreigner in a place where conformity was king, subversion seemed policed, and where I often felt like I had been taken hostage by an adult Girl Scout troop.

  No surprise that my first friends in suburbia were actual foreigners. Naoko and Yuki were my treasured Japanese lady friends who fit in far better than I did, even though they weren’t part of the rich “Power Asian” set, a significant demographic in my new land. “Rinda, this my home now!” Naoko would say, with several kids to take care of and a husband deployed in Iraq (and now, sigh, he’s in Afghanistan. Semper Fi, Kevin Conway.) Still, she somehow found time to scrapbook, and, oh, work overnights at a place where she championed and cared for the severely disabled. What she lacked in language skills, she more than made up for with her indomitable spirit and trays of homemade sushi rolls. I wasn’t the least bit surprised at the strength we all saw after the Japanese earthquake. Not me, not after Naoko and Yuki, who’s a gorgeous beam of steel herself.

  But what made me a foreigner? Really, it was my love of the transgressive and the unspeakable, spoken out loud. I’ve always been this way. As a seven-year-old in 1977, I drove my very conservative, Depres
sion-era mother insane after I read the book William’s Doll and began my own tiny fag hag crusade on behalf of “sissies” everywhere.

  No surprise, I was the all-purpose outcast of my Catholic school—St. Bully’s of the All Sadists—where my only outlet from constant harassment was to furtively read Judy Blume’s Deenie (the one where Deenie touches her “special place” with a washcloth! God, I’m still aroused thirty years later).

  No surprise that my sole childhood friend was the only Jew my Irish Catholic family really knew—Sheryl Olinsky—who set me up for a lifetime of Heeb-lovin’ and Chinese-food eatin’, and whose Barry Manilow and purple-powered Bat Mitzvah was the defining social event of my childhood. Pretty much the only social event, now that I think about it.

  And no surprise I ended up in New York, a glorious Jewzapalooza and Homo Heaven rolled into one, working in a place where having an eye for the deranged and twisted was not just tolerated, but a job requirement. For me, my truest home was a network TV newsroom.

  Earnest moments are rare for me, and here comes one of them: I felt genuinely grateful, especially after 9/11 at CNN, that in my own tiny deskbound way, writing hermit-like on my bits of anchor copy, I got to call bullshit on asshole thugs on a global scale, on a daily basis. “Oh, I see, crazy Taliban nut-jobs, you plan to tip over a brick wall on top of an ‘accused homosexual?’ Now you’re stoning a thirteen-year-old who was raped because she ‘asked for it’? Allow me to help tell the world how sick and horrible you are!”

  And beyond that ample satisfaction, I had the social benefits. I had found a family of trash-talkers like me, and we all relished incidents of guests gone wild. To get a control room full of satellite jockeys, camera guys, and nail-gnawing producers to laugh, you need to bring it hard, like the night when one guest, comedian Bill Maher, discussed basketball player Kobe Bryant “trying to get some stanky on his hang-down. Oh, can you say that on CNN?” Anchor Aaron Brown smoothly said, “I didn’t understand most of those words,” and for a few seconds neither did we as we speed-translated in our heads what the “hang-down” and “skanky” were. (For you nice, innocent types, “getting stanky on your hang-down” means getting a girl to have sex with you, as in “Linda was over last night? Did you get some stanky on your hang-down?”) Once those seconds were up, we began bellowing at the fact that Maher had slipped that tender bit of sweet talk onto CNN air, with no apparent FCC fine either.

  Another favorite was no-holds-barred sex columnist Dan Savage. When we booked him as a guest, I remember thinking in the back of my mind, This guy could go X-rated, nasty-nuclear on live air. He was picked to appear after a U.N. weapons inspector and Marine was reported as being an open and active member of the sadomasochistic “community.” In the span of, um, four minutes? Savage hit the following topics: S&M (“sort of cops and robbers for grown-ups with your pants off, and it usually ends in masturbation”), vaginal and anal intercourse, balloon fetishes, smoking fetishes, and plushophiles (folks turned on by stuffed animals, and/or who dress up like stuffed animals. Savage’s advice: “I hope there’s a lot of Scotchguarded fabric on it.”). He closed the interview by saying “Personally, I haven’t spanked a Marine, but I would make an exception for this man if I could see him first.”

  No one went ballistic about Maher’s “stanky hang-down,” but I think Savage’s bravura performance almost got a few of us fired.

  There were also moments of sublime retribution: When we, the lowly staff, saw our own private Ron Burgundys—the most imperious of anchors—humbled. Some were famous, or, more annoying still, wannabe famous. These are things that never ended up on Page Six in the New York Post, but damn well should have. (I should add that I have worked with or around dozens of anchors and reporters at three different news organizations. Good luck trying to figure out who I’m talking about. To tease you further on this, see the “Toddler or Anchor” piece later in the book, satire that’s actually all true. And to the many nice, normal anchors or reporters? Know that your staff worships you for your sanity.)

  A favorite was when one particularly annoying gasbag anchor left his wallet in the bathroom. Inside was a topless photo of his socially prominent, flat-chested girlfriend. (Is there any socially prominent woman who isn’t flat-chested? And what about the booty? No booty either? Is there any preppy person with a booty?) That image got photocopied, by the way. Lucky for them this was back in the day, well before bare, semifamous A-cup titties would go viral within minutes. In any case, Sorry socially prominent, flat-chested, booty-free girlfriend. That’s what you get for dating a pompous ass who can be nasty to his staff. A bumbling pompous ass who loses his wallet. He’s booty-free too, by the way.

  And there are few things sweeter than seeing the anchor who just humiliated your beloved work friend having his bald spot spray-covered with Hair-In-A-Can after the previous application of “hair” melted off in the rain. Or hearing a know-it-all anchor mispronounce a word everyone with a pulse should know, leaving the tech guys busting a rib laughing.

  So the humor was on the jagged edge and the pace was intense. There were a handful of times when I was writing copy for Anderson Cooper about forty seconds before it was to come out of his mouth. Lucky for me Anderson can edit on the fly, on air, while these never-before-seen words popped from my fingers onto the prompter.

  One time with Anderson, I blasted in, with literally seconds to spare, something thoughtlessly inappropriate about kidnapping victim Elizabeth Smart, in some misguided attempt to be “edgy.” I watched Anderson process the words live and reject them, forcing him to vamp and instantaneously come up with something new and tasteful. Forced anchor vamping = massive fuckup for any copywriter. Crashing that hard, as we call it in news, left my hands sweating and my heart racing in one of the control rooms nicknamed the “Screamatorium.”

  By 2003 (the peak “Hero” moment on my Career Suicide Note), it was in my head that my life needed radical change. The seed had been planted two years before on 9/11. I heard the first plane crash from my apartment, just like millions of other New Yorkers, while Steve watched it fly in overhead. We were by no means affected in a truly personal way by 9/11, that is, having a direct family member or friend murdered that day, as so many other friends actually did. (Yeah, you heard me, murdered. I’m one of those liberal pukes who felt zero ambivalence shouting out “Fuck, YEAH”—and then crying—when Bin Laden got it. Might have been a small fist pump, too. “About fucking time” is how this liberal reacted.)

  But despite not having a family member or friend murdered, 9/11 had a cumulative effect on me: watching people cry in the streets holding “Missing” signs; seeing half my local firehouse wiped out; waking up to the smell of burning rubble for months after; being evacuated after a bomb threat with my boss screaming, “Everyone Get Out Now!”; writing endless stories about it at work; watching field producers come back from Ground Zero looking stricken; having guys in puffy hazmat suits walk around the office while my only protection from possible anthrax was an old, ugly Ann Taylor outfit. It added up, as I’m sure it did with countless other New Yorkers.

  I vowed—quite uncharacteristically for a cynical sort like me—to take a chance on life, clean up my act, and have a baby. Steve said, “Sure, what the hell.” I think 9/11 affected him too, though in a different way. His foul-mouthed daddy lion voice spoke to him saying, “There’s no fucking way I’m raising my kid in this crime-ridden terror trap. Roar!” Not that we even had to debate the question. I knew I couldn’t be a mom, keep my sanity, and continue in the Screamatorium; and we couldn’t afford to stay in Manhattan on one salary. So off we went to the first of three suburbs over the next four years.

  Within months of shvitzing in the Screamatorium, I found myself marooned in suburbia. Now, years later, with a happy son; a small house overrun with his brothers from different mothers; a select group of trash-talking friends; and Zoloft pills a-poppin’, I see it as the birthplace of my new life as a thirty-something mom. I have a new set of satisfacti
ons and, of course, a bigger ass. But at first suburbia seemed like nothing more than the graveyard for my twenty-something dreams. (Sooo overdramatic, spoiled whiny white mommy! Trying to score the Pulitzer Prize for Overwriting? Good effort!)

  I had gone from 80 miles an hour to zero, and I had vastly underestimated the crash this staggering deceleration might cause. My landscape now included Wal-Mart on one end of the class scale and Whole Foods on the other; and crossover between the two looked nonexistent. Nearly everyone was white (see Whole Foods), except nannies, cleaning ladies, and yard workers (see Wal-Mart), and all the dads and the working moms I never met vanished on the 6:04 a.m. train.

  Suburbanites seemed to me to have one-track minds, and mighty clean ones, too. They were about one business, and one business alone: baby and then child-raising. On paper, I didn’t look so different from the other stay-at-home moms. They were mostly former professionals, too, some from Wall Street trading floors, which are easily as rough and tumble as any newsroom. But whatever edge these type-A women might have had now seemed gone, replaced by a version of hyper-vigilant parenting that was, to me, brutally boring and faintly absurd. They blathered on and on about how people without kids “just didn’t get it.” They seemed busy busy busy and, most important to me, appeared very short on laughs. One day I spotted some obscene playground graffiti and I was the only one even willing to acknowledge it, as in, “Look, that slide says VAGINA on it!” I wished I could share my glee with my potty-mouth ex-coworkers, since my new “coworker” moms had no interest. But they were back in the newsroom slamming a show together, while I was soon to establish myself as that weirdo mommy at Gymboree.

  I knew very quickly that moving to the suburbs was a mistake when I realized that I missed my New York City doorman I’ll call Rob, who was such a cliché of the portly, klutzy, up-in-your-business doorman that no self-respecting comedy writer would ever dream him up. (And in fact, one of the world’s most successful comedy writers lived in my building as he, too, became a parent and eventually left for the suburbs: Adam McKay. How do I know this, since I’ve never met Adam McKay? Because Rob told me all about him, what a great guy he was, his nice wife and his adorable baby and his latest fantastic SNL sketch and… .)