Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction

Jarrett retells and illustrates the story of his grandparents’ high school romance. Joe and Shirley met when Joe was a freshman and Shirley was a junior. As Shirley tells it, “she stopped on a dime at the sight of him” (14): the two were instantly infatuated. The two dated all the way through high school until Joe left to join the Navy. He served in Guam in WWII. Shirley broke up with him while he was over there (though Jarrett thinks he might have had a pretty good time anyway, and demonstrates by including a drawing Joe did of a Guamanian babe). However, the two got back together and married when he returned.

Joe was a go-getter, if not always a guy who played by the rules: He originally pretended he was older than Shirley, and after the war he made a brief and illegal living selling neckties door-to-door without a license. The couple had five children (and one heartbreaking miscarriage), and Joe at last opened a piping factory to support his growing family.

Jarrett jumps forward in history now to ask: “And how did my parents meet? How did I come into this world? I don’t know many of the details of it. I just know that it was at my father’s family’s bar” (34). Leslie, Jarrett’s mother, got together with Jarrett’s father—who already had a girlfriend—and became pregnant. Jarrett’s father refused to help or to acknowledge his son. Shirley was at first infuriated with her daughter, but she greeted her grandson with love, and Leslie brought baby Jarrett home to live with her whole family.

The chapter ends with a reproduction of “Baby’s Health Record”: a booklet with a photo of Leslie lovingly cradling baby Jarrett on its cover.

Jarrett goes on to tell the story of his early life with his mother. Joe bought the two of them a house to live in, and Jarrett remembers sweet times with his mother when he was very small. However, he writes, “I also remember strangers coming in and out of the house” (47).

In a spread of sinister pages framed in black, Jarrett describes a recurring nightmare he had as a child, in which monsters were closing in on him. They would freeze when he stared them in the eye, but they surrounded him, so many of them that he couldn’t look at them all at once. They always got him in the end. When he’d wake from these dreams and run to his mother, he’d sometimes find a strange man in her room.

He remembers all of Leslie’s irresponsible behavior—shoplifting, ignoring him, avoiding her family, and hosting sinister guests who used her bathroom to wash blood out of their clothes. He remembers a family confrontation when he and Joe went to bail Leslie out, and Joe threatened to file papers to claim custody of Jarrett.

In the end, that’s what Joe and Shirley did. The young Jarrett didn’t understand why his mother couldn’t be with him, but appreciated the comfort and security of his grandparents’ house: He was amazed that they gave him breakfast in the morning, so used (at three years old) to getting his own cereal while Leslie slept. Joe and Shirley, at Shirley’s insistence, worked out a custody agreement that gave Leslie no parental rights. However, Jarrett says, he of course had no idea any of this was going on when he was little.

The collage at the end of this chapter reproduces letters from Leslie to Jarrett, and a program for a 1982 Christmas concert at a place called “Spectrum House.”