About a decade ago, when I was trying to quit drinking, I went to an inpatient rehab in New Hampshire, in the mountains. Some detoxing and group sessions among the balsam firs, hemlocks, and sugar maples. My aunt Alice and cousin Angelika lived nearby, and are both in recovery, so my mother suggested I join them for some meetings after I got out of my program.
I was unenthusiastic about the idea. Trying to give up alcohol and benzos was already nearly breaking me. Adding Alice and Angelika to the mix struck me as an utterly sadistic cherry on top of everything else I was going through.
But those were desperate times for me. So I took the desperate measure of following my mother’s suggestion, and on the day I was released from my program, I was greeted by my aunt, who ferried me, through the colorful fall foliage, over to her and Angelika’s A.A. meeting, in suburban Manchester.
I soon found myself in one of those old, white steepled churches that once dotted the New England landscape. Protestant, sparsely decorated, freezing.
The basement room we met in looked like a high school auditorium. There was a crucifix on the wall, and an American flag on the stage. The smell of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and Marlboro Lights breath lingered in the air.
My cousin Angelika and her son, Austin, gave me and my aunt a big wave from the back of the room as we entered, just in time for the meeting to start. After the meeting’s host, a brash female truck driver, got everyone settled and dispensed with formalities, she announced the meeting’s speaker — Angelika.
I instantly grew excited. And just a little uneasy. The public utterances Angelika had made over the years — in places like the supermarket, the bank, and yes, church — were a greatest hits collection of the disturbing and the bizarre. Considering the many crowds of people I had seen her completely mortify, putting her in front of an audience was bold.
Angelika put Austin and her Dunkin’ Donuts down, and walked to the front of the room. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a braid, and she was wearing a festive Christmas sweater. It all looked very wholesome. To me, the whole thing was a (nonalcoholic) cognitive dissonance cocktail.
Soon, Angelika began to speak.
“Recovery is the single hardest thing I have ever done. It was like climbing Mount Everest. It was something that I never could have accomplished on my own, no matter how hard I tried. I know, because I tried many times on my own, and fell flat on my face every time.
“But when I first came here, the people were friendly. They were open. They made climbing the mountain less scary. They made me want to come back again and again, even after I failed another time. They shared with me a new way of life and a different way of thinking about my problems. They made me realize I didn’t have to climb alone. And if I struggled or slipped, I was confident that they would be there for me, in a nonjudgmental way.
“That didn’t mean the climb wasn’t still hard. That didn’t mean there weren’t times when I was frustrated by my new friends or by this program. That happened a lot. But one day, after days and then weeks and months of muddling through, I put my head up, and I could see that I had made it so far up the mountain that my view of life was already totally different. And it had taken me that long to notice, because I was so busy and present with doing the work.
“So I want to say to everyone who is coming here today for the first time, remember that it’s supposed to be hard getting sober. Every time you feel that frustration or doubt, remember that you’re climbing Everest. And look around at your fellow climbers, because no matter what happens to you on the mountain, they will give you a helping hand to reach the top.
“Keep coming, guys!”
As she finished her talk, everyone in the room rose to their feet with applause. Including me.
I was positively gobsmacked. Was this eloquent, polished, wise woman really my cousin Angelika? Were this articulate, inspirational speaker and the girl who once shat in the lake, while someone was swimming in it with her, actually the same person?
Was this really The Blonde Thing we were all applauding for?
♦
To explain The Blonde Thing, let me take you back in time, to a warm summer evening in the mid-’90s, up at my grandparents’ lake house in Quebec. I would stay there with them every summer, along with my brother and some of my cousins, including Angelika.
My grandparents (or as we called them, Nana and Ganka) and I were watching one of those classic film channels on DirecTV. We had missed a bit of the beginning of the black-and-white film that was on, but caught an early scene, where a pigtailed little blonde girl murders a boy to steal a medal he won. Shortly afterwards, she confesses to having previously murdered an elderly woman, locks a guy in a building and sets it ablaze, burning him to death, and otherwise generally girlbosses it to the max.
The movie was The Bad Seed, a psychological thriller released in 1956, about a precocious eight-year-old girl named Rhoda — a psychopathic killer in a pinafore dress.
Not long after we were caught up on Rhoda’s antics, the three of us looked at each other with conspiratorial smiles, and all shouted the same name — Angelika!
Oh boy, was Angelika a terror in those days. Such a terror that my grandmother had come up with her own moniker for Angelika: The Blonde Thing. The name was a sort of morbid joke she would make to any innocent bystanders who witnessed one of Angelika’s performances, a way of explaining her behavior. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
While Rhoda’s rap sheet was unquestionably worse than Angelika’s, Rhoda reminded us all of her. They were both angelic-looking blondes and holy terrors. They both had bad-girl nicknames. I even liked my grandmother’s coinage, The Blonde Thing, more than Hollywood’s The Bad Seed.
I think it inspires more dread.
♦
Summer Winds, as Ganka called the Quebec lake house property, was a bucolic playground, with wide lawns, endless flower beds and topiaries, a babbling brook, a Japanese garden, swings, four-wheelers to ride along the miles of maple syrup farm trails that filled the dense forest behind our house, and a dock, stretching out to a speedboat, for cruising, waterskiing, and tubing.
It was an idyllic place. The days were filled with sunshine, and the nights blanketed with stars, so quiet outside that you could hear crickets, and the loons calling, out on the lake.
Except when The Blonde Thing was in residence, of course.
One of Angelika’s most noticeable characteristics back then was her loud, piercing shriek, which would echo throughout the mountains surrounding the lake, like in some horror version of The Sound of Music.
She shrieked so loudly when she got her first period — while being pulled behind Ganka’s speedboat, in a watertube — that neighbors came running over to check if things were okay when they pulled into the dock — Angelika, shrieking, in tears, telling everyone what had just occurred on the lake.
“My fucking vagina started bleeding and Ganka wouldn’t stop dragging me behind the boat!”
I watched as my grandmother, ashen-faced, tried to reassure the onlookers from our lakeside community and shoo them off.
It was not the first time that Angelika had made a public declaration about her vagina. On the way to church one Sunday, she had let my grandmother, and all of my cousins riding along in the car with her, know that, when the Grand Marquis bounded over a particular hill in the Vermont woods we were passing through, it made her “China go up, and it felt really good.”
Angelika was feeling that inertia everywhere, even in her Far East, and she needed us all to know. We were about eleven or twelve. Angelika was probably about six.
Probably her most famous scream, though, was when Angelika screamed at me, so loudly, and for so long, that I fully went Will Smith at the Oscars on her. In my family, The Slap will always be the time I hauled off and smacked Angelika across the face at Beaver Brook Falls.
The falls were a spot in northern New Hampshire we used to go to, to have a picnic, hike the mountain and play in the waterfall. It was fun and a very pretty area, but trips there were always fraught with drama.
My cousin Stephanie would wear moccasins to climb the very muddy mountain, and scream with terror as she quickly slid down the side. My cousin Timothy would climb to a point of no return, and necessitate a fevered rescue operation, every single time. The girls would fight. The boys would fight.
This particular trip, Angelika had instigated fights with everyone, including my grandmother. She was in a horrid mood, and we were all going to bathe in it with her, whether we liked it or not. A common occurrence with The Blonde Thing.
As we were packing up the car to go, Angelika started complaining about her spot for the ride home, and I finally barked at her to shut up. This led her to start screeching again, on and on, with increasing volume and velocity. All I could hear was ringing in my ears and a very faint sound of the falls in the background.
As her screams reached a fever pitch, I suddenly felt a huge rush of adrenaline, and found my hand flying through the air and landing — perfectly, I might add — on Angelika’s cheek.
The slap echoed. Then came what felt like an endless silence, as all of us, including Angelika, processed what had just happened.
Followed by Angelika releasing the single loudest shriek she has ever made, and that I have ever heard, to this day.
People probably thought the train was coming through town.
♦
Angelika was one of my many cousins on my mother’s side of the family. Like many icons before her, Angelika came from a troubled background. Angelika’s parents were my Aunt Alice (my mother’s older sister) and my Uncle Julio. Julio used to accuse Alice of being a raging alcoholic, and Alice would fire back by calling Julio a Puerto Rican. It was that kind of unhappy dynamic. (They’re happily divorced now, and Alice has been sober for well over a decade. Julio, as far as I know, is still Puerto Rican.)
There is no doubt that Alice’s alcoholism, with its attendant chaos, traumatized Angelika.
One time, in the middle of the night, Alice, blackout drunk, decided to drive her and Angelika up to my grandparents’ lake house. They somehow made it through the length of New Hampshire, and when they got to the Shrine of Our Lady of Grace in Columbia, New Hampshire, about a half-hour from the lake, Alice decided she was going to fix a screaming and crying Angelika, once and for all.
At about 1 a.m., my heavily intoxicated aunt parked, got out of the car, and put Angelika, shrieking, on the outdoor stone altar. There was no need to light a candle, because there were some already flickering from behind the altar. Alice then began praying and angrily shouting at God to please let the demons out of her daughter.
I can picture it now: the chill of the night forest. The sound of crickets and passing cars. The stone face of the Virgin Mother peering down, lit by the moon and stars. The screams. The stench of vodka in the air.
By the time they arrived at the lake house — Alice having miraculously made it through Customs and Immigration at the Canadian border in the state she was in — Angelika was still in hysterical tears. She reported everything to us.
My grandmother was mortified and sent us all to bed, presumably to deal with Alice. At the time, us kids thought this was all hilarious. Angelika’s possessed! Nowadays, my heart breaks for Angelika when I think about this moment. She deserved much better parenting. Every kid does.
With some context, the incident was not too surprising. My Irish Catholic family had dark, gothic vibes. Many were alcoholics and addicts; most were mentally ill in some way, shape, or form, too. Read a few novels by William Faulkner and you’ll get the general vibe. We would picnic in cemeteries and take photos with the graves. We’d have bonfires, séances, all sorts of spooky undertakings, in the woods behind the house. My mother even drove a hearse at one point. We would all play and sing in the back.
And Angelika had definitely pulled a “child from The Exorcist” before. One morning before church, my grandmother refused to let her wear what she wanted, so Angelika began screaming at Nana, “What’s your name again? Mary? I HATE YOU, fuckin’ Mary!”
This led Nana to tell her to go to her room and that she wasn’t coming to church with us. Going to church, at St. Albert’s in Beecher Falls, Vermont, also meant getting to go to breakfast with everyone at Bessie’s Diner in Canaan, Vermont, afterwards. So Angelika wasn’t going down without one last cry.
Yelled at by Nana once more, Angelika ran up the stairs, just like Regan in The Exorcist, and then, with both her hands clutching the rails, she stuck her head through the banister, and ghoulishly screamed at all of us, “I’M GOIN’ TO FUCKIN’ CHURCH!” She even sounded like the possessed Regan. It was terrifying.
Certainly though, regardless of a kid’s antics, DIY exorcisms are not it.
You can go ahead and call Child Protective Services now, before I continue.
♦
You would think, based on the situation at home, that Angelika would have relished the opportunity to spend weeks at the lake with her grandparents and cousins. But a lot of the time, even when things were going well at the lake, she would get on the phone with her parents, and make up stories about how awful everyone was being to her, in the hopes she could convince them to bring her home.
I suppose being around us all might have been tough for Angelika, as an only child. It was also likely a challenge to her continued M.O. to be under the watchful eyes of sober adults (for once). Although she might have been protected from escapades like pulling a microwave off the counter and onto her face, necessitating stitches and leaving a scar, if my grandparents had been watching her instead of her mother.
In any case, every time Angelika would call her parents and make up these stories, it caused big drama in the house. Worried, to some extent, about their daughter, Alice and Julio would talk to my grandparents, and demand to know what was going on. Then my grandparents would confront Angelika about her lies, and we’d all find out what she said.
Finally one day, after another of Angelika’s false flag phone calls, my cousins and I all got sick of her routine, and cut her off. The silent treatment.
She really didn’t like that. In order to try and get back in our good graces, she dialed her parents up, and proceeded to put on an Oscar-worthy performance of her love, and cherishing, of her cousins, and everyone she was surrounded by, at Summer Winds.
“Oh my God, momma! I love being around Stephanie. She’s like a sister to me!”
She then cradled the phone to her neck to call out, “Stephanie, do that smile you always do!”
Angelika even pulled Stephanie in, to talk with her father on the phone, while she poured herself a full glass of milk, to fortify herself for another half hour of ass-kissing, for our benefit, on the phone.
♦
Angelika was actually a pretty good actress. She reminded us of Amanda Bynes, who was still on Nickelodeon’s All That back then.
Angelika was probably even my first muse. In between real-life dramas, the cousins often staged our own productions, either performed for the adults, or saved on the gigantic ’80s camcorder we had.
Enhancing her performances, Angelika’s face was a true carnival, a never-ending display of sights and sounds. She was slightly chubby, and her eyebrows were very light, so if she smooshed her chin down, she could make something we called “the Egg Face.” The Egg Face was accompanied by a set of bright blue, terrified eyes that looked like they had been jacked up with a couple of hits of Upneeq.
Our productions ranged from vaudeville to music videos, from comedies to dramas. We had a gigantic bunkroom in the basement of the house, filled with twin beds covered in Disney-themed comforters. There, we filmed a lip-synched duet to “Unforgettable” by Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole over candlelight. We did a go-go style music video to “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” by Nancy Sinatra, and a Western-style one to her darker track “Bang Bang.”
Various skits were done featuring Angelika doing the Egg Face. Humpty Dumpty showing his track marks. A Southern gnome guarding her swamp. A kindergarten teacher with rabies.
I was a tough director.
“Angelika! Come. On. Is that really the face you’d make if your daughter was just raped and murdered? You look like an old woman at the supermarket who forgot her coupon book.”
When the O.J. Simpson trial was happening, we made up a song about the murders, set to the tune of “In the Jungle,” and performed it for the adults. Another time, we harmonized “Dream On” by Aerosmith as we paraded through the house. (All of our parents were big Aerosmith fans, and my grandfather had sold Steven Tyler a bunch of motorcycles at his Honda dealership in Massachusetts.)
Ganka spent a lot of those days parked in front of the T.V., watching the O.J. trial, from start to finish, on Court TV, as well as the entire saga of the Clinton impeachment on CNN. He was cranky, and did not like to be bothered (fathers — you’ve met them, I take it?) — so of course, we would send Angelika his way. As either a performance artist or a human grenade, depending on how you look at it.
My other cousins and I would hide in the kitchen and watch as Angelika was sent to ask a variety of bizarre and disturbing questions, all to see what Ganka’s reaction would be.
“Ganka? Ganka? Ganka. Ganka!”
“For the love of God, what?”
“Can I go to the bathroom?”
“Of course you can.”
“No. Can I go to the bathroom?”
“Get the hell out of here!”
Or there were questions about the birds and the bees.
“Ganka, can I ask you something?”
“What is it, sweetheart?”
“If I made out with a boy only wearing my bathing suit, do I need to take a pregnancy test?”
“Get out of here, you lunatic!”
Another time, we made her stuff her mouth with 20 packs of white Tic Tacs, then blow in his face. She could have done it from across the lake — it was a truly powerful and invasive smell. Like heavy-duty, industrial cleaning chemicals. And it assaulted you like you were being hit by an arctic fucking blast from a Star Wars- or Ghostbusters-type gun.
I think Ganka actually laughed at that one. Worth the stomach cramps, Angelika thought.
I have seen Caroline Kennedy’s hot son Jack Schlossberg do TikToks where he annoys his famously prickly dad, Edwin Schlossberg, with these types of questions and stunts. Furthering my belief that Jack and I are operating on the same wavelength. (Never forget that Angelika and I were there first, though, Jackie boy.)
I think about Angelika and laugh whenever Kanye West parades his wife Bianca Censori around The Grove naked, or pulls some other stunt for the paps with her.
You just know Ye and Bianca spend the next few days lolling up a storm, with tears in their eyes, as they survey the media freakouts and insane social media commentary that follow.
I also thought of Angelika when the internet was losing its shit over the bizarre and captivating faces the Chick-fil-A Girl served from behind her counter. I lolled perhaps just a little bit harder at her theatricality; her face, a limitless palette of wild-eyed expressions and masks; her weirdness, and all the delight it brought the enthralled masses. It was all so familiar to me.
Angelika, who was six years younger than me, shared Gina Lynn’s electric, shapeshifting visage, her love of attention, and Bianca’s gameness, her full willingness to be an objet d’art of fuckery. She was a true gift to me as an auteur.
♦
My theatrical cousin was also a phenomenally entertaining dancer. So captivating that she actually inspired me to create an entirely new form of dance: leg dancing.
Yes, I also do choreography. And leg dancing is one of my most brilliant artistic creations to date. And it is really simple to learn, too: just lie flat on your back and kick your legs up in the air, along with the song.
You can really take it anywhere you want. Perhaps you want to add a little elegance to the routine, so you arch your feet and move your legs up and down in a sophisticated way. Maybe you go cancan style. Or perhaps you want to trace an invisible bow in the air with your big toe. There is no wrong answer.
What I love most about leg dancing is how it puts the focus back on the leg, freeing it from the tyranny of its dependence on the floor and an upright posture, and allowing it to flourish, footloose and fancy-free, in the more prominent locale of the air.
Angelika was a phenomenal leg dancer, with a legendary kick. We once did a coordinated leg dance to Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Goodnight Tonight,” which has a little bit of a disco vibe, and playful guitar work that really allows your gams to blow it out. We all did great, but Angelika really stole the show.
She was, undoubtedly, a star.
I once taught leg dancing at the Brooklyn Bridge, at 3 a.m., at an illegal dance party that my friends and I had, with a gigantic boombox. Kieran Culkin and Emma Stone were there, and both of them cracked up to see me horizontally dancing to “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson. Then they joined in.
One day, the leg dancing tsunami will crash over the world, and you better be ready, Mr. Fosse.
♦
Angelika would often go missing, leading to frantic searches for her whereabouts.
She had stark blonde, almost white, hair, with the exception of her birthmark, a brown patch of hair on the back of her head, that Alice called the “Puerto Rican patch.” The patch allowed my grandmother to I.D. Angelika the time she got lost at Fort Ticonderoga, trying to peep under a Native American reenactor’s skimpy loincloth. She didn’t have to try that hard, because the guy’s shit really was all hanging out. Run those background checks, U.S. Park Service.
Another incident saw Angelika take off on an ATV, only to return with kittens she had decided to adopt. From whom is anybody’s guess. She also dragged our elderly neighbor Mrs. Roy, who spoke no English, down the driveway, so she could introduce everyone to her new friend.
Nana had to drive an exhausted Mrs. Roy back home.
♦
Time for one last story from our childhood. I just know you’ve been waiting for this one since I mentioned it at the beginning.
You know that expression, go shit in a lake? Well, Angelika did that once, for real. While she and Stephanie were swimming by themselves, Angelika decided to just drop her bathing suit bottom under the water and let out a big dump. In the lake we all swam in, every day.
Her big mistake was telling Stephanie, the biggest tattletale in the world, what she did.
No one believed Stephanie when she told us, almost right after Angelika told her. So I had everyone line up behind me, waiting for Angelika to emerge from the lake. Like a true detective, I waited until she was face-to-face with us, then asked her point-blank, knowing that the expression on her face would say everything.
“Angelika.”
“What?”
“Did you shit in the lake?” We all stared at her.
“No?” she lied, her face giving her away instantly.
“You’re disgusting!” we all yelled, going to tell Nana, who made Angelika go and fish the floating turd out of the water and flush it down the toilet.
♦
The last time I saw Angelika was when she and her husband Jerry got married, a few years ago. It was during autumn in New Hampshire, at an apple farm, and the scenery, especially the foliage, was gorgeous.
Aside from my family, I hardly knew anyone at the wedding. There were a lot of people from Angelika’s recovery meetings there, as well as a heavy contingent of deaf people. One of Angelika’s jobs was sign language interpreter, and her hands and face became entertainingly animated as she signed. There were even some words and expressions where it looked like she was doing the Egg Face.
It was delightful to watch, and it made me realize it was probably much easier for Angelika to maintain friendships with people who could not hear her at all.
There was also a huge contingent of lesbians at the wedding — more lesbians than family members combined, for both bride and groom. No one knew how or why Angelika knew so many lesbians. Not even the lesbians. They were very friendly, though.
We were all so happy for Angelika that day. She had come a long way since her first love, her babydaddy. Before we met him or even saw a picture of him, she had taken pains to emphasize that, when selecting a partner, she went “not on looks, but on personality.” (He had neither.)
But Jerry doted on her. And her son, Austin, is adorable and a really nice kid. He has an almost Zen air, which is honestly a miracle, in my book.
Angelika was adulting much better than any of us would have given her credit for. I was proud of her.
After the beautiful ceremony, we were transported through the apple orchard on our way to dinner. Before we completed our journey, though, we were informed that Jerry and Angelika were going to take photos in the orchard, so we were going to wait.
It was then clarified for us (us being the entire wedding party) that Angelika and Jerry, both of whom are morbidly obese, were taking boudoir photos in the orchard.
No tables and chairs, no music, no appetizers, no drinks. Just eighty or so of us, left, for a half-hour, to chat amongst ourselves, contemplating the corpulent and tatted bride and groom taking naked pictures in the apple orchard.
♦
As everyone struggled to hold back their sobbing laughter, I sidled up to one of the lesbians and introduced myself. She turned out to be an A.A. friend of Angelika’s.
“I have got to say, the program has really done wonders for Angelika,” I said. “I am so impressed at how she’s turned her life around. It almost makes me want to tear up. And I went to a meeting with her not too long ago, and she gave this beautiful, eloquent speech that brought everyone to their feet. I was amazed!”
The lesbian smiled. “About climbing the mountain?”
“Yeah, actually! Were you at the meeting she spoke at, too?”
“The meeting?” she laughed. “I was at a meeting with Angelika, where a woman gave that speech. A couple weeks later, Angelika was called up to speak, and she gave the same exact speech, practically word for word. I think the woman was even there.”
I was dying. “Did she credit her at least?”
“No. And Angelika has given that same speech every single time she’s been called, for like the last three or four years. At first I thought it was bizarre, but then I realized, that’s just Angelika!”
Angelika indeed. Never change, cuz. ♦