It was crazy. It was a crazy world.
We called my dad. “We did it!” He was like, “Oh God, Molly, oh jeez!” He didn’t know what to do. He said, “Try to see if you could go find a hotel where you could stay and me and Mary”—my sister—“will come meet you, we’ll drive there.” Basically we were like, “All right, we’ll try to find a hotel,” but he was kind of excited because he liked crazy stuff. Basically we didn’t have that much, we had just our ballet bags and a little bit of cash, so we went to a diner and we dined and dashed and we stole things. We were like little con artists.
We made it to the city. We just asked people, “How do you get to Rockefeller Center?” because I had just seen it on TV.
Marc
Nobody said, “Are you girls lost?” Nothing like that?
Molly
No, nothing. We did try to go to hotels and my dad would call and ask, “Could they just stay there until we get there?” and none of the hotels wanted to be responsible. He was like, “All right, you’ve got to come home, but I’m not paying for it, so try to hop on one on the way back.” The flights were all so crowded, so we ended up having to have him pay for it and he made us pay it all back with our babysitting money.
He loved that kind of stuff. Like I said, he was wild. In his drinking days he would go to bars and if somebody didn’t let him in he would be like, “Damn it!” He would go into the bar and knock all the glasses down. He was the kind of guy who could, maybe, get arrested. It was crazy.
Marc
I love the strange nostalgic excitement you have for this borderline child abuse.
Molly
It was complicated. He was also a very loving parent. I think it’s complicated. He was also really supportive and made me feel like I could do anything, and so in that way it felt really free and wild, but then in other ways I had to learn the rules of how regular people live. From other people. Like, professionals. Like, people you pay.
JOHN DARNIELLE—MUSICIAN, WRITER
I want you to think about wherever you were when you were five. The place I grew up seemed big to me in my mind. The hallway. I remember running all the way to the end of the hallway, and running all the way back down and being exhausted. I’m running all the way to the heater at the end and back. In reality, that’s two steps. Now that I’ve been back in the house, it’s two paces. I remember running down that hallway. The distance between my room and my parents’ room, which I remember being a walk, as if I have to go see Dad to talk to him about something, I’m going to walk down the hall. That’s also two steps.
We had added a room while I lived there, and it was called the front room. I remembered it being a cavernous, big room with a very high ceiling. It’s a fucking garage. It’s where the students live now because now it’s a rental unit. There’s a fucking poster of Biggie and Tupac on the front door.
I went there. I was like, “These people won’t mind if I knock on their door,” so I knocked. They had never heard of me. I was glad, that would have been really awkward. “Hey, it’s Johnnie. Really, this is my old house. Can I come in and make you feel sad about shit?”
I walked in and looked around and just went, “Whoa. We had a piano in there and a stereo.” I looked at the backyard, I looked at my old room, and I nodded and said, “Thank you,” and then told my therapist about it when I got home. It wasn’t too traumatic. It was interesting. It was sweet in a way. It was good to see. When you feel like you’re okay with where your life is at, it’s good to see the smaller place it came from.
AHMED AHMED—COMEDIAN, ACTOR
My parents immigrated to the States. I was a month old, I was like the Lion King. “Aaah, we’re going to America.” Then we ended up in Riverside, California, where I was raised. We were the only Arab family, not only on the block but in almost the whole city, really.
It was very middle class and a little bit lower-middle class, mostly white families, but then our high school was really racially diverse, with black, Mexican, Asian. And we were sort of considered the “thug” high school. Athletes would come and do really well there, but there was also some gang violence and that sort of thing. When I was in high school, I blended in perfectly. When I’d say my name, they’d hear “Egypt.” They were always sort of mystified by it. I’d get the little jokes, like “Did you come in on your flying carpet?” And “Did you climb a pyramid?” And “Do you have camels?”
Marc
Those jokes have changed now.
Ahmed
Yeah. Now it’s like “Do you fly planes?” “Are you good at chemistry?” “Do you use fertilizer every day?” “How many wives do you have?”
CONAN O’BRIEN
I remember when I was a kid thinking, “My family is weird. We’re just weird.” I don’t know how to put my finger on it. Maybe everyone grows up that way, but I remember thinking, “We’re kind of like an Irish Catholic Addams Family. There’s something off with us.” That was the feeling that my brothers and sisters all had, that we’re an odd family. We never quite knew what we were.
AHMED AHMED
The kids would come over to my house and one of my friends walked in and my parents were praying, and he looked at me and said, “What are they looking for?” And I go, “They’re praying.” And he’s like, “To who?”
I always had to explain what Islam was and talk about the belief of it all behind it. We were like the Arab Munsters. The weird family on the block. My mom was always cooking, stuff with spices that Americans weren’t used to, like cumin, stuff like that. All these weird fumes and aromas. They’re like, “Hey, what’s your mom cooking? Cow brains?” Whatever. And my dad, he was a night owl, so he’d sit up ’til three, four in the morning, watering the grass, smoking cigarettes, watering by hand. So the neighbors were always like, “What are you doing out there at four in the morning?”
On top of that, because my parents ate only halal food, or kosher food, they didn’t sell it back then in the 1970s in the stores, so my dad had to drive to Fontana, California, with our station wagon, and load up. He’d go to a farm and load up the station wagon with chickens, ducks, rabbits, and he’d bring it back. We had a live meat locker, basically, in our backyard. Every day around five or earlier, my mom and dad would go out to the backyard and they’d pick out a chicken, my dad would hold it down and say the Muslim prayer “Please bless this soul and let our family have sustenance,” and my mom would do it. There’s a way you sacrifice so the animal doesn’t suffer. And it’s like Clash of the Titans. She’s holding up this head, she’s got blood all over her, it was like “Aaaaah!” We were eating dinner by 9:00 p.m.