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BiographyI was born in a one-room cabin somewhere in the hills of South Dakota
to an abusive ex-con alcoholic of a father and a tough, no-nonsense
traffic cop of a mother. When I was two years old, my parents split up.
My father moved to Vegas where he played the drums in Elvis's band for
years, and my mother took my little sister and me to Hungary where she (my mom)
married a leader of the local Communist party. I remember spending long
nights in Budapest, eating goulash, sipping Tokay, and hearing wild, exciting tales of
the Gabor sisters. It seems my stepfather dated Zsa Zsa in high school (or was it Eva?) and
couldn't help comparing my mother to her. Needless to say, my mother's
relationship with my stepfather was doomed but not before two more
sisters were born. We then moved to Memphis.
Call us trailer trash. Half of Memphis did. But we had love and a tiny
black-and-white TV that picked up Lawrence Welk and Mid South wrestling
when the antenna was adjusted just right, and oh yeah: fried chicken
and mashed potatoes every Friday night. Wash that down with a big glass
of Lipton and a lemon lifted from the rich man's yard up the hill and
you're dining like one of the Rothschilds. Did I tell you about the
attorney Mom started dating?
She met him at a James Brown concert and fell big time for him when
he--the lawyer--sang a slightly off-key acapella version of "Prisoner
of Love." Can you
blame her?
Anyway, with the lawyer footing the bills, we soon moved to Boss Crump's old mansion up on Peabody and
that's where I read my first book...in English. I'd read several in
Hungarian and a version of Goodnight Moon in a Dakota dialect, but I
still remember the curve of those words in English, the tint of each
letter. To this day, I don't know whether that first book was
called Animal Farm or Remembrance of Things Past, but I can't forget my
excitement over those letters, those words, the idea that they pointed
toward something beyond what I knew--a place of enchantment, of wisdom,
of difference.
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