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My mother was a classical pianist. She would have chamber concerts with her musician friends, in the living room, while in another room my father would be conferring with nine or ten other men in the business about how to build a computerized mousetrap. These opposite life-styles would give me circuit overload. My tweeters would burn out and my only insulation would be my bedroom door, which remained closed for most of my life. I had to put towels under the jamb so I couldn't hear the classical music and the computer logic. My bedroom was like all the rooms of all the kids in all the movies I've been a part of. It was a compost heap of everything I never put away. It's still that way today. Gravity undresses me; gravity decides where my things wind up. I don't think I've used a hanger in my entire life. I've always enjoyed living in my own debris. These days, I can really mess a place up in about twelve hours. When I was a kid, I was a little bit faster: it took about 30 minutes.
My first pets, when I was ten or eleven, were parakeets. My parents figured the parakeets would be easy to take care of, and that I'd never let them out of their cage in my room. They were wrong on both counts. I took the parakeets out of their little jail and trained them to live on the curtain rod. At one time there were eight parakeets living on that rod, dripping like candles in old Italian restaurants. After a while it changed the whole fabric of the curtains. The birds were living on the rod, on my head, on my shoulder. I'd find a name I'd like -- say, Shmuck -- and just give the other birds sequel names: Shmuck II, Shmuck III. No imagination. At one time there were four Shmucks in the room. We had dogs, too. Except for a period of six years or so after my father brought a dog home and the dog snarled at me, knocked me over and chased me upstairs into my room. I was terrified of dogs at that point. But then I made friends with our neighbor's cocker spaniel. Since then I've had one dog after another.
Except for shows like Jackie Gleason and Mickey Mouse Club, my parents wouldn't let me watch TV. Part of the reason is that, when I was four or five years old, when I did see things on TV I got scared. I remember crying for hours after I saw a documentary on snakes. That was the beginning of the end of TV for me. For six years my dad would rig the set with booby traps so he could tell if I snuck TV time while they were out to dinner. But I sneaked anyway. When baby-sitters would inevitably fall asleep, I'd sneak downstairs and watch Science Fiction Theater and other taboo shows with the sound on very low. My folks were also prudent about the movies I could see. They had taken me to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when I was six, and when the wicked queen turned into a hag and a skeleton crumbled into pieces, I burst into tears and started shaking. For three or four nights I had to crawl into bed with my mom and dad.