My options narrowed down in a hurry. Marta would have been great, but I knew she didn’t even have enough room for herself, with five other kids in the family. Unlike Sally, who’s an only child, and Norris, who’s got the one sister way up in Riverdale, Aunt Marcelia. She’s got a daughter, too, my cousin Barbara, and we were always supposed to be lifelong buddies, but the first time we met, when we were maybe two years old, we tried to beat each other to death with our toy fire engines, and it’s been downhill from there. I still can’t believe we’re cousins. Somebody’s lying.
So in about a minute and a half it was Norris or nobody. Something I should put in here is that I like my father. Sally always says, “That’s because you weren’t married to him,” but what’s funny is that I know Norris a lot better than she ever did. As much time as she’s spent with show people, she’s never understood, they’re real, they’re just not real all the time. Norris really likes having a daughter, he likes telling people about me, or calling me up—the way he still does now, when he’s singing in London—and saying, “Hey, kid, it’s your old man, you want to come down to the wicked city and hang out?” Only he’d be a lot happier if I were electric or electronic, something with a cord he could plug in or a remote he could turn on and off. It’s just Norris, that’s how he is with everybody. Maybe he’d have been different with me if we lived together, I don’t know. He left when I was eight.