Larry: I met Marjorie when I was working at the TV station. She was a publicist, and she had been after me even when I was married. So I decided to take her out a couple times for dinner. I thought, “I need help so bad.” So I eventually asked her to marry me.

Jenna: Yeah, Dad could never cook. He couldn’t even make instant oatmeal.

Larry: To this day I still can’t make it —or boil water.

Jenna: Tony and I would be like, “How do we tell Dad that we can’t eat this?” He would make us cheese sandwiches until we had cheese coming out of our ears.

Tony: Dad worked all night, and it seemed like all day too. And Marjorie worked until nine. There was never anything to eat.

Jenna: I remember Marjorie used to buy herself a personal stash of Yoplait yogurt.

Larry: That dirty son of a bitch. I had forgotten that.

Jenna: And she would not let us eat it. We knew if we ate it, we would get in trouble, so we would starve. I used to microwave pasta. When it came out, it was still hard. And I’d put sour cream and tuna on it, trying to get some kind of nutrition.

Larry: When I found out that Marjorie wasn’t feeding you, I was so mad.

Tony: Everything in the fridge was earmarked for her.

Jenna: And we were so frigging hungry. I remember sitting and looking in the fridge at those yogurts. That’s burned in my mind.

Larry: Why didn’t you just take one?

Jenna: She would have slapped me the fuck up, dad. If she said something and I went “bleah,” she would reach across the table and backhand me across the face. It got to the point where I was too scared to say anything. One of our favorite things to do was get those vials of cinnamon, and dip toothpicks in the cinnamon.

Tony: That’s right, and then we’d sell them.

Jenna: Marjorie lost her mind when she found out. Remember, she threw the coffeepot at us?

Larry: She did? You never told me that.

Jenna: Finally one day, Tony and I were so frigging hungry we called Grandma. “Grandma, we’re hungry. We’ve been hungry for a couple of months, Grandma.”

Tony: She was a raging alcoholic. Whatever she had to eat was readymade: tapioca pudding, microwaveable food, popcorn. So she came and got us, and we got to her house and she gave us Hostess Cherry Pies. Then she went in the bedroom and got in her nightgown, and then she had us go in the bedroom and get in her nightgowns.

Jenna: Yeah, we wore her nightgowns. Tony was in a satin nightgown. (Laughs)

With Dad on Lake Mead at age eleven.

Larry: And you know, we haven’t been able to break him of them.

Tony: Yeah, I still like them (laughs), but only with pumps. Anyway, she poured herself a full glass of bourbon after dinner. She just drank it and then, boom, she passed out right into the coffee table. The glass shattered everywhere and she didn’t move. So we called Dad and said, “We’re staying at Grandma’s.” And we played over her lifeless body for hours.

Jenna: We never wanted to leave Grandma’s house.

Tony: She never ate. She just drank.

Larry: Eventually, I got offered a job in Panama City, Florida. We needed to get out of Vegas. It was too dangerous. I also wanted to go to the police academy in Panama City, because they send you to college and all that kind of stuff.

Jenna: That’s when you got the brown Firebird. Do you remember where I used to sleep? Behind the seat. I was so tiny that I slept on the floor of the car, with my head on the hump.

Larry: You’ve always been easily stored. We drove all the way to Panama City and got caught in the hurricane. Once we made it into Arizona, all Jenna said every fifteen minutes, was…

Jenna: “Are we there yet?”

Larry: “No, we aren’t, honey.”

With Wanna, my grandma on my dad’s side.