On Thanksgiving of 1991, I pulled the card Taylor had given me out of my wallet and called the number. When you find yourself doing things you never dreamed of, it often happens in stages. You take a tiny step over the line, and then you advance to the next line. You might find you’re lonely one day. Or broke, or depressed, or just curious. Or sitting on the couch at your parents’ house and slowly suffocating, an invisible pillow of memories pressed over your face. And you’re already that kind of girl; you’ve already come this far—so what’s one phone call more?

My boyfriend, Sean, and I were spending the holiday with my family. I had debated whether or not to bring him along, but my desire to have him with me won out over my hesitancy to bring anyone over to my parents’ house. I thought that I was maybe in love with Sean, though I qualified that with the belief that romantic love was a conspiracy employed by the capitalist establishment as a marketing tool and by the media as a Cinderella soporific.

Before I met Sean, I had engaged in tryst after tryst, crush after crush, boy after boy (and one or two girls), never blinking at the rapid demise of the flame, never expecting anyone to stay. When I met him, I was still seventeen. I had already been a stripper for six months and had never had a real boyfriend, not even a high school boyfriend. Then Sean dropped by the Performing Garage one afternoon to visit friends.

Sean was thin and doe-eyed, with wiry, shoulder-length dark hair and gorgeous musician’s fingers. He was a broke artist with a patrician pedigree, a talented actor and guitar player who shared a two-bedroom Rivington Street hovel across the street from Streit’s Matzo Factory. I shared a one-bedroom Ludlow Street hovel around the corner.

We spent our first date eating egg rolls and drinking beer on my rooftop while above us the clouds hung heavy and low. A sudden clap of thunder startled us both to our feet and set off a symphony of car alarms from the parking lot below. Fat drops of rain pelted the tar roof and we stayed there until we were soaked, him bending to hold my head in his hands and kiss me—slow, beer-flavored kisses—while the remains of our Chinese food flooded. It was corny. It was great. It was the best date I had ever had and he was the best guy I had ever met, by far.

Sean didn’t really care about my stripping. He even came to see me a few times. He liked the shoes and he found it all somewhat titillating. He regularly listened at length to my Fellini-esque adventures, even though he harbored a misgiving or two around the edges.

We ate our meals at El Sombrero or Two Boots pizza and we drank late at Max Fish with our friends from various bands and theater projects. We bought bad Avenue B coke and snorted it off his Houses of the Holy LP cover while we drank gin and tonics from coffee mugs and talked all night about art, about levels of disconnection, about media, about our desire for a “real” experience of life. After a while, I figured I was in love, but I kept my fingers crossed when I said it, in case I was wrong.

Sean and I arrived at my parents’ house by the same bus I’d ridden a thousand times throughout high school when I traveled to the city for acting classes or dance classes or rock shows that I’d lied about and said I was sleeping at a friend’s house. The trees had already shed most of their leaves but the lawn was still bright, poison green. The gray, bi-level 1970s house was a no-statement statement, a proud monument to the status quo. Every house on the street was a variation on the same theme, a different configuration of the same Legos.

My parents swept us in the door with overeager hugs. My father was thinner than I’d ever seen him, his hiatal hernia making it nearly impossible for him to eat. His cheek touched mine and it was damp with cool sweat. He was visibly sick and it shook me. What would I do if something happened to my father? He had always been a rock, one of those people who think doctors are for the weak and dentists are a waste of time.

He goosed me on my way up the stairs and I tripped, catching myself with my hands.

“Hey there, porky. Guess you decided to start eating again.”

And to my boyfriend, he said, “Isn’t she dainty? She used to dance around up here and we’d call her Katrinka.”

The Powerful Katrinka is a character in a series of silent films. She was played by Wilna Hervey, a comedic actress who stood six feet three and weighed three hundred pounds. It was my father’s pet name for me when he thought I was being a clod. My father was a rock. A rock tied to my ankle as I fell overboard. That quickly, I shifted from being concerned for his health to hoping he would starve to death right there at Thanksgiving dinner, with a banquet of food in front of him.

I escaped the ensuing Thanksgiving preparations and took a breather in the downstairs den. I sat on the sectional sofa underneath a recent family photo that I had reluctantly consented to. In it, my family stands stiffly on a patch of grass in the backyard. The white pool deck hovers behind us like a flying saucer and the harsh light of the sun flattens us into two-dimensional blocks of color. Incongruously spindly legs support my father’s porcine torso. He squints into the sun, his crow’s-feet an etching of dissatisfaction.

My mother’s skin is shiny and stretched and still young looking but she stands like someone just poked her sharply in the sternum. My brother, Johnny, wears a gorgon’s head of unkempt dreadlocks and I balance beside him with an innocuous white T-shirt and a strained smile, the same smile that appeared whenever I was in my parents’ house, an involuntary reflex as dependable as a leg twitch following a rubber mallet to the kneecap.

Sean was with Johnny in his room listening to Pink Floyd. They hung their heads out the window and Johnny shared the joint that was usually glued to his bottom lip.

My parents adopted Johnny when I was four years old. I waited on tiptoe for his arrival, dangling my pigtails over the white iron railing that ran across the top of the staircase. My mother walked up the stairs holding a blanket-wrapped burrito of a baby with a prune face and black hair that swirled like cupcake icing. I loved this tiny, warm person immediately. He was a living doll for me, with his baby smell, his fat, soft arms, and his wide blue eyes. I liked to cradle him on the couch for what felt like hours, to tickle his ears and kiss his miniature nose.

Johnny wasn’t an easy baby. He wasn’t as quick or funny or eager to please as I was. Whether or not this was true initially, it’s difficult to deviate from such a script once it’s written for you. Johnny was troubled from the very start, my father says, the implication being that it’s not his fault how Johnny turned out—the Obsessive Compulsive episodes, the ruinous acid trips, the religious extremism.

For the first few years of his life, Johnny clung unceasingly to my mother’s leg, while I slept in the T-shirts from my father’s company softball team. We had chosen sides. I loved Johnny, but I loved being my father’s favorite even more.

Now Johnny is Hasidic and lives in Jerusalem. He spends his days davening at the shul and occasionally works as a migrant olive picker or a seller of organic herbal tonics. He dreams of a small plot of land, a herd of goats, and some olive trees of his own. In his world, men and women eat in separate rooms. It is a world with its own logic, but it’s not a world with much of a place for me. We still talk on the phone once in a while. When I can remember, I send his son birthday presents.

I like to blame Johnny for the distance between us. He’s the one with the wide-brimmed black hat and the archaic belief system, not I. But the truth is that when things took a bad turn, I ran from our house and I left him. I promised him I would come back for him and I never did. That Thanksgiving, I went downstairs and sat by myself on the couch and didn’t listen when he tried to tell me that my father had hit him over the head with the telephone the night before.

My mother bustled between the dining room and the kitchen, engaged in the mysterious arts of table setting and perfectly timed food preparation. In the living room, my father played his prized Steinway baby grand. He tirelessly progressed through a medley of show tunes played halfway through at three times their intended speed. He always played as if there were a more important song somewhere on a constantly receding horizon, which he never quite reached. It was to that same off-tempo music that I first started belting out the songs from South Pacific and twirling around the living room.

As I had twirled, my father had called me Katrinka, but I’d never heard of the Powerful Katrinka. I kept dancing. I was the Graceful Katrinka, the Talented Katrinka, born of a woman so ethereal she’d simply floated away.

After escaping to New York, crossing back over the border to New Jersey was like putting a plastic bag over my head. The longer I spent there, the less oxygen I had. I was running out of air, suffocated by the house itself and the music and the family portraits and the family in person and the boyfriend upstairs who had seen it all. Maybe that was why I made the decision to pull the card Taylor had given me out of my wallet. I was trying to poke a hole in the bag, trying to breathe. The Crown Club seemed like a pretty sharp tool and it was the best I could think of right then. The music was loud enough upstairs so that no one would hear me. I didn’t think anyone would really answer the Crown Club phone on the afternoon of Thanksgiving, but, of course, someone did.