AS YOU KNOW, we were each told to write an honest essay about the things that are wrong with us, and this one is mine. Having read over my charming masterpiece, I wouldn't wish the life it sketches on my worst enemy, of which I have more than my share. We were instructed by our therapist Bruce—I doubt that's his real name—to explore what each of us considers our worst personal failings, and if possible identify the genesis, as Bruce put it, of these vices, taking care not to allow ourselves to vent animosity toward others in the group or toward those who had been banes in our lives over the years. I can't have been alone in considering this a damn tough assignment, but I have done my best. Looking back, the hardest part of fulfilling the task at hand was to limit the essay to only seven things wrong with me. My original list, probably like yours, ran into the hundreds. Narrowing it down was a frustrating job, but I suspect this was the idea. Reverse psychology they used to call it, the counter-intuitive approach. By getting us to process just seven of our faults, one each day of the week, we'd recognize that these were merely the tip of the iceberg in the overall scheme of faults, and also discover, by thinking about it so thoroughly, some glimpses of the possible good that lurks in each of our rotten hearts. I'm sure this has been a learning experience for the rest of you, too.

By way of introduction, my father was Bill. My mother is Irene. My sister was Christy and my other sister is Jocelyn. My one grandmother is Honey and my two grandfathers are Wilfred and Paul. My dead grandmother I never met, her name was Nancy, though my family rarely spoke about her because they say she was cold and made a marriage of convenience with my grandfather Paul who is a heart specialist and the one success story in our otherwise pathetic gang. There is an uncle named Hamp which is short for Hampton, and he is a crabby old drummer in a dated lounge act heard every Monday and Thursday down in High Falls somewhere. I had an aunt Janice and uncle Arnie at one point, but they disavowed me, as have my cousin Bill and another cousin I never met whose name is Claudia to the best of my knowledge. To clarify, Christy is dead and her widower is serving three consecutive life sentences for the murder of her half-wit boyfriend Bill—yes, a lot of Bills in my life—Bill's stepmother Addie, and of my older sister herself. Hung them in the garage. For the record, my name is John.

My father, first. We never got along and the fault must lie with me, because he was such a stellar human being, just ask him yourself. He tried hard to be the perfect dad, but I couldn't get with the program. There are so many examples of my ingratitude in the face of his flawless parenting that I could write the whole essay on this alone. An early recollection involves a Boy Scout jamboree where I learned to make cornstalk fiddles, tie a double knot known as the Flemish Loop, and how to sharpen my hatchet with a whetstone. It was during this autumn weekend in the Poconos when some of us scouts and our fathers signed up for a taxidermy seminar. A deceased dude named Captain Thomas Brown wrote in some manual that boys ought to be instructed in the art of stuffing birds and mammals at an early age, and so on his high authority we were urged to start then and there. First we were told how to kill specimens in the best ways—pithing or poisoning instead of buckshot pellets that turned the corpse into a mess. We then learned about skinning, defeathering, defurring, unfleshing, dismembering, and denuding the carcasses of chipmunks, skunks, moles and other helpless wilderness beasts. As it happened, the taxidermist scoutmaster gave me and my approving father a great horned owl to stuff together. Seems a local farmer had been plagued by the bird's ravenous visits to the chicken coop—it had been cleanly shot and donated to the scouts for the purpose of stuffing. Urged on by my manly father, while gorge rose like lava in my throat, I mopped blood from the pretty plumage, then separated its skin from the flesh with my quivering fingers. Dad didn't help much other than to egg me on whenever I balked. As instructed, I dusted his guts—the owl's—with corn meal to soak up the other fluids besides blood, and scooped the eyes then painted their sockets with toxic soap and used the other junk they gave us, the camphor, salt of tartar, powdered lime, wooden dowels and heavy wire. With penknife and threaded needle and lots of glue I created a monstrosity that long weekend, a parody of an owl, as you might have guessed. My father blamed me and I blamed both him and the Boy Scouts, and not only did I never go to any camp again, but to this day refuse to eat poultry. We never discussed the matter afterward, and though my deep hatred of the man began before this incident and matured in its wake, the failure of our father-son outing was like mere arsenic in an already poisonous relationship. I still have the poor owl, most of whose dusty feathers have fallen out. Its beak is black and I put marbles in the eye holes which gives him a somewhat crazed look on top of the refrigerator where he is perched. After this jamboree scene I became, to the old man's horror, a vegetarian. Only legumes and grains have touched my lips, the latter, as with many of you here today, most often in liquid form. As for my dear father, he ate pork, fish, foul, venison, veal, lamb, and beef right up to the day he died of a massive coronary one afternoon when we were alone in the house. If only he'd made it more clear to me what ailed him as he lay there thrashing on the kitchen floor, I might have been able to help him. His death, you could say, and don't think some haven't, was my fault—a natural extension of my guilty inadequacy as a son—if you were to ignore his repulsive dietary habits and lifelong bad temper that gave him the high blood pressure in the first place. We buried him in his old Explorers uniform.

I don't hate my mother the way I hated my father, but I can't claim I ever brought the slightest ray of happiness into her life, either. She nearly died in childbirth, as she liked telling me over and over again, especially on birthdays, both mine and hers. Good old Irene with her blue hair and eyes, a head taller than her husband, back when he was among the standing, didn't like any of her brats, as far as I could tell. When they found Christy and the others in the garage, I swear her torrents of tears had less to do with having lost her eldest daughter than that another source of income had just got hung out to dry, so to speak, old Bill having dropped dead on us just the year before. But maybe I'm being too hard on her, another fault of mine. She has always shown a mother's leniency toward me when it came to my menagerie of stray cats and mongrel dogs and birds with broken wings, and for that I owe her a debt of gratitude. Given how directionless my hours after school had become, once the Scouts and I parted company, and knowing from experience how poorly I got along with other goons my own age, my mother saw the interest I took in feeding, grooming, and playing with the homeless pets found in alleys, backlots, and in the fields beyond the crummy town where we lived, and thought it might be a good thing for me. Might keep me, as she put it, out of the detention house. The fact that it landed me in the detention house is a cruel irony I choose not to address right now, but as I say, I was grateful for her forbearance which I used at every possible turn to my own advantage. To a fault, I confess. What I mean to say is, the more strays and hurt animals I brought home with me—most lived in our basement, freely coming and going by way of a broken window—the more I wanted.

Some of you undoubtedly are the type of delinquents that got your start by hanging the neighbors' kittens on a clothesline. Well, that wasn't my game. Instead, when I couldn't help abandoned animals, I took in pets from houses on the other end of town, usually during the day when their so-called owners were away working, or going to school like I was supposed to do. Irene must have known what I was up to but kept her mouth shut, figuring she hadn't many other options left given the idea was, as I mentioned before, hers, and given I was on probation. She must also have suspected that all the dog chow and kitty litter, the bird cages and rabbit pellets, not to mention catnip toys and rawhide bones and so forth, cost more money than I earned on my paper route, which I did less for the dough and more to scout new mates for the menagerie. So when cranky Hamp, who was living with us, complained that cash was missing from his wallet, as did grandmother Honey several blocks away, my mother's indulgence was put to the test. Despite all the tenderness I showed my animals, the way I went about maintaining my personal free-range kennel must have agonized the old gal and thus, another strike against me.

My little sister Jocelyn and I were thrown together almost from infancy, as Christy was a decade my senior, while I was only a year older than Josie. We were virtual Siamese twins until the big guy, who found us putting on an imaginary tea party in her room, both of us dressed in her Sunday clothes and made up with lipstick borrowed from Irene's drawer in the master bath, lowered the boom on me. This was when he decided that the Little League and Cub Scouts and crap like that was the necessary antidote. I don't like nor do I excel at sports any more than I liked or excelled at anything the scouting organization had to offer. Our virile father, worried that his only son showed signs of orienting down a sexual avenue that would have been disgraceful in his macho eyes, missed altogether my more deviant direction, navigated for many years by my uncurbed little sister and myself. If I'm sounding glib it's because, as any of you who has walked the same path knows, I'm embarrassed by how good and natural our prepubescent marriage was. We said wedding vows one summer day in the attic, and sometimes even now, all these years later, I think it's a pity Jocelyn met her fiancé Michael, a TV-handsome young lawyer, but my love for her, which is also my failing, remains strong. I should add, it continues to give me profound, even grim pleasure, that the big bad wolf never found out. He perished on the kitchen floor sure in his soul that his only begotten son was a eunuch or worse. But, as you now know, he was mistaken. Old Irene never knew about us, either, and while Christy had her suspicions she is no longer among us and in any case might have approved, since how much more out there could you get than Christy?

I would like to take a moment here to protest that all these confessions are beginning to make me sound like some kind of wicked, even pukey, human being, whereas I know I'm not. But don’t take my word for it. Just ask any of the dozens of animals whose lives I saved over the years. Ask my grandfather Paul who would never have posted bail whenever such a kindness was needed to keep me out of places he feels I don't belong. He should know, if anyone does, where I do and do not belong, since he's a medical man of considerable stature. He commutes to Columbia Presbyterian from a Tudor in Riverdale and, as I say, ought to know the score. But all right. I know this is against the rules, so I'll get back to my list, as our therapist Bruce stipulated. Just that it seemed to me the picture was getting too skewed, but I suppose, as a couple of you have just said, that's the point.

So, having mentioned my grandfather, I guess this would be the best moment to describe how, after poor Christy met her death and the trial of my brother-in-law was going on, he took me and Jocelyn in for several months. My mother's father, his heart went out to Irene during those dark times, and so he wanted to do whatever he could to help her through a tough stretch. Since his wife, the loathed Nancy, had died some years earlier, leaving the surgeon in his large pile of brick and slate with only an elderly housekeeper under the same roof, he even seemed to welcome the company. And we welcomed the unbridled days of complete freedom which took us out into a neighborhood of wealth, luxury, splendor that neither of us had ever seen. We trespassed like crazy, skinny-dipped in people's private pools, trampled their fancy flower beds, rummaged around in their garages never stealing anything really but maybe soaping a windshield now and then if the car seemed antique and valuable. We discovered the joy of television and watched junk with the sound off all night long, while our grandfather went to bed early, his work taking him back to the hospital before dawn every morning. We made friends with only one kid in the neighborhood, and here comes the confession. His name was Brewster, or something idiotic. This was before I started the menagerie, by the way. Brewster had the most beautiful little dog, whose penance it was to suffer her master's putting out cigarettes on her belly. Josie and I started smoking that summer, and this snot Brewster conceived the idea after trying and failing to smoke a fag with us. We laughed ourselves silly when his face flushed red and he half coughed his lungs out, and I imagine it was our scorn that prompted his sadism. One day, having noticed the bitch lying near us in the grass on her side was covered with tiny, round welts that weren't her tits, I asked fat Brewster what he thought the problem was with his dog. Proudly smirking, he told me what he'd been doing. It was as if I was dreaming, as if his screams and those of my sister were televised with the volume low, when without the least thought I climbed on top of him and, holding him as still as I could, burned his cheek and forehead and chin and even one eyelid with my cigarette. He lived, the bastard, of course.

And so did I, though for my compassionate crime I was introduced for the first time to The System. A bad thing, I guess, all of it. My grandfather was unhappy, to say the least, about the outcome of his largesse and my mother was made only more despondent, though both saw my violent response to this prick's sickness as the natural outgrowth of the tragedy that had visited the margins of my life. For what it's worth, Brewster landed himself in therapy and the pup was removed to a shelter. Without a moment's hesitation I would do what I did to him again, even though I admit that, once more, it's one of the things wrong with me.

Maybe I should allow myself a lesser fault, a breather, as it were. My toenails are thick, brittle, apricot-colored, and split. They are extremely ugly perched on the end of my toes which are as long as most people's fingers. Let me show you. See how each nail is deeply ridged and as amber as any petrified resin out of the Jurassic. My father, who instructed me in all the mysteries of personal grooming, taught me to trim them in the shape of a V, like so, and they have served over the years, when needed, as weapons. Even dear Josie has a scar on her left cheek the result of a friendly wrestling match under the front porch when we were five and six years of age, respectively. They themselves and the injury they have brought to others constitute a fault that should be considered more serious than the smiles on your faces suggest. Which brings me to a more unpleasant entry in my catalogue.

As you know, my love of people—Jocelyn excepted—borders on nil, while my love for animals is almost without limit. So after they released me from juvie hall into my mother's custody, I scored that paper route, as mentioned, and one by one started taking in a slew of stray calicos and tabbies, halfbreed mutts that mixed all kinds of things from dachshund to mastiff, not to mention pigeons, robins, sparrows, the occasional escaped parakeet, gerbils, rabbits, mice, possums, snakes, lizards, even a blind raccoon. Of course, the place did begin to stink a little. Hamp complained the most, Irene having no sense of smell and Josie being Josie, they didn't seem to notice. But Hamp wasn't wrong. Nobody, even I, could have kept up with the activities in our basement and back yard. All I did was care for my precious darlings, which is how I came to think of them nor am I ashamed to admit it even though I see some of you find it humorous. The rest of the time I tried to cop enough dough to cover the expenses. Josie tried to help me out, but her dashing beau Michael didn't like my asylum any more than he liked me.

As you must have figured out on your own, some years had come and gone between my release from juvie and Jocelyn's accepting this Michael's offer of marriage. It would be about ten of them, during which time I was only busted once on a minor infraction, thanks to some do-gooder from the Department of Health, who showed up at our door with a warrant and a bad attitude. Irene and Hamp happened to be out, so Josie and I virgiled this dude on an inspection of the cellar and back yard. Needless to say, he didn't like what he saw, even though, coincidentally, I'd tidied the litter boxes and various cages just the day before. When Mr. Clean wrote out his summons he advised me that I would have to erect a fence around the back yard in order to avoid future visits. The neighbors, who never spoke to our family at any rate, were planning on bringing an action against us, he kindly informed me, and even treated me to the cliché about good fences making good neighbors. By this time I had a job over at the mall working at the mega pet store, so paying the couple hundred bucks fine was doable. Less so was his smiling directive to reduce the number of domiciled animals, as he called my beloved buddies, in the next thirty days, by about half. Smiling even more broadly, he offered governmental assistance with the necessary removal, after laying out for me the law regarding domestic pets housed in suburban environs, and other crap like that, but seeing I had a choice in the matter, I told him I'd take care of it myself. I would later find out that he didn't have the authority to dismantle my dream right on the spot because, living as we did at the edge of the edge of town, our domicile could be considered rural, and different restrictions apply to rural precincts, etcetera etcetera. If he could he would have. Still, the son of a gun didn't depart without confiscating Mindy, my African gray parrot, since of course I couldn't produce the necessary papers to prove I owned her legally, which you can bet your own damn rural domicile I did not.

If you're thinking this story is all fine and dandy, but where is John's fault in it, why does he relate it as something wrong with him, I share your concern. As you will see, one man's good is the next man's evil. The fence I erected was twice as tall and I hope a hundred times uglier than my neighbors bargained for, but since no zoning restrictions prevented its construction—ours was no gated community with fancy covenants—up she went pronto. The dogs, the woodchuck, and the fox got to work right away digging tunnels, bless their hearts. The menagerie knew, just as its Noah did, that the wall was only for show, and not meant to keep anyone from the usual appointed rounds, mostly done under the light of the moon. In the meantime, I persuaded Honey, which is to say I paid her, to let me keep some animals in her detached garage for a week, guaranteeing her I'd take care of everything, she wouldn't even know they were there and neither would anyone else. Amazingly, everything went off without a hitch. The D.O.H. punk was satisfied, Honey made a couple dollars, the neighbors were stifled, Irene and Hamp turned a blind eye on the whole business, and all my kids were back home just days after we were given a reluctant bill of health. As our therapist Bruce told me last year, it was probably my success with this scheme that pumped up my confidence and led to the mess that followed it just as naturally as piss follows beer.

It all developed so slowly that none of us noticed, certainly not me. Hamp croaked somewhere in here, and Irene moved in with Honey who welcomed the company. Josie met her beau and moved in with him. Christy's husband was sent up to the big house for good. I, pretty much left to my own devices, painted the windows black and kept adding members to the family. Like any connoisseur, my tastes developed and refined. Not content with alley cats and mongrels, garden snakes and hamsters—though I loved these with the same love I showed all my chums—I began confiscating from hither and thither more exotic creatures. Where's hither and thither? Since it's all public knowledge now, there's no point being coy, so I'll fess up to some nocturnal wanderings of my own, back then, to the homes of pet store patrons who had purchased the more intriguing animals, the store itself naturally, and to a small, understaffed zoo one state over. I brought home some pretty snazzy friends. A lynx I named Lucy. A mink named Ned. Some peacocks. The mutts were joined by a sweaty old Shar-Pei named Chairman Mao and a Rhodesian ridgeback, Buster I called him. A huge Maine coon and sleek Russian blue joined my cattery. My myna bird could recite the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address, a feat his tutor who stands before you is proud of to this day. Listen, can any of you asshats recite the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address? If not, stow the mirth. Finally, I outdid myself by spiriting away a baby mountain lion from the zoo one night, nearly getting killed in the effort. Were I an addict, this would mark my bottom. Who knows, maybe I had become an addict, another thing wrong with me I hadn't even counted on confessing today. I named her Kitty.

This mountain lion, though I kept her in the biggest chainlink cage in the back yard, and fed her an endless stream of food, broke out more than once and made a banquet from the menagerie. Gone were the peacocks, gone my Maine coon. Let me admit it: I was in over my head. She was growing faster than I'd ever seen a feline, or any other animal for that matter, grow, and I came to the conclusion I had to release her but quick, before things got completely out of hand. She would do fine in the mountains of northern Jersey, I told Josie, who spent less time with me than ever because she couldn't stand the stench, she said, and the blackened windows depressed her. Jocelyn had agreed to help me with the transfer and even nabbed some sedatives from the pharmacy where she worked in order to calm the wildcat so it could sleep in the trunk during the drive. All my plans, all my hopes of rebalancing the upset menagerie were dashed when, the day before we were to make the run, Kitty got loose again but instead of going after her terrified mates in the habitat, she scaled the fence to maraud our neighborhood in search of something more interesting to eat. It wasn't her fault she happened upon some kid a few blocks away and removed him from his swing-set even as she wrenched off the better part of his plump little arm in the process. Kitty was only following nature's mandates, just as the cops, who took me into custody and charged me with an impressive list of offenses including reckless endangerment, were merely following the mandates set out by lawmakers who know more about these matters than I seem to. The kid lived, but poor Kitty was destroyed for no good reason. Just because my grandfather came to my rescue again, not with bail this time but a lawyer and some psychiatrists who steered me here so I could hang out with all you bozos, doesn't mean that my menagerie was a crazy idea. Far from it—I think I was well on my way to creating a small piece of heaven there. That I couldn't pull it off is just one more of the things that are wrong with me.

* * *

None of you has appreciated my confession, I can tell, including Bruce over there, our good therapist. My words have not inspired you, nor have you benefited from listening to my sad stories. Now, while I won't vent animosity toward others in the group, I am going to ask your indulgence when I confess our therapist's assignment to identify the genesis of these vices may be beyond my capability. Can the mirror look at itself? I have tried like crazy to figure out why I've done the things people say I have done wrong, but in every instance come up with the same answers, ones that seem pure and simple to me, but which over the years haven't convinced one solitary soul of my true innocent nature. I love animals and refuse to eat them, therefore I'm a lunatic? My brilliant father couldn't eat their butchered carcasses fast enough, but when old mincemeat gets his just desserts it's my fault he croaked? Fat snot Brewster burns holes in his puppy and needs quick punishment, which I implement, and who is labelled the criminal? Having no family to speak of, I invent one with my little sister, and therefore I'm a pervert. My neighbors want a wall, I build a wall and devote myself to taking care of God's helpless creatures, and for my troubles I am laughed at, then investigated, fined, ostracized, and abandoned by everyone. And the business about that mountain lion mangling the little boy? I already confessed being out of my depths with Kitty. The tragedy was in the timing—I was, after all, about to correct the situation. Bottom line is, analyzing everything as best I can using common sense, all the things that are supposedly wrong with me are not, at the end of the day, my fault. I realize I've said right along that they are my fault, but—as Bruce hoped—I have glimpsed the good that lurks in my rotten heart. I doubt I even belong here with all you freaking spazmos.

Let me finish up by saying I'm very aware I covered only six things wrong with me, not seven as we were directed. I also know that for each of these there must be countless deeper pitch-black defects backgrounding them, but at the risk of cheating—which would be yet another fault in itself—I'm going to skip my last failing, because I see our time has run out. Too bad, since it was a good one, as failings go, and had to do with my aunt Janice and uncle Arnie, whom I love as the cobra loves the mongoose.