My mother and father lived in New York City, and then they split up when I was about a year old. My mother remarried, and then maybe when I was about three, my mother, stepfather, and I moved to Texas.
My father was murdered when I was four. My grandmother, my maternal grandmother, lived in New York, so I would spend time with her, and then I would spend time with my father as well. My grandmother, even after he got killed, she did a good job of trying to keep talking about him.
He was a New York City cabdriver, and he took a fare up to Harlem, and then they robbed him and shot him.
Just recently, maybe two years ago, a friend of mine connected me to an NYPD detective who pulled up the file, and I got to see everything. I always knew where it happened, but this sort of laid it out. Once he was shot, he died instantly, and then his foot was on the gas, and the car went across the median, and crashed into some cars. Then there were some witness accounts and stuff like that. It was really amazing. Then, at the end of it all, there is the guy. They caught the guy and I had his whole rap sheet. It was weird to just see that, and to just get a fuller picture of that guy. He lives in Brooklyn. There’s a whole kind of weirdness of oh, wow, this person, I’ve seen his whole life. I see his rap sheet.
He got a really short sentence for it. I think he was sixteen when he did it. I just think about, he was sixteen, and this thing, it just set him on a path. Weirdly enough, he was doing time in North Carolina at the same time I was in college in North Carolina. It’s just strange, these little sort of intersections of life where it’s like oh, we were both in North Carolina at the same time.
Marc
Different institution.
Wyatt
Exactly. Yeah, different state-run institution. Both not the best football teams. Really underperforming football teams in both situations.
Marc
Wait, so now, the dude who murdered your biological father lives in the same city as you as a free man.
Wyatt
Yeah.
Marc
Do you have any compulsion to meet him?
Wyatt
Not really, no. People have asked me that. I don’t really have anything to say to the dude. If anything, there’s a part of me that I look at him and what he did, and there’s a sense of he is partially responsible for me being who I am. I’m not going to send him a Father’s Day card, but this was a traumatic event that changed me in the way I saw the world. He’s the person that did that. Who knows how different my life would be? I assume I’d probably still be in the same place, but maybe my father would have been the deadbeat that he was to my sister to me, and maybe I would have dealt with that. Or maybe I would have gone to New York and lived with him, and it would have changed my impression of him in that way.
In that way, it is, like, yeah, this one thing, that idea of the butterfly effect or something like that, here it is.
AIMEE MANN—MUSICIAN, ACTOR
My childhood was pretty fragmented. My mother left when I was three years old. There was a lot of drama around that, because she ran off with a guy and he was married, and they took me, and my father didn’t know where I was. This was just a lot of drama. I was eventually found and brought back, but this was probably nine months later.
Marc
Your mom kidnapped you with this dude that she ran off with, who was also married, and took you to another state?
Aimee
Out of the country. We wound up in England, but I think we spent some time in Germany. I remember being in Amsterdam. I don’t know what the plan was. I think he was going to get a job. He took his kids, because he had kids.
Marc
“Here’s your new family.”
Aimee
Yeah.
Marc
Was this a guy from the neighborhood, somebody that your father knew?
Aimee
Somebody who worked for my father. There’s a lot of drama in it. My father had hired a private detective, but I think he found out where I was by accident, because he was in advertising. He was in the same business. In the course of doing business, my dad ran into a guy who said, “I saw the guy that used to work for you,” and it was him.
I think she flew back with me, and then I was taken to my grandparents for a month, which is crazy. It’s all fucking crazy. My dad told me most of this. I know her now, but I sort of didn’t really see her until I got back in touch with her in my midtwenties. She obviously doesn’t really want to talk about it.
Here’s another detail: I think we were all staying at a hotel or something, and I was three years old, playing by myself in the parking lot, and this boyfriend hit me with a car and knocked me unconscious. Probably not on purpose, but he did yell at me for causing an accident.
Marc
I’ve never heard of child abuse where the child was hit by an automobile.
Aimee
Yeah. Well, look, it was only a VW bug.
Marc
Oh, you could have won.
Aimee
I could have.
TOM ARNOLD—COMEDIAN, ACTOR
When I was ten, my dad married the next-door neighbor. She had a couple kids and that was terrible. It was terrible because she’d come from a very corporal punishment background and I was the oldest and she was going to tame me. It was not a pleasant experience. I get along with her now, of course. I know it was hard for her because I was like, “Oh my God, you’re taking my dad.” He did ask me if he could marry her. I remember saying, “Well, yeah. Of course.”
She had a chart on the fridge with check marks during the day for when my dad got home and this is how many whips you’d get. The saddest thing, and I thought of this recently because my son was born, was when I was in bed. Man, I was loaded up with the extra underwear, the padding, because I knew it was coming because there had been a lot of check marks next to my name. I could hear him saying, “Oh, come on, Ruth. I don’t want to.” She’d say, “Goddamn it, it’s him or me.” You’re ten and you’re hearing that. You’re like, “Oh my God, I don’t want my dad to get divorced.” You march on down there and say, “Let’s do it.”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN–MUSICIAN, SONGWRITER, AUTHOR
How could you live in a house where there was so much kindness and great cruelty? It was very, very difficult to understand those things, and it set me very on edge. I had my own little local minefield that I had to walk every single day, which caused a great deal of anxiety and neuroticism in me. You know, I had this one great thing, but then I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. It made me a very nervous kid.
PAUL SCHEER
My mom got divorced three times when I was a kid growing up. That was a little rough. We lived a lot in small apartments and moved around Long Island. Weird guys. Weird stepdads. I remember I had one stepdad who refused to let me call him by his name. His name was Cordell. I could not call him Cordell. He made me call him Daddy, which is, in retrospect, weird.