How To Destroy Everything - How To Destroy Everything Presents: Toughen Up - Episode 2: Buses, Nuns, Christmas, Knives and a No-Name Sister

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Episode Two finds Maureen taking on The Reverend Mother of her children’s Catholic School. The family then experiences the darkest Christmas of their lives, propelling them south, to face an uncertain future in an empty house in the suburbs. A violent period unfolds for The Kearins, which includes a hammer, a hospital and a runaway girl. Then Danny and Darren explain why they called this “The Catholic Episode,” explore the nature of forgiveness and our attempts to stop a cycle of family dysfunction. If you would like to support this podcast, please consider becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/HowToDestroyEverything and please don't forget to share, rate, and review! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tuffin' Up, written and performed by Stephen Caron. Episode 2. Buses, nuns, Christmas, knives, and a no-name sister. Because my father was always working and my mother didn't drive, we rode the bus everywhere. We took it to Panorama City to go shopping. We took it to the Fox Theater to see the Jungle Book. And we once took it to Los Angeles International Airport to see the Apollo 11 astronauts when they came back from the moon. In our family, we were woken up for every single space launch at a respect for Jack Kennedy. And in truth,

you didn't even have to be awake. We were just taken out of bed, propped up in a chair. They launched the rocket, and then we were thrown back in bed. In Camelot. Camelot! But the night they walked on the moon, like most everyone else on earth,

we all were crowded around the television set, about to turn blue, when the eagle finally landed. We heard our apartment complex explode with the sound of cheering, and my engineer father took me outside in his high-waisted khakis and a white t-shirt, and in the heat of the night he pointed at a bright crescent in the sky and said, "'Man are walkin walking on that tonight. So our mother took us on the bus for half a day to LAX to see Neil, Buzz and Michael, and we were running late, so everyone was already lined up when we got there.

The astronauts were just coming off of the plane. I'm sure the world-wide tour was far more physically demanding than the actual voyage to the moon, as they were forced to land at airports, get out, walk around, wave, get driven around, wave more, then get back on a plane and take off for another airport. But we were late, and we were standing behind the row of people pushed up against the cyclone fencing, and I was a little seven-year-old, and suddenly I was lifted up under my arms by a complete stranger who saw that I couldn't see, and he floated me, weightless, high above the astronauts, and held me over his head, slowly angling me toward them as they walked by waving. And I remember waving back as I looked down on their blue suits,

freshly shaved faces, and tight NASA crew cuts. The year prior we had taken the bus to downtown Los Angeles and we were stopped in traffic and mom pointed up to the hall of justice and she said, you see that little window in the corner up there honey? The real small window at the top with the bars in it. You know who they keep up there? She asked. Sir Han, Sir Han.

He's the son of a bitch that shot Bobby. Thank God for Rosie Greer, she said. Broke his thumb so he couldn't get another shot off. But mostly, my sister Sheila and I took the bus. We took the bus to school. Not the school bus, I took the bus. We took the bus to school. Not the school bus, but the city bus. The RTD.

The Rapid Transit District. Because we were going to school out of our zip code. Because my mother said, you two are going to St. Genevieve's, or you're not going to school at all. I was in second grade. Sheila was in fifth grade. and Lisa, probably because she was thrown out of her Catholic school for flamboyant handwriting, had her own thing going at a public school.

We would leave the house dressed in our uniforms, and Sheila, sporting short and severe wet hair, held in place with a stern barrette, would hold my hand with such savage determination that it left a dent that you can still see to this day. And we would walk right up Valerio Street to the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard, where the bus stop was. But first, in the mornings, we had an errand to run. And so, a no-nonsense ten-year-old girl with a little 7-year-old boy in tow crossed 6 lanes of rush hour traffic to the liquor store with a note, and we put the note up on the counter

every morning, and it read, Pfft, please give my children two packages of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Thank you. Mooring Kieran, 786-7305. And it was the 60s, so they would sell Lucky Strike cigarettes to a fifth grader and a second grader in their uniforms on their way to Catholic school. Lucky Strike, if you remember, was so packed with tar and nicotine that it was widely understood to be the brand Death Smoked, and we would dutifully deliver the cigarettes back home to our mother, and then we would walk back

up to the corner, and the bus would come, and we would get on that bus, and we would march right down the middle, because my big sister Sheila was all business, and people would smile at how cute we were, and I would wave like an astronaut and smile back, but the steely blue-eyed girl, wearing the game face and the plaid skirt who was crushing my tiny hand, was unimpressed and got us both seated, facing forward. Sometimes that bus would get us to school on time, and sometimes it wouldn't, and sometimes it didn't show up at all, and our mother would throw us into the back of a taxi cab by ourselves with a

little wad of cash, and sometimes when we'd miss the bus she'd say, you know what, forget it, stay home, watch my stories with me. We were homeschooled by Mike Douglas and the edge of night. One day the nun in my class had had enough of my erratic attendance, and so she called me to the front of the room and had me stand at attention next to her desk, facing the other students, and for maximum shame, one by one, she read all of my tardies and absences. When I went home from school that day, I told my mom what happened, and she listened, and then she said, Go turn down Mike Douglas. And so I did. And then she said,

Now go get me a seagull diet drink out of the refrigerator. Very vanilla, please. And I did. And finally she said, now, go get me the phone. So I brought her the telephone. And my mother called St. Genevieve's Catholic School, and she didn't get my nun on the phone. She got the nun on the phone. The mother's superior, Sister Mary Benedict. And my mother told Sister Mary Benedict what happened.

And then I watched as my mother leaned in, listening to the Reverend Mother. And then she leaned in a little closer, and she said, You go straight to hell, sister. And don't stop on the way, honey. Clang. You kids are going to public school. And we did. For the record, when you refer to the mother superior as honey, well it just doesn't get

much jerseier than that. Later that year, on Christmas morning, there was a knock at our door, and when my father opened it, there were two LAPD officers standing there in their dressed blacks, with their long sleeves and their hats tucked under their arms on the same side. They came inside and sat at the dining room table and told my parents that earlier that morning my mother's mother had been found in her car in San Diego. She had overdosed on pills and cut her wrists. Nanny had tried to take her life a number of times in the past, but she always called

my father and he had gotten to her in time, like it was a game. But this time, she never called, and somehow, a note that she left behind got back to my mother. And the note read, Maureen, this is because of you. And what the note didn't say, but said most of all, was P.S. Merry Ravaged Christmas for the rest of your life. So we believe that for this reason, our parents felt they needed a new start for the whole family.

And so it was decided that we were going to move. ... we were going to move. It was 1971, and we were going to move fifty miles south, roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, to the suburbs, to a brand new planned community, to a place they named

Mission Viejo. And at the time, there was nothing down there, and some could still make that argument today. But at that time, our lonely housing tract was surrounded by golden rolling hills, vast expanses of savanna grass, and an actual lion preserve. For real, because it looked exactly like where lions lived. Mission Viejo was hailed as the California Promise. And looking back, it's as if California put its big, golden arm around my family, pulled us in close and said,

Some real crazy shit's about to happen to you all, I promise. And California kept its word. Now everybody moves into a home with no furniture. Ours just stayed that way, because my mom said she would rather live in a new tract home with no furniture than live in a home with furniture from Sears. But my father said that's all we could afford, but Mom was having none of it, and consequently neither were we. Which isn't totally true.

We had a piece of a sectional couch, but not one of the broad, grand, sweeping, majestic segments, but rather the connecting piece, sort of an ottoman with a back on it. And my mother would lie across it with her lower legs dangling off the edge, wearing tennis socks with little pom poms on the back, watching the guiding light on a television about a quarter mile that way. Both pieces floating like flotsam on an ocean of brand new thick shag royal blue carpeting. My father was working around the clock now, commuting to Los Angeles during the day and moonlighting in San Diego at night. My mother would watch her shows all day and at dusk she would do some light cleaning,

until it was time for us to go to bed. But the cleaning really was but to... prelude, if you will, to the main event. As I would lie in my roll-away bed, the kind with a bar across your back that you might see a paint-chipped plaster boy lying on in a Lower East side tenement museum, I would start to hear it far away in another part of the house. The vacuuming had started. Can you imagine a house better suited for raw, untamed, almost feral vacuum cleaning? Vast expanses of dense, factory fresh carpeting, with nary a stick of furniture to hamper your headway.

It was akin to plowing a suburban lawnmower through open pasture land. And our mother, with her lit cigarette, her house coat, and her white Keds tennis shoes would start night after night, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaàA covering acres and acres of carpet waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa She wasn't crazy. It was night time. The kids were asleep. So best to shut all the lights out and just use the headlight on the front of the vacuum. After all, that's what it's there for apparently.

For night vacuuming. You would lie in bed hearing it come closer to your room. You would see the light coming eventually. And sometimes it would come up and rrrr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r And come the morning, we would have to rake it. Anyone? Any carpet farmers out there? Anyone else have to harvest loose synthetic fibers? We did.

We had drapes in the one front window of our house, but tin foil and newspaper on the sides and back facing windows, fooling absolutely no one, and the weeds in our backyard grew so high, it was like wandering into a corn maze, without the fun. One Sunday, a complete stranger walked into our house. It was our father. And he said, come on, come here, I want to show you kids something. And he took Sheila, Lisa, and me, and he walked us through the kitchen onto the service porch that led into the garage.

And then our father just went, chicky, and opened the door. And there, sitting in the middle of our garage, was a brand new car. We had never seen a brand new car that close before, let alone one that belonged to us. The garage door was closed and there was a single light bulb overhead, and he just walked over and leaned his arm on the roof of the car. It was a Datsun 1200 Amazon Parrot Green with cream white interior and Dad just stood there nodding at it. And it was then that we smelled smoke. As we were slowly pushed aside by our mother, and she stepped through us and stopped at

the edge of the doorway and looked into the garage of the car, and she said to us under her breath, Stay here. I'll be right back. And we didn't know what that meant, but we did stay there. And pretty soon mom did come back and we were pushed aside again and we watched as our mother set herself at the edge of the doorway, raised her arm and tomahawked a claw hammer across the garage impacting the shiny green hood of

the new car, bink! Caroming off the windshield, and then bing bong bong bing bim blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib blib bl And then she disappeared through us and back into the house. My father picked up the hammer without saying a word, walked over, shut off the light, shut the door, and that, we thought, was that. But a short time later, in our kitchen, my mother went to a drawer, pulled out a carving knife, and ran at my father. He grabbed her wrist just in time to stop the knife, and I ran over and helped him keep it from going into his heart, which is where you stab someone if you want to kill them.

Our father, like I said, always kept a lot of pens in his breast pocket, but we wondered if for occasions such as this, he might also have kept several layers of stainless steel erasing shields in there for you civil engineering historians in the house. I remember hanging on to both of their wrists until the attempted stabbing stopped. It wasn't long after that that our mother suffered a massive heart attack. A myocardial infarction to be exact. I told my friends at school, yeah it wasn't a heart attack, it was a myocardial infarction. And our mother went into the hospital for about three weeks. And while she was in the hospital, mom's aunt came to take care of us. Aunt Kitty.

Kitty Peacock from Las Vegas, who was a mix between a great horned owl and Mrs. Noggetuck from the show Maud. And Kitty was famous for being clairvoyant, and also for being present when people suddenly died, like the priest who dropped dead after high mass and crumpled down the stairs in front of the altar, sliding to a stop in front of Aunt Kitty, seated in the first pew. Or the time she was standing on a high bridge and a man walked up, mentioned how beautiful the bay was, climbed atop the railing, and jumped, hitting a police boat below, and because it was Aunt Kitty watching, probably killed not only himself, but all officers on deck.

She watched over us kids while my dad worked his 18 hour days, and eventually my mother came home from the hospital and promptly smoked three weeks worth of cigarettes in the bathroom behind the wall of sound while she popped her new mysterious nitroglycerin tablets for her heart, which were tiny little white pills kept in a thick glass vial. At age 10, I had watched enough cartoons to know that nitroglycerin was as dangerous as dynamite and I was obsessed with the idea that if that glass vial were ever to be dropped on the floor at just the right angle, there would only be a crater where our neighborhood used to be. Whenever my mom asked me to go get me my nitro, in the back of my mind, I knew there was a small chance I wasn't coming back.

And possibly neither were the Achesons or the Loutensocks who lived on either side of us. Now, before her myocardial infarction, my mother and Lisa were not getting along all that well. And when my mother came home from the hospital, almost immediately they got into it again. One day, my mother's love of common household weapons took the form of a long wooden spoon that she used to thwack Lisa with. On the bright side, the fact that she took an improvised kitchen hickory switch to my sister instead of reaching for a knife showed my mother was at least teachable, open to learning, willing to grow.

I was off visiting some family friends in Los Angeles at the time, the Valdez family. Margarita the matriarch and Arturo the bricklayer had a lot of kids, an oddly narrow swimming pool and furniture. Margarita cooked big Mexican meals and Arturo would sometimes discipline their children by whipping them with hot wheel tracks. When the Valdez family drove me back home, I walked in, and it was as if my sister Lisa had never been born. Her walls were bare, her bed was stripped, and her closet was empty.

She had run away from home at 17 years old. Lisa ran away up the street to the Schneider's house where she was a babysitter. And my father marched up the street to get our sister back, and he came home without our sister, looking strangely disoriented because Mr. Schneider was a psychiatrist. I don't know what he said to my father, but he must have played him like an Irish fiddle. For some impossible reason in the suburbs, the Schneiders owned a Bentley, an old-school English Bentley, like with running boards and giant fenders and the oversized

steering wheel on the right. And they would let our 17 year old sister drive this colossus. And we would see her coming slowly up the street, because it was impossible to miss what appeared to be the Queen of England visiting Mission Viejo. And Lisa knew to keep our house on the left. And when she got close, Sheila and I would dart out of the Sullivan's bushes on the right and then jump up on the running board and say to her, we miss you, we love you, we're not allowed to mention your name in the house.

And we would drop off as she drove away, like some super sad Grey Poupon commercial. ["The Last Supper"] Okay, wow. We're in the studio now, Danny Jacobs alongside Darren Grotsky. Darren Grotsky. And Stephen Kearns. What an, what an episode. What an episode.

That was packed. Packed. Man. Um, where do we start? I mean, I guess I want to talk about the, this suicide. Um, just to, just to tear the bandaid off. Okay.

All right. Um, it, I just, I'm just trying to wrap my brain around the idea that somebody would commit suicide and leave a note that's saying that this is your doing. Yeah, and who found the note and thought it was a good idea to share it with my mother? That's a great point. That's a great point.

That's something you could absolutely find and then just slip in a pocket and never to be seen again. Right. That is true. I mean, do you have a sense of how that affected her? Oh yeah. I mean, what made it wild is that my birthday is on Christmas Eve, which is really strange to begin with. Wow. Yeah.

And so Christmas for me, for the longest time, and I think still is, is just completely like accompanied by just ghosts, you know, like Dickens, Dickensian ghosts. Oh God, yeah. It was, it ravaged my mom for the rest of her life. Always Christmas was something you could see. She was just stealing herself to get through,

just to plow through it, just to get through it. Because of that morning, I remember that morning so clearly. I remember those cops and how they were dressed and how respectful they were, why they would, I don't know what's the protocol there. Why would they send the police to our house? And my mother, you know, collapsing onto the floor,

you know, just collapsing onto the floor. And how old were you then again? I had to be like probably 10. Man. Maybe no younger than that. So it was probably eight, I think eight years old. Old enough to understand not the extent of everything, but to understand something horrible has happened. Yes, but I couldn't take it all in.

Of course. And Nanny, as she was known, Nanny was such a mysterious and mercurial character. Yeah, what was, had your relationship been with her? She was always really incredibly loving. My dad, my dad, their relationship was wild, but my dad always said, you know, when she was good, there was no one better. But when she was bad, there was no one worse. Dad always said that because of all of, you know, it was, it was schizophrenia and it was drug addiction.

And it was, I mean, you're sleeping with a priest, you know, and, and that whole relationship and, and father Kelly, you know, my dad's relationship to father Kelly was always, wow, my dad would make him like steaks because my dad could kind of cook a little bit. So my dad would make steaks just, just the way father Kelly liked them, you know, and my dad had this wild, almost blind spot around anyone with an education. And dad, dad would, I remember, would always tell me like, I never met anyone as intelligent as that man. My dad had strange respect for him in spite of himself because anything to do with, you know, my dad didn't really finish school,

you know, certainly not high school, but I don't even know if my dad got through middle school because of the farm, you know, needing to work. So I remember like when I graduated, my dad looked at that diploma and this is just a bachelor's degree, you know, not like you guys, I'm like, you know, I just squeaked by. But I remember my father opening that thing up.

It was leather bound, right? And he just could not believe it. So I think my father had this unbelievable respect for anyone who could get, stop working with your hands, Steven. I remember he told me as soon as you can, he goes, you see these? He goes, and he pointed to his head. He goes, as soon as you can get the work off of your back and get it here. You know what you're making.

And so I think my dad had a wild blind spot for the fact that father Kelly was such a learned man. To go back to your original question of, you know, Nanny was, she was also dangerous. I mean, she was like physically dangerous. I remember there were times, I think I may, again, I, you know what, I can't say it. I just have a vague memory of just being threatened by her if I wouldn't stop crying or, or, uh, there was just a, this darkness to her. Kind of like her daughter who didn't want you to be sad either. Right.

It's the same thing. It's exactly right. That's, that's exactly right that, that she just couldn't accommodate it. I mean, she, she went through hell in her life. She went through hell. She was institutionalized. She had electros in her life. She went through hell. She was institutionalized. She had electroshock therapy. It took doing this one man show

and my dear friend, Peter, Kiwi Pete, we call him, from Christchurch. And the first thing he said after the show, the first thing he said was, oh, oh, mate, your grandmother, mate. He just felt so much empathy for her and that was not a thing in the family. There was no forgiveness.

There was to speak to you and your dad. There was none of that. She was a pariah and the fact that she could do that, even if she was so damaged, but it took Peter to introduce that idea even to me, that that also, that she was in hell and she was passing it on. That Richard Rohr, I'm just quoting everyone,

but the great Richard Rohr always said, that any pain you don't transform, you will transmit. And I feel like she just was a pain transmission, just channel. Right. You just said something that I was gonna ask about earlier. So after she committed suicide in your family,

no one was really, like she was, she was a pariah. Like everyone, your mom spoke of her in anger. Wasn't even, it was just known. It was like, that was verboten. We didn't talk about nanny. Nanny was off the table. We would go to the, we would go to the cemetery. Right.

And her, because her husband was in the Navy, we would go down to the military cemetery down in San Diego. And we would look out, why there? I don't know, but she ended up down in San Diego, but why he ended up there, buried there, I don't know. I think it was the, he probably requested it. Oh, her husband from back in Jersey was also buried in San Diego. And I remember my uncle Jimmy, my mom's brother, who we're going to meet later, Jimmy, fucking

uncle Jimmy in the greatest sense, my hero in life in so many ways. But I remember we would sit up on that hill at Nanny's grave and we would look out down on the ships, on the destroyers. So it was up above, I'm guessing Coronado or so. I don't know where the military cemetery is in San Diego, but that was- By the way, the destroyers is a very apt name for ships for this podcast. Sure, it sure is. Yeah, that's the ship that, yeah, at least is firing upon us in our lives. Mission accomplished, but to look down there, but that's, you know, it's interesting. That's the most we would ever do with regards to Nanny, as far as I can remember. The girls would know more, my sisters would remember more.

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Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. Did, um, I don't think I, I also did not realize that Father Kelly was still around at this point. So when, when she killed herself, where was he in any of this? Don't know. I mean, I don't know. That was all a mash too. But I remember my father, one thing about my dad,

and there was a recklessness to my father. My father had physical courage. My dad was like to a fault. I remember these motorcycle dudes, these guys, I guess a gang cut us off in traffic and Dad chased them down with all of us in the car and Dad got out and went for them. Now this is two wars, right?

Two wars. So Dad, I don't know which came first. I mean, but this warrior side of my father, which was, it's the thing that he threatened his boss once. If you ever speak to me like that again in front of the rest of the engineers, he goes, I will punch you in the face. He said that, and the boss kept him on.

The boss was like, fair enough, Eugene, fair enough. But I mean, I remember my dad throughout his life, all the way to the end of his life, I will get back to the question in a second, but dad would show this, dad would show this side of him that was like, physically my dad was not, he would not back down from stuff.

And I remember this guy, I guess he was like a Russian mob dude that my dad did some work for at the very end of his life as an engineer. My dad was picking up jobs wherever, other jobs guys wouldn't take. And I remember the guy brought his guy with him. And the quote that someone else was in the room said,

your father turned to this guy, this mob guy, and said, that stays outside. He pointed to his guy as that. And the guy was Mr. Kiernoop. And my dad, he goes, no. He goes, and my dad pushed away from the table, the guy said like, we're done. And he goes, the guy turned around

and said something in Russian, that stayed in the hall and dad got the job. So what happened? That's unbelievable. That's crazy. So when Nanny died, we all went down to San Diego. We stayed in this parlor of this big giant drug house, like with these people who were supplying her

and dad was finding out who, trying to find out who supplied her. So he's in this fucking drug house, my dad. What? He's like in an investigative mode there. He's like trying to. Yeah, that's a nice way of putting it. You're there too?

We're in the fucking parlor. We're sitting, and I remember it was an old Victorian, like an old Victorian house you would see in San Francisco, but back in the day in San Diego, whatever neighborhood that was back in the day, in the early, like 1970 or 71. So we went in there and dad was raising hell. Oh wow.

He was like, who did it? Like who did this? So to go back, father Kelly, I have no idea where father Kelly was. All I know was that he was, he was a hard drinking man, so much so, and also would sleep with women that he was sent out to start a church. I think it was Lee Vining. What's on the edge of the Salton Sea? Whatever is it? They were basically sending him to Siberia. They sent him out on the edge of the Salton Sea and I think it's Lee Vining and he was told to build a church out there.

It was the Catholic church, typical, bury it, just let's pretend this isn't happening, send him out there to the edge of the desert. And that's where he was told to build the church. And I think he died out there. Holy moly. But talk about a blind spot. My dad, my dad would have rung him up too, if he thought it was, you know, but that's something that I always, always really strangely loved about my father, but also it was, it's a recklessness my father, but also it's a recklessness that I was like, wow, that's really dangerous. Well, hold on. I have a bunch of questions about this. Well, first of all, just logistically, did he find out any information at this drug house? Okay. I wonder what you think about this, which is, um, do you think there was any part of him that was doing that in a way to protect your mom that like, yeah, the note said, this is because

of you. And it's like, he's immediately being like, no, no, no, I'm going to find out who's really at fault. You know what I mean? I think completely true. Yeah. Completely true. And maybe- There's something sweet about that, even in his misguided, you know, rage. Yeah, I think he also thought this one got by him. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you say that in the episode,

that there had been others and he had always- It was a game she would call and he would get to her. And then, and I remember he dropped her off once at some hotel in Santa Monica. He just then, and I remember he dropped her off once at some hotel in Santa Monica. He just like, you know, just put her on the West side for a little while. Yeah.

And I think this one. He felt responsible. Yes. Which my dad, you know, look, Irish Catholics, you know, the guilt. Yeah. Just like my dad felt that misguided blame and taking overdeveloped sense of responsibility.

And this one, you know, it's like, no, Dad. Yeah. Toward the end of his life, I got to say, that was really, among other things, Dad was sorting stuff like this. Desperately sorting. Really? Because he thought he was going to hell. Because, yeah.

Wow. Oh wow. Well, I mean, that goes to something else that I, that's interesting to me because one of my big takeaways from this episode is that there's a lot of transportation in it, right? There's like the buses, there's the car that's bought, but it also feels like nobody's going anywhere. That's so well put, Danny. That's so, like there's a lot of movement, but then it's circular. Yeah, that's right. And making a rut.

Yeah, exactly. Deeper and deeper. It's also funny that you mentioned, um, the, the Irish Catholic guilt, because I actually wrote down that I could have nicknamed this for myself, the Catholic episode. I mean, I guess they're all kind of the Catholic episode in a sense, but, but like

starting out of respect for Jack Kennedy, you know, um, the, the, the whole, every, every, uh, astronaut mission, you know, that we're talking about, um, father Kelly, the, the private Catholic school, the nun story. Yes. So true. Yeah.

Like it's, it's just permeating everything. Yeah. Um, and then the guilt, which you're right, obviously it's there for your mom because it's in the note and then it's there for your dad because he felt like he let this one go. Yeah, that he somehow missed it. Yeah.

Somehow. And that it all happened on Christmas. I mean, it's- And also the horror of him trying to sort out the war. Yeah. The war is plural. I remember as a kid, I asked him, I said, did you kill anyone, dad? I was little.

Yeah. He was doing something and he's just stopped and he'd turn around and he said, it wasn't killing. It was my job. Oh man. Jesus. I'm a real crybaby this episode. No, listen, it's, um, it makes sense. It's, um, that is, um, rough stuff.

God, my dad and my dad, my dad hated war. He loved the service, but he hated war. Oh, interesting. He held, he held famously on the way back across once they dropped the bomb in Nagasaki, dad helped a guy throw a bunch of shit over the edge of the ship halfway across to New York because the guy, dad said, what do you want that shit for?

Cause the guy had taken a full, they had taken out a machine gun nest on their, I think they're on their way to Paris and the guy, the guy had fucking full blown German machine gun. He had Nazi flags, he had all this stuff. And my dad convinced him. I always think of somewhere, somewhere in the bottom of the ocean, is that thing that my dad helped the guy get up

on the railing and over it went. Oh, wow. And we found a lot of stuff in the closet. We can talk later, but the things that we found in the closet in dad's, in the bedroom, have a lot of, a lot of stuff that. Do you think he sorted? Do you think, where did he get to?

He got there, I think my dad died before he died. I think dad died the day, just before he died. I think he died the day, literally the day before he died, dad had an awakening. I was right there with him and I watched a slide off of him. I watched it all just slide away. There were priests involved. I saw more priests at the end of my dad's life

than I'd seen in my life. It was like I saw chaplains and priests and like, get that guy, bring this dude. Father Paul showed up, this God, he has an interesting role at the end. But my dad, because of, well, I'm not tipping the hand, we know there's a divorce coming. Two wars, one divorce, no therapy.

Look, the deal is this. My dad thought because of the divorce alone, he was going to hell. Oh, right, right, right. And I remember this one priest came to my dad and was like, look, Gina, he kind of like, he did, he gave him a pass, he's like, I know, I know. It's like, I think you're gonna be okay.

And my dad was like, what? He's like, like in case there were other priests listening. So, so religion to me. It's so religious. It's like, oh, your whole life we're gonna be telling this stuff. And then at the end, you're gonna say, it's fine.

You know what, all of that was just to scare the fuck. We were kidding. Yeah, we were kidding. It was just to scare the- It's just to keep you in line. Yeah, to keep you in line, to scare the fuck out of you and get you to do stuff.

But look, you know what, pound for pound, I think you're gonna be okay. You know what I mean? It's like- Yeah. It's interesting though, I asked about the sorting also because I'm just thinking about you, Stephen, sorting it and you Danny also sorting it. It's like, it's even this generation earlier,

what year was your dad born? Oh God, it was like, I think 1923. So in the 20s, right? Yeah, yeah. Were, I think, 1923? So in the 20s, were he alive now, he'd be 100, whatever. And yet, you know, this, the greatest generation man, like you said, no therapy, but he still needed to sort. Somehow he was carrying all this with him. The truth is the truth, man.

Yeah. Right, it's like, or it's sorting you, it's sorting you. Like eventually we take this, we stop and you turn. You don't always have to. I mean, you can die high. That's true. But it's like you turn eventually, something you've brought to your knees eventually.

Yes. Yeah. And then there's your mom, and obviously there's a lot to come in future episodes with your mom and your dad for that matter, but like in this episode, I found it really interesting, couple things. First of all, the nun story,

which is hilarious and fantastic. And also I feel like my takeaway of the subtext of the nun story is that your mom loves you. Yes. Right? Like, you know, beneath it all, beneath the go get me the diet, whatever, what was the drink? Seagull and they, all of the flavors had very before them, like very strawberry.

Oh, I was going to ask about that. Very chocolate. Very vanilla. Very vanilla. But like, she's, she's defends you to the mother superior. What did that feel like for you? Cause you don't really get into this in the episode. What did that feel like for you in that moment?

In that moment, it was shocking. Like we were going to be in so much trouble with these nuns and mom was like, fuck those nuns. You know, we're not doing that. I was like, you can do that? And I realized that mom in her own way was like, no, no, no, no. That that, you know,

when someone first saw the one man show, they picked out two parts where my mom completely went to bat. Completely went to bat. This was one and another one that's coming, which we can talk about later. But this was, they just said your mom was like a mama bear. And I'm like, yeah, the bear doesn't work for me.

Mom was more like a badger or like a small wolverine. Like a mama wolverine was like. A rabid wolverine. A rabid wolverine, like a mama wolverine was like. A rabid wolverine. A rabid wolverine, like, and mom was like, you know, I can abuse my kids, but if you fucking even think about abusing my children, don't you ever shame, you know, she just, not to mention, she was completely beat to hell

by the nuns. They said, my mom, the old joke about wrapping knuckles with a ruler, she said that literally happened. Oh, wow. I don't know that old joke. That the nuns would go by. Is it a joke or just a thing they do? They would actually... They would wrap your knuckles with a... Oh, I see. It's an Irish Catholic perspective to say it's a joke.

I see. Oh, I see. Horrible thing. My literal brain was like, oh, there's a joke. I can't wait to hear it. Well constructed. Yes. Wow. That's something that I was thinking about during this episode too, which is like, your family, there's this internal dynamic, which is chaos and crazy. But then there is an immediate, like, the image that popped into my head was like, you know,

when there's like old, like medieval wars, when like the soldiers would create a wall of their shields. Yes. It's like, that's what your family would do from, for the outside. But beyond those, inside those shields was just, you know, chaos. But then you have the situation where Lisa winds up on the outside. Yes.

Yes. Right. And suddenly now she's not in the shield. She's literally erased from existence. Right. Um, which again, so that was the bit for me in this episode, last week we talked about, you know, some of the, what, what it must've been

like for you to experience some of that stuff as a little boy. And this Lisa thing, I was thinking about what, cause you would have been 10 at this point, I think, right? 10 or 11. Yeah. And that's, we're getting to be old, you know, old enough to really feel stuff now.

And your big sister is. Erased. Erased. She has to, she drives by and the Bentley was again, you make this all so funny that I have to like, I have to sit with it for a minute to put myself in your shoes. It is absurd.

And like, yeah, I mean, you know, what was, what was that like to just, you got a glimpse of her, she drove past. It was devastating. Yeah. More than I ever knew. Yeah. We, more than we ever could even process at the time. Cause I, I, again, I was visiting family friends

and, and, uh, and then I remember being dropped off and it's as if my sister had never been born. I remember looking at her room. I walked into her room and her closet was empty. The walls were like stripped bare, you know, and teenage bedrooms are like shrines, you know? And this thing was just like, nothing. The bed had been stripped.

My mom was making a point. And like, you are not to mention her name in this house. So my mom was passing it down the line now. Yes. From Nanny to my mom, to Lisa. Yes, yes, yes. And the blame and the blame and the blame. I always said that Nanny died with one finger up,

like the middle one and one pointed out. Yeah. Yeah. finger up, like the middle one, and one pointed out. It occurs to me that, like, if I were you going through that and seeing that, I might, from that lesson that I might take, and I'm just curious if this happened to you or not, a lesson that I might take is that I can't stray an inch from the line, from what's expected from anything, because it could all just disappear. I became hyper-focused on behaving well. As I mentioned earlier off the air, I didn't use any going into high school. I didn't drink or use drugs earlier off the air, I didn't use any, going into high school,

I didn't drink or use drugs or anything. I was just hyper, hyper controlled. And I remember any time, this is where I really started to develop this unbelievably critical voice because it was a way of surviving. I always joked that the voice in my head is named Ramon. But Ramon was saving my life.

Eventually, you know, it was killing me right over time. But during this time, Ramon, and we used to have this list in the pantry door that my mama goes, you don't know a word? Write it up there. We're gonna look it up together in the dictionary. So mom would have us like, you'd go, rather than just go to the dictionary,

we had to like make a list and we would go and we will look these up. And I remember I was so self-critical that I had made a mistake that I symbolically went to that list, opened the pantry, went to the list and wrote down behavior. Like, I want to know the definition because I have a shaming myself like that.

I had some sort of bad behavior, Like, I want to know the definition because I was shaming myself. Like that I meant I had some sort of bad behavior, didn't do my chores. Cause it was fucking chore city around our house. It was like, you know, my dad, you got military corners on the beds. Right. And my mom, my mom was super organized.

And it was just, we got to just keep appearances. Well, those floors were so well vacuumed. Well and the vacuuming was symbolic. Even though if friends on the rarest of occasions would look inside of our house, they were never allowed in, but if they were like, what's going on? Like what's going on in there?

Like what? Like there was no way to, I, I, like an indoor stadium, like, like if you were to come in, you could play soccer. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. And it was a tractome that with just smelled like carpet with no, with nothing inside. It's an incredible image. By the way, also one thing is a quick thing about that vacuuming. I found your description of that so incredibly relatable.

I feel like all of us at one point have been in a room when someone's vacuuming elsewhere, not always at night when you're ostensibly sleeping, but just that vacuum coming closer, bumping up against the door. Oh God. So very relatable. Yeah.

You also said a minute ago, that this thing had passed down from nanny to your mom to Lisa. That was just on mom's side, but yes. Mom's side. Yeah. Well, it makes me think again about what we're doing here with this podcast last season

and now, and like the, the effect of all of this trauma is in you, you have it and, and Danny, your trauma, it's in you and look, mine is in me, all of ours, we have it. And I feel like, you know, one part of what we're trying to do here is to try to have it die with us and not, you know, in our case, pass on to the kids or any of our kids, just pass it on to, to

others, you know, in the way that our parents try as they might to have sorted things or not try to sort things, inadvertently pass these things onto us. I don't know, you know, what you think of that. The only thing I'll say about that is I don't know if the goal is for it to, I don't know that that's possible. I think that in some ways that is part, like in terms of my childhood and my family,

like that is part, like in terms of my childhood and my family, like that is part of me. I think it's the negative expression of that that I'm hoping will have an end. You know, the ways in which that can be harmful or hurtful or painful to others. Destructive, dare I use the term? Oh, I mean, it was right there. It was right there, Kieran. There it is. For me, that's a big thing.

I don't know. I don't know what you think, Kieran. Yeah, the buck stops here is a great aspiration, but not only are we not gonna get rid of it, we're gonna do our best to take our best shot at dismantling the insanity. Yes. Yes. But it's not all bad.

Yes, that's right. It's also mixed in. It's all, it's just, there's such beauty and poetry that comes out of it. And again, our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses and where does it show up? I mean, it's all mixed together. I'm desperately trying not to sound so lyrical about it, but I really think that it's a beautiful mess, as they say.

Yes, I think that's 100% right. I'm sorry, but yeah, you were gonna say something. No, no, no, go. I was just gonna say that I also think that, you know, I think it's a misnomer. I don't know if misnomer is the right word there. A mistake? Yeah, to say that it's, to think that there's no, that there is a way to do this life in which there is no even inadvertent negative harm that's done on somebody else. You know, what I said to my dad in the finale of, in that letter that I wrote him in the finale of, of my story, uh, of how to destroy everything, uh, was that you did the best

you can. I think we're just trying to do the best we can. That's right. And there's going to be inadvertent trauma that we, that you and I put on our children for sure. We are not aware of in the moment that they're going to go to therapy for, you know, in 20 years. And that's just part of it. That's life. That's human life. Yeah. That's human life, apparently. That's the deal here. And who's to say where, you know, all I know is it does start here. What were you going to say, Darren? I feel like I just jumped

you. No, no, you go. It does start here. That I know. The old saying, my friend, Kyle Seacor, told me a story of the Buddhist at the dinner party. The finger is like everyone else, the finger is underneath the table, pointing at everyone else like that, and then pointing over there and pointing. But the Buddhist over time hopefully slowly,

slowly, slowly brings the finger pointing back here. It has to start here. And I mean, not to blame, but this is where the, oh God, this is where the work is. I know you've got to do the work, man. Yeah, go fuck yourself. But it's like, you know what? I get the message of that.

I get that even though it's packaged in a bunch of McTherapy these days, I really do believe this is the deal. Where else are you gonna start? How's the blaming going? It feels fucking awesome. But it's not, it's empty calories. Yep.

So let's focus, let's talk about next week, episode three, which is called Wes Skate Barn, The Big Split, and Frank. What do we have to look forward to, Mr. Stephen Kieran? Well, you're gonna meet Wes and his family, and this is a very pivotal episode, because this is where I went, basically, to escape the insanity. I got out of my shield of raining arrows

and ran over to another circle of shields down the street. And we're going to learn something outrageous, fully and completely outrageous about my father. There's going to be a big old split and then we're going to meet a guy that comes out as a result of the big split named Frank. I can't believe we're just now going to learn something outrageous about your father. Something to look forward to. All right, well, before we end this week's episode,

here is a clip from what you're gonna be hearing next week. Now I didn't run away from home like my sister, at least not officially, but I did start spending more and more time at what was known as Down the Street. At the house near the corner. The house that had his and her Cadillac Coupe De Ville's in the driveway. And a motor home.

And a Volkswagen Bug. And a boat in the garage next to an all-terrain vehicle. Motorcycles plural, a partially restored Model A Ford, and a 39 Dodge sedan with suicide doors. Go ahead, go around back, and you'd find a giant swimming pool with a little Italian pool off to the side that they called a jacuzzi. This was Wes's house and they had something I'd never seen or heard of before. They had money. How to Destroy Everything presents Toughen Up is written, performed, and created by Stephen Kieran. Executive produced by Darren Grodzki and Danny

Jacobs in partnership with Eastman Productions and 333 Productions. Story Editing by Lisa Blair and Sheila Stevens. Music Mixing and Mastering by Arlo Sanders. Audio Engineering by Glenn Eastman. Original Theme Music by Alan For questions, feedback, and of course any stories about Danny's dad, we can be reached at Iknowrichardjacobs at gmail.com. If you would like to support this podcast, please consider becoming a patron at www.patreon.com forward slash howtodestroyeverything. And of course, you can find us on Instagram and Blue Sky as well. How to Destroy Everything presents Toughen Up is available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Special thanks to Spotify Studios for the use of their beautiful recording space in downtown Los Angeles.