Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut Read Online Free Page A

small detail that hadn’t come up in the Q & A session she’d had with my parents. She was a sex fiend.
    The first evidence of this was when a neighbor called my parents.
    “I’m . . . afraid my maid has witnessed some inappropriate behavior by your babysitter,” she confessed.
    Huh? Sue? Southern belle Sue?
    The neighbor arranged a sit-down between my parents and her nervous maid, who recounted how one evening as she was drawing the curtains by her window, which looked out on our building’s roof, she saw little Sue running about stark naked, giggling and being chased by a large black man.
    “I’m the Big Bad Wolf!” he bellowed as she ran from his grasp, laughing.
    “What are you gonna do to me, Big Bad Wolf?”
    “The Big Bad Wolf is gonna fuck your brains out!” They ran in circles as the maid crossed herself in the window and called her boss right away.
    My parents gulped. Time to talk with Sue.
    “Um, Sue, you can’t bring men into this building. This is a co-op and we have very strict rules about guests.”
    “I’m sorry!” she cried, weeping. “Pleeeeeeease don’t tell my parents! Pleeeeease! ”
    My parents looked at each other.
    “I won’t do it again, I promise, ” she swore.
    A few weeks later, my mom brought me home from school, and from the second we got off the elevator, she smelled the stench. “PU!” I recalled her saying. (Remember that? What happened to PU? And what did it stand for? Random.) Within seconds, Willie emerged. He was matted with sweat and waddling in a T-shirt and a bulging diaper that contained heaps of what we call in Latin rhea explosiva .
    “Oh my god,” my mom exclaimed, scooping up her little son. “ Sue? SUUUUUUUE!”
    My mom’s voice rang through the apartment. Clearly Willie had been majorly neglected, considering he was coated in perspiration and poo. “SUE! SUE?” We followed my mom as she looked for her. Willie’s nursery. Nope. The bathroom. No. My room? Nada. Nowhere to be found. She walked down the hallway and saw the door to the den was closed. Just as my mom reached for the doorknob, Sue opened the door with a startled look on her face and her bra showing through her half-buttoned shirt. My mom pushed the door open and there was our doorman, Joe, sans uniform top, zipping the fly of his gray pants with the gold stripe down the side. It was unclear where the doorman hat was. Maybe Sue wore it with nothing else as they porked.
    Willie and I stood with wide eyes as my mom asked Joe to please leave and told Sue there was going to be a Talk that evening.
    “Pleeeeease don’t tell my parents!” Sue said beseechingly.
    “I thought I told you this is not acceptable!” my dad said.
    “You said I couldn’t bring in people from outside the building,” she said between tears in her defense. “So I found someone in the building.”
    After a last warning my pushover parents acquiesced to her pleas and let her stay. But the worst was yet to come.
    .
     
    Sue’s pal Nightingale was trouble. She was a tall, striking brunette with that disco-era big hair worn with two combs. I liked her because she always came over after my parents left and would bring us frozen Kit Kat bars. As Sue and Nightingale watched our cracked-out shit-eating grins as we tore off the dark orange paper and foil wrappers, they realized something. Chocolate = kiddie currency. With those four cocoa-dipped bars, they could buy our silence.
    Nightingale had wads of money. Why? Because rather than work for peanuts as an au pair wiping asses, she worked two blocks from our apartment, at the Playboy Club on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street, a huge mansion that is now the Polish embassy. But in the 1970s, it housed a different genre of poles.
    Bunny suits with cotton tails paraded by the cabaret tables serving cocktails on logo-covered napkins. Somehow I knew what Playboy was even at age five because of its extensive advertising campaigns for subscriptions. Because I was glued to my