You Cannot Be Serious Read Online Free

worked as a bank messenger and security guard. (He also made a little money on the side as a trombone player in Irish bands, so I come by my performing interest honestly. My actual musical talent, though—that’s another question.)
    Coming from such a humble background, my dad did extremely well to be able to go to college at all, let alone work his way through night classes at Fordham Law School and wind up as a partner in one of the biggest law firms in New York.
    But Dad has never forgotten his roots: He’s full of Irish music and humor; there’s nothing he likes better than to get together with friends and have a beer or two, and sing and tell jokes at the top of his lungs (unlike me: I can’t remember a joke to save my life). I still remember how boisterous my parents’ parties were when I was growing up—and how, the next morning, my dad would always be bright-eyed and full of energy, ready to go at the world again.
    As those of you who watched tennis in the ’80s may recall, my mother was much quieter: My shyness, I think, comes from her. And some of my edge. My mom, Kay—born Katherine Tresham, the daughter of a Long Island deputy sheriff—tended to see the world in a somewhat harsher light than my father, who always seemed to have a smile and a kind word for everyone. My mom has never been as trusting of outsiders as my dad is; she could hold a grudge with the best of them. Unfortunately, I’m like her in those ways, too.
    My parents met in New York City in the mid-’50s, when my father was home on vacation from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and my mother was working as a student nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital. Typically enough, their relationship started at a bar one night, when a couple of my mother’s nurse friends ran into my dad and some buddies of his. Dad didn’t hit it off with any of those nurses, but they introduced him to a girl who turned out to be perfect for him. John and Kay got married while Dad was in the Air Force, and I was born on February 16, 1959, at Wiesbaden Air Force Base, in West Germany.
    When my father got out of the service, we moved to an apartment in Flushing, Queens, home of La Guardia Airport and home-to-be of the New York Mets. Dad worked during the day as an assistant office manager at an advertising agency and attended Fordham Law by night. There’s a story that’s typical of my mother: When Dad finished his first year, he proudly told Mom that he was second in his class. “See, if you had worked harder, you could have been first,” she said. (The next year, he was.)
    We were still in Flushing when my brother Mark was born in February of 1962, but then, shortly before Dad’s graduation, we made the big move to the suburbs, way out east to Douglaston, Queens—first to another apartment, and then to a two-story saltbox house at 241–10 Rushmore Avenue.
    Douglaston was a typical New York–area bedroom suburb: nice, safe, clean; nothing fancy. The houses were small, square prewar Cape Cods and Colonials; there were a lot of young families like us, with a station wagon in the driveway, a barbecue grill on the back patio. Kids rode their bikes, played football and stickball in the street and at Memorial Field, played basketball in the driveway. It was Leave It to Beaver, Queens style.
    I even had a paper route when I was ten and eleven, delivering Newsday and the New York Times on my bike. It was brutal work: I made about a buck-fifty to two bucks a week, and people didn’t exactly throw around the tips—it was four cents from one person, exact change for $1.86 from someone else.
    I was seven and a half when my baby brother, Patrick, was born: I took vague notice of the fact and then went on about my business, which, from the time I could stand up and walk, was mainly one thing: sports, sports, and more sports. If it had a ball, I played it—and was good at it. A story my dad likes to tell: When I was four, we were playing in Central Park one day. He was