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front of my family’s massive color Zenith that I absorbed enough radiation to power a Polaris submarine. It didn’t matter if it was a classic Hitchcock movie or an episode of
Petticoat Junction
—if it was on TV, I watched it. I not only memorized TV theme song lyrics but could recite credits from the closing crawls of sitcoms like
Bewitched
and
Get Smart
(I knew, for instance, that Botany 500 did men’s wardrobe for both). When I wasn’t watching TV, I was devouring pulpy spy novels (all of Ian Fleming’s during eighth grade, most of Alistair MacLean’s during ninth), cracking up to the Bill Cosby comedy albums I found in my father’s collection (until I started buying my own Richard Pryor records), and grooving to Duran Duran on my first Walkman. It was the ideal preparation for a future calling as an entertainment writer.
    I grew up in suburban Shady Hill, New York—on the other side of the commuter tracks from Scarsdale—in a house that looked like it belonged on TV. The kitchen, with its lime-green linoleum countertops and daisy-themed wallpaper, could have been Carol Brady’s. The tastefully bland living room furniture might have been picked out by Rob and Laura Petrie—there was even an awkwardly placed ottoman—and the den could have been designed by Ward Cleaver. I had an attic room over the garage, just like the Fonz, although for some reason, girls didn’t come when I snapped my fingers.
    My father, an ad exec at a Madison Avenue firm, was a charming, funny, Fred MacMurray–style dad who alwaysmade a point of affectionately ruffling my hair when he got home from work. Mom was a former beauty queen from Brooklyn whose knockout smile had once appeared in a toothpaste ad in
Life
magazine. They were as bright and breezy as any sixties sitcom couple, and just as sweetly corny. One of my earliest memories is watching my parents dancing to music from a transistor radio as they cleaned up together after a dinner party—how my mother laughed when my father dipped her over the sink, dunking her ponytail into the suds. And then, suddenly, without the slightest bit of TV-drama-style foreshadowing, there was the accident that turned our household into a tragic movie of the week.
    I was eight years old at the time. I was sitting cross-legged in our den watching
Planet of the Apes
on Channel 7 when I noticed my dad standing by the door, looking stricken. He sat down in front of me on the floor, blocking the TV, and talked in halting, confusing sentences about a trip to the supermarket and brake failure and red lights. I wanted to see what was happening on the TV set. It was the part of the film when the gorillas snare Charlton Heston in a net and he stuns them by finally speaking—“Take your filthy paws off me, you damn dirty apes!” My dad finally spat out the words: my mom had been killed in a car crash.
    Dad was never the same. He tried his best to raise me on his own. There were grim outings to Carvel for ice cream, where I would gorge myself while watching him stare into space, his cone melting untouched in his big fist. There were birthday parties, afternoons at ballparks, and all the other moments a boy is expected to accumulate duringthe course of a normal American childhood. But for most of it, my father was absent, even when he was standing right there. So I disappeared into my pop culture world, clinging to TV and movies for warmth and companionship. And predictability. Every week, no matter what else was going on around me, I could always count on Jan to get jealous of Marcia. I knew for sure that Gilligan would screw up and they wouldn’t get rescued from the island. Somehow, at the end of the half hour, everything would be okay again, back to normal, everyone happy.
    And then, in 1982, when I was twelve years old, while standing on the playground at school, I got smacked in the side of the head with a snowball.
    Samantha lived only six blocks from my house, on a cheery tree-lined street called