Reality Boy

“So where to, then, Ger?” Dad asks, swirling his drink with his index finger.

I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to do anything, really. I just want a chance to start over and have a real life. One that wasn’t f**ked up from the beginning and broadcast on international TV like a freak show.

3

EPISODE 1, SCENE 1, TAKE 3

YES, EPISODE ONE. As in, they did more than one show of the Crapper. I was such a big hit with all those troubled parents around the country, so they wanted more chances to watch poor little Gerald squat and deposit turds in the most peculiar places.

I could almost hear the relieved parents of normal tantrum-throwing children saying At least our kid doesn’t crap on the dining room table!

So true. So true.

What they didn’t know was this: I didn’t become the Crapper until those cameras were mounted on our walls. Until the strangers with the microphones did sound tests to make sure they could pick up every little thing that was going on. Until I became entertainment. Before then, I was just a frustrated, confused kid who could get violent—mostly toward drywall… and Tasha.

If I was to give a postal abbreviation to my house while I was growing up, it would be UF. I was furious, yes. Livid. Enraged. Incensed. But only because everything was Unfair. Postal abbreviation UF. Zip code: ?????. (The zip code for UF probably changes every five seconds, so there’s no point trying to give it one.)

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to punch everything around me, out of confused, unacknowledged frustration. I never punched Lisi or my parents. But then, Lisi and my parents never begged me to punch them. Walls did. Furniture did. Doors did. Tasha did.

From the moment I saw Network Nanny, I didn’t really believe she was a nanny. She didn’t look like a nanny or act like a nanny. She had starlet hair—something you’d see at a red-carpet movie premiere. She was skinny. Bony, even. She dressed up, as if she was attending a wedding. She didn’t smile or possess any warmth. As if she was… acting.

They’d sent us a fake nanny.

I didn’t know this for sure until I was older, but it was true. Nanny was really Lainie Church, who was really Elizabeth Harriet Smallpiece from a small town in the south of England, who’d wanted to make it in Hollywood since she was five. Her first acting jobs were in commercials, and then she got a stint for a while in Iowa as one of those fake meteorologists who don’t know anything about weather but act like they do. She had a very convincing Iowan accent, too. But Network Nanny was her breakthrough role.

Alongside our fake nanny was a less camera-ready real nanny. She wasn’t allowed to interact with us, but she winked at me sometimes. She told Fake Nanny what to do to play a good nanny. This arrangement made me mad. I remember sitting there watching them set up and wondering what I could do to really show the world how wrong things were in my life.

After meeting with her makeup artist for a half hour, Fake Nanny got into costume and character and came into the living room, where my family sat waiting. She clapped her hands and looked at the three kids. I was five, Lisi was seven, and Tasha was nearly eleven.

Then she looked exclusively at me while she talked. “Your parents have called me in because your family needs my help.” She stopped and checked her reflection in the TV screen. “Your mother says you fight all the time and that’s not acceptable behavior.”

To imagine Nanny properly, you have to give her an English accent. She dropped her r’s. Behavior was behay-vyah.

“Sounds to me like you need the three steps to success in this house. And we’ll start with some old-fashioned discipline. Gerald, do you know what that means?”

The director told me to shake my head no, so I did. I tried not to look into the cameras, which was why it took three takes to film scene one. How can a five-year-old not look into a camera that’s right in front of his face?

“It means we’re about to start a whole new life,” she said. “And this will be a whole new family, easy as one, two, three.”

Nanny only came around for a day and then she left her crew of cameras and cameramen there to film us being violent little bitches to one another. Then, two weeks later, she came back and decided, based on that footage, who was right, who was wrong, who needed prop-ah punishment, and who needed to learn more about responsibility. She taught Mom and Dad about the naughty chair and how to take away screen time. They made homemade charts with rows, columns, and stickers. (The girls got cat stickers. I got dog stickers.)

Nanny didn’t actually help make the charts, because her fingernails were too delicate and chart-making wasn’t in her contract. “Anyway, it’s not my job to parent these children,” she said to Mom and Dad. “It’s yours.”

What the cameras didn’t see was: Everything that made us violent little bitches happened behind closed doors or just under the radar of those microphones. And so Nanny (well, really, the nannies) only saw part of the picture. Which was usually me or Lisi running after Tasha, trying to hurt her.

Or me squatting on the kitchen table that day—the most-watched YouTube clip from our time on the show—after Nanny took my Game Boy away for throwing a tantrum. That was my first crap—first of many. After I spent the rest of the day in my room, she asked, “You know pooping anywhere but the toilet is dirty, don’t you?”

I nodded, but the word dirty just kept echoing in my head. It was what Mom had said to me when I accidentally pooped in the bathtub when I was three. “Why did you do this?” Mom asked. “Why would you be so dirty?” I was so little I didn’t remember much else, but I remembered that five minutes before, Tasha had told me she was going to help me wash my hair. Which is not what she did.

Nanny said, “Every time you poop and it’s not in the toilet, you clean it up yourself and then you go to your room for the whole day. Does that sound fair?”

I shrugged.

She repeated, “Does that sound fair?”

I ask you: Imagine any five-year-old who’s surrounded by cameras. Imagine he lives in the postal area UF. Consider that he has so little giveashit that he has started crapping on the kitchen table in front of video cameras. Then ask him this question. He will not know how to answer.

So I freaked out.

I screamed so long and loud, I thought my throat was bleeding when I was done. Then Nanny came over to me and sat down and ruffled my hair. It was the nanniest I’d ever seen her act in the two weeks I’d known her. She asked me why I was so upset, but she laughed when I told her.