Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)

2 months ago

AN INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN MCCALLISTER ON THE 20TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF HIS ABANDONMENT

by Bebe Ballroom

He is forty minutes late. The pigeons in Central Park have taken the seat on the bench next to me. His hot chocolate is cold chocolate now. My phone buzzes and sends the pigeons scattering. He has sent a text message. It reads:

Traffic! ={

He shows up twenty minutes later, walking briskly in a gray hooded sweatshirt. He wears a black t-shirt underneath that reads, in tall white numbers: 14:59. His jeans are rolled up past his ankles, exposed as boney and pale. His fingernails feature chipped charcoal nail lacquer. His lips are chapped, his hair still blonde, though not the bright blonde it was when he was younger. Kevin McCallister takes one long drag of his cigarette before putting it out on his tongue. He bites the tip off and spits it out, putting the remains of the cigarette in his pocket for later use.

“The pigeon lady taught me that trick,” he said. “Right in this park.”

It is December of 2010, the twentieth anniversary of “The Home Alone Kid.” That’s how most remember Kevin McCallister, the 2nd grader who was left behind when his parents traveled for the holidays. He was eight years old when it happened, and nine years old when it happened again. That’s right, for two consecutive years, the McCallister family boarded a plane without their youngest, the inventive and sharp-tongued Kevin.

He apologizes for being late.

“The city does these things to you,” he says.

He lives in New York now, the same city he accidentally flew to when he paused in Chicago O’Hare International Airport to load fresh batteries into his Talkboy. When he looked up from the recording device, he followed a man wearing his father’s calf-length caramel mohair trench coat onto the wrong flight. Soon after, his family was in Florida and he was in New York, thankfully with his father’s wallet (which matched the atrocious coat).

“What else has the city done to you?” I ask him.

“Some things you can read about and some things you can’t,” he says and smiles smugly.

When his family forgot him in 1990, he spent Christmas and the days before in his large Chicago residence, enjoying his new-found freedom in a suddenly guardian-less world. But in an almost unbelievable twist, he wasn’t as alone as he thought. While Kevin ate ice cream sundaes for dinner and jumped on his parent’s bed, his entire neighborhood was being cased by two wanted criminals known only as Marv and Harry. They came to be known by the police as the Wet Bandits and they planned to rob the houses, empty of families visiting relatives for the holidays. Kevin noticed suspicious activity on his street and soon discovered the danger these men presented. The criminals became aware of Kevin and dismissed him, but they should not have underestimated the imaginative 8 year-old. When they came to claim the McCallister household valuables, Kevin was ready for them. In just several hours, he had booby-trapped his entire house, using objects like paint cans and broken ornaments, even matchbox cars, in fresh and painful ways. The Wet Bandits had no idea of the hurt they were in for.

“Some have questioned your incredible ingenuity in creating instruments of torture at such short notice,” I say.

“I see where this is going,” he says.

“Do you love violence, Kevin?”

“I like Tarantino films if that’s what you mean.”

“Did you have any pets growing up?”

“I wasn’t allowed any. My big brother got to have a tarantula though, that dumbass.”

“Did you ever get in fights with your many siblings?”

“Yeah. I mean, what kid doesn’t? I was the youngest, I was a speck to them, an electron. But I never got violent with them if that’s what you’re implying.”

“Never? I believe an entire gymnasium full of students and parents saw you punch your brother Buzz in the face, sending dozens of children from the risers and the piano accompanist backwards off the stage.”

“That whole thing was bullshit. Buzz was using two battery-operated candlesticks to illuminate my ears and also mock-drum on my head. He was begging for it.”

“How long has it been since you and your brother have spoken?”

Kevin McCallister pulls a balled up straw wrapper out of his jeans pocket and begins to unravel it.

“Not long enough.” He balls the straw wrapper up again.

“What happened after Christmas of 1990?” I ask.

“After I brought those guys down?”

“Yes, after the Wet Bandits were incarcerated.”

“That spring everything changed. I was on TV a lot. The phrase ‘tiny American hero’ was tossed around.”

“Did fame come too fast?”

“It wasn’t fame just yet. It was novelty. I was a novelty. Fame came after New York.”

“How did you feel when it happened again, when your parents flew to Florida without you?”

“I felt nothing. It felt familiar and I felt nothing.”

“What happened in New York?”

“You know what happened.”

The whole world knew what happened. The headlines read Lost in New York. The Home Alone Kid was back. The McCallister family tried to keep this second occurrence of abandonment out of the papers. And it might have worked, if not for the Wet Bandits, who had escaped from prison and hitch-hicked their way to the Big Apple in the back of a fish truck.

“Were you shocked to see the Wet Bandits in New York?” I ask him.

“Not as shocked as I was that when I saw them on the street, they chased me for five city blocks, two despicable looking criminals chasing a nine year old kid and not one person, not a single person in this whole city would help me.”

“They told you about their plan to rob Duncan’s Toy Chest.”

“Yeah. That didn’t sit well with me. Having purchased some silly slime there earlier, I knew that the day’s earnings were going to a nearby children’s hospital.”

“You once said, ‘You can mess with a lot of things but you can’t mess with kids on Christmas.’ Do you still believe that?”

“Yes.”

“You had an uncle in New York.”

“Yeah, Uncle Rob. He and my aunt were in Paris. Their inner city brownstone was being renovated.”

“You led the Wet Bandits there.”

“They came because they wanted to do harm to me,” he says.

“You did harm to them.”

“I did the only thing I could do.”

“Which was what?”

“I turned my uncle’s house into a deathtrap.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“Not my style.”

“Do you think part of you was grateful at another opportunity to deliver justice?”

Kevin McCallister doesn’t answer.

“Did you know this would put you back in the limelight?” I ask him.

He replies, “Does the truth change what happened?”

Once again the Wet Bandits fell for his traps, and once again they found themselves in prison, where they’ve been since.

The Home Alone Kid was back in the headlines, and stronger than ever. He hosted the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. MTV featured him as a guest VJ. He threw the first pitch at a Cubs game. A video game was created. Kevin’s growing celebrity made it difficult for his classmates to focus and his teachers convinced his parents that it would benefit everyone were he home-schooled.

“Did you miss your friends?”

“Those clowns? Naw, I just made new ones.”

New ones included Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Elijah Wood, Anna Chlumsky, and somewhat controversially, Michael Jackson.

“How were you affected by Michael Jackson’s death?”

“That’s not something I want to talk about.”

“You had controversy of your own. The Division of Family Services put your mother on trial for reckless neglect.”

“That was a very dark time in my life. I was eating a lot of cheese pizzas in limousines.”

“You were on the cover of Esquire that year.”

“It didn’t mean anything to me. My mother liked it. I’m glad it made her happy.”

“What was your relationship with your parents like after Lost in New York?”

“Have you ever made strudel?”

“Strudel? No.”

“You have to stretch the dough out, slowly. Slowly. It is prone to holes and breakage. And then you have to roll it. Talking to my parents was like making strudel. And I was the pastry dough. They pulled me thin too quickly and I started to tear and then they tried to fill me with things. They could never get over the fact that they left me, forgotten and misplaced, and twice even. They tried to fill me up with gifts. Gifts from guilt.”

“You married an unknown actress at 17,” I say.

Kevin McCallister touches his chin.

“You divorced at 19.”

“I did those things, yes.”

“Do you feel like for reasons beyond your control you had to grow up too fast?”

“Yeah, don’t you?”

“Some say that in your teens, you travelled to other states, other countries even, alone and without supervision. Were you trying to become lost again?”

“What can I say, I read Catcher in the Rye and it stoned me. I had been there, I had seen those ducks on that frozen pond. I was also reading a lot of Kerouac at that time. I still feel lost most days.”

“What do you fill your days with?”

“I’m a sculptor,” he says.

“You sculpt tables and chairs, right?”

“I sculpt furniture with right angles.”

“Can you sit on it?”

“Would you sit on the Mona Lisa’s face?”

“Do people commission work from you?”

“Michael C. Hall has one. We met at a house party in the San Fernando valley last year. He said he liked my work, and I’m a huge Dexter fan.”

“Do you identify with the character of Dexter Morgan?”

“Uh, no.”

“Whatever happened to the pigeon lady, the homeless Scottish woman you met in this park nineteen years ago?”

“That was Susan Boyle. Sometimes we have coffee in the park.”

“She was very special to you, wasn’t she?”

Kevin McCallister pulls a small white ceramic ornament from his the pocket of his sweatshirt. He rubs his painted fingers over it as if it were a talisman. One of the bird’s wings is broken.

Bebe Ballroom believes you, but her tommy gun don’t. She tumbls here.