Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian Read Free Page B

curtain to see him pounding on the door and screaming, “Let me in, Mary Jo! Let me in!”
    “Go home, Harry, and come back when you sober up!” she screamed through the door. “You’re in no shape to be here.”
    “Let me in!” he continued.
    My sister and I were, of course, scared. We crawled into my mother’s bed and sat there shivering under the covers, wondering what was going to happen next. Every once in a while, we would get out of the bed and peek out the window. He kept banging and he was banging so hard, we thought he might knock down the house. It was that bad. Finally, he went home.
    That night, my mother promised us that she would never subject us to anything like that again. Harry Shannon was out of her life until he sobered up. A day or two later, Harry came crawling back on hands and knees, apologizing profusely. A short time after that, he proposed. My mother finally gave him an ultimatum: quit drinking and we’ll get married.
    That very day, he quit. He wouldn’t have another drink until the day he died. Just like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Harry and Mom flew to Puerto Vallarta and got married, taking a few friends along for the ride. It was June of 1968, and I was thirteen. My sister and I stayed with my grandparents. We were standing there with my grandparents when Mom and Harry returned, thinking,
Wow, we have a stepdad!
From that day forward, I called Harry “Dad.” He embraced my sister and me as if we were his own. Harry taught me a big lesson in life: if you want something bad enough, and are willing to change your life for it, you can do anything. Harry taught me how to find inner strength.
    Soon after their marriage, Harry announced that he was goingto invest in a new company. “We’re going to move to Oxnard, California,” he said. “And we’re going to harvest abalone.”
    “Abalone?” I asked. “What’s abalone?”
    He explained: abalone is a big, red, edible sea snail.
    Ugh!
    I had lived in the San Diego area my whole life. I was in junior high, and we were all very happy. But here was Harry Shannon talking about giving it all up for sea snails, abalone, something we had never heard about before, and my mother telling us it was a done deal. Harry, my mom, Karen, and I were all moving to Oxnard—the strawberry and lima bean capital of California, 155 miles north of San Diego—where Harry could invest in something called the Abalone Processing Plant. Mom put her candle shop on hold—she had someone work there for the summer—and we moved up to Oxnard. We moved into this small apartment. We had no friends. We didn’t know anybody.
    I
hated
abalone.
    I hated the idea of abalone harvesting: of fishermen catching abalone and bringing abalone back to Harry and his partners’ plant. He had people there pounding and preparing the abalone for sale. We would go to these restaurants and eat abalone burgers. Again,
ugh!
Why couldn’t he have bought a McDonald’s franchise?
That
would have been a great idea to a girl of thirteen. Burgers, yes. But abalone?
What?
The whole move was just a big hot mess.
    That same year, I started my period. I was away from my friends, away from any family, stuck up in Oxnard, surrounded by abalone. I was yearning for my grandmother, missing my old life and that part of my family. I wrote her probably three hundred letters during that miserable Oxnard summer. I cried my eyes out every single night, missing her. I could have said, “Oh, I’m getting the next train to La Jolla.” I guess I could have lived with my grandmother.But that was my mother’s first year of marriage, and I was part of a family unit. Still, all I could think about was getting out.
    The only highlight of this time was when a girlfriend from San Diego called and said she and her dad were going into Los Angeles to a big sale at Judy’s. Now, Judy’s I loved. Judy’s was famous. Shopping there was fantastic. So I met my girlfriend at Judy’s in L.A. with some cash