Most of the time I cut out on my own. I needed the space. It wasn’t about the fun and games, going to a girl’s house, drinking or drugs; those all just happened to be there waiting. For me, it was the quiet and alone time I didn’t get in school or at home. Out on the streets, I could finally breathe. I could walk and walk and walk. I could cool my fever.
I’d walk the streets whistling and humming songs, studying my surroundings in the dreary neighborhoods, and I envisioned a time when I would never see these streets again. Maybe I’d be a rock star or an actor far away in California and all these New York streets would be a distant memory. Everything was surreal like a dream. The jagged cracks in the sidewalks. The sharp grass of the front lawns. The white and yellow homes that all looked like one another, except for the occasional red or blue one. The neighborhoods just rolled on and on and never seemed to end. The streets were all the same. Even when I wasn’t stoned and before I had even tried pot, something was strange. It was hard for me to grasp.
Many days I would just walk and smoke cigarettes. I’d go to the deli café and sit at a round table by myself with a Boston crème donut and a Yoo-hoo. I’d look around and the other tables were filled with other lonely folks, all older and many probably retired. Some looked like they were on a lunch break or like maybe they were ditching work. I felt like I should’ve been in work, like I was older than I really was. I guess I always rushed things and looked ahead. It was my coping mechanism to get away from where I was in the present.
My walks to nowhere usually resulted in detention or suspension. One year I spent over forty days in the ISS room, and many other weeks of after school detention and out of school suspension. The suspensions always began with a typical declaration from Mr. Bundy:
“You’re being a dirt bag and you’re insubordinate. I’m going to have to suspend you.”
Mr. Bundy was a tall man with a giant girth. Wide eyeglasses engulfed his face and seemed connected to his bushy mustache like a Mr. Potato Head attachment. His thick dark hair was parted to the side like a politician. His chubby cheeks reminded me of a pig. His monotone voice droned on and on— and many days his morning announcement would start our day— I pledge allegiance to the flag… echoed like torture.
I slumped in my chair as he dialed the phone.
“Yes, Mrs. Tortis, this is Jack’s high school principal, Mr. Bundy. Your son has been suspended for insubordination. He will serve three days in the in-school suspension room. If you would like to talk about the issue feel free to call me at the school office number. Thank you.”
The good old answering machine had saved me again, at least from immediate embarrassment.
“Finish up your day and report to the suspension room tomorrow morning. Don’t be late or absent because you’ll get an additional day. You’re dismissed.”
As always I went right home and earned myself an extra day in suspension. But since no one was home, I erased the message from the answering machine and the problem would stay my problem.
$$$
I reported back to the suspension room and sat down facing the windows. Mr. Kelly arrived and took attendance. The bell rang and he began going around distributing the assignments for the day. When he got to me he smiled and shook his head.
“You really liked that assignment, eh?”
“Yes, I guess I have a lot to say.”
“Have you ever thought about being a writer?”
“No, not really.”
“You have real potential. You could consider journalism, but you might want to try and stay out of here if you want to go to college.”
Journalism? College? These were foreign and I didn’t know what to make of these suggestions. I blew them off as ridiculous.
“Yes, I’d like to stay out of here.”
“All right. I read this last night and you’re really taking me somewhere, but I think you’re going to need to take me back to the start.”
And so I started at the beginning.
4
MY MOTHER was seventeen and graduated high school five months pregnant. My father was nineteen and had dropped out at sixteen to build racecars. He still lived at home with his younger brother and sisters. Their father had taken off just after the last daughter reached her second birthday. My father wouldn’t even make it to my second birthday. When I was one and a half, he packed all his belongings into a hefty bag and drove off into the night. A wife crying at the back of his head, a baby crying in the background, a rental house with no one to pay the rent or bills— all that was behind him now.
Mom moved us out of the rat-infested rental house in Bayport, and we moved into a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Bohemia. We stayed there for six months and then moved up to a bigger two-bedroom garden apartment building in Sayville. These were good times, at least how I remember them in the photo album. The Halloween parties with me dressed as Dracula. Birthday parties with my mother and aunts smoking cigarettes as little four-year-old Jack sat on their laps to blow out the candles. My mother’s friend’s daughter named Spring was there too. She cracked me on the back of the head with a brick one afternoon because I wouldn’t play house with her. Pretty little Spring was in all these pictures until the brick incident. She was so prominent in these pictured memories, you’d think she was my sister. And then that was it, she was gone and I’d never see her again. Her single mother remarried and pulled them off to the mysterious land of California.
When I’d ask how come I didn’t have a daddy like the other kids, I was told my father was far away out in California. This story led to a mystical attachment to the state. It seemed like a lot of people were always leaving for there and I curiously wanted to see the place, especially later when I found out so many great bands came from there. As a truck driver, my father had traveled the country including California, but never really lived there. After leaving us, my father had moved back in with his mother for a period of years. At nineteen, he wasn’t ready for the world yet. He lived downstairs in the basement apartment where he’d “bang his girlfriends” according to my older cousin who lived upstairs for a time. I wouldn’t see my father, or even really meet him, until I was older and my mother was already remarried.
I had no memory of him, but I had met him a couple of times when he’d drop by the Fotomat where my mother worked. He came through on a motorcycle. One time while he was talking to my mother, I went over and leaned on the bike and burned the back of my leg on the hot engine. I never liked motorcycles after that, but I don’t remember anything about him. He just wanted to say hello and get a glimpse of me, but I was never told he was my father. I was like a zoo animal he could come visit once in a while.
Years later I would be told wildly different stories from my father— how he desperately tried for years to track my mother down and find me, how he turned to his brother the cop to dig up my mother’s location even though we were just down the block from his mother’s house, even though he had stopped by my mother’s place of employment. None of it really mattered.
$$$$$$
My early years were full of rich memories with mom, like listening to Billy Joel albums or going to Fire Island on the ferry, but we had our share of adversity. Some of it I don’t remember because I was too young, like the braces on my legs to help me walk or the scar on my chin from falling out of the crib. The poverty was always in the background too, but little kids don’t always see this, especially if Mom is good at making the best of things.
My speech impediment couldn’t be hid well though. People couldn’t understand me for the longest time. The public school sent me out to an expert speech pathologist, who worked with me on a weekly basis for about a year. I can remember pushing out the word butterfly for the first time. The therapist and I celebrated. I repeated the word over and over and shouted it when my mother came to pick me up from the office.
“Butterfly, butterfly, butterfly.”
It