When I was five we moved again, this time to a second-floor apartment in a house overlooking a lake in a small town in the middle of Long Island. It was a nice change and we were escaping a massive rent increase at the corporate complex. By eight years old I was beginning what seemed like a normal life— just mom and me, and a snow-white cat with blue eyes named Max. My mother tried me out with little league, but I got hit in the face with the ball and was bored the rest of the time. She also tried me out in religion classes on Saturdays. I was unimpressed with the Jesus coloring books and so I dropped out of that one too. But I had my Atari games, a good number of toys and books, an antenna with eight or nine basic channels, and my imagination. I could spend days at a time in my room alone just thinking and dreaming.
Though I was a quiet, shy kid who liked to spend time in my room lost in fantasy, I did have friends in the neighborhood. Justin lived next door with his nice looking older sister Jessica, who would come over and babysit a couple of nights a week. A couple of doors away there was this older kid named Layne. He used to tell us about how he was born with some rare problem and how his toes were purple and stuck together. Then one day he just disappeared. Rumor was he got kidnapped. We didn’t think he’d really move and not say goodbye to any of us. This was a period in time when we were told not to go near any vans. Apparently, vans, white ones, were notorious for kidnapping kids in the 80s. I was always on the watch for vans. But I loved walking to school along the lake over the bridge and up the bend. Life was peaceful at the lake apartment.
Of course, things weren’t as normal as I thought. My mother hid it well. This is one of her greatest parenting successes. The boyfriends on the couch were obvious, but I was oblivious to the welfare, the food stamps, the bringing me to work to one of her two jobs because she couldn’t afford a babysitter. My mother was a trooper. She didn’t complain.
There we were at Fotomat, a little 8 by 8 booth where people would drop off their film, my mother would file them, and then a truck would pick up the film at the end of the day. This was her full-time job. She had various part-time jobs, which included an office. I wasn’t allowed at that one, but she would drag me to the booth at least three times a week during summers, or on weekends during the school year. I would walk around in circles outside the booth breathing in the smell of the nearby Long John Silvers restaurant. When I got tired of that I would take naps in the backseat of our old ’71 Chevy Nova.
Mom also did housecleaning part time and brought me along. I remember going to nice houses on the north shore. My favorite was filled with plants— on the floor, tables, shelves, hanging from the ceiling— this house was a jungle. Mom would send me around watering them.
When my mother had the cash and didn’t or couldn’t bring me to work, she left me with various babysitters. While no one beat me up, I do remember one woman being abusive with peanut butter. I hated the stuff and still do. Something about the nutty smell makes me gag. This woman had nothing else in her entire kitchen and her job was to feed me. When I told her the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she put before me wouldn’t do, she flipped out.
“What kind of kid are you? Every kid eats peanut butter and jelly. You’ll eat it today because I said so.”
She stuffed the sandwich in my mouth and I instantly gagged and vomited all over this woman’s kitchen. I spent the rest of the afternoon on the floor locked in the woman’s bathroom. When my mother picked me up, the woman complained.
“He got sick all over my house, and I would be all right with that if it wasn’t intentional, but I do believe your child did this on purpose because he did not want to eat his lunch as instructed to. You really need to teach this kid better manners. I know it’s difficult as a single mother and all, but…”
I never went back to that house.
Another babysitter’s house was in a poor south shore town, but it seemed like the middle of the ghetto. Outside, people were fighting and yelling. Loud bass from cars in the street rattled the windows. I remember one day being thrown to the ground; loud pops were heard and glass shattered. It felt like a movie, and I walked out of there that day feeling in a daze.
I never went back to that house.
My poor single mother worked two jobs and even went to community college for some time. After a scary breakdown on a dark stretch of highway one night on her way home from college, she decided to try real estate training, but that wasn’t for her. She tried training in several other fields. Welding. No. Sales. No. Corrections officer. No, not at four foot ten. Then she found a quick six-month paralegal training program. It turned out to be a for-profit gimmick, but it’s how she met Don.
5
“HE LOOKS LIKE TROUBLE,” they said. Despite what my aunts told her, my mother married Don. My whole world was uprooted almost overnight. There I was packing my bags, saying goodbye to friends, nine years old and crushed. In actuality, I was saying goodbye to a part of myself that wouldn’t return for years. My first crush Christie was also moving, but she was going a bit farther, up to Canada. I don’t know if it made me feel better or worse that she too was going somewhere. She was one of those few people in this world when I looked into her eyes I felt comfortable like I’d known her a long, long time. I’ll never forget the sadness in her eyes as she stood on the sidewalk as my mother’s car pulled away for the last time.
When we moved to the new town I was devastated. I missed my friends and the quiet lake neighborhood. After I moved, the whole class wrote to me at my new address and wished me good luck. I wrote back and then a few close friends wrote back one last time. There was no Internet— Who knows how I might have kept in touch and how that communication might have comforted me or maybe even made it worse. But that was it. I planned to visit them, but that never happened. You learn to move on and forget. People I had grown up with through the lower grades would go on to middle and high school and become adults I would never know. People, like my first crush, Christie in Canada, gone. While I was only nine when we left, I wondered about her and what might have evolved out of our friendship and cute childhood crush. I wondered about others. Where are they now? Who are they now? But after a month, I realized that world was gone forever. Now I would say hello to a host of new problems.
The new apartment did not allow pets, so I had to give up my beloved cat, Max. No looking for a different apartment. This was it, even if it didn’t allow Jack’s pet. You would think they could at least let me keep Max as they were about to move me miles away to a new town to live with some strange man I barely knew. Making me sacrifice my pet was not the right foot to start out on. They took him away one day while I was out at my grandmother’s house. I came home and that was it.
$$$
Don tried. He really did in an odd way. In the beginning, he tried to buy me with tubs of Carvel vanilla ice cream. It surely was the way to an eight-year-old kid’s heart, but it stopped there. No connection— no spending time— just superficial weather talk. Even the ice cream stopped once the wedding plans were sealed.
One night six months into their relationship, they sat me down in a pizza place in some strange town we were visiting. They told me the news that they would be married in the winter, we’d be moving to the town in which we were eating pizza, and I would have a new brother in the spring. This was a fork in the road for me and I accepted it. What other choice did I have?
Don tried to be a family man. He brought us to Disney World and played the role. He went to work from nine to five and wore a suit; he tried to be a man. He was just twenty-three when he met my mother. He had just graduated from college a year before and met my mom in paralegal school. He aspired to be a lawyer someday but then life happened. He met my mother and had a baby and later bought a house. His responsibilities forced him to invest energy in his part-time car detailing business, which suddenly started to expand with lucrative car dealership accounts in the late 80s. I think sometimes this deviation from his plans ate away at him later on. He went from wanting to be a lawyer to someone who cleaned others’ cars.
He provided a small but comfortable apartment home with a washer and dryer, something my mother really wanted. No more stinking laundry mats in the middle of the night or on Sunday afternoons. But there was a cost. Her