The World Comes Crashing Down...

When I was eight years old, my parents split up. My Dad owned his own business and was not home alot, but Sunday was always family day and I can remember him reading Ragedy Ann and Andy to me. There was a character in the particular book that he read called "Little Weaky" and he used to tickle me and call me by that name. That's about the only time I remember my Dad being affectionate to me. His parents were fairly cold people. My grandmother came from a WASP family that was very typically New England. You didn't hug or kiss or say "I love you." My grandfather was French Canadian but he was an alcoholic. Generally French Canadians tend to be warm people, but he was a beast. He hated kids. Whenever we would visit my grandparents he would already be drinking and he'd keep his distance. I always thought he was mad at me, but it turns out he was just an asshole.

When we would arrive at my grandparents house, my grandmother would be sitting in the TV lounge, drink in one hand, remote control in the other. She wouldn't even get up. Her obnoxious French Poodles would come yapping to the door, their claws tearing at the screen and scraping against the metal like nails on a chalk board. They weren't big dogs of course, but they were intimidating to a kid whose only pet was a kitten, and who was fairly introverted and shy. There was never any warm, fuzzy anticipation when we went to their house.

This was the early 1970s, so the remote control was a fairly new contraption. I remember it was a big, rectangular brown box with tan buttons that clicked when you pushed them down. Each one was for a different channel. It had a cord, since infrared remotes were still some years off in the future, so a wire ran from the television to the sofa and you had to be careful not to trip and break your neck. The room would be billowing with smoke, since both my grandparents smoked like chimneys. Looking back at how they interracted, I am reminded of the film "Who's Afraid of Virigina Woolf." They carped at each other, nagged each other. Never would anyone mistake their interraction as love. Two cold, lonely people, masking their unhappiness with alcohol, yet unable to free themselves from this marital bondage because of the generational attitudes about divorce in those times. Better to honor "til death do us part" then to have even a year of peaceful solitude. My grandfather would later become a sad, eccentric person. When he died, my aunt told me that they found a garage full of unopened items he bought from home shopping channels on TV. They also discovered that he'd been supporting a mistress forty years his junior. Yet my grandparents did stay together for the rest of their lives, both dying of natural causes. Miraculously, neither suffered liver damage or lung cancer. Good, hardy, 17th century genetics at work, I guess.

My father. Well, he requires a lot more analysis, but for now I will just relate what happened to completely destroy my childhood world. Apparently, my dad had been seeing hookers in the city next to our town. His company was located not far from the "red light" district and, apparently, he had managed to squeeze in some leisure time during his 14 hour workdays. Funny, he couldn't seem to drag himself home for some time with his kids. Therein lies the power of the penis, the one true master of all men. Well, naturally, my mom - a woman with good instincts - sensed something was up. She found phone numbers in my dad's wallet and I distinctly remember the night all hell broke loose. I was in my parents' room and my dad was in the shower. He had just come in and was always covered in grease and grunge from his job. My mom was upset and she picked his wallet up off the dresser and began rumaging through it. She found a slip of paper which apparently had a name and number scrawled on it and she began to cry while simultaneously flying into a rage. I had never seen so much anger and vitriol spew forth in our house before. She barged into the bathroom, steam wafting out into the hallway, and confronted my dad in the shower. They had it out and I remember him getting dressed, grabbing some clothes, and storming out some time later on his way to my grandparent's house. All the while my mother was convulsed with anger and grief, the betrayal shattering any sense of normalcy that reigned in our house. What made it worse was that she was pregnant with her fourth child.

My parents would never reconcile. I remember the day my mom decided it was time to pack my father's things up. My brother and I helped her to put his clothes into brown paper bags. I was rummaging through my father's top drawer and i found a clear plastic box with some kind of steel contraption in it. I was a very curious kid, which can be a dangerous thing. I took the item out of the box and began fiddling with what looked like a kind of lever. The lever slid forward and in a split second the room filled with a green cloud. My brother, who was on the receiving end of the explosion, began to exclaim that his eyes hurt. Apparently I had accidentally fired off a tear gas gun that my dad kept in case of a burglary. My mom grabbed the gun out of my hand and rushed to the phone. I heard her address my grandfather on the other end. Apparently it had come from my grandfather's fire control business and my mom was asking him what to do. She hung up the phone and dragged my whimpering brother into the bathroom and began rinsing his eyes out with water. That incident has been emblazoned on my mind since. As an adult I look back and think how much worse this could have been. You see, my dad also kept a number of guns in the house in the closet. They had no locks whatsoever, and I even remember red shot gun shells being kept in the house as well. How different the times were. I keep thinking how awful it would have been if my curiosity had extended to those guns.

My dad's things sat by the front door of our house for what seemed like an eternity when he finally came to collect them. He was living at my grandparents' house and we hadn't seen him in some time. I remember thinking that this was all temporary and that my parents would find their way past this and that the status quo would soon be restored. It was not to be. Never again would my dad read books to me, nor would we spend those Sundays going for a drive and stopping for dinner at Vallee's restaurant. In fact, I couldn't forsee what hell my life would become in just a few short years.

Oh, and then there was the One True Church. My brother and I were enrolled at a parochial school that was run by our parish. I was in the third second grade at the time. I had a reputation as a model citizen in the school. A model student, a model christian. I had learned to read at the age of four and was a voracious reader. I was already reading at the high school level by that time and the nuns at school thought I was God's own angel here on earth. Each afternoon as I left the school I would pause before each nun's open classroom door and say, "good afternoon, sister, God bless you sister." This was my daily ritual and it endeared me to the entire convent. I can remember one Saturday afternoon riding my bike up to the convent and knocking on the door. I had come to visit the nuns and they invited me in for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and we chatted for a bit. I do remember some confusion on their faces since apparently it was either not proper or it was unheard of that a student would pay a visit to the convent, especially a boy. After a short time, the sisters politely sent me on my way.

This Catholic bliss would all come to a screaching halt when wind of my parent's divorce finally made its way through the parish. Nothing is more evil then a bunch of Catholic women gathered together in one room. My mother was part of the lay women's club, and her plight was ripe fodder for the group. Once the divorce was final, she was asked to leave the women's club. Worse still, one Sunday at mass the old, shriveled head priest, Father O'Day, refused to give communion to my mother when she went up. I watched in horror as my mother stood there, mouth open, hands folded in prayer, as father shook his head "no" and my mother, embarrassed in front of the entire congregation, had to step aside. She took my brother and I and we left the church that moment, never to return. We remained in school for the remainder of the school year, but further indignities followed. The worst was a nun telling my brother, just age nine, that my mother was "going to hell" for getting divorced. Of course, it mattered not that my father was the one to blame for the breakdown of the marriage. The ignominy befell my mother, while my father somehow escaped public blame.

My mother gave birth to my youngest sister in November that year, and my father was nowhere to be found. Worse still, my mother's father had died of lung cancer that previous Spring before all hell broke loose, so my poor mother was left with only her mother to support her. My dad was a selfish bastard and was refusing to pay proper support to my mom. And, obviously, with four small children, she was unable to work. We were forced to go on welfare and medicaid because we suddenly found ourselves without an income. My mother was humiliated having to use food stamps at the local market. Our friends and neighbors witnessed the whole shameful proceeding, but no support came from outside. It was a dark time.