Fiction : Life and Times…..

Should I begin with the boring stuff?

I have one ‘real life’ memory of my father.

I think I might have been about six years old.

We were at my grandparents’ for a big Christmas dinner. There was lots of flashy tinsel and lights and everything was magical.

He was standing near a fire place with a drink in his hand (I’m remembering something clear and sparkly, like white champagne? in an “on the rocks” glass. I only know the probable name of the glass because I worked in a restaurant one summer and had to put the hot and steamy glasses in their proper places.)

My dad was positively beaming. He was big and strong and could beat up any monster in the universe.

He smiled at me, and my mother and the shadows of my brothers and sister, “You know, I have a good life. I have a wonderful wife and a good family- I could die right now, today, and be happy-”

I think the bottom fell out of my life right then and there. No. My father couldn’t die. Who would keep the monsters away?

About a month later he was driving my oldest brother to basketball practice with my other brother and younger sister in the car. I was home sick with a slight fever and a scratchy throat. Mom made me a couple pieces of toast with grape jelly and I thought the world was a pretty nice place. Dad and the other kids were going to stop at a bakery somewhere to pick up a birthday cake for somebody on their way home.

A truck swerving to avoid a drunk driver went through a barrier and lost control, went off a highway bridge and landed on top of my father’s car.

The truck driver recovered physically, but never got over it. He deliberately drove his truck off a cliff two years later.

-And now, looking at photos of my father, he was probably about five foot nine and might have weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds. Not exactly the perfect monster fighter.

We spent the next couple years living with my other grandparents, my mother’s family.

My father had been the seventh of nine children. And no, they weren’t all boys. My mother was the youngest of four. Two boys and two girls. In Dad’s family everybody got up at 5 am and worked on the farm for an hour or two before breakfast. The boys all got jobs somewhere before they were sixteen. The girls all had chores at home plus babysitting or cleaning jobs. One aunt went to work at a rest home, emptying bed pans from before her 12th birthday.

On my mother’s side, her father called himself a ‘businessman’. He owned a “variety store”. Everybody told me he wore an apron in the morning and supervised breakfast at home. The kids were all relieved when they could escape to school and tried really hard to find excuses to stay after school. But he wouldn’t have any excuses like athletic practice. They had jobs to do in the store. When every other store in town closed before 5 pm he stayed open until 7. He said there will be people on their way home who would drive by his store and need to stop off and buy something. He thought the automobile had been invented just to make him a rich man.

During the War, he’d had a small manufacturing business. The war department had made sure that all good patriotic Americans understood that winning the war was an immense priority and ordered manufacturers not to build anything with or order anything made of iron or steel unless they absolutely needed it. My grandfather considered himself a patriotic American. He even planted a victory garden. When his competitors saw that the war was going well, they began to order one or two more extra parts any chance they got and after the war was over, they had a stockpile and they happily ran him out of business. He never recovered. He was the most bitter, most opinionated man I ever met or heard of.

My earliest memory of him was him wailing the tar out of me. I had just been praised immensely for learning how to climb the first couple stairs to the landing in their big old in town house (I think it had something like eight bedrooms on three floors.) (One of those bedrooms was half the attic.) (They also had a huge and smelly basement with table after table arranged with all kinds of weird stuff like miniature statues of liberty and busts and statues of General MacArthur that glowed in the dark, arranged as if for sale down there.)

He had sold his store and worked in a factory when we lived there. Everybody got more and more tense when it was time for him to come home. He stomped around and screamed and ranted and I actually made the connection between him and Adolf Hitler in a tirade and had my mother’s hand clamped over my mouth for a very long and terrifying few moments before she spirited my far enough away (claiming I was sick) from him to convince me that we would both be killed if I ever said that loud enough for him to hear it. My grandfather was one of the monsters I wished my father was still alive to defend us from.

As soon as she possibly could, my mother got a job just far enough away so we had to move out. I heard her on the telephone telling all her friends, one at a time, “No, we didn’t have free rent while we were there, and even if we did, putting up with that crap- it just wasn’t worth it.”

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I found out that my grandfather had her virtually declared dead for defying his orders and moving out from under his thumb. But I didn’t learn that until his funeral, when one of my female cousins got blind drunk and told me I was lucky I was a boy, because good old grampa had molested every girl in the family, probably including his own daughters. By this time I was a single father with a nine year old girl who was turning from the most wonderful little angel I’d ever known until something with glowing red eyes and a repertoire of semi-ballet-like poses and postures and ugly facial expressions and snappy one liners like, “And I should care… because—” I looked at her and wondered what kind of life she would have had if my grandfather had mangled her body mind and soul like that…

But that’s a whole nother section of this story

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Yeah, where was I? Starting with the boring parts? I was born in 1958. Some historians believe I just missed the baby boom. One of my cousins had a reel to reel tape recording of my father saying he met my mother in a bar. They were the two best looking single people there, they turned and looked at each other and thought it was inevitable that they should start dating. I don’t know how to take that. Was he pretending he really didn’t love her and need her as much as he feared he might?

But then again. He took Danny to basketball practice with Eddie and Elizabeth along for the ride and they never came home. I remember Elizabeth the best. It’s like she was there in living color and the others have faded to black and white. I remember her crib, I remember her playpen. I remember everybody fussing over her when she was learning to walk. And I remember a small white coffin with the lid firmly closed.

I think I dreamed I played with her often after that. I said good night to her spirit every night for years, asked her for advice about dating in high school and never heard an answer. I think I was still crying about her every now and then until I was at least eighteen years old.

But anyway we escaped the tirades of my maternal grandfather. I started a new school where the kids were nasty. They almost spit when they talked. They criticized everything I said. If I talked about going somewhere with my uncle, this one kid snarled, “Why do you talk about your uncle? Don’t you have a father?” When I said no, he’s dead, the same kid came back the next day and said I was a liar and I was full of shit. I never had a father, my mother was a whore. I think this was 2nd grade. I asked my mother why somebody would say my mother was a horse. She got angry and called somebody who called back and gave her the principle’s phone number. She called the principle and while he was on the phone they grilled me about who had told me my mother was a horse.

So the next day in school I got beat up by the nasty boy and four of his friends for being a tattletale.

And when I thought the principle was going to have me arrested and taken to jail for not tattling on the guys that beat me up, I burst into tears and told him who they were.

The five of them weren’t in school for a couple days. They waited until school was out and followed me home. They set up a couple good ambush points and beat me up, I think three more times the next week.

The principle told my mother he could either give me a ride home from school every day for the rest of my life or she could enroll me in the catholic school, where the nuns could beat me with rulers or pull my pants down in front of the class and beat me with ping pong paddles.

Mom told me we couldn’t afford the Catholic School’s fees but then somebody told her about a secret program that helped her with the payments and we got a special dispensation because one of the people who advised the Catholic school board knew the families that produced three of the bullies. He also pretty much knew the parents of their ring leader.

I can see the ringleader’s face now. He was shorter than most. Middle son of three, all of them shortish guys who always made the school baseball team and played the infield. Philip Demarco. I don’t think he recognized me when I played for the Saint Cyril’s High School baseball team and I got three punched line drives just beyond his reach in the one game we played against his team. He tripped me when I later ran past him and an umpire threw him out of the game. We won by a score of 5 to 3. I could hear him snarling that we had cheated. And their coach told him that they lost the game because he got caught, and he hoped he’d learned his lesson. His life’s ambition was to become a cop. He was something like an inch too short to pass their physical. So he dropped out of college and enlisted in the marines and volunteered for Viet Nam. He came back in a body bag. I found this out like ten years later so I can’t take credit for wishing anything evil on him. He probably wished it on himself.

But anyway. In the Catholic school system, most of my friends were Irish. There were a couple Italians who tolerated me, but pretty much there was an invisible line down the middle of every room we were in. If we weren’t ordered to sit alphabetically, all the Irish kids were on one side of the room, all the Italians were on the other and the ones in the middle were probably ‘Most likely to grow up to be beaurocrats or total nerds’; nobody called them nerds back then. They were dweebs.

I thought I was probably a dweeb but a couple of the Irish kids liked me, so they walked home with me every afternoon after school (because we lived about twenty yards too close to the school to take the bus).  I was also asked to play on their baseball team (in an area between two residential streets that wasn’t quite wide enough to justify another street going in there.) And I was invited to sit on their side of the room in school and nobody found out that I really was a dweeb.

There was one kid in our neighborhood who we were never supposed to play with. He was twelve years old in the fourth grade. He wore a black leather jacket and had long “beatnik hair” (which was actually more like ‘greaser’ hair but they hadn’t coined that phrase yet) He sometimes gravitated over and watched our baseball games from a safe distance. I think it was one Easter, Mom made me put on a suit that one of my cousins or somebody had outgrown and handed down to me. We went to Church across the street from the Catholic Church where all my friends looked stunned to see me going to the wrong church. The 12 year old beatnik/greaser sat in the adjoining pew and in whispers, asked me if I realized that I was probably the best hitter on the neighborhood team.  He pointed out that it looked like I knew just where to hit the ball and while I was not a home run ‘power hitter’ I was (in his words) ‘dam good’. He also told me that his mother was a lawyer, his father was dead too and they were moving to Albany. He thanked me for not being afraid to talk him and said there was an invisible girl sitting next to me. He thought her name was Elizabeth. I told him she was my sister and she died with my father and brothers. He nodded, said he couldn’t read because the letters kept moving when he looked at a page and that’s why he was 12 years old in the fourth grade, but he wished he knew other people like me who wouldn’t call him names or run away in fear when he walked down the street. I wish I could remember his name and I wish I knew what happened to him.

But anyway. That Easter I decided that good things happened in Church, and that people who were called dweebs, greasers, and retards by others just might be really good people inside.

My Catholic friends wanted to know if we had to watch human sacrifices in the church I went to and seemed disappointed when I said no. Before school got out that June, one of them got around to asking why I went to a Catholic School if I wasn’t Catholic and I told them that Philip Demarco and his gang beat me up after calling my mother a horse and their oldest brother burst into uncontrollable laughter. He told me it was probably a sin to correct my pronunciation and he would not be damned by telling my what the word meant, but “There was no ‘S’ on the word that asshole called your mother.” I never saw much of him. His name was Danny, like my oldest brother’s, and I did tell him about my dead oldest brother Danny and he told me he thought God wanted him to be a priest but he had impure thoughts about Mary Jane McCarthy, so maybe that would never happen. He was drafted in 1968 and listed as Missing In Action in Viet Nam. I don’t think they ever found his body. We kept playing our hearts out, trying to win another one for Danny. That was our secret good luck message, whispered to each other before a game. It’s okay to be superstitious if you’re a baseball player.

Just before graduation that whole Delaney family moved to Rochester. They graduated with us, but we never saw them again.

My marks were good enough to get me a scholarship to a New York State College where the English Department told me they wanted me to go into creative writing and the science department wanted me to major in electronics and I twisted my ankle trying out for the baseball team so I hobbled around a lot, actually studied more than I thought I would, got mixed up with the school’s radio station, got a third class broadcaster’s license and was one my way to deciding to be a radio engineer, go for a second or even first class license. I had a bunch of people telling me that that would be a really good move.

Then my mother told me she’d been diagnosed with cancer. I talked to my guidance counselors, changed all the courses I was about to take that semester and dove into a crash course in biology and was heading for pre-med studies when she got really bad and I dropped out to spend her last couple months as an unpaid medical attendant. A Male nurse at one of the hospitals we frequented told me that if I ever thought about enlisting into any armed services, never tell them I knew anything about medicine or they would paint a big red cross target on my helmet and my life expectancy would go from ‘not bad’ to ‘forget it’ in two or three pen strokes on a contract.

A week after mom died I almost did enlist in the navy. A local ‘hero’ stopped me. (More people called him a “nut case” than a hero. He almost always wore his fatigues jacket with a couple medals over the pocket below his name and over his heart. He had  long dark hair past his shoulders and a beard that was almost as long as the hair. Local Cops called him “Farmer John” since he’d been busted for havesting a couple pot plants in a town park.) Farmer John saw me walking toward the recruiters’ offices and blocked my way, told me I had to be out of my mind to even think about that and told me his friends needed pizza delivery drivers and newspaper delivery drivers and I followed him to the pizza parlor and fell in love with the one dark haired Irish waitress in the place.

I started working my butt off, buying cars on their last legs, learning to keep them alive for a few extra months and saved enough money to buy her the diamond she pointed out on our first date.

We got married about six months later. We’d sent invitations to something like fifty cousins, aunts, uncles, and close friends on my side. Two cousins showed up with their families and I think I had half a dozen single friends and one married couple. My side of the church was pretty much empty.

A year and a half later I was taking a computer course at the local community college, working two stupid delivery jobs, painting apartments and exterior trim for a ‘friend’ who pocketed ten times more than he told me he made at this and paid me half what most ‘real’ painters got for the same jobs with a union contractor. I was trying real hard to keep track of what I made and trying even harder to keep enough of it to pay my taxes because neither job took out income tax or  had any benefits… And then I learned I was about to be a father. Sue had never been whiney or bitchy or even complained about anything we didn’t have. I thought she was getting more and more depressed all the time and I tried to approach the subject. She said, no, she was fine. Nobody had ever loved her like I did or paid half as much attention to the real her as I did-

And then I got a job with benefits, working for a Security Guard company. I had to pay to be investigated by the state, local, and county police and sheriff’s departments. I had to pay some government agency to say I’d never been drafted, never served, never been dishonorably discharged from any armed services. I had to go through all of that and more to get an FBI clearance. And then I had to take an intensive gun safety and qualifying course at the state police academy. They gave me a sharpshooter badge and told me I was one of the very few students they’d had who went through their obstacle course and never shot a cardboard cut out of a civilian and most likely would have survived the scenario unscratched. I had an officer from the State Police write a recommendation that included a couple lines to the effect that if I wanted a career with the state police I should show up on such and such a date with a check made out to the police academy-

And-

On the first day I was to officially show up at work with a semi automatic ‘piece’ strapped to my hip, my boss looked at me and said, “You didn’t tell me you were taking computer courses, do you know anything about computer security?” I told him I had some kind of certificate at home that said I’d had a weekend crash course in internet security and security software issues. He told me he had an assignment that he needed somebody like that for, it paid twice as much as the armed security at the private airport job. He sent me home to find my certificate.

I rushed home, almost didn’t notice the big white van parked outside, rushed inside in my uniform with my monster gun strapped to my hip and scared the living cement out of three very clean cut looking young men in suits. When a fourth emerged from my bedroom I realized they were packing my wife and daughter up after clearing out everything that looked valuable that they thought they could sell quickly for pretty good money. Sue nearly died of shock, left Rachel in her crib and ran after the four guys, they jumped in their van and drove away with squealing tires. And a smelly cloud of rubber smoke. I found the note she was going to leave me, claiming I was an agent of the devil and she was saving our daughter and herself from me and moving into a religious community I’d never heard of before. I called the police. They were there in seconds. I called my boss, he was there half a minute after the police got there. The police came at me with their hands on their holsters and barked, “Keep your hands away from your holster, keep your hands where we can see them at all times.” They were in the process of calling child protective services, they had a hunch that I’d murdered my wife and this was some kind of hoax to hide that fact. But then a squad car had pulled the van over and Sue confessed to trying to clean everything out of the house and sell it and she was going to take the baby and move to California and into some Religious compound out there and did I want to press charges for attempted kidnapping?

No-

And my boss looked at my computer security certificate and said, “My daughter in law has a day care service, I can get it for you at half price.”

And before my head stopped spinning I was sitting at a computer with a handbook in one hand and a remote in the other, watching very expensive software scan hard drives at a million gigabytes a second and glancing up to see my old buddies from the newspaper introduce me to a guy who had taken one of my routes. They introduced him as ‘Ducky’. His slightly overweight girlfriend glanced at my monitor and said, “Holy shit, – is that- no it can’t be. You have to have a presidential clearance to even know that software exists….” and my boss nearly died of a heart attack before she handed him a business card and he called her father who said a few magic words and Ducky’s girlfriend had a job beside me and we had to tell everyone, even Ducky, they could no longer enter the building unescorted by armed guards with dark glasses at night and I heard somebody gasp, “-Well, I’ll be dipped in shit, you’re working for the men in black…..”

As it turned out, no, they were not the official MIBs. As a matter of fact they were trying to learn if there really were any official or unofficial MIBs and they grabbed everything we scanned and spirited it out of our sight before we could grab the read-outs and as a matter of fact, grabbed the read outs before we could get a hint at what they said and the job lasted six months. They told me never to mention the name of the company they supposedly represented and made me sign a piece of paper saying I wouldn’t try to travel to several listed countries for at least ten years, and wouldn’t let me read the rest of the contract, but said if I didn’t sign it within ten seconds I wouldn’t get paid, and when they moved out Ducky’s girl friend went with them-

Ducky went into shock but he knew somebody who had a girlfriend and she turned out to be the world’s most reliable baby sitter and my boss said he would understand if I couldn’t stay with him, but he couldn’t pay me the kind of money that I’d been getting during those six months, but he could give me one of his highest paying jobs, I needed the computer training and I would be scheduling jobs for the guys and gals that worked for him, as well as running computer security checks and the only problem he could see was that I would have to work all night, five nights a week….

Ducky told me about a double wide modular home that needed to be moved and needed a little bit of TLC, mostly a coat of paint or two. He said he’d also heard about a really nice piece of property that was for sale. The property even had a foundation in place that almost perfectly fit the double wide.

The double wide had been built by a company that made log cabins and was a really good experiment, built really well, with energy efficient insulation, but they’d never sold because there wasn’t a market for double wide modular log cabins. It was for sale for $1,500. No, that wasn’t a typo. Fifteen hundred dollars because it had to be moved and it had to be moved, like yesterday.  The property was fifteen thousand.

We looked at the double wide-  The outside had a couple sun-bleached spots that could be fixed with a little bit of sanding and a careful match with the right shade of stain. Inside, there was some cosmetic damage that looked like some half-sober jerks had disassembled it in a big hurry and kicked some dents in drywall.

What it needed was a couple panels of drywall and a little help or maybe just guidance from somebody who knew how to reassemble a double wide and make sure the insulation was up to code.

We got somebody to check the wiring, check all the connections. Told us it didn’t look like there were any major problems.

We looked at the property-

I loved the property.

From the road it looked like a thickly wooded couple of acres. Thickly wooded conifers, pine trees, evergreens. And a gradual slope up a hill that became really steep just beyond the property lines. But at a closer look- there was a driveway that wound around, in, and between two solid walls of evergreens and opened onto a slight valley which had been cleared, with a creek and it’s own “pond’. The pond had been expanded by a “hippy” family who had tried to live there, “under the radar”, and “off the grid”- until some rabid social workers learned that they were living in a mobile home and weren’t paying for electricity. The social workers showed up with the local sheriff’s in tow and handed the couple a paper saying that if they didn’t come to their office within two weeks with a valid electric bill in their name for this address, they (the child protective services) would come and confiscate the children and keep them in child protective hell, probably for the rest of their children’s lives. But at least long enough to really scar the poor kids’ hearts and minds so badly they might never recover.

The hippies packed up and moved to Colorado or some place out that away and had a friend sell their property so they could afford a bigger place in a more secluded setting where they didn’t have laws that stated if you don’t pay electric bills, you’re unfit parents.

And the property had electric service. The meter just hadn’t been turned on.

Anyway. For twenty five thousand dollars, in 1994, I had a double wide house that looked like a log cabin, with a second floor balcony out back (overlooking the pond and its meandering creek) on a foundation that needed only a thousand dollars worth of tweaking to fit the double wide- a cedar deck all around it. A pre-fab lean-to sun room on the way. All the wiring in the house and up to it, and the phone lines, were brand new and tested to be in amazing condition (including upgraded fiber optics DSL lines that the rest of the county wouldn’t get for another two years.) The house was so well put together that the electric and gas company accused me of stealing propane tanks or bypassing their meters (Until I stretched the truth a bit and told them I ran the wood heater in the basement constantly) (Instead of just a couple hours most nights while I sat there and read with Rachel as she fell asleep.) For three years, while I was on that shift, Danielle, the baby sitter showed up at 9:30 pm and watched taped videos of her favourite soap operas until she fell asleep in the rocking chair. She was absolutely fine with sitting in the improved basement with its family room and wood stove, large open space and pretty big screen teevee. The downstairs washroom had a brand new shower, a nice sink and a toilet that could flush uphill if it had to. Rachel had a nice quiet room all to herself, open to the family room so if she woke up Danielle would know immediately. I had a computer room Danielle never knew about, and surviellance cameras that looked like clock radios covering every square inch of the place. I could sit at my computers at work and dial up my home computer and keep a split screen on all night watching every breath the baby and the baby sitter took. Thank goodness I didn’t have to. But it was reassuring to know it was there. I probably could have told Danielle how loudly she snored, how many times she turned her head, what she said, if it was intelligible at all, when she talked in her sleep.

But I showed up every morning at just after eight. Drove up to my driveway, which looked like a road to a nice picnic spot near the trees by a mailbox in the middle of nowhere, took a couple right angle turns into what looked like solid walls of ever green trees and emerged in a secret clearing with a magic chalet like house in another dimension, with its gurgling brook and a pond that often had ducks come visit for a night, or a week, or whatever… more trees all around the clearing…

After a couple years I bought an extra large garage kit with a second floor loft. (24 x 36) Dutch style, gambrel roof. I went the extra money for the cedar siding, two dormers, nearly the full length of each side of the second floor, and a steel roof. It had an area designated as a workshop. It had an optional washroom package on the ground floor and an explanation with a warning that if you wanted to build a bathroom with a bathtub on the second floor you should buy the ground floor bathroom package because the walls that came with it would be load-bearing walls that would support the second floor bathtub, and a small fine print section that said something like, “If you bought the extra spiffy reinforced flooring package, then the main floor bathroom with its load bearing walls would not be a requirement, but would still be strongly recommended….” So I got the extra spiffy reinforced second story flooring package and the downstairs bathroom kit (plumbing and fixtures not included) (I didn’t really expect a toilet to come with it. They tried to sell me one. I told them I had an arrangement with a plumbing supplier out here in the real world.)

So anyway. The garage was in, I had about fifty feet of steel reinforced poured concrete slab driveway leading up to the trees. I had the real log double wide with it’s cathedral ceiling, big real log beam across the middle with an indoor rope swing for Rachel on rainy days, the basement I could live in comfortably, the loft with my official bedroom, computer section, extra sitting room area and ensuite bath… I’d installed the hot tub out on the deck, beneath the second floor balcony overhang-

For Rachel’s sixth birthday she wanted a party at Chucky Cheese’s. We reserved our section, assured that the employee of the month was there, ready to knock herself out entertaining the kids, invited a dozen of Rachel’s ‘closest friends’, with the parents hovering with me just out of mind as the kids went nuts in that over stimulating atmosphere. Some of the parents even tried to contribute, and when I said that ‘she’s only going to be six years old once’ they looked awkward and said they’d never be able to afford anything like that for their kids. I felt awful. I felt like I’d spoiled a generation of five and six year old girls who could never love their parents because I’d exposed them to the noisiest most over the top overstimulating kids paradise in the universe. But we talked about things and when they found out that I hadn’t spent anywhere near as much as they’d thought, we were friends again. I told them they could pay the tip. They looked dumbfounded and gasped, “You actually tip somebody who works in a place like this?” I pointed to the employee of the month and lied a bit, “She’s going to Cornell to study early childhood development” The parents were both suspicious and impressed, like I’d told them their kids were part of some secret government study in brainwashing six year olds. but then they were overstimulated by screaming happy kids and left with smiles on their faces. And the employee of the month asked me how I knew that she was studying early childhood developmental psychology at Cornell and I shrugged and said, “good guess”.

Rachel fell asleep on the way home. I carried her inside and set her down on the couch, covered her with a fleece blanket with a big eyed cartoon blue pony on it (her favourite) and stepped outside, looked at my perfect little hidden paradise and thought, “Wow, I pretty much have it made here- I have everything I ever wanted… except for the loving wife, and maybe another two point five kids… but hey this is great- And Its all paid for and – ” I gasped. I remembered my father’s happy speech at Christmas time at his parents’ house and determined I would not say, ‘if I die tomorrow, I know I’ll die happy -”

So that’s the surface. Pretty much. The next summer I bought a canoe and then a large rowboat and gave each of them their time in the pond. The year after that I started building a houseboat. The year after that the houseboat idea changed from a playhouse for Rachel to a kind of floating patio with a sort of cabin with a built in couch that could become a guest bedroom and a second story kind of make believe pirate lookout balcony with a patio table and a beach umbrella.

And then I wondered how the hell I’d lived all those years without a ‘significant other’.

And then Rachel’s hormones kicked in.