My earliest memory is being at the beach with my family and some relatives who had rented a big old house. Like the one next door it needed painting. Their were Australian pines all around that hurt when you stepped on them barefoot. The beach kids living next door were locals. One of them was named pat. We called him patty the porpoise
My family and relatives went on a boat fishing and I was deemed to young. Instead I was left in the care of a black woman who was nice enough to walk me down to a motel that had a little candy store. The sidewalk was very hot. Barefoot I stuck to the thick spongy rubbery grass.
At some level I’m pretty sure that I felt the sting of abandonment by my family. Perhaps this was the beginning of my separation from them psychically. Perhaps a forever goodbye because I turned out to not be close to any of them. I replaced them with my close friends.
My older brothers who were 2 and 3 years older than me were very close. They had formed a relationship where the older one was the leader and the younger one the follower. I came out of left field and they never really took me in. They either bullied me or used me when they needed another body in sandlot football or baseball.
Even as a child I felt that my oldest brother was odd and not in a good way. He would have wild mood swings. I’m convinced he was an undiagnosed bi polar. I guess my parents were too caught up in their cocktail parties and other social activities to even notice. Both of them had grown up during world war 2 which made them mentally different from today’s parents. Their parenting style was of the “children are to be seen and not heard”variety, the throw you in the pool to see if you would swim or drown. My oldest brother committed suicide at age 32.
Looking back I wonder if their atrocious parenting sprang from an unhappy marriage. When I was older I witnessed lots of liquor soaked domestic violence. Perhaps it had always been that way, I was just too young to notice it.
My dad came from a wealthy family whereas my mother was undoubtedly middle class. I think my father was a sport fucking bachelor around town until he met my mother and decided he wanted kids and a family but once he got it he regretted it and brooded over it the rest of his life.
From wealthy sport fucking man until he meets my mom who was middle class but from good lineage. Neither realized consciously that they both had deep abandonment issues. Toxic dysfunction from unconscious, unknown issues. Most mating conducted in the conscious realm. How tragic. He also did not know the psychic effects of being brought up by a “refrigerator” mom who had sent him away to another family at age 4 during the great depression because she “needed” to go back to work teaching typing.
He, not knowing of these, self medicated with Johnny Walker red and cigarettes. My mother’s abandonment issues also started young. She was a first born. Her younger brother was born with severe cerebral palsy and learning disabilities. Her parents basically overnight focused on him and his special needs without knowing that withdrawing their attention from my mother would cause abandonment issues. It manifested by my mother being a bully and desperate for attention. She was incapable of having a conversation with anyone because that would cause her to have to listen and not be listened to. She would assemble “stories” that she would repeat to any visitors. I probably listened to her evolving content hundreds of times until I put it all together and would disappear to some other part of the house to read or watch tv. We didn’t have the sort of relationship where I could sit down and tell her about this in the hopes she would take it on board. Rather, I suspect that she thought I would always disappear because I did not like her. But it was just the brain deadening time of listening to something I had heard too much already.
I have this theory that deep in some men’s lizard brains that if they are alpha and not simps they should be out fertilizing the herd. They project this prohibition from this onto their wives. Hence the battered wife, how dare she detract him from his evolutionary programming (that surely he knows nothing about).
He was a mean drunk. I remember him being drunk from when I was very young. I remember when I was probably 4, we were chasing him around the yard. He was the giant we were trying to catch. I remember him lying on his back with his eyes closed and prying his lids open. I have no way of knowing if he was sober or not.
I can’t remember when I first became aware of any domestic violence. I guess my mother put up with it because she didn’t want to be a poor single mother. I would like to be able to say she stayed with him for the sake of us kids but there is no way. I remember being in middle school and praying that they would get the hell aware from each other unlike kids who pray that their parents wouldn’t get a divorce.
He was a binge drinker. That means morning noon and night he would stay drunk. I remember in either middle or high school walking through the kitchen on a school morning and seeing him there in his boxers pouring a big drink, half wine and the other half vodka. The longest I saw him stay drunk was 3 months. The only thing that stopped it was his bodily rejecting anything he would try to consume. If he drank a glass of water it would come back up. When I was a junior in college my mother called and told us he thought he was dying and wanted to see us one last time. We begrudgingly went. There were no big reveals, just his fear that this was the last 3 month hangover he had in him. He must have felt very sick because he was also a cheapskate and 3 last minute plane tickets I’m sure were pricey. He died from a stroke about 10 years later.
I have a bad habit of thinking up theories in my head (even scientific ones) without validating them. The most glaring example was when my daughter was born. I theorized and concluded that if such a fragile creature caught a cold it would surely die. I’m a grown man and can only breath and sleep properly if I snort Afrin up my nose which requires such effort for it to come out in the back of your throat to be spit out. Hell a baby can’t even blow its nose.
Convinced of this I never took her into “general population” and every time I went out when I returned the first thing I would do was wash my hands. My dad always told me to do this but he also told me a lot of dumb shit so I ignored him. I used to get 3 to 4 colds a year like most people. On the baby hand washing routine I did not get a single cold for 3 years!!!! Guess dad wasn’t completely full of shit.
Turns out I was wrong on the baby dying thing also. Apparently babies have their mother’s immune system for about the first 6 months. But then again I had an immune system every time I got a cold.
One evening I was shopping for groceries and heard the check out girl sniffle. I said “do you have a cold?” To which she of course replied yes. I went batshit. She had touched everything in my trolley. It wasn’t her fault because I’m sure her manager forced her to come to work. So I set in on him telling him I have a newborn at home that could die from his stupid staffing policies. I left the entire basket of groceries and stormed out. I wasn’t going to re shelve them.
This whole baby dying thing also put me at odds with some of my friends who were parents. One of them would declare “you’ve got to expose them to germs to build up their immune system.” I learned in graduate school to always question “received wisdom.” You know stuff like “birds of a feather flock together” and then “opposites attract.” Both handed down through the ages and both saying opposite things. More later on “follow the money” which for me now includes “follow the sex.”
Anyhow I started noticing this correlation with babies and toddlers ending up in day care when moms wanted to lunch, shop, or play tennis. What a coincidence. Them doing immunotherapy always concurring with stuff they wanted to do. I was ignored and it got under my skin enough that I went to work on the pre AI internet. I found a medical journal article submitting that the oldest child has a higher chance of getting cancer later in life than his younger siblings. The argument went like this: child one goes among the germs which his immune system copes with as best as possible. Then the second child goes through it and the oldest one goes through it again. And assuming 3 kids, the 3rd one has missed all this being prenatal. When that child goes through it that makes three times the eldest has had to endure this onslaught. We all now know that cancer and the immune system are tied at the waste once we saw people with a virus (HIV) develop a rare skin cancer. To be more our cells are constantly dividing in droves. Sometimes one of the pair after the division is defective, cancerous. Our immune systems, if healthy, swoops in and kills it. So bottom line is that if you don’t want cancer figure out how to keep your immune system in top shape. For me that translates into lots of sleep. I personally will get 9 hours sleep a night, live in a not so posh neighborhood and drive a hooptie rather than 5 hours sleep and driving a Benzo.
If I still haven’t got you convinced I have one more cautionary tale. A friend of mine was of the “let them have germs” school. One day she was grocery shopping and looked down and her toddler was licking the push handle. She thought, whatever. The kid picked up “roseola,” some skin rash deal which tripped her into the bad childhood diabetes. That shit can really happen. There was this young healthy 30 something I used to play tennis with. He got the flu. After he got over it diabetes showed up. That shit is not to be flexed with.
I’ve been wanting to write this book for a long time. In fact I wanted to try to write after undergrad. Instead my parents financially bullied me to go to law school. I never saw them getting away with bullying my 2 older brothers but I was to thick to say “yeah me too…fuck off.” I just seemed to love them more in some visceral way that my brothers didn’t.
My oldest brother was completely obsessed with sports, playing them (not quite enough skill for the high school teams). He was always hyper competitive. One night we were discussing the 70’s drug scourge and my brother said he thought it was great because it would eviscerate his future competition. I was gobsmacked.
The competition thing never took with me because my brothers were big enough that I would never win anything because of our relative size but no so much bigger that it would look like they were beating on someone half their size. My parents had some kind of “let the dogs sort them self out, ie alpha, beta, Charlie” and allowed it to go on infinitum. My only defense was to try to talk my way out of situations or be funny to defuse danger.
This of course carried over into school where I was the class clown at a school that more resembled a concentration camp, beatings and all. Not the smartest place to be a class clown but it was all I knew and not smart enough to figure a way out of this conundrum.
I’ve got rows of books on my shelves purporting to tell me how to write. When I decided to try to get stuck in I expected them all to have unbroken spines. My bad habit of consumption was that I WOULD use these books, that in the act of buying them it was that one step toward being a writer. In retrospect it feels more like it was the only step I would take. I was shocked to discover that the “best” of those books would be the Norton guide to becoming a writer and not only was the spine broken but I had read the entire thing meticulously highlighting with notions in the margins. I of course have no idea when I read it, probably using it to blow off working on my Master’s thesis.
Don’t get the master’s thesis confused with law school. Being a gutless wonder, I succumbed to my parents bullying to go to law school instead of an M.F.A. in creative writing. I hated law school passionately but didn’t have much alternative and thought maybe if I stuck it out it would grow on me. By the time I was halfway through I knew I hated it, didn’t want to practice law and deep down didn’t think I had the acuity, didn’t have the concentration necessary in my head that competed with all my demons. But halfway I said what the fuck I will just cruise, make C’s and get the degree.
The first bar exam I didn’t even show up for it. The second one I failed. The third one I studied for least I passed. Go figure. The one amusing thing that came out of all of this was I got to sit my father down and tell him it wasn’t the best idea on his part to send me to law school because I learned about all kinds of obscure things like what trust funds were. His mother was wealthy and had been transferring money into my account yearly. I told my dad he could either turn over the assets to me or I would sue him. Life does have its unexpected little ironic moments.
One of the theories I had come up with for being a writer is that you had to lead an exciting life, one worth writing about and therefore a stranger wanting to read about it. So I set out to lead the most exciting life I had the stones to lead. My big mistake was to not journal at all, I assumed wrongly that in my dotage I would remember crystal clear everything I needed to. Horrible idea, I’m 68 and can’t remember things I did a week ago. My only prayer is that long term memory doesn’t correspond to short term memory.
When I mentioned earlier my completely unfounded theory of how to become a writer I’ve only had one bit of advice that made any sense to me. I forgot her name but she said “stop reading and start remembering.” One can just see the legions of writer wanna bees saying “I’m just not ready, if I just read that one next book I’ll be ready.”
While we are on the subject of brilliant aphorisms I will share another that I’m pretty sure came from Oprah Winfrey; “show me who you are and I will believe you.”
How many of us can look back at the ruination in all the relationships where we willfully ignored or gave the benefit of the doubt with nothing but bad results to show for it. People say lots of things that they want you to feel has verisimilitude but I think one must be very critical and analytical when hearing these things. Give points if the person is speaking about something that they have direct experience in.
So the “write about what you know” advice is great but with me my life was such a clusterfuck if I relayed it to you dear reader I’m afraid I would sound like a whiney bitch. Who wants to read the sordid details of someone else’s shit hole life of bullying, double alcoholism, domestic battery, guns being shot in the house by both parents etc. who would want those details. I’m sure everyone has their problems behind family closed doors and I sure don’t go looking for books about them. Enough said until pertinent later.
I didn’t realize it until much later that its women who choose men for relationships not the other way round. Men have that cave man mentality of “hunter” and think the when they get a connection its due to sophisticated hunting. The fact is it is women who “gather” men. They school around looking for a good match for themselves (this is not a charity party) until they find a guy they like/want and let him in. He of course thinks he made a good kill.
This flips the whole hunter/gatherer idea on its head. Let me explain through my own experience. I went to a sophomore high school party and spent it entertaining my guy friends, definitely not on the hunt for a girl for that night or a girlfriend. About a week later one Saturday night I was at home, minding my own business, watching “Don Kirshner’s rock concert” and my brothers come tumbling in from a night out carousing. My oldest brother (4 years older) knew a girl his age who went on and on about how her little sister, my age, had a serious crush on me. I paid little heed but he was pounding the table on it.
Then this Christmas dance came up. I was at the all boy catholic school and there was a female one 5 miles away. A Sadie Hawkins dance came up on the calendar (in this form of dance the girls get to ask the boys out on dates). The first girl that called me was not attractive but word had it that she put out. I didn’t want to go with her and my mom started riding my ass that I HAD to go with the first girl that asked. Somehow I found the nerve to keep my mom out of my business on this and waited for another girl who had a crush on me call. I said yes more so I could just go to it.
This friend of mine had been dating the girl that had a crush on me (I didn’t really know or care) and somehow at the dance the other 3 arranged a switcheroo where I ended up with his date (the girl he was fazing out and the little sister that had a crush on me) and he with mine. I didn’t question it or analyze it I just went with it. This is how I started a 2 and a half year boyfriend/girlfriend deal with the little sister.
I’m shocked as an old man now that I didn’t call a timeout, ask what was happening, whose idea it was and how I was just left out of the entire scheme. I don’t know if it was because I was stupid, naive, just was a go along guy or what. Nothing like that would happen to me now. Maybe its down to the fact that I was either a stupid teenager in the fog of youth. It certainly wasn’t a miscommunication. Rather for me there was no communication at all.
My father didn’t communicate with me at all on matters of romance. Perhaps he did not know of these things himself. I wish he would have brought up the hunter gatherer thing, but define the hunting as hiding quietly and motionless surveying the game until one got you fancy. Of course my idea of hunting was going in the wild and surveying the talent (completely unaware of any signals a girl might give off that she was interested in me). An example of a girl giving off a signal can be as subtle as flipping her hair when you walk by. Or one comes up and talks to you under a friendship vibe? Women have been working on how to attract a man since they were four while us guys were outside playing army, running around with a stick that we pretend is a machine gun. The mating game is heavily skewed in favor of women. They are playing at the Phd. Level when guys are freshman in college. Scan the room and see if any women are looking at you, making eye contact. I was too busy performing, being the class clown to read any rooms.
I was fairly attractive as a young man, probably an 8. But I chalked up any successes with women to my outgoing personality, sense of humor, intellect, etc. I did not think that I was very good looking so the girls attracted to me must be for my personality and ideas. I am shocked to admit now that my success was only down to my looks. I spent my youth and midlife trying to educate myself and work on my personality because I knew deep down the looks would fade. Sadly there are no women beating my door down to hear a pithy exegesis on semiotics.
I didn’t have a normal career like most others. Being a lawyer scared me to death. I was fast to leave my hometown because I didn’t want to relive my parents life there: country club, dinner parties, debutante balls, etc. To have aspired to all of that seemed mind numbingly challenge less. I wanted something different.
I went back to grad school after law school and studied film, television and culture. This led me to an interest in social anthropology so I went to Scotland to pursue that. Yes I took my golf clubs and methodically ate Indian food but I swear I was into the anthropology. Well maybe not as I could have, there was just so much culture on offer and many of the concepts I was already familiar with from the prior master’s degree
THE EDINBURG YEARS
After having a high school monogamous relationship for 2 and a half years, it wasn’t that I’d gone off her I just felt one could not possibly have lucked into their soul mate at age 15 and I was very curious to find out what kind of girl I liked: tall, short, busty, flat, smart, silly etc. I had never had a chance to figure this stuff out but going off to college was my chance.
I liked having the home down girl as a place marker (I would, after dating some other women from other places) find out that I had the craziest good luck at age 15 or I was going to have to file that away as perhaps a Mistake I had made.
The high school girlfriend attended the local university whereas I went 600 miles away. She and I never had the talk about what our situation was going to be (I guess I felt it was on her to bring it up). It just defaulted into an unspoken long distance monogamous relationship. She perhaps gave that a try but I later learned that she had networked a spy that was going to my college to report back to her. As he reported on me (I was dating but had no girlfriend) she was also discovering at her University that there were lots of interesting good looking guys in her orbit. I don’t remember exactly but probably my first Christmas break she surprised me with the fact that she had been dating someone and wanted to be monogamous with him. I was shocked and hurt but a tiny bit relieved. I had no sisters. Women were quite a mystery to me. I needed the opposite; lots of dates, girlfriends, and rolls in the hay. I had no idea what my type was but never learned to stay still and quiet to work for me.
She had stopped dating this guy by summer and wanted desperately to have us go back to monogamy. I was way more interested in hanging out with my guy friends. I would see her one night of the week and the rest of the time with friends. Most guys would have been pressured to see her every night but I wasn’t going for that. It was one of the best summers of my life.
By junior year she had found a new boyfriend and invited me to a location sorority weekend to drop it on me. Looking back it was so planned. She dumped me and he was at the party waiting for her. I guess it was revenge she sought and acquired. I remember going to my car and noticing the run down condo/hotel that held the function. I remember the dingy concrete on the parking lot. I drove back home alone.
The next thing I hear is that she is marrying a new guy, her 4th boyfriend. How someone can date 4 people and choose a life partner is beyond me. I’m either primitive or a genius.
My first year of college was kind of odd. Coming off the high school girlfriend gig I had a no girlfriend rule. I started dating this girl who was also dating another guy. So on Friday nights she was my girlfriend and on Saturday nights his. I liked it for the guaranteed weekly sex but being able to date whoever else I wanted because she had this other boyfriend.
The other boyfriend and I never had a face to face or discussion about it which from adulthood seems crazy. The big problem seemed to be that freshman girls wanted to go out with upperclassmen. He was a junior. I think the idea that really upset him was that I was a freshman. The junior with the BMW had to equally share his girlfriend with a carless freshman.
She told me he didn’t like this arrangement at all. The only time it got close to popping off was one night she was in bed with me watching tv and a brick came through the window. The other boyfriend’s fraternity was having a party at the dorm across the way. I grabbed my next door neighbor, a huge football player and we walked through the party to see if anyone would own up to it. Of course no one did.
When I look back I don’t think the brick was thrown from the balcony at the party. To far to throw it that accurately. So someone came close to my window, threw it and high tailed. I ended up never confronting the other boyfriend or called campus security or the county sheriff. I was just a dumb broke college kid and didn’t realized the gravity of a deadly missile being thrown through my window. The other boyfriend was an heir to a nationwide frozen food company. If I knew then what I know now there would have been a righteous beatdown.
That summer my part time girlfriend expected me to call her frequently. I was busy juggling my friends and their shenanigans. I called her twice during the summer.
When we got back to school as sophomores I figured we would just resume business as usual. But no dice, having never told me that she wanted/expected me to call more she dumped me the first time we saw each other. I never found out if she started dating the senior exclusively because having been dumped I didn’t much care.
I ended up dating this girl who wasn’t very pretty (bad skin but she did have a car). I liked her southern drawl and she was expert at flirting probably to make up for her below average looks. This college of which I write was very small, had very few good looking girls so one took what one could take. The several good looking girls would only go out with football players.
I transferred for junior year to a big state school. The difference could not be bigger. Parties all the time. Attractive women. Everywhere. The only way I survived it was because I learned to study at the boring school. I know lots of people who fail out after first semester at big party schools. They come out of high school just not ready for all the distractions.
The human brain is not fully formed until age 25. We send our kids out of the nest and into the party/study struggle at 18. If I were king students would start college at 25. They could party stupidly until their minds were matured. I know this first hand because I didn’t become a serious student un I was 25. It was like a light switch being flipped.
I remember being in college and being genuinely interested in what I was supposed to be studying. But when faced with a choice (read Milton or go to the keg party) my reasoning was I can always read Milton when I’m old and boring. You can’t go to college parties when you are old and boring.
After college I wanted to get a MFA in creative writing, write some, teach it. But my parents wanted me to go to law school. I didn’t have any money and they told me if I went to law school everything would be paid for but if I chose the MFA I would be cut off from family funds and need to drive for uber to pay my way. I call it financial bullying. And having been bullied by so many people my whole life as usual I buckled. Of course I wasn’t clever enough to know how long I had been bullied by so many people. I was years away from realizing what should have been plain for me to see.
I cannot stress how much I hated law school. Every day I would toil reading for 8 hours and then go to 3 hours of classes. I had no free time at all. I went from having 20 great friends and 10,000 beautiful women to no friends, no time to make any new friends. The people in law school loved to argue. They would argue about if the sky was blue. The only subject that interested me was criminal law. At least it was full of passionate, complex behavior. Much more interesting than reading the tax code or arguing about where someone’s property line was.
One night I was sitting at my desk reading and started daydreaming a little. I couldn’t remember what season it was. I sat there for minutes not being able to come up with it. I had to get up and go outside where I saw the snow and knew it was winter.
All work and no play made me a bit crazy. One day I was watching a sappy old Disney film about leprechauns and at the climax suddenly became aware that tears were rolling down my cheeks. I said to myself that I was not in a good place at all.
I didn’t quit immediately. I thought maybe I will grow into liking it. By halfway through I still hated it, never wanted to practice law. Instead of quit I decided to scrape by, get the degree, pass the bar exam and then figure out my life.
I dis law school but it did teach me to reason my way through things at an extremely high level. Almost too much. One night I went out and ran into a girl I knew of in the party school. I started spitting some game and she dumped whoever she was with (guys) and came back to my studio apartment with my two guy friends. When we took her home the 3 of us had to debate who would walk her to her door (code for who was she into and who was into her). The other 2 guys insisted it be me so I did. After that I started to date her.
This could have been exactly what I needed to get my head back on track. I really needed a girlfriend. But she was the kind of girl who was very teleological with her life. She didn’t want to be just a girlfriend. She felt at age 23 that it was time to get married. I fit the bill and she went to work. At the time I thought she was very manipulative toward her goal. She would mention other guys who were interested in her. She seemed kind of finicky, something that I never felt confident in. I decided it was just typical girl ball busting to get a husband. I was in such a bad place mentally that it worked. I still don’t know to this day whether that was the case or if she was high functioning autistic.
After going round and round about it I finally broke down crying saying “ok I will get married.” She seemed to have no problem getting engaged to someone that was crying out of misery not joy when he capitulated.
I felt like a soldier who had become a prisoner of war. I didn’t want to be in this situation but had no idea of how to extricate myself. I very slowly came back to myself and the whole thing seemed really wrong to me but I didn’t have the strength to get out of it. As I regained slowly something of my sense of self I began confronting her with my theory that she manipulated me into getting engaged. My head was now telling me “your wife is your closest relative and is supposed to have your back” yet I felt like I was just something to let her live the next phase of her life whether I liked it or not.
I would like to think that anyone else not interested in being married at age 23 would have the emotional spine to get out of that situation. Not me. But I did have enough spine to increasingly let her know that I wasn’t happy with it.
I desperately wanted out of the engagement but just as definitely wanted to keep her as my girlfriend. Life is so damn complicated. In real time it is confusing as hell and only becomes clear in retrospect.
We both ended up having affairs. When we decided to amicably split up (no children) we decided that we would not blame each other to our friends etc. We didn’t want our parents etc. taking sides. When we were separated I was working on my master’s thesis at our family summer home. My mom comes in one day and says “you guys being separated doesn’t mean you might get divorced does it?” I replied “of course it does, separation is the halfway point between marriage and divorce.” She replied “well if you do get divorced I hope she takes ever dime you have.”
My mom was materially generous but an emotional bully. I was really close to her growing up because I was the only child who kept my mean alcoholic father from killing her. She and I had a serious bond. My soon to be ex wife was from a socially prominent family in NC. I didn’t know it but my mom felt I had “married well” and was very happy about it. Before we were engaged and I was still in that “reel in the trophy fish” stage I arranged for her to come to my home town, meet my family, friends etc. I needed the girlfriend to see our family in a good light, not the toxic dysfunctional cauldron that it was. I summoned my alcoholic mother to my bedroom and said “can you do me a big favor and stay off the booze this weekend while this girl that I’m very serious about visits?” Her response was basically “go fuck yourself, I don’t have a drinking problem, you have a problem with my drinking.” If I had a child who I found out was embarrassed by me in any way I would totally cease and desist and feel I had been a terrible parent. Not my mom. That day was the final straw for me in our relationship. Later that day I went over to a friend’s house who was a great sailor and we took one of his boats out on the bay. I told him what had happened. He said, “you have a mother problem.” And I agreed, he was spot on.
If I could do my life over again I would definitely not be her domestic violence knight in shining armor. I would be like my brothers and just wash my hands of it. Instead I would get 4 hours of sleep each night keeping them from killing one another. Every day I would take a pillow to high school in my PE bag. I didn’t have PE everyday. When I had free time I would go to the back of the library and sleep. Not one person, student or adults said to themselves “why is that kid sleeping everyday, I need to ask him if everything is ok at home. I don’t know if I would have told the truth.
I only came to understand my mother and father after they both had passed and after much thought and education.
vignettes 