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The Story of Barrett (Part 2 ... continued)
The Family Grows
With a population of 1.5 million and an area of 470 square
miles,
Phoenix
,
Arizona
is today the 6th or 7th largest city in the
United States
. This is not the
Phoenix
I remember. The city I was taken to
in 1953 had a total area of slightly more than 18 square miles and a population
of 110,000 people.
I don’t remember much about the drive from
Albuquerque
to
Phoenix
. Father Gilchrist (or Frank, as Margaret
called him) didn't seem to have much to say to my mother and even less to
me. From my vantage next to the bags and
boxes packed into the back, I listened incuriously to occasional snatches of
conversation coming from the front seat while I watched the barren and
relatively flat landscape of the New Mexico desert give way to rugged mountain
passes and then to vast areas of saguaro cactus and sagebrush when we crossed
into Arizona.
Some of their talk involved money. I didn’t find it surprising that Frank was
going to pay for an apartment for us and promised to send Margaret more money
after he returned to
New Mexico
. I guess I assumed that the Catholic Church
routinely did things like that for parents whose children had destroyed their
mother’s lives.
The apartment we moved into was a single story duplex with a
house behind it where the owner/manager lived. I guess Frank wasn’t big on long goodbyes. As soon as our car was emptied out and
everything carried into the front apartment, he was gone. I would never see him again nor did I ever wonder
how he made the return trip. Maybe he
hitchhiked.
No sooner had the good padre disappeared over the horizon
then Margaret took me aside in the new apartment and told me I could expect an
addition to the family. She was
pregnant. I was going to have a little
brother, fathered by none other than the Reverend Frank Gilchrist.
She was excited when she told me the news but she was even
more excited several weeks later when she attempted to contact Frank at the Air
Force base and learned he had been transferred. No one seemed to know where he was. She tried to trace him through the Catholic
archdiocese in
Albuquerque
without success. If the Catholic Church
or the Air Force knew where he was, they weren’t about to share that
information with the angry, increasingly foul-mouthed woman who kept calling
and leveling charges of fornication against one of Christ’s representatives on
earth.
If the same thing were to happen today, I’m sure the
response of the church would be much different. Far from hiding father Gilchrist from the world, I would expect him to
be paraded in front of the media. The
archdiocese would prepare a press release and announce with great fanfare that
a Catholic priest had successfully impregnated an adult female. Today, the Catholic Church would offer
prayers of gratitude to God and all the saints for giving them a heterosexual
scandal.
But this is now and that was then. She never did locate the father of the small
life growing inside her. Her inebriated
after-dinner tirades expanded from character assassinations of my father and
began to include streams of invective against the Catholic Church and the way
it “takes care of its own” a reference to a group of people I assume, didn’t
include her.
It would be many years before Margaret would finally even
the score by committing the most heinous sin any Catholic is capable of committing.
She renounced the Church of Rome and became a Methodist.
Margaret eventually went to a hospital to have the baby
while a neighbor stayed in our apartment for a short period to watch me. When my mother returned home empty-handed, I
was told that the baby had been stillborn.
Given my mother’s predisposition to tell lies when telling
the truth would be easier, I would say there is a 75-80% chance that I have a
half-brother (or perhaps sister) who was born in 1952 in Phoenix, Arizona and
who was immediately turned over to the state for adoption. If, as I suspect, I have a sibling I’ve never
met who would now be in his or her mid-fifties, being adopted at birth would
have been the best thing that could possibly have happened to the baby.
I can find no causal relationship between my present
attitudes toward father Gilchrist in particular or members of the clergy as a
group with the events of 1952. My contempt
for Catholicism is no greater or different than my distaste and dislike of
Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and all of the other “isms”
that have plagued mankind throughout recorded history. Religious ideation is a mental aberration
that, hopefully, will one day be subject to treatment and cure the same as any
other form of mental illness.
If the “Good Book” (and there’s a misnomer if I’ve ever
heard one) tells us that a tree is to be judged by its fruit then one need only
examine the “fruits” of religion, whether organized or otherwise, to appreciate
its foul and poisonous nature.
The human race has never suffered from a shortage of fools,
charlatans, swindlers, con men and hate mongers. There is plenty of evil in the world deserving
of hate. This category shouldn’t include
the mentally ill. I used to detest
people like Jimmy Swaggert, Pius XII, Pat Robertson, Jerry Fallwell, Fred
Phelps, Roger Mahoney, Pope Benedict, Jim Jones, Sun Myong Moon and all the
others of their ilk. I no longer
do. Like the Christian who claims to
“hate the sin and not the sinner” I can now say that I hate the belief but not
the believer. If I hate cancer it
doesn’t mean I have animosity toward the cancer sufferer. I might despise the affliction but I have
only pity for the afflicted. Some day,
perhaps we’ll have a vaccine to protect us against religion the same way we
inoculate our children to protect them from polio. Until that time, justice and our common
humanity require that we view the religious, not as evil but as victims of a
mental virus that has plagued mankind since the beginning of time.
Margaret made no attempt to find a job until after the baby
was born. I have no idea whether our
bills were paid from funds provided by father Frank, a welfare agency or
Margaret’s savings but for at least 6 months she was able to stay home and we
never seemed to lack for food or alcohol.
For me, things changed for the worse. Until
Phoenix
,
I had spent very little time around Margaret. She was never present when I was living with her parents. My first 5 or 6 months in
Albuquerque
were spent in a foster home. When I finally went to live with her in the
apartment over the garage, I saw her only on weekends except for a few hours
each evening during the week when she was alcohol-mellowed if a bit maudlin.
Our departure from
New Mexico
must have occurred close to the start of summer vacation since I wasn’t
immediately enrolled in a
Phoenix
school and, as a result, we spent the next several months in closer proximity
than was comfortable.
As an adult, I’ve occasionally been asked about my mother
and I’ve usually replied that my only memories of her are of a maudlin drunk or
a hung-over harridan. While this is
close to accurate, it’s not the absolute truth. There was a window during the day, usually from 10 or 11 in the morning
until 6 or 7 in the evening when she was almost indistinguishable from a
benign, if somewhat neglectful, parent. Until nightfall, when she would begin drinking, she would be neither
affectionate nor abusive. I was always
fed on time. I always had clean clothes
and my relationship with her could probably be described as guardedly friendly.
I soon learned that even when sober, she could become violent suddenly and
without warning but those occasions were infrequent and just as I learned to
avoid thinking about the eternal damnation that awaited me, I also learned to
ignore and live with the constant if somewhat vague apprehension that being
near her so much of the time generated.
Once the sun set, things would change. My self-image of myself as a horrible, sinful
child had to have at least some validity as I was punished on an almost daily
basis for recurring infractions that I no longer recall. Discipline might be administered by hand,
with a belt or with a wire coat hanger.
One day when I was playing alone in the yard, the woman who
lived in the apartment behind us came out and questioned me about the cause of
the screaming and crying she could hear through the wall each night. I was horrified and embarrassed at the
thought of a stranger finding out how sinful and bad I was. I denied having any idea what she was talking
about.
There was probably no connection but it wasn’t long after
that before we moved to another six-unit apartment on the other side of town
and I never saw the woman again.
Once we were in the new apartment, my “punishments” became
more infrequent. Either my behavior
improved or Margaret became distracted and no longer paid as much attention to
my shortcomings. Two of the apartments
had children close to my own age living in them so I had someone to play with
during the day. The neighbors were all
friendly and the world began to seem a more cheerful place.
Within a very short time of the move, Margaret’s baby was
born (or stillborn?) and not long after that she found a job and began going to
work each day. The school year began so
I had a something to do and an enlarged territory to explore and play in. I was enrolled in St Agnes Catholic School
for my 2nd grade year and, once again, the church and school were only a short walk from our apartment.
It would be nice to say that I had learned my lesson in
New Mexico
and forsaken
my criminal career but I’m ashamed to admit it wouldn’t be true. I was skipping Mass on Sunday, and worse,
each week I would rip open the offering envelope my mother would give me as she
sent me off to church and spend the quarter on Hostess Twinkies, ice cream or
potato chips. I always bought
consumables with the money so I could eat the evidence before returning
home.
This was fine for Sundays but I knew I needed a scam I could
run during the week and it wasn’t long before I found one. There was a small
market a few blocks from St Agnes where soda bottles could be redeemed for the
deposit (2 cents for regular and a nickel for the large ones). Once redeemed, the clerk would carry them to
a small fenced yard behind the store where they could be stored while awaiting
pickup by the soda distributor. The
enclosed area had no gate, entry was possible only from the store but there was
a small depression running under one stretch of fence that created a hole just
large enough for small hand to fit through and penetrate into the yard as far
as my nine-year old arm could reach. It
was enough.
Each day, after school, I would head for the market and
extract as many bottles as I could reach from the fenced yard then carry them
around to the front and into the market where I would redeem them and collect
the deposits. I should add that I
always spent everything I collected on edibles from the same market. I was convinced that spending the money in
another store would have been disloyal. It would also make what I was doing too much like stealing and I was now
old enough to know that stealing was a sin.
When I’d get back home the apartment would be empty and I
would be on my own until 5 or 6 when Margaret would return from work. She would fix our dinner and then, if she
wasn’t going out, I was expected to join her in the living room to learn new
atrocities my father had committed, hear anew the treachery of the Catholic
Church and the rapacious appetites and sinful hypocrisy of the Catholic
clergy. When these subjects had been
exhausted she would begin what I came to call her “Special Bonds” lecture. Drunken tears would come to fill her eyes and
roll down her cheeks as she would tell me about the special bond that always
exists between a mother and her child. She would insist there was nothing as powerful or enduring as a mother’s
love and that nothing could ever come between a child and his mother.
I may have been only 8 years old but I was maturing. I was learning skepticism. I won’t say I thought she was lying … but I
had some genuine problems buying into her protestations.
One Saturday morning when I was outside in the yard playing
with the girl who lived in the apartment across from us Margaret called me from
the door of our apartment. It was too
early in the day for her to be drunk and late enough so she had probably recovered
from the night before and I went to her without any particular misgivings.
Her face was alight with excitement as she beamed happily at
me and motioned me into the house. She
had another secret to share. She was
going to get married again.
She may have told me who she was going to marry or she might
not have. I hadn’t known she was seeing
anyone and if she named the lucky(?) man it wasn’t a
name I knew or recognized. I could tell
she thought I would share her excitement and happiness so I made an attempt to
act happy and excited. It must have
worked because she let me go back outside where I rejoined the little girl from
across the way.
“What did
your mother want,” she asked?
“Oh, she’s
going to get married again. I’m going to
have a new father,” I answered.
Of such innocent remarks are disasters born. The little girl told her mother the
news. As it happened, her mother was
planning a small party that evening. By
coincidence and unknown to me, my mother and her boyfriend were invited guests.
That night, after dinner I was put to bed. I was asleep when my mother returned from the
party and staggered into the apartment. I didn’t hear her enter my bedroom and had no idea what was going on
when I awoke as she began beating me with a coat hanger. She was yelling and I was screaming and I
expect the neighbors got an earful.
It seems my friend’s mother, learning of Margaret’s
engagement, had congratulated her in the presence of Margaret’s boyfriend. Apparently, the news of his engagement came
as a surprise to the boyfriend and he had elected to leave the party early
without Margaret.
Once again, I had destroyed my mother’s life.
One positive thing came from the incident. Any feelings of affection, trust or love for my mother that might have remained in my heart died that
night and never returned. That was the
night and the moment when I began to hate her.
It is very difficult to live harmoniously with someone, even
a child, who regularly destroys your life. We moved one more time and within just a few months of this last
relocation I was bundled onto an airplane and sent back to live with Margaret’s
parents.
No reason was given nor did I feel a need for one.
Margaret’s parents
I spoke earlier about Patrick and Georgiana McMorrow, Margaret’s
parents and my grandparents. Patrick was
no longer running Campbell Coal Company and was instead working in a clerical
capacity for a bigger coal and oil provider in
Springfield
,
Massachusetts
. I assume that Campbell Coal was a casualty of
the change to oil and gas as sources of home-heating fuel.
My grandparents had moved from the house I remembered in
Easthampton
and now rented the upstairs portion of a
private home in
Northampton
,
Massachusetts
owned by John
Moynihan an 87 year-old widower and their long-time friend. It was a good arrangement for all concerned
since John (Uncle John, as I was instructed to call him) could supplement
whatever retirement income he had with the rental income he got from my
grandparents as well as sharing our meals, while Patrick and Georgiana could
benefit from a lower cost for housing.
Northampton
was semi-rural in those days. John’s
house was next to a farm where we bought our milk and eggs and it sat on
several acres of land that, through an arrangement between the farmer and Uncle
John, was used to produce much of the hay consumed by our neighbor’s livestock
each winter.
This period from early 1953 to late 1954 was one of the more
peaceful times in my childhood. The
public school where I attended 3rd grade was only a a block and a half away and many of my classmates
lived in the immediate neighborhood. I
had a number of friends, there were woods and fields to explore and, in spite
of a series of “crushes” on a few of the boys in my class, I was usually able
to avoid thinking about the hellfire that I knew would be my eventual fate.
Like every gay, I’ve been frequently asked “How long have
you been gay?” or the even more laughable “When did you choose to be a
homosexual?” The answer to the first
question is “all my life”. The second
question can’t be answered since it involves two false assumptions. The first assumption is that sexual
orientation is a matter of choice like choosing to be a Democrat or
Republican. No one “chooses” to be gay
or lesbian just as no one chooses to be heterosexual. You play with the hand you’ve got (no pun
intended). The religious right may
believe that we’ve elected to be ostracized by family, discriminated against by
society, targeted by bashers, reviled by many, if not most Christians, Muslims
and Jews, legislated against, imprisoned and sometimes killed but the truth is
one’s sexual orientation is never determined by whim or any rational
decision-making process. Two brothers or
sisters raised in identical environments may grow up to have different
orientations as adults. The nature
versus nurture debate has gone on for years with proponents on both sides
unable to show any conclusive evidence of the superiority of their arguments.
Another problem with the question of orientation is the
assumption that one’s sexual choices are matters of black and white; either-or
scenarios that are mutually exclusive. Sexual orientation is not a dichotomy, it’s a continuum. The absolute homosexual is as rare (or
non-existent) as the absolute heterosexual. Everyone falls somewhere on the scale between these two extremes with
the vast majority aligning closer to the center than to either of the
ends. Therein lays the problem.
Homophobia is found most often among those closest to the
middle of the scale and fearful of discovering that they are on the wrong side
of center. It’s a fear of consequences
rather than status. To be thought of as
anything other than “straight” is to be shunned and hated … and not just by
others. Accepting one’s homosexuality is
almost always accompanied, at least initially, by self-loathing.
Given my orientation and my environment, I could have
developed in one of two ways. I might
have grown up to be an open gay or I could have become a homophobe. For whatever reason, I’ve become the former
and my life is far richer and more fulfilling than it would have been had fate,
parental or peer pressure, the church or social taboos steered me in the other
direction.
The late and mostly unlamented Jerry Fallwell once stated
that if another man ever “came on to him sexually” he would kill him. I personally think that would be the
Christian thing to do since I firmly believe any man who viewed Fallwell as a
sex object should be put out of his misery.
Fallwell’s emphatic and emotional
repudiation of homosexuality illustrates the conflict and shame that drove the
anti gay message of his sermons. One
wonders why he couldn’t just say no.
Another statement that most open and out gays hear with
depressing frequency from ignorant and fearful closet homophobes is, “I have
nothing against homosexuals as long as they keep their hands off me”. One of the speakers I vividly recall was
attempting to convince me that he was a really broad-minded guy who had nothing
against me based on my sexual orientation. He was also covered with black and blue marks where others had poked him
with ten foot poles. I tried to reassure
him that, for my part at least, girls weren’t THAT bad.
In our culture, the fear, shame and embarrassment
experienced by adults “in the closet” doesn’t come close to the crippling sense
of alienation faced by gay children growing up with the knowledge that they are
“different”. Their terrors can be
overwhelming and debilitating. Add
religious ideation to the mix with its promise of eternal damnation to those
guilty of unnatural affections and its false assurances of the possibility of
“change” for those who put their faith and trust in God, or Jesus or any other
ignorance-generated notion of a “Personal Savior”, and you have a formula for
mental illness and self-torture that can completely destroy an innocent child’s
life.
My grandfather was Irish Catholic while my grandmother was
just crazy. Their faith in God and the
Catholic Church was as unshakable as was my grandmother’s gullibility. Chain letter prayers, fortune tellers, a
belief in the frequent interactions of angels, devils, saints, spirits and
ghosts into the affairs of men … and of course a belief in the sinfulness, or
maybe even demonic possession of their grandson (even though they had no idea
of his sexual orientation) all combined to make up the framework of their
spiritual life and religious beliefs.
They never inspired the hatred and contempt in me that
Margaret did. Their shortcomings and
defects of character were the results of stupidity or ignorance and not
malice. Georgiana’s occasional
references to “those damned Jews” and Patrick’s love of “nigger” jokes were
indications of the times they lived in and the attitudes of their generation. On the negative side, Patrick and Georgiana
might today be called trailer-trash if they had ever been able to afford a
mobile home. On the positive side, I
don’t remember either of them ever engaging in cruel or vicious behavior for
its own sake.
It may be unfair to paint them both with the same oversize
brush of stupidity. Georgiana was the
dominant personality in their relationship and she was stupid. There is no cure for stupidity. Those born with the defect go to their graves
with it. My quiet, non-assertive
grandfather may have suffered from nothing more serious than ignorance which is
quite curable with the judicious application of knowledge. Unfortunately, the man went through his life
and died without ever receiving a diagnosis or treatment for his handicap.
Children are self-centered. All of us are born egocentric and only as we grow older do we learn
empathy. When I lived with my
grandparents, I would once in awhile feel a little hurt and resentful of what I
perceived as my grandfather’s disinterest in me and my activities. Only now from the vantage of my sixty plus
years and from my own parenting experiences can I look back and see that part
of the blame for his lack of interest has to rest with me. Today, I can’t tell you the name of the
company he worked for after Campbell Coal Company. I couldn’t have told you then either. I don’t believe I ever knew it or was ever
curious enough to ask. He and I never
played ball together, never went to a movie together, never talked about feelings or goals. We never
talked about anything and the fault is as much mine as his. I never tried to talk to him. I never asked him to play ball, or go to the
movies. I never shared anything of me
with him. He can be faulted for ignoring
me, at least as much as you can ignore someone who lives in the same house with
you, but I can also be faulted for never having any interest in, or reaching
out to him.
I don’t feel guilty. It’s not the child’s responsibility to reach out to the parent. The responsibility … or blame, if you prefer,
flows the other way. What I do feel is
regret. If I had been just a little more
mature and just a little more empathetic, if I had made any attempt to get to
know him, I suspect I would have liked him It’s even possible he would have liked me.
I had the opposite problem with Georgiana. My grandmother’s “love” for me was a genuine
emotion. Whether it was love can be
debated but she certainly thought it was. Her cloying affection for me was over-possessive, controlling and all
consuming. This was bearable, maybe even
fulfilling when I was 5 or 6 but sometimes distressing by the time I reached
the age of eight.
I developed a mild though unspoken aversion to physical
affection which continued until I was in my late teens. In fairness, I should add that if I had ever
spoken of this dislike it might have reduced the physical pawing I was forced
to endure from my over-affectionate grandmother … or it might not have. Who knows?
Georgiana had emotional needs and I was, to some extent, her
answer to filling those needs.
When an emotional attachment can be expressed as a need, it
isn’t love. Thomas Aquinas described
what he chose to call the conditions or attributes of love. His last condition has always seemed to me more
like a definition than an attribute. He
said that (to paraphrase) real love is marked by a oneness of spirit that merges two souls and makes them one. One who loves another rejoices in the joys of
the loved one and sorrows in the loved one’s tribulations just as if they were
his own ... because that joy or sorrow IS his own.
Could there be a better definition of empathy?
Real love requires nothing in return. There is no requirement of reciprocity. When someone says, “I need you, I want you, I
love you” what they’re really saying is “I need you, I want you, I love me”.
Imagine a world where we really did love one another as
Christians claim to be commanded to do. Imagine a world where no one could hurt someone else without feeling the
pain themselves. Think what it would be
like to live in a world where we would feel and share each others fear, pain,
and discomfort. Picture a world where we
would be compelled to comfort, console and care for one another; where war and
violence, cruelty and intolerance would be impossible because those who wage
the war or engage in the violence, intolerance or cruelty would themselves feel
the full effects of their actions.
That kind of a world doesn’t exist and never has. It probably never will and that fact alone is
a tragedy.
What my grandmother felt wasn’t love and even then as an 8
year-old, I could tell the difference. If I look back on her now without compassion it’s because when she was
alive, I had no first hand experience with compassion.
I wouldn’t learn to feel empathy, compassion or love until
24 years later when I would meet my
partner of the past 32 years, in Bishop, California and we became two people
sharing one soul.
I can say that I never wished ill on either of my
grandparents. If my grandfather
was ignorant and my grandmother stupid, they were hardly alone. The world was and is full of stupid
people. Stupidity is not a basis for
hate or even dislike. Today I can look
back on both my maternal grandparents with a mild, if somewhat pitying,
affection.
I was in the 4rth grade and had lived with Patrick and
Georgiana for almost two years when Margaret reappeared on the scene. Not only had she moved back into the area,
she was sporting a new boyfriend. In
order to introduce me, I was one day collected from my grandparent’s and
brought to spend the day with Richard and Margaret at his apartment in
Springfield.
Richard Miller was in his late twenties or very early
thirties and worked for a department store where he arranged and maintained
window displays. He was soft-spoken,
gentle and always fun to be around. He
and I hit it off almost immediately. When, a month or so later, I was told that he and Margaret were going to
be married I was overjoyed. Even my
on-again, off-again antipathy for my mother dissipated somewhat, probably in
part because, with her living 20 miles away, she was always sober when I saw
her.
Richard and Margaret would sometimes arrive together in the
early evening to visit my grandparents and (I suppose) to plan their wedding
and relocation. Their move to
Melrose
,
Massachusetts
(just outside of
Boston
)
would include me and was to be the start of a new life for all of us.
Richard and I had an understanding. Before he and Margaret left to return to
Springfield, he had to walk with me to Jackson Street School and back (a total
of three blocks) so I could tell him everything I had done and everything that
had happened to me since I had seen him last. In spite of my developing aversion to being touched by anyone, I used to
demand that he hold my hand, at least while we walked through the darkness to
and from the school. When we got there,
we’d walk around back to the playground where we would sit on the swings or a
picnic bench and look at the stars. When
I had related everything I could think to tell him, he would talk to me about
the planets and the stars, about dinosaurs and animals and what it had been
like when he was my age and going to school. The walks and conversations were too short for me and I would always
feel sad when we’d start back to the house. My only consolation was the knowledge that he and Margaret would be
getting married soon and then we would all live together and he would be my dad
and wouldn’t ever have to leave me.
It was about this time that I was told Georgiana had to have
some kind of minor surgery and they would have to find a place for me to stay
temporarily while she recovered. As a
kid, I had been conditioned not to expect explanations for the mysterious
doings of the adults in my life, even when those doings affected me
directly. Still, I was surprised a week
later to find myself in a Catholic boy’s orphanage/fostering facility just
outside of
Springfield
called Brightside.
The experience wasn’t completely unpleasant. The facility was spacious, clean and modern
(in the context of 1954). It was made up
of a number of “cottages” each of which could house 25 or 30 boys. Each boy shared a room with up to three other
boys and each cottage had two resident nuns who acted as house mothers to the
boys in their cottage. The school we
attended (Catholic, of course) and the church were atop a hill and perhaps a
quarter mile from the cottages. We were
free to leave the property during the day if we wished but since Brightside was
in a non-residential area on
Riverdale
Highway
, a busy connecting route between
Northampton
and
Springfield
,
there wasn’t anyplace to go except the school or the church giving us little
motivation to wander.
I think I was there for about one and a half or maybe two
months. Surprisingly, the fact that I
had no idea when, or even if, I would be returned to my grandparents made my
adjustment to my new home easier than it might otherwise have been. The food was plentiful and good, the nuns
were kind, and several of the boys in my cottage became objects of my forbidden
affection. I missed Richard Miller but I
felt no emotional ties to Margaret or my grandparents. I half expected that Richard and my mother
would get married and, if they did, I thought there was at least a chance I
would accompany them to a new home … but I was far from certain it would ever
come to pass.
And then a miracle happened. Richard showed up alone and unannounced (at least to me if not to the
staff of Brightside) with all the appropriate documents signed by all the
appropriate people. He helped me pack
and then drove me back to my grandparents in
Northampton
. Best of all, he was now married to my mother and officially my dad. It wasn’t more than a week later that I was
loaded into a car with Margaret and Richard for the trip to
Melrose
and the beginning of our new life.
They rented a small house and Richard started working for a
department store in
Boston
, doing the same
window design and maintenance he had done in
Springfield
. He commuted back and forth each day on the train leaving the car with
Margaret. I was enrolled in a new school
and a new phase in my life began.
On those evenings when Richard got in from work early enough
and dinner was finished before the sun went down, he and I continued the
tradition of short walks in the evening. They were never long and we never talked about anything important but
those conversations became high points in my life. It was honestly the first time I had ever
been able to talk regularly with some one I believed cared about me.
My mother never joined us. Margaret would remain at the house to recover from her day and relax
with a drink, or ten. The train from
Boston
left the station
very close to the end of Richard’s workday and two or three nights a week,
Richard would have to take the next scheduled train and would arrive an hour
late. When that happened, Margaret would
be well into her cups and usually angry by the time he got home. Dinner might or might not happen.
Although 9:00 o’clock was my bedtime, I seldom got to sleep
before 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. My
mother’s volume and her outrage tended to increase in direct proportion to the
lateness of the hour and the quantity of alcohol she had consumed. Richard was an inconsiderate son of a bitch
who didn’t have the courtesy to be home on time for dinner. His job was more important to him than she
was. He cared more about his sister than
he did about her. He no longer performed
his husbandly duties in the bedroom. He
was a queer and preferred the company of his friend “John” to the company of
his wife.
Her words were all I ever heard. His voice, when he was given a chance to
respond was always soft, just below the level where I could make out the words
but it didn’t really matter. Margaret’s
rampage would continue unabated until she finally drank herself into a stupor
and Richard would carry her into their bedroom and put her to bed.
If she usually waited until I was in bed before beginning
her drunken rants, there were certainly other times when she was unable to hold
it in until I was out of the room, if not out of earshot. “You know what he is, Richard,” she would
shriek at me as my stepfather would sit quietly and calmly in an armchair
unhappily watching. He’s a QUEER! He wants to play with your penis.” She would make a clumsy grab for my crotch
which I always managed to dodge. “He’s a
FAGGOT. He can’t function the way a real
man can. He can’t satisfy a REAL woman.
At the time I wondered when he ever had an opportunity to
satisfy a real woman. The only woman I
ever saw him with at home was a sloppy and disgusting drunk. To this day I find nothing even faintly
erotic or desirable about drunks of either sex … even though too much of my
adult life would later be spent in that physically repulsive condition.
Usually, though, I wasn’t called upon to participate in the
party. I would be sent to bed before the
serious taunts, insults and accusations would begin flying.
Richard took an early train to
Boston
each morning and was always gone by
the time Margaret would call me for school. Early mornings always found her surly and hung over. One morning, she made a statement to me
critical of my stepfather. After hours
of listening to a particularly vicious battle the night before during which she
had ripped a phone out of the wall and hurled it across the room I wasn’t in
the mood for it … or for her. I called
her a liar and told her that, judging from the way she talked about Richard, I
was willing to bet my real father was a terrific guy.
She was shocked. A
moment later she slapped me across the face. I grabbed her by both hands and moved my grip down until I was holding
her thumbs. She struggled to free her
hands and said “Let go of my thumbs”. I
said nothing and wouldn’t release her. She struggled harder and, feeling a sudden burst of exultation, I was
sure I could see the beginnings of fear on her face. I finally said, “I’m going to school”. I released her thumbs, shoved her away and
walked out the door. She didn’t say a
word and she didn’t attempt to stop me.
The incident wasn’t mentioned when I returned that
afternoon. Georgiana had arrived on the
train for a visit while I was in school and she planned on being there for a
week. Margaret’s behavior toward me was
always more temperate when others were present.
Unfortunately, that was also one of the nights when Richard
missed the earlier train and once again arrived home an hour late. By the time I went to bed, Margaret was drunk
as usual and screaming at Richard while Georgiana (who didn’t drink) screamed
back at Margaret and Richard occasionally offered a comment that was pitched
too low for me to hear.
Everyone has a breaking point. I had reached mine.
During the next lull in the screaming I got out of bed and
went to the dresser where I had some pencils and my notebook from school. I ripped a blank page from the binder and
wrote in capital letters “YOU ARE A FILTHY CAT WITHOUT A SOUL”. I folded the paper twice then walked to my
bedroom door where I checked quickly for witnesses. Richard and Georgiana were in the living room
and they didn’t see me pad quietly through the dining room and into Margaret’s
and Richard’s bedroom. My mother was
stretched out on the bed, struggling to recover the energy she had expended
during her last raging diatribe and trying to gather the energy she would need
for whatever angry rant she was planning to encore with. She looked blearily up at me from the bed as
I flipped the folded paper into her face. I said, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it” which may not have been the
most devastating verbal assault ever committed but wasn’t bad for a 9 year-old
who was plotting his first revolution.
I went back to my bedroom and waited, knowing exactly what
would happen next.
I didn’t have to wait long. I was the only one who heard her stagger out of her room and stumble
across the carpeted dining room to the door of my bedroom. I was standing in the middle of the room, in
my pajamas, completely unafraid. The
look on Margaret’s face was one of pure hatred which probably matched my own
expression. She lurched into me and her
hands went around my throat. As her
fingers closed and began to squeeze, I shoved my arms through hers and pushed
her arms apart at the same time I was twisting and forcing her back against the
wall and then to the floor. As she fell,
she grabbed hold the Venetian blinds covering the room’s only window and pulled
them from the wall. They hit the floor
with a crash and the next thing I knew Richard and Georgiana were in the room
pulling me off of her.
Neither Margaret nor I welcomed the intrusion. As I was being pulled back, I was struggling
to retain my grip on her while, in some part of my brain that seemed to be
detached from my body and from the violence that was happening, I was calmly
thinking of those objects within reach that I could use to bash in her
skull. For her part, Margaret was just
as unwilling to disengage and as we were pulled apart her nails were digging
into my arms as hard as my fingers were digging into hers. When the encounter ended I had five bleeding
claw marks on each arm running from a little above my elbows to a point midway
down my forearms.
The filthy cat might have lacked a soul but she did have
claws.
The following day, Richard and his sister from the nearby
town of
Haverhill
drove Georgiana and I back to
Northampton
. I was told that my mother had had a “nervous
breakdown” and had been hospitalized. It
would be six or eight months before she would appear once more in my life. I would never see Richard again.
I have no idea if Richard Miller was gay or not. If he wasn’t before he married Margaret, I
can certainly understand why he might have become so after their marriage. In any case, his orientation was as supremely
unimportant to me then as it is now.
One of the biggest myths and misunderstandings about
homosexuals is the widely held belief among homophobes and ignorant “liberals”
that gay men are sexually attracted to children. It’s on a par with the belief that swallowing
watermelon seeds can cause death because it can lead to the growth of
watermelons in your stomach or that Jews eat Christian babies to celebrate
their holy days. (I’ve also heard that
atheists and Satanists have also been known to consume baby Christians during
their celebrations. Fortunately or
unfortunately, depending on your religious persuasion, non-believers like me
suffer a chronic shortage of superstitious excuses to celebrate so Christians
can relax. For now, at least, their children
are safe.)
Richard Miller may or may not have been gay. Regardless of his orientation, he was a
caring and gentle man who I believe would have loved me and been an excellent
father to me had he been given an opportunity. The tragedy for both of us is that he was never given that opportunity.
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