Living Arrangements

40

What's a mother to do when her plans don't pan out?

The apartment had always been temporary, but not in the way it turned out to be. By Spring of Nineteen Seventy-Six, I had settled into the big bedroom and I had even gotten a modular shelving system which you could choose how it fit together. I used one section for a bed table between the two beds and the rest made a blocky pyramid shape for the far wall of the room which finally left no more empty looking areas. By May, mother rewarded me with a small black & white television set for the room and it fit nicely on the top shelf of the unit. The following month, I discovered the trick of the 'selfless gift' of the T.V.: It would now be her room.

Her three pieces of furniture were moved into the area where the big round throw rug had been while mine was moved piece by piece into the now empty smaller bedroom. The bed had to once again be stacked into bunk beds with my pieces of furniture squirreled into the handful of available corners. She kept the shelving system and the T.V. though I needed to clear my stuff and put it into boxes as I didn't have shelves in the smaller room. After a year of slowly expanding my belongings to fit in the large room, my stuff now seemed cramped in the other room whereas mother's, which had just fit the smaller room, now looked lost in the large room.

Mother explained that we were doing this because Joe, the store owner, was separating from his wife and would soon be moving in with us and bring his son, William. William would be taking the lower bunk of my bed and the larger bedroom would soon be full because of Joe's stuff when he moved in. Mother also bought a large brown faux leather recliner for the living area of the first floor and the original third chair of the living room set was pinched into the smaller bedroom with me. It was nice having a club chair in my bedroom as I had never had one before, but it now meant a bit of careful maneuvering when crossing the room.

In July, mother arranged a play date for William and me which was the rare time I had seen him outside of school since second grade five years earlier. But this play date was nothing more than Joe arriving at the apartment with William; mom and I got into his car and we drove to an out of town burger stand for lunch. Once done, we returned to the apartment where mom and Joe talked downstairs while she had me show William around upstairs. About a half hour later Joe left with William and that was the last of it. She later told me that Joe's wife wouldn't let him leave without taking William and mother didn't want to deal with William. I suspect in reality Joe had never signed-up for the deal and mother set-up the lunch date saying it was at my request. Once we'd been sent upstairs, mother had lobbied Joe about how well the lunch went and how he should move in, and he declined. To me, that theory makes more sense. But it is just my theory.

For New Years Nineteen Seventy-Seven, mother decided it was silly having the large room mostly empty to herself and me stuffed into the smaller room and we swapped back to how it had been, only this time I had the chair in the large room along with the rest of my original two bed layout. I also got to keep the television.

While it was nice to have the black & white T.V. in my bedroom, mother was so rarely home during the early evenings or Sunday afternoons that I had plenty of time to watch the color set on the main floor, so it sat mostly unused in the large bedroom until my thirteenth birthday. For that year's twenty dollars and my additional ten, I discovered a video game console I could afford at a capital city department store and snatched it up. Featuring 'Pong' and the single player version called 'Squash', it also had a plastic gun and you could do target practice. The pong dot would wander around the dark screen and you'd aim and press the trigger button and if the light sensor in the gun saw white, you scored a point. When Luke would visit my house we'd play this and he marveled at how good I was at it as I most always scored. In reality, I had accidentally found out that aiming at the white wall behind the T.V. worked just as well as aiming at the dot, and the white wall didn't move around either. I'm so evil.

If Joe wasn't going to move in, mother decided to make the apartment his full service retreat away from home. Specifically, as the branch grocery store was open Friday evenings, mother would take the evenings off to prepare dinner for 'us'. Since moving into the apartment, I had been on my own for food preparation, the only exceptions being when other family members had visited during the holidays. But now mother was actually making dinner for 'us', meaning her & Joe... and I was welcome to join. The most common two meals were fondue, where we could stick various small bits of food into boiling oil or melted cheese, and 'True Italian Spaghetti'. For the latter, mother explained that Joe had told her that true Italian spaghetti sauce was very chunky with clumps of vegetables and chicken and so she made that for him. These dinners lasted for about six months, then Joe started to find excuses not to come anymore. Mother would prepare the meal and we'd sit and wait for Joe to come. Then she'd call to find out when he'd get there and then a couple hours later we'd eat without him. She stopped making Friday night dinners after three weeks of this and returned to 'work' on those evenings instead.

We settled back to the old practice of once a month for Fridays, Joe would take us to the burger stand out of town. Over the four years I'd see this stand expand, starting out as a box with two serving windows in front and a couple of picnic tables to the side. First they made a back room with tables and chairs protected from the weather where you could have something fancy like burger patties without the buns as if it were therefore a ground steak dinner on a paper plate. Then a true dining room was built in where the picnic tables had been. Half high walls and a roof, it was enclosed with windows all around making a rather nice space with full dinner tables and a really expanded menu featuring items other than burgers and fries. By the time the four years had come to an end a chain had bought them out and it was officially a full service restaurant. Once that happened, Joe no longer wanted to go there, perhaps because it was too public, and we instead went to a dank greasy spoon room attached to a small interstate highway side-motel. Obviously intended for truckers, I wondered if this was where mother and Joe had been coming too over the years when 'staying at the store late to count the money'. Given the atmosphere, I soon bowed out of joining these dinners and any pretense of being a 'family' disappeared.

Actually, as a side note, during those four years the kids in the apartment town took it as 'common sense' that I was Joe's illegitimate kid. This impression was enhanced when my Iroquois nose hump sprouted in my preteens and they took it to be an Italian nose. It turns out generations of Native American actors had made a living playing Italian mobsters in the movies and on the small screen.

By the Spring of Nineteen Seventy-Nine, mother had realized that this was all that her life with Joe would be and she started house hunting. There were a few I could see living in, but mother compared the color-painted or wall-papered walls of those houses to the bright white walls of the apartment and found them wanting. And in fact, she found her life of the past few years wanting and prospective future as well.

Suddenly, I was told we were moving to Colorado.

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Talking Too Much

37

One thing was clear after I'd told mom of my 'situation', regular visits to the doctor came to a halt. To be honest I might have found that a good thing as much as my mother had felt it necessary. By the end of the school year, it was quite clear to me that what was happening to my body must be puberty related, just not in anyway I'd come to expect. And yet, what if my mother took me to see the doctor after my thirteenth birthday revelation? What would he have made of 'the situation'? What would have been his recommendations? Being thirteen, those choices would have been whatever mother would have wanted, I wouldn't have found any say in the matter. By keeping things a secret, while it was a disconcerting situation to be in, it allowed me time to slowly consider it and what this meant to me while holding onto the semblance of normality and continuity that school provided.

Lying in bed at night, I'd think about this and what the likely fall out was. I concluded I'd never be able to have any children, then what would be the point of getting married? Beyond wanting to be an astronaut, I had never planned out my future of marriage and kids and the like. I had just assumed that these things would come into my life when they found me. As a result, losing marriage and kids as options didn't have a big emotional impact on me, it just became a fact for me. Some might say there was always adoption, but at that time in history even mixed race couples were having problems being allowed to adopt, how could someone with my 'situation' be allowed?

After learning research skills for the eighth grade term paper, I spent the final quarter of eighth grade in the library applying those skills to find out anything I could about my 'situation'. Unfortunately the school library didn't have any information on any such thing, the closest I could find was information on Renée Richards. A Navy man transsexual who became a woman professional tennis player, information on her was, oddly enough, available at the school's library as they carried back issues of Sports Illustrated magazine. But the more I read about her, the less it seemed to have to do with me.

As with the previous years, I continued inviting friends over for the Friday night to Saturday sleep overs. When on the camping trip with Pete's family in the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Four, Pete and I had shared a tent and after getting into our own sleeping bags, we chatted for a while before going to sleep. With the sleep overs at the apartment, we'd kept up the tradition and one of these nights, early into the school year, I had brought up the subject of how girls and boys were different. What would it be like versus being a man? I doubt Pete suspected why I was pondering these questions, though by the following morning I concluded that had been a dumb thing to have brought up and made sure I didn't make that error again.

By this time, mother had taken up hitting me. The first time it happened was a school morning in the Fall when I was getting ready for school and my mother for work. I entered the kitchen to go to a cabinet and get something for breakfast, she was there and abruptly hit me in the face. Stunned, I asked what that had been for, what had I done? But she was silent and continued getting ready for work as if nothing had happened. Then a couple days later it happened again, another hit completely out of the blue, this time a punch to the shoulder blade. Again, no reason was given, my mother didn't say a thing, just kept on as if deaf to my questions. Christ! As I type this it occurs to me this was where I had gotten my tactic from when I pulled the 'Intro To Algebra' card at the end of eighth grade. When the adviser told me to put it back and followed me for a bit demanding that, I had just gone on with what I was doing as if he wasn't there and as such he didn't know what to do. The lesson was, the easiest way not to get into an argument with someone is simply not to respond to them.

Anyway, from my mother hitting me without explanation, I eventually concluded that it was due to my 'situation' and this was my punishment for it happening. By Winter, as there was no way of stopping these randomly timed hits, I instead learned methods of avoiding them. Rather than sit at the end of the couch near the end of the stairs and other chair, I'd start sitting at the end that was in a corner, and pulled in the coffee table to effectively act as a wall between me and any passer by. I stopped ever walking in front of her and instead stayed behind as she then couldn't see me to aim a blow. When in the passenger seat of the car, I would sit on the outside edge of the seat with my back against the door, thus keeping my mother's hands in view, allowing me to fend off any budding blow. By the end of the school year, I'd taken up no longer riding with her to the branch store and just always walked to the bus stop behind the town hall. I'd stay in my bedroom until she left for work in the morning, then rush down, grab a bit for breakfast and walk quickly to the bus stop all the way from the apartment.

Yet, with all of these tricks, she would still find moments to hit me when I wasn't expecting it. By the start of my Freshman year of High School, I had realized that the best way to handle her blows was to recoil my body at the first touch, thus if she was aiming for the face, I would start to turn my head making her hit glance off. If I felt a touch to my shoulder, I would immediately sink it in to reduce the impact of the presumed blow. By the winter break of my Freshman year, this had developed into a full-on tick where, whenever she moved her hands, I would start to recoil only to notice she was reaching for something on a near by table. One day it was the salt at a restaurant and my mother demanded I stop it. How? These new demands that I stop flinching whenever she moved her hands or came close to me meant nothing as I would just end up in her blows once again resulting in red marks and bruises. By the following Spring my mother had figured out what she had to do to stop my flinching and that was to stop hitting me. While this made the most difference, even to this day if I get an unexpected touch, or a hand moves quickly into my field of vision, I find I will still flinch or recoil sometimes, resulting in an awkward moment between me and the innocent person moving their hands or patting me on the back.

Toward the end of the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Eight, I found a new friend who had moved into a near by apartment complex with his family. 'Ed', a year older than me, had already finished his Freshman year of High School and as I was heading there in just a few weeks, he became my fount of wisdom. He was the one with the sister he described as being 'big-boned'. Once High School commenced, he decided to show me the skills he had learned in his first year of High School and asked me what I wanted to be. An astronaut of course. I had stumped him as he had learned how to look up college courses based on a chosen profession, but there was no college course to become an astronaut at the time. But in this case, I knew that astronauts had most all started out as pilots for the military and thus I was aiming to go to the Air Force Academy and, if I didn't get in there, my back-up plan was to join the regular Air Force. This worked as a point of reference and he took me to the library to pull out the encyclopedias and look both of those up. In the case of the Air Force Academy, one would have to get a letter of recommendation from a Senator, but not so for just the Air Force. While Ed thought that would be the hardest hurdle for me to pass, my eyes got stuck on the fact that either option required first passing a physical examination by a doctor.

Given my 'situation': How the Hell was I going to do that...?

 

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Uniform

34 

Once my mother had gotten comfortable telling degrading stories about me to my face, this soon meant she was comfortable saying them to any friend I might have visit. By the end of Nineteen Seventy-Six, she started telling a story of the time she dislocated her knee soon after moving to the family home. This happened when she was in the yard and fell to the ground and found she couldn't get back up. I was with her, she said, around two or three years old, and the rest of the family were away at a game. In response to her being stranded and in pain, she told me I picked up rocks and threw them at her.

Now this story had something to it that the other stories she would tell didn't: Physical evidence. She had kept the ACE bandage once used to wrap-up her relocated knee in the medicine cabinet at the family home, and it was one of the things she had brought with us during the move and put it into the apartment's medicine cabinet. I remember when I was younger seeing it in the family home and one day asking her what it was. She told me it was the bandage used to wrap-up her knee after it was dislocated, but she didn't tell me any details at that time.

By early the next calendar year, she had started telling this story to any friend I would bring over. This was exasperating but I didn't know what I could do about it. I couldn't call her a liar because I didn't know if it was a lie or not, but at the same time I had grown up hearing her tell bogus stories about me to other people in the next room, let alone derogatory stories about other people to me that I had doubts about. Then the solution occurred to me, she had a small brown birthmark on her forehead. When she would tell the story to my friends in the future, I would seem to acknowledge the story by saying, ''That's how she got that bruise on her forehead.'' Mother seemed befuddled by that response, but at the same time didn't know what to do beyond giving me a glare. And it was effective for my friends as they didn't know if that was another detail to the story that she had told me privately and if so, how could she still have a bruise after so many years? A grain of salt was added to the story in their minds.

The morning after I told mother of the strange thing that was happening to me, I found that ACE bandage on my bed. I picked it up, wondering why it was there and asked mom. She said, ''It's for...'' and she motioned toward her chest. It took me a moment to guess what she meant, then a longer time trying to figure out how to use it. Wrapped around my budding breasts it did help with the pointiness and chaffing, but not as much with the bulging.

Along with the breasts, my hips had started to fill out and I was having problems pulling on my pants over them. As it was normal to need larger clothes as one grew up, this didn't cause any concern when I said I needed new pants. We went out and looked for some and I found a problem. Guy pants are largely the same size from hip to waist, girls' taper inwards from the hip to the waist as the waist is usually smaller. By getting guy pants that made it past my hips, there was a lot of loose space between my mid section and the waistband. This would let the pants slide off, not an ideal situation, but if I got a pair too tight on the hips that might show more of them than I felt was good. I got the larger pairs of pants and solved the sliding-off problem by having one or both hands in my pockets when walking. While it looked casual, it was, actually, so I could hold up my pants.

The following week, I was at the family home for the mid-week father visit and noticed the various bits of army equipment leftovers that he kept on shelves at the top of the basement stairs. Looking it over, I caught a glimpse of a belt. Unlike typical belts with holes, this was a continuous band of woven material without holes but with a pinching clasp allowing the belt to be set to any length needed. This was perfect for my needs and I took it and used it on my pants. While it worked, it gave the waist a draw-string bag look, but this was easily solved by no longer having my tee-shirts tucked into the pants.

When it came time to go back to school for eighth grade, I spent the week before looking in the mirrored sliding doors of the apartment closet. Earlier I had found my baggiest tee-shirts had been the ones with pockets sown on the left side and that leaning forward for pictures let the material drape and hide the chest-level bulges. While I could lean forward sitting at school desks, I couldn't very well walk down the school hallways while leaning forward all the time. Then I realized how flexible shoulders are and I could roll mine forward, this pulled the material from my chest and it draped to a flat surface.

Still, this looked rather dorky with my arms hanging before me like this and I put them in my pockets. This kind of worked as it looked like my shoulders were rolled forward so I could reach my pockets. Yet with both hands in my pockets it still looked a little funny. Also, how was I going to carry my books? One hand out, I grabbed my new notebook folder for the year and held it, first to my hip, but that didn't allow my shoulder to be rolled forward enough, so I held the notebook in front of my pants pocket. That worked, but I realized it would be better to always use the right hand for this as holding the books allowed for my shoulder to be rolled forward more than if I had a hand in a pocket. With the left, if the draped shirt should blow back as I walked, the shirt pocket would distract from any bulge that might touch from underneath.

Everything seemed set for my return to school look, but the draped, hanging shirt front still seemed to stick out as people's shirts normally touch the front of their body. The final touch was when I remembered back to second grade and the twin girls at lunch with one of them bulging out her tummy in order to pretend she was pregnant. If I bulged out my stomach, it would make contact with the lower half of the shirt and I could even use that as another distraction by peoples eyes noticing it rather than anything that might be going on at chest level. But how to do it?

I could loosen my stomach muscles, but that didn't cause much of a bulging tummy; I needed to push it out as well as loosen the muscles. I realized that as I breathed in the chest filled and expanded, but if I tightened my chest, the diaphragm made the abdomen push out instead. And I had it! While having my diaphragm lowered like this all the time reduced the amount I could breath in and out, it wasn't as if I'd be panting walking up and down the halls at school.

Staring in the mirror to check out the final look, I felt this could work.

It became the uniform for the next decade of my life.

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The Situation

33

In my second to last year working at the main grocery store before moving to Colorado, I went for my break. The break room was the old upstairs apartment at the store where Joe and Dorcus had once lived, to get there one had to walk into the back room, past the long dairy cooler room, then turn left to walk past the sides of the dairy cooler and freezer room to reach the stairs. Once I went through the swinging doors on the start of this route, 'Betsy', a cashier, and her boyfriend were also taking a break and had settled atop a pallet of grocery boxes by the far corner of the dairy cooler. She normally wore thick lensed glasses but at this moment wasn't, for some reason. She shouted toward me, ''What sex are you?''

This question stunned me and I didn't know how to respond. So I chose to ignore it and kept on walking toward them on my way to the break room. ''What sex are you?'' she again shouted as I approached. And I ignored it. When I reached the corner where they were, I turned left toward the stairs and Betsy was dismayed because I hadn't said anything. Her boy friend told her who I was and she explained that, without her glasses she had been trying to guess who I was and she started-out with the most basic question of asking what sex I was. But I pretended not to hear her explanation, too, as I had pretended not to hear her question.

I went up the steps to the break room and found it empty. And I broke into a cold sweat and shook. You see, it wasn't that I thought she was trying to insult me with her question, but simply that I didn't know the answer...

By the last two weeks of seventh grade, my nipples started to hurt and chafe against my tee shirt. Lying on my stomach made them hurt more, so I stopped doing that. As I lived in a family that didn't talk about things unless we really had to, I just kept this to myself. A few weeks after school had let out, Uncle Ronny and Aunt Harriet came for a visit and as part of the visit was the obligatory picture that my mother took of me posing with them. When the picture was developed I saw myself in it and was shocked to see two round mounds pushing out from my tee shirt at chest level. Checking in the privacy of the bathroom mirror I discovered that my breasts were developing.

This came as a complete surprise to me as I thought I was a boy. I mean, I'd been peeing standing up for all those years! But even that was becoming more of a problem as the tissue around what I'll be calling the 'nub' was expanding and covering it up. But to me, that was the least of my problems as the breasts were the most obvious. Picking through my apartment closet, I discovered that my larger tee shirts were best as they were baggy and I could lean forward to keep them from clinging onto my chest. This also helped with the chafing problem.

Still, when time came for more pictures I felt the need to play it safe and lean forward and rest my hands on my knees if I was seated. When not seated, I would make a face, thus people's eyes would be drawn to my face in the picture, not my chest.

With the top half of the situation addressed, I found that all that extra tissue developing by the nub was very pinchy and uncomfortable. This was improved when I was walking with mother through a department store on one of our Saturday errand runs and saw that the guys' underwear section not only had briefs on display, but baggy looking boxers as well. As the baggy tee shirts seemed to help, I asked mother to buy me a set of the boxers. They helped too and so briefs were a thing of the past.

Summer time would have been the perfect time to have made new local friends in the area, but given my uncertainty about what was happening to me, I pretty much just kept to the tree house or apartment when not at my father's or working at the store.

August came and we reached my Thirteenth birthday. As I had turned down the offer to have another day of friends gather at the apartment, my mother arranged to have a gathering at my eldest brother's new apartment which he shared with his girl friend and my not as older brother. My not as older brother had moved into the family home when he returned from his Wyoming trip and taken a job at the main grocery store to save up money and go to College. He started out at a dorm room that Fall, which reminded me of the back room my maternal grandfather Bumpa had been in when he first went to a nursing home, but then moved into an off-campus apartment for the remainder of that year. College hadn't worked out and he returned to live at my eldest brother's apartment rather than move back in with our father at the family home. He had joined eldest brother's painting business and they all had used the apartment to experiment with color schemes and styles. With the fresh paint their apartment, the upper floor of an old house, was really homey unlike mom's apartment with its white painted walls, or the old family home with its now faded and peeling wall paper.

After dinner we sat at the couch with me in the center as I was given and unwrapped my presents. The present from my not as older brother was the ''Wings Over America'' three album set by Paul McCartney. Given my confusion by this, my brother explained that Paul McCartney was in the Beatles to which I became excited and said, ''Oh, a new Beatles album!'' No, it was explained further, that since the Beatles had broken up, Paul was now in a new band, 'Wings', and this was an album of their live concert. ''oh,'' I said and put it aside with suspicion. Though it turned out to be a great gift that introduced me to a new band that I came to love as the years rolled on.

To commemorate the event of my birthday, my mother took a picture of us sitting side by side on the couch and I was stuck. She was taking the picture from the side and if I leaned forward to make my tee shirt drape, it would block the view of a sibling, so I made a face just as she snapped the picture. A self developing 'instant' picture she only saw my face once it became clear and she was not happy. But she withheld her displeasure until we reached the apartment after we left my brothers'.

I went straight upstairs to put away my new gifts and she came up after me and demanded to know 'why I had taken up ruining her pictures' that Summer. At first hesitant, she insisted I tell her, and so I did. She seemed confused by my explanation so I lifted my shirt and showed her. She became quiet and pale. Then she told me to keep it a secret and not to tell anybody.

She avoided taking more pictures of me for the next few years and that suited me just fine.

Four years later I was in the break room at the main grocery store still stumped as to what I should say when people asked me what sex I was. Then it struck me to pull out my driver's license where it had an 'M'. So, legally, I was male. With the full force of my legal identification backing me up, when asked or filling out a form in the future, I would state 'Male.'

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Friends

30

New friends Brad and Mathew lived in the same town as the apartment. New friend Tim lived in my home town.

And then there was another new friend, a 'John'. He was a year older than me and lived a couple houses down from the apartment on the way to the back of the town hall where the school buses would meet. After the first couple of months making the morning walk to the bus waiting area, it was obvious seeing him take the same walk a bit before me or a bit after me. One day it was pretty much at the same time as me and so we walked together and chatted. He was a friendly boy also interested in a new friend near his home and that was that. He visited my apartment a few times, I visited his home a few times, but mostly we'd meet to roam the surrounding woods and chat.

Still, there were the old home town friends as well and I don't know if it was my mother or me that came up with the idea that, since I had the spare bed in my room and it was too far to drive for just an afternoon visit, how about an overnight visit much like I was doing overnight visits to dad's house during the week. It was thought best to do these for Friday/Saturday where there was no worry of homework that needed to be done and it provided most of the following day for visiting and play. Once this plan was settled on, the first person I invited was Pete. Despite the fact that he had become distant at school, I was hoping the overnighter would mend fences.

He accepted and rode the bus to the apartment town with me after school. The branch grocery store was open into the evening on Fridays and so my mother worked late and then had to spend sometime with Joe after closing hours for stuff, so we pretty much had unsupervised free time from the walk to the apartment after the bus reached town until around nine thirty when my mother would get home. Frozen pizzas and making popcorn kept us fed as we visited and maybe played a game or watched a little Friday night television.

Sure enough, Pete's and my friendship seemed to be back to where it was in the previous years as we spent the following day exploring the woods behind the apartment, seeing the tree house, chatting and playing some more games. Mother actually made lunch for his visit. Then we got to take him home around three in the afternoon so he'd be there in time for dinner. All and all the sort of reunion I had originally hoped for once school had started and I could see my old friends again... But then the following Monday at school, it was the same distant Pete as he had started out the school year, again I presumed to not jeopardize his new friendship with the upperclassman. And yet, he was back to being my old friend again the next time I invited him for an overnighter. I, myself, had to work hard to switch how I interacted with people when locations changed. I wondered if it was easy for Pete, it seemed to be.

Given the success of this, I invited Jonathan for an overnighter and it was equally successful, though he had remained friendly during school hours as well so I hadn't any doubts before hand. Things roughly worked out to three overnighters with Pete that school year and two with Jonathan. By the following years Jonathan would be less able to come as his father would progressively want him to spend more and more time on his studies at home, which included doing homework Friday evenings while Friday classes were still fresh in his mind. So with Jonathan down to once a year for an overnighter, I thought I'd invite new friend Tim. Also a success, he reciprocated by inviting me over to his home a few weekends later.

Unlike me having a spare bed in my room, Tim shared his bedroom with his younger brother, so he was displaced and I got his bed... Which included a plastic under sheet as his brother had problems wetting the bed. Oh, kinda icky, I thought but I toughed it out sleeping in the bed. The following morning his mother made a fried egg breakfast for us, though apparently his family liked the whites of their eggs runny. It kind of grossed me out and I just ate the edges around the eggs and avoided the less cooked centers. The toast was good and having juice for breakfast was a novelty for me. Then, unlike with my parents, or Pete's and Jonathan's parents even, Tim's parents didn't like us leaving the yard of his home, so roving the woods was out and this was especially disconcerting as my family home was just a quarter mile walk away and I would have loved the chance to have shown it to Tim. So we did a couple of things in his yard and played games in his home and visited, but by the time three o'clock came along I was ready to be back at the apartment and have more freedom. I wondered if this was how my other two friends had felt during their overnighters to my place, but I concluded 'not' as they came for return visits over the years. In the case of Tim, I was afraid of inviting him back for another overnighter for fear that I would get a return invite and wouldn't know how to turn it down without offending him or his parents. Tim and I would just remain school-time friends for the rest of Middle School and then just acquaintances by High School.

My routine during the school year, for those days I was at the apartment town, was to return on the bus and go to the store and work for two and a half hours until it closed at six and then get a ride home with my mother. She soon encouraged me to only work two hours and walk home as she and Joe had to 'count the money' after the store closed and she knew I'd be bored hanging around during that. So I would work at the store two hours, then grab myself a frozen pizza for dinner and walk to the apartment. On Fridays when I didn't have friends over, I would work three hours due to the store's extended hours, have Saturdays off as did my mother, then work Sunday mornings as, unlike the main store, the branch store was open then and made a fair deal of money as the town included quite a few working class single parents who couldn't shop the weekday hours.

For this work week, I'd get handed a five dollar bill and I was rich! This I cycled into school lunches so I could finally find out what my other school friends had been enjoying all these years, yet I still had plenty of money left over. There was a branch bank across the street from the branch grocery store and my mother would go there from time to time. So one day I took that week's five dollar bill and asked to open an account. I was eleven at the time and the bank personnel met this with some good humor. The answer was 'maybe,' but they'd have to check with my parents first. I told them that my mother worked across the street at the store and so they opened-up the phone book and called. Being just across the street, my mother came from the store and quickly signed some paperwork and left and I completed the rest and had my own bank account with passbook showing my account balance. This spent most of its time in my keepsake drawer until it was time to deposit more money or less often withdraw some money. This was my primary bank account until I left New England and moved to Colorado seven years later.

For my twelfth birthday, my mother wasn't able to assemble the family gathering as she had the previous year, so she recommended I think of some friends to invite, though they'd have to be local ones, not from the old home town given the driving time. Further, when my mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I just told her money. The previous Christmas had been a disappointment for me as my wish list of things to have got translated into generic knock-off versions of those things. By having cash in hand, I would be able to make sure I got exactly what I wanted. She gave me twenty dollars the next time we visited the capital city, and I pulled another ten of my own from the bank. While she spent her time visiting the various stores on main street, I studied the aisles of the toys-only store on the back side of the block. Seeing all the things I'd like to have, I did the math and figured-out the combination of games and toys that would perfectly use up my money. Mostly games as I knew I'd be able to have a group of friends over for my birthday the next Saturday. This was my most rewarding birthday haul and I insisted on cash from mother for all my future birthdays... It would just be two.

As an additional surprise, when my mother came to pick me up at the toy store, she wanted to go back to the department store on the corner as they had adult sized ten speed bicycles on sale and she was going to get me one! While I could only pick from the style on sale, I did get to pick the color and we then had the scarey time at the loading dock wondering if we could actually fit the box of the disassembled bike into her car or have to leave it behind. We finally got it in, though the trunk had to be tied partially closed. The next day I assembled the bike on my own and was riding it around the apartment parking lot that afternoon. Unlike last year's bike, this one fit me without having to raise the seat and handle bars high into the air. When my father picked me up for my midweek overnighter, my mother recommended I show him my new bike and enthusiastically I did, riding round the parking lot for him to see. My mother smirked as my father frowned, then he got to load the bike he had bought for me the year before into the back of his wagon so I could now have it at my old home.

For my birthday, I had settled on inviting over John from down the street and Brad and got them confirmed. I wanted to invite Beth over but, as I had friends of both sexes when I was younger, I had noticed an implied division of the sexes as I had reached my preteens. So instead I was thinking I'd invite Mathew... but when my father brought me back to the apartment the following day my mother said she'd seen two boys with their families at the store and invited them! Oh, ah... okay then. Mathew was now out as she said that would be too many kids. The good news, though, was I knew the other two boys from school and liked them so my brief fear, that one or both of the boys might be from the final quarter of Science class, was dispelled. When the day came and the boys arrived we pulled-out the pile of games I had gotten the weekend before only to find that they were for 'Up To Four Players.' We debated how to handle this as with the boys and me there were five. As we began to settle on the thought that one of us would sit out each game as we went through playing all of them, mother intervened and pointed out that, as a good host, I should let them play the games and I could be the banker: “After all, you'll have plenty of time to play the games later, yourself.” It turned out most of the games didn't need a banker and I got to spend from noon into early evening watching the four boys play through the various games I had gotten for my birthday. I discovered the games were not very fun when I later tried to play them alone...

The following year, when my mother asked if I wanted to have another group of boys over for my birthday, I said ''No.''

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Poison In The Brain

29

What happens when someone urinates in your mind?

The Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Three, once mother had moved into my sister's old bedroom at the family home, she would invite me in and then use me as her confidante to tell me everything wrong with my father, and sometimes how terrible Aunt Harriet or Dorcus Giacomo were. Once we had moved to the apartment in the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Five, this was not something that just happened in the bedroom anymore but the whole apartment and expanded beyond just derogatory comments about a couple of people, but all the neighbors in the apartment complex, various regular customers at the branch grocery store, some of my siblings, and of course my father, as always.

Whereas before I could just leave her bedroom to get a break from these stories, with the apartment the only escape was to be at the tree house or in the woods. The woods were better as with the tree house she could check for me there and tell me to come back inside where she could once again use me as a captive audience. One time I told her I didn't want to hear any more and left the apartment to go into the woods, only to find on my return that she had locked me out. Despite being in the apartment she ignored my ringing of the doorbell and knocking on the back glass doors and I ended-up spending the next few hours stuck outside, unsure if I'd ever be let back in.

Lesson learned: I just fell into the pattern of trying to do other stuff, like playing with building blocks while my mother droned-on about how terrible everything and everyone else was and of course I was supposed to remember not to tell anyone what she was saying. Of course remembering what I wasn't supposed to say meant remembering everything she was telling me and keeping in mind not to tell anyone. This crap would circle 'round and 'round my head like a toxic whirlpool and I was slowly drowning.

Once skiing season had started it occurred to me I could avoid a weekend dose of poison by staying at the family home and joining my father to the ski area when he went to work and I could ski. Having grown-up skiing at the park, this would have been a typical thing to do during winter and my mother couldn't find a reason to say no. But the months and months of stories of other people's incapabilities and inadequacies had taken their toll and once I got to the top of one of the lower slopes I discovered as I looked down the slope that I was terrified to go down it. I had grown-up zipping down these slopes, but now at age eleven, I couldn't. Confused and panicked by this discovery, all I could do was take off my skies and walk down the side of the slope as I fought off a case of nervous shakes.

I spent about an hour at the base of the mountain trying to gather myself and come to grips with the whole silliness of my being afraid to ski. Eventually I steeled my nerves, put my skies back on, and decided to start with the gentlest slope of the lower mountain. At the top of the slope I decided, rather than facing down the slope and skiing to the bottom so far away, I would ski across the width of the slope thus just seeing the nearby side as I slowly slid across and came to a stop. Then there was the scary moment when I'd have to briefly face the length of the slope as I turned one hundred and eighty degrees around, then slowly slid to the other side of the slope. Fortunately, the easiest slopes weren't in demand by the majority of the skiers and if another skier was coming I'd just wait at the side of the slope until they passed, then slowly slide to the other side. Doing this slow zigzag I reached the bottom of the slope. I had survived it just fine and went for a second run, this time not coming to a complete stop as I turned at each side. By midday I had built-up enough confidence where I could ski with the direction of the slope at its flattest points. By the end of the day I had finally worked my way up to taking the easiest slope that went down the full mountain.

Rattled by this whole experience, I decided not to ski the following day, but as my father felt I was too young to be left alone at the house, oblivious of the fact that mother had been leaving home alone for years, he had my mother pick me up and I was back at the apartment. I down hill skied very rarely from that day onward.

Soon after my eleventh birthday, my not as older brother decided to move out of the family home before he got his official disowning from dad. He took his savings from his various part-time jobs over the years and left for an extended visit with my sister out west. His plan after the visit was to go to Jackson Hole Wyoming and find a job as part of the ski industry there. It turned out many people also went to Jackson Hole for this only to find that those who already lived in Jackson Hole got all the jobs. He ended-up returning to the family home by Christmas.

That Christmas, for some reason my eldest brother decided to make some two by four furniture and asked to do so at the house using the basement workshop. By this time my father's disowning of my eldest brother seemed to have softened to the point that he was willing to let him do it. Perhaps it was also partially the case that he had felt a little lonely in the otherwise empty house as Pappy was in his apartment during the daytime. The two by four furniture comprised three coffee tables, colored through wood burning then sealed with a glossy clear coat. Once completed they were placed in the empty space where the dining room table had been, the table itself now at my mother's apartment.

One of these days, visiting my father on his day off, my eldest brother was there and my not as older brother as well. He and I were admiring eldest brother's work when suddenly all of the likely disparagements mother might make about them bubbled up into my mind. Like mental vomit, I fought to keep it inside as my eldest brother and father were wondering what was going on from the living room. Suddenly, all the poisonous things mother had been telling me over the years wanted to escape, but I knew they couldn't. Out of desperation I let the mildest comment of hers that I could think of loose: That my not as older brother ''...wasn't mechanically inclined!'' It burst out and I fled from the room to my bedroom upstairs where I hid until I got it all tamped back down.

By the following Spring, I had come to let the comments my mother made pass right through me and not take them in, personally. It occurred to me that if I didn't hold onto them in the first place, then I couldn't betray them by bringing them up later. This was a useful skill to have learned as the following Fall was when my mother told me about the circumstances of my birth and from that point onward she would feel comfortable directly telling me stories about my own incapabilities and inadequacies and I just let it flow through me and not take it personally.

But like any channel with a constant flow of effluence going through it, the edges of my mind did become stained and moldy over time.

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Joining The Mod Squad

27

At the beginning of sixth grade year, my mother let me know that she had made sure to only move us to a town that went to the same school district as the one I had been in thus, while I might be away from the original home, I would still see all my friends at school. She told me she would never be the type of mother that would take her kids from their school and friends. But of course she had done this with my two older brothers when they moved to the bigger house next to the hayfield a year after I was born. In just a few years, her actions would point-out that lie to me, personally. I would conclude upon reflection that the only reason she picked this town was simply because it was where the branch grocery store was that she worked at.

The Middle School was just in another wing of the building I had been going to in the previous five years, but that building was now twenty miles away, this meant getting up at my not as older brother's high school time to take a bus all the way from the center of this new town to the school building. We would gather behind the town hall where there were two buses, one for the high school building and one for the Middle School. The branch grocery store was just a small walk and a street crossing away, so I either rode with my mother to the store when she went to work, or walk the third mile from the apartment on my own during better weather days. This was the first time I'd taken a bus without knowing anyone on it. In the previous years I'd always had the same bus driver so at the very least I'd have her as a familiar face, but this time I kind of had to guess which bus to take. It was pretty easy as the younger kids were boarding one and the older kids the other. The drive to the school was up the interstate highway, a ride I'd already become quite familiar with during the summer drives when my mother was temporarily working with the night crew at the main grocery store.

Though in the same building, the middle school wing had its own entrance by the new gymnasium where we would gather on the fold-out bleachers. In time I would become familiar with some of these new kids that I rode the bus with and we'd chat, tell jokes, and horse around as we waited until the first bell rang to signal the start of the school day. One time a kid was showing another how he couldn't catch a dollar that was right between his fingers. The kid would hold the dollar from the end with his thumb and index finger, while the kid taking the challenge would be allowed to hold his open thumb and index finger horizontally with the dollar hanging in between. The first kid would let go and the trick was to close one's thumb and finger fast enough to catch the bill. And they couldn't. The story was one's nerves from the eyes to the brain then to the arm were just too slow to register the bill was falling and then order the fingers to close in time. After watching other kids fail at this, I took the challenge... And I caught the bill. This stunned the couple of kids watching and I feigned keeping the bill for a moment just to tease, then handed it back and they wanted to see me catch it again. So I did. A couple more kids gathered to watch this and then the bell sounded. In the following mornings those kids would be trying to make their fingers close faster so they could catch the bill as I could. I didn't tell them my secret: Rather than watching for the bill to drop, I watched the holding kid's forearm. The skin over his muscles would start to move before you could see his fingers loosen so as I saw the skin of his arm shift, I would then close my fingers, grasping the bill a tiny moment after his fingers let go. I was pretty good at Rock/Paper/Scissors, too, which I learned at the same time using the same method. Needless to say, if the challenging kid wore a long sleeved shirt or jacket, I was out of luck.

Sixth grade presented multiple teachers instead of one, each with their own subject matter. To make things easy they called class periods 'mods,' short for modules, and decided to rotate daily when the classes met. So your first class on your first day became your second class on the second day and the last class of the day before was your first class that morning. This was supposedly setup because sixth period -- I'm sorry, mod six -- was an hour and fifteen minutes long, not the fifty minutes long as the other mods. Thus with rotating, each class would have the extended period to teach with on a regular basis. But I just suspected they were screwing with our minds for this first year of Middle School as, by seventh grade, time periods were once again called 'periods' and classes stayed at the same time each day.

Of the seven mods per day, five were for the core classes of 'Social Studies', 'Science', 'English', 'Reading' and 'Math'. The two time periods that didn't rotate were the 'Specials' mod and lunch time/study period mod. Specials were Gym most of the time and Home Economics or Wood Shop. Effectively, to even out the load of sixth graders, half the kids would have Gym Monday, Wednesday, Friday one week, then Tuesday and Thursday the next, while the other half of the kids had the other days for Gym. For 'Home Ec' and 'Shop', the half not going to Gym would be divided again with one quarter of the kids at 'Shop', while the others had 'Home Ec'.

As the school had gotten into trouble in past years by shuffling off the girls to 'Home Ec' and the boys to 'Shop', they now had mixed sex classes which swapped at the half year mark, so I had 'Home Ec' for the first two quarters, then Shop for the last two quarters. While 'Shop' was a natural for me as I had grown up using wood tools at home, 'Home Ec' turned out to be my favorite of the two as it was something new and I got to learn how to cook and sew. For our sewing final project, I decided to make a bean bag chair, but rather than a ball, I was going to make mine a cube to be different... And sewing a cube was a hell of a lot easier to plan out than cutting and sewing the pattern for a sphere. Cooking was a handy skill to learn because, as it turned out, without a family to cook for my mother no longer made dinner once we lived at the apartment, I had to come-up to speed on how to cook for myself.

'Gym' class was with a parent of a classmate, a girl I had known for years and had a play date or two during our Elementary School years. Elementary 'Gym' had been run by our regular teachers over the years, but with middle school gym class we had a professional teacher who would shape us up and expose us to various activities, not just those games played with a dodge ball. Also with this gym class came locker rooms and showers. As the school had gotten into trouble the year before, using the showers now needed the written permission of your parent. As it was biting nails to get my parents to sign anything, it was really easy not to get the written permission to use the showers and so I didn't. Besides, the whole showering with your friends concept seemed kind of weird. So our assigned gym lockers effectively ended-up being used for the pair of shorts we would wear during gym class, then put back once class was over.

Lunch time/study period was just that, a mod that was divided in half with the first half being lunch time and then we'd go to our homerooms for a study period until the next regular class started. Study period could also be used for library time, but we had to sign-out for that so they'd know where we were.

Of course, with Middle School, we got to have our first hallway lockers. While for sixth and seventh grade we had to share, by eighth grade we got to have one to ourselves. For a deposit, you could get a combination lock from the office as our 'lockers' didn't come with 'locks,' but as money was harder to get out of my parents than a permission slip, I just brought a spare lock from home.

Anything I've missed?

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Surroundings

26

After my entire life at one family home, how did I settle into my new surroundings?

To properly set the next four years, I should probably explain the townhouse and the surrounding area. The bottom floor was a concrete pad that had golden shag carpet over it, the stairs and upper floor were smooth hard wood floors. My mother was so fearful of slipping down those steps that she took the two foot wide strips of orange shag from the temporary living room at the house and sliced it up and glued it to each stair step using a vast quantity of white, all-purpose glue. While this insured no one would ever slip off a step, I doubt she got her security deposit back. The remaining strips of orange shag were used to carpet the attached storage shed where the clothes drier was located along with any yard items.

The upstairs was divided into two halves, the front half was the master bedroom which my mother let me have as I ''would have more room to play in,'' but with the bunk beds stacked in one corner with the chest of drawers directly next to it, it left the room very empty. The remaining half of the upstairs floor was cut in half again for the second bedroom which my mother took with the remaining portion sliced up for the bathroom, towel closet and hallway between it all. My mother bought a large round throw rug to put in the master bedroom to take up some of the vast floor space, but it looked rather lonely in the center of the floor, making the room seem that much larger.

Once I had finished the penicillin and regained my strength, I moved from the lower bunk to the excitement of the upper bunk. Before the age of safety rails, one night I rolled in bed only to fall off the edge. My head collided with the chest of drawers while the rest of my body hit the floor. I soon moved the chest of drawers against the wall at the foot of the bed and pulled up the throw rug to the base of the bed to cushion any future falls. By August, the thrill of sleeping on a high bunk had passed and I remembered the bunk bed came as two halves. I took them apart and I put the top half in the corner where the bunk bed had been and the lower half parallel to it halfway down the remaining wall. I slid the throw rug to the center of the smaller open floor space and this made the room look more naturally filled. I had chosen the top bunk half for the corner to use as my bed because its half had shorter legs and sleeping on such a low bed reminded me of the time my eldest brother slept on the mattress in my old childhood bedroom.

The townhouse complex was three buildings of four apartments each, set-up in an 'L' shape, with our apartment in the lower half of the long line. Inside the 'L' was a solid flat parking area with each apartment having enough room to park two cars in front. There were no lines. Between the buildings were large patches of lawn and behind them a smaller ribbon of lawn after which there was a forest. As I had enjoyed the tree houses my brothers had built at the house, my mother had Joe provide some assorted scrap wood so I could build my own tree house in the woods behind the apartments; she had gotten the permission of the landlord she told me. I then spent the next few days scouting the woods for an ideal spot.

The scraps of wood weren't much, so I talked my mother into going to a nearby town's hardware store so I could get a couple two by fours to support the base of the tree house, we also got some nails and a saw. My mother had kept my maternal grandfather's turn of the century hammer after clearing out his house, so she got herself a small toolbox to put it in and a set of screw drivers for use in the apartment. The tree house started out as a small platform between two tress with strips of the scrap wood nailed across to create the floor. With the remaining two by four wood, I created a ladder to get up to the platform, but found it was too short to reach from the ground to the platform. To accommodate this, I nailed one side to one of the trees about halfway between the ground and the tree house floor, the other side of the ladder hung in the open air. While not structurally sound, with my childhood weight it actually held up pretty good. From the platform I surveyed the woods and looked across a large rock touching the two trees I was at and it stretched to a third tree about six feet away. I fantasized about one day having the floor of the tree house reach that third tree, but I didn't have anywhere near enough scrap wood.

Then soon after, the remaining unused scrap wood I had in the backyard disappeared. My mother panicked as she saw the project of the tree house critical to keeping my interest in living at the apartment rather than deciding to move back with dad at the house. In reality I didn't realize I had a choice so she was safe. But still, she called around and found that the landlord's guy who came to mow the lawn assumed it was trash and took it and threw it out. As the landlord had given permission for the tree house to be built, he felt guilty about this and, as he was a house developer, had two four foot by eight foot sheets of half inch thick plywood brought over to replace the scrap wood. I was vastly better off with the deal and we ran to the hardware store to pick up five dollars more of two by fours and I was quickly across that rock and had a solid floor to the third tree and a roof to boot!

For birthdays, while my friends would have parties with lots of other friends, I pretty much just had one friend over, if that. But for my first birthday at the new apartment, my mother wanted to make it big and memorable and insisted that both my brothers attend and even had Uncle Ronny and Aunt Harriet come out. So everyone could come, we celebrated my birthday the Sunday before and we had lunch and cake, and I got to show-off my tree house and my mother took lots of pictures... In fact, that was one of my very few birthdays that pictures had been taken of and had ended-up in the photo album. For that birthday my father had one of my brothers bring a ten speed bicycle as my present. It was in a box and needed some assembly, which my brothers helped with, and it was child sized. While my mother had at first fumed that the bicycle was father's way of upstaging any present she had gotten me, those feelings were soon replaced with shy laughter. As I was just turning eleven, I was already no longer child sized, at least the size the bicycle had been intended for, thus my riding it was a little like the way clowns would ride tiny bicycles at the circus. By the next week I had found a longer handle bar brace pole and bicycle seat and installed them so I could ride with my legs fully extended. The side effect of this, though, was there was the bicycle down by my knees and feet, then about a foot of the extended poles to where my arms and seat were. Still, I was thrilled with it and the first time my father picked me up at the apartment the following month, my mother insisted I ride around the parking lot for him to see. I was more than happy to but, while I did, I noticed my mother smirking as my father frowned.

Once September came and I was going to go back to school, my mother returned to working the day shift at the local branch store and thus we discovered that the apartment complex had a block party every Friday night. The lights and loud music horrified my mother, but by the second Friday they drew me out of the apartment building to see what was going on and I got to meet my neighbors and one of them had a boy, 'Andrew', a few years younger than me whom I would later impress with the tree house and he would become my tag-along buddy whenever I was up to something on the nearby grounds as he wasn't allowed to leave the property without his parents. His parents didn't like the diminutive 'Andy,' but when we were out of their ear shot, I would call him Andy as he got a tickle out of being called by the forbidden name. With him in mind, I added middle height safety rails to the tree house and eventually filled the space between the safety rails and the floor base with slats of wood to make walls on either side. I eventually replaced the ladder that hung out into space with a structurally sound one at the back of the tree house.

Wandering the woods as Fall came, I found a girl, 'Beth', sitting on another large rock in the woods meditating. I introduced myself and while she was initially hesitant, we soon became good friends. She also lived at the apartment complex so it made it easy to visit. She was a year younger than me and had an even younger brother and a single mother about my sister's age. Having a mother so much younger than my own meant there was a whole different generations' worth of interests. Where my mother was into Herb Alpert and Dean Martin records, her mother was into rock and even Cheech & Chong albums. They had a bean bag chair which was all the modern rage at the time and her mother made Jello with a third of the water in a cookie sheet, then once solid, sliced it into squares which could be eaten as rubbery finger food.

With Fall came a shock. Once the ski area was closed for the Summer season this year, my father took Sundays off. It was the first, and I think the only time, he had either day of the weekends off on a regular basis. And he was taking them off just for me! Each Sunday he would pick me up early in the morning and take me places, typically touristy places but sometimes nature places. There was the Boston Museum of Science one time. Another Sunday he took me to visit an old timey railroad station and take a scenic steam train ride and he showed me how to squish a penny by placing it on the track for the train to run over. A trip to the capital city to bum around and see a re-release of Vincent Price's 3-D movie ''The House Of Wax'', this was one of the very first polarized light 3-D movies and I kept the special glasses in my keepsake drawer for the next few years. Once we visited the ski area where, at the base of one ski lift, there was a stream that a beaver had damned up making a pond; we got to watch with binoculars as the beaver worked, then later walked up to the damn and took a closer look. There was the time to visit the Boston Aquarium and the Bunker Hill multimedia experience nearby. There were a couple more of these and then they abruptly stopped and my father would just take me to the house and read the Sunday newspaper inside while I raked up the fallen leaves and pine needles for him. We never did anything like this again.

After another boring Sunday of just raking leaves or bumming around the house, as having friends over was not allowed, I asked my mother what I must have done wrong for him to have stopped taking me places? She laughed and told me they had finished the separation agreement two weeks earlier and ''He didn't have to put on a show anymore.''

Once the ski season started, my father was back to midweek days off and I would visit him and stay at the house on those days after school, and at the apartment the rest of the week. And so things remained for the next four years...

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