The Early Years

 

My early years aren’t anything to brag about. I was born a bastard, although my parents did reunite and ultimately wed. Those four years were extremely volatile. My father was an alcoholic, and a violent one when he drank. My mother was a gorgeous, but complicated woman who enjoyed the drink as well.  Dad was a handsome tall blond who went to Catholic school in elementary school, military school in high school, and served a couple of years in the U.S. Marine Corps. He got out as soon as his contract was up. That life just wasn’t for him. Born in 1951, he was more of a hippie type, interested in poetry and music, and the occasional herbage.  Mom was absolutely gorgeous, olive complexion and raven haired with high cheekbones, doe eyes, and a killer smile. Four years his junior, she had dabbled in hairdressing, but since my father managed the family’s bar and lounge with his grandmother, she ended up bartending there.

In our early years as a family, we were for all intents and purposes, homeless, as in we had no home. My great-grandma allowed us to use the restaurant as a place to lay our heads at night, and wash up in the sink, literally for me. We had large basin sinks for the restaurant, and I have vivid memories of dad giving me a bath in there when I was a toddler. My parents rolled out a sleeping bag in the middle of the kitchen every night, where they slept there together. My baby brother James, who came along three and a half years after I did, slept with me on the pool table in the lounge. Mom and dad covered it with a sheet and threw some pillows on it.

I was a curious child, and it got me into quite a few predicaments, probably why I always felt a kinship with Anne Shirley of Green Gables. One of my first snafus came in the middle of night while my parents were sleeping. I snuck into the business office of the restaurant and found my mom’s purse. I went rifling through it, likely searching for candy, but maybe just being nosey. I found this weird gadget I had never seen before, and it looked like a spray, maybe a perfume? With my little tiny toddler fingers squeezing as hard as possible, I squeezed down on the trigger. Ow. OWWWWW!!!! What is THAT!?! My eyes were burning. I had inadvertently sprayed mace directly into my eyes! I ran into the kitchen screaming for help and my parents popped right up out of their sleeping bag. I remember seeing their faces through a red filter. Dad snatched me up, plopped me in the sink, turned the faucet on full blast and put my head under it, rinsing my eyes furiously. I kept pinching my eyes tight, and he kept prying them open gently while coaching me through it, explaining why he had to do it. Once my screaming subsided, he started to relax and even chuckle a little to himself about what kind of trouble his little girl had gotten into.

Most people today do their laundry in fancy washers and dryers in their laundry rooms or go to the laundromat where even higher efficiency machines are used. Back in the day, my mom did laundry using a wringer-washer. If you are not familiar with these contraptions, it consisted of a washtub, akin to what we have today, but there was no spin cycle which meant your clothes were still sopping wet once the washing was complete. In order to prep your clothes for the clothing line, you had to wring out the water. If you’ve ever tried to wring out a shirt by hand, you know that wrinkles are a big issue. The wringer-washer was equipped with a wringer on top of it for just that purpose. The wringer was a device that looked like a pasta roller, where you would feed in wet clothes and drier ones would emerge from the other side. One day while exploring our backyard where the washer stayed out in the open, I got a little curious about these rollers and how they worked. Mom had stepped away from the laundry and left it running. When I saw my opportunity, I absolutely could not resist the urge to stick my little fingers in the running wringer and see what happened. The soft rollers, like paint rollers gently pulled at my hand first, and then in a split second, began furiously sucking in my whole arm. The grip was tight as I tried desperately to pull my arm out on my own when the pain set in, and I began shrieking for help. I saw my mom’s head pop out of the back door, and she came running. It must have been close to Christmas when I pulled that number, because I remember going to my grandparents’ house to open presents.  My giant green arm scab was the center of attention and it kept itching, and I kept picking at it, which got me yelled repeatedly by every single adult. To this day, my scar that I was warned about remains on the inside of my right forearm about the size of a small drink coaster.

That wasn’t my only trip to the emergency room either. One time my brother and I found some capsules on a table which I took the liberty of opening and pouring out for closer inspection. When my dad walked in and saw the evidence, he threw us in the car and headed to the ER.  We had apparently decided to take our investigation further in order to identify the substance, and what better way than to taste it? For what felt like hours, my brother and I were made to drink what seemed like gallons of nasty solution which after a short time induced vomiting. My dad had the best attitude. He gently and kindly coaxed us into drinking more, telling us why, and cracked jokes about the contents of our bellies coming up, “Look sweetheart, you forgot to chew your dinner.”

Another time, I was taking my brother on a tour of the property where we stumbled upon a large rack of empty mason jars. This became a perfect staging area for me to play pretend. The rack had been out in the weather for a while and showed some evidence of it, shards of glass on the ground which I didn’t see until my dad was walking by with Billy Earle and shouted, “Get out of there before you get cut!” I looked down. Too late. Blood was pouring from the inside of my left foot. I began packing dirt into it to get it to stop and instructing my brother to assist me. I got the bleeding to stop, and it was settled. I didn’t have to tell anybody.

By this point, my parents were able to purchase a small RV that my dad nicknamed, “The Sardine Can” because of it’s ridiculously small size and the fact that it looked like a silver submarine from the outside. They had a bed that rested about 18 inches from the ceiling, and my brother and I got bunk beds built into the wall down the hall. That night after the mason jar incident, dad piled us into the tub for our nightly bath, two birds one stone you know.  He left us in a pool of about 8 inches of soapy water to play. I hung my foot over the side of the bathtub because when the tiniest bit of water hit it, and oh my did it sting! When dad walked back in, he looked at my foot with a puzzled look, and then it clicked. Scooped up again, he rushed me to the ER, Billy Earle in tow. Billy Earle was a musician who would occasionally perform at our family lounge, and my dad enjoyed hosting him. The ER nurse had to take a scrub brush to my wound in order to get all the sand out. I doubt it was an actual scrub brush, but that is exactly what it felt like to my four year-old foot. Again, my dad was so sweet, calming me down and coaching me through the stitches. The nurse told him that I nicked an artery and if not for the sand, well, we wouldn’t be joking about it now.

When we made our way to the parking lot of the ER to go home, I had little baby crutches and my foot was wrapped tight as Fort Knox. My dad loaded me into the back seat, and when he closed the door, my little fingers were still in it. Instant agony. I screamed out, and he immediately opened the door back up and began apologizing profusely as tears streamed down my face. When the tears started to stall, he asked if he needed to take me back inside. “No,” I sucked in my lip and shook my head. For a few days, I hopped around on one foot and continued to hang my foot out of the tub at bath time.

I said that those four years were volatile and they were, but thankfully I only have two memories of this. One night, I was awakened by  the sound of my mother’s screams. I could hear them through a screened window in the RV. She and my father were fighting, and he was winning. Her screams were of pain, not anger. I yelled out the window at my drunk father, “You leave my mommy alone!” The next thing I knew he was in my face, “Do you want some of the same?” he grabbed my arm. I shook my head, tears forming.

The other memory was from the night we left. Both of my parents, who very much loved each other, were two broken people that took all of their brokenness out on each other, and ran to others for comfort. The night my mom left my dad, she walked into the lounge where he was sitting at the bar, holding on to my right hand with her left. “I’m leaving,” she said, “and I’m taking Brandy.” My dad spun around, Budweiser in hand, the inertia of the action sloshing a thin stream of beer from his can right into my eye. “I hate you,” I mumbled to him under my breath, defiant. He didn’t notice as he was already giving my mother the riot act. She just walked away. When we got outside, a man was sitting in the driver seat of a black Firebird Trans Am, a smile on his face, waiting to escort her from the frying pan into the fire. She put me in the back seat with a blanket, where in my exhaustion I slipped into slumber as we drove into the night.