Note: This is the first in a series I intend to run in this blog about how different songs remind me of different points in my life. This is a reworked version of what was supposed to be the first chapter of my book, and it is in a very rough version. I know there are punctuation errors, and most likely typos that point out the fact that when I type, I do it quickly and don't pay much attention to things like "their" and "there." Almost everything I write is handwritten first and I transcribe as fast as possible. I post it here because I am happy with how it has turned out thus far and wanted to share it.
Three men in yellow jump suits were attempting to save the city from various monsters while I took a break from loading up the U-Haul my father had gotten stuck on a tree stump and that I ultimately had to pay for. I didn’t sit down, but I watched them do battle from the middle of our almost empty apartment. I was exhausted and the battle was a distraction. Truth be told, I don’t know why the television hadn’t been moved yet. All that was left to move was the television, the couch, and my mother.
I had been working straight through the night with the exception of a tear filled, hour long nap on a mattress that used to be a part of my bed in a room that used to be mine as well. No one usually watched MTV in my house. I know I hardly ever did unless it was the movie awards. I was so tired that the video began to hypnotize me despite the fact that we still had one last trip to the storage locker to go. From that bleary eyed moment I could never listen to the Beastie Boys without thinking of how badly my parents had fucked up.
My mother’s empty beer cans should have been cleaned up, but looking back at her from my spot in front of the TV she bought back when she had money and less of a drinking problem, it was clear that neither of us really cared about the apartment anymore. There was a broken lamp left behind in the old dining room, blending dangerously into the ugly, yellow shag carpeting and causing us to step cautiously. The avocado coloured kitchen was a maze of stains where the oven and fridge used to be, and the already worn out and matching linoleum tiles were showing even more cracks than I ever remembered seeing in eighteen years. The only room that remained mostly the same was the bathroom because nothing really had to be moved out of there.
I asked my father if we were even going to bother moving the couch at all. I would have asked my mother, but she was passed out. She never once lifted a finger to help us. Instead she remained on the couch drinking all night only to get up and go across the street to the new liquor store next to Shaw’s to buy another twelve pack of Meister Brau that I probably inadvertently paid for but was too stupid to notice. My mother was a tiny woman about four foot ten and 92 pounds, but she could drink with the best of them.
My father muttered under his breath that he didn’t give a shit. The couch came from the attic and was a must old replacement for the musty old couch my father had worn out two years earlier. I also think that much like the couch, my mother could have rotted there for all he cared.
My parents never married, and the only reason they ever stayed together was out of fear. Or at least that was my understanding. Their stories always varied wildly in terms of how they met. My father insists they met at the bar my mother was a bartender at on a night when someone got stabbed in the men’s room. My mother insists that they first met at The Fair (a shitty department store on Front Street in Worcester, Massachusetts that shuttered it’s dingy yellow windowed façade for good in the early 90’s), but she did admit to having seen him at the bar before that and he probably wasn’t even there the night the guy was stabbed and my mother was the only witness.
My mother was born Alice Abbott in 1943 in Worcester, the second oldest of eight brothers and sisters. Only Lillian eclipsed her in age by two years, and neither knew who their real father was. She always suspected that her mother was ashamed of their real father and lied to them, thinking her step father was the real deal. My mother was the only one abused by him as far as she knew. I didn’t know before she passed away that her suspicions about him had been right and she had in fact been raped by her own father. It might sound callous and cold to write something like that off in such a sentence, but that was all I ever really knew about my mother’s relationship with her parents, who had both passed away long before I was born.
Alice had previously been married to Robert Parker, the name that she kept and passed on to me instead of my father’s surname of Cooke which boggled the minds of my teachers all throughout school since God forbid a child ever be born out of wedlock. They met by chance in Green Hill Park. She was serving beer at a lawn fete and he was in a band playing at the gazebo on the other side of the park. They struck up a conversation, began to date, and apparently married in 1972 after a two year courtship.
While I didn’t know much of their relationship, and probably never will now, I do know they divorced in 1979 due to the old chestnut known as “irreconcilable differences,” and that as far as I know they never spoke to each other while I was alive. Robert died in 1985 after a lengthy battle with lung cancer. His decision to have his body cremated and strewn about a field of daisies in Green Hill Park where they used to go, was one they had talked about while they were married. She never went to the ceremony (one performed by his sister) but remembered him in her own way: with a bottle of vodka and tears for two straight weeks every night before going to bed.
My father was born in 1930 something in Sommerville, Massachusetts, and while I had met his mother (who ended up living until she was 98) and one of his brothers (who was a stock broker in Chicago and the only present he ever gave me was a holographic beer stein from the Marlboro Racing Team when I was ten before never seeing him again), the only relative on his side of the family that ever opened up to me was his sister Hazel who seemed to like me very much, but never thought very highly of my father. When he refused to show up for his own mother’s funeral, I never so much as got a card from her every again. She was the only extended relative that ever remembered my birthday or ever really seemed to care that I existed.
My father’s life in general was a mystery to me. All I know about Donald Cooke (other than the last few years of his life) is mostly random knowledge. He was hit by a school bus when he was six. He served as a paratrooper in the Korean War. He could have been a stockbroker with A.G. Edwards had he bothered to go to college, and he always wanted me to become one without outwardly saying it, but instead he went to work with his friend Bill Wentzel (whose daughter Jill would later become my prom date Senior year) and Newman-Haas Racing.
At some point, Donald and Alice met, fucked, and had me. Then they moved in together. Why they stayed together was anyone’s guess, but apparently Donald threatened to kill me had she ever had the nerve to try and kick him out.
I never remembered being there when that fight happened since I was still in diapers, so just like most things they had told me over the years, it could have been bullshit, but my father’s violent outbursts were no secret to me.
My father had only been physically abusive toward me twice. The first time was in sixth grade when I tried running away. I was failing all my classes, save English, and had already been grounded for the remainder of the year and the summer to follow. I thought I would hop on the city bus, go to the Greyhound station and just disappear. I got as far as the public library when I saw him standing there. When we got home he beat me senseless with my English book.
The second time was right after my senior prom. I had just picked up my pictures from CVS before going to school on my daily morning trip to get my father his morning coffee and newspaper. I was nervous about him seeing the pictures because I had honestly forgotten to take a picture of Jill and I together, and had wasted all the film on pictures of my friends and teachers.
He opened the envelope of pictures almost as soon as I had entered the house, and I knew what was coming as soon as I saw the look that came across his wrinkled face. “Not one fucking picture of you.” Each word was punctuated with a long pause that no ellipsis could rightfully convey.
That was when he threw the scalding hot medium double-double at me, most of it hitting my left bicep and chest after dodging most of it.
“Now everyone is going to think my son is a fucking faggot!”
I saw red with him for the first time. I thought back to all the things he had done to my mother that I had always been told to stay quiet about. The time I had to run to my neighbour Shannon’s house by escaping through the window and just barely out of his grip on my bare ankles while he screamed at me and punched the air. I was six and had playfully slapped him with a spatula before he snapped. I had no idea he had been fired from his job at a junkyard (or as he always hastened to say “salvage shop”) and he snapped. He slammed my mother on the coffee table and told me to watch what he was going to do to her because he was going to do it to me next. Before he could pull her pants down I had been making a break for it. He had previously nailed the back door shut, and it wasn’t until that terrified moment as a child that I realized exactly why he had done it. He made it back to the window just as I had gotten away with my mother screaming at me and telling me to run.
I took a shortcut through the woods as the fallen pine needles and branches cut up my feet. I kind of blanked out at that point and remembered nothing until my mother came to Shannon’s door to get me, wearing a plain white T-shirt covered in blood and a small trickle coming down her nose telling me that everything was ok and that it was safe to go home.
I remembered the time my father was throwing open beer cans as if they were grenades at my mother’s door and nearly missing me as I sat at my desk trying to read “Trumpet of the Swan” for school. That was because he came home drunk and wanting to fuck, something that hadn’t been done since I was conceived.
When he was out of ammo, he turned to me and ripped the book form my hands, screaming at the top of his lungs that I was the man of the house now. He stormed off and out the door, only to come back the next morning after my mother had gone to work with no recollection of what happened the night before.
It all came back when the coffee hit my arm. I knew that in less than three weeks all this would be over and that testing my patience at this point in my life would make for a fair fight.
“Who the fuck is going to think that, Don? You don’t have any fucking friends anymore!”
I ducked out of the way of the lamp he ripped from the wall; the same lamp that remained in the corner of the dining room on the day we got evicted.
I cocked back with my fist ready to strike and he recoiled. I wasn’t young anymore. I was tall as he was now and in much better shape from playing varsity hockey. I didn’t pursue the issues any further. I changed my shirt despite the sting from the burns and left without saying a word.
The last job my father even held was a landscaper, which he quit when I was seven, never to work again. Instead he spent his days watching CNN, C-SPAN, and listening to Rush Limbaugh all day complaining about the state of the liberal world while doing all the chores himself because my mother and I would just “fuck it all up.”
My mother used to be quite successful. She was an assistant manager at a Friendly’s restaurant when I was born and for the longest time was supporting the three of us. I never noticed her drinking problem, which led to her demotion to wait staff and work, until I was almost out of high school. My father always brought it up, but I always refused to believe him. I always thought that the woman who always use to soothe my wounds and meant the world to me could do no wrong.
I never questioned that we needed to go to the supermarket every day with her tip money and that the only things we bought every day were beer and cigarettes (the beer for her, the smokes more for my father). She always told me we were just living day to day. I believed it. I never found it odd that she always had a beer before work when she got up at five in the morning. I thought a lot of people did. I never questioned her need for a beer as soon as she got home, and I never questioned her need for one every time she got up in the middle of the night.
My mother did have the vast advantage in my heart precisely because she did actually work and wasn’t a lazy piece of shit like my father was. I will always remember that every morning she would write me a note if she had to leave before I went to school telling me just how much she loved me. No other reason other than love. Every note was written on blank checks from Friendly’s, like the kind you would get your bill on. Always along the margin she would write “P.S. I love you!!!! XOXOXOXOXOXO” until she ran out of room on the page. Every day a new pet name for me (some I would adopt as pet names for others) and a smiley face right next to where she would sign her name. And just so I wouldn’t forget she would put my lunch money and bottle of Flintstone’s Vitamins next to it.
But now, here she was passed out and reigned to her own fate. She hadn’t been working as much. Her drinking more prevalent and our new landlord (a strip club tycoon and owner of the Palladium Entertainment Complex) wanted all the tenants out. We couldn’t afford the rent increase and my mother was fast talked into a sucker deal that stated she could pay the old rent of $480 a month until I graduated high school, and if we wanted to stay after that, we would have to come up with $1,400 a month. It went to court. She never sought counsel no matter how illegal and shady the guy was. She did it, even though my father grumbled about it constantly (despite refusing to go to court in her place even though he knew a lot more about tenant’s rights).
My father was on his way to the storage locker and I took a break. I was drained, both physically and financially. I was supposed to be starting at Boston University in the fall, but I had just spent all the money I had saved on getting a storage locker for all of our possessions (which my parents said the would pay for after I loaned them the money) as well as on the U-Haul and it’s future damages. I was broke and no amount of money that I could possibly earn over the summer would ever be enough to cover the difference between what my grants would get me and what I had on hand. I guess that was my own damned fault for wanting a quality education.
“You know you are going to have to find some place to stay, right?” My mother had woken from her cheap beer induced coma to do nothing more that rub some more salt in my wounds. She was going to live with her sister on Preston Street in the city, which is a nice enough neighbourhood if you enjoy muggings, car crashes, fires, and shoot outs every night. I wanted to tag along with her since I really had no other place to go and my application for last second on campus housing hadn’t gone through yet. Sadly, that was never going to happen as Lillian thought I was a heathen in her devoutly Catholic eyes and she never forgave me for calling her brother Billy a low life smack addict (to his face).
“Yeah. I know.”
“Why don’t you go stay with your father?”
Given our past history, one could assume that I just flat out wouldn’t want to live with someone who was so abusive towards me, but if he even bothered to come up with a plan, anything would have been better than being homeless. I know he attempted to contact Hazel. I even attempted to contact her on his behalf, but we had all lost touch for so long that we didn’t know where she lived anymore. Or even if she was still alive at all. Despite her disdain for her brother, she probably would have let him stay with her had we been able to track her down.
When I asked my father what he would do, he simply shrugged his shoulders and mumbled that he would survive. When I broke down and started crying because I didn’t know what I was going to do he just told me to stop my crying and move the TV set.
I unplugged the television and unhooked the cable. Somewhere the battle still raged on, but here, it was a lost cause.
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