A change of perspective Nov. 14, 1985

  

This is not always a happy anniversary.

Each year at this time during the overnight, great changes happen in my life, traced back to that dark night when as my family breathed hoarsely in their sleep, I slipped away with their money.

It is not a moment I am proud of, and I’m stunned that sixteen years have passed since then, and how much has changed in the interim.

As time goes on, details often fade from memories like that, even as it is also a moment in which I became part of family legend.

Looking back, I see it not as a moment of great courage, I recalled being scared to death, a moment when I took the easy way out that turned out over the long haul as much harder than if I had simply stayed or gotten a job.

Back then, I excused the crime with the idea that I was in love, or lust, and I had just been discharged from military service to find the object of that love or lust had gone west, and lacking the resources to follow here, I took the money.

I could blame the old house and a family driven crazy by their conflicting desires, my mother the most obvious, perpetually hearing voices and continually attempting to end her own life to be free of them, and a pack of uncles – perverts and drunkards, angry men and sad, all at each other’s throats all of the time we me always in the middle: Frank, the would be artist and musician, Harold, child molesting mobster, Rich, the wife-stealing alcoholic, Albie, the son of a carpenter who could not live up to his father’s expectation, and Ted, the youngest and one with the most hope,  forced to abandon the life he wanted to live to pick up the remnants of his father’s life.

Harold loved little boys and saw me as an opportunity too easy to pass up, always asking me the wrong kinds of questions and getting angry when I would not let him do what he wanted to, already wise enough for wandering the streets to know I wanted no part of his little perverted games.

Rich was like a drunken minister, always giving me the gospel of how he expected me to live my life just as his father had lectured him, making me too scared to stay in the same room with him so I fled to the street or to my room, and resorted to petty crime.

Frank wanted to help me but was so full of rage at the rest of the family, he could not even help himself, and often, I wound up comforting him, calming him down, trying to keep this mountain of a man from falling down with his fists on brothers who taunted him.

Albie preached, too, but different, always trying to impart his wisdom on me, stopping only when he came to realize I knew as much as he did, and neither of us knew much.

I always wanted to be like Ted, but the Ted before the war ruined him, and before he got trapped into a life that was not his, before he got bitter and sad.

Taken individually, I could handle each well enough, finding ways to cope with their madness. But when they came together two or three or four at a time, it staggered me, I could not sleep, I could barely breathe, I sought ways to escape that often brought me home in the back of a police car.

These days, they live apart, and so I can travel up to see Harold in his house near Greenwood Lake where he lives with his boy companion, or to see Frank walking his dogs through Toms River, or – before he took off for the Carolinas – to see Albie in his mother in law’s house in a small German immigrant town, or to see Ted, his kids, with home my mother and grandmother lives – Rich left in my care although between his attempts at suicide resides in a mental hospital where I visited him weekly.

But back then, back when I was in love and confused, back when I had not yet learned how to cope, stealing the money to escape seemed like a good idea. And maybe it was, time changes perspective.

 

 1985 Menu


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