Chapter 1
I was born a freak! Well...freak-ish to be more accurate. I came out almost two feet long with an unruly crop of red hair and bright green myopic eyes. As unsavory that sounds, that wasn’t even the freakish part. I also had six fingers on each hand and though I had the right amount of toes, they were unevenly distributed; six on my right and four on my left but even that was considered normal birth defect parameters in those days. My parents must have had a package deal with the doctor because around the time I got circumcised I had the extra digits snipped off as well. I eventually got the solid toe on my left foot split and as I grew older my hair changed from red to light brown, my eyes turned hazel and I replaced my coke bottle glasses with contact lenses. I began to at least have the appearance of looking somewhat “normal”.
Actually the freakish part was my brain. Somehow I seemed to have been born with a few extra synapses that never stopped firing or at least the shut off valves for the ones I did have didn’t work properly. Unfortunately this didn’t give me any more intelligence, just a specific skill set. This by itself wouldn’t have been so bad except that it also prevented me from understanding when I was getting myself into trouble later on in life.
Other than my initial strange physical appearance, my childhood was fairly ordinary. I suppose like most people, it was neither really good nor really bad. I wasn’t necessarily a happy kid but that could very well be, at least in part, to the way I was naturally or unnaturally wired. I did have fun, but the fondest memories I have are with my friends. Not my family. Some of the things I endured would be considered abusive, (at least in today’s world) but in the 1960′s it was just par for the course.
My dad was basically a compassionate man and he often would go out of his way to help a stranger. He was always polite to other people and as far as I remember he never had anything like road rage. However, he was short tempered and impatient as far as his own kids were concerned, especially when he perceived that one of them was encroaching on his parental authority. (Yours truly) I suppose he got that from his father. My dad was very smart but he didn’t seem to do a lot of independent or creative thinking in those days. He not only loved and respected his dad but he believed everything his father told him as if it were some sort of gospel so I’m guessing that he just accepted the way he was raised without really questioning the status quo.
Unfortunately for me, I was the kind of kid who questioned everything which often didn’t sit well with him. I was truly curious about the world around me and I was punished constantly for my curiosity or for having the audacity to ask the age old question of why. I really wasn’t testing my parents, as I had seen some of my friends do, but I was always searching for answers and I wasn’t getting any; at least none to my satisfaction. I never really accepted the banal responses that authority figures gave me and I remember thinking that if I could have gone back in time to shoot the first person who coined the phrase, “Because I said so” I would have done so without a lot of reservations.
My dad’s style of parenting also incorporated several cliches and he seemed to favor the classics:
“WHEN I TELL YOU TO JUMP, YOU ASK HOW HIGH, YOU DO NOT ASK WHY.”
I would answer him in all sincerity,
“But dad, you didn’t answer my question and you didn’t tell me to jump!”
My dad would say that I was only making it worse by trying to be smart. I was yelled at constantly, spanked often but I only got hit in the face a couple of times and it was always with an open hand. (Some of my friends were not so lucky) The very first time that my dad hit me in the face was very emotional and I never forgot it.
I was about eight and my parents had just bought a brand new picnic table for the backyard.
My dad took his time assembling it with some of his new tools until it was just so. He beamed with pride at his accomplishment and my mom congratulated him on a job well done. I was excited for them. I liked to see my mom and dad happy, because they argued a lot in those days. So...being a wonderful son, I decided to get a screwdriver and a hammer so I could carve all our initials in the table. Mine, my older sister’s (Denise) and my parents. As you might imagine, my tribute didn’t go over as well as I had anticipated.
I called my mom and dad out to see what I had done for them and I was genuinely enthusiastic to see how they would react. I was also beaming with pride. My dad took one look at my artwork and without hesitation, slapped me hard in the face. I was more shocked than anything else but my feelings were devastated. I really thought that I had done something noble for my family. My mom usually didn’t get involved but I think that he shocked her as well.
“Oh honey, that was way too much.”
My dad ignored her however, as he told me to go upstairs to get cleaned up. Sobbing, I ran to the bathroom to take a shower. I was trying to be quiet because I thought that any minute I would hear another one of my dad’s gems:
“YOU STOP THAT CRYING OR I WILL REALLY GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT!”
Fortunately he refrained that time. I remember the moment very distinctly because as I was standing in the shower crying, I told myself that my parents were just people who made mistakes but I thought my dad was very close to making too many mistakes for me to ever love him and I was resentful of my mom for not sticking up for me.
I ended up escaping into books, movies and any television show that my parents allowed me to watch. One of my favorite programs in those days was “The Million Dollar Movie.” This was on Channel 9 and it specialized in showcasing different movie stars and various genres. The station played the same movie nine times in a seven day period and when I found one I liked I would watch it over and over again.
I don’t remember when I learned to read. It seems that I have always known how. I didn’t go to preschool and I don’t recall ever sitting down with my parents for anything, much less reading lessons but in Kindergarten when they brought out the Dick and Jane books, I found that I could read them perfectly. I was the only one in class that could. Maybe my parents worked with me but I don’t think that was the case. I believe that this was just another way that my brain worked, even though my parents happily took credit for my prowess. At five, I had a sudden realization that a world had just opened up to me. I began with comic books, then read everything that I could get my hands on. It didn’t matter which genre, as long as the story was entertaining and the characters were interesting.
Through reading and having a vivid imagination, I started to roll with the punches (as it were) and began to find a smattering of joy in life. I also discovered that besides my always buzzing brain, I had a fair amount of athletic ability. This was very gratifying to me especially when I would try to transfer my fantasies into reality. I became a thoughtful hero, a pirate with a heart, or maybe just a misunderstood gunslinger. To the best of my ability, I would act out what I thought those characters might do in the physical world. In many ways my life became a paradox because on one hand, I was painfully shy and introspective but on the other hand I had a high self esteem and was confident in my abilities. This enigma of being a swashbuckler and hopeless romantic, yet sensitive and introspective seemed to work for me through childhood but the conflicting traits would get me into a little trouble as an adult.
Shortly after I turned nine my parents impinged on my fantasy world for awhile by forcing me to go to Sunday School and church. I absolutely did not want to be involved in another “school like” atmosphere on the final day of my precious weekend so it didn’t take me any time at all to develop a real distaste for organized religion. My sister and I both had to chores to do before we could do anything anyway, which included the normal things like taking out the trash, cleaning our rooms and washing the dishes but I also got stuck with yard duty. About that same time we had just moved from Norwalk to a small town in Orange County called Placentia.
Our new backyard looked like a flowing field of wheat that one might see in the plains of Nebraska except that in the place of wheat, every inch was covered with three to four feet bottle brush weeds. Guess who got stuck with the total renovation.
So as anybody can see, I had too many other things to do in the day and church was the last place I wanted to be. One Sunday I decided to take a stand. I was going to try to reason with my mother about the banality of religion when she came to wake me up to get ready for Sunday school. I impressed myself, thinking I had done a really good job of getting my point across, because she just looked confused before closing my door. Less than a minute later my father came storming into my room,
“YOU BETTER GET UP THIS SECOND TO GO TO THAT GOD DAMMED CHURCH OR I AM GOING TO BEAT THE HELL OUT OF YOU”!
If I hadn’t been so scared, I might have started laughing. I reluctantly got up grumbling my displeasure on the way to the bathroom but the thing that bothered me the most was that my dad never went to church himself. My mother was extremely religious and my father was completely apathetic towards the subject so because of this dichotomy, I decided to make up my own mind about most things, including religion.
About a year later I finally found a way of getting out of going to Sunday school, although it was somewhat inadvertent on my part. At the beginning of each month, the pastor would come into the Sunday school classes and ask if there was anybody who had a birthday coming up. If there were children who had birthdays that month, they got to go up in front of the class to put their offerings into a big, plastic birthday cake that had “Jesus” written on top. The rest of the class would proceed to sing Happy Birthday to the student and give him or her, (and Jesus of course) a round of applause.
In March of that year when the pastor came in to ask about birthdays, I noticed that nobody was raising their hand so I raised mine even though my birthday wasn’t for a few months. I went up to the front of the room to accept the song and applause, then gratefully thanked the pastor when he wished me a happy birthday. Later that week the pastor saw my mom at a bible study and asked her in front of her friends if she had done anything special for my birthday. She informed him that he must be mistaken, because her son’s birthday wasn’t until July. The pastor quietly took her aside and told her what I had done. My mom was not only embarrassed but livid.
I don’t know what made me do that exactly except that I was beginning to find out that even though I was shy and nervous, I kind of liked being the center of attention. Of course I got punished for my appalling misbehavior which consisted of a basic spanking, being put on restriction and being lectured about the evils of dishonesty. I then had to go in front of the class to confess my deception to my teacher and my fellow students. However, there was one good thing that came out of that little incident that made it all worth while. My mom never forced me to go to Sunday school again.
Thank the Lord!
A few months later I looked up the word agnostic and have practiced my own version of agnosticism ever since. My ideology probably varies a little from the standard, however. All I really knew was that I didn’t want to be like either my mom or dad and I didn’t want anybody telling me how to think. I do believe in higher powers in the sense that I believe that anything and everything is absolutely possible. I believe that at times these higher powers might watch over us and at other times they probably have better things to do. I have faith in my beliefs, but also realize that they could be completely wrong and I am okay with that. Mainly I believe in love, kindness, and being respectful of other people’s choices.
This is how I grew up, and how I started to build the foundation of my persona.
I Persevered...
