Читать книгу The Punk and the Professor - Billy Lawrence - Страница 11

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MY MOTHER was seventeen and graduated high school five months pregnant. My father was nineteen and had dropped out at sixteen to build racecars. He still lived at home with his younger brother and sisters. Their father had taken off just after the last daughter reached her second birthday. My father wouldn’t even make it to my second birthday. When I was one and a half, he packed all his belongings into a hefty bag and drove off into the night. A wife crying at the back of his head, a baby crying in the background, a rental house with no one to pay the rent or bills— all that was behind him now.

Mom moved us out of the rat-infested rental house in Bayport, and we moved into a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Bohemia. We stayed there for six months and then moved up to a bigger two-bedroom garden apartment building in Sayville. These were good times, at least how I remember them in the photo album. The Halloween parties with me dressed as Dracula. Birthday parties with my mother and aunts smoking cigarettes as little four-year-old Jack sat on their laps to blow out the candles. My mother’s friend’s daughter named Spring was there too. She cracked me on the back of the head with a brick one afternoon because I wouldn’t play house with her. Pretty little Spring was in all these pictures until the brick incident. She was so prominent in these pictured memories, you’d think she was my sister. And then that was it, she was gone and I’d never see her again. Her single mother remarried and pulled them off to the mysterious land of California.

When I’d ask how come I didn’t have a daddy like the other kids, I was told my father was far away out in California. This story led to a mystical attachment to the state. It seemed like a lot of people were always leaving for there and I curiously wanted to see the place, especially later when I found out so many great bands came from there. As a truck driver, my father had traveled the country including California, but never really lived there. After leaving us, my father had moved back in with his mother for a period of years. At nineteen, he wasn’t ready for the world yet. He lived downstairs in the basement apartment where he’d “bang his girlfriends” according to my older cousin who lived upstairs for a time. I wouldn’t see my father, or even really meet him, until I was older and my mother was already remarried.

I had no memory of him, but I had met him a couple of times when he’d drop by the Fotomat where my mother worked. He came through on a motorcycle. One time while he was talking to my mother, I went over and leaned on the bike and burned the back of my leg on the hot engine. I never liked motorcycles after that, but I don’t remember anything about him. He just wanted to say hello and get a glimpse of me, but I was never told he was my father. I was like a zoo animal he could come visit once in a while.

Years later I would be told wildly different stories from my father— how he desperately tried for years to track my mother down and find me, how he turned to his brother the cop to dig up my mother’s location even though we were just down the block from his mother’s house, even though he had stopped by my mother’s place of employment. None of it really mattered.

$$$$$$

My early years were full of rich memories with mom, like listening to Billy Joel albums or going to Fire Island on the ferry, but we had our share of adversity. Some of it I don’t remember because I was too young, like the braces on my legs to help me walk or the scar on my chin from falling out of the crib. The poverty was always in the background too, but little kids don’t always see this, especially if Mom is good at making the best of things.

My speech impediment couldn’t be hid well though. People couldn’t understand me for the longest time. The public school sent me out to an expert speech pathologist, who worked with me on a weekly basis for about a year. I can remember pushing out the word butterfly for the first time. The therapist and I celebrated. I repeated the word over and over and shouted it when my mother came to pick me up from the office.

“Butterfly, butterfly, butterfly.”

It was a victory and oddly enough it’s the only word I remember learning to get right.

When I was five we moved again, this time to a second-floor apartment in a house overlooking a lake in a small town in the middle of Long Island. It was a nice change and we were escaping a massive rent increase at the corporate complex. By eight years old I was beginning what seemed like a normal life— just mom and me, and a snow-white cat with blue eyes named Max. My mother tried me out with little league, but I got hit in the face with the ball and was bored the rest of the time. She also tried me out in religion classes on Saturdays. I was unimpressed with the Jesus coloring books and so I dropped out of that one too. But I had my Atari games, a good number of toys and books, an antenna with eight or nine basic channels, and my imagination. I could spend days at a time in my room alone just thinking and dreaming.

Though I was a quiet, shy kid who liked to spend time in my room lost in fantasy, I did have friends in the neighborhood. Justin lived next door with his nice looking older sister Jessica, who would come over and babysit a couple of nights a week. A couple of doors away there was this older kid named Layne. He used to tell us about how he was born with some rare problem and how his toes were purple and stuck together. Then one day he just disappeared. Rumor was he got kidnapped. We didn’t think he’d really move and not say goodbye to any of us. This was a period in time when we were told not to go near any vans. Apparently, vans, white ones, were notorious for kidnapping kids in the 80s. I was always on the watch for vans. But I loved walking to school along the lake over the bridge and up the bend. Life was peaceful at the lake apartment.

Of course, things weren’t as normal as I thought. My mother hid it well. This is one of her greatest parenting successes. The boyfriends on the couch were obvious, but I was oblivious to the welfare, the food stamps, the bringing me to work to one of her two jobs because she couldn’t afford a babysitter. My mother was a trooper. She didn’t complain.

There we were at Fotomat, a little 8 by 8 booth where people would drop off their film, my mother would file them, and then a truck would pick up the film at the end of the day. This was her full-time job. She had various part-time jobs, which included an office. I wasn’t allowed at that one, but she would drag me to the booth at least three times a week during summers, or on weekends during the school year. I would walk around in circles outside the booth breathing in the smell of the nearby Long John Silvers restaurant. When I got tired of that I would take naps in the backseat of our old ’71 Chevy Nova.

Mom also did housecleaning part time and brought me along. I remember going to nice houses on the north shore. My favorite was filled with plants— on the floor, tables, shelves, hanging from the ceiling— this house was a jungle. Mom would send me around watering them.

When my mother had the cash and didn’t or couldn’t bring me to work, she left me with various babysitters. While no one beat me up, I do remember one woman being abusive with peanut butter. I hated the stuff and still do. Something about the nutty smell makes me gag. This woman had nothing else in her entire kitchen and her job was to feed me. When I told her the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she put before me wouldn’t do, she flipped out.

“What kind of kid are you? Every kid eats peanut butter and jelly. You’ll eat it today because I said so.”

She stuffed the sandwich in my mouth and I instantly gagged and vomited all over this woman’s kitchen. I spent the rest of the afternoon on the floor locked in the woman’s bathroom. When my mother picked me up, the woman complained.

“He got sick all over my house, and I would be all right with that if it wasn’t intentional, but I do believe your child did this on purpose because he did not want to eat his lunch as instructed to. You really need to teach this kid better manners. I know it’s difficult as a single mother and all, but…”

I never went back to that house.

Another babysitter’s house was in a poor south shore town, but it seemed like the middle of the ghetto. Outside, people were fighting and yelling. Loud bass from cars in the street rattled the windows. I remember one day being thrown to the ground; loud pops were heard and glass shattered. It felt like a movie, and I walked out of there that day feeling in a daze.

I never went back to that house.

My poor single mother worked two jobs and even went to community college for some time. After a scary breakdown on a dark stretch of highway one night on her way home from college, she decided to try real estate training, but that wasn’t for her. She tried training in several other fields. Welding. No. Sales. No. Corrections officer. No, not at four foot ten. Then she found a quick six-month paralegal training program. It turned out to be a for-profit gimmick, but it’s how she met Don.