It’s late October, 1974 at about 1:30 in the morning, and Alice Cooper is winding up a set on the Midnight Special. Wolfman Jack is singing their praises and the studio audience is going wild with adoration. There’s my mother, tanked as usual whooping and yelling at the big Zenith color TV set. It was then that she began insisting that I start clapping to the TV. Now, I had just spent the last hour trying to wrap my 8 year old mind around the concept of a man in heavy makeup and long blond hair named Alice gyrating on stage. I wasn’t about to start clapping at a TV set that no one else was going to hear, and I told her so. That’s when she grabbed me by my shoulder length sandy brown hair and started beating the living crap out of me.

I finally escaped her grasp and ran to my parent’s room where my father was sleeping. Waking him up I started sobbing and screaming that I wasn’t going to clap at the TV set and he had to make her stop telling me I had to and stop hitting me. He got up, and went into the living room where he proceeded to pick her up, toss her five foot two inch frame over his shoulder and take her into their bedroom. There he threw her down on the bed and proceeded to spank her like a small child. I stood there in the bedroom doorway and watched her scream and yell and thrash about as he spanked her.  It was what he did next that really surprised both my mother and me, he packed a suitcase, grabbed a bunch of shirts on hangers out of the closet and walked out the front door of the house.

“See, you made him leave” she told me, and of course my 8 year old brain believed her. And, that was the last that I saw of my father for awhile.

Things at home got worse by the day. With my father there, at least there was some sense of normalcy centered around when he would get home from work, there was dinner, there was order around the house, at least some break in the chaos where she would at least try to put up a front. Now all that was gone. Now, there were people over at the house constantly, people that weren’t necessarily very nice to me or to her. There was people in the pool, people everywhere in the house. There was a constant party atmosphere with all the local teenagers hanging out and partying there at the house. I would leave for school in the morning, and walk over people sleeping on the floor, cars lined up in the driveway.  I wondered what the neighbors were thinking. And once at school I had to wonder what the teachers were thinking. There I was, showing up unkempt, long hair, dirty clothes, no lunch and no schoolwork done,

I came home from school and I could hear the bass line of Smoke On The Water coming through the front door and windows of the living room. The band was set up and playing, I could see all the people inside dancing and partying to the music. Once again, the front door was locked and I couldn’t get in. No matter how hard I pounded on the door, no one was going to hear me, and if they did I was sure they wouldn’t open the door anyway. I dropped my book bag and sat down on the steps. Why did my father leave me here? what did I do that made him leave me here with her? what could I do to make him come and get me?

I got my bike out of the garage and decided that I would just leave, go as far as I could go and forget about the whole mess. Not too far from the house was a shopping center, and behind that was a cluster of homes. I realized that I wasn’t doing too good a job of riding since I was crying so hard and I decided to stop in the middle of a cul de’ sac and just sit on the curb and cry. That’s when I noticed that there was a man in his front yard out watering his lawn and he was watching me. Great, he’ll probably call the cops on me or something I figured and got back on my bike and rode home.

There are few things that an 8 year old kid wants more than a mother, and there is not much that an 8 year old kid won’t do to keep his mother, no matter how crazy she may be acting.  Who was I to believe? My father left me, and she was still there telling me it was because of me. I had no way of understanding the reality of the situation. It was a few weeks before I saw him again, on a Saturday that he came to get me for the day. And I didn’t want to go with him, she made a big point of telling him that too. He had just bought a small sunfish sailboat from Sears, and it was on top of the Camaro, we were going to go sailing for the day. I didn’t want to go sailing, I didn’t want to do anything, I wanted my father to come home and be my father. He kept saying no, that wasn’t going to happen. The more he said no the madder I got until I was a crying sobbing mess. He didn’t tell me at the time that he had tried to see me every weekend since he left and that she wouldn’t let him. He didn’t tell me that he was trying to figure out how to afford an attorney to fight what would certainly be a losing custody battle in Broward County Florida in the early 70’s. He didn’t tell me any of that and the more that he didn’t tell me, the madder I got.

The little hand is on the two and the big hand is on the ten on my Mickey Mouse watch, and the door is locked again. Her friends are in the living room again, the band is setup and I can hear House Of The Rising Sun loud and clear outside the front door. I’m hungry, I didn’t eat lunch because Mom didn’t pack me one and she didn’t give me any lunch money. Of course the door is locked again. Today I decide to go around to the back patio door, it looks in on the dining room from the pool. I start pounding on the glass door with my fists and screaming “let me in, please”. A few of the kids look at me and look away like they never saw me in the first place. Then, Jimmy, who hangs around with my mother a lot comes up to the door and looks me straight in the eyes. He unlocks the door and opens it wide.

“Hey Scott, you’re home from school?”

“Yeah. I’m hungry”

“Well, let’s see what we can find in the kitchen for you then” he says and we go into the kitchen, right off the dining room area. All we find is some bread with mold on it out on the counter  and some cheese in the frig. We tear off the crusts where the mold is and make me a sandwich.  I sit down to eat it. Jimmy sits with me at the kitchen table while I eat.

“Didn’t you eat lunch?” he asks

“Um, no, Mom forgot to pack it for me today.” I lie, he has to know that there was nothing to pack at this point.

“I see” he says. “She do that often?”

“Hasn’t remembered all week, not since my Dad left here.”

“And she forgot to give you lunch money too?

“Yeah…”

“So take lunch money” he says, “just take it out of her purse.”

Later that evening there was a bunch of the local kids were still at the house, and there was a band still playing in the living room. All the kids were dancing and having a good time, I noticed that they were passing around a paper plate that had a bunch of sugar cubes on it. When they set it down on the coffee table I grabbed a couple and ate them, it was just a sugar cube but one of the kids looked at me real funny when he saw me sneak them. I’m not real sure what all happened after that, I remember that the music started to not only sound like music but look like it too. I remember that I could feel all of the music flowing around me, it didn’t feel good, it felt like I was being carried away, like I was swimming in the pool only there was no water in the room. All I wanted to do was go to bed and go to sleep, so I went in my room. Once I got in my room, I could still hear the music but it wasn’t as loud. All over my walls were movies of people and things that I’d never seen before, it was both really cool to watch and scary at the same time, I just laid there and stared at the walls, watching the movies and trying to go to sleep. I knew better than to tell my Mother.

On Monday before I went to school I took two bills out of my Mom’s purse for lunch. When lunchtime came around I went through the line and up to the lunch lady, giving her the bills.

“Where did you get these?” she asked me.

“From my Mother” I told her.

“Wait here” she said looking at me funny, as she disappeared from behind the desk. Then she came back with one of the teachers.

“Your Mother gave you these bills for lunch money?” asked the teacher.

“Yes.”

“Your Mother gave you  two hundred dollar bills for lunch?” asked the teacher.

“Uh huh.” I hadn’t bothered to look at what they were, I just took them out of her purse.

“Well, we can’t break these, so just bring in money tomorrow, ok?”

“Ok”

Of course they called my Mother to ask her why I came to school with hundred dollar bills and she was pissed at me. She was sitting in the living room watching her soaps and waiting for me when I got home, there was nobody there to protect me. She beat the crap out of me for taking money out of her purse and taking it to school.

After the phone call from the school I started getting lunches packed again each day. Every day it was the same thing, she packed me a bagel with cream cheese and a thermos of coffee with milk and sugar. The bagel and cream cheese was because she was going through a Jewish phase where she decided we should be Jewish.  The coffee would cool and make the screw top of the thermos really hard to get off, so one day when I couldn’t get it off, I asked one of the teachers for help to open it up. She opened it and freaked out when she saw that it was coffee. “Your Mother packs you coffee in your lunch?” she asked me incredulously. “Yeah, every day.” I told her. Well that resulted in another call home to my Mother, and another beating for asking for help to open the thermos.

We didn’t have dinner anymore. Sometimes she’d make TV dinners for me, other times she’d be too busy.  In the evenings and most nights she had her clients over. That meant that I had to stay in my room while she and whoever the man was that was there that night sat in the living room or were in her room. The only times that I was allowed to come out was if I needed to use the bathroom and even then I’d get yelled at to go back in my room.

There were many nights that Mom went out, she’d leave me with Jimmy at home. Those were good nights really, we would watch TV and eat TV dinners. Salisbury steak and turkey with gravy and vegetables. Jimmy was cool, he would play guitar and we would make up silly songs and laugh a lot. One night when Mom was gone Jimmy suggested we go skinny dipping in the pool.

“Um, I don’t know Jimmy” I told him

“What? Why not? Your Mom won’t get mad, she and I do it all the time” he told me “There’s nothing to be scared of”.

“But then you’ll see my pee-pee…”

“So what? I’ve got one too, here, I’ll go first” Jimmy said as he got undressed, dropping his cutoff jeans down off his hips. He peeled his shirt off and said “Let’s go” and headed naked for the patio door to the pool. I stripped out of my Speed Racer PJ’s and followed him outside.

“Can I touch it?” he asked.

“Ok.”

“Now you touch mine.”

“Can I kiss it?”

“Ok.”

“Now you kiss mine.”

The next thing I knew, Jimmy was behind me, and pushing himself into me, the water was up to my knees on the pool steps and I was holding onto the metal stair railing.

Something told me this was wrong, but it was Jimmy, and he was a grown up and he was always nice to me so how could he be wrong? It was Jimmy, who brought me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Somehow, it felt good and bad at the same time, I didn’t know what to feel or think about any of it.

“I want to go to bed” I told him and headed out of the pool into the house through the patio door. Jimmy came in with me, and came into my room to tuck me in. “It’d be best if you kept what we did tonight between us you know” he told me.  I’d pretty much figured that out already and agreed.

The next morning was Saturday, and i got up early to watch cartoons. I heard a yell come from my Mother’s bedroom and ran in through the door. There was Jimmy on top of her and she was telling him not to stop. They both turned and looked at me at the same time and my Mother yelled at me to get out.

A few minutes later, there was a knock at the front door, a real hard knock, and I went to answer it. Standing there on the front step was a man holding a shotgun.

“I’m Jimmy’s Father, where the fuck is he?” he yelled as he walked in past me. He made a direct line towards the bedroom where Jimmy and my Mom were. The next thing I heard was my Mother screaming and Jimmy yelling at his Dad, his Dad was saying “If you ever even see my son again I will fucking kill you, you whore!”. Then Jimmy and his Dad left. As he walked past me he didn’t even look at me, he just looked at his feet as he went past.  I never saw him again after that.

After that Andrea started babysitting me at nights when Mom went out. She wasn’t as much fun as Jimmy, she mostly did homework and stuff after we ate TV dinners.

It was another few weeks before i saw my Dad again. He came by on a Saturday morning again to pick me up to go sailing. Mom said I had to eat lunch first, before I could go and put an open can of peas on the table in front of me.

“That’s your lunch.” she said when I just looked at her.

“No one is going to say that I don’t feed you.”

They were cold and in the can, and I’d never seen them like that before. They were nasty.  It took a long time to eat them all, and my Father stood on the front doorstep the whole time waiting for me.

He asked me how things were at my Mom’s house and I tried to tell him they were fine but I couldn’t lie to him. I told him about the school, lunch money and the thermos of coffee. I told him about how we never ate dinner any more because she was always out with her clients. I didn’t tell him about the episode with Jimmy or his Father coming to get him because I didn’t want to get in trouble for anything. We sailed around the lake and my father just kept saying “uh huh, uh huh” to me when I would answer his questions. I could tell that he wanted to ask me more, but was holding back a lot. I kept asking him again why I couldn’t come and live with him, and he just kept saying that the way the laws were I would have to live with my mother until everything went to court.

The school called my Mother again. I got home and walked in the door to a barrage of screams. Something about I hadn’t been doing my homework and hadn’t been paying attention in class, I don’t know. All I know is she was screaming at me and then came the table lamp flying at me, smashing against the front door behind me. That’s when she got up and came after me and I ran into my room. That’s where she caught up to me, in the doorway. She threw me backwards against my bed,  my back hitting the frame so hard that I couldn’t breathe for what seemed like forever, so much so that I didn’t realize at first that she was kicking me as I lay there. Still screaming, though I have no idea about what. After what seemed like forever she left. That was when I decided that I was leaving. If I couldn’t go live with my Dad I would just leave and find somewhere else to live. I couldn’t go to the neighbors, she’d find out then, I’d have to just leave. I couldn’t stay there any longer. I hurt so bad I just curled up on the floor and cried. The next thing I knew she was standing over me saying “I have a client coming over, stay in your room”, and she left again.

The next week was Thanksgiving. My Uncle Paul came to get me and I went to spend the holiday at his house. He was always nice to me, his wife Linda and their daughters were too. No one was yelling or screaming, no one got hit for anything. We had a good Thanksgiving dinner and everyone had a good time over the weekend. Then Sunday came around, and it was time to go back to my Mother’s house. By the time we got there I knew what I was going to do.

We got to my Mother’s house, and parked in the driveway. My Uncle Paul got out of the car and came over to my side and opened the door.

“No” I said, “I’m not going”.

“What do you mean you’re not going?” Paul asked.

“I won’t go back inside with her, I won’t do it,, I’m tired of getting hit, tired of being yelled and screamed at, I won’t do it, I won’t go back in there. I want my Dad. Please Uncle Paul, don’t make me go back inside there. Please.” I begged him.

“Let me go talk to your Mother” he said, and he walked up the sidewalk to the front door. I could see him there talking to her, could hear her screaming and yelling and then heard the front door slam in Paul’s face. He came back to the car.

“Well, let’s go call your Father” he said to me as we headed back to his house.

Once we got to his house, he started calling my Father at home, and soon got him. Shortly after that my Father was on his way from Miami to get me. He got to Paul’s house and his friend Seren was with him. Paul and my Dad talked for awhile, and then we got in the Camaro and made the hour drive back to Miami.

When we got to my Dad’s house in Miami there were squad cars everywhere. In the driveway, in front of the house, everywhere. As soon as my Father got out of the car he was surrounded by cops with their guns drawn telling him to put his hands up and keep them there, they took him down right there on the hood of the car and handcuffed him. Seren and I went inside the house as they were putting him into the back of a squad car. It was three days before I saw my Dad again, Seren stayed with me and we waited there for him to come home.  We weren’t sure what all would happen with me, if or when I would have to go back to my Mother’s house, but for now I knew that there was food in the fridge and no one was hitting me, screaming or yelling at me. As it was,  I didn’t have to go see my Mother for a long time after that.