24. February 2009 by Frank.

     Really, it was the seventies. But how many people can remember a babysitter named Ace? Sure, when you are five, it sounds really cool. Ace was way cool. He was tall, had long hair, and even wore a black leather jacket. I imagine he later got a motorcycle and joined a biker gang. I remember Ace smoked Lucky Strikes, which I thought were neat because of the red target logo. At the time I never wondered where babysitters such as Ace came from. They just magically appeared when my mom and evil stepfather wanted to go out without the kids. Since this was before cable television, sitters like Ace actually played with us and were very entertaining. I had a deep and passionate love of army men of any kind at that time, and Ace would occasionally show up with one of those cheap plastic bags of army men. I was in heaven. Ace told me that his brother was a backup guitarist for the Jackson Five, and even at five I thought that was pretty sweet. I don’t know why Ace felt the need to lie to a five year old to impress him. Especially with something as remote to me as a famous music group. But that’s what he told me, and I believed him. Perhaps that is why my mother chose him, for his proclivity for making up fantastic stories. Or maybe his brother really was a session artist with the Jackson Five. That was the thing with my childhood. One just never really knew what to believe.

      At the time of your life when all adults, or even older juveniles, look like towering giants to a little kid, Ace was certainly adult enough for me, but he was probably only sixteen or seventeen. I imagine he met my mom from coming to one of her many stellar parties that began every Friday night and regularly spilled over into Sunday morning. Or, as we did not attend church on a regular basis, i.e. never, she could have met up with him at the guru gatherings she regularly attended. Who knows? I wonder if my mom paid Ace in cash, or Lucky Strikes, or pot. The world will never know. I will say that, other than the babysitter we had much later who liked to play the pull his pants down and touch his willy game, my mom regularly chose cool babysitters for us.

      Ace had a lot of girlfriends at the time. How could he not? He was always bringing someone different with him to watch us. Of course, the young ladies adored me. More cool points for Ace! So what is the point of this story, you ask? Where is the crazymom? Sounds pretty good so far. Ace was cool as shit to a five year old, and I had a blast every time he showed up. Until my mother ruined it all. Yes, she even managed to fuck up Ace the babysitter. What was the use in giving her children something to enjoy in life if she couldn’t wrench it away? I have had the carpet pulled out from underneath me so many times, I am surprised I can stand up straight.

      Here it is. Picture this one. I am five years old. Ace is over watching my sister and me. We had dinner early, and Ace was sitting at my evil step fathers desk talking on the phone. I was sitting on a stool next to him, listening to the rap master at work! I was never one to have my hands idle. They say that idle hands are the devil’s playground! I started to fidget with the phone cord, twisting it up, wrapping it around my index finger, weaving through all my fingers, etc. This was back in the day, when our phone number had letters in it, and all phones looked the same. Big, black boxes with the dialing wheel, and a long, straight, black hard rubber cord that disappeared off into the floorboards somewhere. Fidgety five year old me decides after playing with the cord for a while to get a little more experimental. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to take a closer look inside the phone cord and see just how this magic talking box really worked. I picked up a pair of scissors from the desk, you know the big metal ones with the black painted handles? I started to try and peel back the outer layer of plastic to see what was inside the cord. I actually got some of the outer cover peeled away pretty well before disaster struck.

      Ace was rapping away and must not have noticed what was going one. He sure took notice when his phone conversation ended abruptly. He looked down at me in surprise. I was pretty upset myself, as I certainly hadn’t intended the results of my excavation. I had somehow managed to snip the cord in half. Whoopsie. I have to say in the continuing legend of Ace that he was super cool about it. Kind of like, “Hey, no problem, little man. Lets see if I can fix this.” No big deal to Ace. His girlfriend could wait. Ace spent at least fifteen or twenty minutes trying to splice the phone wires back together, but despite his most valiant and heroic efforts, it did not work. All this time, my subconscious fear was growing. Ace might have been one cool cookie, and was certainly understanding of a little five year old boy who was just trying to explore his environment, but I don’t think he had any idea of what was coming. He thought my mom was super cool. The party mistress. The go to guru lady. Grace under pressure. He didn’t have any idea who he was really dealing with.

     So, where was I? Ah, yes. The paralyzing fear that was gripping me as the moment approached of my mother’s return. The fear of the unknown. Well, partially unknown. I imagine the feeling is more like someone in a torture chamber, hearing his tormentor coming down the hallway, terrified as to what it will be this time. The knees? The teeth? An eye? One never knows until they get there.

      Poor Ace. My mom finally came home, and I am sure Ace didn’t think it was a very big deal to tell her that the phone cord was cut. I have done plenty of babysitting in my day, and kids do stupid shit sometimes. It happens. Oh well. It was, indeed, a big deal. My mother was probably drunk and high that night when she got home. I know that now. But five year old me didn’t really understand those things. Upon hearing about my transgression, she flew into a rage. She started yelling and screaming at me, towering over me, face red, hands flailing, all her pent up rage and anger and frustrations spewing out right on top of little me. If steam could come out of people’s ears someone would have had to call the fire department from all the smoke. I was frightened. I was terrified. I had no where else to go. No where to run to. This was my mother. She was all I had. My protector. My sole care giver. She screamed. She yelled. She went ballistic. She held absolutely nothing back. Over a fucking phone cord.

      Then she threatened to call the police. As soon as the phone was working, she was going to call the cops and have me arrested. Now to most of you reading this, that sounds laughable. Ridiculous. But to a five year old kid who has been taught from an early age to fear the cops, it was even more scary to me than her rage and anger. My parents were druggies. They taught us to fear police because of what they were doing. I was sure that the cops were going to come and haul me away. What I should have thought was, how bad could that be? How could what the cops would do to me be any worse than her?

      She scared the living shit out of me that night. It was like she cut some vital part of me out. I am not sure I even remember just what it was or what it was supposed to do. I just know it’s gone. Like the tip of a cut of finger that you feel from time to time. And Ace? Standing there stunned while the drunken monster raged, feeding on the terror and helplessness of her little five year old boy. Yeah, we never saw him again. Go figure. I will wrap this up here, but, true story, while writing this, I remembered another babysitter story that was, for me, even worse than this one. Rock on!

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22. February 2009 by Frank.

Time to Change

4/17/2004

I am filled with demons

they are here

They grow because of my fear.

When I am afraid I freeze

and don’t move.

This allows the demons to groove

on my weakness and shitty mood.

I see they are constantly fed

by my indecision, my dread.

I don’t even know I allow

them to grow

As I see this mess I have made

I know that to be afraid

will cause them to keep on

growing.

It is time to change

this around

   “I am filled with demons, they are here”. What a great place to start. My mom wrote this poem in her sixties, just a few years before she died. It is tough stuff to read, to see how, even at that age, she was still tortured and tormented by her past, unhappy in her present, and yet, still strangely hopeful about the future. This was what I grew up with. It is one thing to read this poem in my thirties and feel sadness and compassion for a woman who is clearly, at best, very troubled, if not truly disturbed. It is another thing entirely to deal with a mother who thinks like this at the age of two, or four, or six. Imagine dealing with this kind of a mentality as a little child. How do you process it? How do you make sense of the world when the woman who is the primary care giver in your life is filled with demons? I never knew as a child that my mother was mentally ill. I thought it must be me. Or my evil step father. Or the government. How do you understand or comprehend at a young age that your mom has an undiagnosed and untreated mental problem. You don’t. You suck it up. You deal. You cry, and you hide, and you try to shield yourself from the worst of it. But you never understand. It is truly and utterly bewildering. And indelibly painful.

My mother beat me with wooden kitchen spoons when I was a very little boy. I don’t remember the shock or the pain of the beatings, just the raw terror of those moments, this mother who I loved so much chasing me around the house, smacking me with those spoons. Like some twisted surreal version of Jack and the Beanstalk come to life. I can’t remember what I did wrong. I only remember the fear it created in me. I have a young son myself now, and I can’t imagine just what he could do to make me beat him with anything. Or how devastated and confused he would be if I did. Would his loving smiles change or disappear all together? Would there always be an edge of fear in his eyes every time he looked at me?

I was six years old when I took all my mother’s wooden cooking spoons and hid them in a tiny crawl space in the back of our kitchen cabinets that only I could ferret my way into. I will never forget the look in her eyes when she asked me about the missing spoons. I could see the regret there, the sadness she suddenly felt after realizing how terrified I must have been to hide those spoons from her. That was the thing with my mom. Sometimes she was all there, and sometimes she was gone. It made things even harder for me as a little kid. You never knew what you were going to get. But at that moment of lucidity, she leaned down to me and hugged me. She promised if I gave her those spoons back she would never hit me with them again. I crawled in and got them out, and she never hit me with the spoons, or anything else, ever again. So you can pull a gun on me, or wave a knife in my face, and I am a cool customer. But threaten me with a wooden spoon? I just might piss my pants. I think I must have inherited a few of those demons myself. Thanks, mom!

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