After years of beating the shit out of family, neighbors and strangers, the favor of fighting turned away from me as I entered high school and came up against other large morons. Soon I found myself prey as often as predator. I had received a head start on the fighting front when I was left back in first grade, a move which positioned me as the tallest, strongest kid. As a result, I found fighting useful. In our neighborhood when our parents where pissed, tired or just annoyed, they hit us. We learned from our masters and in turn we hit those around us. In my house, we were hit just about every day. We learned hitting is a sure fire way to make a point and to express frustration or annoyance. As such, we hit every day.
Of Irish decent, both my parents were taught to smack a wayward child. They applied such wisdom to the management of our home. As young adults with four kids, my parents were overwhelmed. With the world a complete cluster fuck of cold and hot wars, assassinations, generational and racial clashes, inflation, stagflation and daily mayhem they struggled to contain their emotions. My dad worked two jobs in order to cover our move from the shit hole Bronx to N.J. and my mom stayed at home to try and control us.
Though my parents eventually rekindled their love when we kids left the nest, somehow they had missed the Cleaver family vision; the vision they thought a move to the suburbs would provide. As they scraped forward from lower middle class to upper middle class they dragged behind them their Irish Bronx roots.
More than once I heard from my father, “You can take the boy out of the Bronx but you can’t take the Bronx out of the boy.”
My mother, in particular, struggled with balancing her desire to openly love us and her ability to control her temper. She stroked my matted hair, kissed my forehead and shared a story from her childhood. A moment later she was set off by an outburst of my wild behavior or my father’s cryptic comments regarding dinner’s preparation. During the early part of my parents’ journey, their resentment towards each other simmered, consistently breaking into open bedlam, with smashing dishes, slammed doors, screaming matches and a fitful vengeance taken out on kids. They didn’t hit each other; they hit us.
It was the same throughout the neighborhood. With our friends’ parents of similar mind, we all drew from the same well of domestic mayhem. We hit each other with our hands, rocks, sticks, bats, football helmets, and hockey sticks; anything that tipped the scales in our favor. In grade school I lost a few fights but, in general won most of them – dozens or perhaps hundreds; in some cases sending kids to their respective doctors with bloody noses or the inability to breath (punches to the neck were big).
This began to change in seventh grade when I entered Jr. High. The population of our school merged with the students from four other schools becoming a teeming cauldron of like-minded fighters. From seventh to ninth grade we were prey. I still won some local fights, but the high school kids were big, powerful, and scared the shit out of me. None of this, I thought, was unfair, or unjustified. It was the rule of the world and when I was tagged it just sucked.
At the same time, relatively speaking, I became ugly. While others were blossoming, I was saddled with braces and glasses and stretched out like a bean pole. Though the kids punching me knew I existed, and the kids I punched and beat in turn sure as hell knew who I was the Jr, High girls did not. In fifth grade I had been making out in the woods, squeezing ass, and trying to contain my springing hardon (for I had no idea what to do with it) during my encounters with my girlfriend, Jennifer. By seventh grade I was out of favor; replaced by those above me in the pecking order. As we said in church every Sunday, “This is the word of The Lord.”
Feeling blue one afternoon, for a reason I can now not recall, though I can imagine it had to do with girls ignoring me, fear of violence or the seething resentment at having been hit by my parents or a high schooler or a comingling of such frustrations, I found myself in my basement, rummaging through the shelves. I found a tin can of turpentine on the old rusted metal shelves under the stairs next to the laundry. We used this stuff to clean paint brushes applied to our bikes, forts and basement walls. Thinking life was not so great, I poured a goodly amount of turpentine into a crusted laundry cup perched on the edge of the dirty slop sink in the wash room and began to muster my strength. I steeled myself to down the entire cup in one fell swoop. I stared down into the liquid and smelled the familiar smell, wondering what would happen. Instant? Puking? Fall asleep? Spastic convulsions? Shit my pants?
I took a breath and slowly pressed the cup to my lips.
Hearing silence, my mother, working in the kitchen directly above me, came to the top of the basement stairs, “Beasley. Beasley, what are you up to? What are you doing down there?”
“Nothing, Mom. Just hanging out.”
“Want some tea? Come on up, honey, I’m making tea. I have a story to tell you.”
Down the drain went the turpentine and up the stairs I went, trading my cocktail for a cup of tea.
