Life Goes On

Life was never just life.  It was filled with drama, violence, distrust and those were the good days.  The bad days were brief but burned deeply.

Uncle Perv, the uncle who should have been eliminated many years before had a dirty little secret.  It was not that he was old and his feet stank.  They stank so bad that his wife did not sleep with him and if his bedroom door was open the smell permeated the rest of the apartment.  He was an alcoholic.  He drank only on the weekend but he drank from the time the factory whistle blew until he fell asleep on Sunday night. 

The thing about Uncle Perv and Aunt Oblivious is that they fit together so well.  He worked and she worked and they lived in squalor.  Every penny that he made went to alcohol.  He drank up his entire check during those two short days.  The electricity was generally disconnected due to none payment.  They lived with kerosene lamps for light and wood-burning stoves for heat.  There was an ice plant where they would pick up a block of ice and keep milk and other perishables in an ice chest.

The cockroaches ran rampant.  At night when the lights were out and the place was silent, you could hear them scurry.  If you walked into the kitchen with a lamp, you could see not dozens, but hundreds run from sight.  Hot water for bathing was heated on one of the wood stoves.  Every now and then Aunt Oblivious would pay a bill and the lights would be turned on.

There is a peculiarity of growing up around  perverts and those who turn and look the other way.  If they really see it; if they truly acknowledge what is going on, they might actually be required to do something about it.  So, it is every child for themselves.  My mother knew he was a pervert.  I knew without knowing for years that this was the case.  The reality of my knowing was proven when my mother told me that they all knew what he was.  She told me that when I finally had a child of my own.

There was some kind of gathering at their upstairs apartment.  From my perspective as a 6-year-old there were a lot of people there.  There were other children and this was the first time that I remember being there.  My uncle called me to him.  He lifted me up on his lap.  He smiled at me and put his hand under my dress and his fingers went ...  I knew instantly that this was wrong and suddenly I heard my mother yell at me to get over there.  I knew that I had done something wrong.  The whole interchange probably took less than thirty seconds.  That was all it took to start a chain of events that stole my innocence.

She said, "I told you to stay away from him!  He's a dirty old man!  Why can't you listen to me!  I ought to whip your ass!"  That was Mom.  She handled things the only way she knew how.  It was nothing less than effective.

You can bet that little interchange taught me a lot.  I did something wrong.  My mother wanted to punish me and I would try my best to stay away from Uncle Perv from now on. The truth would come out, but it would take almost thirty years.  

Everyone in the family either knew from personal experience or from anecdotal evidence that Uncle Perv was a pedophile.  No one ever called him that.  They just did the best they could to keep their children away from him.  He never got reported, that I know of.  They blamed the alcohol.  They blamed his wife.  They blamed the children.  They blamed the weather, the time of day and the wind.  They blamed everyone and everything but him.

How adults reconciled the avoidance of this issue with the damage that was being done to their children and to others is something I never found out because no one ever spoke openly of it.  It was the family's personal disgrace.  Much later in life whenever I asked anyone about him and his nefarious deeds, they looked at me like I had lost my mind.  So, I never verbalized anything until people started dying off.  The perpetrator is dead and gone, but the effects of his perversion live on in his prey and their descendants.

Where do I go from here?  Well, let us go into the hallowed halls of first grade.  It was a time of learning, a time of wonder.  It was a time of wondering how adults got control of things.

I had a best friend.   Best was the closest thing to a sister that I ever had.  She, too, had a little brother and his name was Typical.  He was just a little brother that hung around when we did not want him to and kind of made a nuisance of himself.

My little brother, Joyless, was a bit different.  His father hated him.  Well, maybe he did not hate him.  Mom told stories of how his father had wanted to leave him at the hospital when he was born.  When his father asked her who the Joyless' father was, she would lash out in anger and tell him that the child belonged to his father.

An example of Two's dislike of his own son was dinner.  Joyless and dinner time were not friends.  There were so few dinners without an argument, that I think I only want to remember a happy dinner.  I only assume that, statistically speaking, in all those years, there had to be at least one happy dinner.

Typically, dinner went something like this.  Mom and Two would come home from work.  They would change clothes arguing about who did what to whom on the way to work and on the way home.  While Mom cooked dinner, they would argue about grapes; about what to watch on TV; about Grandma and Grandpa living with them; about sandstorms in the desert; about anything.

Then it was dinner when the real fun began.  Joyless was a picky eater and had medical problems.  On of those problems was his blood's inability to coagulate properly.  That made him a free bleeder.  Joyless just never knew when to stop.

He would say, "I can't eat that." or "Don't like that." or maybe just make the yuk face.  And with that the battle was on.

His father would say, "Eat it!"

Joyless, "NO!"

Two, "I SAID EAT IT!!"

The exclamation mark came as a slap to the face.  Then the blood from his nose pooled on his plate.  His father was still yelling at him to eat it.

Mom would say something calming like, "Are you happy now, you son of a bitch?"  Mom was never silent on matters of the safety of her children.  Unfortunately she knew little about how to deal with these things or how to truly keep her children safe, but she tried.

When he was about 5 Joyless would look at his father and say, "Are you happy now?"  That comment would bring on a tirade between the parents with the grandparents getting up and marching off to their room, slamming the door and turning on their TV.

Learning to eat without looking up was the only way that dinner was palatable.  Mom was a good cook and the food was good, but the chaos was unnerving and, like change, it was a constant in life as we knew it. 

We were the first ones in the apartment building to get a color television.  Joyless was enamored with the inner workings and every time the repairman came to work on it, he was right there asking questions about the inner workings.  It was not too long before he wanted to take things apart to see how they worked and then try to put them back together.  When he got it right, all was well with the world.  When he got it wrong, there was Hell to pay.

It was the belt or the switch or the fist.  You always wanted her to have the switches nearby.  They stung pretty bad, but they did not hurt nearly as bad as that belt or her fist.