TOM'S BLOG

BUTT'S UP

11/18/2024

"Butt's Up" is the third in a series of essays about my childhood. If you haven't already read "Foxy's Firehouse" start there, then read "Strays," and then come back here!

In 1979 my brother Mike and I invented a game on the racquetball courts at our apartment building. “Butts Up” involved players taking turns throwing a racquetball as hard as they could up against the front wall. The next player would have to catch the ball – straight off the wall or on the bounce – it didn’t matter which. If his catch was clean, then he threw the ball at the wall and the game kept going. But if he dropped it he had to run to the front wall as fast as he could, touch it, and call “safe!” before the other players got the ball to the wall first. If the ball made it to the wall before the player who dropped it, the meaning behind the game’s name became clear. The fumbler had to face the wall, like a suspect waiting to be frisked, as the other players gathered behind the service line, promising to “light your ass up.” They’d take turns firing the racquetball at the fumbler’s butt while he waited – cheeks clenched and eyes closed – to feel the sting of the rubber against his body or the sweet relief of hearing it ping off the wall.

Getting hit on the ass wasn’t that uncommon then. Corporal punishment was still a thing in school; something I experienced first cheek, and Mom would occasionally deal a few whacks with a wooden spoon or a shoe. Before we were evicted from the Jones apartment, my brother Dennis once stepped up to discipline Mike and me. Mom, who was clearly tired of hearing neighbors complain about us running wild through the complex while she was at work, lacked the arm strength to effectively whoop two growing delinquents.

Greased Lightnin'... It's automatic, systematic, and hydromatic. And red. Photo: Paramount Pictures

Mike and I were delighted to have our big brother step in. Dennis was fun. He took us to the Autorama to see the Batmobile (POW!), and the hot rod from Grease (the red one from the “Grease Lightnin’” sequence, not the white one Danny drove at Thunder Road). Another time he gave me and Mike five dollars to stand in the outfield of a nearby park while he and his friend shot bottle rockets at us. We were so sure that Dennis was more likely to smack a pillow than our asses we didn’t even put on extra underwear. When he came to our room and shut the door without winking or whispering for us to fake our screams and cries, Mike and I just assumed Dennis was already in character, a consummate professional dedicated to selling the moment to Mom. We weren’t acting when we spilled down the stairs, rubbing the sting from our hindquarters and yowling like cats whose tails got run over by a hoopty full of T-Birds. I wonder if that was Dennis’ attempt to be the man of the house Mom wouldn’t let him live in because the guy she had been dating didn’t want him there?

That was John. Mom started seeing him when my “boy and his dog” story was at its joyful zenith, but we weren’t sure why. He did drive a nice car, wore designer clothes, and (too much) Aramis for Men, but John was scarecrow tall and skinny, with gray eyes and questionable teeth. He wore his thinning hair in a feloniously tight perm. My mother was petite, but curvy; a verifiable babe who wore red lipstick that matched her short, stylish hair. But she also had three kids at home and two more in orbit; a hard sell in the Me Decade, no matter how pretty you were. That he didn’t run screaming after meeting us for the first time was probably John’s biggest selling point.

John's continued attention came with notes. In a less misogynistic world, the single mother would run the casting call, but here was Mom, reading for what she hoped would be her breakout role – just as she had with my father almost a decade earlier, and husband number one before that. At John’s urging, she got rid of all our pets except Sammy and Tara, and started dressing our nearly naked days in itchy, complicated layers. Roaming the desert looking for lizards and treasures among the tumbleweeds and trash gave way to parenthetical thisses and thats designed to make way for John’s rescuing presence. She should have watched the dogs. They would lower their heads and growl whenever John came too near, sensing the static and crackle he’d generate well before he started yelling and throwing things that weren’t his.

She didn’t know it then, but whatever stability Mom hoped John might bring when she accepted that perm and rejected her oldest son never arrived. In the nine years he spent in our lives, John was an “emotional parent,” the most infantile of Dr. Lindsay Gibson’s four types of emotionally immature parents, who “react to small upsets like the end of the world.” Given the inherent unpredictability that comes with being around any child — let alone wilder ones who had experienced the trauma and upheaval we had — upsets of all sizes inevitably happened, and John invariably overreacted, even in those early days. I carry a scar just above my right eye, a desperate echo from an ashtray smashed against a wall during one of his rages back on Drake Circle. I look into the mirror and hear his angry voice thundering about something I don’t remember in a house he didn’t live in or pay for.

John‘s demands and the storms that broke over us when they weren’t met served as evidence of how unprepared he was for the breathing, reckless reality of “your kids.” But he used other levers on Mom; petty jealousies over her playing softball, or spending time with her girlfriends. Mom’s reticence at abstaining from these activities became obstinance, so John put down the housewares and threw her around instead. When Dennis found out, he picked me and Mike up in his Plymouth and drove us to John’s apartment. I had just turned eight, Mike was ten, and Dennis was seventeen. I’m not sure how menacing we looked droning down the hall like angry bees, but when Dennis’ tire iron stung John’s door, John wisely kept it closed.

It makes sense that Mom and John were on hiatus when we got kicked out of the Jones apartment after die Nacht des Geschmolzenen Marshmallows. Neither wanted to take a pilot so fraught with production problems to series. But exasperated, broke, and now desperately in need of a place for us to live, Mom called John. What was that conversation like? Was he immediately eager and supportive, selflessly offering to open the door that Dennis damaged a few months earlier? Or did he make her beg, bargaining for concessions and imposing conditions we were bound to break? Whatever story they thought they were writing, Missy wrote herself out. She had already moved in with her boyfriend when, a few days after that phone call, we carried our baggage into an apartment too small to contain it.

Cambridge Towers, now known as Prime Apartments, today. Photo: Redfin

The idea that mothers and fathers “raise” kids hints at a level of authorship even the best parents don’t deserve. Grownups don’t write their children into adulthood, but they do live the language kids use to ultimately tell their own story. Everything our parents do and don’t can impact our ability to fluently read and write our lives. John’s arc in my story began with Drake Circle and flew over Jones Boulevard before landing at a fourth floor apartment in the Cambridge Towers Tennis Racquet Club. The pages of my short time at John’s swinging bachelor pad are full of erasures, but I know we had some of the physical and financial security mom wanted for us. There was food in the fridge, clothes that fit, and Mike and I occasionally got some spending money. Another Sam entered our lives, this time a calico kitten we named Samantha that Mom found covered in motor oil in a hospital parking garage after John had fallen at work and blew out his knee — because selling used cars can be a full-contact sport.

All of these things should’ve carried me back to Buffalo, to Voorhees Avenue and that time before Foxy. Instead they sit as bullet points; facts about my time at Cambridge Towers in an apartment I can hardly remember or feel anything for. What happened in that space, the path I traveled from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom, didn’t get enough foot traffic to blaze a lasting trail through my neural pathways because they happened under guard so I moved through them quickly. Living with John was like playing Butt’s Up, only the rules were shifting. His moods were angular and too unpredictable on the bounce; his expectations too hard to catch cleanly. We would fumble balls we didn’t know were in play. One Sunday he ate his breakfast and read the paper. John loved bear claw danishes, and when he got up to change for the day, he left his dirty dishes, crumbs, and newspapers scattered all over. Then he came back and exploded. “Look at this place!” he demanded, “Are you pigs, because you live in a pigsty!” When Mike and I pointed out that the mess was his, John made our “talking back” the issue.

So we avoided the apartment as much as we could, especially when John was there, something he encouraged by telling me and Mike to “go outside and play in the traffic.” There was enough in and around Cambridge Towers to keep us busy. In addition to the tennis and racquetball courts there was a gym and a swimming pool on site. There was also a gameroom with a pool table, and a few video games. Bobby Vinton, or some similar crooner, lived in the penthouse and passed out full-sized candy bars on Halloween. At our third school in four years we joined the kickball team, and found other after school diversions like stealing from stores at The Boulevard Mall, which we passed to and from school each day. We became entrepreneurs, swiping keychain pistols and scented Hello Kitty erasers, which we’d then sell for pure profit to our classmates.

The Boulevard Mall, sometime in the late 1970s. Photo: Lee Jackson

The world beyond my field of vision began impinging on my periphery. The Iran Hostage Crisis was pouring salt on the wounds of American supremacy, and I couldn’t understand how my two Iranian kickball teammates could come from a place that hated “us” so much. I also became a bit class conscious. Like a lot of schools in my ever amorphous city, the student body of Ruby S. Thomas Elementary cut a broad swath across the socioeconomic spectrum. My classmates included students bused in from the predominantly poor African American Westside to satisfy integration mandates, Iranian and Indochinese refugees, and children of the country club set. The latter, some of whom had their lunch brought to them from McDonald’s each day, became our best eraser customers.

We wrote our boyhoods in the same messy script that got us kicked out of the Jones apartment, only we were careful to keep any evidence of the crimes we were committing under the bed and out of sight. I felt a kind of power in the small risks I was taking — the stealing, the rough games — like putting your hand over a flame and seeing how long you could keep it there; measuring how much pain you could stand without really hurting yourself. It numbed my sadness and served as a release valve for stress generated by living with a man who I wasn’t sure wanted me. I was in third grade then, and I got into my first real fight, one I started with a sixth grader who used to come to the tennis courts for lessons. When Mike and I fought, we had rules – no hitting below the belt or above the neck. Maybe I expected the kind of tolerable body shots those fights produced when I kept getting into this kid’s face and calling him chickenshit; this older boy who clearly did not want to fight. In the end, my inability to shut my mouth and keep my hands to myself, combined with the pressures of public boyhood, left him no choice.

Our “match” didn’t end with a tangle of bodies rolling around on the ground the way most childhood fights do. Someone had taught this kid how to throw hands, for real, and when I finally pushed him one time too many he punched me just above my left eye and knocked me back. I came forward again, and got punched again. Then I came forward another time, and got knocked back again, and then again, and then another time. I was soon on the ground, bruised, bloodied, and sobbing as he stood over me, untouched save for his bloodied knuckles. That’s what Mike saw when he stepped out of the apartment building and onto the sidewalk. Smaller than the boy, and a year younger, Mike flew at him in a frenzy that ignored any rules or boundaries. It took two men to pull my brother off of that kid, who Mike kept kicking even as he was pulled away.

I think I picked that fight with that particular boy because of John. I barely knew the kid, who actually seemed pleasant enough, and I doubt John had ever set eyes on him. But with his blonde hair, blue eyes, fancy tennis gear, and two matching legs, I imagined he was the kind of boy John would prefer to have around. His presence alone judged me, even as his actions towards me were benign. And I hated him for it because I desperately wanted John to like me. It had been two years since divorce blew Pop back east, and when you’re a lonely kid yearning for someone who left, it’s not really that specific person’s absence that leaves your heart heavy and your throat dry. You’re thirsty for the way they made you feel. John’s presence brought on phantom pains from when my family was whole. I wanted to feel the way I did when my father called out “nature boy!” as I ran naked into the living room after a bath; to feel his whiskers across my laughing face when he’d hug a towel around me. Instead I got “Why don’t you go outside and play in the traffic.”

Mom found our stolen stock and ill-gotten cash under the bed, and she was pissed. “Where,” she wanted to know, did all of these pleasantly scented erasers and this dirty money come from? In what would be a crucial misstep on her part, she didn’t grab a spoon or a shoe, nor did she call Dennis. She told John. I think we – me, Mike, and Mom – would have preferred a beating to the sanctimony that slowly tarred out of John’s mouth as we sat captured on the couch. Mike and I were animals, he said. It was Mom’s fault for not being able to control us. We were ungrateful. Inconsiderate. On very thin ice. All of us. “If you are going to act like trash,” he said, looking at me and then Mike when he was really speaking to Mom, “then I’ll throw you out with the garbage.”

Photo: Sprinkles & Puffballs

Photo: The Rusty Splinter

We got grounded for a month; but, like everything else this sentence triangulated back to and was truncated by John’s inability to breathe the cool, conditioned air with us. There was a logic to the aversive punishment Dennis doled out to Mike and me that day on Jones Boulevard. He was, in his way, trying to teach us something; to get us to behave in a way that might make Mom’s life a bit easier. John’s punishments generated a mutual aversion and made life harder on everyone. We would cross paths to and from the kitchen, the bathroom, out the door in awkward silence. Plus, it’s not like Mike and I were sitting in our room quietly contemplating the negative impact our stealing might have on Woolworth’s third quarter earnings report. By the time that first weekend hit, my opening a kitchen cabinet was enough to set him off, so John angrily sent us outside. We didn’t stop to ask if we were still grounded. We trusted the rhythm of the world outside, and longed to be anywhere John was not.

One night Mom blew a catch, and John got the ball back to the wall before she could reach it. Mike and I lay in bed listening as words morphed into shouts into muffled thuds and slaps. I have no idea what they were fighting about, and Mike doesn’t remember either, but it was probably money. Finances were yet another lever John used against Mom, as she was a lowly waitress while he was purveyor of Sin City’s finest gently used automobiles. They would sit down to do the bills, come up short, then cups and calculators would start flying. Mike and I would leave the TV and slink into our room where we’d listen to John shout out the many ways we were contributing to his imminent financial collapse from behind our closed door. We drank too much milk. We grew out of our clothes too quickly. Since he worked on commission, all of us – including him, he’d point out – were just one bad month away from the street, and Mom wasn’t carrying her weight. He’d say all this wearing an expensive designer watch that peeked out from the sleeve of a tailored shirt as he pointed a manicured finger weighed down by a gold-nugget crusted ring at my freeloading mother; ignoring the fact that even his perm came on credit, and that the car he drove had dealer plates.

Mom usually managed to ride out his words, but this night either she could or would not. Or maybe John felt words weren’t enough. I’m not sure how many blows landed between them before Mom had us up, dressed, and out the door as John fumbled to follow, but we easily beat him to the elevator, then made it through the lobby, and across the parking lot. We climbed into our orange station wagon – the one that brought us to Vegas from Buffalo and was still running on duct-tape and pure Vegas luck – relieved that John was nowhere in sight. But as Mom backed up the car and swung it into drive there he was, spotlighted in amber like a comic book villain, bathrobe flowing behind him in the headlights as he stood blocking our exit, spitting for us to stop. “Hit him, Mom!” Mike and I gleefully yelled from the back. “Light his ass up!” We spent that night in a shelter I can remember about as well as John’s apartment. Mom said this was it. She didn’t know where we were going, but we were definitely not going back. Any uncertainty we felt facing tomorrow was buffered by Mom’s certainty that it would not include John. Mike and I drifted off to sleep; his absence like a lullaby.

Instead of going to school the next day, Mom drove us to Valley of Fire, a state park about an hour outside of town that truly looks the way it’s named. Mike and I explored the Martian landscape, scampering over red rocks under blue skies, reading petroglyphs and trying to catch chuckwallas with our t-shirts. We lay on our bellies and watched pollywogs swim in Mouse’s Tank – a small pool time carved in the sandstone that collects rain and is named after a Paiute fugitive who used the area as a hideout, just like us. We lost ourselves in the dusky smell of sagebrush and sand as Mom tried to form a Johnless future for us from the sunkissed air. But she could or would not. We climbed into the station wagon and went back to Cambridge Towers

Mouse's Tank in the Valley of Fire State Park, just outside of Las Vegas. Photo: Charli Dawns

Despite my Dad’s alcoholism and its accompanying violence, I never felt like he didn’t want me until many years after he left. This made the ache of his absence more visceral. Pop was guilty of seeing “family” as an all or nothing proposition – of having dreams he couldn’t reconcile with his crumbling reality. He may not have been a good father, but even Mom thought his disappearance from our lives was a measure of his love for us in some bizarre way. He didn’t want to have us if he couldn’t have us completely, so he was making way for someone who could. In my father’s absence and Dennis’ exile, John became my primary adult male role model, and even though his presence was a constant from the time I was 9 until 17, he never dulled the ache of Pop’ absence. A man who ran a boys home I never got sent to did that when I was 12.

Why would someone who seemed so disinterested in being a parent spend almost a decade of his life playing at one? Not only was John an emotional parent run by his feelings, he was also an archetypal example of Gibson’s “rejecting parent” – the kind who “engage(s) in a range of behaviors that make you wonder why they have a family in the first place.” What became immediately clear to me after just a few weeks at Cambridge Towers was that John was not someone I could go to if I got hurt, or needed help with homework, or had an issue that needed sorting out. His was a house where children were only seen and heard on his terms, and for his purposes.

This combination of emotional and rejecting styles was the result of John’s internalizing societal expectations his own rejecting parents didn’t prepare him to meet. In order to get ahead (even in the cutthroat world of used car sales) John felt he needed a family. So he found a pretty wife who had a couple of kids lying around, and eventually added a house, a nice car, and a dog. Mom, her small but steady income, and her two kids gave John a respectability he wore like one of those expensive shirts. In the coming years, John would take us from Cambridge Towers to other parts of the Vegas Valley, miming the things families are supposed to do as he worked for a paper-doll version of an American Dream he wasn’t even sure he wanted. He was punching beyond his skill, just like I was when that kid beat the shit out of me. John knew it, but he kept punching anyway. What else could he do?

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STRAYS

6/23/2024

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This piece is meant to follow a previous essay called "Foxy's Firehouse" and is the second in an ongoing series about my childhood in Las Vegas. If you haven't read "Foxy's" yet, go do it now!

I didn’t experience Buffalo enough to measure it against Las Vegas in terms of infrastructure and “ease of use;” but, compared to where I live now, the Vegas I grew up in was a relatively easy place to navigate once I got used to it. This may surprise people who think The Hangover says all there is to say about experiencing Sin City. Sure, there’s a level of chaos hidden beneath the neon, but everything that happens and stays in Vegas finds a place on a well-ordered, albeit very congested grid. When I moved to Boston just prior to the proliferation of GPS, I would MapQuest directions too and from any destination because the first and only time I assumed from was too in reverse I found myself stuck behind a minivan on Malcolm X Boulevard. The tearful white lady behind the wheel of the van pleaded with a police officer for directions to someplace less colorful (though, now that I think of it, she may have been unnerved by the strange white guy in the blue VW Golf behind her).

That wasn’t the first time I got lost in a new city. Shortly after we arrived in Vegas, I stepped out of our apartment complex for my first solo run to the 7-11 up the street, a trip I’d made a few times before with my older brothers and sisters. Everything went as planned until I returned, Slurpee in hand, to my apartment, flung open the door, and found a family of complete strangers sitting in the living room watching TV.

My complex was made up of a series of indistinguishable buildings that guarded both sides of the street. This was typical of the stark sameness the city carried as you moved away from the Strip, with neighborhoods varying only slightly from one another as they blended into a beige blur of tract homes and apartments with stucco facades and tiled roofs. It was the epitome of suburban sameness – splashed with neon and rimmed by mountains. Dazzled by the familiar, I turned into the courtyard for Building 4 when I should’ve been looking for Building 5, or something like that – I can’t remember the exact numbers – and found myself in an apartment that was and was not mine. I dropped my Slurpee, took a deep breath, and pushed out my shock in confused, convulsive sobs.

Apartments on Silver Dollar Avenue today, via Google Maps.

The people whose afternoon I disrupted were patient and understanding. They calmed me down, and guided me to my version of their apartment I. Maybe they were used to strange children from other buildings opening their door at all hours of the day. I can imagine the woman who helped me home slowly getting up, sighing, and saying to the air, “Another one? Really?”

These people helped me navigate my new space – physically and emotionally. They made it so I learned from an experience that could’ve left me afraid to leave the confines of my courtyard by balancing my fear with their guidance and grace. Thereafter, I would make that 7-11 run often, paying careful attention to which “mine” was where. Despite their kindness, this family would not become my first true friends in Vegas. That honor fell to a dog I named Sammy.

I can’t say I had a particular affinity for animals before I met this dog, though pets have always been a part of my life. When I was born, my family had a German Shepherd I don’t remember named Spuddy. Dennis had guinea pigs, and Linda had her cat, and we had another cat named Spooky who ran away during the fire but returned to us every winter. Then there was the first Sam – who I should probably refer to as “Sam 1.0,” or “Sam Senior” to distinguish him from the line of other Sams, Sammies, and Samanthas who would, like Banquo’s children, reach into my future.

Sam was a dalmatian who didn’t make the trip west with us. He was an athlete, with a bad reputation in the neighborhood. Once some kids decided to throw rocks at him, so he jumped the fence and chased them down the street. Another time, when we were eating dinner, Sam was under the table begging for food. As the smallest pack member, I must’ve seemed like an easy target. Sam nibbled on my pants leg with a bit too much jaw pressure and pinched skin, so I slid down and bit his tail. Sam yelped and snapped, but gently. Later, I would imagine him living the life of a firehouse dog, riding shotgun towards burning houses.

I don’t remember having pets our first year or so in Vegas. We might have been allowed a cat in the apartments we lived in, but dogs of any size were most likely off limits. By the time I reached second grade, Mom had found us a house on Drake Circle with a fenced-in yard and no animal restrictions – at least not ones we followed. It was there that a new dog came into our lives – Tara. Tara was a beautiful shepherd from the Catholic group home my sister Linda had been sent to. The nuns brought in abused animals, hoping that the girls and the dogs might rehabilitate one another. Tara "graduated" with Linda, but Linda didn't stay with us very long, so Tara became Missy's dog. There was at least one cat in the house also, maybe two, I can’t remember for sure.

I do recall that the neighbor across the street, who I’ll call Mark, had an Australian Shepherd that was highly trained and very friendly. Mark would let me play with the dog, whose name is lost to me, though I know it was a beautiful merle with one gray and one brown eye. One summer night, my brother and I had been playing hide and seek with other kids in the neighborhood, and I planted myself in the bushes in Mark’s backyard. I had a clear view through his sliding glass door into his living room, where I saw his topless girlfriend feeding him grapes as if Mark were a Roman emperor. I was too young to really understand that I was witnessing foreplay, but definitely old enough to know that the rest of the kids I was playing with had to see it if I was to be believed. My cover was quickly blown as I tried to call my friends’ attention, drawing a, “Who’s out there!?” from a startled Mark. I wasn’t caught outright, but I didn’t see much of Mark’s pup anymore.

While I’ve had access to all of the animals I’ve shared roofs with (though Dennis was a bit protective of those guinea pigs), Sammy 2.0 was the first pet that was “mine.” He came to me when I was about eight, literally stepping away from a feral pack that had been raiding neighborhood garbage cans. One morning I watched from the kitchen window as a dog who – if I had to guess was a shepherd-labrador mix – picked through our garbage on the grassy verge that separated our driveway from our neighbors’. I grabbed a cupful of Tara’s food, and made my way outside. The dog was cautious, but curious, eyeing me – and that kibble – from a distance with his head and tail down and ears forward. So I placed the food in a heap on the ground, stepped back a few feet, and sat down on the dewy grass to see what he would do. Maybe ten minutes later, Sammy was laying next to me, tongue lolling and eyes squinting with satisfaction as I scratched his ears. For a short time – probably about a year – he and I were “ours.”

An AI generated image of what Sammy sorta looked like.

That house on Drake Circle was our third stop around the southwest corner of the Vegas Valley. Pop was still a ghost whose presence I longed for, and my siblings were in and out of the picture, coming and going so often that I can’t remember who lived where, with who, or when. Linda was back east, as was Dennis, though he would return towards the tail end of our time at the house. Was Missy with us the whole time on Drake? I’m not sure. She did briefly have a job at an ice cream parlor around the corner, and would give us free samples. I know Mike was away in Synanon when we first arrived. He would return, making his bed with military precision until he understood no one was going to beat and berate him if he didn’t.

While his presence would be my bridge to the neighborhood and the kids who lived in it, I mostly lived in my head until then. I continued to spend my school days isolated and daydreaming about my father, while I tried not to draw attention to the 2-inch lift on my right shoe. My time out of school was spent as batboy at Mom’s softball games, or drawing in front of the TV. On the weekends, I caught up on all the work I should have been doing in class. Sammy’s arrival wove a thread of normalcy into the fabric of my time on Drake Circle. He gave me an anchor I desperately craved. Ours was a story so common it’s become too typically American: “A Boy and His Dog,” one that always ends in tears.

I have no clue how old Sammy was, but his energy lifted mine. There was a pile of scrap lumber in our backyard that I used to make a grubby agility course (though I was probably thinking “lion tamer” as opposed to “dog handler”). Sammy took to it immediately, jumping over the nail-filled obstacles, following my hand signals and vocal commands after just a few awkward two-legged demonstrations on my part. He would see us to the bus stop each day, and be waiting there when we got home. Still an outside dog prone to roaming the neighborhood, Sammy was never more than a shout away, and always came running when his name was called. He was an invaluable member of our lizard hunting expeditions; his keen eye following whiptails and horned-toads from bush to bush, striking a pointer’s pose until we either caught our quarry or flushed it out. He was a gift – one Mom let me keep without me asking – even though it meant having another mouth to feed, another “kid” to look after. There were times when I ate syrup sandwiches because that’s all we had, and moments when much needed new clothes only came because a generous customer left Mom a huge tip. But Mom never said “no” to animals, or books.

With Mike’s return and Sammy’s presence, my disposition started to align more closely with the bright desert sky I lived under, and I was happy in Vegas for the first time. I started making friends in the neighborhood (human ones). I found The Force, as reflected by the doodled X-Wings and Tie Fighters that battled on the margins of the school work I was now doing. We added three part-coyote puppies we found feral in the desert to our pack, along with a few cats. I became open to the possibility that life in Las Vegas might be okay. We explored the vastness of the desert, swam in other people’s pools to beat the heat, and generally used the neighborhood as our playground the way kids did before their parents’ fears and video games kept them indoors. This hint of “normalcy” was reinforced by a man Mom started seeing off and on. His name was Jon, and while he would become a constant for the next 10 years – helping to keep us housed, clothed, and fed – he was physically and emotionally abusive.

Mike immediately saw Jon for who he was: a petulant child play-acting as a man. Early in their relationship, Mom took us to Jon’s apartment for a getting to know you pool party. I was ever-eager to please, and desperate for a father figure. Having learned early on that smiling in the face of my disability was endearing to others, I took this tack with Jon, but Mike was not interested in ingratiating himself to this tall, skinny man with big teeth and a thinning perm. He left Jon’s, and walked the three miles or so back to Drake Circle on his own – something Mom and Jon didn’t seem too concerned about.

The house on Drake Circle today. Again, via Google Maps.

Jon immediately began influencing my mother even as they initially kept their residences separate, forcing her to trim our menagerie of pets. One day, we came home from school and the puppies were gone, as were the cats – but Sammy and Tara remained. While Mom – at Jon’s urging – would refuse Dennis a place to live when he returned to Las Vegas, when it came to giving Sammy and Tara a home, she would not budge. Then the rent went up, or our lease wasn’t renewed, and we had to move yet again. I’m not sure what the state of Mom’s relationship with Jon was just then, but we did not go with him, and the dogs could not come to our new apartment with us.

Instead, Sammy and Tara would be taken in by a friend of Mom’s who had a big place – “a farm,” Mom said – on the valley’s edge with lots of room for two dogs. He pulled up in a brown truck with a cap over the bed. Tara had to be carried in. She immediately took a position at the back of the bed and laid down. Sammy, on my command, jumped onto the tailgate; and, when it was closed, began pacing and panting. He knew something was up, and this was confirmed when I reached over the gate, pulled him close and started to sob. I can still feel his fur on my wet cheek; feel the weight of him on my shoulder, his head curling around my neck as we leaned into one another. After Mom, who was also crying, gently pulled me away with promises of future visits that never happened, the man got into his truck, started the engine, and began to drive. Sammy continued to pace, lurching now and again to keep his balance as the truck picked up speed; his mouth shaping soundless, confused whimpers. His eyes were locked on mine, even as he shakily paced and cried until the man turned the corner at the end of Drake Circle and the truck disappeared.

Despite my memory blending and blurring exactly as Quiroga says it should under the weight of such an emotional moment – for instance, I can’t remember Mike and Missy being there when the dogs left though they surely were – I can place Sammy’s departure between April and early summer in 1979. I know I was out of school when we moved into our new apartment (where we would mar glass with those molten marshmallows), and it had to be after the release of “Sad Eyes” by Robert John which hit the charts that spring. The exploits of Emperor Mark notwithstanding, I didn’t understand that this song was so adult in nature. Written as a “goodbye” from a cheater to his soon-to-be ex-lover, to my naive ears “Sad Eyes” perfectly captured the imperfect circumstances of Sammy’s departure (which, I guess could be considered the end of an affair):

Sad eyes, turn the other way
I don't want to see you cry
Sad eyes, you knew there'd come a day
When we would have to say "goodbye"

In The Forgetting Machine, Quiroga describes how the narrator of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time vividly and involuntarily recalls a childhood memory when he bites into a tea-soaked madeleine. In the decades after that truck drove Sammy away, “Sad Eyes” was my Proustian Madeleine. If the song’s opening bars were piped into a store I was shopping in, sadness would seed in my chest, and my eyes would bloom with tears. I’d quickly move towards the exit to avoid making my garden of grief public.

In my young head and heart, the weight of Sammy’s loss rivaled my father’s, becoming another wound that would never completely scab and scar. Both were part of what I thought was a pattern — one where any happiness I experienced was destined to end in heartbreak. To me, “Sad Eyes” was one of many indicators that doom was inevitable. Normal, constructive exchanges with my first wife could quickly send me into a defensive fit – me seeing her, but hearing Jon’s condescending tone – despite that not being her intent. Any “nice” thing I came by would draw waves of panic and shame if anything happened that made it less than pristine, or rage if I wasn’t the one responsible for the damage. It was clear to me that the arc of my life swung towards loneliness because so much of my childhood had been marked by that feeling.

All my accumulated unprocessed pain was riding shotgun when, nearly thirty years later, I took those wrong turns into Dorchester, under circumstances that mirrored my childhood move to Vegas. My first marriage was over, and I had returned to the east coast to be nearer to my daughter after spending 10 months depressed and hiding in Vegas, sleeping on my mother’s couch and teaching middle school reading (poorly). Only now I was driving the car, facing decisions my parents faced in 1976 when it was obvious their marriage was over: where would I live? Who would I love? What sort of space would I build for my child? My mother looked for the answers to these questions outside of herself, and I had repeated that pattern with similar results. This had to stop. If I was going to be the kind of parent I needed but never had, I had to become my own dad, friend, wife. My own Sammy. I just wasn’t sure how to do that.

I was dealing with another bout with major depression, eating ramen and watching stolen cable in my overpriced basement apartment just north of Boston. Some days, it was all I could do to get off of my red futon and into work. I had taken a job as a humanities teacher at a brand new charter school, and we weren’t ready for or equipped to handle the issues our students brought to the building each day – which, for some of them, included their own kids as we had a daycare on site. I barely lasted the year, fixing boilers and breaking up fights, doing anything but teaching. But during that time my colleagues grew into supportive friends. I would see my daughter often, visiting her in Plattsburgh or having her join me in Boston, basking in the sunshine of her presence and the transcendence that comes with being her dad. These things, along with antidepressants and therapy – helped me push the pain and depression under, where it lived with a dull, vibrating ache. I began learning that loneliness and being alone don’t always mean the same.

Then one day, a beautiful woman with ocean blue eyes brought me a handful of food as I was digging through her garbage.

Not really. We connected on a dating site. I had committed to the 30-day free trial because I couldn’t afford anything beyond that, and she had accidentally changed her settings beyond her preferred 15-miles radius. She clicked on my profile, we exchanged notes and numbers, then met for coffee (which then turned to dinner), and quickly fell in love. Eventually, Cecily gave me a home in her heart and under her roof. In my first marriage, I largely lived through my wife; defining who I was via her interests and worldview (though she never expected this of me) because I was just 19 when we married and I was my mother’s son.

My Match.com profile pic...

...and Cecily's.

I live with Cecily, not through her. We keep separate bank accounts, but share trips to Europe and runs to the dump. She pretends to be scandalized by the audacity of me farting in her presence even though Borat was the first movie we saw together. Both of us laughed until our faces hurt (and she had already seen it!). We’ve supported one another through loss, encouraged each other through change, and celebrated the magic and milestones we’ve reached during our 17 years together. She’s accepted my baggage, loved my daughter, and we’ve built a life where we’ve grown as people and partners who shelter and support each other. While I know I’m strong enough to face the world without her, I hope I never have to.

I had arrived in Boston determined to grow into a stronger, happier person; and, for the most part, I’ve done that. I started therapy when my first wife and I separated, which made sense given the gravity of the situation, and have continued on an “as needed” basis after I moved to the Commonwealth. I’ve read a lot of self-help books, and have accepted that antidepressants will be part of my long-term mental health regimine. Despite the fire and smoke of my past, I am an intelligent, well-functioning adult capable of managing life and rising to the occasion. Productively working full-time while taking classes to earn an additional teaching credential (and earning all A’s while doing so) – easy! Leaving the continent – and often my comfort zone – to experience the world is something I’ve grown to love and crave. When Cecily’s mother struggled with cancer and died, I was reliable and steady.

Yet depression, anxiety, and fear still find me in surprisingly discouraging ways. Echoes of past traumas are unexpectedly triggered and that triggering brings irrational feelings of anger, loneliness, sadness, and doom back even though I know those emotions don’t reflect the truth of the moment, or my ability to handle whatever it is I’m facing. When the timing belt went in my car, I was so filled with anxiety I could barely move or breathe. Starting the new job closer to home that I was imminently qualified for and that gave me a better work-life balance — that kept me up at night and sent me back to therapy. A trip to Italy saw my breath taken as we turned a corner in Florence and caught sight of Brunelleschi’s dome, but I lost half a day in Rome filled with shame because I scratched my new Apple Watch. I’ve faced losing two dogs – one to old age and another to a shockingly unexpected illness – with sadness, but also with gratitude and grace. Yet “Sad Eyes” could turn me into a puddle.

My first view of Il Duomo in Florence. It was staggering in the best way.

Depression is a natural extension of loss. I can understand why I was floored by divorce (my parents’ and my own), and losing Sammy. However, I couldn’t reconcile the daily duplicitousness of my mental health – good when it mattered, mush when it shouldn’t have. When my niggling nerves and unpredictable panic attacks sent me back to therapy on the heels of the pandemic — even as my life was relatively untouched by COVID and its consequences — I was determined to figure out why I could not stop sweating the small stuff; why I could never step away from the edge of the river of doubt that kept running through my undergrowth no matter how good my life looked on paper. Previous therapists had resisted my desire to delve into my past as a way to counteract its impact on my present. Best to focus on the now, they would argue, and look for ways to manage your stress and anxiety. My questions about why a leaky faucet would lead to debilitating panic while a seriously ill relative would be faced with aplomb were met with shrugs. I couldn’t accept that my panic wasn’t fixable, especially given my growth in so many other areas. My new therapist agreed.

Jessica was willing to journey into my past with me – to revisit what I could remember so that I might rationalize and release my swerving thoughts instead of hotly reacting to them. She became a sounding board who validated the idea that understanding the weight of my past — as opposed to ignoring it — could be transformative for me. She reinforced some things that I already knew: that it did me no good to minimize and dismiss my traumas simply because they were in the past, and that I had accomplished a whole helluva lot throughout my life in spite of them. By working with Jessica, all of my previous attempts at finding surer footing against worry began to synthesize in ways they hadn’t before. She helped me process Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, by Lindsay Gibson, which lifted the lid off of my self-doubt, and explained why I carried such reactivity. Another amazing thing Jessica did was recognize that a different therapy — one she wasn’t able to provide — might serve me well: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR for short.

On the surface, EMDR struck me as something gimmicky that could not and should not work. As I understood it, I would spend some time thinking about something bad that happened to me while a therapist waved their hand in front of my eyes, and my brain would magically realign and heal itself. But Jessica said she had had clients who had gotten over traumas that had haunted them all of their lives — all within the course of a few sessions. I decided to give it a try.

A few weeks later, I met Cara, the therapist who would be working with me via this new approach. Our first session was informational – she explained how EMDR worked, and did some history taking. I learned how our physiological toolkit includes mechanisms for processing our positive and negative experiences, and how sometimes those processes get overwhelmed; clogged by traumas that essentially get stuck and therefore go unprocessed. I talked about the work I had been doing with Jessica, and why we felt EMDR might be a good next step for me, considering my frustratingly visceral reaction to thoughts and feelings that seemed insignificant on the surface. When it came time to explore a potential jumping off point for our first EMDR session, I knew right where I wanted to go.

I was sitting before my laptop at my messy dining room table when Cara, who was meeting with me via Zoom, asked me to hold my memory of Sammy’s departure in my head, and started our first set. She was using a wooden screen as a backdrop, her torso in the left of my monitor as my eyes, with my head still, followed her hand back and forth on the right of my screen. After 30 seconds or so, Cara paused and asked me what thoughts and feelings came up. Then she’d have me hold on to a particular thought or feeling, and we’d go again. When it was all over, my mind had played back my life with Sammy in reverse. My memories moved from the truck, to chasing lizards in the desert, to seeing him at the bus stop, to scratching his head on that very first day. In these flashbacks, I was always in the frame with Sammy — smiling, directing, playing, confident. Over the course of a few sets, spanning maybe fifteen minutes, my feelings about my time with Sammy shifted from devastation and loss to happiness and joy.

I was shocked at how good I felt at the end of the session. I was light, giddy, even. Thinking of Sammy filled me with laughter and triumph, and I kept repeating, “I can’t believe this!” and, “This is incredible!” to Cara again and again. I kept bringing Sammy to mind, replaying my memories of him, waiting for them to turn sour and they did not. The real test came later that evening, when I opened up Apple Music, searched up “Robert John,” and double-clicked on “Sad Eyes.” As those first few bars hit my ears I smiled and began to laugh as happy tears ran down my cheeks.

In her book, Getting Past Your Past, Francine Shapiro, an early pioneer of EMDR, talks about why people need more than just time to heal their hurts. The brain, like the body, is equipped with tools for healing, but just as our cuts heal better when they are covered, kept clean, and treated with care, our brain’s information processing system requires optimal conditions to minimize scarring — conditions that were decidedly lacking when Sammy followed my father out of my life. As I moved forward, what Sammy gave me was paved over by the pain of losing him, because I never got the chance to process that loss. It was something bad that happened that I was simply expected to move on from. The sum of our time together was him leaving in that truck, and sad “Sad Eyes” was the soundtrack.

By tapping into the same mechanisms our brains use to process information and emotions during REM sleep, EMDR helped me reframe that devastating childhood trauma. Now when I think of the bent-eared stray who came to stay when I was eight – I no longer have to fight back tears when I remember his inquisitive eyes asking “are you coming too?” as he paced in the back of that truck. EMDR helped me literally remember how amazing my life was during the brief time Sammy was in it. He was my best friend. He always listened, had time for me. He was my confidant, my playmate, my hunting dog who pointed the way towards lizards with his keen eye and sharp nose. In return, Sammy asked for nothing but my time, some ear scratches and belly rubs, and kibble. After I lost him, the loneliness and sadness returned, but for a while, I was that boy – the one Sammy chose over his pack.

Today there’s another song that reminds me of Sammy – “Bros” by Wolf Alice. Like “Sad Eyes,” it’s not a perfect representation of me and Sammy, but it’s close. Lead singer Ellie Roswell wrote the song as a tribute to a childhood friend, and calls it “an ode to childhood imagination and friendship and all the charm that comes with that." One thing I like about this song, is how the opening verse not only takes me to the past, but brings Sammy to the present:

Shake your hair, have some fun
Forget our mothers and past lovers, forget everyone
Oh, I'm so lucky, you are my best friend
Oh, there's no one, there's no one who knows me like you do

I know it was the promise of a regular meal that lured Sammy, and all dogs down through the ages, into domesticity. But the emotional need to believe that there’s more to it than that is just as real for me now as it was when I was eight – and that’s the truth I claim. Sammy stayed because of me, not because of the food I gave him. I am still that boy, and Sammy is still with me, even now. He never left.

Today, I'm doing my best to make the most of my unreliable internal Global Positioning System, just like you. Each moment we pass through, half-lost or moving confidently forward, is like one of those squishy stress balls filled with swirling, multi-colored liquid. If we assigned one color “good” and another “bad,” we’d see that both are always present to some degree, depending on the circumstances and the pressure. Memories are like that: cloudy, iridescent, beautiful. So is life.

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FOXY'S FIREHOUSE

5/23/2024

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There’s a picture of me when I was little, a photo I remember seeing often as I grew up, but that has since disappeared. I’m wearing shorts, a windbreaker, tube socks, and a shirt with a pattern lost to the early 70s. I’m holding a large bag of marshmallows, and wearing a forced, lazy smile, indicating that the picture was staged. The lackadaisical smile and the marshmallows don’t go together. I’m four or five years old, and my face should be filled with the maniacal joy that comes from possessing such sweet treasure. Instead I’m clearly going through motions I haven’t quite mastered yet.

Boy with Marshmallows: A Recreation

I can’t contextualize this scene. I think my godfather gave me the marshmallows; maybe as a parting gift before my family and I left Buffalo, New York for Las Vegas, Nevada. Is there something nefarious behind that smile? Did I not like this man who, as a friend of my father’s, became one of the many “uncles” Italian families give to children without their asking? Maybe I was the subject of an accidental Marshmallow Test as my parents, playing Walter Mischel, measured my willpower by making me “save them for later” so as not to spoil my dinner.

Why do I remember this picture at all? Why is a polaroid I no longer possess that captured an event I no longer remember held so firmly by my brain the way my hands held that bag of marshmallows? Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, in his book The Forgetting Machine writes that “memory makes us who we are.” So who does remembering random photos of myself, ones I don’t know the story behind, make me?

It makes me curious. And frustrated. Until recently, I did not care that pictures had gone missing, that I have no boxes filled with bric-a-brac talismans to anchor me to a past I thought best to forget. Now that I know there’s value in that past – not just for me, but for people I love – I wish my memory of it was better because I’m having trouble pulling the pieces together. Timelines are muddled. Places and events blur and blend. Faces have faded. I turned to Quiroga’s book to try to jumpstart my faulty memory, but instead of unlocking archetypal Toms of days gone by, I ended up learning things about why my memory – and yours, too – sucks. Things that, according to Quiroga, I am likely to forget.

For example, humans only remember a fraction of the sheer volume of information they take in. Not only that, those things we do remember risk being inaccessible over time if we don’t go back to them. Like any other road or trail, a neural pathway “that is unused,” Quiroga explains, “will eventually become overgrown and impassable.” What I’ve forgotten is there, but it’s lost, unreachable via the parts of my neural network I’ve left untended.

The things we do remember aren’t reliable because memory making is an inferential, context-dependent experience, one rooted in senses we only partially use. When we look at something, we only “see” pieces of it while our brains quickly construct the rest. This comes from a time when seeing and perceiving had to be fast to ensure survival. Our eyes saw a flash of teeth, and our brains created a picture that said “sharp” and “dangerous.” Seeing those teeth again kept that memory – and us – alive by keeping our road to this danger (and hopefully away from it) clean and clear. That kind of “knowing” was vital, even if it was technically incomplete.

Humans also have the capacity to color and shape memory making – sometimes by necessity and sometimes by choice. Our memories of traumatic events are often amplified, distorted, or erased completely in service of our psychological well-being. Conversely, Quiroga notes how artists “load scenes with subjectivity,” emphasizing parts of an image they wish to draw attention to, sculpting the way audiences’ perceive and digest a world awash in creativity.

I think people curate their memories with the same sort of selectivity, and apply it equally to what they want to remember or forget. I am certainly guilty of this. So you’ll have to accept the “fact” that my first memory of Las Vegas is a hypersexualized neon fox for what it is: an impression of an image I didn’t fully see or understand at the time, but am now presenting to you as truth.

I was five – maybe full of marshmallows – lying on the floor of the backseat of our giant orange station wagon, drifting in and out of sleep when the warm, dark air above me started to pulse and glow. I raised my tired eyes to a flickering, firefighting fox floating across the windows, calling gamblers to “the hottest slots in town.”

Foxy’s Firehouse Casino was once a deli and celebrity hangout that had been converted to a slot palace – not quite big enough to be a resort, but just big enough to take your money. Had Foxy made it 20 years past her 1988 sell-by date, its owners may have appropriated Kings of Leon: “Oooooh-ooohh, these slots are on fire!” For me, Foxy’s just another image burned into my brain, anchored in a childhood I lived but only remember in bits and pieces. She guards the border where “before” meets “after.”

Foxy’s Firehouse Casino, 1977. Kodachrome photo and scan by Angus J.

Maybe there’s another reason why Foxy and her flames made such an impression. When my mother was pregnant with me, our house on Voorhees Avenue was engulfed one early spring day. As Mom was returning from the corner store, she saw smoke and flame bursting through the roof and frantically ran to make sure my siblings were safe. When I came into the world a few months later, my right leg was shorter than my left, and my right foot hooked like a broken field hockey stick. I crawled into my place as the youngest of five wearing a cast so tiny that Dennis, my oldest brother, used to take the casts I outgrew to school for show and tell. Metal braces replaced plaster when I was two. When those braces came off at age four, my right leg was two inches shorter than my left and my foot faced forward, but was still misshapen.

That the physical and emotional stress from the fire impacted my development in the womb was a story I told to explain my disability as I grew older, though I have no proof of its accuracy. I constructed it to stand in for memories I could never claim; for facts no one shared with me. Then I told it to show how heat and fire became part of my neuro-fabric. It’s a narrative borrowed from other people’s memories that I’ve made my own. So while I can’t place my early days in Vegas onto Freytag’s Pyramid, I have a timeline filled with flashes focused on a common motif I can trace back to that house fire.

There was the dumpster fire I saw burning behind our apartment building on Silver Dollar Avenue shortly after we moved in.

Lighter fluid flames outlined the race tracks Dennis made for his remote control cars in the parking lot of the Mormon church just up the street from that apartment.

There were burns, like the second degree sunburn I got from splashing in the shallow end of our apartment’s pool, and the one I got from hot oil sizzling my stomach as I tried to make popcorn.

It’s as if heat and flame stepped into the void left by mom and dad, for each of these memories is also marked by the absence of adults. Somewhere between Western New York and Southern Nevada my family exploded like an atomic bomb, leaving each of us burned, blinded, and alone.

Before I met Foxy, life was eating pepperoni sticks and pistachio ice cream behind the bar at my father’s restaurant, and hearing him sing novelty songs, like “Shaving Cream” by Benny Bell as he got ready in the morning. It was playing with Jethro Tull, my sister Linda’s cat, while Linda played her Beatles records. It was tunneling through the snow drifts of a cold Buffalo winter, then reveling in the green of a Great Lake summer at Shoshone Park. It was where my family – mother, father, my two sisters, and my two brothers – was whole.

But those memories confuse familiarity with happiness. When all you know is dysfunction, you can’t recognize it for what it is until you are exposed to something functional. While I remember my father as the man who made funny faces, who had silly nicknames for each of us (I was “Jacko”), in reality, life in Buffalo was far from marshmallowy sweet. Pop was a recovering mobster and practicing alcoholic who made his living running a tavern called The Little Red Inn. He desperately wanted a family, and when he met my mom – who came with three children from a previous marriage – he got one. He adopted my older half-siblings, and added two more to his crew – my brother Michael and then me – but Pop didn’t know how to be a husband, or a father, or a businessman. When he drank, which was often, he was verbally and physically abusive towards my mother and my brothers and sisters. That I witnessed this abuse is certain, but I remember none of it, not one single incident.

After his restaurant failed, Pop set out for the desert at the Bicentennial with a letter of introduction from a crime boss in his hand. The rest of us followed early in the fall. America turned 200, I turned five, and my family turned to dust.

Why do I remember a picture of me holding a bag full of marshmallows, but recall nothing of the moment that picture captures? How come the toothless smile my dad made when he pushed out his front dentures lives in my mind as a warm reminder of his jovial nature, while I don’t remember the vicious beatings he gave my siblings – especially given the brain’s tendency to amplify traumatic experiences?

Perception and memory are connected recursively, influencing how we see and remember, see and remember, see and remember… and then act. We process input on sensory and emotional levels which in turn produces physical and emotional responses. But children need others to help them make sense of this input-output cycle – people to help them shape and normalize perceptions into schema they can lean on in the future. As dysfunctional as Buffalo was, I had people around me who helped me process and make sense of things, at least to some degree. My older brothers and sisters – they looked out for me. After I met Foxy I was largely alone emotionally. Yes, I was more or less fed and clothed, but when it came to making sense of my new family situation in my new surroundings – or learning about ways to process and shape what I saw into a healthy sense of self – that was all on me because everyone else was unmoored, too.

Mischel’s Marshmallow Test attempted to measure willpower, and sought to say something about how its four to six-year old test subjects navigated their world via their ability to defer gratification. The decision these kids faced was something like this: you can have one marshmallow right now. However, if you can wait until later, not only can you have this marshmallow, but I will also give you another one. The adult would then leave the room, sometimes as long as twenty minutes. Kids who couldn’t wait were labeled “hot” or “go” thinkers while those who could hold out – about one third of the kids tested – were “cool” or “slow” thinkers. Hot thinkers were impulsive and emotional. Cool thinkers were balanced and rational. When researchers followed these kids into the future, they noted that cool thinking kids scored better on those matrices that define conventional success – be it SAT scores, income attainment, or physical and emotional health.

But hot and cool thinking is not innate. Like building and maintaining memories, building and maintaining the ability to make good choices is situational; borne from without before it’s internalized and expressed, requiring repetition and reinforcement. I’m sure some hot thinkers may have demonstrated more willpower had they been “tempted” by a broccoli floret as opposed to a marshmallow. I’m also certain that many of those cool thinking kids wanted the marshmallow just as much as their hot thinking peers – they just had help developing the skills they needed to delay and double their soft, pillowy gratification.

Far too many kids face far more difficult choices in uncontrolled conditions, and they often face them alone. When my father decided to leave Las Vegas and head back to Buffalo, I was given a choice: “do you want to stay with your mom or go with your dad?” I have no certainty that I physically faced this question (maybe this is my moment of amplifying trauma), but for some reason the choice is cataloged as “memory” in my mind. Not vividly, the way flashbulb moments – like 9/11, or the birth of my daughter, for example – are. It’s more of an impression; an abstraction constructed to rationalize the singular aloneness I felt walking into my future after choosing “mom.”

Mom drove the car past the dumpster fire.

Mom sent me along to the church with my brother so I could watch him take cars he meticulously made and run them through flames that would diminish his handiwork if not destroy it altogether.

I braved the pool because it was too hot not to, and going inside was out of the question. Mom’s new boyfriend hit me when I walked in on them doing something I didn’t understand at the time. So I went swimming, nervously holding onto the edge, afraid to move to a part of the pool with a bottom my crooked foot couldn’t touch.

She had left me alone and hungry, so I decided to try my hand at making popcorn; burning my stomach instead of filling it.

These experiences, along with many others, got lost in the weeds of my hippocampus – that part of the brain that connects emotions to memory. These events weren’t processed; weren’t talked about. I reacted to them in a way that would become my go-to, fully engaging that hot part of my brain to the point where my affect was rooted in sadness and fear because that’s what the world gave back to me. The desert is where I mourned the loss of all I’d known; where I moved towards the future scared and alone and forgetful.

A few summers after I moved to Las Vegas, my mother had a friend and her family over from work. We were at our fourth address, living in an apartment that my brother and I largely had the run of as our sister Melissa – who would watch us when Mom was at work – had moved in with her much older boyfriend. The adults had retreated inside, leaving Mike, me, and our guests' daughter (whose name I can’t remember) on the patio with some marshmallows brought for us to roast over the grill’s still red coals.

In the two or three years since Foxy, I had seen my father just once. My sister Linda and my brother Dennis followed Pop back east, and Melissa would be in and out of a girls’ home before taking her leave, too. Mike had been sent to and returned from a youth camp in California run by Synanon – an organization later indicted for abusing kids like him, among other crimes. Mom’s on-again-off-again relationship with the man who would soon become Husband Number 3 was currently off, and I had said goodbye to Sammy – the dog who was the only bright spot of my time in Las Vegas to that point. I mourned all of these losses with an impulsive heat, retreating into the safe cocoon of my imagination.

In school, instead of doing my lessons I’d lose myself to cool daydreams – creating elaborate cartoon contraptions to shower whoever was laying in bed next to Mom instead of my dad with pee, or water, or eggs, or feathers as he entered the room; have him dodging hammers with heads the size of watermelons, and force him to leave. These dreams were coldly imagined, if not forward focused, and well worth the stacks of schoolwork I’d have to do on the weekends. I was throwing a wrench in Mischel’s work with my slow thoughts triggered by go feelings that sprang from uncontrollable helplessness.

That night, I came out of the chrysalis, and I was pissed. My brother and I took the gift of those marshmallows and fucked shit up to the extent that we could. I’m sure we ate one or two, but while the adults sat inside making conversation we moved through our complex like a raiding party with molten marshmallow torches we then threw onto our neighbors’ windows and sliding glass doors. Not only that, but we corrupted our young female guest, making her an accomplice.

I think we were lowering ourselves to the expectations of our neighbors, who didn’t like the way we moved through the summer without any responsible adult supervision. Now we were owning this reputation; leaning into it. Were we being impulsive? Probably. So much of that time saw me making hot moves; ones completely devoid of any sort of rational thought – like the time I put my hand through our front window because Mike had locked me out of the apartment while Mom was at work.

But I’m not convinced this was just another incident born of impulse. Sure, we felt the adrenaline rush that comes from doing something you’re not supposed to, but the jumping off point for us – because I can’t remember if it was me or Mike who threw that first molten marshmallow – was a cold, calculated “fuck you” to the neighbors who had recently told their kids not to play with us. I knew what we were doing was wrong, but I didn’t care. I took the fire I was given, made it mine, and threw it back, smiling.

We were evicted the next month.

I shouldn’t grieve my inability to shape those early Post-Foxy era experiences into some sort of neat and tidy narrative. Those weren’t neat and tidy times, and my forgetting much of them is research based, blessed by Quiroga’s explanation of the way our brains work. The fragmented nature of my memories matches the fragmented nature of my childhood, reflecting the isolation that would follow me until Mike and I were “rescued” by the church. The fact that I survived that time relatively intact – I mean, my leg didn’t get any shorter, and I still have all my other limbs – says more about who I am and about what I’ve learned than the melted marshmallows I had to scrape off of my neighbor’s glass. The kid in the picture with the marshmallows and the fake smile existed and exists still, just like the angry kid with the burning marshmallows and the mischievous smile. They are with me and they are me. Sometimes cold, sometimes hot, and occasionally forgetful.

Man with Marshmallows

All photos by Cecily Pollard & Tom Guzzio unless otherwise noted.

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MEMENTO VIVERE: AN INTRODUCTION (REVISED)

4/26/2024

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This is a revised, and greatly expanded version of a piece I published nearly a month ago (and have since deleted). That small essay seems like a thumbnail now; a beginning of a beginning. I didn't know where that sketch would take me, but I'm grateful for the start...

Night sky photo by MK Feeney, remixed by the author.

I will not make the bold claim that this paper holds the essence of what my mother is or what she experienced, for I can never present her as she would herself, but only suggest what she means to me, and how her experiences have affected my life as an extension of hers. - “The Story of a Single Mother: A Case Study.”

When my mother died, I got a necklace that had an anchor and a charm that said “memento mori” – remember death. Instead of focusing on the life of the woman who bore me, I reached to the rigging of my heart and hoisted a flag honoring what took her. I was doing my best to rationalize a loss I had already made peace with. During her last few years, Mom sunk into an apathy I couldn’t understand and didn’t have patience for, especially since her chosen ignorance included people who were important to me, like my daughter and my wife. She spent her days smoking pot, watching tv, and doting over her chihuahua. When we talked, our conversations were feather-light and hard to carry.

The day after she passed, I posted a copy of a 23 year old essay I wrote about her to Facebook. Written for a college class on modern sociological theory, “The Story of a Single Mother: A Case Study” told of a woman who leaned into herself and learned to stand up to and apart from the people – men, mostly – who made her feel less than. “Since this is my paper,” I wrote, “and since life for me is best expressed by the soundtrack that fills up those quiet spaces between trauma and joy, I will, from time to time, take liberty with lyric and verse.”

And I did. My assertion that Mom’s life repudiated Parsons and Bales’ functionalist theory on gender roles used lyrics from songs like “Hymn to Her” by the Pretenders, lines from a Philip Larkin poem, and her own words. It was a playful way of honoring her rise from a waitress at a casino coffee shop to the role of Assistant Banquets Manager at an exclusive Las Vegas resort; a job that gave her the confidence and financial wherewithal to leave the pink collar ghetto and my abusive stepfather. My paper earned a 96, but it also paved over the fact that my mutinous mother would never see herself as the captain of her own ship.

Ultimately, Mom wanted rescue more than she wanted freedom, and when the fourth and final man she called “husband” got terminal cancer and died, the vestiges of the woman I wrote about drowned – swept by a tidal wave of grief for a man she was thinking of leaving just months before his diagnosis. After his passing, instead of looking to the living, like a potential husband number five, or my daughter who had met her only once, or her other grandchildren, Mom spent her remaining years out on the widow’s walk, mourning the one man who left her before she could leave him.

Posting that essay was a lazy, performative attempt at bringing that version of my mother to the present without truly facing the finality of losing her. It let me move forward without much work or weight, and was typical of the coping skills my parents gave me. When in rough seas, pick a direction and hope for the best. Sail, so long as it puts the pain behind you. Face the sun. Travel light.

Loss, and the indeterminate movement away from it, marked the rhythm of my growing up. After my parents split up when I was five, my father retreated east before completely resigning from my life. Meanwhile, my restless mother feverishly looked for the right man and the right roof to keep over our heads. This going from man to man and place to place took me to eleven schools before I graduated, and made me shy and hard to know and incredibly lonely. Husband number three gave us some physical anchorage, but his unpredictable abuse kept us dreaming of different, calmer seas we desperately wanted but didn’t know how to reach.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
   They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
   And add some extra, just for you.
“This be the Verse” - Philip Larkin

I thought I was a skilled sailor when, 34 years after leaving my mother’s house, my daughter asked me why I left her small hometown in the Adirondacks when her mom and I split up. Why, she asked, wasn’t she enough for me to stay?

Something had been off between Emma and me for weeks, but her question, and the evident pain with which she asked it, was a broadside I didn’t see coming. I was 52, the same age my mother was when I wrote that essay, but I was rooted in ways Mom and her various partners never were. Living just north of Boston for almost two decades, in a steady, healthy relationship for nearly as long, I had built a life that I was proud of, one that very much made Emma and her happiness a priority. I knew I was a good dad, long distance or not. I worked hard with my ex to make sure our daughter had a richer, more stable path to adulthood than I did. Now this amazingly creative, whipsmart young woman who had my nose (sorry, kid), my height, my feet (God bless her), and my artistic eye told me she carried pain I never intended to give. She wanted to know why.

I’m not sure what scared me more – drifting back towards a hurt I worked so hard to ease and overcome, or knowing that this hurt held a story that might diminish me in my daughter’s eyes. I talked things through with my wife and Emma’s mother, deciding that the only viable option was to take a deep breath and start talking. So I did. A few weeks later, as Emma patiently listened, I waded into that painful past, and brought back the story of how the failure of my first marriage converged with the loss of a job I loved, and how I wasn’t expecting or prepared for either ending. Devastated, depressed, and unable to function, I took a page from my father’s book and ran – all the way to Las Vegas and my mom's couch (Keep moving. Face the sun) – hoping to find my bearings. I didn’t last a year before Emma, who was almost three, drew me limping back to the Eastern Seaboard, determined to find a way to be her dad and stay upright under the weight of my depression.

She knew the rest; like how I landed a day’s drive from her, and worked hard to build her a home away from home. I fell in love and brought another caring adult into her life; gave Emma pets, places, and people. I wanted what made the Greater Boston Area different from her small hometown – the history, the museums, the concerts, the sports, the ocean – to be as available and familiar as the beautiful mountains and lakes that surrounded her in the North Country. I gave Emma moments and memories she now shares with the boy she loves. I gave her movement, too.

For me, the 255 miles between us was an inconvenience; something to make the best of with audiobooks, music, and podcasts. It was also a buffer that kept the radiation from a life I lost when my first wife told me she didn’t love me anymore – a life she was now living with someone else – from contaminating the new one I built out of the ashes of that devastation. That distance was different for Emma, she explained. It reminded her of something she lost that she was too young to remember having but still keenly felt: my daily, physical presence in her life. Each visit’s ending brought the sadness of me staying or me going to where she wasn’t. When she was really little, the fact that the adults in her life got along so well only made our geography more confusing and painful. I thought her questions about why everyone in her life couldn’t live together were cute; evidence of how very loved she was. For Emma, they weren’t really questions, but attempts to articulate and understand the deep pain she felt when we parted.

Through our conversations about my leaving and the introspection they inspired. I began to understand how the choices I made with Emma’s best interests in mind were both good and bad for her (They may not mean to, but they do). I had been a reflective, active parent; doing the best I could with no regrets, and yet I fell short. To move forward with Emma, I had to face the pain I caused all those years ago, and recognize and own the damage my very visceral and necessary need for self-preservation had done. This took me back to Mom (how could it not?). I couldn’t reconsider my life as a parent without reconsidering hers. I had to give what she did and did not do for me the grace her trying deserved. After all, she stayed.

Those things that make us alive cannot be captured and held by the conventional means of remembering, for life surrenders only unto death, and death will concede to nothing else. - “The Story of a Single Mother: A Case Study.”

Rebecca Solnit, in her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, discusses the different meanings of the word “lost,” like the one associated with a lack of awareness as it relates to place; to geography. Explorers were always lost because they had never been to the places they traveled. Travelers today get lost not because they reach for the unknown, but because they don’t pay attention to or trust their instruments.

For Virginia Wolf, Solnit notes, “getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity… to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.” There’s also the kind of lost that’s external to and apart from you, like the remote control that’s hidden in the cushions, or the family photos gone missing in a move. You can lose at love, and other competitions. The “lost” I’ve been for much of my life has been a combination of these things, and I think it was like that for Mom, too.

She was abandoned by her parents when she was too little to remember. When you’re a child someone intentionally misplaces, the rest of your life can become a quest for the validation you were denied. This was my mother’s modus operandi. Her search for self-actualization carried her across the country, gave her five kids and four husbands, but little lasting happiness. So she kept moving, getting rid of the literal and figurative things that could have been passed on to me because they were too painful to hold. All of it – pictures, people, pets, places, and events receded into the blue distance. This desperate, hopeful losing was done to make room for treasures from a new, less painful country she never found until, finally, Mom just stopped.

She put me on the same course, without even realizing it: longing for love and security without knowing what it looks like. Fleeing from pain and upheaval like a calf from a kill chute. I’ve since learned that this reaction was a trauma response handed down the evolutionary ladder; a biological imperative that can only be balanced by the nurturing and validation my mother never got, and therefore could not give to me, even though she tried. Rudderless children become rudderless parents. We move blindly, often in circles, looking for a country hidden within and from us. For home. I have never doubted my mother’s love for me, but love is a dull tool in the hands of an unskilled craftsman.

So when my daughter’s question led me to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of my past, I looked at my choices and saw how the map of my life was both a reaction to and a mirror of my mother's. People and experiences would come into, and enrich my life the way they do for most of us: actively pursued and readily welcomed. But when pain inevitably and unpredictably disrupted my calm seas, I’d throw it all overboard, just like Mom. Even good memories were tinged with too much emotional radiation to be seen as anything other than damaged and dangerous. I did my best to keep that past from impacting my daughter’s present, but in creating a false equivalency between “past” and “pain” I ultimately hurt us both.

(Death) leaves words and pictures behind to take the role of proctoring the mind through remembrance, which is itself only another way of imitating the act of living. - “The Story of a Single Mother: A Case Study.

Solnit recounts how her family was shaped by tradition; customs kept for the kids. Keeping these things, and the giving inherent in doing so, is more important than believing in them. Things like the glass of wine Solnit’s parents left out for Elijah every Passover – that Solnit got drunk on when she was eight – become our stories, and stories can be stars we navigate by.

I wanted my daughter’s sky to be full and bright. By staying in her life I had already eclipsed the mark for parenting set by my father, and I was determined to be the kind of parent my mother didn’t have the tools for. So I kept things Mom did not. School pictures, craft projects, play programs and newspaper write ups; these crowd shelves in my office, are sprinkled throughout my home, and take up residence in my cloud storage. But like posting that paper when Mom died, this keeping is an easy, performative act made with more intention than depth. It measures my daughter’s growth and success, validates my contributions to both, but does little to fill the pages of our shared past because they are stories written by, not for her. My daughter wanted my story – or at least the part that related to my leaving. Without it, she explained, our relationship risked becoming feather-light. Hard to carry. So I added ink to the empty pages of our past, and gave us both a constellation.

…for now, all I can give is my understanding – my explanation that what I do has been influenced by what she did, and that who I am is largely the product of who she is, and how hard she has fought to be an individual. - “The Story of a Single Mother: A Case Study.

My mom was a star in that sky. I never questioned the choices she made when raising me until I became a parent with choices of my own. I excused her role in the loneliness and self doubt that marked my itinerant youth because she and I were trenchmates trying to survive my stepfather’s abuse. “Mister Tommy,” he would say, “why don’t you bend over, reach between your legs, and pull your head out of your ass.” He treated Mom worse. I was so proud when she left him, even if she was only making way for someone else to be the True North she could never find in herself.

I thought I was better at parenting; better at adulting altogether, until my daughter reflected my loneliness – and my mother’s – back to me through her own feelings of abandonment and isolation. Then I understood.

I used to think Mom telling me, “I did the best I could” was an excuse, if not a lie. What arrogance! The best you can do does not always line up with what someone else needs, but that shouldn’t diminish the beauty inherent in giving; in trying. There’s strength in trying, even if you fail. My mother failed me many times, but most were the accidental failures that come with doing a job no one prepared you for. When your parenting skills center around what not to do, something’s bound to get fucked up. But course corrections are possible.

I’ve lost most of the pictures of my pre-Emma past, and the ones I’ve kept I rarely look at. The same is true of the stories that made me who I was before “father.” This was part of that running away from, rather than moving with life’s pain. I always assumed that the answer to the equation of my past was negative, and that to hold on to it would make my present less than. Now I see that assumption was not a given, but a perception; maybe a choice. The pain of losing the dog I pulled from a feral pack when I was eight; a dog who would wait for me at the bus stop each day, pushed aside the sheer power and beauty of my time with him. The ending of the marriage that gave me a beautiful, glowing, force of a daughter is remembered more for how it ended. I almost got it right when I posted that essay after Mom died, but instead of embracing her best, I buried it with her.

No more.

My painful memories will no longer push away a past that’s been touched by love’s blunt, clumsy hand. I’ve lived a better story.

One of two pictures I have of my mother and daughter together, from the first and only time they met.

And she will always carry on
Something is lost
But something is found
They will keep on speaking her name
Some things change
Some stay the same
“Hymn to Her” - The Pretenders

Roughly six months after Emma and I discussed my leaving, I told her how her mom and I met and fell in love. Taking tentative steps with visits and voice, Emma and I had worked our way back from a ledge, and were on our way to Montreal for the day – just us two. Under gray skies, I did my best to convey the awkward, shining beauty of a shy boy suddenly brave enough to approach his oblivious crush. He was temporarily an art major, nervously asking a beautiful girl if she’d look at his slides, expecting no more than the electric pulse of her presence, but hoping that she’d see him, not just his art. She didn’t run away screaming…

Neither did Emma, though I imagine it was strange – maybe cringey, even – my painting her parents as people not much different from students she might run into at school; kids who could be fumbling towards a shared future, maybe from behind a slide projector one of them barely knew how to operate (are slides still a thing?). Or maybe it was sad to see the people her parents were then – at least my version of them – in light of who they are today: happy, but apart.

Still, now she knows; she has that story. I see now how that’s a gift; another thing my mom gave me without realizing. Not all stories need a happy ending to be beautiful; they just need to be yours. They need to be told.

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TEN MINUTES TO THREE

3/30/2023

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Annie Ryan, via Getty Images

I remember a film called Three O’Clock High – mostly because I may have had a crush on Annie Ryan, the female lead. If I remember correctly, the story involves a new high school student – some glowering bully in a leather jacket with a larger than life reputation – deciding to beat up the resident nerd, and said nerd’s attempts to avoid being beaten up. It’s a film that explores and exploits the intricacies of a stereotypical high school trope: there’s gonna be a fight, news of which spreads throughout the school to everyone who breathes air and is not an adult. It reflects the two worlds that exist under a single roof in most schools: the world inhabited by teachers and staff, and the nebulous, dark waters precariously navigated by kids.

I’m thinking about this movie because there was a fight at my school recently – a bad one – and an administrator trying to break it up was hit multiple times. So many adults were surprised by the fact that so many kids not only watched and cheered on the fight, but also recorded it on their phones as well. Our principal sent out a thoughtful response about how what happened is not consistent with “our values.”

Hm.

While I know that my school strives to be a safe place, what happened is a textbook example of how US schools reflect the broader American culture; a culture that has always commodified and capitalized on violence as a spectator sport and a way to solve problems. We do say something when we see something in America, and it’s usually “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Photo: NECN

There’s a large segment of society that applauded the rise of ultimate fighting, and professional slap fighting, just as previous generations celebrated boxing. We bemoan how athletes see their lives and careers shortened by the abuse they take, gasp when that violence spills out of the game and into their personal lives, then applaud these "warriors" week in and week out for laying their bodies on the line for our amusement.

As I write this, the tattered flag in front of my school sits at half-mast because of yet another school shooting. We light candles for victims of mass shootings and watch them burn out on the altar of the second amendment.

We have no right to wring our hands after we’ve used them to build and applaud the violent institutions we celebrate. It’s disingenuous and hypocritical.

Photo: Nicole Hester/The Tennessean via AP

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NOTES FROM AN EMPTY TABLE

BUTT'S UP

STRAYS

FOXY'S FIREHOUSE

MEMENTO VIVERE: AN INTRODUCTION (REVISED)

TEN MINUTES TO THREE

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