I don't remember ever
being afraid or fearful when I was in my single digits, in Elementary School;
in fact I was quite brave. I leaped into each new experience with an
adventuress, forward "Can Do" spirit of discovery. At eight I
remember walking to the Community Park to go swimming and took my sister with
me. Now this might not sound like much but she was six and the park was about a
mile from our house, and I had a vague idea of where it was, but off we went. Somehow
we found our way home and we had told no one where we were going when we left,
I guess my mom certainly would not have sanctioned such an endeavor. When she
found out, she was pissed off in a normal motherly way, and rightly so, she
gave me hell for what I did and when my dad got home he was actually amused,
and said to my mom that it was "Enterprising Of Me" to have done that
and bring my sister back safe and sound, that made me feel good. It was at
about this time that I had my first crush. My sister had a friend, her name was
Janice Jacobs. I just remember loving this girl from afar and mooning after her
and hiding in my room when she was in our house, she was so cute and I could
not muster up the courage to talk to her.
When I was seven we went
off as a family to a faraway land called the Middle East, Greece, Israel,
Turkey, etc., and we had to fly there. I was excited to fly for the first time
and I was hooked soon thereafter. At the age of nine I braved the high board at
the deep end at the Community Park, that scared the hell out of me, but I
jumped off, loved it and kept doing it from that point on. I always threw
myself into everything, seized the day and moved forward as fast as I could
because as long as I could remember I could not wait to be a "Grown
Up".
That all changed
towards the end of Elementary School. By then my dad was beating my mom, my mom
was using us to get at my dad, he was hitting me and my sisters, we were going
through the primitive legal system that existed back then and there was mayhem,
psychological manipulation and general dysfunction going on at 25 Jean Place in
Syosset.
We lived in a
perfect little suburb in Nassau County, New York, almost a Norman Rockwell
poster, in the sixties. You would think a rich successful doctor back in those
days with nothing to worry about would be able to create a dynasty of well-adjusted
kids who would always respect his memory, but not so.
By the end of the
sixties my parents were getting divorced and I was becoming dark and sullen. I
had discovered The Beatles back in 1965 when I formed an unusual attachment to
a very cool counselor at Eastern Academy Day Camp named Bill, he was the first
hippy I ever knew and he turned me on to "Eight Days A Week". There
was nothing weird happening that I can remember except that he took a special
liking to me and gave me more attention than the other kids, attention that I
was lacking at home. I think he had sown the seeds of my passion for music by
playing me a lot of records on his little Vanity Fair record player, I can
remember all the colorful labels on the 45's as they spun around.
The summer of 1968
was a vortex of ups and downs; my father was spending more time with us, he
took me to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, we were taking lots of road
trips to theme parks and visiting his family and friends in Canada. For that
very short summer he seemed to finally morph into the perfect father, but more
on this later. He had started dating a new women that summer, she seemed to be
a good person plus she had the very first color TV I had ever seen, suddenly I
was hooked, imagine seeing Star Trek for the first time in color, we only had
black & white. Little did I know that she was on her best behavior and she
was so good at manipulating us that before I knew it, it was 1969 and he had
married this thing, this medusa, this vile piece of flesh and protoplasm!
She immediately
set about turning child against child and turned our house into a tornado of
discord. She would work my father like a violin and suddenly I was getting
beatings, deprived of food, wearing old, dirty and mismatched cloths, and she
had the balls to send me to school like this without thinking that there might
be eventual consequences for her and my father such as school and state
intervention, loss of reputation in the neighborhood and whatever punishment
that I would eventually bring to them when I got older.
She would send me
over the top, emotionally torturing me by killing my fish, taking my stuff when
I was at school and throwing it out, having my father take everything away from
me until I just had a bed. He once locked me in the basement and made me sleep
there for some wrong that I did, but the joke was on him because I knew how to get
into the cedar closet and I could watch TV there at night while everyone else
was asleep. There was even one day when he was hitting me in the head
repeatedly in front of our house in Syosset and a neighbor came over and
stopped him, I was so thankful to this kind stranger who cared more for me than
my own father.
Meanwhile
throughout this tumultuous time I was acting out in sometimes depraved ways
that to this day puzzle me as to what the hell I was thinking and what did I
hope to accomplish? All it resulted in were more severe beatings and more
isolation, I was beginning to feel alone and I missed my real mother who was
mostly a good soul but way to immature to be a real mother. This was due to her
abuse at the hands of her father and mother and the loss of her youth to the
point she never fully grew up, she would have made a better sibling than a
mother; she was fun.
I remember stealing
people's mail back in Syosset and I can't say why, I guess I wasn't getting any
of my own. I set fire to our garage because I was playing with matches that my
mother left hanging around, I burned one sister with a coat hanger that I
heated up on the stove and the other I almost poisoned by putting my mother’s
perfume in her baby bottle, I was an ass. I destroyed furniture, punched holes
in the walls all the while being kind and loving to animals and insects; I just
loved and nurtured anything smaller than me that was other than human. There
was a robin that had built a nest in a tree outside my window and our cat
Caesar had killed it so I climbed the tree and rescued the eggs and my mother
had helped me build an incubator in order to hatch the eggs, we used a shoe
box, lots of cotton and a 60 watt light bulb as a heat source. I dutifully
tended to the light and moved the eggs around in the hope that they would
hatch, but they never did and I never was sure why it didn't work but it made
me so sad that I cried.
I
did have friends back then and my best friend in Syosset was a neighbor girl,
Susan Rubin. She was real cute and sort of a tom boy so she enjoyed rough stuff
and boy stuff. And eventually would be the first female body I explored. It was
purely innocent, all I knew was that we had different stuff and I wanted to see
it besides I had no idea what to do. We used to make believe we were married
and that was about as far as it went. In Greenlawn the first kid that I meet
was Peter Evancie. His family was the first people to move into the new
development that would become our neighborhood, my family was the second. This
poor soul had an even more screwed home life than I and I can only guess about
what was going on because he spoke very little about his family.
They were a very
religious lot, going to church every week. His father was sort of Lurch-like
and was also a doctor, only a General Practitioner whereas my father was a
Cardiologist, his mother was a fat and angry women. When they got married they
had trouble having kids so they adopted Peter. Soon she was popping kids out
like crazy, all girls and four of them. When they started having biological
kids they treated him like a Dixie cup and heaped the abuse on him like crazy,
most of which I can only guess at.
I always felt
not-at-ease in their house; there was a weird vibe in there. The house was
always dirty and I could always hear screaming and yelling from over there. I
knew that the father beat him because I witnessed him being hit outside but he
never spoke of it. His mother was completely removed emotionally and there was
no indication that she had any affection for anyone including her biological
kids, he seemed to suffer from classic detachment since birth. When the Jethro
Tull album Aqualung came out he took an instant liking to it because of its
anti-religious themes about the hypocrisy of religion, also I think it pissed
his parents off.
He grew into a
handsome guy, sort of like Matt Dillon, and girls seemed to initially be
attracted to him but he would turn them off with his weird sense of humor and
like me when it came to girls he had no clue as to how to relate to them. For
me one of his most endearing traits was his ability to make me laugh so hard it
hurt. This poor guy who was so full of despair that it affected the way he
walked, he shuffled slowly with his head down like a man going to execution and
you could tell it was him from a distance; he had the wildest, funniest most
risqué sense of humor and at the unbelievable age of 13 and up.
I remember one
time he and I were walking to the store to get cigarettes and we had to pass a
church on the way. We went inside and we could see some people up front with
the priest doing some kind of religious thing. We were in the back behind a
wall that blocked anyone from seeing us besides they had their backs to us. He
would do these funny walks back and forth like a retard holding his arms in
spastic ways like he had palsy and I was behind a wall snickering. Finally I
waited until he was in the middle of the open space, quite within view of
everybody and I yelled "Hey" suddenly everyone turned to see this guy
walking like a spazz and for a brief moment he and these people are frozen in
time, with him in mid-step, one foot in the air. We then bolted from the church
and ran like the hounds of hell were on our tail laughing hysterically.
There was another
incident that involved a Jewish Synagogue and food left out after some kind of
event. We entered the building to find an unbelievable amount of fresh food
still out on tables so we commenced to fill ourselves and to have a food fight
until the place was a disaster, we cracked-up madly and fled. And then there
was the time we were running from Peter's father who happened to be in town and
we were not supposed to be hanging out together. We were out drinking and
smoking pot and he saw us. So off we ran through the kitchen of the local
pizzeria, where we and all our friends hung out, to escape out the back door
and on the way out Peter had bumped into a large container of pizza sauce which
spilled all over him; we ran like hell and here comes Peter half red with Pizza
sauce.
Both of us liked a
girl named Denise Allen, she was beautiful, blonde, and thin with a wonderful
laugh; she was a little like Olivia Newton-John. She seemed to like me and when
we played tag or games that required physical contact I would tag her on the
chest where breasts were starting to appear, she would just laugh and made
nothing of it; somehow both Pete and I made her hate us. We both loved her and
just could not deal with the feelings that we felt inside so we acted out in an
overly aggressive way. Pete and I eventually made friends with another guy,
Richard Carlson; he was a different kind of dysfunction.
Richard's parents
were ridiculously rich and I believe they were the only people who had more
money than us in our little part of the world; his father was the original
farmer who had owned all the land that made up the part of Greenlawn where we
lived. He sold it for gobs of cash and continued to live in his modest house on
the family property where his grandmother also was living in a separate house
across the field that was our world. His father was a tall, lanky sort of Jimmy
Stewart kind of guy but was so quiet and strong, like Clint Eastwood; it was
hard to imagine that an adult could be so relaxed. His mother was just plain,
sweet and old fashioned like Jane Wyatt, the mother on "Father Knows
Best", she just loved little Ritchie. They had a daughter but she was
already grown and married and I rarely ever saw her. Richard was much younger
than his sister and was raised like an only child and given anything that he
wanted. He had mini-bikes, B. B. Guns, a built-in swimming pool and all the
attention and positive reinforcement that any kid could want. He was blonde and
tall and cool like James Dean with the kind of lips that the girls were always
trying to kiss, all the girls and my sister were hot for him. However he was
quiet, like his dad, and seemed awkward around girls but there was a dark under
current about him that just never let you get close or know him very well. To
us guys he was just cool and did cool guy stuff that we were all into, he had a
place where we could hang out and do whatever we wanted, smoke and drink
whatever we wanted or blow up whatever we wanted. There were no parents
screwing with us because his father was basically very hip and let us be
teenagers, I even used to grub cigarettes off him in the morning on the way to
school, and his mother, bless her heart, was clueless. His house became the de
facto place for our gang to hang out and we found so much adventure and trouble
in our short time it was amazing. There was Stanly Witchikowski and Pete Hickey
who was Stanley's cousin. Then Kenny Dow came and eventually a girl named
Bonnie Toth who was older than us by several years and liked to play dare games
that usually involved us feeling her up or her holding our penis, mine in
particular. I need to point out that I was at least three years younger than
all these people and five years younger than Bonnie. Richard did not like Peter
as much as I did and he used to call him Yancy, a play on his last name as we
all referred to each other by our last names. Peter did not hang there as much
as I did and eventually we went in different directions, I went to Pot and he
would soon go to a darker place. Occasionally Peter and I would still hung out
just not as much as when we were as thick as thieves. I think his parents did
not like me and I know mine did not like him and both sets set about making it
hard for us to remain friends.
All the kids had
mini-bikes except me, my dad was a cheap bastard on top of everything else, we
would take trips usually following railroad tracks for as far as we could go, I
would ride on the back with Richard. Usually all we did was go places, the trip
was more important than the destination. We went through a phase of
building pipe bombs and blowing stuff up. Pete Hickey was into chemistry he
knew how to make gun powder and stink-bombs, he even made bath tub wine. We
developed a way of making a Cannon out of a piece of galvanized fence pipe,
gunpowder and M80's, we would shoot golf balls through the sheetrock of the new
houses that were being built in the development that was eating up the
overgrown and trail laden field that was our domain until they looked like
Swiss cheese. We would make bombs and put them in the brand new sewers being
built at night, set it off and collapse the cement walls in the man-holes.
Every time we set off a pipe-bomb it would blow off one cap and shoot like a
projectile in this confined space and hit the walls with the impact of a jack
hammer, explode a lot of them and cement breaks up. There was another time Pete
Hickey was making stink bombs in his house using his mother’s stove to cook the
mixture or something. Whatever he was doing, I hadn't a clue, went awry and
this mixture combusted right there in the kitchen and started issue thick black
smoke with an unforgettable stench, we all ran outside coughing and laughing
like idiots. We were fortunate that there was no damage and that the neighbors
had not called the Fire Department; all we had to contend with was that smell
in the house. We spent the rest of the day helping him clean up, doing whatever
we could do to mitigate that stink and creating a credible explanation for his
parents in case they could still smell it.
There was one time
I wanted to try and make gunpowder myself so I bought Sodium Nitrate, Sulfur
and Carbon at the local hobby shop. I brought this stuff back to Richards barn
in his back yard and mixed this stuff up but I guess I got the mixture wrong
and it wouldn't burn so I included, like an idiot, Gasoline and Chlorine. I
remember making a small pile of Sulfur on the ground, lit a match, put it on
the Sulfur and poured the 8 ounce glass of this mixture on the match. With a
loud whoosh there was suddenly a 6 foot tall wall of flames, an awful stench of
my hair and the skin on my left shoulder burning and chlorine which could have
killed me; I was on fire. I ran like hell to Richard's pool and jumped in to
put myself out. I had to cut my long hair the next day just to even it out
because it had burned on the left side of my head and my father had to dress
and bandage third degree burns on my left shoulder, I could still smell the
burnt flesh when it was peeling off and oozing. I was so lucky this time, but
there was to be more risk taking behavior to come. I developed a
fascination for fire and breaking glass. I would set fires and wait to watch
the fire department come and put it out. I would also break windows in the new
houses being built. I also stuffed fiberglass insulation in the plumbing of the
houses as they were being built so that when they were finished the plumbing
was all fucked up.
I was growing up
so fast and making even more friends and soon I drifted from Richard and that
gang to another bunch of people who were also older than me. They were having
sex, doing drugs, drinking, and vandalism; rock music was the fuel of our
reality. There was Donnie Ball who was the tall athletic type, Rick Josephson
also athletic, Tom VanDoozer whose family just moved in from the south and had
a very slow southern accent and his sister MaryLou who was also very southern,
hot and sexually active. She had a boyfriend Named Hoot who looked like a hippy
and had a 1969 Chevy Malibu in which I learned to roll my first joint. There
was also Brenda Beaton and her sister Dede who we referred to the beat off
sisters, I was just so horny for Dede that I was frozen with fear and could
barely talk to her. Brenda was older than Dede and I know she was sexually active
from what the other guys told me but I wasn't sure about Dede.
Every weekend
there was a party in the basement of the VanDoozer house, Black lights, pool
tables, booze, pot, rock music, potato chips, and sexual pressure towards and
from the girls. I remember one time there was some kind of dare game going on
and if the girls lost they had to kiss me because they were so much older than
me, I was the booby prize and of course I loved this game. I was the youngest
kid there and became the target of all sorts of stuff both good and bad.
I was always
afraid of booze and I hated the taste but at thirteen I was goaded into
drinking scotch whiskey for the first time and proceeded to become so shit
faced that I was stumbling around the neighborhood and managed to make it to
the back yard of Donnie Ball's house, I sat down on the swing set to remain
steady and lit a cigarette. His father, who was a great guy came out and found
me sitting there smoking and proceeding to talk to me about how bad smoking
was. I'm not sure if he knew that I was drunk.
I managed to
stagger home and somehow my father figured out that I was drunk and
surprisingly he did not beat or punish me in fact he said on the next day after
I asked him why he was not mad that "I punished myself" while I was
suffering a tremendous hangover, this was the only understanding moment that I
ever had with my father but it was too little too late.
The Ball family
were really good to me they knew about what was going on in my house with my
parents and the mother really felt sorry for me and my sister Roberta who was
friends with Karin Ball and we knew that we could always find refuge there. I
spent more nights at their house watching TV with that family than I did with
my own; they even used to feed me dinner.
I also was a
welcome guest at Rick Josephson's house. His parents also knew about my home
life and their hearts went out to me, I often started my day having breakfast
there. Rick was also a good friend who worked on his car and showed me stuff
about mechanics. His dad was really smart and good with mechanics, he had a
machine shop in his basement and fabricated special parts for machines all over
the country and made money that way, he also worked for Leviton Electronics.
It was in 1969
when we moved to the new house in Greenlawn, my father had made it difficult
for my mother to find us, and he had gotten remarried the year before to the
single most loathsome creature that I had ever seen, heard or smelled in my
life. She was genetically cursed, she had a nose so damn big that I'm sure that
I've seen it on a one-way street sign, she had no tits, I mean nothing. She was
a new definition of ugly and evil, inside and out. She gave birth to a demon
seed, deformed, pigeon toed miscreant named Harold, yeah I can't believe that
someone had fucked this pig in the past, moreover that my father looked at her
and decided that he could look at this creature naked, much less fuck her. I
can only assume that he had prostate cancer at the time and his cock no longer
worked. She was such a poor excuse for a wife and mother, she had my father
hire and pay for live in maids and did nothing. Once in a while she would cook
or make a Bundt cake. Occasionally she would have her clucking hen friends over
and they would play Mahjongg and she would swill Harvey's Bristol
Crème. Her fucking little poodle was as much an assshole as she was and when
she wasn't looking I would kick it. The only talent this bitch had, besides
playing my father, was that she could play the accordion, she would play this
cacophonous box of shit and I would cringe, I now hate accordion and I want to
smash them every time I hear one.
She immediately
employed psychological manipulation and divide and conquer tactics to create a
state of martial law in our house, it was hell. My father was already a
horrible scumbag and this cunt took it to a new level that even disturbed my
father and his reaction was heaping more abuse on us particularly me, so much
so that I was completely frozen with fear. I tried nothing, I learned nothing,
I attempted nothing, aspired to nothing to the point that it was safer to fail
from not trying rather than try at all. By the age of 12 I was staying out
almost all night until they went to sleep then I would sneak in through an open
window that I had arranged to be unlocked, after a while they just left a door
open for me because I was destroying the air conditioning unit outside my
window. They did not want me there and I did not want to be there but they were
legally bound to take care of me until I was eighteen, and I knew this.
I proceeded to
employing whatever tactics I could muster in order get myself little victories
for my overall mental health, which was taking a beating itself, I made those
fuckers pay. I ruined what little reputation in the neighborhood they had, I
shot out windows in our house with a BB gun that I took from Richard, tore up
the garden with mini-bikes whenever any of the kids let me ride theirs, stole
money from them, stole his tools and sold them, let local bad kids know about
his safe full of ready cash which they stole years later after I moved out and
beat that bitch with whatever weapon I could get my hands on knowing full well
that it would lead to more beatings.
One thing that
brought my father no pride was that the only mention that I got in the school
yearbooks was that I was voted "Class Clown". I took this as a high
honor because a group of my peers and a few teachers thought I was funnier than
everyone else in school, my father was ashamed but by then it made me feel good
that it bothered him. I also was given a certificate for best attendance; I was
absent from school zero days in one year. To him this was a good thing, to me
it represented that I hated being home so much that school was always the more preferable
option.
Honestly the only
thing that brought me any joy was the music of the day, it was sublime, and the
euphoria that I got from listening to and singing those songs was almost
sexual. All I wanted to do was sing and raise my voice and make a joyful noise.
I remember back in 1964 seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show and going to
my room and standing on my dresser with a hair brush and miming to the songs on
the radio, I wanted to be a singer and nothing from this point forward was
going to stop me.
Before my mother
moved out she had given me her acoustic guitar, she was trying to learn but she
just did not have the discipline or the time to devote to it, and guitar
requires a lot of dedication. I used it to hide my baseball cards in because that
sick bastard sperm donor felt that baseball cards were a waste of money and I
had to hide them in the F hole of the guitar or he would throw them out and
scream at me. He eventually found them and he broke the guitar and threw it
out, I hated him.
In order to give
my father what little credit he had coming to him I will say that in the summer
of 1967 he took just me to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands with him; this
was one of the few good times that he ever showed me. We went snorkeling off
the coral reefs and I saw really cool fish of incredible colors. We went deep
sea fishing and I caught a small baby Barracuda, I was so proud and I wanted to
keep it so bad that he let me bring it back to the room, I put it in a draw
until it smelled like hell then I threw it out willingly. I remember that at
night in the main yard of the hotel we were staying in there was a kettle drum
band playing Caribbean songs for the guests and I loved the music and the sound
of the drums so I stayed by the players and listened to them while they played
most of the night.
I had spent so
much time in the sun of the 108 degree Fahrenheit days that I turned brown and
my arms had started to blister as well as burning my butt through my bathing
suit. I mention this because when we left to go to the airport on the return
leg of our trip I had to stand up because the seats in the cab were killing my
ass. It was also on this cab ride that I first heard "A Little Bit Me, A
Little Bit You" by The Monkees and I became hooked. I had also first heard
"Penny Lane" by The Beatles on this trip and instantly fell in love
with that song.
In the summer of
1968 my father was still trying to be "Bill Bixby" from "The
Courtship of Eddie's Father"; and he came close. We started the summer
with him and my sisters traveling each weekend from theme park to theme park
just having the best of times in his new gold 1968 Ford Mustang; he loved that
car and so did I. He ended the summer with us driving through New England all
the way to Halifax Nova Scotia in Canada where he grew up. We stayed with his
friend Bobby Smilestone and his family in their large family cabin in the woods
by a lake. This was a very exceptional time of swimming, boating, hiking and
visiting the points of interest in Nova Scotia.
Two things that my
father and I shared was a love for new gadgets and swimming. One day he brought
home a Morse code kit and we built it and spent some nights communicating with
someone somewhere. He also brought home a brand new personal tape recorder; it
had two reels and really small tape that was a pain in the ass to put on the
take up reel. I used to just make noises into it and belch and crack myself up.
Then there was the time he brought home a large storage battery a large bolt
and a roll of copper wire and taught me how to make an Electro-Magnet. Another
time he brought me a 20 in 1 do it yourself electronic hobby kit he had bought
at Lafayette Radio; it had a small AM radio transmitter in it and I used to
broadcast to the living room.
Then there was the
swimming. He loved to swim and so did I, this he was proud of, I was real good
at a young age and he encouraged me from the very beginning. When we moved to
Greenlawn he put in a built-in swimming pool which I loved but I stopped using
it shortly thereafter because by then he was with that cow he married and I did
not want to have to spend any time with them anymore.
I had discovered
two things on September 16 1966 that would factor large in my life, Star Trek
and The Monkees. Both these shows where the wells that I drank from frequently,
they provided the inspiration for all things creative that were to come. Star
Trek fed into my passion for the American Space Program, the Apollo missions to
the moon. We were going into space on a regular basis, there was so much real
drama with Apollo and Star Trek showed me what it might be like in the future.
I read every newspaper, every magazine, and every book and watched every TV
program about space and science that I could find. I read crap I didn't even
understand, but I tried. It pathed the way for my at least trying in science
class, I actually got A's and all my father could say was "Couldn't You
Get An A+". His lack of encouragement was so virulent that in short order
it short circuited any attempts or desire I had to participate in school; it
reached a point that I just took up space in class and just read the New York
Times for articles on the Apollo missions in the back. Bless the teachers that
I had for they all knew about our family problems and they
recognized my intelligence and were so impressed with the fact that I read The
New York Times that they all gave me passing grades because I did do well on
the tests despite the fact that I did not study.
I also had a very
unique and excellent English teacher Mr. Enziloco who wanted us to call him
Duke in Jr. High School; he was using John Lennon Lyrics and Simon &
Garfunkle Lyrics to teach us about poetry. The guidance counselor was also
intuitive enough to encourage me to join Glee club where I learned about harmony
and how to sing properly, and I paid more attention in music class where I
attempted to learn drums, I did have rhythm. At 12 I took Piano lessons but
because they were forcing me to take them I rebelled and they ceased. Soon I
was singing everything where ever I went and writing primitive lyrics to songs
I had not yet written.
By the time these
teachers encouraged me I was already a huge Monkees fan, specifically Mike
Nesmith, the guitarist; his songs were beautiful, enigmatic and sung from the
heart with a genuine passion unlike the other three, although I loved them as
well. I already loved the Beatles but the Monkees were my favorite and everyone
was confused that I could not see that The Beatles were better than The
Monkees, but I did not care. Sure I love The Beatles as Much as The Monkees but
The Monkees were American and I liked their style more than The Beatles, but my
love for both bands are equal in their ferocity. To this day I can live without
most everything, I don't watch Star Trek anymore and the space program is a
great disappointment, but I must have Beatles and Monkees in my life. The final
major influence on me, musically, was Elton John, that did it, after him I had
to write, sing and play an instrument; it was clear what I wanted to do with
the rest of my life.
The next year, 1971, they sent me to Holiday Harbor Seafaring Camp in Sarasota
Florida. This place was great, I learned to sail, more water skiing, more motor
boating, more camping out and spending one night sleeping on board the HMS
Bounty, the one used in the movie. Our little group had gone on a day cruise to
spend some time in St. Petersburg and visit the ship. The owners of the Bounty
had offered us the opportunity to sleep there for the night because suddenly it
started to rain hard and the water became much too choppy and not particularly
safe for our little boats to return to the camp. There were also waterspouts
forming on Tampa Bay; I found them strangely beautiful and compelling but
obviously dangerous. I remember the creaking of the wood and the slapping
of ropes against the hull as the Bounty moved up and down in the
water because of the motion of the tide and the smell was so
wonderful; it was unique and antique. The sounds of this great ship and
the movement rocked me to a very restful sleep.
In
1972 they sent me to Camp Tel Shalom in Israel, the coolest part of this is
that he shoved hundreds of dollars in my packet, put me on a plane for an
eleven hour flight and sent me thousands of miles away to another country. They
were suddenly trying to be Jewish and by my thirteenth birthday I was about as
Jewish as the pope. Some rabbi bar-Mitzvahd me, I didn't give a shit any way
because three month earlier I had started smoking everything and was well on my
way to being a stoner. The most interesting thing about going here was I got to
see the desert and meet Israeli soldiers who would show up at the camp looking
for a place to stay for the night and they were allowed to stay with us. One of
them had showed me how to take apart his Uzi and clean it. I also remember
taking hiking trips in the desert and saw blown up tanks and spent shells.
Every once and a while I found unspent bullets, one of the kids showed me how
to remove the projectile so I could get to the gun powder and we would light it
up on the ground.
I also remember
walking around the Sea of Galilee smoking European cigarettes and thinking
about the fact that this was the same body of water that Jesus lived near. I
also got in trouble with the camp administrators because someone had witnessed
me and another kid throwing fruit at cars as they went by and they complained;
it seems that they were more upset because I was wasting food than that I might
have caused an accident. I also spent a week on a Kibbutz, all I can remember
is that it was primitive and there were a lot of scorpions, the little bastards
were disgusting and easy to kill with a broom.
In 1973 they sent
me to Camp Berkshire in Winsted Connecticut. This was the same year that I had
gotten drunk a couple of months earlier; I was 14 and ready for anything. When
I first got to the camp I was put in Bunk 18 with a Yugoslavian counselor named
Yuri, I can't remember his last name, and a blond surfer dude named Tommy, also
can't remember his last name. They were pretty cool guys and I remember one
night they had produced a bottle of Vodka and a watermelon and they proceeded
to teach me how to spike a watermelon along with the other kids in our bunk.
Now I had already been drunk once and I was not about to do it again so I paced
myself and had a really good time with no hangover the next day and that is how
I learned to drink responsibly. The only other thing I remember is that during
the early morning some skunks had eaten the vodka saturated watermelon rind's
and got shit faced and now I knew where the expression "drunk as a
skunk" came from. They proceeded to fight with each other and sprayed the
place up, it smelled really bad. We even screwed with them in the morning until
they went away.
All the bunks at
this camp were built on a hill so that the rear portion was on stilts and we
had a trapdoor on the underside of the building that we could sneak out and
return through, some of the other bunks had that also. One night one of the
other kids and me snuck out and went to the bunk next door with an M80. We put
a cigarette fuse on it, put it up through the trap door in the floor of their
cottage which was in their closet and ran back to our bunk to wait for the
eventual chaos that would erupt when that little present of ours went off.
There was a flash and a loud explosion and all the boys and counselors from
that bunk ran out screaming like little girls half naked, I remember lying in
my bunk on my bed laughing my ass off and no one ever was sure who did it. By
the next day a lot of people were pissed off they knew that our bunk was
responsible but they just couldn't prove it, by then we had a reputation and we
were quite notorious. Then there was the time that our counselors led a raid on
a girls bunk across the yard, I remember the counselors climbing in bed with
the girl counselors and humping them under the covers and us climbing into bed
with twelve year old girls and not doing a damn thing, we were clueless.
The only kids I
remember were, Adam Osterfield, Scott Fisher, Steve Green and Nori Haru
Shinazaki. Adam I knew from Timberlake, somehow our paths had crossed again.
Scott was my partner in crime and was Into Star Trek so we had that in common,
Steve was a green belt in Ju-Jitsu, and he was strong and fast and showed me
some moves. We tried to remain friends after camp but he lived elsewhere on
Long Island and I had no way to get there. My father drove me there once and
his dog took a piece out of my ass so my father shut that down. Nori was
Japanese and a really nice kid. At the end of the summer we designed a plaque
to add to the bunk wall of fame and we named ourselves "The Bunk of Unity
and Discontent", it was Scott who came up with that. I stole the plaque and
took it home with me; I wanted to remember these guys.
Meanwhile it's a
new decade, I hardly ever got to see my mother, my father married the
anti-Christ, I'm in a new school, I have a bunch of new friends and there is no
sense of security in the house I had to live in, no surprise I was getting
high. There was no where I could turn to and not have to worry about anything,
and I was only a teenager, I don't know how I made it through that without
killing myself or someone else.
My whole world
fell apart four years earlier starting with my mother's departure and in
fairness I never blamed her it was clear to anyone who could remember that my
father was the fuck up. I do remember her screams as he beat her, he treated
her like shit, he treated the maids better. It really was for the best in the
long run that she left it meant that there was some where I would finally
escape to from the maelstrom that resided at 150 Darrow Lane, Greenlawn.
However before my
deliverance from hell in 1975 the seeds of my eventual escape were planted two
years earlier in 1973 when that bastard gave me a black eye because I had
struck back at his minion from Maine, she was prone to violence directed
towards us but she was impotent and almost comical. All I had to do was punch
her and she would retreat like the coward that she is. When my father got home
she worked him up and aimed him at me, he in turn picked me up over his head
and threw me. Like a cat I landed on my feet but my legs collapsed and my knee
impacted my eye socket.
The next day I
went to school with a very severe shiner which he did nothing about, hell he
didn't even consider the ramifications of sending me to school in that
condition. Perhaps he was so arrogant he did not consider that anyone or
anything would take him to task, maybe that's the way it was in Canada when he
was a kid. But here and in the seventies the school stepped in and the State of
New York took him to court, they forced him to pay for a private school far
enough away from him and the wilder beast he married; only then was I able to
start functioning again. On October 3rd 1973 I was driven to the airport and
put on an airplane to Syracuse where I would live at 960 Salt Springs Road for
the next two years
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