Dad and I sat at the kitchen table at Glenn and Carol's house. It was New Year's Eve, and the minutes were counting down to putting this year in the history books. 1985 had been a very progressive year. Live Aid happened back in July. Ronald Regan and Mikhail Gorbachev met for the first time at the Geneva Summit. Coca-Cola introduced New Coke, which turned out to be one of the biggest failures in business history. This was the year of The Breakfast Club and Back to the Future. The wreckage of the Titanic was finally located this year. The space shuttle Atlantis made its maiden voyage.
I could not count the emotional miles I have traveled on this little island this year. When it came to coming of age, I jumped from the plane without a parachute. I got to see things about myself that I did not like and wanted to change, and I made those changes. For a person who didn't really have direction growing up, I figured out that it was up to me.
I actually had my first publication this month. Ray Cushing was the owner/publisher of one of the two island newspapers: The Island News. He loved the article I wrote the year before, which I called "The Art of Sunday Driving." Ray renamed it "Sunday Driving Recollections" and published it in December 1985. Copy of article Click Here I know this was just a small town newspaper, but having my first by-line was surreal.
I did not get paid for the article, but Ray did gift me an electric typewriter. For the last 5 years, I have been working on a story I called Lost in a Strange Life. I was pretty much over the revisions of that story. With the new typewriter, I would go on to write my second story, called Misfits.
The end of 1985 was this strange gathering of fragments, rushing to meet the end of a road somewhere, when I would have to make choices that I had never made before. In 1985, nine space shuttle missions were launched. It was the most ever launched in a single year. What we did not know was that only 29 nine days after this New Year's Eve, all of that would change. The reckless would become humbled. The humble would become reckless. Everything that 1985 began with would be drained of all of its value and become the salvaged cautionary tale that could never be duplicated.
As the holiday passed, the decompressing effect stirred up 1985 for all of us. I could not deny the broken pieces of a relationship that went on far longer than it should have. Dee needed to grow. 12 years of captivity, of which some of the living conditions outright matched those of human trafficking victims. She needed solidarity. I don't think I ever met a person who deserved it more. I had been too young to understand that.
She invoked something in me that I was all too familiar with. My parents separated at 8. We were Title 19 (Welfare) kids. We bounced frequently, moving from apartment to apartment, school to school. We had no car for two years, and during that time, we even went without a refrigerator for a short period. We were poor. The kindness of my Grandfather got us through the holidays, school clothes, and, I am sure, other times when there was just not enough.
Living life like this conditioned me. I was always trying to make things better. Always pushing against the current. Always taking the answer "No" and making it into a 'Yes." One time, specifically, was when we were evicted from 541 East Main Street in Torrington, Connecticut, back in April of 1979. My Grandmother, who now lived in a two-room apartment with a kitchenette, took us in. We were pounding the streets looking for a place to live. Agencies, papers, radio ads, and window signs. Anything out there, we tried.
It was a cool spring evening just after dark when Mom and I pulled up on Earl Street in Bristol to look at a potential place to live. As we were walking into the driveway alongside the house, there were four couples there to tour the apartment, too. My mom saw this and did an about-face, "Oh, we are never going to get this, let's go." I grabbed her by the arm of her jacket. "No!" I said quietly. "You're right. If we get in that car, we will absolutely not get this."
In 1979, there was still a stigma about the single mother when it came to projecting whether they could maintain a good payment routine. The two-parent family seemed more secure for sure. This landlord was a widower, so the fact that there was a single woman looking to rent might have been an advantage. The fact that my mother was walking out to her car one cold morning while the landlord was backing out of the driveway, somehow caused his truck to crash into his own porch railing, might support that he liked her.
There was another factor. A solid one. He, Jim, had been raising a son who was almost my age since losing his wife. It had been many years. I was not a passive 13-year-old; I was in control. I wanted to show this man that I was not some deadbeat, trouble-making teen. When we got to the basement, my opportunity presented itself in the form of a giant 50-year-old furnace. "Hey, that's one of those old wood/coal burners converted into oil furnaces," I said. Jim looked at me, very surprised. "Yes! How do you know that?" I placed my hand on one of the pipes, "My Grandmother had one of these in her house. There is no mistaking them." You could tell he was more than impressed.
My life was like this. I always found ways to save my mother. She absolutely could have done things on her own, but I also know I did something to tip the scales in a way that complemented her efforts. I did not realize that reflexively, this created in me what someone counseled me years later as my "Superman complex." I applied this so naturally, especially in my relationship with Dee. I spent a good part of 1985 trying to save her, whether she needed it or wanted it.
All of the pieces were landing where they would. Getting the house, and her ex moving away, and her needing to make all of her decisions. As she expressed her right and desire to be on her own, I wanted to show her that I could still save us. After Christmas, I finally got it. There were 2% of the reasons why we should go on, and 19,678% of the reasons why we needed to separate and see what we could be as individuals and what we could be to each other.
I told her she needed to move out. It was here that I discovered I had been living in my own nebula. "This is what I have been trying to tell you." As she said the words, it was as if I suddenly had months of dialogue in a foreign language translated. Not only did I see that I was trying to defy gravity, but I saw her kindness toward me. Patience interwoven with frustration. We decided we were still together, but on the last weekend of December, she and the kids moved out. We would "date." Within a month, we had decided the dating would also be over.
Our relationship was hard to define, and it did not end here. We had several intense relapses the following year, and most people do not know it, but on the 4th of July weekend, on one very crazy Saturday night, she whispered to me, "Let's leave. Take me away from this place!" It was there that the plan to leave Port Aransas started to take shape. The idea was fueled when my Grandmother fell sick, and then I could not stop the momentum. I honestly can say I don't know if I ever would have left if she hadn't said those words to me.
After 1986, we continued as friends, and in my extreme lost state in the late summer of 1989, just before I quit drinking, I actually worked for Dee. By then, she was the Beach Crew Supervisor. She was easy to work with, and we enjoyed a true friendship that stood well on its own during our days working together. Although she had nothing to do with this, I do find it amazing that the last day I ever drank in my life was also the last day that I worked for her. It was a seasonal position, and it had concluded.
While I was working on the Beach Crew in 89, Horace popped up on the beach. He had not changed at all. He was no longer with Dee's sister. He was like a vampire; he just took resources and energy from all of those around them. I yelled his name when we pulled up to him on the beach. He walked around and acted very happy to see me. Then he retracted into a voice I was only too familiar with. The same whiny voice in which he used to advocate that Dee should be with her Ex, or that he and I were with the wrong sister. This time, he was complaining about Dee's live-in boyfriend, whom I knew well, and was a good guy. Horace whined that she would be so much better with me. Some people, you just can't save. I was looking at the living dead. I did not know where his life would end, and in reality, it really did so many years ago.
The moment Dee moved out, everything felt right. She also experienced the same thing. We had made friends and went through a period of change together that was extremely different for both of us. She was breaking out in her solidarity, and I helped her meet ends materially and accompanied her through the breakaway stage. I came of age in a way that could only be described as jumping out of a plane without a parachute. It molded who I was for the rest of my adult life.
When 1984 ended, I was sitting on the couch in that old mobile home where Dad and I lived at the time, watching the New Year's Eve celebration on MTV. I was definitely still a kid. Untested. Inexperienced in so many ways. Over the last 12 months, I have learned a skill in the oil business, and learned how to survive in the rough construction industry socially. I learned how to eat hot baked beans from a styrofoam cup without a spoon. I learned how to back trailers with ease, drive trucks and tractors, and so many other skills.
I learned how to keep my mouth shut. I identified a need to keep quiet, to be stealthy, and to keep strength because of it. Mostly, I learned to see and hear the person I showed interest in. The Superman complex continued for a few more years, and it caused significant trouble for sure. We cannot grow up all at once, but I definitely took the expressway for much of it.
1984 was good for Dad and me. We had an equal balance of father-son and friendship aspects to our relationship. In 1985, it became more of a friend you like to spend time with, and the friend who makes you mad with their choices, too. Whatever happened in 1985, we learned how to exist in parallel lines, and it worked.
1985 was the year Brooke migrated to Texas, and she was meant to be here. Port Aransas fit her so well that it was as if Dad being there and I being there were almost supplemental. She and I were also true friends, and I loved that so much.
In the coming year, my Grandfather would come many times with my cousin, with my sister Amy, and it became quite normal for him to visit.
Now, Glenn and Carol's kitchen table. At the same table, I was first introduced to Dee last May. It was just Dad, Glenn, Carol, and me. Dad raised his glass with rum and Coke to us in the center of the round table. "Here is to 86ing 1985." We raised our glasses too. "Here, here."
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