Recent years have seen new discoveries in quantum mechanics. If something is observed, it can actually become matter, whereas if it is not, it is a wave that dissipates without substance. This gives new meaning to the power of positive thinking.
Here is where I have become my own assailant. My mother used to date a man named Richard. He loved his burgundy wine. He was a member of the Franco-American club. He went there almost daily to spend way too much money on wine by the glass. My mother, my sisters, and I, in tow, would also drink wine and sodas, respectively, that he paid way too much for.
How do you pass the time in one of these clubs? Stepping out of the story for a moment here: I need to write a piece about the damage Richard did to me. How I let it happen out of pissed-off, passive-aggressive rebellion over what happened to my family. My father leaving after Karen moved in next door. The Christmas Day kiss he gave me in 73 that made me realize I did want him home with me. Despite his stern parenting, I loved him so much.
Why was I so mad? I was mad enough to self-destruct before their very eyes. I could never understand why self-deprecation was my weapon of choice. But I sat there. It was 1978. Richard, my mother's boyfriend, squared off at 13-year-old me. His message was clear. I needed to make something of myself, and I needed to do something about it now!
The room was dimly lit. The tables and vinyl chairs were round. Very late 60s style. We were sitting in the Bristol, Connecticut, Franco-American club. Richard was a member.
The Franco-American club was established in 1936. It was a place where francophones (people who primarily speak French) could meet, primarily to help people of all nationalities obtain citizenship.
Richard spoke French (Canadian) fluently as it was his first language, but I never saw him try to help anyone attain US citizenship. We seemed to only be there so that he could, aside from his membership dues, pay way too much for burgundy wine by the glass. It was an elite and expensive way to get numb and indignant.
Let me say right here that it is THIS guy I have blamed for all my failures. This wine-drunk, control-freak, wannabe cop, who, somewhere in his journey, alcohol took his dream away from him, and he abrasively wanted to live vicariously through the son that he could not have. I had heard that he could not father children. So there I was. The tourette of distorted good intention, trained on me, 13-year-old me. I did not know what he was talking about. The rest of my immediate family and I had just fled in severe socialist storms from one flimsy tin overhang to the next. What in the world was intention? What was trajectory? To me, those people looked like they needed counseling, not emulation.
We (I) were not broken! No way. My life to this point has been a mix of experiencing the bounty of the latter part of the Industrial Revolution, strong influences from the Silent Generation, hippie culture, the ghetto, the women's movement, and, overall, life in the 1970s. I had no use for the establishment. I had enough hippie culture to hate that kind of authority. Richard embodied that, being a former Navy man and former auxiliary state police officer. His words only did one thing for me. It caused me to take defensive measures.
Hour after hour, day after day, month after month, paying premium prices for bad wine by the glass and Cokes and Ginger Ales in glasses full of ice that contained maybe 4 ounces of actual beverage for $ 1.50 each (a lot of money in 1978, man), it was a frontal assault. My mother and sisters sat in the round, fake-leather back chairs as Richard droned on aggressively about what I had to do. Here is the awful truth. He. Was. Right! It was the delivery that I hated so much.
and I raise my glass to awful truth,
that you can't reveal to the years of youth,
except to say it isn't worth a dime...
-Leonard Cohen
Rebellion burned in my veins and drove my responses. I argued with immeasurable energy. This man just had no right to tell me what I was supposed to do. That was a job for my father. My father lived in Maine, and I saw him maybe twice a year.
There were many unavoidable landmines in the Richard experience. The screaming arguments between him and my mother, his weird delusions in which blackout drinking and driving moments led him to hallucinate that he was still an auxiliary state cop. He drove a 1973 Oldsmobile Regency 98, Oldsmobile's flagship luxury "land yacht," measuring over 230 inches long. It featured a standard 455 cubic-inch Rocket V8 engine and a Turbo Hydra-Matic transmission. The thing was a powerhouse, but floated like it was 2 feet off the ground, riding on a cloud.
I always knew the signs. It was like he flipped a switch. We would be driving down a dark road or highway, and then suddenly, he would turn on all of the interior lights, which this land yacht had, like, over a hundred of them, and he would floor the accelerator, pushing us to speeds similar to those experienced by a space shuttle re-entry. No matter how much we yelled at him, we could not get through to him during these little "identity slips," which seemed to be self-serving attempts to gain social dominance when he was feeling somehow insufficient. Where were the cops when you needed them? I mean, real cops.
"I had four arrests and four convictions," he boasted frequently. We never heard the end of it. This is the beauty of an alcoholic loop. You never went anywhere; week after week, it was all the same. The highs and lows we experienced in 1978 were just the same as those we experienced in 1981.
In the spring of 1979, our landlord decided to evict Jim and Sharon from downstairs and us. A current rift between my mother and her father left us without the strong and generous safety net that had been there for us in the past. My grandmother, my dad's mom, took all 4 of us into her two-room apartment with a kitchenette. What really gets me about this is that it was right in the middle of the Richard years. He lived in a large 100-year-old home in Waterbury with only his mother. There were extra rooms throughout the house, and he could not be bothered. My sisters and I rolled with everything, so we were fine. Plus, this is a fine memory of my grandmother's self-sacrificing spirit. I am really bitter about how this highlighted the absolute usery of my mother. We were essentially homeless. He still got exactly what he wanted. Oh, to have been older than I was at the time.
On Christmas Eve of 79, he held his usual party, with the attendees always his ex-wife's family. This is where I met Margie, whom I would date for the next 23 months. For the first six months, I did not see Margie as much as I wanted, but in June we moved to Waterbury, and now I was one town south and could even take a bus to see her if I wanted to. Now, I spent less time with Richard, but it was the same for my mother and sisters. Margie and I often went to restaurants with Richard and various members of our families. Now the rhetoric included not only what to do with my future but also how Margie held a baby factory within her. The drilling was relentless.
Having this guy in our lives was a literal minefield. We would go off on a beach day with him, and once he added enough alcohol, the personality change happened. Jealous, enraged, accusatory, paranoid, and riddled with the idea of conspiracy against him. He would get an idea in his head, and then this new, dangerous, hair-trigger person replaced him, right before our eyes. You could see it in his eyes; there was a whole universe of war behind them, and there was nothing you could do except to brace for impact.
The cycle was insane. He would get so mad at my mother and she at him; they would be done. Then, a few days later, it was on again. Them working at the same company did not help matters. He was loud, crass, invasive, volatile, but somehow weak. I recall one night in 79 or 80, while we still lived in Bristol, my father was visiting. We all sat at the kitchen table, Richard included. After a couple of hours, my father left, and Richard, having had enough to drink and now delusional, was imitating my father, similar to the way a small boy pretends he is Superman or Batman.
As a young teen in Waterbury, I delivered the afternoon newspapers. I remember walking into Dolmar's, the local VFW on Watertown Avenue, to deliver their paper, and in the coatroom, the oak phone booth burst with the shouting voice that I was so familiar with: "I am not insinuating anything!" It was him; no doubt my mother was on the other end. I could almost lip-sync the entire shouting match for him.
She finally broke free of him in the fall of 1981; one of the break-ups that happened every couple of months finally allowed her to break free of the orbit, right around the same time I broke up with Margie, which, of course, he saw as coordinated. Unfortunately for my mother, this was definitely a frying-pan-into-the-fire situation.
There were a couple of less-than-negative memories of Richard. One, he saved us from a leech of a person who plagued our family on and off from 1976 to 1979. Charlene. She was one of 13 kids in a family, if I am recalling this right, who were ALL alcoholics. She would move in on and off when she could not bed down with some social misfit. She was dangerous because she was always pushing things with me in a way that could clearly be seen as grooming for molestation. She was a thin pole of a woman, with bloodshot eyes, and when drunk, most of the time, was sick, falling down, gross.
Richard, in one night of blazing glory in March of 79, engaged her and stood up for Brooke, Amy, and me, telling her over and over that she was not our aunt (or, in his French-Canadian dialect, "Hont"). I remember being behind my closed door, cheering him on silently. I hated her. This was triggered by me telling Richard, in naive confidence, about a weekend when he and my mother went away, and I was with Charlene. I had gotten ridiculously drunk Saturday night and roamed the streets of Torrington. Richard, who had a moral compass, started shouting for my mother. "Sandy! Please come here!" He told my mother that this person needed to go. Sure enough, a little while later, he told her that she was not our "hont" and that she should get out. I never saw her again.
In late 1986, I had moved back from Texas. Unsure of what I was going to do, I got a job at Timex in Torrington. Richard was still working there. I worked 2nd shift. After work one night, I went to the local bar with him and had a beer. He was married to a nurse for several years, and he seemed to have softened. I could tell he was still high-strung, like he worried about things. I marveled at how all things really do pass, even when you think that they could never change.
I had been stuck in a causality loop with this guy for years; he was drilling me on what I needed to know. It was forceful, as if there were no other option. I failed to understand what I was looking at. I thought it was about dominance. But now I know. It was panic. It was regret. He was trying to save me from what he did. I, being endlessly defiant, would throw a verbal Molotov cocktail into the dialogue. He once said, "You sound like you have lost already." He said this with such sadness. It pained him, and I somehow enjoyed it. Little did I understand the effect this had on me. I am the assailant of myself. It has taken years to undo the mess that I made in protest of my environment.
