remedyandBOR

The Remedy It was the winter of 1966. We were heading north. Traveling up the eastern seaboard of America; following the same route and at the same speed as one of those yearly, August hurricanes that blow in from the warm equatorial Atlantic Ocean. The eye of this storm contained four siblings. Two in the middle, one in the back and one in the front. We all knew our places in the light blue 1962 Mercury Comet station wagon. My 17 year old brother was “riding shotgun” in the front seat, next to my father. One sister was in the back seat, next to me. The other occupied the flat space behind that. Swoosh ... swoosh … swoosh. The sound of passing cars on a wet road seemed endless. We would drive all the way to New Jersey from North Carolina on this road trip. As a military family, we were accustomed to road trips. California to south Carolina, South Carolina to New Jersey, Texas to north Carolina. Always in a car. (Except for the plane trip to and from Hawaii when my father was stationed at Kailua Peninsula and I was only five years old. ) Somewhere around the sound of an eighth can of beer being forcefully punctured by a well used can opener, I heard my father tell my brother the news. (It has since been my observation that during a crisis, people tend to clear the air about hidden things.) "Dane," my father said after reaching back to close the ice chest behind the passenger's seat. "You know ... you're not my real son ... You have a different father than me." That revelation rocked me as much as it did my brother. As I look back at that revelation, I can say that it took quite a while for it to fully sink in, as I wasn't yet mature in my understandIng of the sordid world around me, even though the previous 15 years of my life had been imbued with an underlying parental tension. A tension. I now know, was between a father and his real son vs. an obliged mother and her bastard son. It hadn't yet generated its full socio-psychological havoc upon me, but I was already “damaged goods” at only fifteen at the time. My brother, Dane, being almost eighteen, was obviously the same. This particular trip had been presented to me and my three siblings as an emergency "rescue" operation, but in the mind of the father/career Marine who was driving, It undoubtedly could be found in the war operations manual the chapter of "Search and Destroy". My mother had run off with a married man from Italy. She’d met her co conspirator in infidelity while my father was half a world away, fighting the Viet Cong, and while his family (as was usual when he went away to war) stayed at my maternal grandmother’s house in Jersey City. I'd heard my relatives say that the Italian man had intentionally scalded his arm in order to be transferred from his ship to an inland hospital. He had been convalescing in a hospital room not far from my ,then, dying grandmother's room, where my mother had met him. So here we were: four kids, a father, cold case of beer; on a ten hour trip across five states; driving towards the apartment of my mother's illegal immigrant Italian boyfriend. Upon arrival, my father and my 17 year old brother donned Inspector Clouseau style trench coats (Courtesy of the US Marines). My father then left the three younger kids in a small station wagon, bearing out-of-state plates, parked on a dark Jersey City street, at four-in-the-morning. Later, my brother Dane would tell me about how when the offending boyfriend answered the door, he and my father flashed their Military ID cards to impersonate FBI officers. After quietly gaining access to the apartment of my mother's boyfriend, they went in and found my mother there, naked in the bedroom. Dane said that the beat beat the boyfriend to a pulp. My mother was also Injured during the fray when she tried to intervene. She had fallen on the sharp edge of a broken dinner plate. After the Marine successfully extracted that member of his unit, she was taken to her New Jersey sister's house to be cleaned up before her final journey back to Jacksonville, North Carolina. My unt Arlene had gotten my mother hooked on “diet” pills while my father was away at war. The two of them had slimmed down During my mother’s stay. The used to brag about how men in dark limousines would pull over to ask if they needed a ride while they were travelling to their beautician’s school classes. She had married an Italian man. “Louigi”. A really great guy. “Don't go back with him Lore” my aunt Arlene implored. (Lore was short for Delores, My mother's name.) “I'm down on my knees begging you. Come back for the kids” My father said. “Dane, take your brudda for a walk. Gowan. Get awtta heaw for a whyal” My aunt ordered. Twenty hours after leaving our home, near Camp Legune, North Carolina, and with a large cut on her right leg (as the only reward for her effort), my mother was effectively put under house arrest and shipped back. Never to go free again. Nothing more than a sailor who had gone “absent without leave” and was now condemned to serve out a life sentence, without the possibility of parole. To any other observer, she was a ship who’d taken herself out of mothballs. When released again, onto the high seas of life, she’d experienced the sweet taste of freedom, only to be crippled in battle, towed back to a dry-dock and decommissioned. There was to be no campaign ribbon or ceremony or war medal medal or for time spent raising four children in enemy territory. She had only done the “right thing" for her her family's sake to keep them from enduring shameful ridicule and excommunication from the church. All from a seed that had been planted almost two decades earlier... Uncle Ernie My uncle Ernie probably met my father in a bar. My father was stationed with the U.S. Navy in Bayonne, New Jersey, sometime around 1949. My Father had served in China at the end of World War Two and was, at the time, serving with the Marine Corps Military Police. He was charged with the job of keeping an eye on any drunken sailors who may have come into that naval port-town for “a good time”. He and Uncle Ernie became drinking buddies. After my mother became pregnant at the age of 16, her brother, Ernie, introduced her to my father ( the aforementioned drinking buddy). It was never clear as to whether my father was just some useful fool whom Ernie had come across while searching for a man to wed his pregnant sister, (under a tight timeline and Papal pressure I might add) or whether he had already been my father's drinking buddy beforehand. Whatever the circumstance, I can surmise that as a representative of my mother's desperate family, Ernie probably made my father an offer he couldn't refuse (as they used to say in the New Jersey mafia). My mother was considered to be a beautiful woman for her time, and could easily have found someone she really loved, but her delicate disposition (after being taken advantage of by a high school boy of Italian descent) had relegated her to the category of "undesirable goods" for any eligible, Irish Catholic male of those times. The Result: My brother was born: Dane Patrick Vaughn, on December the 14th, 1949. Only four years after the end of the Second World War, and only a few months after my parents were married. Not long after the birth of Dane, another son was born. My mother went into the hospital for the delivery while my father was serving overseas in the Korean conflict. In Korea, he was a flamethrower tank crewman. The baby that was born to his wife (while he was burning enemy soldiers to a crisp in Korea) was taken from my mother, and then pronounced dead by the delivering doctor only thirteen hours after its birth. No one saw the body after that. My aunt Arlene (her sister) said it was a case of the hospital stealing the baby, and that it was a fairly common practice in those days. His name was Kevin. So I would have actually been the middle child, if the family had stayed intact. I was baptized into the Roman Catholic religion. I would later do the whole Catholic thing: Catechism, Holy C ommunion.a.nd finally, Confirmation. By the time of my own Catholic baptism, (the first Catholic ceremony, which is done soon after a child is born) my father had already done his own obligatory "three "C's". He did that in order satisfy the Catholic church's marriage regulations as a requirement for marrying my mother. According to my aunt Marlene (the wife of my father's brother), my father had converted from a “rebelling Baptist”, to become a parishioner of what my mother's side of the family called the "true" faith. I will say this about my mother's side: they "true-ly" drank a lot during all those religious celebrations and wedding receptions and Irish wakes ... My beloved grandmother's wake (the Irish Catholic celebration where the relatives have a sort of wedding reception style "send off" for a person who dies) is where I saw my 15 year old brother drink his first beer, under the wonderful tutelage and parenting style of my mother's eldest brother ... Uncle Ernie. Needless to say, the 'true' religion (as they called it) never really made a positive impression on me, nor did it take permanent hold, but another early "New Jersey" experience did ... First, a little background: As was popular at the time when I was in my 40s, I inevitably entered into a round of mid-life crisis, psychotherapy sessions. While going through it, I uncovered some very deep and unnerving childhood memories, and in one of those incidents, I found myself standing up in my crib. The yellow/white glow of those old 1950's tungsten filament light bulbs filtered under my door. I could hear the sound of all-out screaming, as if someone were fighting for their dear life. At some point, I realized that the sound was actually coming from “me”. Suddenly, the door opened. It seemed as if the sun had exploded and was bursting into my room like a celestial floodlight ... carrying with it; first a shadow, and then a person. A fantastically frightening world melted, at the speed of spreadinglight, under that illumination. Frank Sinatra's voice was filtering in from the kitchen over a large, vacuum-tube table top radio and I could hear familiar, sarcastic voices. Those voices belonged to my New Jersey relatives. They spoke an east coast English, which came across to any non-Jerseyite as a kind of high twang, and French accent, combined. Inside the room, next to my crib, I could feel the empathy of someone who, like me, had also been through the same childhood horrors. The empathy of one who was as spiritually sensitive as me. After all, we shared the same ancestry. The ancestry of the folk who saw, and talked to, fairies and leprechauns. Who "knew" when a visitor was coming, whilst they were still out of sight and miles away. Unfortunately, she, and her sensitivity, would later suffer despair, heartache and an eventually morbid existence. All because of one teen-aged mistake, and my Uncle Ernie's remedy. What I saw in that room, when the lights were out, was terrifying. Like one of those dark and ghostly scenes from a Hollywood horror movie, only it was real. Some kids will tell of similarly fantastic stories. Stories so scary and unnerving that the resulting effects would warrant the prescription of medication, if the parents could afford a doctor, or a good spanking until they fell asleep, if they could not. Other parents would simply fall back on the age old philosophy of "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger, and let the child tough it out. I think that viewpoint is held by the same kind of person who says: "Why did the man keep hitting himself in the head with a hammer? Because it felt so good when he stopped." My father was one of those persons. He always laughed when he told a sarcastic joke. Even for the hundredth time. My father's family was only one-step-up from what they used to call hillbillies. He grew up in the coal mining state of West Virginia, and in a time of scarcity (the great depression). While I was growing up, he told stories about how hungry he was as a kid in the depression. He often re-told hillbilly jokes and would sometimes display gross behavior as an attempt at humor, and although he really loved my mother, she was actually a kind of captive; a wild bird in a cage. New Jersey had been a kind of touchstone in my childhood, and before the strange and brief winter of 1966, it was always "good memories". We stayed at my grandmother's house in Jersey City whenever my father was shipped off to fight for the Marines. For my father it was always a dangerous time. For me, it was just another stay in New Jersey. My father had participated in World War 2 and in the Korean conflict before I was born, and In 1960 my father was sent to the Dominican Republic with a thousand other marines, for what our government called a crisis. I remember the event mostly because color televisions had just made it into the general populace, and my grandmother, (Nana) had purchased one for her apartment in Jersey City. We stayed in that apartment for eight weeks on that particular visit. Incredibly, my favourite television broadcast, "Bonanza", was one of the first TV shows to be shown in color, and we got to watch it every Sunday night. Although the color television looked a little different than the black and white versions, (the television tube was round instead of square) we felt like we were at the movie theater in that living room. What a thrill, and as I recall, my grandmother even made us some buttered popcorn and covered the windows. There were roll down window shades called "blinds" for covering the windows at my grandmother's house. I once asked my grandmother's husband, Matty, why they were painted black on the outside. It seemed odd to me, even at eight years old. "Well Ricky," he said in a deep East Coast accent "In the war, German submarines owf da coast was a twet, (standard English: off the coast was a threat) and da houses needed to shield daar house-lights from da view o' da enemy. We was awl owdered to paint da outside o' da blinds wid black paint sose dey wouldn't know where da cidee wuas." That visit to the "Garden State" of New Jersey was in the modern 60s, but for the residents of Jersey City, the reminders and memories of that previous global war , with it's electric sirens, air-raid wardens, search-lights and German U boats (submarines, were still vivid). Soon after, our family moved to Houston Texas, where my father was assigned to be a Marine Corps recruiter. He was good at signing people up for the Marines, and was not transferred to another Marine Corps Base for four years. My mother loved that, but as for me, I always loved going to new places. Because we were in a stable situation in Texas, my father tried to make extra money, so he learned to repair televisions. After a few months, we all sported a black and white television in our bedrooms, plus the house had one in the living room. When the weekends came, all four of us kids watched cartoons or action shows, like Tarzan, Rin Tin Tin or Roy Rogers. But three November days in 1963 would see nothing at all “fun” on television. Eighty miles away, near a school-book warehouse, the American President we had all grown to love, was assassinated. Only reports and news about that assassination, and America's response, were to be seen on the television, until President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. I never saw so many adults crying during that time, and I must admit, even I cried for the man and the family whom we all read about in our 'Weekly Reader' elementary school newspaper. Soon after, we would leave the crestfallen state of Texas. HOUSTON 1964 - "Hey Rick. Turn it up. Have you heard this one? 'Cherie', by that guy with the high voice ... Frankie Valli. What was the name of his band?" It was another scorcher in Houston, but my brother Dane still wore his signature tight black pants and a tight, black knit shirt. I really didn't like him. He was two-and-a-half years older than me and we were not at all alike, except for music. "Hey wait, Sidewalk Surfin' is on!" I shouted excitedly to my brother, who just happened to be "sidewalk surfing" down our own driveway, on a skateboard he'd made from some old skates. His skateboard was a lot better than mine though. Mine only had metal wheels. His had the hard resin-material ones. The ones used at the skating rink with wooden floors. They absorbed the rough places on the concrete better that the metal ones made for skating outside. "I wonder what it's like to surf the ocean waves? Like in the movies?" I said when the song had ended. My brother hit a pebble on the driveway and came to a screeching halt. He didn't fall like I would have though. I was always jealous of his physical abilities ... and his height. He was taller than most kids his age, and I was fat. When I hit a pebble there was always blood, or at least a bruise. I had freckles, he was tall dark and handsome to the girls. I was short, fat and ruddy. Then my brother Dane let me in on a little secret. "Mom says we're moving right next to the beach. Dad's going to be stationed near a city called Oceanside, California" My brother went to put his skateboard away in the garage. "Hey! Can I try your skateboard?" I said. "Sure ... if you let me borrow your transistor radio." I had just gotten it for my birthday and I didn't trust it to anyone. Besides, the batteries were expensive. "Maybe tomorrow." I said. "When do we move?" "In June," My brother replied. "Good," I said, "I love going to new places." We've been living in Houston for four long years, and I am more than ready for a change, I thought. Then a song by Jan and Dean, 'The Little Old Lady from Pasadena' came on the radio. "Hey Dane, this song is about some little old lady from Pasadena who races her sports car around town, in that city called Pasadena where the refineries are ... 40 miles from here. That's the place dad calls 'Stinky Dina' because of the bad smell from the oil refineries." "Yeah ... She races it in Pasadena … CALIFORNIA. … Forty miles from where you're going to live ... not Pasadena Texas" He replied sarcastically. "Really?" I replied incredulously. "California?" He just shook his head, rolled his eyes and went into the house. I guess the black clothes had made him too hot. Transistor radios were a big deal back then. The one I had, could fit in a shirt pocket. Well, not in "my" pocket at the time, but for sure in a grownup's shirt pocket. I was to get another radio in a year. I loved radios. But my new one would be very high technology for those days. They were important to teens back then, because like the computers and smartphones of today, they brought the new rock music - and the news about the groups who performed it. 1964 - The Best Time of My Life During the six months I lived in Oceanside California, I was having a great time. I woke up every day to the chilly salt air of a beach that was only half-a-mile downhill from me. I fished at the pier, watched the surfers, tried to belly-board, heard surf music all the time and went to Ditmar Elementary School, where I made a best friend, Joe Castro. Six months later, my father would be deployed to Vietnam and the rest of the family would go to live with my mother’s relatives in New Jersey for a year before my father came back to move us all to Jacksonville North Carolina, his next duty station.