The Year 1964

My mom says that whenever my dad would leave, I would cry inconsolably. I was only five the last time it happened so I can’t be sure if it’s true or not.

The Year 1996

Thirty years later I have a hard time believing that I was so attached to “Jack,” but my mother has no reason to lie.
Ultimately, my brothers and sister and I ended up in some random church, on an extremely hot August day, gathered around his coffin, making jokes.
“He’s not embalmed,” my older brother, Frank, said, “I’m surprised he doesn’t smell.”
“What if shit just starts dripping out of the casket?” I asked.
“You guys are gross,” my brother, Rex, interjected.
“But, it’s true,” the youngest, Cletus, commented, “it IS a dead body.”
“All I can say is I don’t want to sit next to that “cousin” we supposedly have,” Ivory, my sister, said, “talk about smelling.”

We weren’t that callous for nothing. After having no contact with my father for years and years, I was determined to go to the funereal only to save Rex from taking all the heat for what our father had done. Frank, Ivory and Cletus, also, had had no real contact with the man, and Rex seemed to be the one all the funeral-goers knew. That became clear during our father’s best friend’s eulogy when he stated, “Jack really loved his children - Rex, and all the rest.” Considering the agony and wasted lives my father left when he shot himself in the bathroom of a bank, I couldn’t leave Rex to fend for himself when all the “investors” started calling in wondering where their money was now that Jack was dead.

We all bunked at Rex’s three bedroom apartment in Northern Virginia, so he already had the bulk of the responsibility. Jack’s wife of 25 some years, Agatha, was still in shock at their house in McLean. We made a plan to go over there - partly to cheer her up and partly to try and discern whether she had any knowledge about the financial disaster our father seemed to have left in his wake.

It was a nice house, the one in McLean. Well, McLean is known for housing the old- money kind of elite. That and Congress persons in search of residences. Not that our dad had old money or was any kind of elite. He was just the kind of guy that needed that type of environment in order to perpetuate the idea that he WAS that type of person.

What type of person was he really? The fact about him that sticks out most prominently in my mind is that HIS father had five wives and my father was never sure which one of the women was his mother. That could be incorrect. Maybe he did know who his mother was, but I don’t. The cloudy history, related mostly by my own mother, is that a woman he called “aunt” turned out in the end to be his mother. Other sad parts of my father’s story are circumstances in which he was left alone as a child in hotel rooms for days at a time - waiting for his father to return. Apparently the important thing for my dad, according to his father, was that Jack always have money in his pocket. So my grandfather always left Jack with money in his pocket. I suppose, as a young child in a hotel room, it might be prudent at times to display that you had the cash to make your stay legitimate. I can imagine a sympathetic maid questioning a seven year-old child, and maybe he flashed some green. Then she thought that at least they weren’t freeloaders and no one would leave a child for too long with a pocket full of money. I can’t imagine what he did all day in those hotel rooms - no television in the thirties.

So, maybe that’s what happened that caused my father to believe that having money was the only way to have anything. Of course, we all know that money is our form of barter. We all need to have money to trade for services, but my dad seemed to learn that just the money to pay the bills was not enough - he needed a lot of money. He needed to live in a manner that showed the rest of the population that he had power and presence. Well, like I said, lots of this comes from my mother, and she has no reason to lie.

Way back when, my mother did have quite a bit of reason to lie. Regardless of what kind of father he may or may not have been, he was definitely not a good husband. I’ve seen a glorious display of “errant husbands” on court television shows, but they all look like caricatures of public television puppets when it comes to my dad.
My father had a bad habit of spending money he didn’t have. This was in the time before credit cards, so if you wanted money on credit, you actually had to go to a bank for a loan. Going to a bank for a loan became one of Jack’s most fruitful endeavors, and he apparently got banks everywhere to give him money. Must have been a smooth talker - well, my mom can attest to that.
In the early days (at least my brother, Frank, was born), new furniture arrived, and my parents had funds to go on vacation with their friends. By the time I came along (second child) my mom was no longer working as a journalist because hubby was providing everything and wanting a “stay-at-home-wife.” I still have a piece of note paper with a message “from the desk of Jack Reid,” indicating that he apparently had a real office and a real job. (Or maybe just an adept ability with copy services - remember, no computers back then.)
Well, at least he had a secretary. When I was thirteen, I discovered a letter my mom had written to a lawyer requesting a copy of the marriage license between my father and his secretary. It seems he had married her while he was still married to my mom, - and they had a kid. The kid’s name was Sean. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time other than that my dad was a dog.
I’m sure the secretary fared no better than we did. My mom tells stories of how my dad would call late at night and tell her that he was actually with the CIA, and she needed to get us kids and go to a certain motel out of town. My mom would do what he said and then wait for hours at the motel with no word from him. When she finally carted us all back home, my dad would act like the whole thing was no big deal. My mother’s screaming was made to seem hysteria on her part. My father was that good at getting people to believe what he wanted them to believe. He had to be “that” good with my mom, because she had five children with him.

Back to around the year 1965.

As I said, I don’t remember crying when he left, but I’m sure I did if he was as charismatic as his history dictates. I’m sure he told me how much he loved me and how his not being in the house was all my mother’s doing. It was a couple years later that I found the gun under my mother’s pillow. She said she had gotten it to protect us from all the people my father said were out to get him. He did want my mother to know that these unscrupulous people would come after his family.
My mother has five children and one day a company comes to repossess the furniture because my father bought it on time and was not paying the bill. Then they come to repossess the car. Finally, my mother tells my father that she can’t do it anymore. She wants a divorce.
I can’t recount all that transpired between my parents because most of it is hearsay, and I’m not blaming everything that happened on my dad, but I have known my mother for quite a bit longer than I ever knew my father, and I will say that she never disparaged him to us EVER when we were children. As an adult with children of my own, I find it incredible that my mother never blamed my father for anything during those first years - in retrospect and in this current day and age, her restraint is truly remarkable. Anyway, this is all just the background for what I do know. Everything else starts when I’m seven.

After the divorce, we moved from Virginia into a track-type home in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. My mother had gotten a job in that state. When we moved there I was in the middle of second grade. The first day of school, a man (presumably the principal) brought me to the door of the classroom. The teacher introduced me to the class and then left me standing there as she went to confer in the hallway with the man who had brought me.
“Ew, she’s so tall,” was one student’s comment.
“She’s like a giant,” was another’s.
The students were all whispering and pointing at me. I bolted from the room square into the teacher.
“Oh, Honey,” she tried to console me, “I shouldn’t have left you. I’m so sorry.” She shepherded me back into the classroom.
Later we had to color a picture relating to a fairy tale. The teacher apparently always chose the best for display on the bulletin board. She chose mine. I knew then that the only reason she chose mine was because she felt guilty for leaving me standing alone, in an unfamiliar place, in front of a bunch of kids I didn’t know. I still remember that the picture we had to color was, “Wee Willie Runs through the Town.”
School was okay after that. It was home that sucked. Now that my mom was divorced from my dad, she had to work full-time, so we had a live-in babysitter. The first one we had was Karen.
Karen was a fat woman, probably in her twenties, with a baby named Jed. Jed was legitimately a baby - maybe 9 months or so. Karen made it clear to all five of us that her baby’s needs came first, so we were not to disturb her if she was feeding him or playing with him or in any way engaged with his care. For the most part that took a great deal of her time, so we, as kids, did what we wanted.
We spent a lot of time at a creek near our house creating make-shift forts and swearing about them. There were other neighborhood kids in the fray, but mostly I remember my brother, Frank, saying, “This goddamned thing!” Then my other brother, Rex, parroting Frank saying, “Yeah, this goddamned thing!” Funny that I never remember hearing the f-word. Maybe the f-word wasn’t “touchable” at that time. Maybe we didn’t know it.
Well, actually, we must have known it (eventually, anyway) because the second year we lived there we got a new babysitter. Her name was Velveeta, and she brought with her a daughter, who had Down’s syndrome, named Angel. Velveeta was much more demonstrative when it came to our activities, and we started to have chores to do.
One of our chores was to help Angel learn her letters. We were on a rotating schedule - one day it was me and my sister, Ivory, another day it was Rex and Frank. Cletus, the baby of the group, seemed to be absolved most of the time. Toward the end of Angel’s training, we were on call individually.
So we had a pile of flashcards. On each card there was a picture that illustrated the sound of the letter. We went laboriously through them until we got to the sound “tr” and the picture of the truck. It seemed Angel had the capacity to pronounce the sound “tr” only as “f”. So every time we showed the picture of the truck, Angel would say “fuck.” We started spending happy hours teaching Angel her letters by showing her the picture of the truck- over and over again. Well, we were kids.
In retrospect, I think Velveeta really cared about us. I think she really tried to be a kind of surrogate mom since our own mom was gone so much. I remember one night I had the most excruciating earache, and all I could think was “please let my mom come home, please God (I still thought of God with a capital “G” then) let my mom come home.” I will never forget that she did come home that night, but what I often forget is that Velveeta tried her best to comfort me before my mom’s arrival. I’m sure Velveeta assumed that the possibility of my mom coming home was sketchy at best.
See, my mom had a decent job, I think she worked for Job Corps as a public relations person, at least she made some kind of money to have a live-in housekeeper/babysitter, but the problem was that she liked to drink. Sometimes drinking with her friends kept her from coming home. I didn’t know that drinking was the enemy that kept her away until one night at dinner.
We children were doing our Velveeta- assigned chores, setting the table, making the salad, when the telephone rang. My mom was busy procuring a bottle of vodka from inside the buffet when the call came, so I answered the phone. On the other end was a man I knew to be a friend of my Mom’s, Jack, and when he asked me what my mother was doing I said, “Well, right now, she’s into the booze drinking.” I don’t know why I said it like that, but I distinctly remember phrasing it that way. Immediately he asked to speak to her at the same time that she (hearing me, I guess) irritably grabbed the phone from me. I really think that was the first time I realized that her drinking was a problem somehow.
All I can really remember from that time living in the suburbs of St. Louis was how hard it was for me to do what all the other kids did. I felt like they all knew the way to be kids and I was left out.
For instance, I had a best friend starting in third grade, the year first full year after we moved there. Her name was Ruth, and we were inseparable at school. For some reason the inseparability ceased whenever I tried to stay over night at her house. I think there were three times at least that I got to the point of wearing my pajamas, and her mother saying, “Good night, girls,” before I absolutely had to go home. I can’t conjure up what actually transpired inside me, all I know is that I would feel panicked by the idea of sleeping there. Literally, I would feel sick and somewhat delirious - like if I didn’t go home I couldn’t survive. Then Ruth’s mother would call my house and my mother or Velveeta would come and get me. To this day I don’t know why I couldn’t stay there, although several years of later therapy give me a clue that my home life was so tentative at that time that subconsciously I was afraid that my whole family might leave while I was spending the night with my friend..
Ruth moved away in the fifth grade. I was better acclimated to the school by this time. After all, fifth grade was the highest grade there was at that school, and that made our class the superior beings. This was the year that Wanda Barkley explained how it felt to get “your period.” We gathered around her on the playground. “It feels like something hot is coming out of your butt,” she said. We had all seen the health video describing why “your period” happens, but this was the first real life person we knew who actually had experienced it. Wanda Barkley was a hero of sorts. I wanted to get my period so I could be a celebrity, but I didn’t want to get it because the video we saw made it seem gross. Wanda said you had to wear a diaper between your legs, and that just sounded disgusting.
That same year I decided to like a boy. It was really the first boy I had ever liked. It’s strange how it just comes upon a person all of a sudden at that age. Hormones are really evil in the regard that there is no warning ahead of time. Just one day - Bam! You get enamored. Having no warning, I tried to assess the situation and start slow.
Kelly was playing tether ball when he became the object of my desire. Well, maybe he was the object slightly before - like in class - he was in my class. But that one day we were playing tether ball, and I thought if I could beat him…he would what? Know that I liked him? So I did beat him, and after the game he said, “I think I might like to kiss you.”
Oh, for heavens sakes, there is no appropriate way for a good girl such as myself to respond to such a comment, so I said, “Yeah, if you only knew where I lived.” Like I thought that the only way he could possibly kiss me was if he came to my house. Then he said, “I could follow you home.”
For the rest of the school day I was terrified that Kelly would follow me home.

I’m not sure if it was that day, but shortly thereafter he did follow me home. It wasn’t a far walk. There was a big down hill, a crossing of the creek, and then a slight walk up to my house. I saw him behind me the whole way, and all I could think was that I couldn’t believe he was serious, I couldn’t believe he was actually coming to my house so he could kiss me.
So what I did was get into my house and tell my brothers who were loitering in front of the television that if some boy came to the door, I emphatically did not want to see him. Then I went to my room. It was only seconds later that I heard my brothers inviting the enemy into the house. At that point, for some reason, I rushed into the bathroom. I think I thought that a person in the bathroom should be safe from any intrusion. But I was wrong.
With the assistance of my brothers (whom I shall never forgive) Kelly proceeded to pound on the bathroom door demanding that we had an appointment to kiss. I was terrified. (Years later all I can think is that I was terrified at the prospect that I would be inept at the actual act of kissing. I can’t really think of any other reason other than the general idea that I thought of myself as a “good girl” who did not do such things.) How quickly times changed.
The upshot of the “Kelly Outside the Bathroom Door” episode was that I was clutching the towel rack on the inside and his (and my brother’s) weight on the outside of the door succeeded in wrenching the towel rack from the wall upon the opening of the door. I proceeded to wield the towel bar as a weapon, threatening forever anyone in my wake. Needless to say, I never heard from Kelly again about anything pertaining to the incident. It’s funny that we were still in the same class, but I can’t remember anything about him after that day. Sad.
Sad also, that I was somehow a “good girl” then and so quickly became tainted when we moved to the city.
Our mother explained it to us, “My job is in the city. There is a new concept unfolding in the city - a collection of townhouses that will be for multiple races, it will be for many different kinds of people, all living together as people should live. We will be one of those families living together with all the other families who understand that various races need to live together in order to understand and appreciate each other.”
Maybe she didn’t say it just like that. Maybe she didn’t even say it at all. All I know is that I thought I was going to the junior high school with all my friends, and suddenly we were moving to the city.
In retrospect, I think my mother must have told us something about moving to the city because no one moves their whole family anywhere without telling them about it, but I don’t lie when I say that I was wholly unprepared for our new environment.
We must have moved in the summer because I remember liking the townhouse we moved into. If we had moved during the school year I’m sure my experience at school would have colored my feeling about our house. In any case, initially, the house was nice and new. My sister and I shared a room on the second floor, then there was a bathroom, then there was our mother’s room. Our mother’s room didn’t really have a door, it just had a sliding laminate wall. To this day, I don’t know what the architect’s purpose was for that room. It turned out to not matter much. My brothers lived on the third floor - there were two bedrooms up there - Frank had one to himself because he was the oldest and Rex and Cletus shared the other. Just explaining how we arranged ourselves in this domicile is the extent of my good feeling concerning the two years we spent here. Every experience after the move-in was horrible.
I think it’s probably a psychologist’s nightmare - if one ever tried to decipher my trying to enumerate all the crazy things that happened while we lived in that townhouse. I’ll try to stick to my own experiences although I will have to allude to some of my siblings’ experiences from time to time by way of explanation - or sometimes just because I have to point out that it was just as hard for them as it was for me.
So now we live in the city, and I go to Waring Elementary with my sister and two of my brothers. Frank has to go to the high school. Our school is a short walking distance from my house, but in the beginning our house is not ready so we are commuting to Waring Elementary from Velveeta’s house on the South side.
Here is what happens: Velveeta gives us money for the bus. She tells us to get off on a certain street and walk a couple blocks to the school. We (two of my brothers and my sister and I) are completely unable to understand what it means to traverse the city via public transportation. The first day we ride the bus all the way to the end of the line. The bus driver says, “We ain’t goin’ any where else.” He feels sorry for us and puts us back on a bus toward where we are supposed to go - but we don’t know where that is. We get off when we see a 7-11 and spend our lunch money.
Yeah, we got it eventually. My oldest brother, Frank, was never with us then, of course. He had to go to the high school, and that was a different bus. I feel for him to this day - as hard as it was for us, at least we had each other, he was on his own.
So we are there. At school. There are only two white kids in my class, and they are both from El Salvador, so they aren’t really white. The rest of my classmates are Black, (back in the day we didn’t refer to Black people as African Americans, so I’m not) and I know nothing about Black people. In 1968 there were virtually no commercials featuring Black people, no magazine advertisements depicting Black people, when we lived in the suburbs there were no Black people and subsequently I had never had classmates as Black people. Now, for all intents and purposes, my whole daily experience was fraught with Black people. I couldn’t understand it. I remember my mother spouting that party line, “We are all the same; skin color is just that - a different color.” That was not my experience.
In sixth grade, my teacher was what I now know to be an alcoholic. She sat at her desk and ordered us to complete workbooks or watch videos. I, early on, realized that she would easily let me go to the restroom whenever I wanted. One day at her desk she hugged me sloppily and told me, “You know you remind me of my own daughter.” I have no idea what that meant or how it was significant, but I used her attraction to me in order to get out of class whenever possible.
Frequently I would ask to go to the bathroom and then just leave the building altogether. Most of those times I can’t relate the outcome of the excursions because I can’t remember what happened. But I do remember one time.
One time I asked my sixth grade teacher if I could go to the bathroom and she said, “Yes.” I immediately left the building and just started walking north. I had walked a long time and was in a strange neighborhood when I was accosted by a man in a U.S. Mail truck. He said, “Honey, what are you doing in this neighborhood?” I replied, “I don’t know.” The man took me into his truck and drove me all the way to the South side where Velveeta lived (which was the only address I knew). To this day, I think that man may have saved my life - after all, if he thought it was a bad place for an 11 year old white girl to be roaming, and he was a postal worker, he must have known what he was doing.
That is the extent of my memory for 6th grade.
By seventh grade we were fully ensconced in our town house. Well, we had moved in without the assistance of Velveeta some time in my 6th grade year, but I don’t remember when it happened. It is interesting to note that none of us, not one of my brothers or my sister, remembers any Christmas at this townhouse. You would think that we might remember where the tree was or some random gift, but no…nothing.
In 7th grade, I met another white girl named, Lizzy. Lizzy and I got along famously. Fortunately she had been in the city for a while, had some older sisters, and was not at all daunted by the number of Black people in our class. She was mostly about what happened outside of school.
I am emphatically not blaming her, but once I met Lizzy and her sisters, I learned that there were drugs that could make school much easier to bear. Seventh grade became a joke. We had a white teacher, and it seemed that she favored us (because we were white?) Anyway, we were barely in class that year. Lizzy’s older sisters were in some alternative school where they spent hours “feeling a moment” or “reconciling an altercation” through such activities as silent meditation or prolonged statues (which kept the people with the issue in a frozen pose until someone had to finally admit a responsibility). There were quite a bit of drugs circulating through that alternative school, and they made their way easily into my life.
Look, I was basically on the loose in a large city with no supervision.
Where was my mother? At that time, I really couldn’t tell you. I remember one time when I was in the sixth grade and scared most of the time, some boys showed up at the back door and demanded that I come out because I was the spitting image of some girl named “Angel,” and one of the boys was in love with her. It’s so funny how years later when I moved back to the same town and ran into some of the same people, they weren’t so scary after all. Maybe I just got stronger through my experiences. Too bad the method of my strength wasn’t positive for my life or society at large in those early years.
Well, at the time, I was petrified that these boys were outside my back door. My mother had left a number to call. I called the number. A man answered and said, “Your mother is busy right now.” I think that maybe this one experience was a turning point of sorts - I remember thinking, then, that I was pretty much on my own.
The boys outside the backdoor eventually left after my brothers began firing their BB guns at them. The whole experience living in the townhouse designed for “inter-communal living” was a bust from my perspective. All I learned at that time was that Black people were scary, and there was no one to trust.
Except there was that Fuller Brush man. There was this man who came by our house every couple weeks, ostensibly to sell Fuller Brush products. But our mother was never home when he came, and he would come in anyway and show us products that could freshen the air or scrub a toilet better than what we had. Always he gave us vitamins. He would shake a vitamin out of the “test” bottle for whomever of us was present, and say, “You need top try one of these vitamins.” We always took them. He seemed like such a nice man.
One time he was sitting at the table with us, giving us vitamins, and he happened to look at the floor. He was such a friendly guy; he reached down and said, “Oh, a penny.” Then, as he realized it wasn’t coming up, he said, “No, it’s stuck to the floor.” To me it seems a metaphor for our entire time at that location - what this nice man tried to pick up was a wad of gum that had been walked on so many times it appeared to be a penny. So there we were, a nice bunch of kids, so trodden on by our life experiences that, once a shiny penny, we were now really just a wad of gum.
It didn’t matter to me anymore, now that I had met Lizzy and her family. Now I smoked pot and occasionally we had some acid. I was living at her house most of the time.
That spring, at the end of 7th grade, Lizzy’s mom brought her new boyfriend into the picture. And with her new boyfriend came his sons. One of them was Will. Will was 18, handsome, charismatic and talkative. He talked to me. He encouraged me to sing. He was highly complimentary of everything I did. I naturally thought I loved him.
One day Will said we were going to do something special, something he would never do with anyone else. We went upstairs. He told me to lie down on the mattress in the room. He took my pants off. He squirted some foam into my vagina, and then he fucked me. Afterward, he said, “Now, this is between you and me, it’s a special thing that you can never tell anyone.”
I lay on the mattress after he was gone wondering what was the special thing. He had put a pillow under my hips that had some of the contraceptive foam on it. I took the pillow case off and kept it - it seemed my only reminder of the special thing that had happened. I kept that pillow case for three years - until the day I realized that Will basically raped me. No, I wasn’t argumentative or unwilling; I just didn’t know what was happening. I was 12 years old at the time. I had never been amorous with a boy at all before that time. I believed that Will was a god. I believed that he would never lead me astray. So, that’s how I lost my virginity. Not even knowing that I had lost it.
No, I lied. I had been somewhat amorous with a boy once before. In sixth grade I met a boy who moved into the new developments across the street - they were nicer townhouses - they were called “Breakthrough.” His name was Benet. His parents were professors at the university, and they got housing for free. He and his brother, Derek, were quite a bit younger than their older four siblings, and somehow one or another of the older siblings was often left in charge of supervising the younger two. Most of the time, no one was home.
We used to play a card game called, “Bloody Knuckles.” I can’t recall how a person got to the stage of being subjected to the “bloody knuckles” part, but when it arrived, the person presented his or her knuckles and the chosen perpetrator pounded the deck of cards on the person’s knuckles a certain number of times. The hope was always that blood would be drawn. The hope resided in the minds of both the perpetrator and the victim. The perpetrator proved his/her ability to inflict harm and the victim proved his/her ability to withstand the infliction. It seems a crazy game to the mind of a full-fledged adult, but it’s really no different than most of the sports activities we subject our children to on a regular basis. Not only that, but it’s quite similar to the seemingly bizarre games the alternative teenage set play today - burning each other with cigarettes, getting tattoos or piercings.
Anyway, the point I was getting at is that on one of the occasions that I was at Benet and Derek’s house playing this game and, we ultimately ended up deciding to play one of those games that involves kissing. I don’t remember for sure, “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” “Spin the Bottle,” or “Post Office,” it was one of those, and I ended up kissing Benet. Fairly perfunctory I recall, in retrospect. Although to be fair, at the time, I did wonder if I was now in love with Benet - now that I had kissed him.
Shortly after this, Benet was involved in a play at the university. He suggested that I try out for the part of his girlfriend. Unfortunately the director didn’t like the fact that I was taller than Benet so instead he cast the only other white girl that showed up who happened to be a girl from our school that I hated. The director made me in charge of props. I will say that the experience helped me pay attention to detail, but mostly I remember being pissed that I wasn’t Benet’s girlfriend.
So I had played around at kissing by the end of my 6th grade year, and half way through my 7th grade year I had been fucked.
For the summer between my 7th and 8th grade year my family was moving to New York. My mother had gotten a new job being the director in upstate NY of a program called Covenant House, which had already had success in the city proper and was now spreading its wings upstate. The premise was that some of the boys (all boys at this time) were harmless enough to spend some time in a pastoral setting. Those boys who had proven themselves worthy could live out their court-ordered or personally-mandated sentences in the welcoming arms of a renovated friary in the bowels of upstate New York.
Really, the friary itself was awesome. It was an imposing red brick structure that loomed above a major route to the area. From the front porch of the building one could see acres of the surrounding farmland. That was significant in that farming was the major business of the land. Having that perspective gave the whole program more credence than it might otherwise have had. Unfortunately, the program couldn’t capitalize, but I am getting ahead of myself.
The building had three floors. The first and second floors were where we all lived. If you came in the front door, my family lived to the left. Down that hallway were six bedrooms, many bathrooms, and at least two “living” rooms. If you went to the right you would pass through several open spaces before hitting a cluster of rooms that was the domicile of Joshua and his family. Joshua was one of the counselors. With him was his wife, Shrew, their son Pissant and their daughter, I think her name was Margaret. On the other side of Joshua’s family was the “the chapel.” I had no religion to speak of so I didn’t know how that part of the building was significant until later, but I do need to say that there was a separate door leading into “the chapel.”
If you walked straight into the building from the front door you would encounter the dining hall. It was huge in my estimation. There were two long tables on either side of the room that could seat at least 50 people each. Considering that when we first arrived there were no “boys” present, it seemed a huge waste of space. Beyond the dining room, at the back of the building, was the kitchen, The kitchen was probably Martha Stewart’s dream, but to me it was a daunting display of steel and dials - just waiting for someone to configure the whole monstrosity correctly.
Upstairs there were mostly bedrooms. There were 47 bedrooms all together. I don’t remember how many bathrooms there were - some of the bathrooms were not attached to bedrooms - they were the kind you find when traversing down any college building hallway - suddenly you find a doorway propped open, and it is a bathroom.
But two of the counselors lived on the second floor. Peter and his wife, Icky, and their infant son, Moses, lived at the top of the stairs in a cordoned off section of bedrooms (and presumably bathroom). I know they had a room that seemed a lot like a living room because I saw it one time when I had to apologize to Peter for something I did, but I’ll tell you that later.
To go back, my family moved to this friary in New York while I was on vacation with my friend, Lizzy’s, family in Canada. I feel like I should make a separate chapter for the trip to Canada, but since I’m kind of streaming this whole thing I guess I’ll just include it as a matter of fact.
Lizzy’s family was now pooled with the family of her mother’s new boyfriend. That meant that Will was on the trip with us. Here was the crew: Lizzy and me, Lizzy’s sisters, Jade and Sassy, Lizzy’s mom, Rainbow, Lizzy’s mom’s boyfriend, Kiefer, and Kiefer’s sons, Will, Sam, and Goliath. Then, strangely enough, there was Kiefer’s old girlfriend, Random. Lizzy’s sister, Krystal, had gone with my family to New York.
The trip to Canada is quite the story in itself. I wish I could write down every single thing that happened like I did in several notebooks, but those notebooks went the way of so much of my writings - and that’s another story as well. Suffice it to say that the trip to Canada was marked by physical fights between just about everyone present, sex between most of the people over 16 (and some under the age), and the resulting union of Rainbow and Kiefer. Poor Random, I don’t know what happened to her.
When our haphazard crew arrived at the friary, I already had a room, and my family was already settled. As I recall there was little fanfare seeing the new couple and their mixed progeny off to St. Louis. It was the last time I saw Lizzy or her family for quite a while. It was about 20 years before I heard from Will again.

Once deposited at the friary, (“The New Coveted Abode”) it was much as I imagine free range chickens feel after they have been kept captive and are suddenly, “free range.” My brothers, sister and I just had all kinds of freedom. There were several out buildings associated with the place. There was a small weathered building that had once been an observatory of sorts. There was a beaten-down garage and a huge barn-looking structure that actually had a gym floor inside. There was a man-made pond that seemed stagnant but frequently had visitors - many of the people who visited from the city seemed to have no idea what really clean water was like so they routinely jumped into the pond as if it was some kind of city-cleansing process. The fact that they emerged coated with green slime had no effect on their renewal.
My favorite place was the Chapel. At the far end of the building, beyond where Joshua and Shrew stayed, there was a set of paint-peeling double doors that were always locked after that family moved in, but you could still get in from the outside. Not being religious at all, and certainly unfamiliar with the catholic faith, I thought the Chapel was a play waiting to happen. It was dark - even when the lights were on - there was a muted dimness that called for a somber demeanor. In the many closets were fantastic robes of satin in unfamiliar colors like gold and crimson and the purple that must have been the one reserved for royalty. Then there were these scarf-like things with serious multi-hued embroidery and the occasional head piece decked out to match. Along with the wardrobe there were grand incense burners attached to long chains, intricately carved metal goblets and plates, but my favorite find was a wooden safe. It resembled a little house in nature with its chipped gray paint, slightly vaulted top and that little door in the front that had a tiny skeleton-type key poking out. I took the safe to my room. The only thing I remember keeping in it for the longest time was the contraceptive smeared pillowcase from my experience with Will.
We often dressed up in the robes and paraded around the premises before the boys came. After the boys came we weren’t supposed to go in there anymore because it was sacrilegious or something. Well, I guess Joshua and Shrew were there by then, and they didn’t like any noise, so that was probably the real reason. It was toward the end of the summer, when I met Victor that I had my most memorable time in the Chapel.
I met Victor through my brother, Frank.

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