My Bio - Part 6

The summer of 1981 through the summer of 1984, when I was fifteen to eighteen years old, were the worst years of my childhood. The amount of stress, fear, anxiety, anger, confusion, frustration, and depression I experienced during this period was unbearable. I think that’s why I hurled myself out of a second-story window when I was seventeen in the spring of 1983 at a so-called private school that was run like a boot camp.

In late July 1981, when I was fifteen, my parents drove me to Brattleboro, Vermont. According to them, I was going to a place called the Brattleboro Retreat, which they made sound like a luxury resort. “You’ll come back a whole new person,” my mother said, reminding me that I wasn’t good enough as I was.

The place turned out to be totally shitty. The “retreat” was an adolescent psych ward. It was coed, and each kid had their own room. There were shower rooms, bathrooms, a small area where the nurse dispensed medication, a kitchenette for making tea or air-popped popcorn, a staff station, a sitting area, and a recreation room. There was also an enclosed outdoor porch and, of course, the “quiet room.”

Most of the windows were Plexiglas, but not all. The ones farther from the staff station had regular glass, reserved for better-behaved kids not deemed a threat to themselves. When a person was first admitted, they were usually placed in a room near the staff station. I didn’t move away from that area until towards the end of my sentence. I refer to it as a “sentence” rather than a stay or anything else because that’s exactly how it felt to me. It was like being in jail. I was miserable and felt trapped. My parents later claimed they were misled about the place being “nice,” but any decent parent wouldn’t have left me there for so long with how much I begged to go home. Surely there must have been a way to get me out if they truly wanted to, especially given how miserable I was, which I made clear during visits and phone calls. Perhaps they didn’t have complete control over the situation. I doubt I’ll ever know for sure.

We were allowed to smoke and have as much money as we wanted, but we couldn’t keep the money in our rooms. There was a small store on the ground level where we could buy cigarettes and other items.

As awful as this place was with its structure and control, I hadn’t seen anything yet. That would come the following year but that’s for the next section of this bio.

On my first day in Brattleboro, I asked to borrow and sign out another patient’s razor, which I used to cut myself. I couldn’t direct my emotions at those causing my grief, so I turned inward and took it out on myself as mean as it was to do to the girl to whom the razor belonged.

I spent the first half of my five months there on restriction, which usually meant I wasn’t allowed to smoke. My caseworker, Amy, reduced my cigarette allowance to just six a day. She said it was due to my asthma, but I always believed it was more about control. If I hadn’t had asthma, she’d have found another excuse.

When I was caught smoking more than my allotted amount, I lost my smoking privileges. When I was caught smoking in the rec room, I was restricted from the room. When caught on the porch, I couldn’t go there either. When caught in the bathroom, a staff member had to accompany me but thankfully, she stood outside the stall. When caught in my room, they removed my door and stripped my room bare except for my pillow, blanket, and a box of tampons.

One of the most degrading experiences was when someone informed a staff member that I had a cigarette on me that I wasn’t supposed to have. The staff member quickly grabbed me and forced me to run alongside her into the bathroom for a strip search. Being forced to run like a marionette was utterly humiliating as hell. Why couldn’t she have just asked me to follow her? At least she never found the cigarette I had hidden in my pants pocket. I reached into my pocket, closed my fist around it as I pulled the pocket out, and said, “See? I have nothing on me.”

The staff were determined to control everything. This included trying to change me into someone I wasn’t. Since I was a loner who preferred being in my room, they forced me to interact with others more than I wanted. I was only allowed in my room for one hour a day at which time I typically listened to music.

One day, after reaching the higher levels, Amy told me to tell someone if I started feeling suicidal again because suicidal people shouldn’t have extended privileges. In hindsight, it seems absurd to punish someone for sharing any negative feelings but that’s exactly what they did.

When I resisted their shit, they’d throw me into the padded room, bare except for a mattress. Once, they even put me in a body bag, immobilizing me from the neck down.

Towards the end of my stay, inspired by my experiences, I wrote a song called “My Time Has Come.” Looking back, it seems like a stupid, silly song, but it became my signature song over the years that I was into that sort of thing.

The biggest lesson I learned was that people aren’t always what they seem. Sometimes those who are supposed to be the most stable and knowledgeable are the most ignorant and misguided. I had thought adults knew it all, but often, they were worse than kids.

Overwhelmed with depression from how the retreat was run, I begged my parents to take me home, but my pleas went unanswered. One time I got so upset that I puked my guts out.

In the end, my mother was right. I did come out a whole new person—more bitter, less hopeful, less positive, less trusting. How could my parents have given up on me? How could they let me be treated this way?

I finally returned home in December, shortly after turning sixteen. Things weren’t much better, but at least I was home…for a while.

My Bio - Part 5

In 1978, we moved from the newer side of Longmeadow to the older section. Although the house was much older, it was bigger and I liked it a lot better. It didn’t have much of a back or front yard, but that was okay since I was well past the days of playing outside on swings and in makeshift forts and tents. Besides, there weren’t any woods nearby anyway. All there was in the back was a hedge separating a small patch of grass from a small brick terrace. The front yard was similarly sparse. My dad could ditch his sit-down mower for a push-mower and leave the mowing to me. I didn’t mind; it was pretty much all I ever had for chores besides laundry, and keeping my own space neat and clean. I didn’t do any cooking—my only kitchen tasks were to set the table, clear it off afterward, load the dishwasher, and then empty it.

I received a weekly allowance of $10, which I’d spend on cigarettes. A carton of cigarettes cost around $5 when I started smoking and ended up being over $20 when I finally quit eighteen years later.

Unlike our first house, which was on a dead-end road, this house was on the corner of a busier street. It was also a two-story house with four bedrooms. My stereo and guinea pigs were set up in one part of the cellar where I’d hang out a lot.

When Nana Bella first came to live with us at the first house, she’d snitch on me for every little thing. But once she saw how my mom could be at times, she started feeling sorry for me, and we became closer. She even kept her mouth shut when I’d smoke. “Just don’t burn the house down,” she’d tell me.

She passed away when I was away from home as a ward of the state at seventeen. Both of my maternal grandparents died two years later.

As of 2002, if I had to pick a time in my life that was the worst, I’d say my teenage years were definitely it. This was when my mother began running out of patience with me, and her sending me off to other places escalated. Sometimes those places were even worse than being with her. I truly believe my mother never wanted kids in the first place; she only had them because it was expected in those days.

As a hyper child with wild dreams of becoming a rich and famous singer, I was more than getting on my parents’ nerves. They started ignoring me more, becoming increasingly engrossed in TV and outings with friends. I felt neglected, and my mother’s control and ridicule increased. It seemed I could do nothing right, and as my optimism and confidence faded, my early teens were when I first had thoughts of suicide.

I took an overdose of sleeping pills, but it only made me drowsy. I began cutting myself regularly. I wasn’t doing it to die; I was channeling and venting my frustrations, depression, and growing anger. No one influenced me to do this. I never saw it on TV or heard anyone talk about it. In fact, I didn’t know anyone else in the world had ever cut themselves at this time.

Although I was raised Jewish, we rarely went to the temple. Religion wasn’t a regular part of our lives, which was fine with me since I found religion too structured and often bigoted.

Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, I was walking down the street next to ours on a crisp fall day when a middle-aged woman raking leaves in her front yard said, “Oh, what a cute sweatshirt.”

I looked down at my Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and said, “Thanks.”

Noticing my ear, she asked about it. After I told her about it, she mentioned that she had a deaf son and invited me to meet him. So I did.

Jeff was a dark, lanky boy a year older than me with the same birthday. He knew sign language well. At the time, I only knew how to fingerspell the alphabet. Jeff taught me many words. I’d write down the words I wanted to know and he’d show me the signs for them.

I also began teaching myself Spanish using books and records as I knew no Hispanic people to help me. There were no Hispanics I knew of in Longmeadow at the time. The only Hispanic people I had met were a family from Venezuela at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital when I had one of my ear surgeries.

I had never even seen a Black person until I was around ten or a little older. I called the Black section of the city “Dark Land” whenever we drove through it.

I also dabbled in French and shorthand.

Although Jeff and I spent a lot of time together, neither of us was interested in each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. For him, it could have been for any reason. For me, it was because I was mostly attracted to women, though I didn’t understand that yet. I was simply attracted to women more than men; I didn’t question it, whether it was my attraction to someone I’d seen or to singer Linda Ronstadt, one of my favorites, or actress Kate Jackson.

The summer of 1980, when I was fourteen, was not very enjoyable. Instead of being at the beach, my parents were traveling daily to sell eyeglass frames to optometrists. Having just been kicked out of camp, my mother, not ready for me to come home and disrupt her peace, dropped me off in Connecticut at the campground where Uncle Marty and Aunt Ruth spent their summers.

Although I could take my guitar and new guinea pig with me, I was not a “happy camper.” My only good memories from that time were going water-skiing on the lake and diving from a cliff that was fifteen to twenty feet high. It was scary at first, but a lot of fun once I took the plunge.

Marty and Ruth stayed in a trailer while I stayed in a small outdoor tent. I didn’t mind the tent, but I did mind my uncle and my spineless aunt, who went along with his domineering ways. Even so, she was the one who hit me that summer, not him. She slapped me across the face. I’m not sure if it was for bumming smokes off others or for the boy who came into my tent, whom they thought I invited.

This boy entered the tent one early evening when I least expected it. He sat on my cot next to me as I held my guinea pig on my lap.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked him.

Saying nothing, he pulled my mouth toward his. Before his lips could touch mine, I heard, “Jodi, who’s in the tent?”

It was Aunt Ruth. Both of us emerged from the tent, but before I could explain, she had already made up her mind about what had happened.

“Get in the trailer!” she demanded, where I spent the night.

Shortly after this incident, my father came to get me. Before we left, he, Marty, and Ruth openly discussed my “problems” as if I weren’t even there.

My Bio - Part 4

We had a summer cottage at Old Colony Beach in Old Lyme, Connecticut. As soon as school let out, we’d head there and stay until Labor Day. My family began going to this beach when I was a baby and continued until I was in my mid-teens. This was partly because my parents made some enemies there. While the beach had its fun moments, I usually preferred being at our house in Massachusetts. Old Colony Beach was predominantly a Jewish beach, which suited my parents, as they weren’t particularly interested in associating with people different from them. They never explicitly taught me to hate others, like Black people, but I eventually grew to dislike everyone in general, regardless of race, color, or anything else.

When I was about eight, Tammy and I would go out and “be bad” when we checked on the cottage during the off-season. We’d rip screens off of other cottage windows, yank old doors off their hinges, and cause other minor damage.

My main companion was Andy, the youngest of six kids in the cottage next to ours. My parents and his, Judy and Al, had been friends for years, even before I was born. Their friendship ended in the ’70s, and Judy and Al sold their cottage shortly after.

My parents had fallings-out with at least three other families at the beach, mostly because of my mother. These childish cliques and struggles for popularity went on and on. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized just how silly and immature it all was.

Most of my days at the beach were spent bored—swimming and playing in the sand could only keep me entertained for so long. In the evenings, I would sometimes interact with other kids, play bingo, or watch movies on the beach. When I stayed in, I watched TV, listened to the radio, or played with my dolls.

Despite my boredom, there were a few highlights at the beach, like ice cream, fried dough, candy necklaces, miniature golf, and glow-in-the-dark wands. There was also Mrs. Labriola, an elderly woman who lived at the other end of our street year-round. I don’t remember how we met, but she was very good to me, often spoiling me with little treats. I was between eight and ten years old when I started visiting her, and the last time I saw her was when I was around twenty-four in 1990. After I moved to Phoenix in 1992, I learned that she had died in 1994 when I called her home and her son, Vito, answered.

My parents often played cards or other games with other couples just like them—very white, very straight, and very Jewish. My mother, like my sister, craved praise and popularity. Recognition and acknowledgment were everything to them.

My most horrible memory of the beach was when my mother nearly left me for dead.

Literally.

As I got older, my parents, especially my mother, became more obsessed with my appearance. I went through a chubby phase as a kid, and my mother taunted me as if I were a beached whale. This made me self-conscious, and my self-esteem started to crumble. I began to eat less and less as I tried to live up to my mother’s obsession with me as the “beautiful” child. Known for my big, long-lashed eyes, thick curly hair, and petite frame, I felt immense pressure to maintain this image—or else! When I finally lost some weight, my mother congratulated me as if it were the greatest achievement I could ever accomplish.

On one particular crash diet, around the age of ten, I went without food or water for several days. On the third day, I could barely lift my head off the pillow. I was incredibly weak.

My mother and her best friend, Charlotte, were just outside my room by the little kitchenette. When I called out to my mother for food and water, she refused to help me.

“You did this. You correct it,” she said, eager to return to her backgammon game, which was obviously much more important.

I was confused. My mother had been picking on me for being fat, yet when I once insisted I was too full to eat any more at a restaurant one night, she made me finish my meal and I ended up vomiting it up in the parking lot. It took that for her to stop forcing me to eat when I was full.

As I lay there in my weakened state for hours, I realized it was up to me to save myself or I would die. Somehow, something must’ve wanted me to live because if that kitchenette hadn’t been right off my room—forget it. With all the strength I could muster, I pulled myself out of bed, stepped just outside the room, yanked open a cabinet, grabbed a Devil Dog, and collapsed back onto the bed. My heart was pounding. It took me ten minutes to gather enough strength just to unwrap the wrapper and eat the damn thing. By this time, it was late afternoon.

After I ate and got some water in me, I showered and went outdoors. My legs were shaky. And being the kid that I was, I didn’t hold it against my mother that I could’ve died had I not managed to feed myself, and I almost didn’t!

In my early teens at the beach, I’d often cruise the next beach over, a public beach, looking for anyone who had some pot to spare or share. Once, I was foolish enough to get into some guy’s car to get high where there were fewer people. He hinted at wanting sex but dropped me back off at the beach when I said no. The guy could’ve kidnapped, raped, and killed me, so something was looking out for me that day too.

I attended two camps in Maine—one when I was eleven, the other when I was fourteen. I was supposed to be there for the whole summer, but I managed to get kicked out of both camps. I hated camp, not because the activities weren’t fun, but because it was too structured and hectic, leaving no time for myself or for privacy. I always valued my solitude and missed being in my own room with my own things, without having to share a bathroom with twenty other girls. I missed my stereo the most.

Camp M, where I was when I was fourteen, doesn’t stand out in my mind much. All I remember is making sure I’d get caught smoking cigarettes so I could get kicked out, and slugging the camp counselor assigned to my cabin. I guess she startled me when she went to wake me up, so I didn’t literally “slug” her. She claimed I did, though, but I knew she was exaggerating because she wanted me out of there just as much as I did.

Camp N, where I went when I was eleven, stands out more because of a woman whose name I couldn’t remember. She was somewhere between her late teens to mid-twenties and was exceptionally nice to me. I think she was some kind of supervisor because she had her own cabin where we spent my last night together.

Twenty years later, in Phoenix, Arizona, I tried to track this woman down to thank her for caring for me when so many others didn’t. I was never one to take good people for granted after all the bad ones I’d encountered, and I’m still not. I even contacted Unsolved Mysteries for help and was shocked to get a phone call from them inquiring about her, but I couldn’t find her or learn her true name at this time. No one I spoke to seemed to remember her. All I learned was that the camp was predominantly a Jewish camp. I should’ve figured as much since my parents were big on sticking with our own kind.

Jenny, a friend I’d had since I was nine, wasn’t a very good influence on me. On top of having a controlling mother, I had this bossy friend telling me what to do, too. But being the nice girl that I was, I put up with it until I was in my twenties.

After a year of friendship, Jenny moved to a rural town about forty minutes from where I lived, but we still visited each other from time to time. Her father seemed pretty passive, but her mother was a neurotic alcoholic whom I never really liked.

Jenny and I had our share of good times, but I can’t say I was too thrilled with her for getting me started on cigarettes. Who knows, though? Maybe I’d have started anyway. She also introduced me to pot, though fortunately, I never got carried away with that. I smoked the occasional joint from my early to mid-teens. Actually, my last joint would be when I was twenty, but that story will have to wait.

As kids, Jenny and I would hang out together, smoking our cigarettes and stealing from stores. Petty things like candy and cigarettes.

My other friend was Jessica, and she and I are still friends today.

Just as Jenny had gotten me hooked on cigarettes, I got Jessie hooked on them but I spared her the pot. Jessie and I didn’t cause much trouble together, though we did skip school once.

Jessie was also adopted like Jenny was. Her adoptive parents were divorced, and she lived with her mother just a few houses away from mine. Her father was a very famous public figure…Sesame Street’s Big Bird.

I stayed with Jessie at his house in Connecticut a few times. His house was quite impressive, with a cool layout and many photos of him with other celebrities. The show’s set was in New York, where he also had a nearby apartment.

I hated school and having to get up early, though I found middle school to be a little better than elementary school and high school even better. Before I became a ward of the state, that is. I loathed math and history. English and science were okay. My favorites were chorus, gym, and the typing class I had.

My Bio - Part 3

James and Charlotte were good friends of my parents. I liked them, along with their daughter Shelley, who was a lesbian. Another couple close to our family was Goldie and Al, and I liked them as well.

Richard and Beatrice, who were beach friends of my folks, owned an ice skating rink in Windsor, Connecticut where I took some lessons. I didn’t see much of Dick, but I remember Bea as being one of the phoniest people I ever met, similar to my Aunt Ruth, though they didn’t look alike.

I rarely saw my cousins Norma and Milton. They seemed nice enough, though.

Cousins Max and Dorothy were a different story. I had mixed feelings about them. They were very generous, giving me money for my big cross-country move later on in life, but they had their faults, too. After I moved, I found out that they regularly visited Tammy, even though she lived over an hour away from them. Yet, when I lived just ten minutes away, they never came to see me. I understood why, though—it was due to the “crazy” label my mother had worked so hard to stick on me.

What really bothered me was how Dorothy, nicknamed Boo, reacted to something I once told her. She and Max were driving me home one day after visiting my father at his friends’ house in Brimfield, Massachusetts. When she asked how I was getting along with my mother, I told her the truth, which wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

“I love my cousin Doe! She works so hard! How could you cut her down like that?” she demanded.

Hey, she asked!

Regarding my health, my physical challenges as of the very early 2000s include being deaf in my left ear which is deformed, ADHD, asthma, and allergies.

ADHD just means you’re hyper, often have trouble sleeping, and sometimes struggle to concentrate. That’s all it means. However, my mother tried to brainwash me into believing I had a severe chemical imbalance and needed medication for life simply because I was energetic, a bit eccentric, and saw the world differently. Maybe the doctors brainwashed her too; I’ll never know for sure. But this was a time when people preferred to label certain traits and prescribe pills, rather than accepting the person as they were or addressing the real root of the problem.

My mother nearly miscarried me, so she was given an estrogen drug (DES) which they believed back then would help. Later, they discovered it could cause cervical cancer in DES daughters and increase the risk of infertility. I don’t know if I’m sterile because of this drug or for another reason. I might not be sterile at all, just not meant to have kids (I possibly had an early miscarriage in the late ’90s). Despite deciding I didn’t want kids in the end, somehow I knew this would be the case since I was a little girl. This was part of my prominent sixth sense, which didn’t fully develop until I was in my twenties.

In the ’70s, I had fifteen plastic surgeries in Boston to build an outer ear. The results were disappointing; it never looked natural, and twenty years later, it brought me problems. Persistent sensitivity within the frame led me to a doctor, resulting in two surgeries to dismantle the frame and have a canal drilled. The hearing I gained in that ear is next to nothing.

I was amazed at how I could be in and out of the hospital on the same day for two operations in Arizona in 1994, yet had to stay for two days for each of the many reconstructive surgeries I had in Boston. In Phoenix, they just bandaged the area. Back in the ’70s, my entire head was covered in bandages, except for my face and a small area at the crown of my head where my hair was tied in a ponytail. The part under my neck was the worst—it itched terribly, and I had to wear the bandages for weeks.

The only other physical issues I can recall are being hospitalized for a couple of weeks with pneumonia when I was around nine, and falling off my bike and needing many stitches in my chin when I was about twelve.

They say our health declines with age, yet I’ve been much healthier in my thirties than I was in my twenties, especially considering how I struggled to breathe throughout most of my twenties. Luckily I quit smoking when I was 31.

I grew up in a small affluent town in Massachusetts, just outside Springfield. The Connecticut state line was only minutes away. We lived in a two-story, four-bedroom house with a large backyard, built while my mother was pregnant with me. I had a little playroom in the cellar until my paternal grandmother came to live with us. She had lived in California, but after her second husband died and she had a stroke, she moved in with us. She lived in the finished cellar since it had a bathroom and shower stall she could use. My new playroom became one of the bedrooms since Larry and Tammy were out of the house before I was even ten years old. For the most part, I felt like an only child, and believe me, there were plenty of times when I wished I truly was.

Next door, my maternal grandparents lived in a two-bedroom ranch.

I won’t sugarcoat my childhood. Sadly, the only fond memories I have are of birthdays and holidays, but even those could be shaky. Being with family was often stressful for me. It made me very uncomfortable—I always felt like an outcast, walking on eggshells, and unable to be myself, especially around my mother and sister.

When I was in grade school, Chanukah get-togethers could be fun. We’d go next door to Nana and Pa’s, and they’d dump a bunch of coins on the cellar floor for the youngest kids to gather up.

I looked forward to getting new records and was into TV shows like Charlie’s Angels and The Bionic Woman.

The most unpleasant preteen experiences were school-related, which would become mother-related. Yes, my mother’s wrath could be scary, and my dad didn’t do much to step in and defend us kids. Though there was physical abuse, there wasn’t as much of that as there was verbal and emotional abuse. She would strip my room of the things I treasured most (my little Victrola was always at the top of her list) when I’d do poorly in school, which usually left me thoroughly depressed. Sometimes just going home with a bad report card was quite a task. My heart would pound with anxiety every step of the way, knowing I was probably going to get hit or punished, or both.

Despite my father being more passive, he did most of the hitting. I remember waking up terrified one night as a child to the sounds of my father beating Larry or Tammy with his belt. Once, my mother even came in to comfort me while she allowed it to go on.

But they stuck together no matter what. If one of my parents had killed one of us, the other would still stand by them, never mentioning it, forever acting as if it never happened. In a town like Longmeadow in the ’70s, they’d have gotten away with it too.

My father once went to attack Larry during a Passover feast next door at Nana and Pa’s house when Pa jumped up and shouted, “Not in my house!”

“I’m going to call DYS!” should’ve been more like it.

A teacher hit me once as well. It was only on the rump, but it was still wrong. To me, violence is violence, whether it’s a little slap or a major beating. No one should hit anyone unless it’s in self-defense. I believe that hitting kids usually leads to aggressiveness. My mother brainwashed me into believing it was an act of love. She’d tell me she did it because she loved me. I thought it was normal for parents to hit their kids, so for a time, I believed that when I had a problem with someone, like a classmate, hitting them was the proper thing to do, and I usually did.

Because Tammy was eight years older than me, I was often left alone with her. That was rather terrible since she was so much like my mother. Tall and wide, it was often said that she was jealous of me. Not just because I was small, but because of the things I’d later be able to do that she couldn’t. She felt stupid and ugly compared to me, so I heard, but personally, I wouldn’t have cared what she looked like or what her IQ was if she had only been less of a monster. While her jealousy was frustrating to deal with and sometimes embarrassing when she’d pick on me in front of others, I felt more sorry for her than angry. This is because, while Tammy may have had nice eyes and wasn’t the dumbest person alive, she was still quite homely-looking and lacked any real skills or talent.

My Bio - Part 2

I don’t remember my mother working until I was older, though I vaguely recall my parents owning a record store when I was very young. Also, when I was little, my father did some extermination work for my mom’s dad, who owned an extermination business.

During my teens, both parents traveled the state selling eyeglass frames to optometrists. They even traveled a bit in New Hampshire and Vermont.

In my early twenties, before they moved down to Florida, they owned a jewelry store in a mall. It was actually one of those carts set up in the center of the walkway between the rows of stores.

The pets we had growing up consisted of poodles, birds, and some rodents. I had gerbils and guinea pigs when I was older. We also had a rabbit for a while during my later childhood, as well as some hermit crabs.

The only thing I really remember my mother telling me about sex and boys was basically not to do anything more than kiss on the first date and to make sure the man I married was Jewish.

“But what if I fall in love with someone who isn’t Jewish?” I once asked her.

“You don’t let it happen,” she said.

As I grew older, I realized how silly that was. Like we can control who we’re attracted to or who we fall in love with any more than we can control our preferences for colors or flavors? Should it even matter who we fall in love with as long as we’re happy?

But I always preferred women over men, at least for the most part. So later on in life, when I was twenty-four, openly bi, and visiting my parents in Florida, my father told me not to tell anyone about my sexuality.

“Why?” I asked him. “Should I be ashamed of it? Because if someone I told had an issue with it, I wouldn’t want them in my life anyway.”

During my preteen years, I was often left at my aunt and uncle’s house with their two daughters, which wasn’t usually much fun. June was a bundle of nerves, and Ronnie, my mother’s brother, was a mean bully. This was probably why June was usually wound up and divorced him later on.

Cousins Lori and Lisa could sometimes be fun to hang out with, but sometimes they could be little terrors. Lori, who was a year older than me, liked to boss me around. I was closer to Lisa, who was a year younger.

For reasons still unknown to me, my uncle always seemed to harbor animosity towards me. I haven’t seen any of them since I was around twenty years old, and I can’t say I miss them.

Ronnie was definitely the worst, shoving me around when I didn’t move fast enough for his liking when we’d go out somewhere, and just being a bully in general. My sister Tammy did her own bullying too, and once bloodied my lip right in front of him. He just sat there staring at us dumbly, as if it was perfectly normal behavior.

I had mixed emotions about leaving Ronnie and June’s place when I stayed with them. While I looked forward to returning to my own bed and toys, I dreaded facing my mother’s wrath, which could be quite nerve-wracking, even scary. It was worse when Tammy was with me because I knew she would tell my mother all sorts of horrible things I supposedly said and did, most of which she made up. But Tammy was the oldest, and that meant she was the most believable, so I would certainly be punished if she decided to tell on me, whether the stories were true or not.

When I was around ten, the visits to their house stopped. I’m not sure why. Maybe Ronnie and June were tired of having me there, or maybe my parents were fighting with them. I know they had their fights with them, just like they did with my father’s brother and his wife. Someone was always fighting with someone in my family. Mom or Dad would beat up on Larry, who beat up on Tammy, who beat up on me. It was crazy, and I often wondered if there’d ever come a day when someone was killed.

The more I think about it as I write this, the more I believe they did have a falling out, and it was probably over an injury I received in the town’s high school gym. This seems to be around the time the visits stopped. During the summer when I was around ten, I spent most of the summer at their house, and Lori, Lisa, and I would ride our bikes to the high school for daytime activities. There were sports, crafts, swimming, etc. It was actually kind of fun.

I was a bit of a gymnast in those days, though I certainly preferred ice skating and roller skating. One day in the gym, I was doing a series of handsprings over the vault. On one particular handspring, I veered toward the side once my hands hit the vault and my feet were directly overhead. I ended up badly spraining my pinky finger. At first, I thought it was broken because of how swollen it was.

My less-than-sympathetic uncle did nothing about it, and this could very well have been why they stopped talking. When I later joined my parents at our summer cottage at the beach, Mom wasn’t too happy about it at all. She took me to a clinic right away, and they put a splint on my finger. So yeah, it probably was broken.

I always felt more uncomfortable when Lori and Lisa would come to stay with us versus when I stayed with them. There may have been Ronnie to deal with at their place, but at my place, there was my mother, who would often compare me to them (not in a good way) and give me the “Why can’t you be more like them?” spiel, making me feel like I wasn’t good enough as I was. It seemed I could never measure up to Lori and Lisa, no matter what I did.

My other uncle, Martin, who people called Marty, wasn’t much better. He was a mean bully too, and I doubt he’d have hesitated to kill me one day when I pissed him off by slamming the door in his face if I hadn’t frozen in fear.

“Open this door!” he demanded when I shut it on him when he came over looking for my parents, who weren’t home at the time. This was because of the way he and his wife treated me when I stayed with them at the campgrounds they camped at which I’ll get to later. So I opened the door and let him scream at me. Even his mother was scared. As I grew older, my fear turned to anger, so it’s lucky for both of us that I simply stood there and took his shit. Had I been like I am now, I’d have either gone to jail for kicking his ass, or he’d have gone to jail for kicking mine. I hope he would have anyway!

Even my father had an underlying macho stance despite being usually mellow, and I did see him slap my mother once when I was around eight. This memory has haunted me throughout the years. It’s even more disturbing to know that had my mother resisted after being slapped, he’d have probably beaten her right there in front of me, never caring how it might have traumatized me. After he slapped her, my mother tried to justify his behavior in a private one-on-one, assuring me it was only because of his heart issues. I was just a kid back then and believed anything I was told. However, as an adult, I know that this was a poor excuse for his actions and that if my mother had had any self-respect, she wouldn’t have made such lame excuses for him. Lots of people have health problems like he did, yet they don’t go around slapping their wives and traumatizing their children.

Marty’s wife, Ruth, could be sweet at times, but she was the phoniest person I ever met! She had a big mouth and loved to gossip, but so did the whole family. They had two kids, Polly and Philip though I didn’t see them very often.

My Bio - Part 1

Written by me, perfected by Grammarly and ChatGPT.

In 2002, I finally decided to write my autobiography, drawing on the memories and journals I’ve been keeping since 1987. I worked on it on and off throughout the year.

I was, and still am, the black sheep of my family, but that’s okay—I don’t mind. I used to mind as a child, but as an adult, it doesn’t bother me. I was a lonely child, surrounded by self-absorbed, controlling adults. I found their predictability rather boring, while they never knew what to expect from me, even though they liked to think they did.

I grew up in western Massachusetts. My family consisted of my mother, father, brother, and sister. They weren’t exactly what I’d call stupid, but they had a limited range of skills. They were very pessimistic about themselves, others, and life in general. They rarely approached the unknown with an open mind and were easily unsettled or even spooked by anything foreign to them.

Although my parents, Arthur (Art) and Dureen (Doe), were considered as different as night and day by most people’s standards—my father being much calmer—they were still very much alike. They liked the same music, movies, foods, and activities, and they shared the same beliefs and opinions.

My domineering mother made much of my childhood difficult. It was often said that she treated her dogs better than anyone else, and this was true. Her dogs came first, then her friends, then her husband, and lastly, her children.

She was her own person; no one told Dureen what to do.

My parents weren’t the worst in the world. They weren’t drunks or perverts, and they were reliable enough to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach. So no, I couldn’t exactly award them the title of worst parents of the century.

But things were bad enough. Our material and physical needs were met, but not our emotional ones. My mother was often negative, impatient, insensitive, hypocritical, and very controlling. My sister Tammy was much like her, except she had one character trait my mother lacked: she was a hypochondriac.

My mother was unusually persuasive, as if she could demand respect just by thinking about it. I sometimes believe she could have convinced anyone to jump off a bridge if she wanted to, no matter how strong-willed they were. Despite this, she was also very emotionally weak and couldn’t handle dealing with other people’s problems, especially personal ones.

She seemed to enjoy controlling people in any way she could, even over the most trivial matters.

My father and brother Larry were much easier to get along with. They were more passive and had a sense of humor that my mom and sister lacked. This doesn’t mean I didn’t have my problems with them—because I did—and by the time I was thirty-two, I had completely cut them all out of my life, later regretting reconnecting with some of them.

My maternal grandparents, Jack and Shirley, lived next door until we moved across town when I was twelve. They were similar to my parents: he was mellow, while she was difficult. One of my meanest memories of Nana was when she told me I’d one day be so big that I wouldn’t be able to fit through doorways. Meanwhile, she was over 200 pounds herself, while I was barely over 100 pounds. I had my pudgy spells as a kid and even as an adult, but for the most part, I was pretty scrawny.

I never knew my paternal grandfather; he died in his fifties of a heart attack. I was named after him.

My paternal grandmother, Bella, wasn’t in my life much until I was around eleven or twelve, and then she died when I was seventeen.

My father was born in 1931, and my mother in 1932. They married in 1951 when they were just nineteen and twenty years old—still just kids, and way too young for even the most mature people to marry, in my opinion. They started in an apartment in Springfield while my father was in the Navy. A year later, they had another apartment, then built a house in 1953.

My brother was born in 1954, and my sister in 1957.