Putting the Fun in Dysfunctional
I grew up in a large catholic, alcoholic family in the Fifties and Sixties. I was born smack in the middle of the Baby Boom, 1954. I was the sixth of seven children of Jim and Rosemary. Jim had been a Christian Brother for six years before he left the order in 1944, just in time to be sent off to the war.
Before he got drafted and sent off, though, he met Rosemary, a bright and lovely girl, the best friend of Jim’s favorite little sister, Ruthie. Jim had eight sisters, he the only boy. Since Jim had been “off the market” for six years, Ruthie wanted to help him with the girls, so she had lined up several dates for him, with friends she thought would hit it off with him. Since Rosemary was her best friend, she got first crack at Jim.
Rosemary knew she’d have to work quickly in order to secure this guy before he went off to the war. She also didn’t want him to make it past her on Ruthie’s list. She was a determined young lady, and once she met Jim, she became even more determined to hang onto him. She saw him as her ticket out of the life she was living, in Pittsburgh, to the life she craved — anywhere else.
Rosemary was so bright, she had graduated high school at age 15. Her family had moved a lot when she was younger, and each time she entered a new school, they would test her in order to determine which grade she should be placed in, and she kept getting placed in the next grade up, in order to be with intellectual contemporaries in class.
She’d had no plans for higher education. Her family were “poor as church mice” with no means of sending her to college. An interested nun took Rosemary under her wing and insisted that she allow her to explore scholarship opportunities. The nun could not accept wasting such talent, and left no stone unturned in finding scholarships for the young teen prodigy. This may have been when Rosemary first learned that anything is possible, for one who has the gumption and persistence to find a way to make it work. These are traits she would later hand down to me, and to all of my siblings. We are an incredibly resourceful lot.
At age 16, Rosemary found herself metriculated at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. She wasn’t quite sure what stops the nun had pulled out to get her there, but when they told her to report to the basketball court, and expected her to play a silly game involving putting a large round ball into a metal hoop with a net up on a backboard ten feet off the ground, she said, “Oh, no — this is not happening. I am not here to play games.”
Rosemary was quite tall for a girl in those days, nearly six feet tall, and the nun had used her height to get her a basketball scholarship, even though she had never played the game. Aside from her disdain for sports, she found the caliber of education at Duquesne to be less than stellar. Buff Donnelly, the football coach, was also her English Literature professor, for Chrissakes! She felt like she was learning nothing new in her first two semesters there, and promptly left that failed opportunity to go work for the telephone company, at age 17.
On their first date, in which they polished off two six-packs of Iron City beer between them — Jim had never had more than a couple beers in a sitting, and was simply astonished at how much they drank that night — she confided to him, proudly “Well, I’m an alcoholic, just like my Daddy.” He could not believe it.
Their lives together would be marked by one tragedy after another, as they tried to navigate a strange, new world, each new child bringing more stress and responsibility, Rosemary turning more and more to alcohol, and then drugs, as doctors prescribed as many as 15 different medications at any given time, to cure all of the ills that ailed her.
Shortly after the birth of their third son, who came exactly ten months and one week after their second son — that’s known as “Irish twins” — Rosemary tried to take her own life, in a laughable attempt to hang herself in the closet of their little one bedroom home, in which not only Jim and Rosemary and their two children resided, but also Jim’s favorite aunt, Margaret, who had gotten kicked out of her lifetime home by Jim’s father, because she was so difficult to live with.
Life would only become more chaotic and tragic as the little family grew, eventually moving from the little apartment on Frankstown Avenue in Pittsburgh, to a much larger home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Chestnut Ridge, in Derry, Pa, far away from Pittsburgh, and from family and friends.
They still lived there when I was conceived, but by the time I entered the world, they had just moved back to Pittsburgh. Jim’s father had passed away three weeks before I was born — Rosemary had taken a fall on the way up the steps to the funeral home, causing a great deal of commotion. Dad used to say that I was already causing a stir in the family before I was even born.
I was the sixth child to come along in seven and a half years, which by that time, Mom and Dad hated each other. I could never stand, or understand, Dad. He was not like other fathers. I watched him break down into a wail of grief and torment, bawling like a baby, his whole body shaking the car as it sat parked in the alley behind our new house on Berkshire Avenue, when we moved there when I was eight years old. I felt compassion for him, though I knew not how to possibly comfort such a giant of a man, so unhinged, and my compassion was followed quickly by contempt.
Real men didn’t cry, just like big boys don’t cry. I’d learned that lesson when I’d gotten my nose broken by a baseball bat swung by my older brother, Chris. As I lain crying my eyes out, blood everywhere, while they applied ice in a towel to my swollen face, my pretty blonde cousin Janey held my head in her lap, and cooed, “Don’t cry, Pete. You’re a big boy — big boys don’t cry.” So I had choked back my tears, and stopped crying, because I was a big boy, and I would not cry. I was two and a half years old.
I couldn’t stand to be around my father. He made my skin crawl. But, I loved my mother. She seemed so unhappy as well, but I felt a real compassion for her, and wanted only to help her feel better. There was a great deal of tension in that household, and I saw my role as being the one to cut through that tension with humor. In addition to being the family mascot, I was also the family clown. I was full of practical jokes, to keep them laughing, to lighten up the load, especially for Mom. While Dad always gave me a hard time for my high — jinks, I always knew that Mom loved them. She appreciated my humor. I could see it in her eyes.
