My story, part one
My mom met my father in the early 1970s. She was hitchhiking and he picked her up on the side of the road.
She was from Long Island, NY. The youngest of three children and the black sheep of her family. It was just like her to get married to a guy she met while hitchhiking. Kind of a simultaneous middle finger to propriety, and an embrace of her passions.
My father — the man one of my brothers calls “the donor” (short for “the sperm donor”) for reasons that will become clear later — was a six-foot-six alcoholic hoping this, his second marriage, might go better than his first. Mom’s siblings called him “mountain man” because he was big, lived in a rural, hilly part of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, and built houses for a living.
I was born a little while after they met. We all lived in a house my dad built 10 miles up dirt roads far into the hills of Luray, Virginia, a place best known for Luray Caverns — a literal hole in the ground was this town’s claim to fame. My dad used to keep rattlesnakes he found on the property in a cage on the front porch, but after I hit the crawling and toddling stage, the snakes were pan-fried and eaten as they were caught.
My younger brother was born two years after, and the youngest was born a year after that. I have mostly fond memories of these first six years in rural Virginia. When the weather was nice, we spent our days outside, climbing trees, flipping over rocks to admire the bugs teeming underneath, playing in a nearby stream, picking and eating blueberries, catching crawdads and tadpoles and throwing stuff into the pond back behind the house.
Domestically, things were less happy. I don’t think we kids were ever the target of our drunk dad’s abuse — the worst we ever experienced was the rare but dreadful command to “go outside and cut a switch” when we had done something that deserved a whupping. (These lashings with tree branches on our bare bottoms seemed typical for the era — even the public schools we attended through the 80s paddled students.) But mom would get hit by him late at night and I can still remember her shouts and cries for mercy.
So she left him. At 2am one night, after he’d beat her then blacked out, she loaded the car with clothes, her boys aged six, four, and two, and drove us out of his reach forever. As dawn broke, we stopped at a gas station and she picked up a pair of big and cheap sunglasses to cover her eyes, both bruised black.
This was the beginning of our wandering years.
Things weren’t easy for my mom, now faced with raising three boys herself. She studied for and obtained a license to sell real estate, this being a career that suited her because she was warm, chatty, and seductive. She was also a bit of a chameleon, affecting a NYC accent if her clients were from the Northeast, and a southern accent if they were from down south. She was never a very successful real estate agent, however, because she refused to stay put in one location. We moved more than once a year, briefly inhabiting towns across Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida.
My brothers and I were mostly left to our own devices. We’d arrive home after school and mom would still be at work. We were wild in the way that every boy should probably get to be, at least a little. We shot BB guns inside the house, experimented with fireworks in the shed behind one of our houses (burning it to the ground), made and ate huge batches of raw chocolate-chip cookie dough, and grew up largely unsupervised.
We were also entrepreneurial. One of my first odd jobs was picking up cigarette butts on the grounds of a local country club. I think I got the job because mom worked for the developer selling homes surrounding the golf course. I was 10 years old. I earned a penny per cigarette butt, and was expected to count how many I’d picked up. I did this for a few weekends, earning as much as $20.00 ($46 in 2017 dollars!) and gave the money to mom for groceries and bills. This is why I never smoked. I seethed with anger at the smokers who’d carelessly toss their butts, even as I scampered about thankful for the money I earned to pick them up.
I started a business mowing lawns when I was 10. Mom fronted the money for a mower and weed-whacker and I ran around knocking on neighbors’ doors to ask if I could cut their lawns. I’d earn $10 here, $20 there. Once, earned $40 to cut an entire soccer field, but got heat stroke doing it — I was 10 — I knew nothing about staying hydrated or any of that. Over the course of a single summer, I had just broken even on the equipment purchase when my brother set the aforementioned shed alight, and all my equipment was destroyed. So my brothers and I went back to crawling through the brambles around the golf course for lost balls to wash and sell back to golfers for $2.00 per dozen.
A few months shy of turning 14, I went to the local Dairy Queen in Gatlinburg, TN, and asked for a job. I wasn’t legally allowed to work just yet, but somehow I persuaded the owner of the joint to give me the job. He paid me under the table until I turned 14. It was the best job ever. This was a full DQ with fries, onion rings, burgers, hotdogs, corndogs, pulled BBQ pork sandwiches, pretzels, soft-serve ice cream, blizzards, milkshakes, ice cream sundaes, and ice cream novelty treats. I was in heaven. I ate my mistakes and more (much, much more), and ended up working on and off at that DQ from the time I was 13 through graduation from high school, six years later. Both of my younger brothers eventually got jobs there too, and I enjoyed bossing them around once I was made responsible for managing shifts at the DQ.
We moved back and forth a few times between Gatlinburg and Orlando, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and even Sosua in the Dominican Republic, but Gatlinburg and nearby Pigeon Forge kept pulling us back.
As a 16-year-old, I felt an urge to travel more broadly. I somehow stumbled across the idea of becoming an exchange student. I asked mom what she thought of the idea and she encouraged me to pursue it because she believed in the value of travel and she was probably eager to send me away for a year so that her mothering duties would be a little easier. I looked for a country on the other side of the earth because Europe felt too close and its languages too easy thanks to the Latin classes I had been taking in high school. I ended up selecting Hong Kong and took off for that territory a couple months before my 17th birthday.
Hong Kong, by the way, was amazing for me in many ways, not least of which was that I met this wonderful girl there, convinced her to become my girlfriend and — some years later — my wife. We’re still married today, almost 25 years after we met.
When it was time to return from my year abroad in Hong Kong, I flew back to Grand Cayman Island, where my family had spent the year. Mom was selling vacation homes, and my brothers hadn’t attended school all year. Instead, they’d spent their days scuba diving and finding treasure on the beach, including, for example, a kilogram-sized brick of cocaine that washed up one day. Let’s just say it was a good year for mom and all her friends.
On the drive home from the airport, my mother informed me and my brothers that she intended first to move us all back to Tennessee for a few months followed by a move to Curacao, a little island north of Venezuela. It was too late to register for the fall semester at a Curacao high school, she told us, but we might be able to attend in the spring.
The possibility of a year without responsibility on a beautiful Caribbean island sounded pretty tempting, but I had come back from Hong Kong with new goals.
As an exchange student I had observed uniformed students my age stand at attention before teachers, do their homework, and take their studies seriously. At first I scorned my classmates as stupidly obedient and too narrowly focused, but over the course of the year, I came to a new perspective: education was to be respected and pursued. Until then I had only taken it for granted and never cared about it.
So now I had a dilemma … a year in Curacao felt wrong after my return from Hong Kong. It would delay me and my brothers by another year in obtaining our high school degrees. I wracked my brain for days trying to think of a way out of the situation. Finally, I hit on an idea and told mom, “you go to Curacao, we’ll stay in Tennessee. It’ll be fine!” I was about to turn 18, and as soon as that happened, I could legally assume guardianship of my brothers. There wasn’t much more to the plan, but I was confident that we’d all earn enough working at Dairy Queen to be able to cover rent and expenses.
She was initially reluctant, but soon agreed to my plan because I refused to go to Curacao, and because she was seeing an opportunity for freedom from single mom-hood. So we visited a local courthouse where mom transferred to me legal guardianship of my two younger brothers (15 and 16 years of age at the time). She departed for Curacao alone and sent us Christmas cookies yearly, but we received no money or serious assistance from her from that point forward. It was a pretty clean break.
To make ends meet, the three of us skirted labor laws by working 30 to 50 hours per week at local restaurants on top of a full high school course load so that we could afford rent, electricity and kerosene for winter heat. We also received some anonymous donations of heating fuel, which was really critical, because the place we lived in lacked heating and winter nights regularly dropped below freezing. We slept in sleeping bags and any water left out from the night before would be frozen in the mornings. For a while, when our car broke down, we had to walk to school in the mornings because the school buses didn’t run early enough for the elective AP classes we needed to take. In the summers we worked two jobs apiece. To ensure that we’d have some savings to cushion us through the academic year, we all worked 100 to 120 hours a week throughout the summer.
Despite this grueling schedule, and thanks to the Federal Food Stamp program and free school lunch program, our home was more stable than it had ever been, and we were able to achieve, academically. I had been a B student, a troublemaker, and class clown before Hong Kong, but reformed my behavior, studied, and earned straight As after my return. I applied to and was accepted at Yale as an independent student, and the school was very generous with financial aid, making it possible for me to attend, though I had no savings or parental support.
I had my brothers apply for their own student exchange experiences so that they took off for Japan at the same time that I headed for New Haven. This was how I ensured we wouldn’t run afoul of child protective services — they were their host families’ responsibility while in Japan, and when they returned, my middle brother would be 18, and able to assume guardianship of the youngest, which is exactly what happened when they returned. This is their story to tell, but in brief, here’s what happened for them: my brothers also graduated with good grades and went on to college at Wake Forest and Yale. One of them now owns his own real estate company in Tennessee, and the other works for the US State Department.
I had about $14 in paper food stamps remaining in my wallet when I showed up at Yale, and I used them to buy snacks from the corner grocery. Surrounded by well-dressed, well-educated kids from rich families, I became embarrassed with how poor I had been and wanted this proof of my destitution off my person. I desperately wanted that chapter of life behind me, and I set to work figuring out what to do with myself now that I was an adult, a college student, and responsible for nobody but myself.
Part 2 of this series … when I get around to it.
