Chapter Two: Making Haste Slowly
One of the benefits of an early morning paper route is the empty streets belong to me. I can be alone with my thoughts as I deliver papers to sleeping customers. Not ready to think about anything, I do my best to keep my mind blank. Head bowed, I study the sidewalk and try not to step on any cracks in them as I walk toward the city center.
Down to my last three cigarettes, I make a slight detour on my way to pick up my newspapers from the Worcester Telegram and Gazette office in downtown Fitchburg. I stop by the taxi stand and pretend to buy a candy bar from one of the two vending machines in the waiting area.
The lobby is a beautiful set-up. The candy machine sits adjacent to a cigarette vending machine. When the dispatcher's attention is elsewhere, I drop a quarter, and a dime into the coin slot of an ancient cigarette machine and pull the handle. Clunk-de-clunk and a red and white pack of Marlboros drop into the tray. I snatch them and hide the cigarettes in my newspaper carry bag. At the age of 15-years, buying smokes is a real hassle. Machines don't care who buys the tobacco they sell.
My side trip only took a couple of minutes, and I arrive on schedule, at the loading dock. I'm in time to wait in line with a dozen other news carriers as bundles of newspapers are distributed. Thank God It's Friday! Today's edition of the Telegram is the thinnest paper of the week and only weighs in at about 15-20 pounds. The Sunday edition can weigh-in at 45-60 lbs, and it's a real killer.
This morning my paper route is running on autopilot. Eventually, I know must deal with what my mother did to me, but in the meantime, I'll put it off.
I reach the mid-way mark and note I'm running about twenty minutes ahead of schedule. It is time for a break. I hop up on my favorite stone wall and take a seat, light a smoke, and try to make sense of my life.
My mother and I were at war since before my birth. Joyce says I was a hard baby to carry and a difficult delivery. For payback, she's been making me as miserable as possible for as far back as I can remember. She's told me hundreds of times it would be better if I hadn't been born and not once do I remember her ever saying she loved me.
There is no universe I can imagine where it is appropriate for a mother to play with her son's private parts, and while fondling him, invite him to visit her bedroom and explore her naked body.
Like a trapeze artist walking the high wire, I struggle to keep my balance. There is no safety net and far below lies madness. If I fall, I don't think I will ever rise again.
It is taking all my willpower to stay centered and resist the growing fear my life is turning into a complete cluster muck.
My father used to tell me, "Dennis, it isn't your fault if you are dealt a lousy hand of cards. But the blame will be yours alone if you play your hand like a fool."
Other than the crap my mother dealt out on a regular basis I consider my childhood to be happy; at least happy enough until my parents decided to divorce. After they split, my deck reshuffled, and my cards turned to crap.
Dad taught drama as a professor at Ithaca College. When the divorce became final, he married a student of his. A few days later, my mother got married to a preacher. Who would have guessed it? Both mom and dad had secret lovers. Go figure.
The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said, "Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forwards." He may be telling the truth, but my life didn't make any sense going in either direction.
If something bad happened, my dad would tell me, "Build a bridge and get over it." The strategy worked well for small stuff like skinned knees or lost lunch money. I didn't think there could be any way to construct a crossing long enough to reach over the canyon my mother blasted in my life.
I knew how to fight with Joyce. We had been going after each other like cats and dogs for fifteen years, and I gave as good as I got. She would try to beat me down and break my spirit and diminished or ridiculed almost everything I did. In turn, I rebelled, defied her authority, and refused to break. Virtually every interaction with my mother left me demoralized. I loved, feared, and hated my mother.
Last night Joyce caught me by surprise when she burst into my room. Too stunned to speak and did not resist as she fondled me. Horrified as I was, I remained passive and became aroused. I hated what she did even as a part of me welcomed her touch.
I would've ejaculated if she continued, but she stopped before I reached the point of no return. Instead, she invited me to come to her room and so I could explore her naked body. In a weird way, she wanted my permission to continue our conflict on a new incestuous battlefield.
I glance at my wristwatch and realize my 20-minute break has lasted nearly an hour. Damn, my customers will flood the newspaper's office with complaints if I didn't hustle. I race through the rest of my paper route. I'm only fifteen minutes late in getting to my last customers.
The morning clouds have cleared, and every sign points to be a warm, pleasant, summer-like day. I make my final stop at a neighborhood variety store where the owner allows me to run up a tab. Almost everything I earned delivering papers went into the store's cash register at the end of the week. The time is 8:30, a half-hour before school will start. I am in no mood to attend classes today, and I didn't like the idea of going home. I decide to skip school.
The corner store has an excellent selection of junk food. Playing hooky on an empty stomach is no fun, so I gather supplies for a pity-picnic. I fill my carrier bag with several bottles of Pepsi, two bags of potato chips, half-dozen candy bars, and a bag or two of peanuts and head for the hills where I can be alone with my thoughts.
The rolling hills around Fitchburg are the granite remains of a once mighty mountain range. Time, glaciers, and the passing eons reduced them to a shadow of their former glory. Forty minutes later, I arrive at a sun-drenched clearing of bedrock on the crest of a high hill overlooking one of the city reservoirs.
The clearing is surrounded on three sides by scrub pine trees clinging to life in a thin layer of topsoil. As the soil increased in depth, the trees grew in height until they gave way to a full-blown forest. At the far end of the glade was a hundred foot drop-off, which afforded a grand view of the countryside. On the horizon, the skyscrapers of Boston were tiny dots in the distance.
Long since stuffed into my carrier bag is the spring jacket with which I started the day. I walk to the edge of the cliff, sit down against a boulder left over from the last ice age, and use my bag as a pillow. Overhead the cloudless sky is a brilliant blue, and the sun rests halfway to noon.
When I was out exploring a few years ago, I stumbled upon this clearing and fell in love with the place. The rocky glade is one of my favorite spots. I find the grooves on the rock face intriguing. Rocks, carried along by a mile thick sheet of ice, gouged out the lines as the glaciers advanced to the sea. They spoke of times long past.
After reading The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, I became fascinated by the concept of time.
I close my eyes and try to capture an instant of time. I blink my eyes open and close them as fast as I can. Now I slice this image as thin as I can. I cut as close as I dare and I slide my mind into the sliver of time shaved off the face of eternity. This thin slice of time is the eternal now, and it is my only real contact with the universe around me.
I imagine time as an old-fashioned phonograph record. Where the stylus touches the vinyl, is "now." ALL that lies behind the point of contact is in the past, and everything in front of the needle is in the future. We cannot remember tomorrow because it hasn't yet happened.
I'm mindful of time. Yesterday we were memories. Tomorrow we are dreams. Today we are real. Now is the only moment I can become the person I want to be.
I was 14-years-old when a short poem I wrote appeared in the Fitchburg Co-op Society Monthly Newsletter. My poem was the first thing ever published over my name and for my efforts, I was paid $5.
Time, that relentless line
With no enemies, it has no friends
With no beginnings, it has no end.
Sitting in the sun and leaning back against a boulder is both peaceful and calming. The tension within me is abating as my body begins to relax. Soon I will turn my attention to the events of last night, but first I decide to play a memory game. How far back in time can I remember. I close my eyes and let my mind drift.
A moment with my grandfather John Higgins is my earliest memory. I'm about four years old, and my granddad is packing things into the back of his Model-T automobile. It is mid-morning, and I'm excited and happy. I'm thrilled because I'm going to go for a ride with my gram-daddy.
He gets into his car, and I start to climb in to take my seat next to him. Grandpa stops me and asks, "Where is your Teddy bear? You can't forget to take him."
"I'll be right back gram-pa," I shout as I race into the house to fetch Teddy.
I grab the bear by his foot and run as fast as I can. I return as my grandfather's car pulls out of the driveway and turns on the main road and disappears into the distance.
Gram-pa abandoned me, and it is the last time I ever see him at my grandmother's house.
I loved my grandpa more than I loved anyone else on the planet, and I cannot believe he's left me behind.
I clutch my bear to my chest and cry so hard I wet my pants. With pee running down my legs I stand in the driveway wailing like a wolf howling at the moon.
My next earliest memory is of my mother, and it dates back to about the same time my grandfather dumped me.
It is a short memory clip and begins with me riding my tricycle down a sloping sidewalk. The wind is blowing my hair as I laugh. I'm thrilled beyond words at the freedom of flying so fast. The next instant my mother is slapping me, cursing me, and calling me an idiot and a stupid, careless little boy.
Unlike my relationship with Joyce, things got better between my grandfather and me. My connection with my mother never improved.
I would've ended up bouncing off the walls of a padded cell if I had to live my entire life with only my mom. Thank the Lord for grandparents. Summers with them were islands of sanity - far from the reach of my mother. Without those ten weeks of love and joy, I shudder to think of the kind of person I would have become.
My grandmother, Myrtle Higgins, was everything my mother was not. Myrtle was a down-east Yankee. She didn't swear, drink, or hit. Grandma loved, nurtured and was supportive of me. She shared with me her love of life, history, and family ancestry.
Often when I got picked up at the end of summer, my mother would rebuke her mother because she had been "too nice" to me. Joyce would fight with her mom and rage at Myrtle for spoiling me and making me "too happy." Myrtle would reply, "loving a boy is not spoiling a child."
There are thousands of memories growing up with grandmother but only a relative handful of memories of time with my mother. None of them is a happy memory.
I climb to my feet to stretch, and another almost forgotten memory emerges from the shadows of my mind.
It is wintertime and early evening. My little sister and I are playing on the sidewalk in the glow of a streetlight in front of our house in Ithaca, New York. Huge flakes of snow are falling, and there is a thin blanket of flakes on the ground. My sister is laughing as I lie down in the snow and make snow angels for her by spreading my arms and legs. I start to make my second angel, a man steps into our circle of light and stands over me. The zipper of his pants is down, and his fly is open. He is holding a frighteningly large, reddish pink penis covered with dark blue veins in his hands. My sister starts to cry when he asks me to touch it. I jump up, take my sister's hand, and rush her into our house.
My backside is hurting. The granite clearing may be beautiful and peaceful, but it makes a lousy mattress. I stand and laugh aloud while shouting to the sky, "My memories suck!"
I wonder if God is listening. Somehow, I doubt the Almighty tunes into my channel on a regular basis. The King of Heaven runs an entire universe, and my hunch is my problems are not at the top of his to-do list. Divine intervention is not going to solve the problem I'm having with my mother. Working it out on my own is my only option.
As I walk around the clearing, I realize I need to take a piss. The Pepsi I drank wants to get out.
I unzip my fly and look around for an attractive place to pee. Being a boy is a real advantage when it comes to urinating. Our equipment makes it easy, and sometimes fun to empty our bladder. I spot a crack in the rock face where some grasses and wildflowers are starting to grow. Life is determined to live, even in thin cracks with scant soil.
I direct my stream of yellow urine uphill, and above the crack and the lifesaving liquid flows down into the small garden. I smile at my good deed because I know from science class and reading my liquid waste contains vital nutrients the plants need to sustain life.
Standing in the sunshine with my prick in my hand, I think about sex. Puberty hit me hard, and I am confused and excited at the new sexual sensations generated by a flood of hormones. My parents gave me the most minimum instruction possible on the facts of life. I learned the mechanics of sex, insert part A into part B and wait nine months for a baby to appear.
I was clueless when it came to anything sexual. I was so ignorant my stepbrother had to teach me how to masturbate in a quick show and tell session where I got to observe him jerking off.
I went into my room and mimicked what I had witnessed. After a bit of fumbling I got the hang of things, and within a few minutes, I discovered the joys of self-pleasure. Mr. Puberty introduces the boy to Mr. Orgasm. Boy has a new best friend for life.
I knew everything except how to deal with being horny 24 hours a day. I would get aroused by the underwear section of the Sears Catalogue. A flash of a girl's thigh, as she got out of a car or walked up the stairs in school would turn me on. Boobs turned me on. Oh hell, everything turned me on.
I didn't have a girlfriend or the social skills necessary to acquire one. Around girls, I was clumsy and awkward. Whenever I tried to strike up a conversation, my rehearsed opening lines turned into gibberish. I might as well been speaking a foreign language.
I was unsure about my sexuality. Girls attracted me. But, so far, my only sexual experiences had been at the hands of male aggressors. As terrifying as each experience had been there had also been an element of arousal. Did this mean I liked boys? Last night my mother derailed the whole process of establishing a sexual identity. I didn't know what I was.
As I walk around the clearing, thirty hours since I last slept, my body feels like a wrung-out dishrag.
I go back and fetch my bag from the boulder and search the edge of the clearing for moss-covered ground. It takes only about five minutes of searching before I spot a blanket-sized patch of soft green moss. I stuff handfuls of leaves and ferns into the bag and fluff it up the best I can, and lie down using the carrier bag as a pillow. I am asleep almost before I closed my eyes.
I've been napping for only a moment before I feel a chill. I'm shivering as I open my eyes. To the west, behind a stand of trees, the sun is starting to set, and my sleeping area is deep in evening shadow. I have slept through the afternoon, and it is now 5:30 in the early evening.
I follow my grandmother's advice and make haste slowly. I return home at my own pace and arrive as dinner is served.
"Where did you go?" my mother inquired.
"Out," I answered.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"Nothing," I said as I went to bed, too tired to eat.
While napping, I had decided how I was going to deal with the events of the previous evening. I am going to shelter-in-place and pretend nothing happened.