Now I know where I am and who I am. Back in that old shithole Kensington. It is the the place I was born in and knew nothing but humiliation, despair, frustration every god dam thing. Nothing but misery. A city of monsters. Miserable derelicts. All my life Ive dreamed of this place. Its gray streets. The grating squealing of its el moving down the tracks. Its tavern lights sickly neons turning on when night impales the sky pockmarked with stars. It is a miracle I am still alive. It feels closer to a nightmare to be here again.
I close my eyes and see the house small and inconsequential sitting on a street lined with identical row homes. Each house had three bedrooms and a tiny bathroom. My tiny bedroom didn't have a door because some genius put a heating vent four foot high right in the entry way so the door would have to be shut to allow heat into the room. So the solution my lazy father had was to take the door off. This is a 6x12 room with an eight foot ceiling.I also had to share this room with my brother so I had bunk-beds and I had to be on top because my brother was too small to climb. Of course in this tiny closet designated a room there was a drop sealing so I couldn't even sit up in bed. My parents the great providers.
In my first memory of this house I see the rug that lined the hallway an ugly dark brown. The first memory I have is walking down this hallway to try and quiet my baby sister who was crying in her crib. Even though my parents were asleep just a few feet away my sister had not woken them at least yet. I remember my arm was thin enough to fit through the bars of her crib I tried to pat her back but she would not quiet. This woke my father. He jumped put of bed and started yelling at me. I no longer remember my sister crying. I tried to back step out of the room and get away but he did not hear me.
“I told you to stay out of my room when we our sleeping!”
“Dad I was trying to quiet Mary for you. I am sorry.”
Maybe he did not here me. I just remember lying on the floor of the hallway. Blue light shot upwards in my right eye. I could have only been on the ground for a second. My mind was empty. I ran into my bedroom and kept quiet. I knew he had yelled something at me in the hallway I could not remember what he said. Maybe I was not listening. It was a few minutes later before I heard sound again this time my mother was yelling at my father. I did not here my sister crying. After more time had past it was quiet again. I dressed in the morning light in a room without a door. My catholic school uniform had brown pants it was the same color as the rug in the hallway. I sat there after I dressed on the bed and looked at the small trucks that lined the border of my wallpaper. I liked my wallpaper very much. My grandfather had put up the wallpaper himself. He was not even mad that I drew men in all the trucks.
I loved my grandfather and always wished that he were my father instead.
As I looked at the wallpaper I could not see it very clear in my right eye. If I closed my left eye everything looked small and watery. I guess my eye had swollen. My father left for work. My mother came into my room and gave me a kiss and a hug. I hugged her back. I always have loved my mother. She put on my tie it was a clip on. She apologized for my father. I could see an ocean of blue in her eyes. I was little but I understood in that blue was a clarity of sadness and regret that she could not stand up for any of us. I had green eyes like my father.
I walked to school it was snowing. When I got into class my teacher asked me what happened to my eye. I replied as I was told, “I fell.”
2
I liked school. I did not have much in common with most of the other kids. They seemed happy and out going. I just figured I would keep quiet so I would not make people mad at me. My teacher gave me extra attention at school. She was very nice and I could not remember her name anymore. Once she took us on a field trip to her house in South Philadelphia. It was around Easter time and she hid eggs in her yard. I sat and mainly watched the other kids. I did not have a black eye then. She sat next to me on a chair and put her arm around me.
“Are you o.k.?”
I was happy. I smiled at her and said, “yes.”
She leaned over and whispered where she had hid some eggs. They were the only eggs I found that day but I was happy. When I graduated from her class she gave me a hug. She did not give everyone a hug.
Whenever I saw her in the hallway she always said, “hello.” She made me feel good inside. It was a good feeling I wished I felt more of. In another year I never saw her again. I wish I knew her name. I would have liked to thank her.
A few years would pass before I can remember anything again. I am not sure what happened in that time. White minutes of lost time. I have seen photos but they conjure no memory or feeling.
3
I don’t think my father liked many people. He did not like my older sister or me. I was never sure what we did to him. He was not a handsome man. He had strange green eyes that if you would look at long enough into the night you could see them become red and glassy. The hatred in them was visible. When I got older I thought that hatred was for the world beyond his immediate control. Across the coarse skin of his face, in the crease of the his brow or in the hollow rings that rang beneath his eyes you could read the years of manual labor and savage drunkenness which left a disastrous effect on his spirit. He simply reeled himself into the system of work, bar and home. He sunk himself in hate and emptied gold cans that read “Miller” or red cans that said “Budweiser.” When I got older I would understand their affects but at eight I did not know why they made him act the way he did. Once in a while he was very nice to us. He smelled awful and had a grin plastered on his face but sometimes he would play with us. Most of the time I was happy to just sit alone in my room by myself. If I kept quiet and out of sight there would not be much reason to hate me.
He walked the dark working class streets with his health wilting from his tremendous bouts of alcohol. Aimlessly he drifted while the sidewalk cut away beneath his feet. He looked everywhere and saw others fortune as vengeance against his own isolation from his own family, his own happiness. Largely, my older sister and I had to suffer for his unhappiness. I do not know what we did that was so wrong. No one would ever tell us.
The first ten years of my life are a dead time that I would never want to think about for long. It is a culmination of things lost and broken and is only recalled remorsefully from time to time the way one may remember with melancholy the evening hush and sorrow of last fading light. These years are peppered with vague memories of random acts of violence that have seared itself upon my brain part of which I carry on and will never forget. Other things are too dark and distant to dwell on but have tinged my life forever with sorrow. I wish my sister and mother never had to suffer. Had I been stronger maybe I could have helped but I was too weak. I was too scared to stand up for my family or myself.
I should thank my father for something however. He taught me my first lesson. Pain. When I got kicked down the steps for no reason I did not question it. When I was forced to fight my older sister for his enjoyment I just did it without question. I plastered a smile on my face to. When there were constant eruptions of shouts and violence I kept quiet. If an object was thrown at me I did not duck I would let it hit me. Still it did not seem to please him. What did he want? I stopped questing and just accepted it. This is my secret. This is how that time did not destroy me. I could feel a thick air of hatred around my father as he stormed through the house each night after work. I could not articulate it then. I just felt it and kept quiet.
Silence and fear separated us all though. My sister Elisa was the oldest she was drawn into friends and fashion. She used to keep small maple notebooks containing designs for women’s clothes.
My younger brother and sister were still babies and mercifully spared the abuse we endured. I always wondered what they saw and knew. It was strange to be a family because no one spoke to each other. No one ever mentioned being punched or kicked or spit on.
I do not think my mother knew very much either. Once my mother took a job at night waitressing things got worse for Elisa and I. One night for some reason our mother was laying it on thick and being good to Elisa and I as we sat on Elisa’s bed. We just started talking and we told her what was happening to us. We used to sometime wait on a street corner alone at night outside in front of a closed hardware store while our dad would go across the street and drink. I once saw him hit the dog so hard over the head that the dog’s eye came out of the socket. I did not like animals but I still did not think that was right.
Fear and courage stirred in my mother. She stood up and composed herself and took my father into the bedroom and they began yelling. This time he did not beat her. They only yelled. My sister and I listened and looked down the brown hallway. I hoped my mother was not hurt. Then my mother said something we had all longed to here, “I am leaving!”
In the blur of excitement clothes were thrown haphazardly into plastic bags as the children scrambled for their shoes and coats still in their pajamas thus everyone descended the stairs, all four children marching in silence all eyes on the front door. As the screen door flew open the stars blazed overhead and out into the darkness laid freedom, no one looked back, no one said goodbye.
