The beginning of a memior

            The first thing I remember is awakening in my crib. The room was dark except for the bathroom light that came through the doorway. I was lying on my back and watching in horror as a hundred butterflies polluted the air, and crawled along the crib rails. Even though I was afraid that they would bite me, I moved. I got up, and hopped the crib rail, moving toward the bathroom light. There I found my mother, who was washing her face, staring into the mirror.

“Butterflies!” I said. “Butterflies!” But being so small, my pronunciation was ,”Buff-ice.” I was screaming in horror, and nobody could understand what I was saying. Some things never change.

            I was born August 28, 1967 at 11:11 pm. For what it’s worth, this (along with a bunch of other information I’ve forgotten from my star chart) makes me a Virgo double Gemini. I’m not quite sure what it means, other than I want things to be a certain way, and I’m confused most of the time. I was born at South Side Community Hospital. My mother’s labor was induced by her doctor, who was impatient to go on vacation. Perhaps if he had waited, I’d have been born with a different personality, damn the astrology.

            The first six months of my life my parents lived in a small one bedroom apartment on Jeffrey Avenue. The apartment was only a few miles from the hospital. They were always good on thinking ahead.

            My mother worked as a file clerk for Prudential Insurance, but quickly quit after my birth only to work her way through perhaps twenty other insurance companies. Her wandering ended in 1974 when she wound up working for the Chubb Group as a Commercial Lines Rater. After 14 years of hard work, Chubb and sons laid her, and many other workers off. She then found herself at CNA insurance as an underwriting analyst, where she stayed for 15 years until she retired.

            My father had an office job with NW railroad. He got the job through the Urban League, who recognized that since the railroad lines were using Federal dollars to operate, they needed to hire a few Negroes to keep the quotas. He hated the job, and tried for five years before becoming a police officer. Five years! And I can’t remember him ever being anything other than a police officer. Back then, he was a reed thin man, and had been thin all of his life. The Chicago police department at the time had a minimum weight of 140 pounds. Before he could become a police officer, he had to gain ten pounds. He went on a diet of fattening foods that paid him off with exactly 140 pounds at the physical.

            After the first six months of my life, we moved to a townhouse at 9641 S. Euclid Ave. This was where we stayed for the next 14 years. Our townhouse was less than a mile away from the infamous townhouse where Richard speck raped and killed eight student nurses a year earlier. The student nurses were working at; you guessed it, South Side community hospital.

            They filled the house with their belongings and new son, and went back to work. During the days, I stayed with my fathers’ grandparents at their house. It was a large Chicago-style bungalow on South Langley. I can remember the sunlight as it came through the East windows, it was a calming feeling. Over the years I’ve done a few drugs, but nothing quite compares to the euphoric feeling that I got feeling that sunshine on my face. There were a gang of people living in that house. First off, there were my great-grandparents, who were named Luberta and Charlie fly. For some reason, everyone in our family either had a nickname, or answered to first or last name. This is only strange when you consider that the children were calling grown people by their Name. I never heard “Mom” or “Granddad” in my father’s family.  Luberta was known as “Doll.” Charlie was Just Charlie. They were light-skinned black people. Charlie, in fact, looked more like a mixture between a white man and an Indian. They lived in the house with their Daughter Luella (Li’l Sister), her Second husband Melvin Jones (Jones), Dolls’ Brother Douglas Freeman (Man), and her Sister Susanna Johnson (Daught). Growing up in a house full of old people should have instilled me with some wisdom. Maybe it did, I don’t know.

            I remember Little Sister and Jones having a crowded bedroom. The bed seemed to take up a lot of area, with a slim walkway between it and the dresser.  On the dresser was a small black and white television and I remembered watching I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners on it. One important piece of my development came from that television. I remember watching Svengoolie on it. Back in the early seventies there were two TV shows that showed old horror movies, Creature Features on WGN and Screaming Yellow Theater on WFLD. Creature Features had a creepy opening, with the sound of a clock striking midnight and a coffin opening to a poem:
Gruesome Ghouls and Grisly Ghosts
Wretched Souls and Cursed Hosts
Vampires Bite and Villains Creep
Demons Scream and Shadows Sleep
Blood Runs Cold in Every Man
Fog Rolls In And Coffins Slam
Mortals Quake And Full Moon Rise
Creatures Haunt And Terrorize ...
This poem was read over a creepy song by Henry Mancini Experiment in terror, and accompanying this was a cool video montage of famous monsters that were moving to the beat of the song. The opening was enough to weird me out as I watched it on my parent’s big living room TV in the dark night. The house would be dark except for the light of the television and I’d be mesmerized as I watched War of the Gargantuas or Frankenstein.

Screaming Yellow Theater, on the other hand had a host named Svengoolie, who was a hippie vampire (with wrist stitches like Frankenstein’s monster). Svengoolie would do actual skits between movie segments. I’d watch Svengoolie as I sat on Little Sisters bed, and I’d imagine that I was on the island with the Mushroom People. Screaming Yellow Theater never creeped me out because Svengoolie was there to help me to identify with being a monster. These horrible things were accompanied by a laugh track. Perhaps that’s where I developed my appreciation for dark humor.

I was a monster fan from as far back as I can remember. It came naturally to me. When I was perhaps three years old, my mother stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes, and I asked her for a glass of water. I was wearing a set of cheap vampire teeth. A glass of water appeared above me on the counter, and I eagerly gulped a swallow before discovering it was warm and soapy. My mother laughed at the expression of disgust on my face. That, combined with the vampire fangs struck her as hilarious.

Another three year old memory concerns an ice cold glass of coca-cola which sat on the dining room table. Adults were buzzing around me like giant flies, and I was only partially aware that they were having a party. I wanted the coca-cola in that glass. It looked delicious. I couldn’t control myself. I downed the drink and probably went, “Ahhhh” Afterwards. It was a warm day, and the party packed up to move to a different location, with me in tow. I was standing on the front porch, when the world suddenly tilted and I fell into the hedges under the living room window. The branches snapped and snagged and scratched at my skin, and I looked up at the adults in a wave of embarrassment.  The coca-cola had been mixed with rum. This was a story that my parents told over and over again. They had such wonderful senses of humor.

The day came when I had to go to Kindergarten. I was to be left with strangers. My mother dropped me off at the center, amongst 20 very unaffected and adult children. It was frightening. I let out a wail that could be heard all the way in Indiana. I begged her not to leave me. I screamed and cried, but I’m sure it sounded like a lot of snotty-nosed nonsense. To my surprise, she wound up leaving me there, with all those little strangers. I loved my mother, how could she do this to me? It was a travesty that nobody seemed to give a shit about, which was the thing that eventually quelled my tears; shame. I sat down, away from the other children, and found a toy, a wooden car. I rolled it back and forth, and this somehow pacified me. With the pitiful and frightening screams behind me, other children came to say hello to me. I had been initiated.

It was an all black class, but I was known as a “White boy” along with two or three other light skinned boys. This upset me. I knew very little about race, but I knew that I wasn’t white. Why did they call me that? Why do people always want to make you feel ashamed of yourself? The little cocksuckers were my first taste of ghetto niggers. Five years old to fifty years old, they’re all the same. All they want to do is get some shit started. All they managed to do was make the light-skinned kids ignore all the shit brown boogers.

Speaking of shit, one day the kindergarten class was taken to Chinatown. Everything there seemed to be fancy, and red. We walked along the sidewalks and the sidewalk markets. Our parents had left our teacher with a few dollars for each of us to buy trinkets. I wound up with a kaleidoscope. I liked the way I could hear it clicking on the inside as I turned the collar on the tube. I was walking along, intermittently looking through my cardboard tube, and following the other children when I got a powerful urge to take a shit. I mean it was growling and moaning inside. I tried to ignore it, how embarrassing it would be to have to stop the entire field trip so that teacher could find me a bathroom. How embarrassing for them all to know that I ‘doo-doo”. I smashed my mini butt-cheeks together, and willed myself not to go, but it was all in vain. A wall of mush came splattering and caking my underwear. I’d worried about the other children seeing me being taken to the bathroom, now I had to contend with the fact that they all knew that I was walking along with shit caked to and drying on my ass. When we got back to the school, I remember having my ass wiped by a truly understanding teacher. She threw my underwear away, and my ass felt chilly swinging free in my cords.

By the age of five I was well acquainted with my father’s belt. It seems to me that I got whipped for the smallest things. If a person shouldn’t cry over spilled milk, should they get their asses beaten over it? Probably not, but it happens. One day I was laying on my kindergarten nap mat, trying to get to sleep, when I noticed a loose thread wrapped around my toe. It was understandably annoying, so I took off the sock and pulled at the offending string. To my horror, the sock unraveled at the toe. Holy Christ, I’d ruined a sock! I was going to get a beating! This was the kind of shit I had to worry about at the age of five. My tiny brain went into motion, trying to figure out a plan to keep my ass out of the fire. I worked with the sock so that I rolled and tucked the open end under my toes. I was too scared to walk around with the sock not tucked, because I thought that my mother or father might ask me to take my shoe off for some reason, and having it tucked would give me a bit of camouflage in case they did. I spent the rest of the school day learning to walk on the uncomfortable lump of sock so as not to look gimpy. My father picked me up from school that afternoon and I walked beautifully, both to the car and then straight up to my room. In my room, I waited until my parents were both downstairs, and I stripped off the pair of socks, and put on a new pair. I stuffed the damaged sock and its mate into the right leg band of the socks I was wearing, and then made my way to the kitchen, where I stuffed the offending hosiery deep into the trash, praying the whole time that my mother or father wouldn’t go garbage spelunking later in the evening. To those of you who say a five year old can’t be paranoid, I say you’re full of shit. Fear of getting your ass whipped will make you do strange things.

When my father was a little boy he went to school at St. Peters Elementary school, so that’s where I wound up. St. Peters was a school building which was built onto a church building, and headed by the dreaded Pastor Ford. Pastor Ford was rumored to have a short and violent temper, and if you were unlucky enough to be called before him, he would damn near kill you with a strap named “Ugly Charlie”. Ugly Charlie was made of leather, folded in half, and had been around since before my father’s elementary days. Pastor Ford was also a drunk, if you believed the gossip that was clucked around between our mothers and grandmothers.

The girls wore matching blue tartan dresses and the boys all looked like tiny salesmen in their white shirts and navy blue pants and ties. I didn’t mind wearing the little suit. They were like dress clothes that you could get dirty in, kind of like being a detective. The uniforms actually made for a feeling of camaraderie between the boys. It was like a gang almost, looking like everyone else.

I got along with everyone in my 1^st grade class, and I was a good student, managing to get into trouble only once. Not Ugly Charlie trouble, just cloak room trouble. I wondered, back then, why they called it a cloak room. None of us wore a cloak, just sweaters and snowsuits. Perhaps it was a way of trying to instill a sense of class in us. How many American black youth of today would ever have the opportunity to say “cloak room”. The cloak room, was a darkened closet/storage room in the rear of the class. My teacher, Mrs. Hassell seemed to prefer to avoid using ugly Charlie. She was a tiny old white woman, and perhaps she didn’t feel she had the right to beat on black children in those early seventies. Instead, she ordered us into the cloak room, where we were supposed to stand in a corner and be bored or reflective, or both.  There was an arched stained glass window in there, perhaps four feet off the floor, and I managed to climb a storage rack and stand on the windowsill and feel the light on my face. On top of the shelf were Halloween decorations. I picked up a collapsed accordion-style pumpkin and opened it up, hearing the faint ratcheting sound, underneath the sound of Mrs. Hassell’s voice, and I didn’t miss the classroom at all. Up in the window, I could zone out and think about nothing. There were no lessons and no bigger kids teasing me because I didn’t have an afro. It was 1973 and because of my shaved head, I was known as “Egg”.

1^st grade at a Lutheran School wasn’t exactly exciting, but every once in a while one of the kids would do something stupid, and we’d have a bit of entertainment. Once, Edward Smith was busted with sweetened powdered drink mix in his possession, and it wouldn’t have been any more dramatic if it were cocaine. Mrs. Hassell caught Edward smacking his lips, and asked him if he had candy. He denied it so thoroughly that I didn’t think about it. The problem was, his lips were blue, so either he was suffocating, or he was eating something filled with artificial color. He denied it and denied it until Mrs. Hassell sent for Mrs. Ford, who was Vice-Principal and Just as Mean as her Pastor husband. She came down with ugly Charlie. She grilled little Edward for what seemed like half an hour, but in reality it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. He finally gave up the sweet powder after having to show his fingers, which were the same dark blue shade as his lips. He had lied! Oh my goodness, it was a scandal. In parochial school a lie isn’t just a lie, it’s a sin! Because he had denied it so many times, the one lie was counted like fifteen times, and Ugly Charlie was then administered. Ugly Charlie was sometimes used on the buttocks, but in this case it seemed almost poetic to use it in its more popular way; the palm of the hand! We watched the strap fall into Edwards hand again and again, and we were filled with both indignation that we were forced to sit in class with a liar, and regret that the poor bastard had to get his hand whipped over a bag of colored powdered sugar. Ugly Charlie was a menace. I went to St. Peters for five years, and saw it spread its horror again and again. In fact, it was used twice on me. The first time I got swats on my butt for “horsing around” in the boys bathroom. Mrs. Ford however was no match for my father, who raised welts and bruises on my body on a regular basis. I felt like laughing it off, but that would only lead to a phone call to my parents, and hell at home. The second time it was used on me was devastating. It was in the forth grade, and I was found by our teacher, “Mrs. Knott” to have not done my homework. Mrs Knott was a huge fat black woman with a short neat afro, who could put her poundage behind Ugly Charlie’s strikes. When she struck the meat of my palm it felt like the Korean War, and she didn’t give me five swats, or ten, but thirty. Thirty swats in the palm. It was enough to quiet every voice in the room. I’d broken a record. I’d been made an example. I walked quickly back to my desk and put my head down on the wood.