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Over the River, Through the Woods, and Gone

“I’ve loved. I’ve laughed and cried. I’ve had my fill, my share of losing. And now, as tears subside, I find it all so amusing.” My Way

The possibility of playing Nick Cristano in the March production of Over the River and Through the Woods had intrigued me for months, and it also scared the hell out of me.

If you did not get to the Sunrise Theater to see the show, it’s mostly a humorous slice of life with rapid-fire dialogue exchanges. Nick has been the only family left in New Jersey for both his maternal and his paternal grandparents to dote on. The rest of the family has moved all over the country. Nick, Aida and Frank, and Nunzio and Emma are each other’s whole lives and have dinner together every week, but then Nick has to go--a job in Seattle--and while he’s away, Grandpa Nunzio has to go.

I was raised—especially through high school and college—by my Nana, my Grandpa Frank, my Great Uncle Bill, and my Great Aunts Mary and Helen.

Although it wasn’t as big a deal as Nick going to Seattle, when I moved to North Carolina there were no more dinners with Nana, and she missed how I’d set off the smoke alarm with the steam from my long showers.

I called her all the time and I visited as much as I could. Then finally someone had to go.
As Nick’s Grandpa Frank says, “Everybody goes.”

I knew Nick would stir up the ghosts in me, and I’m not a method actor. I don’t work myself up to play sad by remembering something sad. If I had done that, my performance would have been a mess. The trick was to keep everything at bay.

My Uncle Bill was hilarious, golden-hearted, and the life and host of every extended family get-together.

Nick breaks down in a monologue toward the end of the show because Nunzio dies not long after his move to Seattle. It goes like this:

“He died of prostate cancer that had spread to his liver and kidneys. My Grandmothers’ said they had known about it, but that they did not want to burden me with the knowledge.”

In 2006 I knew Uncle Bill was dying, and I knew he was going too fast for me to get home to see him. He could no longer speak, and I stood in the parking lot of Hoke County High School on a cell phone relaying my last words to him through his daughter:

Thank you for taking me to see Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

I’m sorry for singing the Willy Wonka song so much you needed a Scotch.

Thanks for singing the Willy Wonka song with me while you drank Scotch.

Thanks for teaching me how to drive.

Thanks for driving me to and from college every year until I finally had a car.

Thanks for standing up for me every time I got caught engaged in reckless debauchery.

Thank you for everything.

And the next day he was gone. His beloved wife Helen, Nana’s sister, left in 2008. Grandpa Frank died in 1995. Now there is only Nana and Mary.

After every performance as Nick, I would retreat to the dressing room and decompress. I would replay that day at Hoke like a vignette in my head, and I would shake uncontrollably for several minutes, and then I was okay.

Nana and Mary now live at the Mount Alverno Center in Warwick, New York.

When Nana still lived by herself, I thought nothing of calling her up at odd hours to tell her things like I had just had a beer with Michael Jordan at a local club. And then she would ask, “What does Michael Jackson look like in person?”

I bust her out of the rest home from time to time for burgers and beers at the same restaurant she took me to when I was home from college. Her blood sugar spikes and the nurses yell at me. Nana laughs.

Mary lived for decades by herself in Brooklyn. She danced on tables at receptions—didn’t matter if it was a wedding or a christening. She sent me birthday cards with money in them up through my 20s. Currently she has a feud going with another resident in the home. They bang their walkers together like angry rams on a hillside.

I’m no longer allowed field trips with Mary—senile dementia.

As the Sunrise house emptied for the last time and the crew dismantled the set, I thought of Bill’s house in New Jersey being emptied and put up for sale. I thought of Nana’s house being emptied and put up for sale.

At curtain call each night, I would linger on stage a moment, wave to friends, and then I would stare off at the back of the theater and wave…to Bill, and Helen, and Frank. I hope you were there. I miss you.

Enjoying Abduction

"I want the things that I had before like a Star Wars poster on my bedroom door.” Wonderful, Everclear.

I looked at the picture. Sporting regrettable pajamas and a bowl cut of blonde tresses, I prepared to tear open what I presume was a coveted X-wing fighter. Christmas in the early eighties, Oy.

Even at age 15, I could deduce that that eight-year-old version of myself I was studying was not a look to relish. Nor was it a good look for my younger brother who modeled a fuzzy sleepersuit, the kind with the feet. Why did Dad use pictures that old?

I put the milk carton down and walked into my mother’s room where I could assess myself in her picture mirror. Pressed, pleated slacks, collared shirt, shiny, navy-blue Members Only jacket…much better look. Two hours from now I would see my father for the first time in three years.

Weeks before, a sheriff had appeared on the front stoop of our Tarboro home with a summons. Mom held the summons while I held my three-month old half-sister.

“Oh my God. He found us.”

The good news was we prepared to move back to Seven Lakes. Why did we ever leave there?

I didn’t feel like a missing or kidnapped child—I knew exactly where I was, whom I was with, and why I was with them. In fact, I had helped. I had concurred with the decision to redeploy south of the Mason Dixon without fully briefing all parties involved.

I would get the impression from articles in the Tarboro Daily Southerner, however, that my fiendish mother sequestered us from the dedicated love of our forlorn father.

Changes

In the last days of our standard, two-week summer visit with dad in August of 1983, my brother and I huddled on the plush bench seat of a Pontiac Bonneville land yacht as it floated down the narrow country roads of Stamford, Connecticut. At the helm, my materialistic, gregarious, charismatic, and very prideful father who had been divorced by my much younger mother in spectacular fashion eight years before.

It was a Lifetime-movie ending for a woman whom too many times had to fend off the man’s spontaneously vicious and heavy hands.

I was two. I remember only brief scenes. I remember the crashing in the kitchen. I remember my grandmother (Nana) sleeping outside my door. Mostly I remember fear.
Mom boarded a plane in Chicago with me in her arms and my brother still in her belly. She called my father from Nana’s house in New York and said, “The car is in long-term parking at O’Hare, and I’m never coming back.”

She divorced him, and she got everything. One reason for that was she produced a piece of jewelry the cleaning lady had given my father. On the back of it the inscription read, “We did it our way.”

Shortly after that my father materialized on Nana’s back porch, broke through the door, and attacked my mother in the kitchen. She was saved by the off-duty cop next door. Who says there’s never one around when you need one?

It was at this point I think that we stopped being children in the eyes of my father, and instead we became possessions that he must take back.

Looking at my father’s distinguished salt and pepper profile as he drove, I saw the weariness in his eyes even before I heard the heavy sigh. Almost eight years of knock-down, drag-out court battles, private detectives, and calculating charges against my new stepfather had yielded only a modicum of visitation rights. He was not winning.

“Boys, how’d you like to stay with me a while. I mean, I’m not bringing you back to your mother tomorrow.”

I knew it.

The standard response to any query of his was, “Yeah! Great!” while I tried to keep from soiling my shorts.

It had not been a great visit. He had found me wrestling with my brother, had decided I was being a little too aggressive, and thus he had decided to beat the crap out of me. But he made me wait alone in my room for a considerable time before it happened.

I don’t remember many beatings at the hands of my father. It was not his style. Although loud and heavy-footed as he entered a room, his gift was being quietly and smolderingly cruel in a manipulative, dissembling sort of way. However, one got the impression that violence was a distinct possibility, if not imminent. Incidents like when he took me out in his speed boat and dropped me in Long Island Sound so I’d get over my fear of the water didn’t help either.

The next few nights were rough. Even at that age, my brother was magnificently affable and possessed an ability to acquiesce to any situation. Whoever was in charge at the moment, he got along with them. In retrospect, that is an infinitely better strategy than the one I employed—I became the fighter, the orchestrator of survival, the person who aims to set things right. It is one of the few traits I inherited from my father: Don’t take crap from anyone.

Affability went out the window when the sun went down. My little brother cried at the prospect of never seeing Mom again. Late at night I would pick up the phone and put him in touch with Mom. I would cringe when I dialed the bigger numbers as the clicking of the rotary dial went on longer, sometimes engaging the phone’s bell and yielding a little chirp or ring. If I got caught, I was a dead man.

I worried too about never seeing Mom again. Dad’s strategy was a good one. If he was going to fight the same old losing court battle, why not do it with the kids under his roof, daring Mom to find a way to come get them? In those days the law did not consider what Dad was doing kidnapping; it considered it “custodial interference,” and it had no immediate consequence. I liked neither the prospect of being enrolled in a new school nor the idea of seeing Dad every day. I had the impression that we were not that important to him. He never remembered our birthdays…not once. Many times he forgot my name—in his defense, he had four children from a previous marriage and he simply called me all their names before arriving at mine—and he never remembered Christmas unless we spent Christmas at his house. Nevertheless, he fought like hell to keep us. At that age, I could not wrap my mind around it, but I knew I was tired of trying.

Five days later, I packed all of our things even though I had no intention of taking them with us. I was even prepared to leave behind my beloved boom box with the brand new Rush tape inside the deck.

The following afternoon I went down to the den to find Jan, my Dad’s new wife. She was a sweet lady who told us bedtime stories and who had four grown children who thought my brother and I were adorable. I told her that I was going to ride around the neighborhood and that if she needed anything, I might just ride by the local market. She gave me money to get her cigarettes. I winced. I did not feel entirely good about my next move.

I put my brother on a bmx bike hand-me-down, myself on a Schwinn ten-speed-hand-me-down that I was not tall enough to ride (stuff that belonged to Jan’s children), and the 11-year-old and the eight-and-a-half-year-old commenced the two-mile trek from 29 Happy Hill Road in Stamford to Giovanni’s Market on the narrow country highway known as Long Ridge Road. I had to stop a few times to make sure my brother kept pace, but we made it. After converting Jan’s cigarette money to quarters, I pumped the payphone full, had Giovanni give Mom directions to the market from the Merit Parkway, and an hour and a half later we were running to her outstretched arms.
Mom called Jan the minute we got home. Jan had the unfortunate indignity of explaining to Dad that the kids had vanished on her watch. Dad had the indignity of going to collect the bicycles stashed behind Giovanni’s.

The next morning I woke up home in Goshen, New York with my dad circling the block in his yacht, waiting for somebody on the premises to rear their head.
I caught sight of the Pontiac’s tale end as my mother ushered us out the door toward her Buick Regal. I felt like Chief Brody as he glimpsed the shark for the first time from the stern of the Orca. Mom made the most of the time it took for Dad to circle the block again and crammed us into the car. We were going on a short vacation. The destination was North Carolina.

Reunion

On March 27, 1987, I walked into the court room in Tarboro to find media, curious onlookers, and the poor middle school girls who thought they’d been doing their civic duty by turning us in. I knew one of them. We were pals and spent time together after school. Melissa was sitting in the back row with her two friends who had recognized mine and my brother’s photos during a class project on missing children. We made eye contact. Melissa studied me for a moment and then dissolved into sobs and left the room. I remember feeling afraid and nauseatingly sad. I must have looked that way too. She might have been the only onlooker that day who realized she had been a pawn in a clever ruse by a great salesman. This was not a good day; I had a few maneuvers to answer for.Dad was sitting in the front row. His hair was now entirely white. Jan looked as if she put on 30 pounds. They stared straight ahead.

The initial proceedings rehashed the events of three years ago.Finally there came a break, a lunch break. One of the decisions of the judge was that each boy would first meet with the judge in closed session, and then we would meet with Dad. My perpetually affable younger brother went first. The lunch break was my brother’s time with Dad, and he acquiesced beautifully. I went to lunch with my mother, accompanied by my then stepfather and an esteemed young attorney from Southern Pines who had taken up our cause.

Lingering in the courtroom after lunch was a reporter from the Tarboro Daily Southerner. Our attorney, who had advised Mom not to try her case to the press that my father had shamelessly courted, eyeballed him curiously and then engaged:
“Don’t you have something else to do? Like maybe a story on how much the grass has grown…something?”

The reporter smiled and remained relatively quiet. I remember liking the attorney. It was he who worked out how the rest of the day would go. It was he who reminded everyone Mom had sole custody of us and thus could not be held accountable for a poorly-worded visitation agreement that failed to put parameters on habitation.
He also orchestrated and argued for the step-by-step, monitored re-acquaintance process the judge eventually followed: First we’d spend Easter Weekend with Dad at a bed and breakfast in Tarboro. Then, in the summer, we’d each spend a week with him in Connecticut—separate weeks. Dad did not want my brother and me to visit him together. That made me nervous. And, by the way, Dad had to pay all the back child support that was due.

I think maybe part of the idea was to throw enough obstacles at my father right there at the finish line so that maybe he’d give up. He did not give up. I would have to be the one to make him say “uncle.”
I entered the judge’s chambers and he asked me if I wanted to see my Dad.
I said, “No.”

“Why?
“I don’t like him.”
“Why don’t you like him?”
“I’m scared of him.”
“I believe you.”

He must not of, because minutes later I would be sent back into the hall to reunite with my Dad, my shiny shoes clacking against the shiny floor.
I waited, a diminutive Luke Skywalker alone in the hall listening for footsteps. Vader appeared from around the corner:

“Sean, it’s your Dad.”
Luke, I am your father. I needed a lightsaber.
“I know,” I replied.
“I hear you’re a fabulous distance runner.” He smiled his smile, a disarming smile that started in his eyes.

I stared. I was not disarmed. I was vigilant. He laughed a little and advanced as I stepped back, kneeling in front me and putting his hands on my shoulders.

“You don’t know what to think do you?

He smiled, shook his head, and then stood up. Then he put an arm around me and led me back to the courtroom.

“Come ‘on, it’ll be alright.”

Perhaps it would.

I went home and watched myself descend the courthouse steps in my Members Only jacket on Channel Five.

Vacation

Our week-long getaway to a gated community in the South was really a reconnaissance mission.

The first thing I saw through the windshield of the station wagon we rode in from the airport was a water tower painted to look like a golf ball. Then I could smell the grass of the horse pasture. To a city-suburban kid whose only wish was to find a pool that someone would let me swim in during the summer, Seven Lakes was like Disneyland.

There was, and is, a huge pool, stables, a golf course, and miles and miles of freedom. We stayed in a guest house on Dogwood Lane. I was at the pool every day, and I swam in every lake I could find.

At the pool I made fast friends while playing “shark” in the deep end—basically it’s a game of tag where the kids I tagged must then assist me in tagging others. It is not long before the waters are shark infested.

I did not want to leave. It was almost September, and we would not actually move here until February. But there was unfinished business at home, and Dad had one last daring trick up his sleeve.

A Desperate Act

Dad laid low for a while upon our return from the vacation he never knew about. On the horizon, though, was another hearing about visitation rights, and the prospect of Dad seeing us every other weekend and two weeks in the summer had diminished considerably. I was now old enough to speak my mind to a judge and be taken relatively seriously.

My mother’s attorney, who would later become the district attorney of Orange County, was first to see the flaws in the visitation agreement.
According to my mother, he said to her, “If you’re gonna go, go now before someone notices this.”

Too late.

One rainy January afternoon at 3 pm I stood with my pal David Eckerson waiting on our ride home in the vestibule of Goshen Middle School. Through the myriad of little bodies sprinting for busses strode an exceptionally dressed man in a beige London Fog rain coat with matching umbrella, smiling at me. My father was attempting to kidnap me from school.

Time stopped for a moment, and it looked like I was watching him advance through a lens set on vertigo zoom. Slowly I backed from the door, tripped over my bag, and told Dave I had to go. I ran straight to the office and announced to all present, “My father is here, and I’m not supposed to go with him.”

The principal happened to be in the general reception area and spun around.“Come with me,” she said. She led me to her office. “Tell me slow…your name and your father’s name.”

I told her really fast.

“Don’t you have a brother?”
“Yes, he’s at Goshen Intermediate School the number is…”
“I know the number. Have a seat. Take it easy.” She pointed at her high-backed leather chair behind her giant wooden desk. I hesitated.
“Really?”
“Really.”

New Yorkers are exceptional at mobilizing in a crisis. School personnel move with militaristic precision. The principal locked me in her office, but Dad was already headed for my brother’s campus. His school administrators immediately found Jan trying to enter one of the classroom wings where she feigned ignorance as to the location of the ladies’ room. Everyone played along while the cops silently approached the parking lot.

I rode in the backseat of my mother’s car up the hilly drive to my brother’s school. Here too the end-of-the-day departure melee was underway. At the top of the hill, we sat in traffic jam of arriving cars. I looked to my left to find my spectacled father less than two feet away, staring at me from his driver-side window.

I know it was you, Fredo.

Dad had seen the squad cars, had gathered Jan, and was slipping away with the line of departing vehicles, but he took a moment to deliver a non-verbal message to me with the confident look in his eyes.

They’ll be a next time, it said, and you’ll pay.
The cops shadowed Dad out of the city limits until he got on Route 17. One of them spent the night in his cruiser watching my house.

Peace

We then fled New York and took up residence in a small A-frame house on Cottage Grove Lane on the North side of Seven Lakes. I finally learned how my folks knew of this place—my stepfather had made a spring break ritual of bringing here the golf team he coached at New York’s Monroe-Woodbury High School.Also, his friends Pete and Barbara Murphy had retired here. My stepfather brought a photo of my Dad to the gatehouses and gave the guards a Cliff-Notes version of our situation. Then something wonderful happened: for two years I was an issue-free kid with a life and a new hobby.

February is no month to swim, and so I had to discover other ways to spend my time. Before I left New York, I had performed the annual physical fitness test and set a school record in the mile. It had occurred to me to perhaps practice the running thing, but it just was not practical to circle the block on foot as I might wake up in another state catching a beat-down.

Once in Seven Lakes, the rules changed. I could set my alarm, get up with the sun, and walk out the door to do anything I wanted, like Forest Gump my way across the 27376.

The North side of Seven Lakes supports a much younger population now, but in 1984, an 11-year old speeding around Lake Sequoia in 25 minutes or less on foot was noticeable. So was the site of a 12-year-old legging out the five-miles of golf course on Seven Lakes’ south side—we moved a year later next door to the Andersons on the 13th tee.

I ran the course in the evenings, stayed out of the way of the golfers, paused when I encountered someone engaged in a contemplative putt, and no one said anything more than, “That is an interesting boy.”

It wasn’t long before I was introduced to Nat Carter who eventually took me to two AAU national championship meets with his Sandhills Track Club.

Being on the golf course brought me another new friend, a 24-year-old cart-attendant training to become golf pro, Ken Shepley. He let me help him with the upkeep of the carts. I was never officially employed, but I got a few bucks here and there, and I got the coolest older brother of all time. He played guitar, liked Rush, and he performed their songs for me as many times as I wanted. The golf pro at the time, Danny Barrett, shook his head, smiled, and let this odd little duo go about its unofficial business.

I played after-school basketball games, built tree forts and trails in the woods with the Bartletts—until Brad accidently set the woods on fire—watched videos with the Maroun boys, and I never once looked over my shoulder. Later I would meet the Nelsons in the neighboring FoxFire community.

There were even more pals to be found in Sylvia Pusser’s sixth-grade class at West End Middle School. Rob Erwin and I would hold serious discussions about the A-team and Airwolf. I would write short stories that included all my new friends all grown up and involved in fabulous occupations. I get a kick out of the fact that one of them did actually grow up to become a professional baseball player.

In search of better pay, Mom and Stepdad took us to Tarboro two years later. I was not down with this redeployment. All I could think of in the courtroom was that none of my pals in West End would have sold me out over a milk carton, and Mrs. Pusser would have cared enough to gather more info before making the call.

Finale

The Easter Weekend with Dad in Tarboro was odd. The media left us alone. By day Dad was his cordial, magnanimous self. In the evening we sat in the front room of the historic bed and breakfast and subtle demons came out to play.

“I went to your school, Sean. I read some of your stories. Your teachers say you keep to yourself. You’re a loner. Little strange don’t you think?”
You were at my school? Creepy.

I told him that my friends were somewhere else, and I would see them soon.
The set up, of course, was that I didn’t turn out right. What came next were bits of truth about my mother I never knew, merged with half-truths and complete falsities.
I got on the phone with Mom to get things clarified. He didn’t care if I bought it or not; Dad just wanted to create dissension amongst the players of the home team, and he wanted to push me around a little for what I had done. It worked.
July came fast and I found myself in my room in Seven Lakes packing my bag for a week’s stay on Happy Hill. The possibilities of what might happen hung over me like approaching thunderheads. Plaguing me most was what my father had not asked at Easter:

Why did you leave and humiliate me like that? Why did you humiliate me at the school? Who do you think you are? Did you think I’d never find you?

I did not complain. I didn’t look for loopholes. The time for running was done. I simply boarded the plane in sullen silence and touched down at LaGuardia for my finale.

The first thing I saw at the gate was my brother’s big, smiling mug. He evidently had had a large time going to amusement parks and visiting stepbrothers and Smiths he hadn’t seen in years.

I was pretty sure Dad and I would not be going to Playland in Rye, New York. We killed the remaining time before my brother’s departure with lunch at an airport deli where I was regaled with the awesomeness of my brother’s visit.
My visit lasted three days.

I put my brother on a plane back to Raleigh and then lugged my bag to short-term parking. I got in my father’s latest yacht, a Cadillac. We pulled away from the terminal and I heard the universal thump that is early electronic door locks engaging. I noticed that his left hand remained on the lever. I stared straight ahead.

“Listen you little son of a..."

I knew it.

Honestly I don’t remember the bulk of the conversation, just bits and pieces. It was his moment, his win. I was not here to reconnect with him. I was here to remain prisoner and engage in hostilities at his behest. What I was not prepared for was the willingness in myself to engage in hostilities.

Eventually he ran out of steam—or got bored with my lack of reply—and then finally I was looking at Jan’s pensively smiling face as she opened the door. I simply scaled the stairs to the room from which I had planned my escape years ago and called it a night.

There were two days of me getting up in the morning to run and thus setting off my Dad’s new alarm system, which he was not upset about. I think he was amused by the innocence of it. I ran the neighborhood as I knew it, and I found it small.

I chatted with Jan and saw little of my Dad until late in the second day. He had leveled and put a kidney-shaped pool in the side yard that used to plummet toward a stand of woods. After a short conversation with Jan, I retired to my Dad’s den where I caught up with a Mets doubleheader. My goal was to lay as low as possible.
Within 20 minutes the heavy feet of my father could be heard tramping across the fueax-brick linoleum of his kitchen.

“What the hell are you doing?”
“I…there’s a game…Mets…I followed their whole run in ’86…”
“Do you mean to tell me you left your step-mother, whom you have not seen in years, sitting by the pool alone for the rest of the afternoon so you could catch a ball game?”

Yes?

The unmitigated gall of me, what was I thinking? I remember this conversation, and even then I realized he could care less about his wife’s alone time. I had done an exceptional job in the last 48 hours of giving him no excuse to engage, and that was bad.

He remanded me back to the pool, and Jan appeared embarrassed. We all sat at a cast-iron patio set while he did the same thing he began to do Easter weekend in Tarboro.
“You are so much like your mother…”

And so I began to tune out the blend of fact and fiction until he mentioned one name.
“You know I gave your Uncle Joe his first job; that guy could not stay employed to save his life.”

I have a particular reverence for my World War II generation relatives, and Uncle Joe was the recently-deceased brother of the grandfather I never knew. He is also the man who helped my mother flee Chicago. I was not at all buying Dad’s shtick, and so I left the table. I was pursued.

He caught up with me by the front door of the house, slandering my mother’s side of the family every step of the way. He clamped a hand on the door I had half open, and then clamped another hand on me, shaking me while he demanded to know what I thought I was doing. I turned to walk down the slate path toward his garage, and he immediately positioned himself in front of me as Jan arrived.

“Oh no, you leave this property, and I’ll come get you myself. No getaways this time. No…”

Old man I can moonwalk two miles faster than you can get your pot-belly into that land yacht and say, where’d he go?

I did not actually say that. Well I did, but I said it to myself. Had I gave volume to my inner voice, I might not be here enjoying a functional mandible and the power of speech.

It was Jan that interrupted and announced that that was enough. She requested that I go inside and up to my room a while. That reenergized Dad, who followed me up the stairs and commanded that I call it a night—at five in the afternoon—but not before I surrendered all my clothes, including the ones I had on. We reached the second floor. My heart thumped in a way where I thought others could hear it. I turned around and said, “No.”

“No? What’s No? You actually think that you’re not going into that room?”
Enough talk. He was advancing, quickly. I did not move. I bent my knees. The plan was to charge, hit low, and watch both of us go over the banister. Hopefully he’d break my fall.

Jan locked both hands on his elbow as she leaned back and yelled my father’s name. It was the first time I had ever heard her raise her voice. Dad stopped, and at the time I didn’t know why. Here was a woman that did whatever he said. She had no input into their life agenda. If he wanted to drive to New York and have her abduct his youngest child, Jan grabbed her purse and got in the car. She was there for years of court battles, Dad’s occasional arrest, and countless obsessive schemes to legally defeat his ex-wife. And there in retrospect lies the answer. This was one of the few lines one did not cross with her. Jan would not witness violence. This was not going to be a spanking; this was going to be bad, and she neither wanted to see the old man led to the back of a squad car, nor did she want to pick up my pieces at the bottom of the stairs.

Jan was Dad’s last shot at happiness, and he stood down. She stared at me until I straightened up and relaxed. Dad backed down the hallway to his room issuing threats while Jan backpedalled in front of him. I went inside my room and closed the door.
An hour later I heard him set the alarm, which had invisible beams crisscrossing the staircase. The phone that had been in the room years ago had been removed. I had no idea how far I could go into the hallway before the alarm sounded—It had once sounded at the very top of the stairs, and it once went off when I opened the front door—and so it was too risky to go into the two additional guest bedrooms as both their entrances were at the top of the stairs.

The roof.

I had a window that opened to the moderately pitched roof that slanted to the deck. I wondered how I might get off the deck that stood 30 feet in the air. Didn’t matter. I finally saw the alarm tape on the window.

I had seen Eddie Murphy in a movie disarm said tape with chewing gum and the foil it came wrapped in, but I wasn’t going to put all my eggs in that basket. I did, for a moment, look for my Hubba Bubba.

I was a prisoner, and I needed to accept that, at least until morning. I slept not, and twice someone tried the door knob of my room. There is no telling what would have happened had it not been locked.

I laid low until mid-morning. That gave everyone a chance to relax, let their guard down, and for the love of God, shut that alarm off. I quietly exited my room and tip-toed toward Dad’s room until I was in view of the front door down stairs. I heard Dad talking on the phone, and I saw nothing but the screen door between me and Giovanni’s.

This time I took my stuff as I was modestly packed for this trip.

Bag? Check
Running shoes? Check.
Adios.

I slipped down the stairs, out the door, and strode for Happy Hill Road, but I took a new direction.During runs on the previous days, I learned that at the end of my Dad’s cul-de-sac was a shortcut to Giovanni’s. If I cut through the woods, I end up near the entrance to Long Ridge Road, cutting the trek to just over a mile. Problem was that someone now lived on that property and this individual at the moment was not entirely psyched about me traipsing across it.

“Can I help you?”

I explained my situation to the old man. He let me call Nana in Pearl River, New York. He was nervous, but he put a hand on my shoulder and said, “My son lives with me; he’s a cop; maybe he can do something.”

Who says there’s never one around when you need one?

The man’s son was off-duty, but when he arrived home thirty minutes later, he got on the phone with the Stamford Police. Unbeknownst to me, my step-grandfather Frank was on his way and would circle the neighborhood of Happy Hill in search of me—Nana had made a command decision.

Stamford’s finest came and got me and my stuff. I was brought to the station and allowed to call Nana. Then they interviewed me and called my Dad. Dad came to the station, and I was told that I would have to face him one more time in one of the interview rooms.

The room was big, cold and was dominated by a board-room like table surrounded by folding chairs. My Dad sat with Jan, and he smiled at me as I entered. Nothing good was going to come of this.

His monologue was eye-opening. He said he was going to put me back on a plane anyway and this saved him the expense. He joked that this was a good thing, because he no longer would have to pay child support, and there would be no more going to court. There were other comments such as he thought I’d amount to nothing and that I was as weak and useless as the rest of my mother’s side of the family. He also could care less what I did from here on in.

I never heard from him again, and neither did my brother until he was in high school. I was a little sad because I realized that all those court battles were not about my brother and me. They were about him, and that’s kind of tough to take, learning that you’re a pawn and not much else.

Everyone wants their Dad to like them. Anyone who says they don’t is lying.
I lived out the rest of that week with Nana in her Irish hamlet. Then I returned to the South.

We lingered another year in North Carolina, but Mom and Stepdad were eyeballing the much-higher teacher salaries they left behind in New York. In their minds the reason for being in the South had now expired, and I could not convince them otherwise. It marked a significant downturn in my life. Fed up with endless dysfunction, I left home at 16, and the sun-filled days of Seven Lakes got further and further away.

Legacy

I called the center for Missing and Exploited Children the other day and they have me listed as “recovered.”

There are obvious physical similarities between my Dad and me, some mannerisms and personality characteristics, but it’s our tumultuous relationship that left the biggest mark—some dings and dents in my psyche. My self-confidence was nonexistent for many years, and that affected my athletic performance. For a while it also inspired a despondent recklessness that plagued my youth. I got over it.

To this day, though, if I am absently touched by someone in the friendliest of manners--even if they have been in my presence several minutes—I many times visibly flinch. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a pat on the shoulder from a friend, if I don’t see it coming, there’s a reaction.

I love people, but I am still a bit of a loner. I’m great with kids, but I doubt that I will ever have any. I surf avidly; I am a great swimmer, and I am still nervous in the open water. I’m not afraid of much else.

I inherited Dad’s sense of humor, his ability to engage people, and that made me a good teacher.

My younger brother sought out a relationship with Dad when he was a teenager, but the relationship was short-lived. He is a well-adjusted father of two. Like my grandfather and two of my cousins, my brother became a police officer. He lets me sit in his cruiser and turn on the lights. I am forbidden to touch anything else. I am godfather to his little girl.

Mom has retired from teaching.

Dad died in 1995. He refused to see me and patch things up before he departed. I wrote him a letter. It was honest. He didn’t like the letter.

I have a video of his last Thanksgiving which my younger brother shot. All but two of his children were there. Three of my older half-brothers live in Seattle. I have no knowledge of the whereabouts of the fourth. Neither does anyone else. I think his relationship with Dad was worse than mine.

In the video my father is holding court in the kitchen, undaunted by the cancer that had shriveled him, comfortable with the camera, and smoothly delivering humorous observations before slipping into a contemplative, distant stare. He was different but the same.

His family welcomed me to the funeral with open arms. His sister pulled me aside and said of the letter, “I think you were probably right, and he couldn’t deal with it. Good to see you.” None of my half-brothers attended the funeral.

The funeral itself reminded me that my father was also a Marine with a small army of incredibly dedicated friends. A brilliant salesman, he was no Willy Lowman. He remained relevant to his profession until he decided to leave it.
Except for a letter from my great aunt Lucille in my last year of college, I’ve had no further contact with the Smiths.

Jan and her four children were with my Dad to the end. They revered him. There was goodness in him, but he let it show when and where he wanted and on his terms.
In short, he did it his way.

A couple of months ago I bought a small cottage in Seven Lakes. Three mornings a week my alarm goes off and I run the 3.3 mile loop around Lake Sequoia. I pass the Murphys, the house where Mr. and Mrs. Bartlett still live, the street where Rob Erwin lived, the pool where I developed an interminable crush on Beth Haney, and the beach where I once held hands with Christie Ebel.

“Can’t repeat the past?” wondered Jay Gatsby, “Of course you can.”

Kind of.

Christmas is at my house this year. In the second bedroom are two single beds for my niece and nephew. On the shelves is a varied assortment of memorabilia, but next to James Baldwin’s rookie card is an original X-wing fighter piloted by Luke Skywalker.

On warm evenings I can be found on my back porch listening to Frank Sinatra’s Reprise album. My Way is track 16. Everything is indeed wonderful.

Sean Patrick Smith is a freelance writer in Moore County, North Carolina.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Tarboro Chief of Police Robert L. Cherry. He remembered the story and located the original articles from the Tarboro Daily Southerner. There always seems to be a cop around when I need one.

Where's My Youth?

Apparently Right in Front of Me, but it Feels, and Looks Much Different.

“Always hopeful, yet discontent,
he knows changes aren't permanent,
but change is.” --Rush Tom Sawyer

I amble out to the kitchen like John Wayne. The cats have told me it’s time for them to eat. My arches are sore; there’s an annoying tightness in the musculature of my legs that won’t go away, and my joints hurt.

The morning after a tough workout? I wish. This is most every morning.
Max says hello in cat language and promptly leaps to the top of the refrigerator. Maybe he said, “I’m 50-something in cat years and check out this vertical leap.”
Anyway, I’ll loosen up in a couple of hours, and then I’ll go buy some better running shoes for my screaming feet. Maybe, as Indiana Jones said, “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.” I was a competitive distance runner from ages 11 to 25, and now I lift weights like a madman.

For two months a shoulder inflammation reduced my lifting capacity in my left arm by 50 percent and thus mandated that I not only alter my workouts, but that I alter parts of my life. I had to watch how I picked up briefcases, how I opened doors, how I put on clothes, and I had to take a pass on picking up and playing with my friend’s kids.

Uncle Sean was no longer a human jungle gym. I didn’t have this problem at 25, which was…over a decade ago.

Really?

My 50-something friends laugh at my ailments and ask, “How’s your prostate?”

What? Why?

My 60-something friends speak of calcium deposits, back surgeries, and arthritis of the knee.

Should I gobble glucosamine and research the benefits of yoga?
Perhaps.

Should I reduce my salt intake and give up beer?

That, my friends, is crazy talk.

I don’t sweat these things too much, though. If Lance Armstrong can still finish third in the Tour De France and Dana Torres can still out swim 18 year-olds at the Olympic Games, I think I’ll be fine. I may be real close, but I haven’t actually hit my forties yet.

Besides, there are too many of the standard de-evolvements in popular culture that remind me that my early youth was a considerable time ago. Every generation endures it.

Michael Jackson is gone. Patrick Swayze is gone.

The songs I enjoyed in high school are being remade by new bands. The other day I heard a version of George Michael’s Careless Whisper by a rock ensemble called Three Days Grace. Although the tune was originally a ballad, the singer was kind of growling out the lyrics and sounded not unlike Cookie Monster. In fact, most of the rock songs I hear now the vocalists indeed sound like Cookie Monster. Put on 100.3 FM and wait. You’ll see.

Speaking of my googley-eyed friend, Sesame Street is still around. Tried and true. However, Cookie Monster is now Veggie Monster. My God, what does it say about our nation’s lack of nutritional discipline when one has to alter my favorite puppet icon? Cookie demurely nibbling a carrot is by no means the same as him devouring a bag of chocolate chips yelling, “Om yom yom!” as cookie shrapnel crumbles out the side of his fuzzy mouth. Must Sesame Street teach us how to count and eat?
Is Snufalufagus still on the show? Did his sleepy-eyed delivery and the fact that only Big Bird can see him suggest hallucinogenic drug use and thus get Snuffy kicked to the curb?

I blame not Cookie Monster. Times are tough. Former CEOs are now bagging groceries to make ends meet. If Cookie needs to shred a Cobb salad instead of a box of Chips Ahoy to stay employed, so be it. Reading Rainbow went off the air due to lack of funding. LeVar Burton is home, unemployed, and cashing his dwindling residual checks from Star Trek the Next Generation.

It’ll be fine. These changes aren’t permanent.

To make matters worse, the bulk of my favorite action heroes are altering their careers and aging out of the genre.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that Schwarzenegger was flexing through the jungle pleading for his comrades to be airlifted to safety.

“Get to da choppa!”

After three lackluster movies, he finished strong with a third Terminator and then became the Governator. Some of these ole fellas, though, have been donning their guns, gloves or fedora once again, but the running theme appears to be one last blast.

Die Hard changed the landscape of action flicks, and Bruce Willis gave us one more on July 4th 2008, Live Free or Die Hard. He was bald, looked, of course, like he was in his 50’s, and he pulled off the snarky, very physical role of John McClane effortlessly in a film that did not look as dated as the franchise—probably thank Generation-X director Len Wiseman for that.

Clint Eastwood took time out from directing Oscar-winning films like Mystic River and Changeling to once again protect a neighborhood with a handgun and whispered words of toughness, but I think that is the last we will see of him in that kind of role.

My brother had a Gran Torino, but it was paintless and had a roll cage. Eight cylinders is a lot of cylinders. We almost died in that thing. Yes, I wanted to paint it red with a white stripe.

Stallone. There’s a guy a Gen-X guy—or any guy—can count on.
After directing an admirable conclusion to the Rocky series that harkened back to the independent-film feel of the original—“Take it back, Doo, Doo, Doo, Doo.” Yeah, I said it. I actually sung it while I wrote it, “Doo Doo Doo Doo.” Stallone followed Rocky Balboa with Rambo, which did not necessarily finish as a conclusion to the series. Basically the Green Beret vigilante employed minimal dialogue while launching the viewer on a sundry adventure of abhorrent violence, the sheer magnitude of which made me wince and then say, “Awesome.” I mean, heads turned into pink mist and limbs helicoptered through the air. Stallone had a bow and showed a bunch of mercenaries how to kick it old school. It was like the 80’s series was updated and re-loaded.

Currently Stallone is wrapping up the filming of The Expendables, a large-budget romp starring him, Jet Li, and former on-screen nemesis Dolph Lungren (Ivan Drago from Rocky IV) pitted against, among others, wrestling hero “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.

Here’s one thing that hasn’t changed.

I saw a publicity photo of a shirtless, 60-something Stallone whose physique is virtually identical to the one he sported in Rocky IV. So what if he has to inject the human growth hormone his body no longer produces? It’s not illegal, and thus I could care less. I am not here for ethical deliberation; I am here to desperately cling to the icons of my youth. By the way, both Schwarzenegger and Willis make cameos in that film.

Harrison Ford.

He’s Han Solo. He’s Indiana Jones. He’s John Patrick Ryan. He flies his own helicopter, works a ranch in Wyoming, and he pretty much does whatever he wants, including making The Kingdom of the Krystal Skull.

Did he look old? Yeah.

Did he care? No. He refused to dye his hair.

Did he do most of his own stunts? Yup, the part where he was sliding in and out of moving cars was particularly inspiring.
Where I have issues is the suggestion that his young co-star, Shia Labeouf, is arguably earmarked to inherit the series. First let us focus on the boy’s name. I come from a time and a place where even “Sean” was a suspect name because it is kosher for use by either a boy or a girl. Many an unsolicited physical engagement ensued over my name alone.

How is it that Shia appears to not have a single scar on his cherub mug? Make-up or CGI? I think not. Me thinks the lad is that handsome and has never made a fist in his life. As the end of the film neared and Indy’s hat tumbled off his head and rolled to Shia’s reaching hand, my inner, less-than-sane Sean screamed “No! Harrison, go get the friggin’ hat. This visual metaphor shall not pass!”
Indy went and snatched his hat back and smiled.

Whew. All is right in my world.

Old-man rant complete

I will watch the The Expendables. I’ll live if there’s not another Rambo or another Indiana Jones. I will enjoy bands like Three Days Grace and one called Breaking Benjamin, but I will also detour off Interstate 40 in North Carolina to travel to Lake Lure Inn and visit the Veranda Room. Then I’ll pull my baby out of the corner and have a picture taken as we dance in the gazebo of Firefly Cove. Hopefully, somewhere, Swayze will smile. Hopefully, age is just a number.

My ratio of content to discontent in terms of popular culture has been pretty even, and I embrace change, if only because one can’t relish the past until things are different.

Also, know this, glucosamine is rather pricey.

Sean Patrick Smith is freelance writer in Moore County.