The earliest memory I have in this life is this

I am in our front living room, and about 3 years old…I have what is called a ‘Close ‘n Play’, which is a vinyl record player built for kids that requires no skill to operate…you put a vinyl 7-inch on there, close the lid, and the record plays automatically (it’s kid proof)…my parents are fighting in the other room, or fucking (I’m not sure which, maybe both)…I know intuitively that I am not supposed to go back there, where they are…I put a record on, and turn it up as loud as it will go…the music blots out the muffled sounds of my parents…I am totally absorbed in the record when my father wheels around the corner and yells at me, “hey, turn that thing down!”…startled, I scramble for the lid, popping the latch so that the record automatically stops…I sit in silence, waiting for some audible clue as to what to do next…after a time when things have quieted, I feel it is safe to visit them…the door is open, and they are both under the covers, their heads propped up by pillows so that they see me come in… I am surprised that my mom’s long dark hair is laying untamed out in front of her on the bed…they seem happy, and sadly, besides being my first memory, this is also the only moment of intimacy that I can recall between them…

There is not one posed photo of my parents together, arm in arm, like any couple who was once married and had two kids together would have had…there are no wedding photos, no posed photos of them at a party, nothing…only a few casual snapshots where they are both in the frame of somebody else’s picture, or, where they are both sitting together and someone has come up and snapped them…the best one I have in my possession features me as an infant sitting on my mother’s knee while she smiles at me, my father next to her has his head on her shoulder…

My parents met a high school dance that my father was playing with his teenage band…besides their fated meeting, there are no dramatic tales of romance that go beyond that, no Romeo and Juliet scenarios of their parents interference, or of mad passions that spill all over…all that’s left is for us is a simplified timeline that they met, dated, she got pregnant with me, neither one finished school, marriage, had me, had my brother, split, divorced, and then acrimony followed sorrow and distance…if there is a deeper tale of love or betrayal there, it has never been shared with me…

My father says that when he was married to my mother, she had an extremely violent temper, and would often physically attack him…if she provoked him and he lost his cool and knocked her down, she would just lay on the floor and sneer “is that the best you got? you hit like my fucking mother!”…he said that when she was pregnant with me, she ate raw meat constantly…he has also said that they had a terrible fight when I was in the womb, and this is perhaps why I have a birthmark on my arm (this folk tale logic is confirmed for me when at 17 an old Italian woman, speaking broken English, ask me if my father had hit my mother when I was in the womb…when i asked her why she was asking, she just pointed to my left arm)…my dad has told me that he truly loved my mother, but that she was crazy…I believe that my mom truly loved my dad, and he broke her heart so fully that she never recovered…but maybe that is a story too…there are the awed tales of her voice, from which I got that razor in mine…when my mother would yell at you, the walls would ring…I hear this same screech in my niece when she gets angry…we just laugh, and say to each other, “there’s Martha’s voice!”…my dads stories are full of kicked down motorcycles, and broken down doors…

There is one story here that has two conflicting versions: my father claims that I was to be adopted, and that when my mom was 8 months pregnant, they went ‘downtown’ to some agency and were set to sign the papers, and that there was a couple who couldn’t have kids who had arranged to take me and the whole deal…at the last possible second, my father said he couldn’t go through with it…he said he took my mom outside for a walk, and told her his reservations, and that I was his child and he felt it was wrong what they were going to do…because it was her idea, and he had to talk her out of it…when I told my mom this story, she flew in to a unbelievable rage…she said “your father is such a fucking liar!! He was the one who wanted to get rid of you, he pressured me into trying to have me give you away…I would never have done such a thing”…I guess I don’t have an opinion of who was telling me the truth, so much as it bothers me deep down that one of them, or both of them, ever considered it at all…

My brother Ricky was apparently born without this surrounding drama…all indications are that although he was not planned for, he was welcome…all the stories that I tell, he also went through many of the same things…if I omit him at times, it is not because I do not recognize what he has endured…he to me is a constant, and a survivor of this story as well…he is my full blood brother, born 2 1?2 years after me…all indications are that the marriage was already headed south when he arrived, so it doesn’t seem clear why they would have even risked having another child…that being said, I am glad they did…he is a wonderful person, and I am proud he is my brother…

I have never heard one story of all 4 of us together, happy, like one family…

There is one final apocryphal scene that I witnessed first hand, the real shadow of all that is to come…it goes something like this:

My parents are having this never-ending argument…I am about 4, my brother just about 2, and we are watching this all happen in the apartment my mom is renting just down the street from my grandma’s house…we had been living with our grandmother at her house just before this, but she kicked us out because my mom couldn’t pay her rent (an act my mom would never forgive, a symbol of my grandmother’s cruelty and disconnect)…for whatever reason, my father hasn’t been around much, but he is back now…not to stay, but to leave, for good…they are no longer a couple, and the fight is over how best to take care of us kids…they go back and forth, back and forth for what seems like hours, the general idea being that she cannot handle taking care of us, that the strain is just to much for her…they argue about money, where to live…my father tries his best to reason with her, but she won’t listen to him anymore, so deep is her mistrust of him now…they are both around 23 years old (in my mind today they look like kids)… the door is swung open , it is cold outside, and with an air of finality my father grabs my brother by the wrist and moves him to the other side of the threshold…my mother and I stand alone on one side of the world, my father and brother on the other…it is a moment of equal parallel, the fragile woman and the stoic child mirrored against the proud man and the innocent babe…I am my mother’s alone now, and my brother becomes my father’s child for good…I adore my father, and am confused as to why he isn ‘t choosing me…I am jealous of my brother, because my father is the glamorous one…but I understand why I must stay here and take care of my mother…without fanfare, or even a kiss goodbye, my father leaves, taking the baby with him…I will not see them or hear any news for almost a year and a half, they just disappear...I am not allowed to talk about them when they are gone, nor do I want to…

Life with my mother in this time is very quiet…I am the little man of the house now, and I take great pride in keeping my mom’s spirits up…I go out of my way to do nothing to upset her…my whole life revolves around her small universe and few friends…her very best girlfriend, who lives a mere 2 blocks away, has a daughter who is my age, so we go over there a lot and spend the whole day (they have a pool!)…my favourite object in the whole world is there, on a makeshift bar, a globe of the earth that lights up from the inside… my mom seems lighter and happier with her friends around…jokingly, everyone starts referring to my mom’s friends daughter as “my girlfriend”, a thought that embarrasses me even though I do not know what a girlfriend is…the daughter and I start to go along with this eventually, saying one day we will get married, and all of us will live together in this peaceful place…

As a Christmas gift I had been given a little toy car that ran on a real car battery…one morning, without forethought, I woke up and decided I had to run away for my mom’s sake to her friend’s house and live with her and her daughter…I thought my mom would feel much better without having to take care of me, and I figured I would be much happier at her friends house anyway cause I loved being there so much…because I didn’t want my mother to know, I got up in the dawn hours, dressed silently, and snuck out the front door…I pushed my car out of the garage, started it up by turning the plastic “key”, and drove about 2-3 miles an hour for the 3 blocks over to their house (the whole drive took about 10 minutes) …I made it safely without incident, thru intersections and stop signs, and parked my car in their backyard, letting myself in thru the back porch (the door was open)…my ‘fiancee’ was already up, in her pajamas, and I said hello as if it was all normal and we started to play…when my mom woke up, she went into a total panic and called the police, thinking I had been kidnapped…logically, the next call she made was to her best friend, who quickly discovered me in her living room, still in my winter coat and hat…I didn’t get in any trouble, but I was sad when I had to go back to live with my mom…

To this day I still don’t know the exact reasons why my mom was committed to a mental hospital…all anyone ever said to me about it was that she had taken “too many diet pills” while trying to lose some weight and flipped out…I wasn’t around when whatever happened ‘happened’…she was held for over 2 months, until she dramatically escaped by jumping a fence and running away (no doctors ever came to get her and take her back)… no one ever told me at the time what was happening, or explained why my mother was gone…I was already away and I just stayed away, just like her…this is how I came, at the age of 4, to be passed back and forth between grandmothers and great-grandmothers and grandpas and dead grandpa’s…I never lived with my mom again…

I recently found some of my mom’s writings from when she was in the hospital…there were some diary entries, and much to my surprise, a few poems…finding her writings on the eve of publishing my own poetry book was an funny, unexpected discovery…there were also programs of stage plays she had attended back then, as well as one college production she had had a bit part in (I actually saw her in this play, where she diligently sat on a colored cube and pretended to take dictation---she didn’t speak---very 70’s!)…all this hit me kinda strange, because I had never viewed her as an artist type…my dad was the talented one, and he carried the mysterious persona that goes with someone who has a gift…my mom was straightforward to a fault, but didn’t strike me as a failed dreamer…but looking now, I think life was all too much for her, and any outward spark that she had in her died along the way and was buried deep down below…I now understand where both of those faces in me come from, the restless magician and the sad, longing soul…