a little history

I was eighteen-months-old when my father died. I didn’t understand death, maybe I still don’t but I waited for him and he never returned. My mother was pregnant and my sister would be born on June 10th. We share the same birthday only two years apart. I remember being very angry as a child. I once struck my grandmother when she threatened to hit me with a belt. I remember running and being chased afterward. I remember St Agnes and the nun who ripped a pencil from my mouth. I was told by my mother that in kindergarten I refused to tell the teacher my name. I told her she could read my nametag. I recall being in a boat and liking it. I remember when my mother threatened to give us away. We hid in the backyard, so afraid that someone was coming to take us away.

I recall having a collection of stuffed animals, bunny rabbits and toy guns. The great Garloo who looked alot like the jolly green giant. When I was very little I would beat the living hell out of my teddy bear. Then I had nightmares of his coming after me. Mom had to get rid of Teddy.

Mom wasn’t overly affectionate, but she fed us candy and all sorts of cool stuff. We grew fat; I recall having a forty inch waist size in husky. In school I was the perfect angel, at home I was a terror hitting my sister and just being cruel. I collected comic books and had one friend Freddie. It was listening to his older sister’s 45s that I first came to love rock’n roll. I recall being thrown up against the fence in the schoolyard and not fighting back. I hated school and would stay home for any reason I could think of. I once counted the days we stayed home and it came to an entire year of schooling.

I made two more friends, Danny and John; we were the outcasts of everything cool. It was at this time that I went on a diet and dropped down to 140 lbs. Mom could not afford to send us to Catholic School any longer and we’d be starting public school in the fall.

That is when we encounted the rock thrower as we called him. I don’t know if he was a vengeful spirit but for that entire summer rocks flew. I don’t know who suggested it but we came up with the idea of trying to make contact by one rock for yes and two rocks for no. We asked a series of questions and it turned out that he was the spirit of the first William P Haynes who had died young and he was not happy that I had taken his name. He said I was going to die by either a car accident or poison. Both of which came true a few years down the track. My Mom in the meantime had called the police but there was nothing they could do. For the first time in years I went to church and prayed for help. The rock thrower stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

Then I started ninth grade and didn’t fit in. I hated school and by the tenth grade I quit. It was by mutual consent as I had staged some of the wildest parties ever. Girls and booze beat school any day. Then I started going to class to get my GED. It was at this time I met Al Schmitt who was a few years older than us and studying to get his own GED. He had a car, a slick Chevy souped up. He was a horrible driver and we all joked about it. Then one day he asked me if I wanted to go into Queens and pick up some girls he knew. I said Yes and somewhere between reaching our destination and arriving safely; Al got into a drag race with another car. Somehow Al lost control and we ended up smashing into a cement railroad support. The car was totaled and Al left me for dead. It turned out that the car wasn’t his and he went to a chop-shop hoping to sell the car for parts. When the mechanics got there they found a surprise in the front passenger seat bleeding like a stuck pig. They got me out of the car and fled. Luckily for me a UPS driver came along and drove me to the hospital. He couldn’t take me all the way in because he was off-route. That walk across the parking lot was the longest walk of my life. Two and a half hours of surgery and they found out I still had my left eye. Something like 180 stitches later; I lived.

I hate to keep skipping around like this but when I was nine my grandfather came to live with us. He wasn’t well and would howl like an animal at night. My sister and mother stayed together in Mom’s bedroom but she left me alone to fend for myself. I recall pulling the sheet up over my head and hearing him turn the doorknob to my bedroom. I’d pray and pray for Mom to come and save me but she never did. The fear at nine years old was immeasurable. Years later a shrink would ask my mother how she could have left me alone with him and she would answer…”It wouldn’t be proper to have a nine-year-old boy in the same bedroom as his sister.”