BRAVE MEN RUNNING
When I was 3 years old,
my Mother witnessed a murder.
Right across the street from our house.
In those days—
My Father, had become like a phantom in our lives.
He was right there, just out of reach like Zeus, a big myth we couldn’t see or touch.
We talked about him, did he miss us too?
The days filled up with Karen Carpenter’s lonely voice, drifting around the empty rooms, asking -
“Don’t you remember you told me you love me baby?”
We were alone in our house, my Mother and me, and the void my Father left, grew into an excruciating presence.
“A spectre in every shadow..”
Mystery! POOF
My Mother now watched their favorite show by herself.
And yes too much late night television had her constantly on edge or
“spooked” .
But this was different then hearing silly noises in the attic—
She had seen the whole thing right in front of her face, and as it started sinking in -she was suddenly very aware of how much she missed her husband.
Helplessly scanning the house like a map in her mind, she went room by,
paralyzed in her own kitchen.
What about the basement, had she locked the door?!
What about the windows?!
Saying to herself out loud-
“Calm down don’t be a FOOL… of course you did!”
Even so—
Was the killer was still out there, or he had taken off?
And where was the gun?!
“…The unidentified suspect took off running, gun in hand…”
A phrase she would hear later on channel 13.
She tried to stop shivering, as she braced herself for the police to arrive any minute asking what had drawn her to the big bay window in the first place.
That day was not out of the ordinary, or at least not in the beginning.
It had become her daily ritual to stand and watch for the school bus.
She would be anticipating it’s noisy brakes as the yellow monster wheezed into a halt, right in front out house, everyday at 4 o’clock.
For some reason this gave my Mother a sense of normalcy.
Her gaze followed the kids as they ran yelling to each other and disappeared into their different houses.
This was her signal that the day was over, and she could almost relax while the afternoon sunlight oozed into the room.
For that moment, she felt safe again.
Now she was numb and her brain felt sluggish…
“ A DEER IN HEADLIGHTS”
She hated being though of as WEAK.
Finally, when the men in blue uniforms appeared at the front door she nearly screamed when they rang the doorbell several times in a row. My Mother’s nerves jumped at each metal clang. She hated that awful sound, and now she could hear crying coming from my room down the hall.
Surprised by how many other officers were out patrolling, walking through flower beds and leaving behind shoe prints on the spongy green astroturf next door.
She let this annoy her until the front door to the house across the street opened, and a man in a blue was waving his arms frantically -
“HURRY OVER HERE!”
A burst of light shined ….the stains sparkled vividly on the floor.
“Yes…just a splash of color.
..not too red… it just gives you a subtle luminosity.”
The woman who sold makeup door to door had pushed her way inside, holding a compact mirror up to my Mother’s face and pleased with herself smiled saying.
“I’m sure this will get your husband’s attention tonight!”
My Mother snapped back-
“I don’t have one of those anymore.”
They were all asking way too many questions-
Where was her husband?
Was he on his way home?
And what should she say- she didn’t know?
She was humiliated that the “man of the house” had run off again, and now there was no place for her to hide.
This became a metaphor that defined our family for the next 45 years.
Everyone running to opposite corners, and not wanting to face our history.
A girl had been ERASED and no one wanted to talk about why.
Years later, when I brought that day up to her, my Mother shook in her seat,
her shoulders shaking as if a spirit had just passed through her, and escaped from her spine.
She sipped her infamous glass of sweet iced tea.
Pausing to cautiously mention the past-
“Mom—-
I wanna know— about that man— (we never say his name) is he still in prison?”
She looked back me blankly.
“Is he the reason you got remarried so quickly?”
My eyes can’t help but avoid the framed photos of alleged “happier times”
before my step father died.
All around the house.
His cancer was “vicious” according to my Mother.
I can confirm that his violent temper was too.
Their marriage was turbulent at best, and at worst he made me into a warrior for life.
Never being able to trust a man, I became fiercely protective of all women and children.
I started by standing up for my Mother and my little brother.
And I did not pretend to like him, not even for a day.
And I did not cry at his funeral.
My Mother says I should try to forget all the bad times.
I would love to, and the trouble is I don’t really remember too many good ones.
He showed up with a stuffed leopard under his arm as a belated birthday present for me—
“I’ve come to take your mother out like a “real man” does.”
Never fear, he would save us.
Before my parents adopted me, a bald and shiny three month old orphan-
(Courtesy of the Catholic Church)
Before the murder would change our lives forever-
My parent’s house was robbed.
It felt like an omen was perched up on their roof.
The happy couple had only gone to the movies with friends, their weekly date night, and when they pulled into the driveway the house looked almost the same.
At first glance, but then—
Something was OFF
The front door was wide open!
My Mother stayed behind in the car, sitting there as useless as a child,
but my Father rushed inside not thinking.
DANGER!!!
MEN COULD BE INSIDE!!!
But they were long GONE.
Along with my Father’s baseball card collection, my Mother’s jewelry, their stereo speakers and their records.
ALL GONE.
My Father got going pretty soon after.
“Eden” was now just a dead end.
My Mother felt violated afterwards, like they watched her in the house all day.
It was no longer their home.
Those eyes watching in every room.
They were never the same.
My Mother sat alone in the dark and watched T.V.
She was getting
DIVORCED.
She was angry and ashamed.
She didn’t want anyone to think this bothered her.
Silence is her secret weapon.
She needed to find a protector for her, and her child.
In those days, men didn’t stay all night in our house.
(The Devil You Know)
“Mother why must we RUN every time you say MAN’s in the forest?”
Bambi’s Mother never answered.
Gun smoke filled the air, and the other animals watched it all happen.
Mom snatched me up in the grocery store and shook me hard, like a rag doll.
Her pretty face, twisted and ugly with rage, as she said through clenched teeth-
“Just WAIT until we get home.”
As I was bent over her knee.
WHACK WHACK WHACK
She was beating me with her bare hand and wanting answers —
WHY had did I run away from her?!
WHY I had wandered into produce when she told me to stay by her side?!
Why didn’t I call her name when the teenaged girl grabbed me?!
I can only vaguely recall tasting her long greasy hair, when some accidentally got caught in my mouth as she quickly headed for the automatic doors.
My Mother was racing through the grocery store screaming my name.
The purple onions she had been holding, rolled on the floor.
The other people staring at her.
“FAWN WAY”
In a plain small suburb, our street was road to —no where.
Just a bucolic little square of land, plopped down near the Mason -Dixon line.
Maryland, is known for horses and heatwaves.
And of course the eastern shore does get hotter than she should.
“Heat so thick you can taste it.”
Sprinklers hissed outside in unison as my Mom teased her blonde helmet with a white plastic comb, freezing it into perfect dome with hairspray, and smoothed the hem of her blue dress.
It was already September but the cruelty of the summer humidity was still lingering.
She was determined to never live with her mother ever again, and as she brushed mascara over her lashes she looked at face closely in the bathroom mirror for the hard truth—
“Nope, she would rather struggle.”
She was on her own for the first time in her life and she had no intentions of going back now.
WANTED:
Art professor needs FULL TIME BABYSITTER / 2 boys/ please call for more information
The paper sat in the passenger seat, as the car drove towards the skinny grey farmhouse that stood by itself down a dirt road. The afternoon downpour was just slowing to a stop, as we sat there wordlessly, two children splashing in the mud puddles in their driveway.
THE “BOYS”
Dorian and Adrian had matching striped shirts and brown corduroy shorts, making it hard to tell them apart, but one was definitely a little taller than the other. They had shaggy matching bowl haircuts, and they were shaking the water off their heads onto each other like dogs.
They were completely oblivious to us sitting there staring.
My Mother, clicked her tongue then sucked on it in her disapproving way.
“NO BEFORE YOU EVEN ASK.”
Her powder blue eyeshadow narrowed as she looked at me in the rearview mirror.
Then she gave me my instructions.
NO GARDEN.
NO MUD PUDDLES.
NO MATTER WHAT.
“Daddy!!! DADDDDYY!!!”
We were in the mysterious house and the “boys” as my Mother would always refer to them, were racing around in Superman capes.
“Were you out there making mud pies for me?”
This slip of a young woman appeared from the ether, her smile was warm, and her gold bracelets jangled on her wrist as she tapped her skinny cigarette’s long pointy ash into a hunk of pottery. We stood there not moving in the middle of this giant messy library of piled books and records. As far as the eye could see the shelves were overflowing. And there were large paintings of naked on easels and hanging on the walls. The women looking right back at me.
As if to say “What the fuck are you looking at?”
They were confrontational with their creased thighs wide open and their pink puffy nipples exposed.
I was gawking as my Mother picked me up and took me into the other room.
Even the music they played sounded different than at our house.
Real Hippie Shit
And their droopy green succulents hanging in macrame planters seemed to lethargically move together to the psychedelic pulse, as the fan blew in hot blasts of air into the kitchen. Those colorful magazines spread out all over the orange formica table made me feel right at home as future artist.
“Art in America” had been used as a palette for someone’s paint. Pastel splotches were absently placed blobs on the glossy pages. Patchouli burned in the incense holder shaped like a dragon, and the woman with long black hair moved gracefully in her bare feet as she cleared away the clutter unapologetically.
Then she placed Oreo cookies and three glasses of orange juice on the table.
A bohemian man with his denim shirt open stood mopping his forehead with a white rag. Then he winked at us before he gulped down water in a jar, and leaned against the door frame.
His bell bottom jeans and leather sandals gave said he was a free spirit, while his bushy beard and slightly lazy left eye gave the impression he was from another timeline.
QUANTUM LEAP
“FARRR OUT!”
And who could predict that in just a few years, we would all become related through marriage?!
My Step Dad was their Step Mother’s Uncle?
This was our riddle to embrace.
Though my Mother is not superstitious, she is consummately practical.
“The Boys are going to start spending time at our house, while their Father is at work.”
I was slowly crashing in my car seat from all the sugar and muggy weather.
“They’re Mommy is so pretty, and she gave me Orange Ju—…”
“Don’t EVER say that again! I MEAN IT.
That was NOT their Mommy.”
CHERRY HILL
It was almost Halloween in 1981, and my Mother was dreading the endless-
“TRICK OR TREAT!!!”
She did not enjoy the idea of people lurking around at night, and especially not in their deformed masks. She never liked the holiday even as a kid, and maybe that stuck with her when a faceless man had tried to pull my Mother off the sidewalk when she was fifteen years old.
She was walking home alone from school, and angry that my Grandparents refused to let her take rides from her friends.
Then he was grabbing her—
She was screaming—
“HELP ME!!!”
As he pushed her towards the woods-
“SHUT UP OR ELSE.”
She dropped her school books—AND RAN FOR HER LIFE.
She was in total SHOCK when she turned around and saw that the man was running in the opposite direction?!
Running away from her!?
Now she was furious.
Her brand new pedal pushers and saddle shoes were completely scuffed up.
My Grandmother sent her to bed with an ice pack for her headache.
My Grandfather was out driving around for hours, circling until after dark, looking for the man in a red windbreaker. A baseball bat in the back seat.
IN COLD BLOOD
On the afternoon of the murder, the boys and I were napping, in my room-
And we woke up abruptly to the hollow eyes of Raggedy Ann and Andy, their worried faces all over the wallpaper.
First —
The sirens ripped through the atmosphere.
Then a piercing scream—- from across the street.
No that came before the sirens…
Then the smashing of glass.
A girl’s voice pleading-
“NO! NO —NO DON’T!!”
BANG!
“ Hello you have dialed 911- please state your emergency…”
“PLEASE COME QUICK—HE HAS A GUN!!!…”
The flat tone of the dispatch sent my Mother into panic mode—
“Please tell me your name and …”
“He SHOT her! Please hurry! I have children here….!”
My Mother shaking in her disbelief at the way the police walked so casually
taking notes in her house.
My Mother could have become invisible and floated out of the room, and from the way the cops ignored her, talking over her, it seemed like as if she wasn’t even there.
She was already on edge from being on hold for so long.
“MAM….Mam…
please slow down….and tell me exactly what you saw…..
………Do you know why anyone………
….Who would want to hurt your neighbor’s…?…. …
……Help is on their way…..
Please remain on the line…do not answer your door……
………Please try to keep the line free in case we get disconnected….
….MAM are you there???
(Long gaps)
Are you still with me….?”
Dorian woke-up screaming, then his little brother Adrian started wailing.
We were all crying when my Mother tried to stay calm on the phone.
Shiny black helicopters swarmed that evening, and my Mother was anxiously waiting for my Father to come home.
Like an apparition he appeared, and for a few days things kid of went back to “normal”.
For a little while I didn’t really notice that my Father had left again.
Then the nightmares started—
I could see her drowning, she was in the blues of the roaring sea.
“HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME”
Her pale arms in the reaching up, the rain hammering on the side of the boat, and the white nightgown vanished into the waves.
Natalie Wood was MISSING.
Her husband Robert Wagner was on the news lamenting that his wife had fallen overboard.
“SHE LOST CONTROL”
“SHE WAS DRUNK”
Christopher Walken, said he sound was asleep down below ship.
He swore he heard nothing that night.
Mother sewed a button on my coat,
breaking off the the end of the thread with her teeth,
shaking her head at the T.V.
“It’s obvious that he DID it.
That CREEP killed her and got away with it.”
STAR WITNESS
“…Maybe they could even request the death penalty, if they got lucky….”
The teenager’s lives were shattered.
One girl was 6ft underground and Tina, the petite brunette “he had come for”could no longer speak. Ingrid, her best friend, had taken a bullet right through the heart.
They were sixteen years old, and had permission to ride their bikes home from school like they did everyday. Their parents were at work and they were laughing, talking about boys and the Homecoming Dance, and didn’t notice the man watching them.
Then he knocked on the front door demanding to see Tina.
Ingrid slammed the door in his face.
GO AWAY!!!
Tina said they were terrified and hid in her house praying he would leave them alone.
Even though it’s been nearly 5 decades ago-
My Mother, with her “elephant’s memory” is still insulted that the sleezy Defense Attorney asked how she could be so “SURE” about what she saw that day?
Wasn’t she basing her story off of what she had been fed to say by the police?
Didn’t she have an “obstructed view?”
She said her cheeks burned so “hot” when he implied that she was an “unreliable” witness.
She glared across the room at the man smiling at her, a bible strategically placed in front of him.
His eyes were empty and mean.
He smiled and nodded at her as a dare to keep talking—
“I know what I SAW.”
My Mother will not let anyone make her look like a liar.
Besides, she knew her own damn window.
She prayed that her leg would stop shaking.
And as the trial dragged on , my Mother would come home and sit whispering with my grandparents for hours. They came to stay with us while my Mother went to court each day, and tried to pretend that everything was just fine.
“That AWFUL MAN— and what he did to those families is unforgivable!
He should pay for what he’s done to that poor girl….”
I overheard my Grandmother talking to my Aunt on our phone in the kitchen.
UNDEAD
When a rookie police officer testified that he been the one who had chased the man down, he explained he was shocked to discover the guy “rolling on his back”, his gun in the grass beside him, howling like a werewolf.
People in the courtroom shook their heads, chattering together in hushed voices.
The Prosecutor said calmly-
“ Sir, I’m sure you meant to say he was howling like a Coyote?
Because we all know that werewolves aren’t real…”
The courtroom broke into laughter.
“SILENCE! ORDER!”
The officer replied, a little embarrassed but true to his word—
“No sir, I meant to say that. He was hollering like a werewolf. And when me and the other officer asked him for his name he said —-
“I’M DRACULA!”
The courtroom erupted into applause when the jury announced—
“GUILTY MURDER TWO”
It was over now.
Well at least my Mother takes comfort that she did the right thing, but it still haunts her when she is called into sit before the parole board, having to express her biggest fear all over again.
“What will he do if they let him out?”
Dorian picked up the BILL BATEMAN’S matches I threw down when he asked me for a light/
“So how have ya been cuz?”
“WHO GIVES A SHIT?”
Laughing at the ridiculous quote on the other side of the matches.
Now that we were adults we clinked half empty pint glasses and chain smoked to our heart’s content. These were our dive bar days, when I played punk shows with my band, and he always cheered me on.
“ You gotta quit smoking those stupid things.”
I would always tease him while I smoked just as much as he did.
“DUDE.”
Then we sat there smiling, knowing we didn’t really mean it.
Not yet, there would be time.
We loved to deconstruct our weird childhoods, we were “country cousins”.
We had been through so much together.
But sometimes we had a hard time talking about the rough years.
He got more poetic and dreamy the later it got, closer to “last call”, and would wonder out loud what happened that day—
When life went sideways.
Tucking his hair behind his ears-
Dorian sat with his sadness, he was not the kind of person to wanna dwell on the negative, but he was really very deep. He loved his family so much, and missed his brother, who had moved to Malaysia. We had processed my adoption and the way our parents warped our history so that we would have each other for the rest of our lives.
To me they were everything, brothers, friends, and yes also cousins.
“I think I was so scared to ever come back to your house, after that girl got killed…..
But your mom was really cool though,
Dude think about it, she really took on a lot with US back then…
Me and and my brother were pretty fucked up after my mom———
—-You know how she died right?”
Of course this was part of our relationship, pretending and re imagining and trying to make something out of the unknown.
My Mom told me-
“It was Adrian’s birthday, he was only a baby, and Dorian was 2 years old.
Dorian found her in the garden, the sirens made him scream bloody murder…”
He would add his partial recollection—
“Yeah— that’s right,
We were going to make a cake with chocolate frosting…those fucking sirens never stopped…
You know I still wonder what exactly she was trying to get away from that day.
I can’t help but feel like it was me. She was so young and already a Mother, it couldn’t have been easy for her….”
Then we sat silently drinking the rest of our beers,
I said flicking my ashes-
“You know I think we were all changed after that day— like we became radioactive or something a little caustic.”
Smiling
Dorian smiled back-
He understood this was my way of saying he wasn’t the only one and it was time to call it a night.
He would hug me so tightly and would promise to text me when he got home.
I would then be left alone again to unravel my own Mother, she had turned into a sort of pale vapor that has always been there for me, but not always in the way I have needed her.
And it has taken me years of reconstruction and destructive living to understand where we lost each other.
It was not our fault, we are all just trying to live in this world, and it is nothing with out serious heartache, that’s how you know you have loved someone so truly.
And like Dorian something in me persists that it’s something I missed, some hidden clue.
And now he’s no longer here to help me hold it together, so I’m putting it down tonight, in words, and in spirit of my dear cousin who I will miss on this planet til I leave too.
All the old hurts and wounds are no longer needed.
I was standing in my purple pjs and calling out to her from the hallway—
“Mommy—- Are you there?”
The figure slowly rises up under the white sheet
A deep low sound can be heard.
Then the ghost moans—
“She’s not hereeeeeeee”
“She’s not hereee!”