Forever the Fat Kid: How I Survived Dysfunction, Depression and Life in the Theater (6 page)

A frequent visitor from Georgia was my mother’s friend Pargie, whom everybody called “Sis.” Sis and my mother had been friends since they were kids. I liked Sis a lot. I knew her from my visits to Atlanta. Sis was very “southern”; laid back and as unpretentious as you can get. And she loved to get “high”–on alcohol. (Hey, she was from a different generation, remember?) Regardless, Sis was always fun to be around. I could see how she and my mother became, and remained, friends.

In the summer of 1967, the second summer in our new home, Sis came to visit us for a week. Marlyn, the youngest of Annette’s kids, was also staying with us at the time. The events of that particular visit would stay with me for the rest of my life.

COUNTDOWN TO THE FIREWORKS (1967)

FRIDAY, JUNE 30th

Being a big brother isn’t always about being loving and protective of your younger siblings, which I considered Marlyn to be. More often than not, it provides you with somebody to tease and play jokes on–and I was guilty of both, especially the joke playing. Alas, sometimes jokes can backfire. I played two jokes on five-year-old Marlyn during this particular visit that backfired big-time! The first was something that I came across in a book of practical jokes. It involved a small gift box, the kind that a necklace or other small piece of jewelry might come in, some ketchup, and either your right or left hand–all necessary ingredients of which I had access to. You begin by cutting a hole in the bottom of the box, then slipping one of your fingers through the hole and resting it on a carefully placed piece of cotton, add a touch of ketchup and–voilá!–instant severed finger! From there all you need is some unsuspecting person willing to “look at what I found!” For me, that victim was Marlyn.

Why Marlyn? Because she was there! Besides, I figured that most of my friends my age were too smart to fall for it. So, did Marlyn fall for it? Abso-friggin-lutely! When she opened the box and saw the finger, she went hysterical! And not “funny” hysterical; we’re talking’ blood curdling screams hysterical. My mother came running into the room to see what was wrong. When she realized that I was responsible for scaring the poor child half to death, she was furious with me. Fortunately, I was past the age of being “spanked,” otherwise I might not have been able to sit for weeks. Poor Marlyn; it took my mother twenty or thirty minutes to calm her down. Finally, after much cradling and rocking in my mother’s arms and me showing her how it was only a “stupid trick,” Marlyn stopped crying and headed outside to play in the park across the street.

Apparently, this just wasn’t Marlyn’s day, because an hour or so later, she was back in the house in tears again (although nothing compared to the hysterics I had brought about earlier). It seems that she had been in the park across the street on the seesaw with one of the neighborhood boys and he decided to keep her end of the seesaw airborne. Marlyn got scared and, while trying to get off, fell to the ground. She was now covered in dirt and holding her arm saying that it hurt. Since she wasn’t in such a bad state this time, it was dismissed as nothing serious. My mother cleaned her up, kissed her arm to make it feel better, and sent her back outside to play.

SATURDAY JULY 1st

Other than Marlyn’s constant whining about her arm, the day was uneventful. Everybody assumed that her constant complaining that “it hurts!” was just an attention-getting tactic. After all, she was the baby of her family and was used to being catered to.

Later that evening, having not learned my lesson the day before about playing jokes on people, I pulled another prank on my unsuspecting little niece. I was sitting in our living room watching television. So was Marlyn, but she was restless, bored, and probably a little bit sleepy as well. She kept getting up for one thing or another. First to go to the bathroom, then to the kitchen for a snack, then to the porch, then back to the bathroom again. It was starting to annoy me. Around the hundredth time that she got up, I grabbed her by the waist as she passed me. I lifted her up and said, “That’s it, no more walking back and forth for you” and I pretended that I was going to drop her to the ground. I had a tight grip and never intended to let her hit the floor; I just wanted to scare her a little bit. As I quickly lowered her to the floor, I stopped just short of actual contact. However, she put out her arm–the one she had been whining about–to break her anticipated fall. Her body never touched the floor, but her arm certainly did. And when it did, her screams were deafening!

As it turns out, her arm was, in fact, broken; pretty badly broken too. Obviously, the damage had been done in the fall from the seesaw the day before but, of course, my little prank was the catalyst that brought everything to light. Next thing you know, Marlyn was being rushed off to the emergency room. Because I was now the bad guy, I wasn’t allowed to go with everyone to the hospital; I was made to stay home alone. And it certainly didn’t make me feel any better when everyone returned home later that night, except for Marlyn. The injury was serious enough that it required her to stay in the hospital for three or four days. Although I felt bad about my little prank, it was nothing compared to what I felt when I realized that by doing what I did, I was also somehow responsible for the chain of events that followed.

SUNDAY, JULY 2nd

Because Marlyn’s medical attention was now turning into a costly venture, the hospital required proof of insurance coverage. This was a problem since both of her parents, and their respective insurance cards, were in another state. Remember, this was in the days before people had easy access to fax machines, which meant that Annette and her family were going to have to cancel their holiday weekend plans to make the trip to New Jersey to provide the hospital with the necessary documents and signatures. Adding to the hassle was the fact that their car was broken down at the time. Her husband’s cousin offered to drive them to New Jersey to take care of everything. So, on Sunday morning, they all piled into his car and headed to New Jersey. Once there, the whole process at the hospital took up a pretty big chunk of the day. Of course, everybody ended up at our house before making the trip back to Philadelphia. And, of course, my mother made sure they were all well fed before leaving that night.

Earlier that day, my father had given us kids–Tina, Martin and myself–two dollars to spend as we wished. Tina and I spent the money almost as soon as we got it. I think we blew it in a matter of minutes on ice cream and comic books. Martin, on the other hand, still had fifty cents left. I decided to trade him one of my toys in exchange for his fifty cents. After some negotiation over what it was that he would get, we settled upon a cast iron airplane with fold-up wings and drop-down landing wheels that my mother had bought for me years earlier. He gave me the fifty cents and I gave him the airplane–in a paper bag. I told him not to let “Nana” (that’s what Annette’s kid called my mother) see it because she would get mad at me for giving it away. I reasoned that if she noticed it was missing, I knew where to go to get it back. I never saw that airplane again.

MONDAY, JULY 3rd

It was the day before the Fourth of July and I woke up to a beautiful summer morning, and an unusually quiet house. I remember the sun shining brightly through my bedroom window, the sound of birds chirping, and the comforting hum of the air conditioner in the window on the other side of the room. Sleeping late was a luxury I afforded myself whenever possible. And during the summer, since I didn’t have to go to school, I was always the last to get up. By the time I did finally rise, the house would already be a hotbed of activity. There’d be all kinds of sounds–the television or radio blaring, bacon frying, my mother talking on the phone, just a whole symphony of sounds. But this morning it was eerily quiet and still. Nobody was anywhere to be found.

It wasn’t unusual for my mother to run out and leave me home alone for short periods of time, but she always left a note saying where she was. I headed to the kitchen to see if she’d left a note on the refrigerator. There wasn’t one. That’s when the back door opened, the one that lead from our kitchen into the backyard. It was Sis. She had a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth and a water glass in her hand. Sis seemed to always have those two things: a cigarette and a water glass. What was inside the glass depended on the time of day. She was fully dressed, which I found a little strange because she usually stayed in her robe and pink plastic rollers until mid-day. She had a strange look on her face, a look of worry? Or maybe stress? Something wasn’t right.

“Hey, baby. You sleep good?” she asked.

“Yeah. Where’s everybody at?”

“They had to go to the hospital.”

“Why? Who’s sick? Is my mom sick?”

“No, Shug-ah, yo’ momma’s fine.” Then after a moment she added, “Annette is in the hospital.”

“For what? She was fine last night; she didn’t act sick or anything.” Now I was starting to get a little upset, although I didn’t quite know why. Nothing was making sense.

“Honey, on the way home last night…they had an accident.”

“What kind of accident?” My mind was racing now.

“A car accident.” She answered.

A car accident? Last night? On the way home? Well, what about everybody else? What about her husband? What about Tina and Martin? And her husband’s cousin, the one whose car they drove up in? Were they all in the hospital? Or just Annette? My mind was coming up with questions quicker than my mouth could verbalize.

“Don’t worry yourself, baby. It’s gon’ be all right. Want me to make you something to eat?”

“Yeah,” I said dryly. “Okay.”

It was an automatic response on my part; there was no thought behind it, and no feeling. I sounded like a bad actor reading cold from a script he’s never seen. I didn’t burden Sis with any more of the questions running through my head. My intuition told me that it would be pointless anyway. It was clear that whatever had happened, she didn’t feel it was her place to give me the details. That was best left to my mother and father, and I wasn’t going to put her on the spot. As Sis made me breakfast, we didn’t speak. To fill the silence, she turned on the radio. “Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum was playing.

That morning, like a few other significant moments in my life, has been stored away in the part of my mind reserved for those emotionally charged times that can–and do–return full blast at the slightest provocation. Situations you’re forced to re-live, emotions you’re forced to feel again when you want nothing more than to leave them in the past. To this day, I still switch radio stations whenever “Whiter Shade of Pale” happens to come on.

AND LIFE GOES ON

As Annette and her family headed back home to Philadelphia that night, it started raining–a virtual downpour. Annette’s husband, who was driving, attempted to pass another car on the wet pavement and, in doing so, sideswiped it, sending them skidding across the highway divider and into oncoming traffic. Their car ran head-on into a tractor-trailer truck. A witness to the accident said that bodies went flying from the car in all directions. It should come as no surprise that everybody was seriously injured. Tina suffered a broken hip and pelvis. Martin had a serious concussion. Both Annette and her husband were critically injured, with Annette being the worse off of everyone in the car. She had multiple head injuries, an assortment of broken bones, and her throat had been slashed almost from ear to ear as she was thrown through one of the windows of the car. She was comatose for well over a week. Her husband suffered a concussion and his cousin, the one whose car they were traveling in, was thrown from the car, hit by the truck, and killed instantly.

The rest of the summer consisted of trying to function normally under painfully abnormal conditions. In addition to our usual daily routines, we now had to incorporate hospital visits, field questions and provide updates to concerned family and friends and, hopefully, deal with our own personal stresses. As so often happens in times like these, taking care of one’s own needs gets put on hold. The most time consuming, and emotionally draining, was the hospital visits. Due to “quotas,” the family was split up and taken to different hospitals the night of the accident. Annette and her husband were taken to one hospital, while Tina and Martin were taken to another hospital about ten miles away. Not to mention that Marlyn, who was still hospitalized with her broken arm, was in yet another hospital over twenty miles away from these two! Family members would often check in to see who was visiting whom so that nobody would feel neglected. Often, my mother would drop me off at the hospital where Tina and Martin were and then she–either alone, or with another family member or friend–would go to visit Annette, picking me up on the way back. Times were very different then. The hospital staff was aware of the situation and demonstrated an incredible amount of concern and compassion. Even though I was only ten years old at the time, and no one under sixteen was allowed to visit the patients unless accompanied by an adult, they looked the other way during my many unsupervised visits.

On one such visit, I was alone in the hospital room with Tina. I had brought her some coloring books and comics to read. Our visits involved kid stuff. We mostly talked about cartoons, television shows, music, our friends, and relived our many trips to Palisades Amusement Park; never anything too heady. This particular visit was low-key though. We pretty much sat with the television on and read comic books. There was little conversation; we just didn’t seem to have much to talk about. Looking back, I’m sure that it was Tina’s state of mind that dictated the atmosphere in the hospital room that afternoon. After a rather long, although not particularly awkward, period of silence, Tina closed the comic book that she had been reading and turned her attention to the television set hanging from the wall. She showed no reaction to what was happening on the screen. Her mind was clearly somewhere else. Then she turned her head to look at me–she couldn’t turn much else as the entire lower two-thirds of her body were in traction–and asked, “Is my mother okay?” Putting on a smile best described as forced, I assured her, “She’s fine. You don’t have to worry about her. I think she should be getting out of the hospital any day now. She’ll come to see you as soon as they let her out. I’m surprised she didn’t call you already. Maybe she doesn’t have the phone number to this hospital.” I hoped that Tina couldn’t tell that I was making all of this up as I said it.