more autobiographical notes for Maria because that last one's were placed under caution

Ok well in the years of 7th and 8th grade, yes, the transition happened from city punk to suburban lost boy...what sticks out was an event of a sort of how to say this, group attack on a female in a school swimming pool. Very serious business. Very serious business. I had cut classes and left school when each person involved was summoned which was very poor timing because of course, with you mysteriously missing, all the others simply blamed me. What caused the attack, what provoked it what anything, beyond my comprehension and I should have gotten therapy of some kind after that to deal with it. Christ that was many decades ago can you imagine what would have happened nowadays? I'd have been imprisoned. Not proud of it does not speak to the horror of what happened. The fact that I cannot remember it is bad enough but the second fact that I was not there to defend myself until it was too late (I think it had been on a Friday and I left for Toronto for the weekend with my father, grandfather and maybe uncle...so the ramifications did not hit until after I got back.). I was suspended for the rest of the year which to be fair was not long, maybe a few weeks left but during the final exam period which would have led to me being held back. I don't want to trivialise the act of a 13 or 14 year old but I had no idea and yes, I keep going back to the fact that had I been there when my name was called with the others I could have defended myself. I believe to this day that of course all the others were involved as well. It had been a group attack in a pool, surely I wasn't alone or they wouldn't have been called as well. I was blamed as the sole culprit because nobody really wanted to deal with the distastefulness of it all and this was the easiest way out. She must have named all of those accused but only I took the fall. Not that it diminishes the attack of course, I was horrified by this act that seemed to happen in slow, blurry motion, which I remembered nothing of as though I too had suffered a trauma. But I was singled out and that too was wrong (not as wrong as participating in a group attack and it was touchy feely attack I seem to recall breasts in a revealing bikini or something along those lines although yes, the trauma probably blunted out worse details...I feel a lot of shame about this and never think about it other than now. A horror stain on my adolescence. My mother made me go back to the school and work out some sort of agreement wherein I could come back for exams but can you imagine the humiliation? Everyone whispering, everyone looking at me. Ok, yes the girl, I think her name was Tracy Hurley and I only remember a sort of slutty demeanor, tight clothes, heavy makeup and no, this doesn't change facts nothing changes facts but I am sorry to even have to talk about this.

***

Yes.  I did.  I mean, I suffered as a result of it, no doubt.  I might have been after my grandfather died, one who used to called me Michelangelo and was bed-ridden or couch-ridden as the case may have been with TB and was constantly coughing yellow stuff into a hanky and he was always nice to me and he and I kept secrets together.  He was my mother's father.  Teddy.  She said that he used to spend long hours in the corner bar in Albion.  He worked in a canning factory.  That whole side of my mother's family was weird.  Her aunt died of cancer or had been raped or both as a child.  Her sister lived in a backwards sort of rural life.  My mother seemed to have escaped some horrible small town fate, either on her own or for other circumstances and then she married my father.  They were married until she died of cancer.  If I think of her back then, escaping, I have empathy for her but if I think of her as my mother, overprotective, hateful, overbearing, demanding, bossy, controlling, right wing Trump loving brainwashed woman, I have zero feelings for her.  It is a marked point in my llife but this doesn't hav to do with that sublation element of youth, that all came after.  Why was I even referring to it oh right, because my grandmother had been staying with us when the suspension incident went down.  I can't rememvber if this was the end of 7th or 8th grade. I remember venturing up to the High Schdool element of the school (junior high was also in the same building).  I remember runnng up at a dance and kissing a girl on a bet.  There was a lot of sexuality at the time so this attack might have been related also to uncontrolled or confusing hormonal changes. In the home, I don't remember the adjustments.  I had no organised sports for two years between Pop Warner football and High School football.  So those two years were a kind of hell probably.  Maybe I've blacked them out.  I only remember lockers at the end of the year, coming back to that nearly abandoned high school after suspension and taking exams.  Maybe it was indeed my 8th grade finale because I seem to recall that HIgh School would be different, welcomed change.  But it's like two years of my life were gone.  I don't remember anything that I did other than that assault.  I remember around the school there being a pond and small wooded area.  And seeing the High School kids how they didn't seem like adults but this was the late 1970s so all the music, like Fog Hat Slow ride and maybe some sort of Junior high dances...I don't know if it was so boriong or so traumatic.  Maybe a mix of the two, this transition.  

****

He was the first person in my life, close to me, who died.  I remember they had him laid out in a casket in the wake and I kept looking at his face and could not believe he would never say anything again and I think I sort of cried hysterically at the wake and nobody knew why I was reacting so strongly but I think it was that idea of never hearing him open his mouth or talk to me again and that pasty face all done up with makeup, his pointy nose.  Death was weird and scary and creepy.  I remember that my parents were gone and I was at home and my father drove all the way back to Rochester to tell me that grandpa had died and took me all the way back to Albion for this funeral or wake and he and I had a long time to talk in the car and he told me about his years early years meeting my mother and all that.  Or I might have that mixed up with when my mother's mother died.  Both were big traumas for my mother whereas my father bore the weight of hiis parents dying quietly.  His mother was hit by a drunk driver at christmas and paralysued, both mentally and physically, she could barely function and my father told me it was too bad that his father hadn't gone on to live his life rather than stay by his mother's side for years to take care of her in what was not a quality life for either of them.  And I don't even remember my father's father dying.  I was probably gone from the family by then.  

*****

Oh, that is hard to remember.  Junior high dance yes, so 1975 or 1976?  Let's see, OJ ran for 2000 yards in 1975, didn't he?  Which meant that my grandpa was still alive in 75 he must have died in 76 same time really that Elvis died, same day I think.  Elvis died in 16 august 1977 ok so that was 8th grade.  So must have allso been the time of the attck.  The kiss at the juiior high dance would have been before all that.  You know, just kids.  Pretty girl, bet you won't kiss her.  Just ran up and kissed her.  There were a couple of girls, Karen Bernardo and Lisa or Kim something, a brunette and a blonde, and both of them had breasts by then unlike a lot of girls and you know, oozing sexuality.  Kim was blonde with large breasts and we used to talk to her in a non threatening way about it, fascinated by her breatsts.  Karen Bernardo on the other hand, bawdy and sensual every step of the way.  Yet I can't remmeber if it was one of the two I kissed on a dare.  This was during the time that Happy Days, that show about the 50s was on and this kind of thing, kissing a girl on a dare, was the kind of thing that they would have done on that show so the idea probably came from that, oh yeah there was an Italian brunette, it was her, but I can't remember her name, exotic beautiful Rochester italian, I liked her and she was the one I kissed.  Gladly.  The bet was just an excuse to do what I wanted.  That was the other thing - before the move from the city to suburbs, I had a steady line of girlfriends.  When I moved to the suburbs I had the pent up sexuality of being in my early teens plus what seemed like no outlet for it.  No sports either, jesus, what did I do with my time?  Holed up in my room no doubt, writing stories, creeating fantasies, playing elaborate dice games.  Reading.  Keeping to myself.  

****

Well, I am certain that it was during this period of time that I had my first org@sm ever.  By accident probably humping something for some reason and then suddenly that explosion occurred and I had no idea what it meant.  Nobody to talk to about it.  I must have kept magazines.;  I think my mother knew and mentioned it and said she knew but it was ok.  Then once I fell asleep after humping nude in my room a bunch of cushions shaped like a body and surrounded by dirty magazines and my father came in and must have known of course but he didn't say anything my mother had to deal with it instead and the elaboration of what I did, you know, not a simple act but one which had been well thought out and prepared with dirty magazines and body shapped cusions etc, completely naked, wow, it was the whole thing and of course, once I discovreed that I slept with a girl for the first time but that might ahve been a year or so later

****

General?  Four years of life.  Four formative years of life.  There was alots of football for three of those years.  That formed social ties.  I also went through that final period where I could see through everyone and the phoniness and predictability of everyone and high school, as though I were an adult and these were mere children but that didn't come until my final year.  When I was a freshman I dated a girl named Michelle who was a junior or senior.  We didn't have sex.  We held hands and kissed.  She invited me to her junior or senior prom but I refused.  I didn't really care about her.  I went to her house sometimes and watched college football on saturdays and her mother made me sandwiches.  I was oh christ, how could I forget, I was in love infatuated with Lori Hoff whose sister was allegedly a model in Paris and she was a beautiful Farah fawcett kind of blonde at least a year or two older than me and I wrote her seccret love leetters in French because she also studied french like I did.  I studied French because when the movie Jaws came out, I wanted to be an oceanographer and (so two desires, to be oceanographer or sports writer and never dreamed about working for an insurance company, ha) and to be oceanographer I needed to learn at least another languge and because of Jacques Cousteau, French was popular.  So I studied French and so did Lori Hoff but I don't think she was as good at it so my letters in  French she had to bring to my French teacher who we shared there was only one teacher for all four levels of French...she was a crazy motor running young woman but cool...anyway, I wrote those love letters and most of the end of my freshman year was caught up with infatuation.  I also played football again for the first time and did very well.  Same level of success as Pop Warner althouogh I wasn't getitng bigger and this was going to be a concern. later on.  Anyway.  It would have been 1977-1978.   Saturday Night Fever came out and like every single saturday for  amonth or two it seemed like, I went and watched that movie because it was R rated and it was the first time I'd heard the world "fuck" used in public and disco dancing was big and disco dancing had a big effect on my life in the sense that I bought disco clothes and wore them, bought them with my paper route money, polyster disco clothes and wore them to school and disco danced and met chicks at thiis place called something 2000 Odyssey 200O or something because on Sunday nights it was non adults night meaning no booze but it was normally a disco night club so I could have the experience of disco dancing oh wow that was fun.  Meeting girls and dancing just like in Saturday night Fever although I was younger than Travolta in the movie of course.  The disco phase lasted awhile a year at least maybe two.  

****

Yes it was difficult because I no longer felt part of any of them.  I couldn't be arsed to pretend.  It was all a shame to me.  These people were never going to go anywhere or move out of the orbit of their own little soap operas.  I was close friends with this girl who was first dating one of my teammates and then broke up with him to start dating another teammate who was a dick in my eyes, the new boyfriend, Terry Earl Campbell (because he was a running back and I sense you don't care but Earl Campbell was the running back for Houston Oilers back in the day, the best...) anyway the girl, Etta, and I were very close confidantes, she told me all of her problems with love and all that, we were like best friends but it was entirely one sided, she talked, I listened.  I had other girlfriends like that afterwards, many years later, namely Surina, but anwyay, the point is, I saw all the bullshit from the inside, the fake dramas about stuff that wouldn't matter in a few years, the soap operas I emphasise.  I liked girls myself who wouldn't like me back unitil like my juinior year by then my acne had gone away which was bad in freshman and sophomore years and made me feel like a loser and thus I acted like one and when i got to the winners circle I realsied all of it was fake anyway.  These people were nobodies and would remina nobodies in paritcular once school was over and the little kingdoms they ruled disappeared and they were out in the real world.  I'm trying to remember what, if anything, put me in the real world.  No tragedies during this period.  I hated my family mostly.  They wanted to control me but what do I mean by that?  My schoolmates drank alot far more than I was aware of. beceause I didn't usually hang out with them.  So my mother was always jumping down my throat for the slightest tihngs. Bad report from school?  How?  I was getting top grades.  What was I doing wrong?  I didn't get into trouble like other kids but she would find something anything and use it for a reasson to take shit away, like disco dancing, forbade me from going any more for some reason.  I had a friend Danny Izzo who had his father's cadillac and we would go out every Sunday and dance and meet girls but there was soemthing my mother didn't like about it who knows what and another thing taken away.  I mostly hung out with my friend Dave the Fat Catholic and we got high.  I drank once, got sick but nobody knew.  I slept with my first girl.  I dunno, I am trying to imagine why I felt superior to my high school colleagues and I guess for somet reason, something trigged in me that made me reaslise they were never going anywhere and there was no way I was going to stay there.  I hated it there.  I wanted to see the world.  

*****


Commentaires

Posts les plus consultés de ce blog

random convo with Claudia to bring back the past

CITIES Geographical exploration with Claudia (First Paris experiences plus more)