by Stephen Biro
I think the mag was left by a boyfriend of hers named Saul who had a mirror business. Saul seemed like an okay guy. My Mom worked for him and they dated for a couple of months. He then disappeared along with her job. In the good ol’ days, you could fuck your employees and coworkers without the worry of a sexual harassment lawsuit. It just takes a couple of assholes to ruin the party. And there are always assholes.
Around then, in the fourth grade, some idiot farted next to me in class and blamed me for it. We’ll call this troublemaker “Chris.” The very picture of ’70s hot stuff, Chris came to school wearing silk disco shirts that made my Garanimals look more childish than they already were (you may remember Garanimals as the color-coded clothes that kids used to match their shirts and pants all by their lonesomes). Chris listened to KISS, and I had no clue what or who KISS was.
Anyway, after this dickhead blamed the fart on me, I was christened “Whiff!” The Whiff I was, and anyone who farted in school could point their finger my way. And how those little fuckers pointed! I was actually a good sport about it. Hated it but never broke down over it.
But it reached a new level of humiliation when a little shit named Alex wrote a story about “The Whiff Family” and was allowed to read it to the whole class. His two-page story ridiculed me and my family to the juvenile delight of my classmates. Alex’s pen had transformed my Mom into “The Whiff Monster”—a creature who served fart balls for dinner to our family in our garbage-can dwelling. I sat in secret mortification, but sadly, I had to laugh along with everyone else because it was my only option. Even the teacher seemed to be getting a kick out of the story, which frightened me because I counted on her to put a stop to this. She knew I had been made into a walking joke by my nickname, but it didn’t seem to matter to her. No, the only reprieve from humiliation came when that bastard Alex finally finished his opus. The adult in charge was supposed to protect the innocent—why didn’t that happen and why did she give him an A?
The Whiff name stuck until this girl named Michelle puked in the hallway while waiting for lunch. Fortunately for me, puke trumps a fart, and she became Puke Michelle. I gratefully drifted out of the limelight.
There were some good times and more bad times.
Soon, my mother’s depression landed her in the hospital. Before she left, she introduced me to our new, unofficial guardians: John and Cheryl. I wasn’t clear on where my mother had met these two; for all I know, it was through a classified ad.
Cheryl was pregnant, and John was a long-haired hippie type. The first thing I noticed about him was he was dirty and unwashed. I wasn’t yet a great judge of character, but I knew dirt. Young boys are experts on the subject. Ask any kid, and he will, at the very least, be able to describe the stuff in his front yard with great detail. Hell, I can even remember the taste of our neighbor’s dirt. I was that much of a dirt hobbyist.
This new family unit all sat around the big, discarded electrical wire spool that served as the kitchen table. My little sister was still with us, but I barely remember seeing her. I don’t know why. I should be able to tell you a lot more about her from that time, but I can’t. Wish I could.
Before Mom had left, John told me all about the football we would play and other fun we would have, spouting anything he could to reassure Mom feel better about leaving us kids with a couple of strangers.
I got a life lesson when Mom left: Just because someone says something… well, that doesn’t make it so. After Mom left for the hospital, er, “vacation,” I didn’t play football or have any other fun with John and Cheryl. Instead, I got beaten and kicked while being used as a slave to fetch cheese sandwiches and drinks for their friends. I was abused for their amusement. Things were thrown at me as if I was a fucking unpaid carnival sideshow freak.
I also remember Cheryl lying on my Mom’s bed having her belly rubbed by two guys in a sexual way. I watched for a couple of minutes before they saw me. The door was slammed in my face.
This sort of behavior lasted a couple of months, until my uncle showed up unexpectedly. He freaked out when he found a huge bag of pot on the living room table. He tried to kick out all the dirty hippies, and it got ugly fast—even more intense when the police arrived. Some of the hippies split but John was arrested and Cheryl was evicted.
My mom returned from the hosp-, er, “vacation,” and that’s when the threats and harassment started. We lived in a wooded area so the hippie clan could come from out of nowhere to screw with us, and they did. I guess they were some kind of gang. Cheryl came back to threaten us and got arrested. She screamed that her hippie co-horts would kill us. “They’ll make you pay!” Also around that time, John was arrested again for trying to break down the front door with some of his friends.
That period remains a blur of images and emotions that confuse me. I suppose I could give more details, but I don’t want to remember. There was more to it—there always is—but let’s keep it at that, huh?
Shortly after, Mom went into the hospital again, so my father took us in. The house we had been living in was a shambles, and my paternal-side family was afraid our belongings were infested with cockroaches or disease. So we ended up leaving our stuff behind and I lost almost all my possessions. The whole of my father’s clan were germ-o-phobes beyond reason. I’m not. I believe a little floor spice helps keep the immune system on its toes. My father’s paranoid side of the family tree tried to scare me. Scarred is more like it.
I was allowed to keep a small box of Mad, Crazy and Cracked magazines, but only after it had been sprayed with untold amounts of bug spray. Anytime I removed an issue from this box, I got high from insecticide fume remnants. I had collected humor mags every time I came across one, but Dad threw hundreds away; I could only keep what fit in that small box.
So began life with Father. Looking back, this was a short chapter in my life but a big one.
MY FIRST CHILDHOOD STEP TOWARDS ATHEISM
My father was a good man but very set in his ways. He never drank or smoked. He was an exercise junkie who ate healthy food. And when I say healthy, I mean a “soy beans, granola bars and salads with the occasional peanut butter sandwich for lunch and once-a-week baked chicken with a salad”-type of healthy. This doesn’t sound too bad, but this was our diet in its entirety. And this was the ’70s! What’s more, the treat of baked chicken was only consumed in the winter. My father’s colon must have been smooth enough to host the Olympic toboggan finals, and every team would break the previous year’s world record.
If we had to eat out on the road, it was Burger King, home of the mother-fucking Whopper. Why? Because it was flame broiled and not fried in its own fat. Ah, what used to pass for a selling point to the health conscious; as I’ll say many times: the ’70s were a different time. In any case, we ate healthily and did a lot of sports.
My sister and I traveled with Dad as Mom was busy cracking up. As he searched for a job that could support us all, we went from New York to Florida, Florida to California (with a layover in Texas), up to Colorado and back to New Jersey. It was an amazing time. My dad’s big, green van was our room on wheels. We had plenty of legroom and plenty of peanut butter sandwiches. Some nights we stayed at motels and others we slept in the van. Luckily for us, my Dad used our college fund (left for us by his folks) and instead spent the money on amusement parks and all the Big Red Gum we asked for. He never really found any work so we ended up back in New Jersey.
Looking back, I think it was all a ruse to show us some fun—show us the country while trying to make up for life without Mom. It worked. One of the trip’s highlights happened in Colorado. We were driving up the side of a mountain on a winding road that bordered some sheer cliffs. Peering over the side, you saw nothing but blackness beyond the guard rails.
We reached the top, and as we started our descent on the other side, we ran out of gas. My dad cursed and told us to buckle our seat belts since we were going to have to coast all the way down. I was ecstatic. It felt as if we were free falling do
wn this narrow two-lane mountain road, and I was transfixed by the view down the precipitous side. It was snowing, and my dad started to count off mile markers. He reached at least 20, and we coasted for over 30 minutes.
At the bottom of the hill was a hotel, and we whipped into the parking lot and rolled to a slow stop. A couple people ran out of the hotel and told us to come inside quickly; a bear had just attacked a dog in the area. This was even more exciting than the coasting, and when we woke the next morning, we learned the bear was trapped in a cage that had been set up during the night. Colorado was exciting!
During this trip, I formed a set of beliefs that would stay with me for a long time. I was in the back seat of the van when I asked my Dad if he believed in God. He turned around and told me, point blank, without a blink or trace of a smile on his face, “I won’t believe in God until he comes up to me and taps me on the shoulder.”
I was shocked and a little dismayed. I attended church a couple of times with Mom but religion was never explained to me. I think it’s difficult for parents to explain religion or God to their kids, worried they might fuck the kids up with some wrong answers. Church with Mom without any explanations had left me curious.
Dad was the smartest guy I knew so I valued his opinion. And if he didn’t believe in God, then God must not exist. I mean, Dad had been on the planet a lot longer than I. My mom had never told me anything about Him, and I had no concept of her beliefs. So from that day, I started proclaiming I didn’t believe in God.
My new atheism didn’t stem from any reasoning on the matter but merely because of Dad’s beliefs. While it’s important for parents to have The God Talk with their kids, it should be open-ended enough that no inadvertent brainwashing occurs. After all, beliefs are very personal and a true choice in this life. Kids are very impressionable and swayed by their parents but they still have to make the choice in their life.
Dad found a job in New Jersey, and he registered me back into the fourth grade. I had been taken from Mom before completing the grade and had to repeat it. I started this school with a clean slate and began a better life in new surroundings. No Whiff here!
Classes were unremarkable except for the English periods. I fell in love with my English teacher, whose name I forget. Sporting her salt-and-pepper bouffant hairdo and black horn-rimmed glasses, she got her students excited about reading and the classics. She wasn’t a paycheck teacher, she got satisfaction out of sharing knowledge. I’ve been lucky enough to be taught by three such teachers in my life.
School was good, and I was having fun developing an interest in bicycle motor cross, more commonly known as BMX. All my friends had Redlines and Mongooses with Tuff Wheel 2’s and alloy seat poles and chromies for their tires. I didn’t have a bike but was a good rider from my time spent on borrowed bikes. And after much pleading, my Dad agreed to buy one for me, but he was only willing to shop at Toys R Us. They didn’t have a good selection, but the Huffy Bandit caught my eye. That model may not have gone down in the annals of cool-bike history, and I don’t know how long they were in production, but it was certainly the best bike I could find at a toy store. The handlebars twisted up and back (much like a ten-speed but in the opposite direction) while the frame attempted some wannabe futuristic detailings, with extra chunks of metal in odd places. And the tires? Well, they were wild looking, with a half-inch rubber section in the middle, which tapered away into square knobbies that looked like they would grip the dirt for the ultimate traction on a turn. (The tires actually gave no traction, despite their crazy design, and I ended up on my ass more times than I liked.)
I was so happy and proud to have my first real bike. As soon as Dad finished assembling it, I wanted to show it off to my friends. Boy, was that a mistake.
I peddled excitedly to a wooden ramp my friends had just made. I pulled up to them with a skid worthy of my cool new bike. To my surprise and disappointment, they laughed their asses off.
“What the fuck is that?”
“Is that thing held together with plastic?”
“Look at those wheels! Look at those wheels!”
I kept insisting, “No, guys, it’s a cool bike!” They laughed even harder.
So I backed up and pumped the pedals hard towards the ramp. I had to show them a thing or two about the fucking Huffy Bandit! I soared through the air and landed a great distance past the jump ramp. They stopped laughing. Apparently I had laid down the gauntlet: “Okay, let’s jump for distance.”
So we jumped the Hell out of that ramp, and the Huffy Bandit performed surprisingly well against the Redlines and Mongooses. But jumping ramps and creeks and everything else with the BMX kids took a heavy toll on my new bike. I snapped the frame almost in half. My father knew welding, so he soon had it roadworthy again. Over the next months, he welded that bike so many times it slowly became a pure-metal beast that weighed more than I did.
My sister and I lived with Dad for about two years. We were latchkey kids because he worked a lot, sometimes until late at night. We filled our time with episodes of Love Boat and Fantasy Island.
We lived in a two-bedroom apartment, so my sister had her own room, and Dad and I shared the other. I had half the room, and Dad had the other half. My Dad was dating at the time, and in retrospect, I realize ;I was cramping his style. How could he bring women home, with me sleeping on a twin bed a few feet away? I can only hope some of those “late nights at work” actually had him out getting some tail.
My dad taught me frugality, showing me how a dollar could be stretched beyond its normal limits. He was a saver and a fixer. He could fix anything, and everything had its place. In our spotless room, I had a single shelf for my things that I kept clean and tidy—too tidy. I think that’s why I later became a slob. Hell, I know that’s why. “Take that Dad! I just threw my dirty underwear into the microwave!” (I actually did stick my underwear in the freezer once. Ah, the wonders of ice-cold underwear in the dead heat of summer…)
My sister frequently got me into trouble by blaming me for stuff she did, and we had all the other usual brother-sister squabbles. She would hit me and I would hit back, then she’d rat on me, and I’d get into trouble. She hit first, but I hit harder, and she would get pissed off.
RELIGIOUS MISHANDLINGS AND WALKING DOWN THE WRONG PATH
Dad worked hard but ended up hurting his back pretty badly. He needed surgery so couldn’t take care of us anymore. We had basically been on the lam with him anyway, since our mom had legal custody of both of us. We hadn’t heard a thing from her and maybe would have been featured on a milk carton if they’d been doing that back then. After getting out of the hospital, Mom had married a guy named Tom and ended up in Chicago. Tom was a real piece of work, I would discover.
Dad got in touch with Mom, and she was thrilled to take us both back. She and Tom were in the middle of moving to South Carolina where Tom had taken a job. They already had a house picked out. So Dad packed us up, and off to SC we went. I looked forward to being with my Mom again since I thought Dad was such a hardass. I think a lot of children of divorce must do this: worship the parent that doesn’t have custody. That is, until they’re back living with them. “Grass is greener,” whatnot. But we moved back in with Mom and life was good.
I soon had my first South Carolina girlfriend, but nothing happened between us—not even a kiss. A shame, because other boys told me she was a slut who liked kissing.
School was a breeze. I got all As since the schools in the South seemed way behind those in the North. When I was in the sixth grade, I felt as if I was doing fifth-grade lessons.
I fished and explored the woods. Since we lived in the boonies, those were the basic entertainment options. My mom and stepfather had a wonderful German Shepherd named Shotzie. She was my best friend, and she accompanied me on all the exploring, fishing, and fun.
My parents were members of a nearby church, and they became good friends with the pastor, who frequently dropped by for drinks and dinner. The church building wa
s a doublewide trailer, and we attended a service every other Sunday. We sat on foldable metal chairs, and after falling asleep once while leaning back in one of those chairs, I woke to a loud crash with the whole congregation staring at me. “I’m glad you could join us Stephen,” intoned the Minister. Humiliated, I picked up my chair and pretended to immerse myself in the service with copious deliveries of “Amen” and “Hallelujah!”
This church was creepy to me. They spoke in tongues, waved their hands around, and generally spazzed out. All that shaking and Holy Ghost-type seizures were traumatic to the kid who didn’t understand the rituals. And I had no clue what was happening (remember, my Mom wasn’t much on explaining religion).
But it gets really twisted. Understand, my stepfather was an accomplished alcoholic, and by “accomplished” I mean he could function while drunk. He could handle a decent job for about a year or two before getting fired. Then he was off to the next company. Being an alcoholic means having alcoholic friends, so that explains the minister and his wife making constant appearances at our house. I’d been to their house, met their kids and had some fun times. But the fun ended one night, as they dropped a bomb that helped reinforce the anti-religion beliefs Dad had fostered in me.
It started as a normal visit from the pastor and his wife—just drinking with my parents. The booze was flowing freely, and I was floating around the house as usual, only sometimes listening to the adults talk. But then I was riveted when I overheard the visiting couple tell my folks they had something important to confess. It sounded heavy, so I sat my happy ass down on the couch, keeping my body flush against the sofa so nobody would realize I was there. Although the conversation had obviously turned serious, I wasn’t nearly prepared for what I was about to hear.
Sobbing, the pastor and his wife revealed they had been seducing neighborhood children and teenagers. As they confessed to tawdry threesomes and foursomes, I initially had wishful, prurient thoughts about being a seduction victim, as the wife was pretty hot. Mom and Tom—aghast—tried to get the couple to leave our house. But the pastor and wife had a strong need to unburden themselves, and the confessions kept on coming. The alcohol was a serum that brought out some ugly truths that night.