We shared our deepest secrets with one another. Some of these secrets I cautioned her to never reveal to others, especially adults. I intuitively knew that some of these secrets would frighten people into actions we would both regret. People don't want their child walking around telling others they can see people no one else can see, can converse and interact with them, or can have those invisible friends tell when things are going to happen before they actually do. Margaret told me about these experiences. I on the other hand would only tell her about a small rabbit that would come in the night to comfort me when I felt alone or afraid. The point being, I understood that these were serious secrets between siblings and not something adults should hear.
Unfortunately, Margaret was unable to live with those secrets cooped up inside her. Around our twelfth birthday, she began her quiet revolt against parents, church, and society at large . . . but more on that later.
My mother converted to the Catholic religion when I was eight. I now believe this sudden change was predicated by a number of major events in her life.
First, she was severely maltreated (at least emotionally) by her own brothers and sisters. This was not really clear to me. I didn't realize until much later that her entire side of the family had an intense dislike for my father. I suppose it was primarily because of his alcoholism and his inability to improve the family situation financially. These were viewed as weaknesses, and rightly so, but should not have been a cause for cutting her off emotionally. The fact that all of my relatives were Methodist and my father was Catholic probably only added gasoline to the fire. I believe that this smoldering dislike for my father always weighed heavily on my mother. As children we were blind to the effects this was having on our mother, but it was certainly felt energetically.
Second, our mother recognized that if she were going to provide the best education she could for her children, she was going to have to get us out of the state-run neighborhood school that sat next to the projects, and into the closest Catholic school, which was miles away from the poverty-stricken area in which we lived.
Saint Mary's Catholic School sat adjacent to the site for the newly planned Miami Cathedral, and was located well outside the slum area in which we lived. St. Mary's parish would also make deals for those who couldn't afford to pay tuition, by having the kids work around the school or church after hours.
For me the change of schools was really aggravating. I was suddenly forced to walk more than a mile to school each day, going and coming, and later had to act as escort and protector for my little sisters. That may not sound like much, but believe me, it was a major pain in the ass. For example, Mary would sometimes walk the entire distance with her eyes squeezed shut, simply so I'd be forced to hold her hand. Of course this was a total embarrassment for me with all the guys in the neighborhood we had to walk through. To this day, she still claims this was because her eyes were sensitive to the sun, which was in our face both going to school and coming home. She is sincerely definite about this claim and it remains unarguable, but I still think it was because she got to hold my hand. In any event, I no longer view it as having been a pain in the ass. (I guess I've matured since then.)
Like Margaret, I've always thought of our sister Mary as being a lot smarter than I ever was, mostly because whenever Mary decided to pull the wool over my eyes or shine me on with something, it always seemed to work.
My third sister, Elizabeth, was "the good child." In every family there is a child who can do no wrong. That was Beth. She was always smiling and always glued to my father's side. She learned one of those basic family truths while still wobbling around the house in diapers—if you control the alpha male in the family you control everything. Why she gravitated so quickly to my father's side, I don't know. I do know that she and Dad had a bond that was unique. For some reason, the glue in their relationship just set up that way.
One of my fondest memories of Beth was watching her enter a room as a tiny child. She always reminded me of a small fawn gently tiptoeing into a clearing. In fact, for years, when barefoot she'd only walk on her toes. She'd tiptoe into the room with her large eyes scanning everything, and always seemed to be in control of her decision to stay or not stay, participate or not participate, depending on her mood.
Beth always sat within reach of Dad. He'd move, and she'd move right along with him. I think for her, he was always a sense of protection. She shared his field of energy. It's true also that this was very good protection against Mother. By the time Beth was born, our mother had given up fighting my father's alcoholism and had joined him at the bottle. As a result, there were bottles hidden throughout the house. They even hid them from each other.
I always worried about Beth's vulnerability. But in later years she showed me what true strength was all about. She married very young, as my mother had, but missed all the minefields my mother didn't. I remember first meeting her husband-to-be—long hair in the latter sixties, a sure sign of "instability." Yet Jimmy is still her husband today. A more solid bond would be difficult to find. She has raised a fine family of kids and has always been there for them. She may appear soft and is certainly a gentle soul, but she is also a rock, much like one you'd find only in a much older and wiser foundation.
My mother did eventually fall in the battle against the bottle. In the beginning of such an environment, my youngest sister, Kathleen, was born. Kathy was very small and very independent. She was also very much the tomboy. She did extremely well in track and field, and to just about everyone's dismay (and usual panic) was always demonstrating her acrobatic skills in the overly congested living room, doing maneuvers like reverse somersaults over the glass coffee table on the faux marble floor. She was also probably the toughest of my sisters. Not many knew that from an early age Kathy always carried a straight razor. I had no idea, until she showed it to me once after I returned from my first overseas tour. Would she or could she use it? Yes, in all probability, I believe she would have. Where did she learn to do that? Well, unfortunately it was probably from me. I carried one once as well. In my early teens I hung out with a couple of guys, spending a great deal of time on the streets. The guy I hung out the most with advised me to carry a straight razor for protection, so I did. He said no one would ever stand up to a person with a straight razor.
This young man had a severely abusive father who would use his fists as punishment for the smallest infractions. My friend was really quick and could usually avoid him, but he was trapped in his room one night and had nowhere to run. He pulled the razor on his own father in a desperate act of self-defense. His major mistake was not being able to use it. He spent about a week in the hospital and was really messed up. I learned from that incident that if you carry a weapon and pull it, you'd better be ready to use it. If you know you can't use it, don't carry it. I pitched my razor in a dumpster and only carried steel knuckles in my jacket pocket. Those I had no problem using.
It took a while, but my violent tendencies finally caught up with me. My sister Margaret came home from school one afternoon with her blouse badly ripped. She finally told me that one of the local gangs had molested her. Without going into an absolute rage, I quietly pulled my size 33 Mickey Mantle hardball bat from my closet and set off across the neighborhood to the gang leader's apartment building. I rang his doorbell and, when he opened the inner door, I swung the bat through the screen door. What probably saved his life was the decorative ironwork in front of the screen. I left him unconscious and caught two more members of the gang before the police caught me. One minute I was standing there with a bat in my hand and the next I was flat on my back in the parking lot seeing stars, looking up at a very large policeman.
The cop who disarmed me was an ex-Marine, an all-Okinawa jujitsu champion, who, thank God, also had a sister. In exchange for not being arrested and charged, I had to agree to start taking martial arts classes from him. I agreed because it sounded really cool. But as he started my instruction, he started me on my way to understanding open
-hand defense and what a warrior's code of honor meant. I quickly learned that because you can do something doesn't always mean you should. It sometimes takes more courage to walk away than to make a bad situation worse.
I took to the training like a duck takes to water. It was the kind of training I always wished existed for my sisters as well. Now young girls are encouraged to pursue that sort of training. Then, they weren't.
Our parents' drunkenness had numerous effects on us kids. When only one parent was drunk, the other was always angry and was someone we avoided at any cost. There were a few times when they were both sober, which were pleasant and enjoyable. However, it was the easiest when they were both drunk together. During those times, we were pretty much on our own and could go anywhere or do almost anything we wanted.
Being on our own meant having to provide our own food and clothing, caring for each other when we were sick, and—during the short time that I was home while my sisters were growing up—providing what protection I could within the neighborhood. None of this was an easy task, at least from my point of view, and most of the time it left me depressed, exhausted, angry, and enraged with life in general. Somehow we managed. Because I was male, I always felt that my sisters had it harder, and there was very little that I could do about that. I sometimes felt helpless about what they were experiencing and have always felt like they deserved better. While I know this is a product of finding myself in a part-time parental role, it is nevertheless difficult to shake. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure I really want to.
High school was probably the hardest time of my life. Entering my teen years, I was not prepared for what happens at that age, either hormonally or emotionally. Neither was my sister Margaret.
One day, Margaret suddenly and unexplainably decided that the visions we shared within our secret world of knowing were something she should be sharing with others. Since it included what some might consider strange, this was a major mistake. (I had to beg her not to say anything about my imaginary rabbit friend, from whom I derived comfort.) It immediately resulted in an appointment with a psychiatrist, followed by other appointments, and the eventual prescription for drugs to control what they called "her delusional mental state." The doctor said it would help to shut out her visions, and that all-invasive knowing that she proclaimed. The situation worsened for her around the end of the tenth grade when they discovered she was pregnant.
I knew who the father was, because she told me. But, because she asked me not to tell, I never shared the information with anyone else. I won't share it today. Who he was isn't really material now What was important and should have been noticed back then, was the fact that she needed an outside source for her self-esteem.
When our parents found out, they sent her away to live with our mother's sister, who lived in Baltimore. My twin lived there until she gave birth, at which point they forcibly took her baby away and put it up for adoption. This was the last straw for Margaret. After the pressure on her, the inappropriate responses from others, the years of serious antipsychotic drugs, and the taking away of her child, she collapsed. At that point she really did need to be hospitalized for a mental condition. The way she was treated, at least from my point of view, was cruel, unjust, and unusual punishment. From that point on, she was continually running away or spending time in one facility or another.
My mother told me they were locking her up for her own protection, because she was seriously mentally ill. I, of course, never believed this. In my own mind, it was because they couldn't control her. But then, from the time she was a little child, Margaret was never under anyone's control.
Many years later, Margaret told me they first diagnosed her as bipolar, which resulted in her taking some very powerful medications, most of which she said only made her condition worse. Whether she was or not isn't really material to me. I just know that over the years I watched the light in my sister's eyes slowly dim until it eventually went out. My heart aches for the years of loneliness and despair I know she suffered, and even now when I think about it, I become enraged by some people's views of psychiatry.
In retrospect, she probably did have a biochemical imbalance that needed some form of medication to help keep her centered. But back then, it was a new science and no one really knew what that meant. I wish she could have had the benefit of today's sophisticated medicines and the more enlightened counseling that's available. It would have been a completely different story and ending. I think it's one of the reasons I've always had a very soft spot in my nature for those who suffer mentally.
As I've already said, my years in high school were not good. Attending high school at Archbishop Curley, an all-boy school in Miami, was difficult. Our family had moved again, this time to the outer edges of Opalocka City. It was a brand-new project for the poor, the city's way of cleaning up the inner-city areas—and providing real estate to businesses needing space. The new project was built in the extreme northwest of the city, about thirty miles north of downtown Miami. It was different from the other places I had lived, mostly because it was new Until then I didn't know you could live in a "new slum." It was way out on the very edge of town, backing onto what was then swamp.
There weren't many gang symbols spray-painted on the walls yet, and all the outside lights still worked, but it made for a long commute to school every day—a little less than twenty miles in one direction. There was only one other kid, Frank, who lived as far away from school as I did. On most days, he would pick me up on his motorcycle and we'd meet up with the other guys we hung with at what we called the "Corner." It was a small gas station on the corner across from the all-girls school, Notre Dame, which was our sister school. The station didn't open until school started, so we could hang out there and exchange love letters, do a little smooching (that's kissing, for my younger readers), and smoke cigarettes unhindered.
We'd spend a lot of time talking and socializing with our girlfriends till their first class bell. I was usually acting as a courier—that is, carrier of messages from other guys to their girls or vice versa. (I didn't have a steady girlfriend until much later in my high school years.) Hanging out at the corner gave me time to sneak in a few cigarettes before my first class.
It was actually a Catholic priest who got me started smoking. I was 15, running errands at the parish rectory one Saturday to work off some of my tuition, when Father Neil came in and threw a carton of cigarettes at me. They were unfiltered Chesterfields. I asked him what he wanted me to do with them. His response was "Smoke 'em. That's what men do." So I learned, erroneously, that cool men smoked. I took up smoking because I thought it made me look cool. I didn't understand at the time cool was living your own mind. Now I wish I hadn't.
Father Neil also loaned me his car for dates in my junior and senior years. He'd throw me the keys on Saturday night and ask me to please bring it back with as little sin on the backseat as possible. He was an intimidating kind of guy. I mean, who'd mess around on the backseat of a priest's car?
The nuns of Notre Dame must have known about us guys meeting their girls out on the corner, even though we were just out of sight of the school. They always rang their first bell about ten minutes before our own, which gave us just the right amount of time to get to our homerooms six blocks down the road.
On afternoons and mornings when Frank didn't show up, I was forced to get myself to and from school any way I could. Sometimes I'd hitch a ride to a bus stop ten miles farther south with the man who picked my dad up for work. He drove an old Ford and smoked a pipe. He was always leaning forward and stuffing his pipe or messing with it in heavy traffic, while driving with his elbows. More than once I left nail prints on his dash when he was slamming on the brakes to avoid a rear-ender on the newly finished freeway. No one else would ride in the front seat for that reason.
I had sworn an oath to my parents that I wouldn't hitchhike, but that's about the only way I could make it to school on time. In hindsight, I have to say this was probably the dumbest thi
ng I've ever done. For four years, I caught rides from total strangers, sometimes after dark, always in the worst possible parts of town. That's probably where I first started to hone my psychic abilities. I relied purely on instinct when deciding whether or not I should get into a car that would stop to pick me up. If I got a certain feeling deep in the pit of my stomach, I'd wave them off and back away from the car.
But not every system is perfect. At least half a dozen times I didn't follow my own rules and found myself in a situation that could have led to serious trouble. The least problematic of these resulted in a broken bone in my wrist from bailing out of the front seat onto pavement at 45 MPH. I had accepted a ride from a man who seemed at first to be polite and nice. But when he made a sudden turn down a dark street and reached over grabbing at my crotch, I knew it was time to bail. After that, I always climbed into a car carrying a Coca-Cola, or nursing a cup of hot coffee.
The judo and jujitsu I was learning from my cop/ex-Marine friend was worth it. The solution to many of my problems grew out of my increasing familiarity with the martial arts. My friend taught me how to apply it on the street. Combining what I learned from him about self-defense with my growing natural instinct for smelling out trouble before it began, my problems seemed to fade. There is also a confidence that is bred from knowledge, and I'm sure body language played a great deal in addressing any potential problem. If you study animals you can see it in the subtle way they change their posture. Like in cats, a slight alteration in their stance shouts loudly to other cats—don't mess with me.
My high school years weren't very exciting. My twin essentially disappeared from my life. No one would even tell me where she was after they had sent her up to Baltimore to have her baby. I suppose they felt they were protecting me in some way. I instinctively knew something was wrong, but just couldn't quite figure it out on my own. After that, with her hospitalizations and supposedly protective incarcerations, her whereabouts became a state secret.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 4