I have definite and vitally bright images of that beating in the bathroom she is referring to—so gathering us around to watch Johnny getting dragged in there and the sounds of him getting hit with that belt more than certainly did their job. After that, I don’t think my dad ever had to administer another belt beating—all he had to do was threaten to take it off or begin to unbuckle it.
And I distinctly remember how my mom would whack us on the knuckles with a hair brush or a wooden spoon or even a dough roller—whatever she happened to have in hand when we got on her nerves. She was like a Ninja Mom—suddenly springing on you with a fork or a can of Spam or a whole cucumber. My mom was like Rachel Ray on steroids: she would be chopping up some carrots one second and then furiously mugging you with a Crock-Pot cover the next.
My dad? All my mom needed to say was “Wait until your father hears about this.” Yeah—that’s right. Until he HEARS about this. Most kids receive the “Wait until your father gets home”—which usually meant you had at least a few hours to come up with a different story or maybe move a few facts in the story around a little bit. Embellish. Rehearse. But my dad was a mechanic and he worked in a garage about five minutes from the apartment so all Ma had to do was pick up the phone and about seven minutes later he was headed up the back stairs—removing the belt from his pants as he did so. Your ass would start hurting just watching him.
Let’s put it in plain, blunt verse: if someone punched me hard in the face every time I lit up a cigarette I’d either have to start smoking while wearing a football helmet or just quit smoking. The same Pavlovian dog rule applies to kids—anything they get hit for doing you can be damn sure they will not wish to do again. No pain? No gain.
The state of Massachusetts recently considered a bill brought by its Joint Committee On Children that would become the country’s first ban on corporal punishment of kids. It cost several million dollars.
(This reminds me—by the way—of the study done two years ago—again costing millions of dollars—to find out that being in a rock ’n’ roll band actually shortens your life span. Yeah. They had to spend that much to figure out that being in a band increases your alcohol and drug intake and places undue stress on the heart, lungs etcetera etcetera. Not to mention being married to Courtney Love. That REALLY shortens your life span. Especially if there’s a shotgun in the house.)
So Taxachusetts actually spent millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and an unbelievable amount of absolutely wasted time to figure out that whacking kids on the ass or across the back of the head not only makes them cry—it strikes the fear of God into them. This is roughly equivalent to spending seven million dollars and sixteen months to find out that sticking your hand in a fire not only hurts like hell—it sears the flesh and almost certainly guarantees you will never ever ever ever do it again.
What the fuck is getting a good hard kick in the ass or a sharp swack across your skull SUPPOSED to do? Make you ask for more? For every action there is an equal and opposite REaction—in this case? Whatever the fuck you just did wrong you sure as hell won’t do wrong again.
Unless you actually LIKE the pain, in which case the physical abuse becomes a defendable form of medical research: your honor, by smacking my son several times over the course of the last three weeks I was able to discover that he is, in fact, some kind of pain freak.
Shit—when I was a kid even school wasn’t a safe haven. The nuns would whack you with any weapon available—a ruler, a stapler, their hands. I had a nun wallop me across the back of my head one time because I couldn’t come up with seven of the ten commandments. She hit me with a Bible. I asked her if thou shalt not hit a kid with the holy book was one of the seven I had missed. The class laughed. She hit me with the Bible again. It was worth the pain.
Even if the nuns hit you for no good reason your parents always took their side. “They wouldn’t be hitting you unless you were doing something wrong! They’re nuns fa crissakes! They’re married ta God!”
My mother always took the side of the nuns AND the priests. Of course, my brother Johnny and I didn’t really give her any reason to think we were innocent of any given charges. If there was a stupid plan to be hatched—egging the convent or stealing a priest’s wallet or drinking the holy wine (I wanted to see if it actually made me act more like Jesus, which—if He was a giggling, sneaky, bumbling mess—it did)—my brother and I were, generally speaking, somehow involved. And once we established that kind of reputation, my mother’s trust was pretty much broken beyond resolve.
It always cracks me up when you see the mom of some guy who’s been accused of some horrible crime on the TV news. No matter what the guy may have done or how guilty he may seem there’s always one person left on God’s green earth who thinks he’s not guilty—his mom. Murder, grand theft, fraud—you name it. The guy could be convicted and rotting in jail and after everyone including his wife and kids had given up and decided he was guilty—his mom would always feel the opposite. If O.J.’s mom were still around she would be telling anyone who asked and even those who didn’t how her son could never have murdered Nicole.
Not my mom. Whatever the charges brought happened to be—even if they accused me of assassinating the sitting president—point a camera in my mom’s face and the first thing she would say is “he did it.” Followed by “And I’ll bet if you dig a little deeper you’ll find this is just the tip of the goddam iceberg. I’m sure he’s got something to do with this whole global warming crap. I wouldn’t put anything past this kid. He’s trouble with a capital T. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out HE was the one who killed O.J.’s wife.”
Most moms I know and have met feel that the women who marry their sons will never measure up to expectations. Not my mom. She couldn’t believe I came home with my wife. I think—for the first couple of visits anyway—she thought I was drugging Ann or possibly even blackmailing her. Of course, she’s right. Not about the drugging. About the chances that I would have won the heart of a woman as bright, funny and beautiful as my wife. The odds were very much against me. I really had to turn on the charm. And the drugs didn’t hurt. I’m kidding. I’ve often thought if my wife and I ever got divorced, I’d have to fight the courts for visitation rights—to keep my mom from visiting Ann.
Of course we want our kids to have a better life than we had but in this country things have gotten out of control. My parents were born and raised on farms in County Kerry, Ireland. They literally made the proverbial five-mile trek to school on foot every morning and the same five miles back every afternoon. When my mom told my wife about this my wife asked, “Didn’t your dad ever come and pick you up?” My mother said yes, which led my wife to exhale a sigh of relief.
“He’d come out and meet us in the fields and lift each of us up and give us a hug and then we’d continue on our way home.” He came out to LITERALLY just pick them up and spread a little welcome-home love and then he’d continue working in the fields. He was a farmer. Feeding his eight or ten or whatever number of kids he had. He probably didn’t even remember how many kids he had. I can’t even remember how many aunts and uncles I have on my mom’s side of the family. I’m amazed that she can. They grew up in a world where death, disease and destruction lay in wait around almost every single corner. And they only had about five corners—down in the village. Once you got onto the road out of the tiny town—they didn’t even have corners. Just long and winding dirt roads with ditches or turf bogs on either side. Trees? Hah. Trees were for pussies.
There was nothing except the dark wet sky and the cold hard ground and an assortment of atrocities in between as you headed the seven miles back to the farm. How any of them survived is a mystery to me.
My mom once brought a box of ancient black-and-white photos from Ireland in the 1930s and ’40s—when she was growing up—over to our house in Connecticut and flipped through them in front of my wife Ann and me—telling us what eventually happened to each person pictured. It went something like this:
FLIP:
That’s Mary Aberdeen from the Aberdeens two farms away. She got kicked in the head by a horse when we were ten. Died right there on the spot.
FLIP:
This is Fiona Something Or Other. She got this fever and was never the same. She became like retarded almost. Then she fell into a fireplace when we were fifteen.
FLIP:
This guy here was lost in the ocean. It just swallowed him up one night. He was walking along the beach just minding his own business and—then he was gone.
FLIP:
This would be my second or third cousin—she was a Burke I think—and she got what they would call multiple sclerosis now or whatever Jerry Lewis is always on about with those kids and she got married and had some kids of her own and then she was in a wheelchair but she could like stand up and walk around a little bit and then one night all the kids were in bed and she had a couple of drinks and she got up out of the wheelchair to throw some more turf onto the fire and then she fell into the fire and that was the end of it.
FLIP:
This was a fourth cousin of your father’s who got a pitchfork in the eye.
FLIP:
This was a friend of your Uncle Jerry’s who got split into two pieces by lightning.
FLIP:
This lady here was someone’s aunt who got some horrible growth on her leg and never told anyone and then when it burst she got run over by a car.
FLIP:
This man was a great friend of your grandfather’s who fell out of the hayloft in the barn and got trampled by a horse and then got cancer and then fell into a fire. Do you see how lucky Mary Aberdeen was now?
FLIP:
This man dropped dead.
FLIP:
This lady disappeared.
FLIP:
This man got melted.
FLIP:
This young boy on the bike was like a midget or something and then didn’t he grow up to be a great big strapping man until he got hit by lightning out in a field and then he shrank up and was kind of bent over for a long time after until he got the cancer and then he died.
FLIP:
This man had no fingers.
FLIP:
This man had been out in the fields at night and was found in a bog with his head bashed in.
FLIP:
That lady went to bed one evening and woke up dead.
FLIP:
This lady died last year and now her whole family is dead.
And on and on it went. Ann and I sat riveted as the parade of tragedy and manifest destiny unfolded in front of us, wondering just how many Irish people had perished in day-to-day disease diagnoses and accidents and some who apparently had just been smited from above in mysterious circumstances versus those lost during The Great Potato Famine. We could barely keep count of the faces as they flashed by, one old photo after another. It gave me a rush of sense memory from when I was a kid—my mom constantly warning of the sudden possibility of lurking danger and immediate payback for the slightest of sins, not to mention how people could just be turned into instant piles of smoking ash.
I know that growing up in my day I had seventeen cousins here in America and two sisters and a brother and we all lived near each other and every time we went on vacation or just to the beach there were about eight or nine kids in the back of my dad’s station wagon and there were no seat belts and at least four kids in the way way back and the window was always all the way down because the car had no air-conditioning and the entire car—the floor, the side panels, the dashboard, the roof—every single part of the car was made of steel and since you weren’t strapped in whenever the car hit a pothole or any other bump in the road your head bounced off the roof or the side or the floor or if you sat in the way way back maybe even all three one right after another and we thought that was FUN because no matter what you did to someone else back there my father couldn’t reach you unless he threw something at you from the front driver’s seat and if he did that he usually hit one of the kids in the middle row instead and by the way if you fell out the back window onto the highway they didn’t turn around to go back and get you or make a sudden stop they kept right on going ’cause it was just one less mouth to feed.
I remember a Green Hornet cane that turned into a knife and a kid named Matt and another kid named Patrick and a toy Batman motorcycle that shot missiles but my mother says I never owned either one of those toys and Matt was a pain in the ass and there was never anyone in this family named Patrick except your Uncle Patrick so if there was another Patrick shouldn’t she remember? No wonder they never took pictures. It was like the Mafia with children.
And by the way the station wagon was marine green with a painted-over gas company decal on each door because my dad bought it secondhand and retooled it himself because not only was it all he could afford but they never had cars when he was growing up.
My dad grew up with a shitload of other kids on a farm adjacent to the one my mom grew up on—real storybook romance territory. His mom died giving birth to the last kid. He only went to school until he was twelve and then he had to go to work to help feed the rest of the family, along with my Uncle Patrick. One of the kids—who would’ve been my Uncle Matt—died from something when he was five. No one even remembers what disease he died from—they didn’t have enough time or money to find out. They pretty much just buried him and kept on milking the cows. Hey—he’s lucky he got a grave. In those days you had as many kids as possible because you figured some would die, some would get killed and the rest would still be able to carry stuff. You got a cold back in those days—you could pretty much kiss your ass goodbye. My dad grew up the hard way. When he decided to come to America, he was given what all the Irish who were headed across the pond got—something called A Living Wake. That’s where everyone who knew or was related to you gathered themselves down at the village pub and placed whatever money they could manage into an envelope for you—which they gave to you with their solemn goodbyes because odds were very much against them ever seeing you again. So my dad got on a big boat and two weeks later landed in New York City with thirty-seven dollars in his pocket. Almost enough to buy a cup of giant fagulated coffee and a pumpkin cream-filled muffin at Starbucks in today’s terms.
So if you wanted to complain about ANYTHING in our house—you were up shit’s creek without a paddle. There wasn’t a single solitary complaint you could make about your clothes or your toys or your situation that my mom and dad couldn’t dial right back down to the basic facts of life—hey, yer lucky yer even here.
NOT TO MENTION the house they lived in had no electricity and the toilet was a shack out in the backyard. My older brother Johnny and I lived in the attic of a three-decker and my parents and everyone else lived in the third-floor apartment. When my dad got enough money to buy a ranch house in a better neighborhood Johnny and I lived in the basement. We went from dwelling above the rest of the family like strange, pink-cheeked bats to dwelling in the bowels of the house like strawberry blond goddam rats.
The attic sucked ’cause we had to walk up three flights to get to the apartment and then another steep flight to get to the place where we slept. The basement sucked because we slept right next to the boiler room and the water heater would kick on and off and make one helluva racket. So when we did something wrong and my mom or my dad said “Go to your room!” it was a genuine hard-ass punishment.
Today? My kids each have televisions and giant computer screens and electric guitars and sofas and their own individual bathrooms and Xboxes and PlayStations and stack after stack of DVDs and CDs and video games. As a matter of fact when the kids get into trouble my wife and I say “That’s it! WE’RE going to your room. You guys go sit in our bedroom and read actual books.”
When I was growing up we had three TV channels and there were a handful of movie stars and only one or two kid stars plus Lassie and Mr. Ed and a dolphin who answered to the name Flipper. No one in my neighborhood ever even dreamed of being
on TV. Not even me. Wasn’t an option.
We knew Lassie AND Flipper were both smarter and better off than any of us could ever hope to be—not to mention the talking horse. We had clothes on our backs and homework to do and were expected to have paper routes by the time we were twelve and shovel snow off sidewalks in the winter and paint apartments in the summer if we wanted money in our pockets. I got a job in a diner twenty-five yards down the block from the local hockey rink as did my older brother my two sisters and almost all of my cousins and that was considered a choice place to work because they gave you free food at the end of your shift, which was very handy because in the house I grew up in there were no late meals. My mom served supper at six sharp and if you weren’t there to eat it you just didn’t eat. My dad worked two jobs so he would come home from his day job around four in the afternoon, take a quick nap and then eat dinner at six and go to his night job. What did we have for supper? Guess what. Supper. Meaning, whatever the hell she decided to cook that day. She served it hot and when they placed the bowls on the table you had to grab as much as you could and start forking it away ’cause once it was gone that was the end of it. No special meals for anyone. You didn’t like what she was serving up you didn’t eat. Plus—we lived in an Irish household so forget about food that tasted good. If you could taste it at ALL you were way ahead of the game. If you downed a forkful of potatoes and they tasted like dogshit your tastebuds did a goddam kitchen table jig. Irish people eat as though they were doing penance—it’s punishment for your sins and just a way of laying a foundation in your stomach for all the booze that’s about to follow it down your gullet. Here’s an example of a few traditional Irish recipes my mom cooked up for us:
Why We Suck Page 7