Singing Happy Birthday While Bombs Go Off

I hear my dad’s heavy footsteps come up the stairs…ever since the incident with the refrigerator, he has pretty much stopped hitting us so I am not so much afraid of being beaten per se, but rather him showing any disappointment with me at all…my choice to skip school and spend the day waiting it out in the park is obviously poor, but I hope I can make some sense of it…I am always expected to think like an adult and make adult decisions no matter what the situation…I calmly try to explain to him what happened with my forgetting the permission slip, and my rationale for not knowing what I should do…unfortunately, my father and his remoteness can never be called into question as a causal force, so this is not something I can rely on to get me out of trouble…as I explain to him my predicament, he appears to not be that angry, and I start to believe that he might just possibly let the whole thing go and maybe opt for some extra chores instead and throw in a cautionary “don’t ever do that again”…once I am finished talking, there is a long pause as if he is still debating some other information that I have not considered…he gets real cold in the eyes (they slit when he disconnects), and basically tells me that this act is not something that can go unpunished, even if it is my birthday…I can hear the party in full swing just beneath us as my father takes off his belt and tells me that he doesn’t want me making any noise, the implication being that he doesn’t want anyone downstairs to know he is beating me…he kicks the living hell out of me as I silently take it, and the whipping is pretty severe…once he finishes, he tells me to go down to the party and not tell anyone what has happened, nor should I betray any emotions of distress…it’s too late to cancel the party now, so I might as well just act like everything is normal…

The party is a completely surreal experience as I am expected play the part of a 6 year old having his wonderful birthday party with his enthusiastic friends…pictures are taken, songs are sung, candles are blown out, but I am absolutely dying inside…between the stress of the day spent worried in the park and the welts ringing all over my back and backside, it takes all my power to keep on acting as if nothing out of the ordinary has occurred…I am cheered immensely when I receive as a present a brand new G.I. Joe doll (just like my uncle Guy has---he has a collection of the older dolls)…after the cake is served, the kids are all told to move the party to the basement so that everyone hopped up on cake and cookies can go crazy…I am just about to head downstairs when my brother comes up behind me and whips my new doll down the stairs and it breaks immediately, the arms and legs coming off in a fashion that cannot be fixed…this is all too much for me, the last straw really, and I vainly attempt to appeal to my step-mother as to the unfairness of what my brother has done…she responds in her usual cold but fake warm form, telling me that my doll being broken is the kind of thing that happens to terrible children like me, and that I sadly deserved it…

We move about 2 blocks away to a slightly bigger apartment, one that has a bigger shared side yard and a small enclosed concrete porch area where we can play… the new place straddles the back loading dock area of a major food chain…there is constant motion in this area as trucks pull up with produce deliveries at all hours of the night…we constantly dig in the dumpsters to see what they are throwing out, and create a de facto baseball field in the side parking lot…it is dirty and funky, but a perfect place to ride bikes and play hide and seek…we will still attend the same school, so this helps in the transition, but even though we are only blocks away from our old apartment, the isolation of that cul-de-sac cuts off all the old friends and we just don’t see them anymore beyond school… we also get a dog, an inbred black poodle who, in classic Corgan fashion, goes unnamed and therefore acquires the ubiquitous name Doggie…because we have more space now, I am given my very own room, which looks forward onto our front yard and the front stairs of the next row of townhouses …I like having my own room and the privacy it affords, for I now believe I can close the door and read my books…that is until my step-mother again forbids it…

The food market is part of a long processional line of normal boring businesses, and I am almost daily sent to secretly purchase my step-mother cigarettes…she will send me along with a few dollars and a hand written note that says “please sell my son a pack of brand whatever cigarettes”, with her scrawled signature attached…it takes about 5 minutes to walk to the liquor store, and I do this so often the man behind the counter stops asking for the note…I am sent at all hours of the day and night because my step-mother does not want my father to know she smokes, so I am instructed to be very careful that he doesn’t find out…she makes it very clear to me that if I get her in trouble that I will be in even bigger trouble…

I start to collect baseball cards, being given a head start by a relative who passes on to me some of his old ones…I endlessly organize and re-organize my cards into different orders: by team, by favorites, by year…having been introduced to fandom by my maternal grandmother, I closely start following the teams and their progress, making note of individual statistics and who might be playing well at a given time…so it is that I am in the kitchen one morning when I begin to blab on and on to my step-mother about all sorts of things related to my home team, The Chicago Cubs…I am just making casual conversation, uninhibited for about 5 minutes while she is cleaning some dishes…suddenly, without warning, she stops and says “do you think I give a shit at all about what you are talking about?…do you think I really care about anything that you are interested in, ever?”…the air sucks out of the room, because we are the only 2 people in the house, and I am frozen solid in my tracks…I feel absolutely naked…after this incident, she begins to harass me if I leave my baseball cards lying around, as if the very sight of them makes her angry…this begins a pattern that will last for over a decade, which is that if there is something I love she must destroy it…I take to hiding my cards in a loose panel that sits next to some cabinetry in the kitchen…I feel that the cards are safe there, because my hiding place is unknown to anyone but me…after a month or so of using this hiding spot, I go and find my cards missing, immediately suspecting my step-mother…I ask her if she had done anything with them, and she tells me that she hasn’t seen them…but she goes on to add that if someone were very smart and wanted to keep their baseball cards safe, that that would not be a very good place to leave them…

One happy day, a yellow bird arrives, a little songbird that is put into my room because he makes so much noise…I am given the job of feeding the bird, and take pride in bringing him out of his cage to try to get him to talk…he sits proudly on my finger and seems happy when I pay him lots of attention…over time, I grow very fond of this bird with no name…I take to leaving his cage door open and letting him fly around my room freely, something he really seems to enjoy…on one chilly morning, I let him out and leave him alone in my room, just for a few moments to go grab something…when I return he is missing, and I cannot find him anywhere no matter how hard I search…I for the life of me cannot imagine where he has gone…I go get my father, who happens to be awake, and he comes into the room, quickly pointing out that my window has a small hole in it and that he must have gone thru there…the hole was very small, smaller than the bird, and it seems impossible to me that he could have gone thru…my dad explains that he was probably motivated to go outside where there were other birds for him to play with…I ask my father if he thinks he will come back, to which he replies that he believes the bird is long gone…at first, I am saddened thinking about him leaving, but then when I think of him playing with his friends, it cheers me up…I ask my father if I think the little bird he will be o.k. out there? he just shrugs to himself and says, “nah, he’s probably dead already”...