Keep it in your sneaker

After my father, Horhay, moved out of my mother's house he was a fleeting presence in my life. He was supposed to have custody of those of us under 18 on an every other weekend schedule. But for the most part, it was not enforced. It would have gotten in the way of his drinking. No one wanted to get in the way of Horhay's drinking. By the time I was 14, I was the only one left under the age of 18.

My father was living with a woman, Bee. I will not say much about Bee, other than she was younger than my father, and had no children of her own at the time. I have to say that she tried with me, and I did not usually repay her very nicely with my teenage hostility. It must have been quite an adjustment to suddenly have teenage step-children, and also step-grandchildren calling her Grandma Bee.

(On a side note, they eventually married and had a child together. When my little brother was born, I was 16. Kouf was 26 and her husband was the same age as her step-mother. My little brother was born with 2 nieces and step-niece, all older than him.)

Between the ages of 12-14, I started spending a good amount of time over there on the weekends. They let me drink beer and smoke cigarettes, and sometimes Bee and I would smoke pot. Sure I had to listen to the drunken screaming matches sometimes, but it was like staying with a kinda cool aunt. It also gave me the chance to get to know my father, whom I previously only saw on holidays.

At one point, my father decided to give me "the talk". It went something like this - Keep It In Your Sneaker. Already long knowing about the birds and the bees, I still had no idea what he was talking about. My mother had given me the clinical version in fourth grade. Anatomically, I had nothing to keep in my sneaker. Do they really have thingies that are long enough to keep in their sneaker? Does it hurt when they walk?

Asking for clarification, I was told, "All a boy wants to do is get in your pants. Look at me, I'm a 48 year old man and I'm still trying to get into the pants of anything that moves." Um, thanks, dad. That's a visual image I'll never be able to get out of my head.

I pretty much have had no idea what Keep It In Your Sneaker meant all these years until I started searching around on the net recently. It apparently refers to being a kid and your parents might tell you to put money or keys in your sneaker. Keep it out of sight so no one can get it/steal it. More broadly used to mean keep a secret, keep it on the DL but in a much more Leave it Beaver way. (Yes, I did just manage to put the word beaver on a post about the sex talk.)

Has anyone else heard this phrase? Especially in reference to sex?

How did your parents explain it to you?

This is 911, how can we help you?

My sister, Kouf, had us over for dinner one evening. My sisters, Bouf and Shouf, joined us. My son had recently started kindergarten, and was learning lots of new and fun things.

Kouf and Bouf both had teenage daughters at that point, but neither of them was there that night, for whatever reasons.

After we finished a wonderful meal, Kouf suggested my son would have more fun in the childproof room upstairs. She adored her nephew and had a chair set up for him in front of a television with a vcr playing Disney movies. This was also the room outside of her teenage daughter's room, there were t.v. trays and a phone and games and books, mostly on built in shelves. This was a really cool room.

Anyway, the sisters were downstairs chatting and singing, and maybe drinking, and generally having a good time when the phone rang. Kouf turned down the music and answered, and immediately gave us the blow-by-blow. "What, this the State Police?" Our dinners immediately came up in our throats thinking about her daughter.

The next words we heard our sister say were, "No, no one called 911 from this line.". "Oh, okay, I understand.". Apparently, someone had learned about the importance of 911 in his kindergarten class and decided to test the system. And called and hung up on 911 FOUR times. Their policy is that if they get a 911 call, even if they call back and receive a response that they are not needed, they have to send a police officer over to check things out in case a hostage is trying to send them a signal. A hostage could very well be trying to signal 911, but when they call back, someone could have a gun to their head telling them to say that everything is all right.

When I heard that there was a state police officer on his way to my sister's house, I WAS PISSED. I yelled up First Name, Middle Name of my son, Get Your Butt Down Here and Put Your Shoes On, Because You and I are Meeting That Police Officer Outside and Explaining Why We Wasted His Time.

Luckily, the police officer in question was unbelievably understanding. He explained to my son that now he knew if he ever had to call 911 that they would always be there for him. He didn't give my kid a hard time about a false call, but did try to explain that he shouldn't use 911 if he didn't really need to. I was so impressed by the way this particular officer dealt with my kid, when he really didn't even need to be nice.

Needless to say, my son has not ever needed to call 911, again.

My mother almost got us kicked out of Monkey Jungle

When I was about 8 years old, my parents took us on a trip to Florida. My father had an old Citroen station wagon that I thought was the coolest car. It had a hydraulic lift system, and jump seats in the back. I really loved that car. It never looked as good as the following picture, it was a dull white (probably spray painted!) with a green hood.



In the end, it looked a little more like the following picture. My father never could get rid of a car until one ex-wife or another sent it to the junkyard. He's a bit of a pack rat.



Anyway, Kouf got to stay home because she was old enough, so my parents loaded the four younger kids and all of their wordly possessions into the Citroen. As my mother couldn't really read maps, Horhay made poor Bouf sit up front and be the map reader. I've done the trip to Florida with my father as his map reader as an adult, and it was brutal. As awful as that job was, however, there was another one that was worse. Because the trunk was piled so high that my father couldn't see out the back window, they smushed Jimmy in between the luggage and the hatchback door so he could see if it was okay to change lanes. For 3 days down and 3 days back, in the middle of winter, where no heat could reach him.

And what a trip it was! On the way down, Virginia and the Carolina's got hit with an ice and snow storm. Apparently in 1979 they shared one plow and one sand truck between all three states. And no one had ever taught anyone in any of those states how to drive in precipitation other than rain. Oh my god, do you mean to tell me that it can freeze? I remember hanging on to my mother for dear life in the back seat while my father stubbornly forged on in his trusty and reliable Citroen, dodging cars that were at a complete stop in the middle of a lane on an interstate highway!

I truly do understand that they were woefully unprepared for what turned out to be a devastating storm for them. Why would they be prepared for something they never expected to have happen? And really, why would they be prepared for Horhay to be driving through it like a mad-man, not willing to stop until "the next planned stop" on our itinerary, dammit?

He carried around a little notebook, and marked down gas prices and mileage, and how long before we were allowed to go to the bathroom, again. I'm sorry, but a little act of God like a major ice storm just didn't fit in with how many miles we HAD to travel that day.

So we got there, all in one piece, and I think we all actually enjoyed ourselves. My father's parents had a trailer in Jensen Beach at the time, and we visited with them, and did a day at the beach. Then we went on and did Disney, and Parrot Jungle and Monkey Jungle.

I remember Parrot Jungle being fun, I have pictures of myself and my siblings posing for pictures where they line the parrots up and down your arms. I was actually a little terrified, I had no previous experience with birds, and quite frankly - they have sharp little beaks and are not against taking a nip out of you. Birds have too much free intellect, and are just a different species altogether. Give me a simian over an avian, any day.

Monkey Jungle was right up my alley. They had many habitats that were wide open, except for nets overhead . The whole thing was amazing to my 8 year old eyes. The best part, however, was that they had people walking around with monkeys. Nowadays, they try very much to show you how cute and cuddly the animals are, but don't let you touch them. Mostly for the animal's sake, but also because of liability issues. Back then, however, they were much more interactive.

We came across a man with a baby spider monkey - In A Diaper! I thought I had died and gone to HEAVEN. This was better than any Betsy Wetsy doll Santa had ever brought me. This was a real live baby monkey, and I wanted to love it, and hug it, and stroke his hair backward and name him George. This was my first real estrogen rush, and I could have easily sacrificed every estrogen rush in my future if I could just bring this baby home with me. Apparently, I was not the only one. Look how happy my brother, Jimmy, looks in this picture.




(And really, good lord, get a hair cut, Mr. 1979 monkey keeper! Barry Gibbs you are not!)

After this picture was taken, the baby monkey kind of crawled up my arm. I don't know whether he was tired, or hungry, or what, but he started sort of suckling my arm. I didn't know what was going on, I was 8. It didn't hurt or anything, it sort of felt like what I later realized a hickey would feel like. Not a big deal, to me. But to my mother, holy crap!

Apparently she thought the wild crazy monkey was trying to eat her youngest daughter. And She Started Hitting It! Hitting and slapping a baby monkey in a diaper, yelling, "get off, get off". Which is why they probably don't let their patrons touch their animals, any longer.

My mother is probably the only person in the history of Monkey Jungle not to get kicked out for slapping their baby monkey while yelling, "get off, get off". And if any one is here because of a really dirty search - HA-HA on you, you pervert.

Shoufie

Shouf was born special. At first, they just thought she was a difficult baby. She would scream like she was getting paid to do it. If my mother left my father in charge of the two babies (Kouf was already 15 months when Shouf was born), Shouf would pull the pacifier out of her mouth and throw it. I swear that was her way of saying, "okay, the gloves are off", then she would arch her back and scream until her face turned purple and she couldn't catch a breath. I think this is why my father left her alone in later years, he was kinda scared of her. (You go, Shouf! Yay for you! If the rest of us had known your secret, we would have done it, too!)

My parents had "Irish Twins". Shouf was born in January, 1962, Bouf was born in December, 1962. When Bouf started crawling before Shouf did, they knew they might have a problem on their hands.

The doctors started testing Shouf, but it took a couple of years before they gave a vague diagnosis. Mom won't talk about it, and I cannot find any information on the term I remember my father telling me. Whatever they called it, it meant Shouf was special.

What was happening was that something in my sister's brain was not wired correctly. Visualize a punch card that is not getting punched in all the right spots. It definitely punched on things like vocabulary, words and letters (she will kick your ASS at Wheel-of-Fortune!), but did not punch on things like reasoning, time, math and depth perception. Not unsimilar to Savant Syndrome, but she is not autistic.

The doctors told my parents that the best course of action would be to institutionalize her, she would never be able to function in the real world. Thank God my parents basically told them to go fuck themselves. They brought her home and treated her like all the rest of us. They never told her she was different, so she never thought she was. The only reason I don't agree completely with this decision is because she didn't understand why she couldn't always do the same things as the rest of us. She never fully matured emotionally past the age of 12 or 13.

They enrolled Shouf in the same grade as Bouf and they graduated high school together. The school didn't have a "special ed" program, but they somehow managed to coddle her and teach her at the same time. My parents put them both in driver's ed, but Shouf didn't pass, which was hard on her. Also, Shouf didn't understand why Bouf was so wildly popular, and she wasn't. It didn't matter, my mother made Bouf bring her everywhere she went, unless it was a date.

Had Shouf been institutionalized, even for a short while, I'm certain that she would never have had the life experiences that she did. She went to the prom. She moved out and was independent for years. At one point, she even managed her own money. She had multiple boyfriends. She had sex!

She started going downhill again in her late 30's. She was living in an apartment by herself (her long-time live-in boyfriend had left her). My mother decided to sell her house, close her antique shop and move to Florida. Shouf got a lot of stimulation from going to her part time job at a gift store. After work, she would walk to my mother's shop. Around the same time that my mother was closing up shop, the gift store went under. Then her landlords decided they could get more money for her apartment and raised her rent, which she couldn't afford. It was all a harsh blow to her.

Shouf always had a vivid imagination, and often confused dreams with reality. My mother had always maintained that there was nothing wrong with her, though, so we just attributed it to Shouf's quirkiness. She started telling stories around this time that just weren't right. Her landlords' friends had introduced the idea of the spirit world and astrophysics to Shouf, and she took the ball and ran with it. Really, she thought she was having "out of body" experiences and spirits living in the house were leaving her gifts. Not that I necessarily don't believe in those things, I think children or people who are child-like are more susceptible to seeing spirits. But what happened later discounted that this was really happening.

She and I, and my son, moved in together to save on living expenses. I guess I knew in advance that she was getting a little kooky, but I didn't realize how bad it was. She started smelling gasoline all the time, which kind of freaked me out because she was a smoker and home alone all day. I thought for sure I would come home one day to have the house burned to the ground. Instead, I got a call at work from Bouf's daughter telling me Shouf was at their house and I needed to come over right away.

When I got there, my niece said Shouf had called asking her to pick her up - from the business that was in the spot where my mother's shop used to be. Shouf wasn't making any sense, but what we got out of her was the she felt that one the spirits, Christopher, was talking very mean to her and was trying to set her on fire and she was so scared that she ran barefoot over a mile to the new shop. Thank God some of the people that worked there knew who she was and let her use the phone. I brought her home, and asked my other 2 sisters to come over and have a family meeting. When I got to my house, the doors had been left wide open, and the heat had been turned up to 90 degrees on a sunny September day. Shouf didn't remember turning the heat on.

She was hospitalized for a few days, and was put on medication for schizo affective disorder and manic depression. She was having auditory and olfactory hallucinations and would laugh and cry at the same time. The meds turned her into a zombie, but they worked.

When my mother came home for Christmas, she offered to take Shouf back to Florida with her for a few months. When they came home, she had "weaned" Shouf off of the medication. Apparently she thought this was a temporary thing and couldn't stand to see her daughter so doped up. Thank you, Esther.

My parents went back to Florida, again, and Shouf started having hallucinations, again. In our state, you cannot force an adult to take medicine unless they are committed. You can't commit them unless they are deemed to be a threat to themselves or others. I kept telling her I would drop everything I was doing and take her to the hospital whenever she said she was ready. She really didn't want to go back on the medicine, I tried to explain in terms she could understand that the medicine was what was keeping the spirits away. I told her it blocked them from being able to get to her.

By Labor Day we were back at the ER. They had a full house so Shouf was strapped to a gurney in the hallway, screaming OW, OW, THEY ARE RAPING ME AND SETTING ME ON FIRE, OW, OW, IT HURTS, MAKE IT STOP! I was standing there next to her, holding her hand, with tears streaming down my face, begging them to give her a shot of Anything that would knock her out. How could they not see how much pain she was in? They kept her for nine days that time.

This eventually got better, but Shouf is like a zombie, again, and has reverted back to the mentality of an 8-year-old. I have told her that if she goes off her meds again, she cannot live with me any longer. It is like having another child in the house. A child that is an adult. One that you cannot or do not want to tell what to do, because they are an adult. And so, I find myself a single mother with 2 children, one who is older than me. She left for Florida with my mom a couple of weeks ago. I miss her.

I bottle fed a baby raccoon

When we moved from Buffalo to Connecticut, we lived in a very old house in the middle of nowhere. My mother made friends with a lady up the road who lived on a farm. I don't know if they were friends before or after my sisters started dating the lady's sons, but whatever. I was only about four years old at the time, and I don't really care.

The farm had a hen house, and the hen house was being raided on a nightly basis. I don't know if just the eggs were being taken, or if it was worse than that. I do know that they were a blended family with at least 5-7 children to feed. It was not a loss that they could afford.

One night, the man of the house heard a ruckus in the hen house and went out with his shotgun. A huge raccoon was raiding the hen house and he shot her. As she was dying, she gave birth to a bunch of little helpless baby raccoons.

The man of the house was not a bad man, he was protecting the food that they needed to survive. He asked around to find people who were willing and able to take on the baby raccoons, instead of killing them also. My mother has always been a sap for babies and taking in strays, and we took two of them.

Wasn't I cute?

We bottle fed the baby raccoons. We were never able to domesticate them, they remained wild animals. One of them died, despite our efforts. The other one could not get along with our cats and dog. We gave him away to one of my oldest sister's hippie friends. This was 1976. I'll never know what really happened to that little guy. The story I was told is that the hippie friends had him in a car with the windows rolled down, and he freed himself while they were shopping.

Before we gave him away, though, I brought him to my kindergarten's Pet Day. My father and one of his friends brought him to my school that day, and I won "Most Unusual Pet". I also got my picture in the local paper. Thank god it was a very rural town - read "Very White Town" - or I think my family may have had some trouble afterward.

I honestly did not know any better, I was five years old at the time. When the man that was taking my picture asked me my pet's name, I told him straight out, "his name is Tyrone, Tyrone the Coon."

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for ensuring that the only time I've ever been in the paper in my life is when I am uttering a racial slur.

My bother, Jimmy

My brother, Jimmy, was a lot of things to a lot of people. He was a natural born comedian who hid an abusive past behind a wall of comedy. He almost never let his tragedy side show.

He was the kid who gave my uptight mother wet-willies, and she would laugh. He was the kid who told our mother that he was growing tomato plants in his bedroom in the middle of winter, and she believed him right up until those plants started growing stuff that didn't look at all like tomatoes. He was the kid that took care of both his older and younger sisters, because he felt he had to be the man in the family after my father moved out. He was the kid who took the brunt of my father's brutality before the bastard moved out.

I remember an exceedingly cold night in which my father had told my brother not to let the fire go out in the living room fire place. Jimmy could not have been any older than 11 or 12 at the time. When my father got home from the bar in the middle of the night, Jimmy had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room, and the fire had gone out. He made Jimmy go out in the snow in his pajamas, bare foot , down a set of stairs, over the driveway and up a hill to get more wood for the fire. I can't put a number on how many other similar situations the kid had to endure.

Jimmy started getting into trouble when he was 12. He started using drugs and alcohol around the same time. They sent him to the military academy for ninth grade where my father had gone to high school. Jimmy hated it and made sure he got kicked out. That was pretty much the end of school for him. It turns out that not only do mental health issues run in my family, but also dyslexia. Back then, they just thought he was stupid. He used to ask me to fill out his job applications for him because his "hand writing was so bad." He was pretty much illiterate.



He was the nicest guy you would ever want to meet. He was funny, he was kind, he was generous. He loved kids, he loved wildlife, he loved to go fishing more than anything else in the whole world. He may have eventually looked the part of a dirty, greasy alcoholic who got into bar fights and did some time in jail, but he was never any of those things to us. To us, he was always the only sweet little boy in a house full of girls. "Excuse me, ladies, but I believe someone left their soiled panties to soak in the sink, and I would like to brush my teeth."





I pretty much adored him. Even when he threatened to break the thumbs of a much older guy who I thought would be dreamy to have for my boyfriend, when I was 13. He taught me how to play baseball and how to throw a football. He taught me basic self-defense, and gave me a knife to carry when he found out I was hitch-hiking.

When I was 16 and finally had a much older boyfriend, he offered to give the guy a ride home. I found out much later that Jimmy had waited until they got to my boyfriends house, pulled out an unloaded gun and put it to the boyfriend's head and asked, "are you sleeping with my little sister?". Apparently, the guy nearly shit his pants, making my brother a much better judge of character than I was, in retrospect.

I'm not condoning any of the following behavior. It is the truth, and part of the story.

He had already had a couple of DWI's, as they were called then, when he got pulled over driving an unregistered, uninsured car, containing an unregistered, unloaded fire arm. Possibly the same unregistered, unloaded gun as above. He had picked up a hitch-hiker whom he claimed he didn't know was carrying a large amount of marijuana, which the hitch-hiker stashed under the seat. Possession is 9/10ths of the law and Jimmy got busted for it. He finally lost his license and was lucky enough to be put on probation. He then got caught driving without a license, this time with possession of cocaine. He got sentenced to two one-year jail terms, back to back. In our area there are very different terms you could sit out. Jimmy got sent to what we affectionately called the Brooklyn Country Club. It's like summer camp with dorms, but more barbed wire, and less swimming.

When Jimmy got out of jail, serving less than six months of a two year sentence, he really seemed to have changed his law-breaking ways. He never again got behind the wheel of a car until he had his license back. However, he and alcohol were never very far apart. We thought that he had kicked his love affair with drugs, but we were wrong.

He got steady work at a lumber yard. He and my father moved together into in an apartment. Jimmy sometimes spent weekends at my mother's house, and sometimes spent them at my oldest sister, Kouf's house. He was helping Kouf's husband turn the attic into rooms that they could rent out. He seemed to be a nomad, who was welcome anywhere he went. He was always the life of any party he found himself at.

After five years, the State of Connecticut agreed to give Jimmy his license back. I took the day off of work and brought him for his driver's test. He passed with no problems. From that point on, all we talked about was getting our motorcycle licenses together. I don't know why it seemed so important to us, but it did.

Maybe it meant to me that I had finally proven myself to him that I was an equal, that I could stand up to him, and his friends that he wouldn't let me date. I so wanted to be a bad-ass bitch in his eyes, I guess. Maybe for him, it was the same in reverse. He had taught his little sister to be a bad-ass who could stand up for herself in a world that he tried to, but could not always, protect her from.

Three weeks after getting his license back, we spent a Saturday afternoon together looking at bikes. Neither of us was ready to make any decisions, but we had fun with it. I dropped him off at Kouf's house. I had plans, and Jimmy was staying with her for the weekend. He hadn't yet gotten himself a car.

Kouf and her husband also had plans that evening. Jimmy apparently walked to a nearby bar looking for cocaine. We did not know until later that he had been shooting cocaine intravenously. From what we pieced together, he couldn't find any cocaine, so he decided to try heroin for the first time as it was all that was available. He bought a bad batch that killed 17 people in the Connecticut and New York area.

The next day, I was rather a bit annoyed with my sister, Bouf, for waking me up on a Sunday morning by banging incessantly on the front door at my mother's house. I was hung over and assumed she just needed to do her laundry and had lost her key or something. I opened the door, and was already half-way back up the stairs when she said, "Wait, Fancy, I'm here for a reason - Jimmy's dead". I literally cried like a fucking baby, sitting on the stairs, telling my poor sister that she was a liar. It could not be true, we had just spent the day together. We had plans, goddammit! Why was she being so mean?

My mother had worked a 12-hour shift the night before, 7pm to 7am. Bouf and I had to wake her up and tell her that her only son was dead at the age of 26 of a heroin overdose. That was definitely one of the worst days of my life.

Early family history

I have three older sisters. I have to explain their nicknames, because I don't want to use their real names. When they were growing up, they had an imaginary club called the Kit-Kat club. I'm sure my oldest sister was in charge, but cannot say for sure as I was probably not even alive at the time. What I do know for a fact is they gave each other these nicknames, as I will give you in birth order: Kouf, 10/60; Shouf, 1/62, Bouf 12/62. My mother, god love her, had 3 babies in diapers at the same freakin' time.

It was four years after Bouf before another child was born.

According to the story, when my mother was pregnant with the first child, she swore if it was a boy she would call him David. Instead, Kouf was born.

When my mother was pregnant with her second child, she swore if it was a boy she would call him David. Instead, Shouf was born.

When my mother was pregnant with her third child, she swore if it was a boy she would call him David. Instead, Bouf was born.

When my mother was pregnant with her fourth child, she said (in a yiddish accent), "God, I promise if you give me a son, I will not call him David". And so Jimmy was born.

Her fifth child was me, four years after Jimmy. My mother was just lucky as hell that I was even born. She developed prenatal diabetes while carrying me, and she also slipped in dog poop and went down a flight of stairs and almost miscarried me.

Apparently, she had wanted six kids. Unfortunately for her, she had to have an emergency hysterectomy within a year or two after I was born.

Even God has his/her limits on the number of kids you are allowed to fuck up. Or at least a limit for my mother. My father eventually had another child, and fucked him up, as well.