The more my dad withdrew into addiction, the more I leaned on Nick as the main man in my life. Nick was the perfect fill-in father, even if he was still a kid himself. He thought like my dad, and his boys on Third and Jackson fought like my dad. Nick was even half-Italian. But when my dad started ditching all my visits, I begged off spending weekends with Nanny and Pop just to avoid being stood up. Not even Nick could fill the hole in my heart after that. Nobody could have. I wanted my dad. Not my cousin, not Pop, not my uncles, and definitely not one of the guys my mom dated off and on.
MY MOM HAD never sounded so happy or so alive as she did the first time I heard her talking about her new boyfriend, John. Not too long after that, I was playing alone in our cramped cellar when I heard footsteps on the rickety stairs.
“So this is where they keep you,” a man’s voice said.
I knew immediately he had to be John.
As he ducked his head to clear the stairwell, I couldn’t help but compare him to my dad. Even though his street name was Big Frankie, my dad wasn’t a big guy; he just seemed big, especially if he was ticked off about something. My dad had the kind of classic Italian looks that made a lot of women giggle whenever he so much as smiled at them. I couldn’t see women going crazy like that around John. On the scale of tall, dark, and handsome, height was all John had going for him. He was an okay looking guy, an average looking guy. Mostly, though, he was an Irish looking guy. If Grandpa Meeink were still alive, he would’ve been thrilled.
John introduced himself and pulled a chair next to me by my electronic football game. He flipped the “on” switch, and we silently watched the little linemen vibrate into each other. John helped me set them all back up for another play, then he started talking. He explained that things were getting pretty serious between him and my mom and that he liked her a lot.
“I better never hear you disrespecting your mother,” he said. I liked that; it told me he really cared about my mom. Then he said he was moving in with us.
“When?” I asked.
“About an hour ago. You got a problem with that?”
“No.” I really didn’t.
John stayed with me for a few minutes, playing the football game, checking out my Matchbox cars, and talking to me about the Eagles. Then he said he needed to go back upstairs and finish settling in. He told me he’d see me at dinner, then he added, “I’m the only man in your mom’s life from now on.”
That was okay by me. John seemed like a good man. And he
seemed like a good match for me. From our short conversation, I could tell John loved sports as much as I did. But at dinner that night, I learned something even better about John. He wasn’t just a sports fan; he’d been an honest-to- God athlete, a serious boxer during his years in the Navy. I believed it. His nose looked like it’d been busted a few times and his gnarled knuckles looked like they’d smashed in more than a few noses. Even though he wasn’t boxing anymore by the time he moved in with us, John was still the kind of guy I could brag about to my friends. And even though he wasn’t my dad, John seemed like the kind of guy who’d make a pretty cool stepfather if he and my mom ended up making it legal. I had really high hopes for John the day he moved into our house.
Those hopes lasted maybe a week, at the outside. I was fixing myself a snack in the kitchen when John walked in to get a beer from the three-case stack he’d erected next to the refrigerator.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“Okay,” I replied, fiddling with a cereal box.
John slapped the box out of my hands.
“When I talk you listen! You don’t screw around with shit, and you don’t interrupt. You listen. That’s all you do. You got that?”
Under the circumstances, I didn’t know if I was supposed to answer or not. I kept my mouth shut.
“What are you, some kind of retard?”
I still didn’t know what to do.
“Answer me!”
“Yes.”
“Yes, you’re a retard?”
“No. I mean, yes, I got it.”
“Don’t you forget it. And don’t you forget this either, Frankie. You lost the battle the minute I moved in. This is
my
house now. You’re my prisoner of war.”
I was ten. I didn’t have a clue in hell what John was talking about. He taught me soon enough.
God knows I was no saint as a kid, but John didn’t punish
me for my sins. He punished me for the sheer hell of it. If I got an answer wrong on my homework, John would ask, “How’d you get to be such a retard?” Then he’d rip up my assignment and ground me for a day or two. Sometimes he locked me up for weeks and ordered me to copy words out of a big black dictionary. When I was on lockdown, everything was off limits except school and that dictionary. I couldn’t watch TV. I couldn’t talk on the phone. I couldn’t eat dinner with everybody else. After they were finished, John would give me permission to come downstairs. There’d be a lukewarm plate of leftovers on the counter. I’d eat alone in the kitchen while John and my mom curled up on the living room couch with their beers and the
TV Guide
.
My mom looked so happy with that creep’s arms wrapped around her. I didn’t fucking get it. How couldn’t she see him for what he was? He was a total asshole to everybody. He said rude shit to my aunts and uncles whenever they came over. He even said mean things to my mom and treated her like a slave. She worked crazy long hours. John occasionally picked up work at a steel mill, but mostly he made a career out of drawing unemployment and disability checks. Still, he never helped around the house. He laid on the couch all day drinking and watching TV, waiting for my mom to get home and cook his dinner. If he was drunk by then, he was all lovey-dovey with her. But if he was still sober, he wasn’t so nice. No matter what she said, he’d say, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sometimes he called her “stupid.”
Nothing John said seemed to bother her, except for the one time John called my mom “Bitch” like it was her name and she slammed the telephone into his head. He didn’t hit back. He didn’t say anything. They just went to their separate corners for a while to cool off, then they fell back into their routine on the couch with their beers and the
TV Guide
like it’d never happened.
Eating alone in the kitchen, sometimes I’d overhear John talking about me to my mom. I don’t recall ever once hearing her stand up for me when he bitched about how stupid I was or
how much trouble I caused him. Sometimes I wanted to run out into the living room and scream at her, “Why aren’t you sticking up for me?” But I couldn’t. I wasn’t allowed to leave the kitchen until John told me I was done with dinner. Just like I couldn’t eat dinner with everyone else because John told my mom, “The sight of your rotten kid makes me too sick to eat.” The sight of John made me sick, too, so I didn’t mind eating alone.
What sucked most was I couldn’t play sports, not even the one John had signed me up for. Right after he moved in, John convinced my mom to let me do something I’d wanted to do for years – join the Philadelphia recreational football league. John told my mom it would be good for me. I didn’t know about that; I just wanted to play. The league went by weight, not age, and neighborhood, not school. I played with the seventy-five pounders for EOM, the Eddie O’Malley team. Being on EOM was as Irish as playing college ball for Notre Dame. I was really good at football. It was the only good thing John ever gave me and the first thing he took away.
After a year, my room felt like a cell. I thought I finally understood why John called me his “prisoner of war.” Little did I know, I had yet to see war. The first time John hit me, he thought I’d lied to him about my homework; he smacked my vocabulary copy book so hard across my face the metal spiral binding dug into my cheek, leaving a dark purple welt by the next morning. I told my friends at school I got hit by a hockey puck.
John started slapping me around pretty regular after that. If I got an answer wrong on my homework, he’d call me a “retard,” like always, but then he’d slap the side of my head before he sent me to my room. If he caught me trying to sneak some pickles or a TastyKake out of the kitchen, he’d call me a “fucking mooch,” like he always had, but then he’d shove me into the edge of the counter before storming away. His speed was contagious. After a few months, my ducks and bobs got faster, but never fast enough.
My mom and John had been together for about two years
when my half-sister Kirsten was born. When she was still a little worm of a baby, I barely noticed her. But once she started walking, everybody in our cramped rowhouse had to go on high alert, including me. I was lying on the couch watching TV one afternoon when Kirsten came toddling along the edge of the coffee table. She still hadn’t mastered walking without hanging on to something and even then, she usually didn’t make it more than three or four steps without landing on her butt. I just knew she was going to hit her head on the sharp edge of that table, so I put her up on the couch with me and pinned her behind my body so there was no way she could fall. Kirsten was having a great time pacing the back of the couch. She was giggling like a little monkey. Regardless of who her father was, she was so cute I couldn’t resist loving her. I kept reaching back to tickle her so she’d giggle even more. I still can’t believe Kirsten didn’t smash into the coffee table when her dad’s fist slammed into the back of my skull and sent me rolling onto the floor. Instead, she kind of slid down the cushions and landed on my stomach. She thought that was fucking hilarious.
“You stupid son of a bitch!” John screamed. “She could have fell off that couch the way you had her!”
I looked into Kirsten’s little eyes. She was okay; she was still giggling. I cradled her in my arms and staggered to my feet. As I shook my head to clear away the sting of the blow, I realized I was okay, too.
But John wasn’t okay. He stood rubbing his hand, staring at me with half disbelief and half rage. I thought of all the lessons my dad had taught me those afternoons we’d spent together at the bar, and I thought, “You stupid son of bitch, don’t you know you never use your fist on the back of a guy’s head? That’s a good way to break your hand.” And it was.
John never punched me in the back of the head again, but once he got his cast off, he punched me about everywhere else. The lingering ache in his hand made him hate me more and hit me harder. The era of slapping was over. From that point forward,
John beat me like a man beats another man in a bar, as if I were his age, his size, his competition. But I couldn’t compete with a former boxer who had nearly a hundred pounds and twenty years on me. I didn’t even try to fight back like my dad had taught me. I knew my best hope was to try to survive.
No one outside our house knew how bad things were. I was a tough kid who played tough sports in a tough neighborhood. Kids like me were always bruised and cut. I was too ashamed to tell anyone the truth about my injuries. Nick saw some of it go down, of course, but even he wasn’t strong enough to make John stop. But he kept me sane. Late at night, alone in our room, he’d whisper to me across the darkness, “You’re okay, Frankie. John’s the asshole.”
My mom refused to see the truth – probably because John never hit me in front of my mom. She never saw the beatings, only the bruises. And like me, she pretended I got them playing hockey. She couldn’t do that anymore after John stormed up the stairs screaming, “Margaret, your idiot kid just made me break my hand!” There was no more denying what John was doing to me. So my mom started in on why he was doing it. John was smacking me around because I was a smart mouth. I was an idiot. I was a brat. John was a good man doing what any good man would do to try to save a rotten kid like me from ruining my life. If it weren’t for John, I’d end up no better than my no-good father. And if I weren’t such an ingrate, I would be thanking John instead of whining about him to my mother. The lecture got a little longer every time she bandaged up a new round of my battle scars, but she always finished with the same advice, “If you’d just stop upsetting him, he wouldn’t have to hit you.”
In the end, my mom was the one who got upset. About halfway through seventh grade, I finally figured out that John was going to smack me and ground me the same for not doing my homework at all as he would for doing it wrong. So I saved myself the trouble: I quit doing my schoolwork. John knew, because he punished me for it, but apparently he never told my mom, so
when my school called her in for a conference, the news blindsided her. That pissed her off even more than my failing grades.
Everything I know about what went down immediately after that meeting I got from Nick, but not until weeks later. My mom was enraged by the time she stormed through the door. When she told John I was flunking, he pretended he didn’t already know, then he went off on one of his riffs about how I was a retard. My asshole cousin Jerry was there too and egged them both on, saying I needed a lesson I wouldn’t forget.
Things didn’t seem right as soon as I stepped through the front door. Cigarette smoke wasn’t hanging over the first floor like smog. The house was quiet as a tomb. I paused for a second to wonder where everybody was, and that’s when John got me. It was a perfect ambush. John had tucked himself against the wall behind the door. He waited until I was exactly where he needed me to be before he punched me square in the side of my head and knocked me across the living room. Before I even realized what had hit me, he was on top of me. He dragged me to my feet and pinned me to the wall with one hand; with the other, he proved he really could’ve been a contender. It was the most savage beating he ever unleashed on me, so brutal I knew I had to make a run for it.
I took the first chance I got. When he pulled both hands off me to set up for a combination, I broke free. I sprinted up the stairs, thinking if I could just make it out the bathroom window, I could jump onto the kitchen roof, drop into the alley and run away. But John was too fast. I couldn’t make it into the bathroom, so I cut hard right, into my room. He grabbed me from behind. He yanked my shirt up part of the way over my head, pinning my arms. I was completely defenseless.