Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows

For 30 years we were together. For 30 years, if there was a family event, from a small dinner to a large holiday celebration, I went. My sisters-in-law both have spouses. They would show up at all the large celebrations, but often, for smaller occasions, they would not attend. So, it would be Jenny, Omi, our kids and me. When I would on occasion find out my analogues in the family weren't attending a given event, I would sometimes suggest to Jenny I skip the event. It is not as if these were rare occasions. Jenny was always offended and never agreed. To keep the peace, on all but maybe one or two occasions--let's call them excused absences (pretty much only sick or work obligations)--I would just attend. 

This isn't about Jenny, believe it or not. The question I have asked myself over the last several years is why I didn't push back harder. We had serious arguments over this, the few times I suggested I not attend. When I would point out my cohorts were not attending, she didn't care. I needed to be there. Period. The end. Finito. Any time I raised the issue, it would devolve quickly into accusations about my dedication to the family--that could either be expressed in shouting or yelling, but never in a normal voice. Why did I give in to save the peace? It became prohibitive for me to suggest this option.What her sisters were OK with regarding their spouse attendance was not immaterial, but to Jenny was inapposite. We were different. We were a unit, first, last, and foremost. I swallowed this. I enabled this behavior. Sure, I am the youngest child of alcoholics--I should say addicts, having recently learned my father had, at some point, a heroin addiction. He died when I was just two, although he had been brain dead on a machine for 6 months prior to his death in January 1969, having suffered liver failure, a heart attack and stroke, all related to his alcohol addiction. I suspect that he had never kicked his drug habit, but don't know that is true at all. I meander. Despite his death, my mom was no piker. She drank like a fish when we were young. We were surrounded by working class tavern-folk a lot, when tavern culture was a thing people have no memory of these days. These people were hard-working, working class and interesting always  to me--as a child I had insatiable curiosity--and always drunks. Crazy fucking drunks. 

I learned the importance of keeping the peace early. My mom's longest term boyfriend, Ranzell "Randy" Sterns, was a master carpenter, welder, boilermaker and a very kind and decent man  when he was sober. He was a big man, from North  Dakota. He was less than 6 feet tall, but not by much, and was built like a brick shit house--a phrase I learned from him (along with"It's colder than a ditch diggers ass"). He would get drunk every night. He was, like my binge alcoholic mother and dead father, an addict.  This all is

Jephus Millerus

leading somewhere, I swear. Randy, given his North Dakota origins, and having a brother Al who was also a big man, I surmise spent a lot of time fighting as kids. As an adult, Randy would spend lots of time at the Elbow Room Tavern, which was a fixture for decades in Columbia City, where cops, teachers, carpenters and every working class person in-between would spend evenings post-work. Randy, not infrequently, would get into bar room brawls. He didn't hit children, but did beat up his friends, cops, carpenters, wives, girlfriends, whomever, should the alcohol level in his blood hit the right level and someone pissed him off.

I just wanted the peace. Having seen how my kids reacted to stressors as children, I am convinced that much of my behavior was hard-wired. Leiney "peace table" Gamache was a peacemaker from a very young age. If you've seen the Sesame Street video, you know of what I speak. Like me, she felt responsible for making everything okay at home. When Jenny and I had strife, she wanted to solve the problem. I was the same way when I was her age. One night around Easter in 1974 or '75, when my mom and Randy were sitting at the table in our tiny kitchen, where they had been drinking for  hours. My mom, I'm sure I have written about this before, used to routinely begin to pick fights with Randy when they both were drunk. My mom was a mean drunk with a death wish. She would say terribly cruel things and quite often would preface the invective with, "I know you think what I am going to say is only because I'm drunk, but you should know that I always tell the truth when I am drunk." Then, she'd begin to deconstruct the self-image of the target of her anger. Doing this to Randy was as if she was trying to exit the room--i.e. her final exit. As they sat in the confined space, a formica dining room table in between  them, a half wall which ended in an entryway into the living room behind her, she began to trash him. Voices became raised. I was scared. Frightened. I had seen this play out before, but this evening my mother was in rare form. I can't pretend to know what she said to him, but it was awful and cruel, to be sure. He had been drinking all day--it was a Sunday if memory serves, so Randy was in peak fighting form himself. 

I was stressed. My bedroom over the garage (an addition of about 15 additional square feet if I am being honest), which was behind a door and up the stairs from the laundry room, was my sanctuary. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know. I sat on the stairs and tried to think. In my 3rd or 4th grade brain, I thought that I had the power to make it better, if only. In our unfinished laundry room, where the floor was made of rough and uneven plywood, with shelves well above my head that covered three of the four walls, sat canning jars. We started canning foos during the oil embargo--plus farm boy randy just loved to can and make sausage. Anyway, as I sat on the beige painted stairs surrounded by the sky-blue paint of my room, I spied those jars and decided to make Easter bunnies for everyone. There was orange tissue paper in my room in a stack, mason jars and sharpies nearby. I must have climbed up the washer to reach the jars, and got several down. Returning to the stairs, I filled each jar with tissue paper. The raised voices were behind the door separating the kitchen from the laundry room--10 feet away at best. They were getting louder. Redoubling my efforts, I punctured each lid with two equidistant holes using a Phillip's-head screwdriver. I pulled tissue through each of the punctures enough to make something resembling bunny ears, crumpled more orange tissue and put that in the jars, then screwed the lids on each of the jars back on tight. With a black marker, I drew bunny faces. 

I brought my first and only independent attempt at creating art, into the kitchen, interrupting the raised voices. My child's brain thought that I could somehow control their behavior. Needless to say, the jars had no impact on the scene unfolding. They returned to hurling invective and insult, and I returned to my room, scared shitless after witnessing Randy throw the antique Underwood typewriter that sat next to him on a typewriter stand, jammed in a space against the back wall of the house, between an old repainted bookcase and the cigarette burned and scarred formica countertop. Mind you, they were a table's width apart. He threw it with all his might. The typewriter exploded, sending pieces of the machine flying in all directions. My mom had ducked just in time, then sat right back down.. She didn't stop trashing him, however, and made no attempt to retreat. He then picks up a generic Safeway (spice island?) spice jar at her. She ducked again, and a perfect imprint of the base in the half-wall behind her was the results of their efforts. I do think she was often trying to get him to kill her. I do. The last time this had happened, I had locked myself in our bathroom and screamed every swear work I knew at Randy. This resulted in him kicking the door in, which hit my forehead, and leaves the scar on my forehead that is here even today. On this occasion, with the peace offering having failed, I retreated to my room. The screaming escalated. I heard my mom tell the kids to get out of the house. I heard my sisters and mom's voices in the yard--it was clear they had exited out the front door. I was afraid. Petrified. I was scared shitless, alone in the house with a madman. Or so I thought. I was in my Sears pajamas. They were baby blue with white or dark blue piping. I grabbed my K-mart tennis shoes, sat down on the stairs to put them on, and then exited out the back door into the darkness of our large back yard. My exit from the yard was on the south end of the house. A home made gate, constructed vertically of narrow but long tree logs, held together by diagonal narrow tree logs (likely the remnants of long ago felled lilac trees). I could hear activity in the yard as I neared the closed gate--specifically, my mother screaming at my sisters to stand back. I couldn't get the fence, which had no formal latch and would drag against the grass and dirt upon trying to open it, to open. I could hear the engine of Randy's bright orange Gran Torino station wagon revving up in the driveway out front.  

Still in a dead panic, I tried to climb the 6 foot fence. You have to understand how small and uncoordinated I was (and still am) to appreciate the level of terror I was experiencing to manage that feat. Upon getting to the top of the fence, my left pajama leg snagged on top of one of the logs. I was now almost apoplectic with fear. I called out to my mother, who upon hearing me and seeing my predicament began cursing at me, bemoaning the fact that I had left the house. She sounded angrier than me than at Randy. Meanwhile, Randy backed the car out of the driveway and had already made one pass into the yard in an attempt to run my mom over. Ahh, the good old days. My mom got me down, Randy drove off after the second failed attempt at vehicular homicide, and all was quiet again.

That I remember this so vividly, even now, even though I have never spoken of the night, not even with my sisters, speaks to how much of this I have carried with me. I have never been drunk in front of my kids, never spoken to them in anger, never engaged in the kind of behavior of which Randy and my mom partook. The experience also, and most importantly, tells me of where my peacemaker desire arose.