Trailer park boy

My mom and step father got married when I was three and for the first two years of their marriage, we lived in a broken down and decaying trailer park. It was filled with either rednecks or junkies and sometimes both. It was one of those places you see while driving down a back country road and you either ignore, make a joke or shudder to think about living there. When I see one, I feel some much more. It was only two years but they meant so much to a four year old.

I remember sitting on this God awful maroon couch pretending to read a newspaper with my step father and wanting to be like him, not know he was everything that I didn't want to be. I remember my sister Lynnae being yelled at a lot. She was a rebel and rightfully so. She would sneak out at night and sleep with cops and score drugs from them and she ended up being one of my hero's, a love of my life and one of my best friends. I remember seeing a Wolf spider in the shed and my fear of spiders started. I remember seeing and helping to destroy a giant wasps nest. I remember our two giant dogs, Nicholas and Clyde. Clyde was a Bullmastiff. He showed up at our door one day and we took him in. His owner found out that we had him and went ballistic on my mom and step dad. He took him back and beat him on the way home. My step dad went over to the owners house and somehow convinced him to let us take him. Clyde didn't last too long with us, he was just too big. I do remember riding him. We gave him to someone who had a farm but I don't remember who. I hope he had an amazing life. Nicholas was a Rottweiler. I don't recall how we got him but he lived with us until we moved out of the trailer court. We gave him to a family friend when we moved. He was an awesome dog from what I remember. He was later hit by a car and died. I still know where he is buried.

I had a few friends in the area. Up the road was Bobby. He didn't live in the trailer court. His family lived in a ranch style home that had a basement. That basement had the coolest toy I have ever encountered and have forever wanted. It was the Lego Castle Set. Bobby and I showed each other our penises and we also had a pissing sword fight in his bathroom. The other friend that I had was Shawn. He had a younger brother Devin. His father was Bo but I can't remember his mothers name. They were as redneck as they came. Pick up trucks and confederate flags.

There are only three things I remember with all the time I spent with Shawn. We loved going into the woods because someone had dumped a ton of old car parts back there and Shawn and I would always try to build a plane out of them. It was a perfect blend of imagination and niavity and it was as close to perfect as you can find in life.

I also remember riding my scooter around with Shawn. We went to the biggest hill we could find and we tried to go as fast as we could down the hill. On my final attempt, I went down the hill but somehow lost control and the scooter went out from under me and I smashed my face into a rock. One of my front upper teeth was pushed backwards so the bottom of the tooth was touching the roof of my mouth. Blood was gushing everywhere but I don't remember crying. I ran home and my mom shoved me and my sister Jeannette into the car and we drove to the hospital. My mom had told my sister to grab paper towels to help soak up the blood. She grabbed one sheet. It's the first time I saw my mom hit my sister. The tooth would be saved but a few years later an infection grew and I lost the tooth.

The last thing I remember about my time was Shawn was that we were playing down the street near Bobby's house. I think we were playing football. I saw my mom speeding down the road in her car with my sister Lynnae. Lynnae rolled down the window and she screamed out the window, "Grammy had a heart attack!" and off they drove. I didn't see my mom for the next few days and I wasn't allowed to go to the funeral. My grandmother worked at Johnson And Johnson for many years until she died. I didn't really know all that much about my grandmother. From what I can gather, my mom did not have a good relationship with her. I do remember her buying me a He-Man action figure but my step dad took it away because he believed that He-Man was evil. I never forgave him for that. It was the only thing I would ever have to remind me of my grandmother and it ended up in some landfill. My grandmother left my mom her car and some money which my mom used to put a down payment on our future house.

We also took in my grandmothers cat, Michael. We had one car already, Snuggles. My sister Lynnae found Snuggles outside our church when I was three. She was a beautiful fluffy Red Persian. That damn cat lived for 21 years. Michael was just a cat. He had a bad attitude and I was the only one he liked or kindof liked. He spent most nights under my bed. I would talk to Michael when he was under my bed. I had a connection with him. I remember crying to him one night because I could tell he missed my grandmother and he was scared and hurt. We had to give Michael away. I cried when he was taken away. I hope that he had a good life and found some peace and was no longer scared.

The funniest thing about the whole trailer park was that over twenty years later, my mom and step dad ended up back on the same exact lot we lived on just in a ranch style home now. The trailer park is still there but it's a lot nicer than when I lived there. My sister Jeannette ended up moving in there as well. The car parts aren't in the woods anymore, I've checked three times.

Lost childhood friends

I had a few friends in the neighborhood. There was Sam. He had a younger brother Daniel and an older brother named Brian (I think). Brian killed himself after Sam and I lost our friendship (I will get into that later) and I moved away. Sam's dad was awesome or so I thought. His mother was a nightmare. I never saw so much anger in a woman. If she wasn't yelling, she had a miserable look on her face. Sam had a pool and he also had a small clubhouse that his dad built for him. I loved going in there. It is one of the only places I wish I could go back and visit from my childhood. We traded baseball cards and played with GI Joes and had gun fights all in and around that clubhouse.

Mike lived across the alley from Sam and was easily my best friend until our friendship died. He was the only person I knew who had a computer. We used to play this late eighties football game on his computer all the time. We also used to have some amazing wiffle ball games outside Mike's house. Christ knows how many balls we lost in the neighbor's drain pipes. Mike's dad was a single father. Mike had two sisters that were both older than Mike. My earliest sexual experiences seemed to center around my friendship with Mike. We both found a playboy magazine in a garbage can in the local cemetery. We had tapped a Philadelphia Eagles playoff game and when we sat down to watch it once, halfway through it a porno had been taped over it, apparently from his dad. The last sexual experience was when one of Mike's sisters was laying on the couch with her boyfriend. They were under a blanket and he was humping her and she seemed to be enjoying it. I still don't know if it was just a dry hump or actual sex but at 8 or so, I didn't know.

Mike's neighbors were brothers about our same age. Chris and Scott. They had a Nintendo and then later a Sega Genesis and then even later a Sega CD. They had a step father just like me but he was actually pretty decent from what I can gather. He would actually take time and play video games with us. I remember staying over their house a few times to just play Bases Loaded with him. They were okay at first and then played a major part in my friendships with these people to be destroyed.

There was a kid up the road from all us named Mark. He was quit and angry. He once made me stand on a rusty nail and it went through my foot and laughed at me as I stumbled home. He started making fun of me around my back and in my face for being forced to go to church and going to private school. When I was in 5th grade, we had a pretty decent size snow storm. Mark, Sam, Scott, Chris, Mike and I got together to play football in the snow on the street. My sister came up the road later and we started to have a snowball fight. I told everyone to not hit my sister in the face because she had just gotten new glasses. Mark told Scott to make a snowball and throw it at my sisters face and that is what he did. She grabbed her face and screamed. I grabbed Scott and started to beat the shit out of him. Chris threw me off of him and Mark stood and laughed. Sam and Mike stood back and sat down. Things were never the same after that.

Mark was at the center of all the hazing and hatred that would follow for the next few years. Those next few years sucked a lot. I was going through puberty and was dealing with with a ton of changes with school and friends. I would walk my dog Abner just about every night and all of my former friends would either sit outside Mikes or in Sam's yard and insult me. A few times they got in my face and tried to fight me. Once, they shot a BB gun at my face. They tried to befriend me once after that but it was just a ploy to steal baseball cards from me. My mom got them back for me. I gained a ton of weight during those years and weight I wouldn't lose until I turned 16 or so.

I never connected again with those guys. All of them still live in Easton and at least one of them in South Side. Sam had two kids with a girl I used to work with. Mike also had two kids. I don't know about the others other than they live in Easton still.

"All of the worst enemies are somehow always friends that used to be..." Boy Sets Fire - My Life In The Knife Trade.

Roots too deep to run away...

My high school friend, Mike, recently wrote an article about the town we grew up in, Easton, Pennsylvania. I had made a comment to him that he had left out the part of the city I grew up in which was South Side. He told me that he would leave it up to me to write about South Side. Easton is an old industrial town that sits on the Leigh and Delaware Rivers and sits right across from New Jersey. It sits almost perfectly (mileage wise) between New York City and Philadelphia. The town served as a key point in the Revolutionary War and is rich in National history. It was a service center for the steel industry in later years and serviced three canals and later five railroads. The city is broken down into four sections. The Historic Downtown, The West Ward, College Hill and South Side. The Historic Downtown is pretty much what it says it is. It has shops and businesses and mostly apartments as well as office buildings. The West Ward is more of the working class area with corner stores and row houses. College Hill is home to Lafayette College and is the more affluent part of the city. Then there was South Side. It is where the poor people are and most of the crime and minorities reside. Not to say that the area didn't have its nice parts but the majority of the area was what people would consider "the other side of the tracks".

Although the population has mostly stayed the same since the 1970's or so, the city has seemed to have sprawled over the last few years and has gotten bigger. More businesses and it has seemed to become more and more modern everywhere you look. I haven't lived in Easton for years now but when I go to visit family and drive through, so much has seemed to change. Even the main drive through South Side has a glossier look to it but behind the new store fronts and back allies, the area still looks the same.

My mom and step father moved to Easton when I was 5. We lived on the eastern most part of the area, away from the projects. Not that it was planned like that, but it was the first house in my mom's price range that she "liked". My grandmother had died earlier that year and had left my mom some money. She used it to put a down payment on a house so we could move out of the trailer park and hopefully start a better life. Now that I am over ten years removed from that half a double we lived in, it was a shit hole but my mom and step father did a good amount of work on the house to try to make it into something respectable to live in while the rest of the neighborhood seemed to slowly fall apart. The dining room had this splinter filled wood that was replaced a year or so later. The carpet in the upstairs was an ugly nightmare of brown and orange. The basement reminds me of the Blair Witch Project. The windows rattled everytime a storm came through. The attic had exposed nails and always smelt bad and had exposed patches of insulation you could (and my step father did) fall through. The wood would creek all night long. The neighbors were dirty and when they left, dirtier ones moved it. I always felt the house had a creepy feel to it but it could have just been my disorder.

The part of South Side we lived on was a melting pot. It was completely African American area like the western side of South Side. There were some upper middle class people right down the road from our house and some families barely making it up the road. We were probably about in the middle although when you are a kid and don't know wealthy, you can't really gauge your own standing. The Farina's were the only family that I knew of that had a pool. This guy Ron sat out on his porch each night and drank beer and listened to the Phillies game. Whenever I would walk by, we always talked. He was very nice but probably just drunk. The Young's lived next door. They were very old and probably lived in that house for 40 years or more. They were very nice but far from clean. The Nicholason's lived in the other half of the house. They were nice but dirty. Their house smelt bad. When they moved out, a very ugly family moved in. They were the poster family for White Trash. The father would physically abuse his daughters (and I can only assume sexually) and we had to call the police a number of times. We also had to call the CPA just because of the conditions of their house. The yard always had pointless shit in it. When they finally moved out, a nicer and cleaner family moved in. They were African American and their son was a up and coming athlete in the local high school. He later got into drugs and ruined it all. The Decker's lived across the street and were the nicest people on the block. My Aunt moved in next door to the Decker's a few years after we moved in. Her husband beat her and they always fought. There was a small mom and pop store between some of the houses on my street. One of them was a crack house and as the years went on, more and more violence grew from that house. The store was robbed more than once. There was a drive by near that house. There were always late night comings and goings from that house. I always felt bad for the store. They always had cheap candy and baseball cards. One day, the owner snapped and started throwing money and merchandise into the street. It closed and opened back up a few years later and sold sandwiches and hoagies. I don't know if it's still there.

South Side has a million stories just like any other town. I could keep spilling stories of the rusted porches and burnt out houses but the stories always seem to have the same ending and it's never happy. South Side is where you go to stay. South Side was built on the side of a giant hill and all the dreams seemed to roll downhill and into the brown river at the bottom of that hill and washed away. I always relish a story of someone who got out and did good things and just didn't repeat the cycle or someone who just did something different. Someone who didn't end up with three kids before they were twenty or in jail or shot or working some dead end job living between Grant and Wilkes Barre Street. There was always a stigma attached to living in South Side, in Easton anyway. If someone asked you where you lived and you said "I live in South Side." you would get the clenched teeth with a half smile or the "Ohhhh..." response. You weren't up and coming or working towards something, you were fucking down and out.

Too Deep Until Now

I only have one reoccurring dream. When it comes to me in my sleep, it takes over the fear of my reality when I wake. It seems so stupid when I tell people about it but it seems so real that it take me days sometimes to wrap my reality back into place. My reoccurring dream is that I did not graduate high school. When I wake, I believe it and I am encompassed with a deep filled anxiety that I am now in a dream and the reality is that I am back in high school and I didn't graduate and what is going on in my actual reality is nothing more than a projection of what my life could be.

I am 31. I have a wife, two children, two dogs, a cat and a fish. I also have a personality disorder. I don't really want to go into the specifics of the disorder or treatment or anything. That is not the point of this blog. I have a fear that one day I will be gone and there will be nothing left of me. I will not have a legacy. My name will not be in any history book. No one will write a song or movie about me. The fear that my reality may slip one day may be an inspiration for me to start writing or maybe just to make some sort of mark in this world, all be it a very very small one.

This will be made of all sorts of things. Memories of my youth will probably dominate but also music, movies, my family, sports and so forth. I don't imagine too many people will ever stumble across this and who knows how long I will keep up with it. I guess we will just see.