- -
- 100%
- +
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
The Children of Happiness
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Children of Happiness
They are to be cherished and protected,
Even at the risk of your life.
They know sadness but will overcome it.
They know alienation
For they see past and through this reality.
They will Endure where others cannot. They will Survive where others cannot. They know love even when it is not shown to them. They spend their lives trying to communicate the love they know.
Chapter One
I was born on the day of Liberace, May 16th to be exact, The Day of Outrageous Flair. In the Big Blue Birthday book, Outrageous Flair is appropriately illustrated by a snapshot of Liberace himself soaking in a marbled bath as bottomless as deep dish apple pie, the round of the tub one white solid bubble. The showman and pianist was in his golden age, as plump and gaudy as Elvis in those final days of Vegas. Marinating in bubbles, his stout fingers spread by thick, jewelled rings, he flashes that champagne smile, beaming squarely at the camera from between two gilded swan neck faucets.
At the time that picture was snapped, I was a stick figure tweeny living in a trailer out in southern Ohio, on the back woods edge of a dead end country road that held as many secrets as it lacked street lights. My tub was shallow and rectangular and moulded of the same gold plastic as the trailer’s doorknobs. The bentnecked swans my mother had gold leafed were also plastic and hung slightly ajar on the bathroom’s wood panelling. The constant burning of bacon in the kitchen had infused our trailer’s hermetically sealed air with a sort of permanent tack that coated the curved backs of the swans and caught whatever floated through the bathroom, making a sort of three-dimensional dust. It gave the swans a hairy appearance—not unlike the very chest of Liberace himself.
My father’s baby blue polyester suit hung in the closet and his white Vegas-style loafers lounged beneath, their tight backs ready to snap around his heels and rub blisters. I can still see him wince as he hobbled along after only an hour in them. My mother’s cubic zirconia rings sat in an Avon dish on the back of the toilet, next to the Stick Up.
There was no cameraman and certainly no smiling.
As a young girl, I was taller than I was wide. Long, cool and lanky, I took my strides with the measured gait of an Arabian filly. It wasn’t something I tried for, it just happened. And when I walked the halls as a new Jr. High student, the senior boys called me highwater for the long legs that seemed destined to greatness. I should have been a ballerina, or a model, or at least a prima donna. But sometimes the stork drops you in the wrong place.
Because for all the feel and longing inside me to be a noble child of royal descent, even of the Liberace kind, there was no way around the blaring, honking reality of my daily life: I was shackled to a family of losers.
There was my dad with his Mork from Ork suspenders worn long after it was cool and his battery-operated bull horn that he snuck into football games. And Mom with her outdated fringed western gear making me couple skate with her to Peaches and Herb’s “Reunited” at the Make-A-Date Roller Skating Rink in Amanda, Ohio.
Thank God it was the next town over.
And I guess it wouldn’t have been so bad if my dad wasn’t ooga-ing his horn every time a junior in tight Jordache jeans walked in front of the bleachers. And the girls, with their sixth sense, would slow in their tracks for instinctual preening, pulling Goody combs from back pockets to feather long layers back along the sides of their heads, all the while tilting gently parted mouths in just such a way as to showcase their teeth. Then they’d dart glances up into the bleachers trying to catch the eye of their suitor.
I could have died.
And so could they when they spotted my dad; large, hairy, menacing, looking a cross between Jerry Garcia and Charles Manson in rainbow suspenders, wiggling his fat fingers, “Yoooo-hoooo,” at them like he would to a baby. They bolted and my dad would raise his megaphone and blitz the button for the Dukes of Hazzard’s car horn, blaring the confederate tune into the crisp fall night, adding his own “Charge!” at the end and springing to his feet. I wedged my body down into the foot bleachers and unfolded my turtleneck in triplicate up over my nose, hoping this alone would shield my identity.
And when I wasn’t saddled with him on game Fridays, I was stuck with Mom on the Saturdays, dragging me out under the swooning lights of the rink just so she wouldn’t have to couple skate alone. She was upping her chances to catch a wink from the married owner by getting out on the floor when it was least populated.
I held her sweaty hand and we coasted with locked knees around pitted wooden corners, while dancing polka dot lights spun me dizzy on the dark floor.
Reunited And It Feeels So Goood.
Trust me. No kid wants their 40-year-old mother asking them if her butt looks okay in the skating rink bathroom.
I was desperate. Desperate to get out of the hollow where I lived with the big trucks with gun racks in the back and bumper stickers that read “Boobs, Booze, and Country Music”, where at least one hand-lettered yard sign on the way to town scolded with a twang:
This is God’s CountryDon’ drive through it like Hell
I wanted far away from the kids my dad cornered at the football game’s concession stand, demanding they tell him how cool he was—the same ones that went on to pelt the back of my head with crabapples the rest of the year on the school bus. Like it or not, by the very virtue of association, I was a loser too; as long as I was under my father’s roof, every fledgling step in the teenage social hierarchy was eclipsed by a trademark faux pas of my father—a public squelch, raucous belch or exaggerated, lingering crotch adjustment.
The fall of eighth grade saw me herded into choir with the rest of the class, and despite complaining along with the other kids over the injustice and uncoolness of it all, I was secretly thrilled to be looped into the pomp and circumstance of school performance, a world I’d never have gained entry to if it was not mandatory for the class. My parents, in all their trailer-minded glory, placed zero importance on the intellectual advancement of anything as meaningless as music or art. School was seen as a sort of extended daycare to keep me out of the house until I got off the bus and could be handed a list of chores that wouldn’t cease until bedtime. To say that school—and all the bells and whistles of extracurricular activities—meant nothing to them was an understatement.
Choir was the first indulgence of any kind I’d had, the music room a luxurious epicentre of civilized culture that offset the glare of my trailer tarnish.
Our first performance of the year was marked by flat grey skies pregnant with the fall of winter’s virgin snow. The sky hung small and low over the miles of brittle brown corn fields that surrounded Mcdowell middle school but it wasn’t the gloom of winter that knitted my forehead as my father drove us there.
“Dad?”
“Yeah, honey?”
“Promise you won’t embarrass me?”
“Embarrass you?” he snorted. “What, you don’t think your old man’s cool? I know what cool is. I’m so cool I had tattoos on my diapers.”
“Just promise,” I pleaded as I stared out of the window, watching the bitter wind kick corn husks up into swirling funnel clouds.
We stood at the mouth of the auditorium, my father and I, his sideburns thick as mutton chops and with that trademark chipmunk smile, the top teeth forced over the bottom giving his grin, however manly he may be, a forever permanence of being twelve. He wore polyester and I wore corduroy and puttycoloured panty hose, a fresh snag running up my leg. In our first formal event together, my father pretended to wait for someone, craning his neck up and over the families that bustled around us and took their seats in the auditorium once they embraced each other. So confident of his cool in the car, he had started to sweat. A few beads of perspiration popped up on his forehead; one let loose and trickled down into his sideburn like a checker dropped from his hairline.
I knew I would have to stay. Who knows what might happen if I left his side?
The wind instruments began their warm up. My choir teacher swept past on her way to the stage and stopped to collect me, placing her delicate conductor’s hand softly on my back. I can still feel the exact outline of it singed on my back.
My father thrust his arm out to her, erupting in a boyish grin and my choir teacher, never the wiser, stretched her long tapered fingers to his, slipping a dainty palm into his calloused one.
I caught the twinkle in his eye but it was too late.
In the split second it takes for the little squeeze that accompanies a handshake, my father cocked his left leg and farted in the empty hall.
Dad roared maniacally. My choir teacher recoiled her hand in horror as my father held it steadfast. And I, the delicate child, stood alone between them. This was life with my dad.
As humiliating as it was to be out in public with my father, I needed him too. He pointed out kids who made fun of me and without him, I felt exposed and uncertain of how to interpret the world around me. Luckily, our public outings were rare. My father wanted little more than to be parked in his La-Z-Boy recliner in the small cavern of our trailer’s living room, cocooned by the soft glow of six to eight hours of television a night. Dad was perfectly content to recline in a flat, predictable world, experienced in manageable half-hour increments, with nothing more complex than a riveting episode of Sanford and Son.
There was me, Danny, my little brother, Mom and Dad, all living in a mobile home that started out no bigger than the trailer of a semi truck. But each of us was living in our own fantasy.
At night I lay in bed burning; burning in a vision of running away. I would get on The Price Is Right, “Julie Gregory, C’mon down! You’re the next contestant on the Price Is Right,” I would spring five perfect back flips down the aisle—boom—straight onto contestant’s row. I’d lean into the mike and know the actual retail price of the His-n-Hers matching hi-ball glasses, the numbers rolling out my mouth like Pentecostal tongue. I’d play the Mountain Climber game with the grace and ease of a cut-throat watcher. And the way I span the wheel, you’d think I had one set up at home in the wood-panelled basement.
After winning both prizes in the Showcase Showdown, my carefully studied bid falling within buckshot of a hundred dollars of my own well-chosen showcase, I’d step out from behind my podium; pry the mike from Bob’s cold, tan fingers and croon, “This is Julie Gregory for Bob Barker, reminding you to help control the pet population! Have your pet spayed or neutered!”
Bob would fall silent, pursing that thin smile as he clamoured for control. But I could tell he was impressed.
Showgirls would fan out around me to fill in for the lack of family rushing the stage and I’d whisper that I’d be donating at least one of the cars to the Humane Society. One showgirl would cup her hand to Bob’s ear and he, in turn, would tell the audience. The crowd went wild.
“Who is this amazing teenage girl?” hissed down the aisles like brushfire.
I lay in bed at night, the vision searing behind my eyes; my fingers clasped upon my soft-breathing belly, eyes wide open, boring into the dark.
And while I was running away to Burbank, California, Mom was living in a closet of gold lamé tracksuits, each holding in its folds the golden promise of an imaginary cruise drifting on the horizon of a fading sunset. The ensembles jammed to swelling on her closet rod, each with its respective price tag dangling anxiously in case the cheque bounced.
And while Mom spent her nights trying on outfits for the ritzy vacation that never came, my little brother Danny lived in a fortress constructed of hundreds and hundreds of Matchbox cars, to which he was ruler of their domain, and future race car driver of all. For those that were his favourites, he had a special carry bag in which he stacked them double decker and carried like an attaché case at all times. In the space between our fantasy bubbles, the air of the trailer was charged electric, ready to crack with velocity the minute one of these worlds tilted toward reality. But the truth was that even as my father lay dormant in a homogenized state, rich in his lazy life, even as he rooted at football games in his ridiculous suspenders and insisted he was the King of Cool, in the front pocket of his trousers sat a spring-loaded gun. It stayed put in my father’s pocket twenty-four hours a day. He didn’t even take it out at night, just dropped his pants and stepped out of two perfect trouser tunnels—leaving his .25 like a sleeping watchdog on the floor by the bedside.
And if he couldn’t get to it, there was always the gun kept beneath his pillow and the other two tucked under my mother’s wigs in the bathroom cupboard. Failing those, three sat atop the refrigerator—one at the front, one in the middle closest to the stove and the third at the very back in case the one or both of the other two were stolen.
And those were just the guns inside.
Hidden beneath a stack of Taco Bell napkins in the glove compartment of the car was yet another—with an extra gun tucked under the springs of the driver’s seat, just in case.
But the one constant was my father’s .25. It was always with him, in the La-Z-Boy, at church and even as the eighth grade choir warbled through Englasis On High. And each day, without really knowing it, I was holding my breath, right up to my fifteenth birthday when my father took his gun to the rooftop of the Sherex Chemical Company to jump.
By then, my father had come to spook easy. And it was my job to ease him out of it. In this way, I was his watchdog too. Tension strung in trap wires around him and anything could pluck the strings: a door slammed by the breeze, the backfire of a muffler, a hunter’s random gunshot that pierced the silence of our woods and my father’s corresponding jolt, duck, a violent swing of his head, the injection of panic into the air from his electrified body sending a ripple effect through me. When he jumped, I jumped. So having Dad in the La-Z-Boy meant a break from the worry. My father was like his gun; the safety latch might be on, but it could go off anytime.
It wasn’t until I had a life of my own, free from my own jolts and ducks and wide eyes that swung around wildly, that I could lay claim to the feeling, to understand that what lay just under the surface of my father’s happy-go-lucky appearance, and resonated out into our family through the conduit of myself, was something so big, so incomprehensible that it could never be touched or opened by any words or healed by the passage of time. And to a kid, that was far larger than anything spoken at all.
There was so much craziness that went down back then, so much Technicolor madness that defied anyone in the Tri-County area from ever believing it, that I’m surprised we even made it out as a family. And by family I don’t just mean the initial clan of us, the four of us who were at best odd-shaped puzzle pieces from entirely different boxes, but the extended cache of strangers that were folded into our drama along the way. Because honestly, without the punctuation of their presence and the adrenaline that swirled around it, I don’t think I could have stood another day with the suspenders or the bullhorn, the skates or the fringed western wear without grabbing at least one of the guns off the top of the fridge and blowing my brains out.
Chapter Two
Even though my father came of age in the Sixties, he was cut of a different cloth than the era. My dad never went to Woodstock. He didn’t protest the war. He did not wear leather vests or fringy things. Never in his life did he don sandals or moccasins, smoke pot or down a fifth of whiskey. And I don’t think my dad even knew what the term “tie-dye” meant. He was a lanky sprout of a kid with Alfred E. Newman ears that sprung out from the side of his head and a smirk that turned him into a west side slurpee the second he flashed it.
He dropped out of school at the age of seventeen to register for Vietnam because he thought the uniform would get him girls. And when the officer that brought him on pitched an extra week of leave for every friend he signed up with him, he volunteered the names of his three best buddies, walked out of the recruiter’s office and promptly blew off boot camp to take his three promised weeks off. He was AWOL before he even began.
My own mother had scarcely made it through the ninth grade when she was married off by her mother, my Grandma Madge, to a carny—what those who worked in the carnivals called themselves—in his fifties named Smokey. At the same time Dad was doing his two months overseas, Mom was travelling with the Grand Ole Opry, trick riding horses and being one half of a side-winding whip act, all in fringed leather. The original white showman’s jacket she wore before I was born hung in my trailer closet as a teenager, radiating the smell of decaying leather and mothballs.
Mom and father, both from the west side of Columbus, existed thousands of miles apart until the trajectory of their lives careened them into one another with a violent crash. Within the span of a few months, my dad was flown back to the States from Vietnam and checked into his first government-issue psychiatric ward and Mom was a widow after walking in to find a cold, stiff Smokey propped up in bed. It was only later I’d hear the whispers that she’d been questioned about his death.
When my dad came out of the mental hospital at age 20, he took the first job he could get at the gas station at Grant and Sullivan. Mom pulled in and less than a month shy of Smokey being cold in the ground had a real boyfriend lined up. Their first official date was on Valentine’s Day; they married in March. Six months later a baby was on the way. That baby was me.
I guess looking back there were signs all along, ominous forewarnings that we would all end piled up at the bottom of that dead-end dirt road desperate and feral as a trapped cat. And the lynchpin of them all orbited around my father and the first singular memory I have of him just shy of turning four.
I remember we lived on Cedarleaf Road in Ohio.
I remember the picnic table in the backyard was a giant wooden spool for electrical wire which Dad had rolled home from the base where he worked.
I remember getting parked on top of the refrigerator when Planet of the Apes came on, my father’s reason being I’d sit still straight through to the commercials if I was afraid of tipping off.
And I remember looking out the living room window from behind heavy mustard-coloured curtains to see my father on his hands and knees in the gravel drive.
He had come home early after being fired.
He pushed a jack under the sedan, hiked his pants up by the loops and plastered a shock of greasy hair across his forehead. I watched his skinny arm pump as the car began to rise.
When it was high enough to teeter, he got down in the gravel and shimmied up flat under the car, his fingers inching out to grasp the rusty frame. In slow motion, he began to rock; back and forth, back and forth, until his body slid out from under the chaises with each hoist of his arms; like a low, heavy chin-up.
I was standing at the storm door by now, watching through the glass when Mom sauntered up behind me. Her arms grazed my hair as they folded into lockdown over her chest, the heat of bristle rolling off her. And it was then that I first felt the gulf between the rest of the world and my father, a chasm so dark and bottomless that even then I sensed it could swallow him whole.
But in that moment I also knew that I would reach across and save him. I would be his bridge back. And in reaching for my father, I would not let him fall.
The car swayed lightly, his face wedged under the tyre and with every rock my body winched forward, until it pressed solid against the pane wet with cold. I touched my fingertips to the glass and bore my eyes steady into the front end of the car. I would not let it fall.
“Jesus,” Mom hissed, “He can’t even do that right.”
I stared harder, willing the car to stay.
On my father rocked.
And it was only me that stood between them.
That’s where my father remains forever etched in my being: just out of reach, on the other side of the glass. From that day forward, carved in my heart was a hole which no other love but his could fill. With a fragile liability that led him out to the drive to wedge himself under the car and a three-year-old omnipotent enough to feel she alone could save him, we were crippled from the start. But this was the template from which my love was stamped and I could no sooner change it than a duckling could undo its imprinting at birth.
Like the Quakers, the Gregory family lineage had always managed to linger slightly on the brink of extinction. My mother’s dad put a gun in his mouth when she was still a girl, my dad’s mother died young of a stroke, his own father only hovered above death, living in a perpetual alcoholic stupor behind cases of Bud Light stacked to the ceiling to keep out the light of day. And, with the eventual death of the last withered-up great-grandparent, the first portrait of our remaining family clan is snapped.
It is a blustery, winter afternoon in Columbus, Ohio, on a piss-grey day, lined up next to a cement wall cascading the carcass of a bush that used to be alive in the months of green.
There is something to be said for the fashion of the Seventies; something haunting, almost surreal in what people actually wore out into the world. In this photo, it’s all of us and we amount to only five—six if you count the dog my grandmother’s holding.
There’s Lee, my mother’s mentally slow brother, standing on the one end, pelvis tilted forward, shoulders slack, arms stiff at his sides. Grandma Madge, my mother’s mother, is next to him, oozing eternal Christian goodness out her every pore. She has a pulsating cluster of fabric orchids fingering out over her lapel and there is something almost sinister to them, like an accessory The Joker might wear. Mom is next to Grandma Madge in a long blond and black peppered wig that kind of makes her look like an early cone head, from where the seam sewn at the top points into a little ^ that runs down her scalp. She wears a purple mini with one panty-hosed knee cocked like a model’s.
Then there’s Dad on the end. Standing cockeyed, throwing the camera his pissed-off, I-could-just-kill-you glare, having hoisted me up to his chest with one mighty palm and pointing his leg out away from the rest of us, like he was about to get off the exit ramp of this family any minute now. His clip-on tie hangs limp and is tucked into a wrinkled suit coat with a buckling waist button, too small to span his protruding belly, even though his pant legs hang ghostly empty.