I was fourteen working at what for legal purposes, I will call BFC - Beducky Fried Chicken. It was summer and I was broken, living with the secret of having no parents. How did that happen, you ask?
My parents were sixteen and seventeen when I was born. Dad got custody of me which is all you need to know about my mom. The mom always got custody of the kid, especially in the 70s. After he died when he was twenty-three, I moved in with my mom in a working-class suburb on the border of Chicago called Berwyn. I was seven.
If you had WGN growing up (or MeTV now), there was a show called Son of Svenghoulie, where a ghoul made fun of Berwyn. Imagine living in a neighborhood even a dead guy didn’t want to live in.
For the first couple years, I lived downstairs with my mom in her small apartment. Her living room was walled off and illegally converted into a one chair Polish beauty salon. My mom’s father lived upstairs and very suspect of me, the new addition to the building.
I represented his failure as a father. His daughter not only got pregnant in high school, but by a Puerto Rican no less, and now that mistake was living right downstairs.
As soon as I moved in, my mom started taking me out drinking to low rent taverns where she picked up a medley of mustached scumbags. Often times they were too drunk to drive, so I’d drive south down East Avenue in first gear, the engine screaming, while some drunk blob screamed,” shift you fucking pussy!” from the back seat while my mom fumbled with his zipper. I was around nine.
When we screeched back home between 2-4am, I saw the old man upstairs peek out his window then dip back inside as we approached the downstairs door.
Mom never forgot to drink, but often forgot to buy food, so I started stealing from the store down the street or stealing extra hot pack lunches from my Catholic Grade school down the street.
One night when I was still nine, I went upstairs and saw a stash of potato chip bags and a couple two litres of generic pop (the Chicago word for soda) on the ledge outside the old man’s door.
I hadn’t eaten that day so I cracked open a bag of chips and quickly shoveled in a fistful of salty goodness then opened the Red Pop and guzzled as much as I could until it felt like my stomach was gonna burst.
The door flew open and the ledge was flooded with light. The thick necked, stocky old man stood there and barked, “What the hell you doing? You eating my food?”
When I opened my mouth to say “no,” nothing came out but a long, loud incriminating belch.
He looked me up and down and asked, “You eat today?”
As embarrassing as the answer was, something felt like I could tell the old man the truth. I shook my head “no.”
I saw him thinking then he finally spoke, “The Black Stallion is coming on. You heard of it?”
“No,” I answered.
“Good movie. Got Mickey Rooney in it. Come in and watch. We’ll split some popcorn.”
He barely finished his sentence before I bolted past him into his small apartment. The door opened directly into his kitchen lined with yellow cabinets. Two stuffed plush chairs faced a color TV sitting atop a small bar next to the fridge.
As I hopped into the green stuffed chair, he said, “Careful with that one. The springs’ll get ‘ya.”
But I didn’t care. I was going to eat AND watch a movie.
The Black Stallion is about an old former jockey who helps a shipwrecked boy learn to trust again. The old man who fed me that night quickly became my grandfather.
Turns out when he was younger, alcohol had shipwrecked him too, and cost him everything including his marriage and the trust of his children, even the one who lived downstairs. So we became each other’s second chance.
When the movie was over, he turned and said, “Why don’t you stay up here tonight.”
“What about my mom?” I asked.
“Don’t worry, I’ll deal with her.”
And he did. From that night forward, I lived upstairs with the old man, who I called Gramp. I ate three meals a day and the beatings and drinking mostly stopped from downstairs.
Then one muggy day in June, when I was fourteen, I went to wake Gramp up. I gently nudged him. His eyes flashed open. He reached out and grabbed my hand. I thought we were wrestling so I pulled him into me. His face turned purple as he let out a loud hiss. He had a massive heart attack and died in my arms.
I ran downstairs and pounded on my mom’s door screaming, “Gramp’s dead! Gramp’s dead!”
The door flung open, and there she stood buck naked, groggy eyed, with a naked man passed out on the dining room table in the middle of her kitchen.
She called 911, the ambulance came and almost dropped Gramp carrying him down the stairs.
Later that night when mom and I got back to the building, I walked with her up to her apartment door. She turned and said, “Where the fuck you think you’re going?”
“In there with you,” I answered, “I’m too scared to go upstairs.”
“That makes two of us. Suck it up ‘cause you’re not staying down here.”
She headed inside her apartment and slammed the door in my face.
I laid on the steps in front of her door hoping she would open it back up and invite me in. I feel asleep and woke up in the middle of the night and with no other options, trudged upstairs terrified.
I lived alone in Gramp’s apartment while she lived downstairs. As the days went by, I ate all the food in the fridge, then all the canned food in the cabinets, then reluctantly spent the money from the coin jar Gramp kept on the shelf in his bedroom. It felt like what little I had left of him I was spending on hotdogs and milkshakes at the Tastee Freeze down the street.
I saw my mother every couple of weeks, usually bringing home some stray piece of garbage from the bar. They’d get into a fight or I’d get into it with the guy then mom would disappear for a month, furious I fucked up her love life.
After the food and change jar ran out, I begged on the street for money, just enough to eat, but stopped because people were glaring at me like I was a disgusting piece of shit. So, I started stealing from stores to eat. Then I had an epiphany…
If I got a job at a restaurant, I’d get paid AND get something to eat. I forged my birth certificate and got a job as a caddy at a golf course the next neighborhood over.
They nicknamed me “The Menstrual Caddy” because I only showed one week out of the month. I couldn’t do it. I felt like a boy servant to wanna be rich guys. When they asked for a club, I wanted to beat them with it rather than hand it to them.
I scored a job at a pizza joint where I was the worst busboy in the history of bus boys. It got hit by Greek Lightening so continuing to disappoint the Italians was no longer an option. And then I landed the job at Beducky Fried Chicken where I cooked the chicken and worked the register.
During this time, I started dating a great girl. Can you believe it? I had so much going for me; poverty, stealing, poor bathing habits, the secret of no parents. Never underestimate the power of unearned confidence and a sense of humor!
I was fourteen and she was eighteen. Rightfully frowned on these days but encouraged back then. She lived by my cousin who I love like a brother. He came from a working-class family in an unincorporated working-class neighborhood that was zoned into the public school of the very wealthy neighborhood right next door.
She would pick me up after my shift at BFC and drive us to her neighborhood where we met up with her friends, smoke a little weed then devour the left over chicken I brought from my dream job.
She was great and kind and loving. Her friends were usually cool too, but we came from such vastly different worlds and ways of living, I felt like I was playing a character around them.
There was one blonde kid who always pushed my buttons. He always glared at me with a contemptuous scowl on his face as we sat in the middle of the street littered with million-dollar homes and smoked a joint.
They didn’t think about getting in trouble or arrested. Of course, they could smoke a joint in the middle of the street. Of course, their parents bought them cars on their sixteenth birthdays. Of course, everything was going to work out for them. The world was theirs and I was a guest.
One night she picked me up and drove us back to her neighborhood. It had been a brutal week. I fought one of mom’s one-night stands and the cops showed up. Summer was coming to an end and I was supposed to be starting high school but was worried about how long I could keep my secret before I had a breakdown.
My plan was to go to high school until they realized I didn’t have parents then take off down south instead of going into a state home or foster care.
As we drove to her neighborhood, she talked about how excited she was for college. I smiled and acted excited for her too, but I knew our time was coming to an end. No matter how much she loved me, she’d be foolish to save it all for some poor kid back home.
My throat tightened with rage. For some reason, all I could think of was that scowling smug blonde haired rich kid.
There was only one thing to do, only one thing that could give me release from my pain - hurt the rich kid.
The second he said anything negative or looked at me wrong, I was going to start swinging. Hopefully I’d knock him out and when one of his douchebag Richie Rich friends came to his defense, I’d knock them out too, and keep swinging until the cops came and locked me up.
Fuck it.
We arrived at a backyard gathering of about ten graduating seniors at a really nice house. All the kids were drinking beer. My girl handed me a cold Miller Lite bottle. When I brought the bottle to my lips, I caught of whiff of myself and reeked of chicken grease from my shift. Shame hit me like a truck that ran a light.
Then I saw the blonde rich kid skulking in the corner of the yard. When our eyes met, he shook his head and stared at the grass. Here we go, I thought, time to beat his ass and hopefully everybody else’s soon after.
I started toward him and he stood. Good, I thought, maybe he’ll put up a fight and I can feel even more pain. When you come from pain and chaos, they became the only things that make you feel alive. Up is down and down is up. Normal feels like death.
When I got within striking distance, he put out his hand and said, “I don’t know if anybody told you, but we really love having you around.”
I stopped in my tracks and lowered my hands.
“What?” I mumbled.
“You’re just a super chill guy. You’re always cracking us up. I mean, we like that you bring chicken and shit, but even if it was just you, we’s still like having you around.”
I didn’t know whether to hit him or hug him. Then he sat back down, and the scowl returned to his face.
I sat next to him and asked, “Something wrong, man? You seemed bummed out.”
He took a long deep sad breath and said, “I’m really worried, man.”
“About what?” I asked.
“College. Didn’t get into my first three choices so going to my fourth. Don’t know much about the school. Guess I’m just scared, you know?”
I did know what it was like to be scared. I was angry, furious really, that he would use those words. How could he be scared? How could he be worried?
In an unexpectedly unguarded moment, he mumbled, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life.”
But I did. I knew exactly what he was going to do. He was going to go to college, party, get adequate grades, take over his father’s company, have a great family and be fabulously wealthy (which is exactly what happened.)
How could he be so stupid? How could he not know? He is messing with me, I thought, using his money and privilege to play games, to put on an act.
I stood back up, ready to throw punches to shatter his perfect teeth, nestled into his perfectly chiseled jaw attached to his perfect body living a perfect life.
“Sorry to dump that on you, man” he said, “I’m sure you got your own shit going on.”
When his worried eyes looked up at me, I realized he was telling the truth. He really was worried and scared.
I was jealous and envious of everything he had. It was unfair that he should have so much while I had so little and for that I wanted to make him pay.
But in that moment, I realized his fears were as real to him as mine were to me and that there would never be a time, place, world or combination or words that would would ever make him be able to understand me or my pain. He was incapable.
Poverty allowed me to understand his world, but he would never understand mine, because fortune had given him the gift of a permanent escape hatch, even if he hadn’t found the handle yet.
In many ways that night freed me from the naive and often selfish need to have strangers understand, validate or free me from my pain, fears or worry.
He couldn’t carry my fear because he was too busy carrying his own, just like everybody else. My fear was mine to carry and mine alone.
That was one of the many, many life lessons I learned over the summer of ‘88. I also learned how to hustle pool, sell shitty weed, move stolen merchandise, steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, keep my mouth shut until I knew the shot, don’t rat, don’t talk shit and you won’t get hit.
It was terrifying, joyful, heartbreaking and magical.
I've heard you talk about your childhood over the years but reading your story really touched me. Thanks for sharing Mick.
Wow....brave, vulnerable, heart-wrenching story - the fact you were able to grasp such a concept so young makes you wise beyond your years....I cannot imagine such a start to life and how one moves forward in that realm. Hell, I've been dealing with pain of watching my parents grow old. Kudos to you, my friend. It's like Keanu Reeves (and I don't quite the KR often) said via his character in Parenthood, 'they'll let any old asshole be a father." And he was speaking to all parents who are so irresponsible for their children. Always stuck with me.