He openly disobeyed his teachers, who started writing misconduct notes and calling his parents.
Though Castaic was no ghetto, it was also no gated community, and there was occasional spillover from the nearby prison. For a period, a flasher in a raincoat and pants with the crotch cut out started frequenting the neighborhood. Sherry used to let the boys walk alone to and from the bus stop but now began escorting them. One day when Anthony got in trouble in second grade, he decided not to return home, fearing the rebuke. When he didn’t disembark from the bus, his mother called the police.
I see a police car in the distance. Maybe Mom called the police because I didn’t go home. I turn and walk down the side street. The police car also turns down the street and starts driving toward me. Don’t run, I tell myself. But I start to run anyway. I may be able to run faster than my friends but not faster than a car. I hear the engine. A voice says, “Stop running,” but I don’t stop. And then louder I hear, “STOP,” and the car makes a loud sound like a giant chicken and the lights flash. And I stop.
The policeman isn’t mean but he has a gun and his uniform is scary. He asks what my name is and I don’t say anything and he asks again and I tell him, “Anthony,” and he asks for my last name and I say, “Ervin,” and he tells me that my mother is upset and frightened and it’s dangerous to be out by myself. Then he asks me why I didn’t go home on the bus. I don’t say anything because I’m not supposed to talk to strangers and I already told him my name. I don’t tell him that Miss S. called Mom because I was a disruption in class and that she moved my desk far away from the others. Like I have a disease or something. I don’t tell him that I don’t want to go home because I don’t want to be spanked. He asks me again. I just say, “Sorry.”
He tells me to get in the car. I tell him Mom told me not to talk to strangers or get into cars with them. He say he’s not a stranger, he’s a police officer. I know police aren’t the same as strangers but Mom always told me not to trust ANYBODY. So I just stand there. He shakes his head and says I should get in unless I want him to call more police. So I get in.
He doesn’t do anything bad to me. He’s not even mean. He just drives me home. Mom is going to yell and yell. And Dad will tell her to take it easy and let it go, but she’ll still use the wooden spoon or the belt or something. The worst part about getting spanked on your bum is you can’t see it coming. And then I’ll be grounded and stuck in my room for days and days without video games and I won’t be able to see my friends except at the pool, and even there Dave will shout and say, “Give me ten push-ups,” whenever I try to have fun. That’s why I don’t want to go home. But then I only get more punishment. And then I don’t want to go home even more.
Mom is standing outside on the road when we arrive. She looks mad.
Parents often fall into one of two camps: those who want to recreate their own childhood for their children and those who want to rectify it. Anthony’s mother is among the latter. She won’t talk about her childhood. Even her three sons know little about it. When I broached the matter, she retorted that she saw “no valid reason for opening that door.” Only later, after a few more attempts and after I added that it might give context to her protective mode of child-rearing, did she toss me a valuable scrap from her past: “The most I’ll tell you is I was on my own at a very young age. When you don’t have parents, you have to protect yourself. That’s hard work for a young person. So I was going to protect my children.”
The foster-care past she alludes to may explain why Sherry prickles at the mention of a more hands-off parenting approach. It’s hard to know if one’s survival odds are better getting between a grizzly and her cubs or between Sherry and hers. “I would kill to protect them,” she tells me matter-of-factly. Not the soft-spoken, mousy, blend-into-the-wallpaper type, Sherry runs her domestic affairs with the monomaniacal zeal of an Ahab, except her White Whale is a far more practical beast: order in the house and order in the family. Referring to herself as half-Jewish, half-Italian (she was called half-breed as a child), Sherry exudes a matriarchal charisma and maintains a maternal dictatorship, aligning in this sense more with her Mediterranean ancestry than her American upbringing. It’s from her that Anthony inherited his long limbs and cutting quips, which both mother and son can deliver with an infuriating and amusing nonchalance.
Though nearing seventy, she looks a decade younger and has the energy of someone half her age. The blood pressure and sleeping pills she takes are probably more due to hyperactivity and stress than ailing health, which she maintains with daily treadmill runs and neighborhood walks. One might be tempted to say that her intrinsic vigor and bullish tenacity played a role in helping her defeat cancer in 2000 despite the doctors giving her a 60 percent chance of dying within five years. Sherry considers it her duty to protect her children against the perils and treacheries of a poor, nasty, and brutish world. Whatever unspoken demons lie buried in her past, they inform her outlook: “I don’t let anyone walk on me. There was a time when I was more submissive, but not anymore. Shit on me once, shame on you. Shit on me twice, shame on me. I taught my kids that. Protect yourself.”
Though the family celebrates Christmas, not Hanukkah, and though there’s bacon in her fridge, Sherry feels connected to her Jewish heritage, especially to what she refers to as the Jewishness of valuing education. “I demanded good grades,” she tells me. Although the good marks came, they were often qualified by remarks about behavior misconduct, which never sat well with Sherry. As disciplinarian and keeper of order in the home (her husband was the good cop), Sherry had the most trouble with her middle son: “Anthony always had me frustrated. I never found my footing with what to do. I spanked, I yelled, I confined him to his room. Took away this, took away that. It was his personality. When I say, I want it now, I mean now. You say now to Anthony, and he says, I’m going to make you wait twenty minutes because you said ‘now.’ He stymied me all the time.”
The eldest sibling, Jackie, didn’t give his mother as much as grief as Anthony, but mostly because he was better at not getting caught. “There was crazy stuff that Mom had no idea about,” Jackie recounts. “Like riding bicycles over makeshift bridges across the roofs of houses, playing with nail guns on construction sites . . . I look back now and say, Thank God I lived.”
Anthony, on the other hand, didn’t try to hide anything: he’d openly flaunt his waywardness. Even so, the criteria for good behavior were stricter for the oldest brother. Whereas his younger siblings might be punished with a “time-out” that required them to stand in the corner, Jackie would be grounded for a month or longer for minor infractions like not doing homework, getting a bad grade, or lying. And though the others were also spanked, Jackie recalls receiving the lion’s share, usually delivered on his backside by spatula, spoon, shoe, or belt. Sometimes he was compliant, but other times he’d sprint away, running circuits around the house while “being chased and swung at.” Jackie admits he often exacerbated matters: “Part of me was just rebelling because I grew up in such a strict environment. You try to take the win from the loss. Lose on your own terms.”
It was a tug-of-war mother-son dynamic of bizarre, fiendish proportions: one evening Jackie took off sprinting on his usual circuit of the house with his mother chasing him, spoon in hand, only to encounter a wall where a door had been just that morning. “She sealed it up,” he says with a wry laugh. “And then I was trapped.” The purpose of the renovation was less diabolical: to raise the home value by forming an extra bedroom. But Jackie is convinced his mother instigated a skirmish that same day to lure him—or have him lure himself—into her dead-end snare.
In retrospect, Sherry has misgivings about the corporal punishment she doled out: “It was wrong, and now they’re always throwing up to me that I spanked
