My father didn’t beat us. That job was left to my mother. She had a favorite bush on the side of the house that grew the biggest, longest branches that were perfect for her to use as “Rods of Correction.” I hated those bushes, and even today when I see them in Los Angeles, I have to just shake my head and shudder. When I talk to my mom about those things now we just laugh, but it sure wasn’t funny back then because my mom meant business. She had five kids to raise, and from her experience in helping raise her brothers and sisters, she knew just what to do.
As a young boy, I don’t know what it was about birds, but I just seemed to love them. I would climb up into the trees to look at the baby birds in their nests, and sometimes I would take the baby birds out of the trees and then try to put them back without the mother bird missing them. My family teased me for my obsession with birds, but it all came to an end one nice summer day when I climbed the pine tree in our back yard. The day before I had heard the chirps of baby birds coming from its top branches and I was determined to find them.
I climbed high up into the tree and found them about fifteen feet up, very well hidden in a nest. The birds were doves, my favorite kind because they were not aggressive and the mothers would never attack you. Somehow when I went to pick the baby birds up out of the nest I lost my footing and went crashing to the ground. I hit the ground so hard it knocked the wind out of me for about a minute.
I thought I was going to die. No one knew where I was and I couldn’t scream for help. Finally after almost passing out, I forced some air in me. I checked myself out, and to my amazement I had no broken bones or anything, and after about thirty seconds I was up and walking again. After that day, I left birds alone.
During the summers, my mother signed my brother Clarence and me up for camp. The camp provided lots of fun activities, and one was to go swimming at Trenton State College, which was located just on the other side of the woods west of our camp grounds. My mother and my next-door neighbor Mrs. Murphy had both taken part-time jobs at the college in the cafeteria, and often I would slip away from the camp group to visit my mother in the kitchen where she’d slip me a little food
I didn’t know how to swim and I was too ashamed to tell anyone who didn’t already know. It seemed all the other kids were good swimmers and I thought that they would pick on me if I revealed the truth. I told the counselors I could swim, and this little lie would come back to haunt me.
The pool at Trenton State College was an indoor Olympic-size pool. On our first day, the camp counselors told everyone to go ahead and jump into the pool, so like a fool, that’s what I did. I started off in the shallow end and then I made my way down to the deep end not knowing that the pool bottom was about to drop. I realized it too late, and went straight to the bottom, from 5 feet to about 9 feet. I was drowning. I was drowning and no one was paying any attention to
I struggled to get to the surface but went back under, taking in what seemed to be gallons of water. I motioned for help, but no one came. Frantically I did whatever came to me, and I decided to stay under water with the little air I had in my lungs and just swim to the side of the pool, and it worked. I got one hand on the poolside and pulled my way up out of the water, gasping for air.
I crawled out of the pool and made my way to the locker room and sat down to catch my breath. It seemed as if God’s angels had lifted me up again. I didn’t tell anyone about that incident for many years; summer was too much fun and all my friends were there so I could not risk my parents pulling me away from it all
My father continued on with his drunken ways, never fully realizing the damage he was doing to his family. His extramarital affairs produced several children. My mother was a strong Christian woman, and she said she put up with it to keep the family unit together
Lots of people would often visit our house just to hang out. We had a nice house on a good piece of land with apple and pear trees, grape vines and more. It was a laid-back place with plenty of shade. Men popped over to see my dad and just hang out, including some Italian guys who my mother would later tell us when we were older were from one of the New Jersey crime families. “Good Fellas.”
One of these guys, Jimmy Testa, a good friend of our family, had gone to school with my mother in Trenton and he was the baseball coach of the little league team that my brother Willie played on. His boy Jimmy Jr. was also on the team and we knew his wife and daughter. We all loved Jimmy Sr. and his family. He reminded me of the actor Robert De Niro, but with a case of bad acne. Years later after we left Trenton we heard that Jimmy Sr. was killed in prison. We didn’t know the circumstances, but I came to understand that Jimmy Sr. was a mob guy. My mother was devastated to learn about the death of an old friend
In the summer of 1972, my mother had had enough. My father was still drinking and fighting and womanizing, and he told my mom to get out and don’t come back. And she did just that. She packed up what little items she could gather and told my father she was taking the two youngest kids with her for now, which was my brother Louis and me. She said she would send for the three oldest kids when she got settled. She knew the older ones could look out for each other, but as for Louis and me, she knew that we couldn’t survive in Trenton without her. Her plan was to head south to Georgia for a few months and stay with her aunt and uncle, then head down to Florida. That night we boarded a train and headed out of Trenton, and as it slowly pulled out of the station I waved goodbye to Jersey.
The Day I Almost Died
After three months in Georgia we arrived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. My father’s youngest sister Shirley had a house there, so we moved in with her and her five kids until my mother could find a place for us. Some months later my father and my other brothers and sister came down, and to our surprise our parents got back together. Soon, we moved into a little house in a not-so-nice neighborhood.
I hated where we lived; no neighborhood was going to be better than my neighborhood back in Trenton. There were a few bright spots about our life, and one came in the form of a nice older lady who lived right up the street named Mrs. Clayton. When Mrs. Clayton knew I didn’t have any money she would ask me to go to the store for her and buy her a pack of Red Man chewing tobacco. She would always give me a little extra than was needed, and say “Here’s a little change for your pocket. You can’t go around broke.” Mrs. Clayton supported my dream of going to Hollywood and becoming a movie star, always telling me to go for it. Both my parents were immediately busy with new jobs, and my Aunt Shirley was put in charge of enrolling us into school.
After one look at Parkway Middle School I swore to my aunt that I would never set foot in that horrible place. She threatened to tell my parents that I was being disobedient so I gave in and just went with the flow for the moment. My first day at school turned out to be a bad one as I immediately made two enemies in John Spencer and Mickey Corcoran. Luckily, I also made three new friends. John and Mickey were the meanest dudes in the school and everyone was afraid of them. Because the rumor was I was from up north and I supposedly had weird eyes, the two of them made me a marked man in the Deep South.
At the end of school that first day I was walking from class with my three new friends Leroy, Lemon, and Dewayne when all of a sudden the two bullies walked up to me, followed by their group of flunkies. I think the whole school must have known that they were coming after me, even my new friends who immediately disappeared into the crowd. It was just me versus these two bad boys and their crew, but they didn’t know I was a Jersey boy and it was nothing to me.
As they approached I just stood my ground waiting to see what they were going to do. They asked me where I was from and I told them Jersey. Trenton, New Jersey. They said they didn’t like me and they were going to kick my butt. I invited them to bring it on and said the sooner the better. They said that we would meet tomorrow in the open gym to settle this matter and I said great.
Everyone
