My Story: Zero Through Five

In my first memory, I am lying in someone's lap (I don't know whose), looking up at the underside of the open drawbridge over the Black River in South Haven, Michigan. We are on the deck of a sailboat coming back from Lake Michigan, but again, I don't know whose. My mother is there. So is my father.

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South Haven is the town where I lived until I was five years old. My parents bought a bargain of a house less than a city block from the public beach before I was born, and lived there until their decree of divorce ordered them to sell it. It is on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan, a resort town whose population literally explodes every summer. In the winter, when I am born, it's a ghost town.

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I was born slightly more than a month after the storm in which the Edmond Fitzgerald sank on Lake Superior. Hours south of there, I imagine my mother, eight months pregnant, standing in the dining room, looking out the enormous picture window at the 35-foot-tall waves crashing over the lighthouse at the end of the pier 1000 yards away, wondering what the everliving fuck to do if she went into labor that night.

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The house where we live is a dark greenish-grey. The deck wraps around two sides of it: the side that faces the street and the side that faces the beach. There is a tiny two-car driveway between it and the house that belongs to the neighbors, a couple that, when I was young, seemed like the oldest people in the universe. Between our house and the beach, there is a huge triangle of public parking which we live, literally, at the tip of. At this tip of the parking lot, there is a fire hydrant. The summer that I am two, the South Haven volunteer fire department, of which my father is a member, paints the fire hydrant with blond curly hair and blue eyes, in a red gingham two-piece bathing suit, to resemble me.

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My mother goes to work the day that I'm born, and although she waddles across the street to the hospital on her lunch hour to tell the emergency room on-call doctor that she thinks she may be in labor, he dismisses her, tells her to have a drink and go about her day. I am born six hours later. It is a Tuesday, five days after Christmas, 1975. Tiger Woods is born the same day.

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When I am three years old, my mother slams my hand in the car door. It is one of the few occasions that I can remember she and my father being in the same place at the same time, and 29 years later, I realize that it happened because she was distracted by the argument she was having with him at the time. They take me to the hospital and have it X-rayed. Sometime around the same time, I fall asleep at the home daycare that I am enrolled in, and when I wake up, it is dark out. My mother arrives a few minutes later. She seems shaky, and trying to cover something up. It occurs to me, when their fighting wakes me up in the middle of the night that night, that my father was supposed to pick me up from daycare, and he forgot about me.

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I begin to hide every time my parents begin to fight. I am hiding a lot by the time I am three, but then less so as my father is home less and less. Every time I see my mother crying, it makes my stomach hurt. Thirty years later, it still gives me a stomachache to see her cry.

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My father manages a bar called The Lion's Den. There are bowls of shoestring potato chips on the bar and every time I am there, he gives me Shirley Temples to drink, except that they are called "Kiddie Cocktails" there. The waitresses there wear red vests. He works mostly nights. Sometimes when I'm with him, we visit his friends. His friends are mostly women, and mostly not as old as my mother. One time, he leaves me sitting in his truck outside an apartment building across the street from Bronsten Park for at least an hour. Other times, he leaves me with the teenaged daughter of a divorced mom who lives in a huge house on the harbor.

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When I am four years old, I am playing one day with a boy my age whose grandparents live on the other side of the street and down a few houses. My mother calls on the phone and asks my friend's grandmother to send me home. She stands on the deck and watches me while I cross the street and the parking triangle, even though it is the off-season and there is no traffic. My father is home and my mother is angry. My father asks me to come into the dining room and sit on his lap, and he tells me that he has to go away. He is crying. My mother is crying too and my stomach hurts. He asks me to go get him a Kleenex, and I do. Before I come back, he's gone.

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We move into Kalamazoo for the winter, into a rental house in the Westwood neighborhood. I am in daycare on Western Michigan University's campus, in a big A-frame church with a woods behind it. Sometimes my father is around, but mostly not. My mother still cries a lot.

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On May 13, 1980, at 4 in the afternoon, an F-3 tornado hits Kalamazoo, Michigan. I can remember the sound of the phone ringing at the daycare where I am at the time. My mother is an editor for the newspaper, and the police scanner in the newsroom has reported the tornado. She is on the phone, calling to warn the daycare to get the students into the basement. Much later, my mother recalls standing in the second-floor window of the newspaper building and watching as the roof of the Comerica Building, a block away, blows away. Another block away, the back of Gilmore's Department Store collapses on a parking deck. Five people are killed and 79 are injured; Kalamazoo has $50,000,000 in damage. The daycare closes at the end of the day and my mother cannot get to me. There are trees down everywhere. I have to go home with one of the teachers and her son, who is my age. I am terrified that I will never see my mother again, and I cry and cry. She has never not been there to get me. She arrives to pick me up maybe fifteen minutes after we get to the teacher's house, but I am not comforted at all. I am still afraid of tornadoes today.

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During a weekend visitation with my father (one of very few that he chooses to exercise) at our house on the beach, I discover that he has let a male friend move in to help pay the bills. The friend is gone for the weekend, but he sleeps in my room now. I go into the closet to look for an Incredible Hulk doll that I left on a shelf there. The doll is gone, and there is an enormous handgun on the shelf. I don't touch it, but I tell my mother later. She doesn't let me visit anymore, and, to the best of my knowledge, my father never knows or wonders why.

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When I am five, my mother and I go to South Haven one weekend. We sit on the beach and play in the water and walk on the pier. We drive through the harbor. I see my father on a sailboat and I turn my head away quickly, before my mother sees me looking. Later that day, she is buying me an ice cream cone at the restaurant at the mouth of the channel where the Black River leads out between the two piers into the lake, when my father's boat sails past. Again, I look away before my mother can see him. I will not see him again for fourteen years.

To Be Continued...