There was no meat in the spaghetti because she had no money for meat in nineteen-sixty. Her drunk husband poured the pot of boiling noodles over her head because there was no meat in the spaghetti. Ten years old, I retrieved the butcher knife from beneath the stove where I had hidden it for “Next time he hurts my Momma…” Spaghetti tangled in her beautiful hair, face purple scalded, she shouted a plea over my father’s shoulder, “No Tommy, no!” Our names are the same, mine and my father’s. He laughed drunkenly at her impassioned plea and backhanded her to the floor. I urinated in my pants and backed away in shame. A few years before her death she spoke to me about my father who had been dead for twenty-five years. “He was “the one”, the love of my life,” she wept, “Alcohol and death, nothing in this world, can take that from me.”
That same year, I entered fifth grade at Boulevard Elementary School in Denver. It was the fourth school I attended that year. Returning from lunch, I sat in the seat I had been assigned that morning. The teacher was a man, my first experience with a male in that position. He called me to the front of the class, asked who I thought I was to take that seat in the afternoon. Turns out I was supposed to report to a different classroom for afternoon subjects, another new experience for me. The teacher pushed me through the door and out into the hallway. He ordered me to “wipe that look off my face”, an order I’ve heard many times since. My contempt for authority shines through, refuses to be wiped off. A large man, he effortlessly clamped a hand around my throat, pushed me against the wall and choked me until I passed out. I’ll always wonder if “that look” was on my unconscious face; I like to believe it was.
A couple of weeks later, I heard my younger brothers and sisters crying in the hard dirt yard of the tenement. A feral howling rose in octaves above their panicked voices. I charged into a group of laughing boys gathered beneath the clothesline, intuiting their glee being the cause of my siblings’ anguish. The big boys’ glee was fueled by the writhing of a large black tomcat hanging between the wires of the clothesline. They had shoved a stick through its head, ear to ear, balanced the stick between the wires. The torturers turned their wet laughing eyes to the boy who had rushed into their midst. She came screaming from the back door of the tenement, an avenging angel, a five-foot tall howling banshee from hell. The tomcat murderers tore their eyes from me and ran for their lives. My Mother wrapped a blanket around the cat and lifted it from the clothesline. She held my sobbing face against her breast as the cat went through its death throes.
I began to write and sing, have never since lain down my pen nor stifled my voice. It comes as no surprise to me now that Abraham Lincoln was my hero as a child, is to this day. An intuitive man, writer and poet, he hoped to make a difference. Yes, he hoped to write it away, the violence that claimed his life in April of 1865. Blood for blood, I believe he won.
I stood in the schoolyard weeping on that chill November day when John Kennedy, our prince of Camelot, lay dying, made a study of assassins from Booth to… Five years later, April 1968, Reverend Martin Luther King and, two short months later, Bobby, our new prince, both lay dead. I abandoned my study of assassins lest my spirit be tempted to become one, an assassin of assassins.
John Steinbeck’s Chinaman, Lee, tells the story of his birth to Adam Trask. It is an agonizing tale Trask dreads to hear but must. Disguised as a man so she can be with her husband at the railroad camp, Lee’s mother is discovered by her fellow peon laborers. Mob mentality, riot, the voice of a thousand wrongs prevails over whispers of reason. She is brutalized, beaten, left for dead. Lee’s father crawls to her, weeps against her mangled body and rescues their son from her dying womb. This son, Lee, becomes the beloved child of the camp, cared for and nurtured by those who have slain his mother. His father has forgiven that which seems impossible to forgive. It is what I, as a man, must learn to do, what this wonderful country of bullies, movers and shakers, hidden angels, must learn to do from here to eternity if we are to understand, move forward and past the dreadful beautiful.
That same year, I entered fifth grade at Boulevard Elementary School in Denver. It was the fourth school I attended that year. Returning from lunch, I sat in the seat I had been assigned that morning. The teacher was a man, my first experience with a male in that position. He called me to the front of the class, asked who I thought I was to take that seat in the afternoon. Turns out I was supposed to report to a different classroom for afternoon subjects, another new experience for me. The teacher pushed me through the door and out into the hallway. He ordered me to “wipe that look off my face”, an order I’ve heard many times since. My contempt for authority shines through, refuses to be wiped off. A large man, he effortlessly clamped a hand around my throat, pushed me against the wall and choked me until I passed out. I’ll always wonder if “that look” was on my unconscious face; I like to believe it was.
A couple of weeks later, I heard my younger brothers and sisters crying in the hard dirt yard of the tenement. A feral howling rose in octaves above their panicked voices. I charged into a group of laughing boys gathered beneath the clothesline, intuiting their glee being the cause of my siblings’ anguish. The big boys’ glee was fueled by the writhing of a large black tomcat hanging between the wires of the clothesline. They had shoved a stick through its head, ear to ear, balanced the stick between the wires. The torturers turned their wet laughing eyes to the boy who had rushed into their midst. She came screaming from the back door of the tenement, an avenging angel, a five-foot tall howling banshee from hell. The tomcat murderers tore their eyes from me and ran for their lives. My Mother wrapped a blanket around the cat and lifted it from the clothesline. She held my sobbing face against her breast as the cat went through its death throes.
I began to write and sing, have never since lain down my pen nor stifled my voice. It comes as no surprise to me now that Abraham Lincoln was my hero as a child, is to this day. An intuitive man, writer and poet, he hoped to make a difference. Yes, he hoped to write it away, the violence that claimed his life in April of 1865. Blood for blood, I believe he won.
I stood in the schoolyard weeping on that chill November day when John Kennedy, our prince of Camelot, lay dying, made a study of assassins from Booth to… Five years later, April 1968, Reverend Martin Luther King and, two short months later, Bobby, our new prince, both lay dead. I abandoned my study of assassins lest my spirit be tempted to become one, an assassin of assassins.
John Steinbeck’s Chinaman, Lee, tells the story of his birth to Adam Trask. It is an agonizing tale Trask dreads to hear but must. Disguised as a man so she can be with her husband at the railroad camp, Lee’s mother is discovered by her fellow peon laborers. Mob mentality, riot, the voice of a thousand wrongs prevails over whispers of reason. She is brutalized, beaten, left for dead. Lee’s father crawls to her, weeps against her mangled body and rescues their son from her dying womb. This son, Lee, becomes the beloved child of the camp, cared for and nurtured by those who have slain his mother. His father has forgiven that which seems impossible to forgive. It is what I, as a man, must learn to do, what this wonderful country of bullies, movers and shakers, hidden angels, must learn to do from here to eternity if we are to understand, move forward and past the dreadful beautiful.
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