Me: I was born in 1965 in Springfield, Massachusetts, but raised just outside of it in a wealthy bedroom town with all white people, mostly Jewish. I’d never even seen a black person till I was around 10.
Mom: My mom, who is soon to be 77, was domineering, skeptical in a way some would call negative, impatient, but very strong-willed. She was her own person and once she made up her mind to do something, no one got in her way. She was not very open-minded to people and ideas that were different, preferring to stick with science, “logic,” and things that were comfortably familiar and common.
Dad: My dad, who recently turned 78, was much the same as mom, but also much different. So much so that I often wondered how they came to be a couple, but hey, sometimes opposites really do attract as I would learn once I met my own soulmate nearly 3000 miles away. Dad was mellow and more tolerant of people like me who are loud and animated. And unique, too. Mom knows he’s who I would choose to hang out with if I had to choose between her and Dad, but she understands this and is cool with the idea.
Sister: Tammy was almost a carbon copy of Mom. Angry, insecure, too serious, yet also strong-willed, determined and not one to mess with once her mind was made up to do whatever. She is tall and 8 years older than me with 3 grown daughters. Last I knew she was still living in Connecticut with her third husband.
Brother: Larry, who was very tall and 12 years older, was more like me. He liked to laugh. He wasn’t as tense or moody. Instead of sticking around and being mean or controlling to someone he was pissed at, he tended to simply ignore them and that’s what he did for a decade or so. No one heard from him between the mid-80s and mid-90s. He lived with his wife in Massachusetts and their two kids, a boy and a girl. The boy was killed in a tragic accident when he was 16 when the truck Larry was driving rolled over.
Extended Family: There’s not much I can say about my extended family. All that really comes to mind, besides the 3 grandparents that I knew, are two aunts, two uncles, and 5 cousins. My dad’s dad died of a heart attack before I was born. My maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother were easy enough to get along with, though my mom’s mom wasn’t well-liked. She was really strict. One aunt was neurotic, the other phony. I have nothing nice to say about my uncles at all. Both were pretty mean. I have nothing good or bad to say about my cousins, although Cousin Philip was pretty cool.
I was born missing most of my left ear and deaf in it, too. I was a hyper child and even today I am rather energetic. I’m short, a bit muscular and have been everything from underweight, to just right, to fat. I have recently lost 20 pounds and plan to lose 20 more. I invented my own special diet regimen after spending nearly a decade on the heavy side. I’m keeping it a secret for now, although I have discussed it somewhat.
I am very pale with green eyes and curly brown hair. My hair is usually between my waist and butt, but nowadays I prefer it at the shoulders.
It’s been said – and it’s so true – that the harder something is, the more likely I am to succeed with it, while the things that are most common that come easier to most people, tend to be more of a challenge for me. I can sing. I can dance. I can act. I can play musical instruments. I can draw. I can learn languages. I have even skated and skied a bit, once on water, twice on snow. And while all this may make you go “wow” I can also add that I have a driving phobia. I cannot keep a sleep schedule because my body has no internal clock or stable melatonin levels. Simple everyday math is nearly impossible for me. I have no concept of what it’s like to live a so-called ordinary life.
I had around 15 plastic surgeries in the 70s to build my outer ear, but would not have an artificial canal made and hearing restored until later on in life.
While I loved birthdays and Chanukah, I especially loved New Year’s Eve. It was pretty much the only time we kids could do whatever we wanted, which included staying up well past our bedtime!
I loved music and was really into disco and a lot of the 70s TV series, particularly Charlie’s Angels. I had a crush on Kate Jackson which I didn’t understand was a crush at the tender age of 10. I was also into Linda Ronstadt, then eventually Gloria Estefan, the last of my celebrity crushes.
I was neither popular nor unpopular in school. I was pretty much the kid who was just there, although I did have my bouts of bullying and teasing that I both dished out and received.
My childhood friends were Jenny and Jessie. Jessie and I remained in contact on and off, but Jenny and I went our separate ways in our early 20s, deciding we’d grown too different from each other and not very likable as far as each other was concerned.
We had a summer cottage at the beach in Connecticut. We weren’t actually on the beach, but we were by the beach. It only took a couple of minutes to walk from the door of our cottage to the shoreline.
We moved from the newer section of town to the older section when I was around 12. I liked this house better. It was bigger, though it didn’t have a big backyard. My father had a bad heart and had to have open heart surgery. With a smaller yard, he would no longer have to do such strenuous yard work.
As I entered my teens I was aware of the fact that boys still failed to capture my interest. Girls sure did, though. At least some of them anyway. I wrote it off as a phase I would eventually grow out of.
Although I had asthma and allergies, I began smoking when I was around 13 or 14.
A deaf boy on the next block taught me sign language.
My only fond memory of high school, which I only attended for part of my freshman year, was my music teacher. Everybody loved him and I even had a bit of a crush on him.
I started seeing various psychiatrists and counselors in the 80s and was given a variety of medications for years. It was said that I had a chemical imbalance and that was what made me moody and even depressed enough to attempt suicide, but I didn’t buy it. We usually know ourselves better than others, and I knew it was because I didn’t feel I had a happy home life with adequate attention, encouragement, and communication. It wasn’t that I had no one to talk to, but more that I was uncomfortable talking to those closest to me because I was so different from them and the way they expected others to be. These days, most people recognize the fact that if we were all meant to be the same, we would be. But this was the 80s. Back then you could really only be yourself if you were like most others and the way to deal with those who weren’t was to give their unique personality a label of some kind and then hand them a bottle of pills.
But I knew that trying to change who I was would be futile and that trying to solve any problems with pills wasn’t much better of a solution than turning to illegal drugs or alcohol. I was who I was. Period. And I knew that as long as I accepted that, others wouldn’t matter. Especially once I was on my own and able to make my own decisions, even if they weren’t always the brightest, but mine to make nonetheless. So I stopped taking pills in my mid-20s, which had become a crutch and even an addiction that has left me with a permanent side effect that causes random muscle twitches at times.
As they say, things often get worse before they get better. At 15 I was sent to a psychiatric hospital up in Vermont. I felt like a trapped animal suddenly yanked out of the wild and forced into captivity to conform to an overload of rules, restrictions and structure. This caused me to become more depressed. I missed my freedom. I began cutting my arms even more. Then I realized I had no choice but to roll with the punches if I wanted to get out of there, and I did 5 months later. Only I would end up going from bad to worse.
I was only home for 4 months, attending an alternative school in Springfield when I was taken away from my folks. Well, to this day I’m still not sure if I was actually taken away or given up, nor am I sure if I was a ward of the state or not. I never asked either as it wouldn’t change anything and I don’t know that I’d get a truthful answer anyway.
I first spent a few months in the care of an older Italian couple, Anne and Harry, who owned a cluster of halfway houses for physically and mentally challenged adults. I felt very comfortable with them.
I had a black social worker, Arlene, who then had me spend a few more months with a black woman, Dotty, and her friend Valerie just a few blocks away. I wasn’t as happy here because Valerie could be a bit intimidating. She never touched me, but she liked to threaten me. Once I got my very tall foster sister, Shelly, I felt a little safer even though Valerie could’ve squashed us both.
The summer I was 16 began the worst two years of my childhood when I was tricked into a long-term “residential school,” about an hour away in Lenox that was run like a reform school. It was so bad there that it almost made Vermont seem like it wasn’t all that bad after all. I did not have my own room at this place and the rules and routine there were beyond strict. We barely had 5 minutes to ourselves. They ran us ragged during the week starting as soon as we got up. When we finally did get a moment to breathe and relax, it was bedtime.
I had been 85 pounds, partly because Dotty and Valerie didn’t feed me much. Then I jumped to 135 pounds, mostly due to the medications I was on. I was a total walking pharmacy and a human guinea pig to their experimentations of what could make me the most acceptable person in their eyes. The side effects were everything from drowsiness to water retention, and even my periods stopped until I was 19. And all because I as myself simply wasn’t good enough.
I was so depressed at this school, worse than ever before in my life. I felt so alone, helpless, trapped, and just totally hopeless that I threw myself out a second-story window and broke my upper arm in half. It was the most excruciatingly painful experience ever! Back then people were often shunned or smothered who attempted suicide and I was no different. The support I needed was not given to me and I was basically on my own to work through whatever issues I had to deal with. So it was decided that I was simply an “attention-getter,” despite the fact that jumping 20 feet is a bit of a risky way to go about getting it.
I was shocked that my parents would allow me to return to a school I nearly killed myself trying to escape and often wondered how much of a choice they really had. The social and school officials were such control freaks that maybe they felt they just had to use me as an example to show other “troublemakers” that they couldn’t simply take such drastic measures to get out of places they didn’t want to be in, despite what risk they may’ve been taking in doing so.
After two years at this school, a year after my dad’s mom died, I went back to my parents' house. My sister, who had spent a few years in Texas, was also back home with her first child who was a year old at the time. She had her with some Mexican guy who decided too late that fatherhood wasn’t for him.
I worked at McDonald's and then at a concession stand, but that didn’t work out because there was too much counting involved. I eventually wound up at the Harley Hotel just over the Massachusetts/Connecticut line cleaning rooms. This is where I met Paula, someone I’m still friends with today. We were both fired for not getting along with a few of our coworkers.
My mom’s parents died within 6 months of each other, the last right before I turned 20.
After about 15 months of living with my folks, my sister married her second husband and moved to Connecticut, while I got an apartment in Springfield.
There I was, all grown up and on my own in the big bad city at age 20 in 1985. Although I could now be who I was, a new kind of reality was setting in. I was starting to realize that life isn’t usually what we plan it and that adulthood had its own share of problems, even if I still preferred it to my childhood.
I was also becoming angry and defensive, tired of those who took advantage of my diminutive size. My aggression built up so much through the years that I even began to fear for the safety of those who dared to cross me, as well as for my freedom. I feared ending up in jail over the possibility of beating the crap out of someone who either tried to attack me or threatened me, yet ironically enough, I would ultimately end up in jail for simply "speaking out” against someone who would torment me later on in life that I somehow – by some miracle – managed not to lose it on. If it were to happen all over again today, with this person or anyone else, I would definitely fail to have the kind of self-control I once possessed!
I wound up on SSI and Social Security for the stress I was under as a young adult. I was dirt poor, but in these days I tended to simply roll with the punches without as much rebellion and didn’t usually try to change the things I wasn’t happy with.
I taught myself Spanish and dabbled in a little French.
The three people I hung out with most were Andy, Fran and “Nervous,” not people I’d be friends with if I were to meet them today. Especially Fran and Nervous, whose real name was Kevin.
Andy was a gay guy I’d known all my life. Our parents had once been friends. We shared the same dreams at the time; to make it in the music business and move out west.
Fran was a nut on disability, and Nervous was an older guy who was infatuated with me, even obsessed, though not in a dangerous way. I looked like his ex-wife, and so that was why he lived to see me any chance he got, and even spied on me at times, too. For some reason, it never scared or angered me. I actually found it sort of amusing, and admit I would often pull pranks on him and take advantage of his admiration by using him for rides since my only other option was the bus.
As for my New England love history (or sex history I should really call it), I was a real settler when I was young, I’m sorry to say. I first settled for a very non-productive relationship that didn’t even last a year with a guy named Ron. He was very immature and totally wrong for me even if I had been attracted to him which I wasn’t.
Then it was off to settle for a couple of one-night stands with Lloyd, Mike, Bruce and Mark, then to finally settle for a few months with a guy named Al who lived for putting me down and pointing out my flaws.
I had my first encounter with another woman when I was 24. It was just a one-nighter with a girl who was part black, part Puerto Rican named Diana. Then I had another one-nighter with a redhead named Lisa, a few months with Kacey, and then a few more months with Brenda who was part Cherokee. Eventually, there would also be a couple of nights spent with Anne Marie, then one night with Julia, a Mexican girl I would meet in the desert.
The 5 years I spent in Springfield weren’t very fun. It seems that all I did was get in trouble making prank phone calls, have potentially fatal asthma attacks that I had to be rushed to the emergency room for and live on impossible dreams.
Before I would finally leave New England altogether, I would go from bad to worse by moving to South Deerfield in 1991 just after Andy moved to Phoenix. I lived there for almost a year before I then went from worse to even worse when I moved to Norwich, Connecticut to be closer to my sister. That only lasted 4 months until the chaos at the projects I was living in caused me to have a physical and mental breakdown which landed me in the hospital for two weeks.
My dad drove up from Florida, to where he and Mom had moved to in 1989. With nothing left for me in the East, my dad and sister helped see me off to join Andy in the wild, wild West!
Mom: My mom, who is soon to be 77, was domineering, skeptical in a way some would call negative, impatient, but very strong-willed. She was her own person and once she made up her mind to do something, no one got in her way. She was not very open-minded to people and ideas that were different, preferring to stick with science, “logic,” and things that were comfortably familiar and common.
Dad: My dad, who recently turned 78, was much the same as mom, but also much different. So much so that I often wondered how they came to be a couple, but hey, sometimes opposites really do attract as I would learn once I met my own soulmate nearly 3000 miles away. Dad was mellow and more tolerant of people like me who are loud and animated. And unique, too. Mom knows he’s who I would choose to hang out with if I had to choose between her and Dad, but she understands this and is cool with the idea.
Sister: Tammy was almost a carbon copy of Mom. Angry, insecure, too serious, yet also strong-willed, determined and not one to mess with once her mind was made up to do whatever. She is tall and 8 years older than me with 3 grown daughters. Last I knew she was still living in Connecticut with her third husband.
Brother: Larry, who was very tall and 12 years older, was more like me. He liked to laugh. He wasn’t as tense or moody. Instead of sticking around and being mean or controlling to someone he was pissed at, he tended to simply ignore them and that’s what he did for a decade or so. No one heard from him between the mid-80s and mid-90s. He lived with his wife in Massachusetts and their two kids, a boy and a girl. The boy was killed in a tragic accident when he was 16 when the truck Larry was driving rolled over.
Extended Family: There’s not much I can say about my extended family. All that really comes to mind, besides the 3 grandparents that I knew, are two aunts, two uncles, and 5 cousins. My dad’s dad died of a heart attack before I was born. My maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother were easy enough to get along with, though my mom’s mom wasn’t well-liked. She was really strict. One aunt was neurotic, the other phony. I have nothing nice to say about my uncles at all. Both were pretty mean. I have nothing good or bad to say about my cousins, although Cousin Philip was pretty cool.
I was born missing most of my left ear and deaf in it, too. I was a hyper child and even today I am rather energetic. I’m short, a bit muscular and have been everything from underweight, to just right, to fat. I have recently lost 20 pounds and plan to lose 20 more. I invented my own special diet regimen after spending nearly a decade on the heavy side. I’m keeping it a secret for now, although I have discussed it somewhat.
I am very pale with green eyes and curly brown hair. My hair is usually between my waist and butt, but nowadays I prefer it at the shoulders.
It’s been said – and it’s so true – that the harder something is, the more likely I am to succeed with it, while the things that are most common that come easier to most people, tend to be more of a challenge for me. I can sing. I can dance. I can act. I can play musical instruments. I can draw. I can learn languages. I have even skated and skied a bit, once on water, twice on snow. And while all this may make you go “wow” I can also add that I have a driving phobia. I cannot keep a sleep schedule because my body has no internal clock or stable melatonin levels. Simple everyday math is nearly impossible for me. I have no concept of what it’s like to live a so-called ordinary life.
I had around 15 plastic surgeries in the 70s to build my outer ear, but would not have an artificial canal made and hearing restored until later on in life.
While I loved birthdays and Chanukah, I especially loved New Year’s Eve. It was pretty much the only time we kids could do whatever we wanted, which included staying up well past our bedtime!
I loved music and was really into disco and a lot of the 70s TV series, particularly Charlie’s Angels. I had a crush on Kate Jackson which I didn’t understand was a crush at the tender age of 10. I was also into Linda Ronstadt, then eventually Gloria Estefan, the last of my celebrity crushes.
I was neither popular nor unpopular in school. I was pretty much the kid who was just there, although I did have my bouts of bullying and teasing that I both dished out and received.
My childhood friends were Jenny and Jessie. Jessie and I remained in contact on and off, but Jenny and I went our separate ways in our early 20s, deciding we’d grown too different from each other and not very likable as far as each other was concerned.
We had a summer cottage at the beach in Connecticut. We weren’t actually on the beach, but we were by the beach. It only took a couple of minutes to walk from the door of our cottage to the shoreline.
We moved from the newer section of town to the older section when I was around 12. I liked this house better. It was bigger, though it didn’t have a big backyard. My father had a bad heart and had to have open heart surgery. With a smaller yard, he would no longer have to do such strenuous yard work.
As I entered my teens I was aware of the fact that boys still failed to capture my interest. Girls sure did, though. At least some of them anyway. I wrote it off as a phase I would eventually grow out of.
Although I had asthma and allergies, I began smoking when I was around 13 or 14.
A deaf boy on the next block taught me sign language.
My only fond memory of high school, which I only attended for part of my freshman year, was my music teacher. Everybody loved him and I even had a bit of a crush on him.
I started seeing various psychiatrists and counselors in the 80s and was given a variety of medications for years. It was said that I had a chemical imbalance and that was what made me moody and even depressed enough to attempt suicide, but I didn’t buy it. We usually know ourselves better than others, and I knew it was because I didn’t feel I had a happy home life with adequate attention, encouragement, and communication. It wasn’t that I had no one to talk to, but more that I was uncomfortable talking to those closest to me because I was so different from them and the way they expected others to be. These days, most people recognize the fact that if we were all meant to be the same, we would be. But this was the 80s. Back then you could really only be yourself if you were like most others and the way to deal with those who weren’t was to give their unique personality a label of some kind and then hand them a bottle of pills.
But I knew that trying to change who I was would be futile and that trying to solve any problems with pills wasn’t much better of a solution than turning to illegal drugs or alcohol. I was who I was. Period. And I knew that as long as I accepted that, others wouldn’t matter. Especially once I was on my own and able to make my own decisions, even if they weren’t always the brightest, but mine to make nonetheless. So I stopped taking pills in my mid-20s, which had become a crutch and even an addiction that has left me with a permanent side effect that causes random muscle twitches at times.
As they say, things often get worse before they get better. At 15 I was sent to a psychiatric hospital up in Vermont. I felt like a trapped animal suddenly yanked out of the wild and forced into captivity to conform to an overload of rules, restrictions and structure. This caused me to become more depressed. I missed my freedom. I began cutting my arms even more. Then I realized I had no choice but to roll with the punches if I wanted to get out of there, and I did 5 months later. Only I would end up going from bad to worse.
I was only home for 4 months, attending an alternative school in Springfield when I was taken away from my folks. Well, to this day I’m still not sure if I was actually taken away or given up, nor am I sure if I was a ward of the state or not. I never asked either as it wouldn’t change anything and I don’t know that I’d get a truthful answer anyway.
I first spent a few months in the care of an older Italian couple, Anne and Harry, who owned a cluster of halfway houses for physically and mentally challenged adults. I felt very comfortable with them.
I had a black social worker, Arlene, who then had me spend a few more months with a black woman, Dotty, and her friend Valerie just a few blocks away. I wasn’t as happy here because Valerie could be a bit intimidating. She never touched me, but she liked to threaten me. Once I got my very tall foster sister, Shelly, I felt a little safer even though Valerie could’ve squashed us both.
The summer I was 16 began the worst two years of my childhood when I was tricked into a long-term “residential school,” about an hour away in Lenox that was run like a reform school. It was so bad there that it almost made Vermont seem like it wasn’t all that bad after all. I did not have my own room at this place and the rules and routine there were beyond strict. We barely had 5 minutes to ourselves. They ran us ragged during the week starting as soon as we got up. When we finally did get a moment to breathe and relax, it was bedtime.
I had been 85 pounds, partly because Dotty and Valerie didn’t feed me much. Then I jumped to 135 pounds, mostly due to the medications I was on. I was a total walking pharmacy and a human guinea pig to their experimentations of what could make me the most acceptable person in their eyes. The side effects were everything from drowsiness to water retention, and even my periods stopped until I was 19. And all because I as myself simply wasn’t good enough.
I was so depressed at this school, worse than ever before in my life. I felt so alone, helpless, trapped, and just totally hopeless that I threw myself out a second-story window and broke my upper arm in half. It was the most excruciatingly painful experience ever! Back then people were often shunned or smothered who attempted suicide and I was no different. The support I needed was not given to me and I was basically on my own to work through whatever issues I had to deal with. So it was decided that I was simply an “attention-getter,” despite the fact that jumping 20 feet is a bit of a risky way to go about getting it.
I was shocked that my parents would allow me to return to a school I nearly killed myself trying to escape and often wondered how much of a choice they really had. The social and school officials were such control freaks that maybe they felt they just had to use me as an example to show other “troublemakers” that they couldn’t simply take such drastic measures to get out of places they didn’t want to be in, despite what risk they may’ve been taking in doing so.
After two years at this school, a year after my dad’s mom died, I went back to my parents' house. My sister, who had spent a few years in Texas, was also back home with her first child who was a year old at the time. She had her with some Mexican guy who decided too late that fatherhood wasn’t for him.
I worked at McDonald's and then at a concession stand, but that didn’t work out because there was too much counting involved. I eventually wound up at the Harley Hotel just over the Massachusetts/Connecticut line cleaning rooms. This is where I met Paula, someone I’m still friends with today. We were both fired for not getting along with a few of our coworkers.
My mom’s parents died within 6 months of each other, the last right before I turned 20.
After about 15 months of living with my folks, my sister married her second husband and moved to Connecticut, while I got an apartment in Springfield.
There I was, all grown up and on my own in the big bad city at age 20 in 1985. Although I could now be who I was, a new kind of reality was setting in. I was starting to realize that life isn’t usually what we plan it and that adulthood had its own share of problems, even if I still preferred it to my childhood.
I was also becoming angry and defensive, tired of those who took advantage of my diminutive size. My aggression built up so much through the years that I even began to fear for the safety of those who dared to cross me, as well as for my freedom. I feared ending up in jail over the possibility of beating the crap out of someone who either tried to attack me or threatened me, yet ironically enough, I would ultimately end up in jail for simply "speaking out” against someone who would torment me later on in life that I somehow – by some miracle – managed not to lose it on. If it were to happen all over again today, with this person or anyone else, I would definitely fail to have the kind of self-control I once possessed!
I wound up on SSI and Social Security for the stress I was under as a young adult. I was dirt poor, but in these days I tended to simply roll with the punches without as much rebellion and didn’t usually try to change the things I wasn’t happy with.
I taught myself Spanish and dabbled in a little French.
The three people I hung out with most were Andy, Fran and “Nervous,” not people I’d be friends with if I were to meet them today. Especially Fran and Nervous, whose real name was Kevin.
Andy was a gay guy I’d known all my life. Our parents had once been friends. We shared the same dreams at the time; to make it in the music business and move out west.
Fran was a nut on disability, and Nervous was an older guy who was infatuated with me, even obsessed, though not in a dangerous way. I looked like his ex-wife, and so that was why he lived to see me any chance he got, and even spied on me at times, too. For some reason, it never scared or angered me. I actually found it sort of amusing, and admit I would often pull pranks on him and take advantage of his admiration by using him for rides since my only other option was the bus.
As for my New England love history (or sex history I should really call it), I was a real settler when I was young, I’m sorry to say. I first settled for a very non-productive relationship that didn’t even last a year with a guy named Ron. He was very immature and totally wrong for me even if I had been attracted to him which I wasn’t.
Then it was off to settle for a couple of one-night stands with Lloyd, Mike, Bruce and Mark, then to finally settle for a few months with a guy named Al who lived for putting me down and pointing out my flaws.
I had my first encounter with another woman when I was 24. It was just a one-nighter with a girl who was part black, part Puerto Rican named Diana. Then I had another one-nighter with a redhead named Lisa, a few months with Kacey, and then a few more months with Brenda who was part Cherokee. Eventually, there would also be a couple of nights spent with Anne Marie, then one night with Julia, a Mexican girl I would meet in the desert.
The 5 years I spent in Springfield weren’t very fun. It seems that all I did was get in trouble making prank phone calls, have potentially fatal asthma attacks that I had to be rushed to the emergency room for and live on impossible dreams.
Before I would finally leave New England altogether, I would go from bad to worse by moving to South Deerfield in 1991 just after Andy moved to Phoenix. I lived there for almost a year before I then went from worse to even worse when I moved to Norwich, Connecticut to be closer to my sister. That only lasted 4 months until the chaos at the projects I was living in caused me to have a physical and mental breakdown which landed me in the hospital for two weeks.
My dad drove up from Florida, to where he and Mom had moved to in 1989. With nothing left for me in the East, my dad and sister helped see me off to join Andy in the wild, wild West!
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