Bobby's Book

Contents

The Way Back

The Bomb

From Ten to Fourteen

Voted Most Likely to Die Before Twenty-one

Woodstock

Cocaine

Chuch

Michelle

Jail

After Jail, Sally

Bad Crimes

Living on the Streets

Detox

Sue, Third Wife

Daughter Carrie

Family

Sobriety

Photographs

Bruce Davidson, Summer 1959

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About Seven Stories Press

Chapter One

The Way Back

There was no way I wasn’t gonna be a drug addict, no way, no way. I mean I’m drinking since I’m eight years old, my mother and them used to have parties, we used to take the shots in the bottles and sip it, sip it, get a little buzzy. Everybody in the neighborhood drank, they were the role models. There was no direction, there was no principles in people’s lives, people were poor, people did the best they could, and on Fridays and Saturdays they went to the bars on the corner and rewarded themselves with a couple of six-packs of beer and a bottle of liquor.

My father used to take me to the bars on Eighth Avenue and Eighteenth Street when I was a little kid and sit me up on the stool and give me a little shot of beer. They used to have a big milk case on the floor for the little kids when they came in so they could play shuffleboard and the fathers could talk at the bar about politics, baseball, the workweek, the bullshit that they did, who worked the hardest, and drink shots of liquor with beer chasers. It was a big deal when I used to go back to the neighborhood and the kids would say, Where were you? and I would say, I was in the bar with my father. It’s like going to preschool, before you become an alcoholic, they’re taking you to the bar, they’re showing you where the stool is, they’re showing you there’s a bartender, they’re showing you there’s cursing and yelling, you mind your own business here. When you’re older you get schooled on how to go into bars. I couldn’t wait till I could go into a bar, slide my little ass on a stool and sit there and have a beer, smoke a cigarette and look at everybody around the room, and nobody’d say, Get out, kid, you’re too young, or anything like that. It was such a fucking big deal, it was so cool, so cool.

My brothers drank, my sisters drank, and they all hung out in bars and they’d be partying. They worked too, but there was ten people living in the house and everybody had an individual life. I see it like a whole chess game and everybody’s moving, nobody’s bumping into each other because you can’t or there’ll be a fight. Then every once in a while there’s a bump and a fight breaks out.

If my father didn’t come home, my mother would be looking for him and she’d be saying, Go get your father, go down to this bar, if he ain’t there, go down to here. If he ain’t there, go over there. I was like a fucking Indian scout, I had to go and get him.

My mother’d cook and make dinner the best she could, no matter what it was. She put food on the table even though she was drinking, I don’t care if it was just potatoes or if it was just oatmeal. I can remember eating oatmeal for five or six or seven days in a row, for breakfast lunch and dinner, because that’s what we had. She would make apple butter out of apples and icebox cake out of graham crackers with cherry juice and cream and applesauce and she called them icebox cakes. She used to make bread pudding and rice pudding. She’d make a big roast when she had money, and everybody would eat. My aunt would come through the door and she would call my mother, May, she would say, May, I smell the corn beef and cabbage all the way from Bay Ridge. We would get a big kick out of that. But the one thing about my aunt is that she knew about my mother. She was the one who sponsored her to come to this country when my mother was young, when she was sixteen. She always helped my mother, she was a great person for my mother to talk to even though my mother would be in the house drinking, or getting drunk and cooking or whatever. My aunt was always there to tell her, May, you should slow down, you should take it easy. Stop, don’t do this, don’t do that. I always knew everything was okay when my aunt was in the house. She’d say, Hiya Bobby, how are you? When everybody was calling me Bengie she would call me Bobby, and I’d say, Oh, okay, Aunt Lilly, everything is good.

I never really did like my name Robert. They started calling me Bengie when I was around eight years old. One of the older guys on the block, Tommy Conroy, who hung out with my brothers, he called me Bengie like the stray dog in the movie.

I had four older brothers and three sisters, which made us eight. First came my brother Randall, then Billy, then Betty, then Sal, then Margie, then Frankie, then me and then Lillian. There were so many people living in the three-bedroom house—ten of us. It was a coldwater flat, we used to have to heat up the hot water to take baths, and we all used the same water. We had a coal stove and me and my brothers would go get oil, the fuel for the kerosene stoves to burn in the wintertime. There was no steam heat, we used to have two or three kerosene burners in all the rooms to heat up the house.

We played on the street between Nineteenth and Twentieth. It was a really busy block. People used to sit out on the stoops. They would all come out in the summertime and be drinking coffee or beer, all kinds of people, Italian, Irish, Polish, some German families. There was an empty lot fenced in with weeds and rubble, across the street was the factory where my father used to work that made medicine cabinets and stuff like that.

On the corner was the delicatessen, Appanel’s. We used to go down to the store and take a note from my mother or father. Then Mrs. Appanel would give me the stuff and write it in the book. Sometimes when I went down to the store Mrs. Appanel would say she couldn’t give me anything because the bill hadn’t been paid. I felt ashamed and embarrassed and would have to go home to tell my mother. She’d get mad and sometimes send me back for at least the two beers, cigarettes and bread, and she’d say: Until Frank comes home tonight, then she’ll get the money.

My mother took me to school for the first time when I was seven. Before that I was playing in the house, imaginary stuff, or going places with my mother. She used to take me when she walked my brother Frank the nine blocks to the Holy Name School where my brothers and sisters went and later graduated. One day we went up to Holy Name School and she left me with the nuns. When I got there, no way, I didn’t wanna stay, I started screaming and crying but a nun pulled me into the school where I just screamed all day. It was so scary. They tried to shut me up, I kept telling them I wanted to go home. I was just very whimpery, I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to be with my mother, and from that day on I never learned anything and never wanted to be there. I went through Holy Name School not learning how to read or write.

I went to school with ripped pants or maybe a hole in them and my mother would sew them or make a patch and kids would make fun of me. To go to Holy Name School you had to have a little bit of money, and our family didn’t have any. They skipped the tuition for us because we were one of the families that couldn’t afford it, but being that all my brothers and sisters went there, they were letting me go there too. I was probably the worst out of all of them because every day from the time I was seven, I woke up and did not want to go to school. When I was little I was very sick, with bad asthma. It kept me out of school a lot, although my mother and I played on it too. I spent a lot of time making believe I was sick and because my mother was a drunk, if I cried enough, if I screamed enough, she would keep me home. So I was absent an awful lot. When I was in the first, second, and third grades, it was so hard and painful for me to be in school that she made excuses for me being sick.

I was such a problem at seven and eight and nine that they used to bring my brother Frank from his class down to my class to sit with me to try to help me read or write my name, write words, to help me spell, but it just didn’t work. The teachers weren’t very nice to me, I really didn’t like them. I was hit a lot, I was punished a lot, I was put in the back of the classroom a lot. I remember wetting my pants a lot. I would raise my hand to go to the bathroom and they would say, No, you can’t go, and then I would wet my pants and I was made fun of.

I once went to school with sneakers, but you weren’t allowed to go with sneakers so they made me go home. Then I went with shoes that had holes in them and that had to have cardboard in the soles so the socks wouldn’t get wet or ripped. If I put my foot up and some of the kids saw the cardboard they would make fun of me, and every time somebody made fun of me, naturally I wanted to fight them or I wanted to get back at them—to get even. I was beginning to hate everybody, I was beginning to hate people.

I didn’t like being off my block, I didn’t like being away. I was always very frightened. Every day I went to school something happened. There were periods where nothing happened for a couple a days, but a week didn’t go by without me, along with my mother, being called up to the school, or me being punished or put out of the classroom. There was always something: I hit the teachers, the brothers came down, I fought with them, they pulled my hair, they hit me with rulers, they whacked me with keys. I seemed to be such a rebel, but I just didn’t know what was going on. People weren’t nice to me and I couldn’t figure out why. What bothered me was that I had a very hard time learning and the long walks to school seemed endless, especially in the winter.

My mom was this little tiny hundred-pound woman about five six or seven. She was very thin with curly brownish hair, sometimes permed and sometimes tied with a scarf. She was always tough with the people on the block, she cursed a lot. I was a kid so she always looked big to me. I don’t look like my mother, at least I don’t think so. I was told that I look like my father. My father, Frank, was a little tiny man too, hundred and twenty pounds, a rough little man from Nova Scotia. They were both, my mother and father, born in Newfoundland, one was born in St. John’s and the other in Sally’s Town. My mother’s maiden name was Pedel and my father’s name was Powers. From what I understand it used to be Power but he put an s at the end of it coming across the border, why I don’t know. I heard my father snuck across but maybe he just walked. He was about eighteen or nineteen when he came here. They didn’t know each other. I don’t know exactly where they each lived before they were married, but I think they lived on Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn. They used to have Newfoundland Night dances in the Grand Ballroom at Prospect Hall and my aunt took my mother. I think my mother was seventeen or eighteen. That’s where they met.

They were all heavy drinkers. I never knew about their courtship, I never asked. I guess I was too involved with myself to ask those questions. I wasn’t brought up to say, Ma, Dad, how did youse meet? Where did youse meet? I found out most of this information when my mother and father were sitting in the house having these parties and all the people were over at the house drinking. My uncle Jack might have been there, my father’s brother, who my father fought with for years and didn’t like. Every time he came down to the house I would hear bits and pieces about where my mother came from and how she came. My aunt might tell me one little thing, but to sit down and actually say, Ma, did you love him? Dad, was she good-looking? I never thought to ask anything like that.

My mother was a maid. She used to do some well-to-do people’s houses out in Fort Hamilton when Fort Hamilton Parkway in Brooklyn was a really classy neighborhood. My father was always a factory worker, he was a hardworking man, not educated at all, I don’t know if he went to the third, fourth, or fifth grade in school. I think my mother was more read than my father, my father could read but not as well as my mother. I used to watch my mother read, she read good. My father would sit and read the paper but he wasn’t really good at it, I know he wasn’t good at it.

I was around eight or nine and we would have to go to the subway to meet my father before he hit the bar, because if he hit the bar that meant we weren’t gonna eat and he was gonna spend all the money on some woman, or some guy was gonna take it off him. So my mother used to go up to meet him at the subway station and a lot of times my father would sneak and go to another subway station and then we would have to go from bar to bar to look for him. But I think my mother liked that because when she went from bar to bar she would have a beer here and a beer there. She was a pisser, a really conniving woman who worked around a lot of situations. A lot of the energy she had and a lot of her ways I think I have. She was good at doing ten things at one time.

I always wanted to have money. Money was a big thing because I never had any. The first time I stole something was when my father came home drunk one night. I guess I was around eight or nine, maybe ten, I remember going into the bedroom and seeing his wallet sticking out of his pocket. I got it out of his pocket and ran out of the house around the corner and opened it up. There was seven dollars in it. I took the seven dollars out and ran back and put the wallet back on the bed. I didn’t try to put it back in his pocket, I put it on the bed. I thought for the first time, I’m doing wrong. See, my mother used to do this, my mother used to take his money. When I think about it now I feel really bad that I took his money because everybody took his money. He never was able to just spend his money, that’s why he used to go hide and drink it all away. He knew when he came home she would take everything and maybe give him a few bucks, which humiliated him. He didn’t feel like a man, that’s why he sat in