Independence Day

“Everything you write has a layer of sadness, doesn’t it? Why?”

That’s a paraphrase of consistent feedback that I got to the essays that I shared a little over a year ago. I knew the reason why, but I wasn’t sure that I should share. Was it too much of a downer? It was also, quite frankly, a task I wasn’t feeling mentally ready to tackle. So, I took a break from writing, even though the stories I want to tell have literally shook me from sleep on countless nights. Yes, I want to eventually tell you about meeting Madonna and all the celebrities I’ve known. There are so many tales to tell from my 62 years of life so far… many happy and fun. But it’s all been fully informed by earliest experiences and core truth that I also want and need to share. To that end, here we go… “Music to My Ears 2.0”… and this time, it starts at the very beginning.

Independence Day

“It’s Independence Day, all boys must run away…”

Bruce Springsteen

It’s strange to realize you are living without a trace of who you once were.

Not in a dramatic way. Nothing catastrophic happened. There was no single moment when everything broke. Rather, it’s the slow awareness that the boy you used to be had vanished so completely that you can’t even fully remember what he looked like.

Sometimes I try. I sit very still and try to summon a mental image of myself at 6 or 12. I knew what I was doing, for the most part. But I can’t find him. It’s like opening a room in your own house and discovering it’s been emptied while you weren’t looking.

The vertigo of it arrives at odd moments… like in a grocery store aisle or walking past a random child in the street. The thought slips in: “I am living without a past self.”

My parents were teenagers when they married. My father was 17. My mother was 16. I think they loved each other in the way young people love in pop songs about escape. What they truly shared was a hunger to get out.

My father grew up in a home that always felt on the brink of collapse. He had a violent alcoholic father, an adulterous mother, and a cluster of mostly female addicts orbiting welfare checks and emergency rooms. He learned early how to step between danger and the people he loved. By the time he met my mother, he was already carrying the exhaustion of a much older man.

My mother’s house looked calmer from the outside. She was born into a small, strict Italian immigrant family filled with rules. Then her mother died suddenly. She was the only person who made that house feel gentle. Less than a year later, her father married a woman my mother despised. Something inside her cracked open. She didn’t rebel because she was wild. She rebelled because she was grieving and no one noticed.

When they found each other, they saw a door to run through together.

Neither family approved. He was too damaged. She was too young. It was “us against the world,” but without cinematic romance. They married anyway.

About a year later, I was born.

I don’t think they wanted me in the way people usually mean that. I think they followed the rules of the times. In 1963, in an Italian American neighborhood of the Bronx, New York, if you didn’t have a baby within 12 respectable months of marriage, something was wrong. A child was proof that everything was normal.

During those early years, we moved constantly. Everything was temporary and dependent on my parents’ ability to stay on top of their bills. Up until I was about 14, they didn’t. In the moving, pieces of my childhood were lost. Photos disappeared. Objects were thrown away. By the time I was grown, and they settled into a long-term home, there was no physical record that I had ever been a boy.

I have three sisters. They took up space. A lot of it. They were frilly and pretty. And they demanded attention. The concept of the first-born son being coddled and favored was unfulfilled in my family. In my family, the first-born son was an instant man of responsibility, while the daughters were the objects of constant cooing and hugging. Seemingly as a result, my sisters also reflected my parents’ chaos more loudly than I did. Their personalities mirrored my parents in ways that I never did. They fit. I didn’t. I was also painfully shy. I learned early how to stay quiet. And, no, it had nothing to with me eventually identifying as gay. One of my sisters would later come out as a lesbian. My parents insisted that they were fine with us both. I simply wasn’t one of them, whatever that meant. There never seemed to be connective personality characteristics between them and me.

By the time I was 10, I had another job in the family.

Referee.

For as long as I could remember, my father was a functional alcoholic. He worked hard, and he largely maintained his family responsibilities, but he was also prone to cyclical binges. Whenever he came home drunk and raging, it was my responsibility to calm him. I learned which words softened him, as well as how to stand between his violent anger and the rest of the house. At the same time, I was my mother’s confidant. I knew everything about her life, her marriage, her disappointments, her secrets. There were no adult boundaries. I carried their marriage inside me.

I grew up managing the emotional climate of the house while trying to disappear inside it.

I did well in school. That became my assigned role: “the smart one.” I was the good kid to the point of being a teacher’s pet in school. Teachers provided a great deal of the adult reinforcement that I received as a child. My parents frequently bragged about my grade and achievements, but it always felt less like pride in me and more like proof that they were good parents.

They told me constantly that education mattered. My mission was to go further than they had. I had to succeed. But what they cared about most was money. Being a provider. The path of least resistance to stability. It didn’t matter what the work was, only that it paid well.

Despite this pressure to be the family’s future success story, they invested almost nothing in helping me get there. In fact, they often inadvertently sabotaged me with our constant moving and school changes.

In middle school, ironically after the constant moving finally stopped, I unravelled. I became a truant. I skipped class constantly and drifted, barely showed up. Eventually I was kicked out.

I still remember sitting in my guidance counsellor’s office, waiting for my future to be decided. The options were bleak: trade school for mechanics or plumbers. The end of anything that looked like a real education. My parents were prepared to accept that. If I found a way to make money, it was fine.

The counsellor studied me for a long moment and said he saw something in me that didn’t belong there. He took me outside the office to talk without my parents. It was then that he cut me a deal.

I could stay in school, if I met with him every single day for a year.

So, I did.

I showed up. My counsellor taught me how to regulate myself. How to plan. How to survive without anyone saving me. He taught me independence and the beauty of freedom. He once told me that the world would be mine if I just stayed the course right now, which I did. That year changed my life, and my parents barely noticed.

They wanted me educated, yes. But only in theory. My future was something they talked about, but it was not something they protected.

At the same time, they didn’t want me to leave.

There was always that tension: “Go further than us, but don’t go anywhere.” Excel, but stay available. Grow, but remain within reach.

When I finally did leave, I went permanently no-contact. They let me go without a fight.

There was no confrontation. There was no attempt to pull me back. They simply let me go.

Part of me was relieved.

Part of me was shattered.

I wanted them to fight for me. Instead, there was only silence. I still don’t know if it was shame, regret, or the realization of how bad things had been. Or maybe I had simply stopped being useful.

It’s probably a combination of it all. I will never fully know.

I am often asked how I reached the decision to go no-contact. There are a handful of moments that led to the final break. It began on the day my father finally committed to getting sober. It came after one his more unhinged drunken rages, during which he pulled a gun on my mother. We fled our home and stayed with a neighbor. I remember him throwing a tantrum in the street outside the house where we were staying. I went to talk with him to calm him down. After years of it working, it didn’t anymore. He looked at me coldly and said, “bring your mother out here or you will never be my son again, if you ever really were.”

I froze. I could tell that he was no longer drunk, so his words could not be blamed on booze. He was just intent on getting his way at all costs. I walked away without a word. It was over. I was done. I had nothing left for him or for my family. My first 21 years of life were spent in a whirlwind of drama. I was out. Minutes later when I told my mother what happened, she shockingly apologized for him. He didn’t mean it, she insisted. Several hours later, they were happily reunited. We were back in our home. My father went to his first AA meeting and came home with a sponsor. That was good enough for everyone. They five of them went to church that night as a family. I stayed home. To his credit, he never drank again, and the family became instantly devout Catholics. I didn’t join them. There was no need.

That evening my father did something he’d never done before. He apologized to me. He even hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. It was the first time he had ever done either to me. He was very affectionate to my sisters, but boys didn’t get that. It made them weak.

In that moment, I felt nothing. I played along. I knew he was sincere, but it was too late. I was mentally and emotionally gone. Checked out. I accepted his apology and privately vowed to utilize the skills my guidance counsellor had taught me long ago. I started therapy, and I began formulating my exit plan. My job was complete. No one needed my protection anymore. He was finally committed to sobriety. They’d rediscovered the church as a bonding ritual. I could leave. And I eventually did.

Without a family, without photographs of myself as a boy or even as a teenager, I had to build my past from something else.

Music saved me.

Throughout my life, songs were my frequent companions. They were my witnesses and my shelter. All my childhood memories live inside specific songs, movies, and television shows. I don’t always remember myself, but I remember the soundtrack.

I read constantly. I watched endless TV as a child of the ’70s. Sitcoms gave me refuge. They were predictable, while making the world manageable for half an hour at a time.

Those shows, those songs, those books became my photo albums. They are proof that I exist and that I have done so for over 60 years.

When you grow up in constant adaptation, you don’t build a self. You build strategies. You become a buffer, a translator, and a peacekeeper. You learn how to survive every room. It took decades for me to learn how to belong to myself in a substantial way.

That noise has been replaced by grief. The weird part is that I don’t grieve the loss of my family or the people I knew growing up. I grieve the people I didn’t get to have in my life. I want to say that I miss my family, but I don’t. I’m not mad at them anymore. I honestly don’t feel anything for them anymore.

It’s funny. Some days I feel ancient. Others, I still feel like a boy who never got to be.

I no longer think we “find” ourselves. I think some of us must build ourselves from the left-over pieces that were not destroyed.

Maybe that’s what this part of life is for.

Sometimes I imagine my parents at 16 and 17, standing at the edge of their lives, believing escape would save them. They weren’t villains. Far from it. They were children wearing wedding rings. They were deeply flawed. But I now think they sincerely did the best that they could.

I wish we could have given each other what we wanted from the other. It just wasn’t possible.