My tall skinny
grandmother, Josephine, had a temper.
She nearly killed our white cat one day because it had taken a dump
behind the upright player piano. She
chased the animal through the house, swinging a broom, as it slinked and then
finally scurried out the front door.
She was a stern, methodical and precise woman. One time from the bathroom doorway I watched her sitting on the
pot. She meticulously folded a length of
toilet paper into a neat square. Before
she could use it she spotted me, and told me to shut the door.
When I was five she
took me by the hand and walked me down the hill to the parochial school of St.
Casmir. On that first day Sister Regina
told us to sit at a table and play. But
QUIETLY, she said. There were blocks
with big capital letters on them, lumps of blue and pink modeling clay, and an
assortment of small toys. I got the
bright idea of building a wall. The blocks were bricks, and the clay was the
mortar that stuck them together.
Sister Regina saw my
construction. I thought she would
praise my cleverness. But instead she
went ballistic. “Oh, no, Johnny!” she
yelled. “You’ve ruined the blocks. And they were brand new.” She tried to scrape off the clay, but they
were permanently stained. “Bad boy,”
she said. “Bad boy.”
I disliked being
among so many strange kids, and those moody and aggressive nuns. When I talked back or otherwise provoked
her, Sister Regina would fly down the aisle between our desks, seize me by the
hair, and slap my face. It occurred to
me that long hair was a disadvantage, so at the barber’s I asked for an
extremely short buzz cut. The next time
Sister Regina made a lunge at me, she grasped only air where my hair should
have been, allowing me to duck her blow.
Everyone laughed. She was so
surprised at missing that she didn’t try again.
My classmates were
Martin Rodginski, Billy Organic, Bobby
Quinn, and Marion Lipinski. There also were a number of others whose
names I don’t remember. Bobby was the
most popular, but he didn’t last long.
He got totally fed up with being slapped around, and didn’t try to hide
it. One day Sister Regina called on him
to answer a lesson question, and he replied, “I don’t know. And even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
That sent Sister
Regina flying down the aisle again, but Bobby stood up and faced her. “Keep your Goddamned hands off me,” he
shouted. She was stunned. She’d never encountered such blasphemous
resistance from a little kid before.
Flustered, she told him to go home, and she would speak to his
father. Bobby said, “Go ahead. Bitch!” He never came back. His
dad sent him to the public school, where he’d wanted to go in the first place.
I was a frail child,
with extraordinarily slender arms and legs.
For too long I mistakenly equated my physical weakness with
inferiority. Billy and Marty enjoyed
taunting me, threatening me. When they
trapped me in the basement lavatory, I made the mistake of fighting back. Marty quickly knocked me down on the
urine-soaked concrete floor, and Billy literally sat on my face as he pummeled
my ribs with his fists. I have never
forgotten the shock of that violence, and the suffocating shit-stink of Billy’s
hard ass pressing on my face.
My father came home
from the war when I was three. I
watched him from the stairwell, peering through the posts of the banister. He was in his Army uniform, unpacking a
green duffle bag. He pulled out three
bottles of Seagram’s 7.
Grandma
frowned.
“We won the war, ma,”
he said. “We gotta celebrate.” Then out came a strange- looking thing that
rustled and whispered. “It’s a hula
skirt,” he said. “The Wahinis can
really make it shake.” Then he came up
with a bottle of perfume, which he handed to his mother.
“Don’t you want to
see your son?” she asked.
“Huh? Oh, sure.
Where is he?”
She turned, saw
me. “Janek, come here and say hello to
your dad.” She spoke in Polish.
I gripped the posts
tightly. “No,” I said.
“He’s a wiry little
thing, ain’t he?” my father said.
“C’mere.”
I didn’t move.
“Hey, get over here
right now,” he said, clearly annoyed.
“I’m your father.”
My mother? Well, she was dead. That’s what he told me. And when I asked him what she was like, he said
he didn’t want to talk about it. Later
a friendly next door neighbor, Caroline, told me my mother wasn’t dead, she
actually lived on the other side of town.
And what’s more, she called once or twice a week to ask how I was
doing.
Turned out she was a
beautiful Irish woman by the name of Elizabeth Jean Joyce, who loved opera and
poetry. Her relatives read books, went
to the theater, sang at the piano. Her
great-great-grandfather, Jack, was transported from Dublin to a penal colony in
New South Wales, Australia, for sheep stealing during the famine. Not all the Joyces were criminals. Look at
James, the famous writer of Ulysses.
He was an excellent tenor, as well.
But despite all
that, my father announced that I could no longer see her.
Why?
“Because that whore
is living in sin.”
I was only ten, but
I fully understood his hypocrisy. My
mother and her boyfriend were deeply in love, that was perfectly clear to
anyone who saw them together. My
father, on the other hand, was full of anger and hatred. Sin?
He went out every Saturday night, got drunk, and got laid. Then he came staggering home.
I’d lie in bed at
three in the morning, listening to him stumble about in the dining room, and
then he’d turn on the staircase light and climb up, one slow step at a
time. He’d come into my room, sit on
the bed, and mumble. His breath was
foul, putrid. “Johnny, I love ya,”
he’d say. “Honest to God, I love
ya. I wish things were different,
Johnny.” Then he’d cover his face with
both hands, tremble, and weep.
He told me he loved
me—honest to God—only when he was incoherently drunk. When sober, nothing I ever did pleased him. If I got good grades in school, he seemed
uncomfortable. Once he said the nuns
gave me all those As because they just felt sorry for me, coming from a broken
home. When I made bad grades, he
whipped out his belt, laid it on me.
Every so often he’d
stare at me, and sneer: “Who do you
think you are?”
Now, this
question—posed in a much kinder way, of course—is one artists most frequently
ask themselves. Writers,
especially. We believe self awareness
leads us to meaning in the astonishing and inexplicable events of our
lives. Also, creating a careful record
of our journey has utility beyond esthetics.
Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann says, “Instead of allowing each day,
pushed back by the next, to lapse into imprecise memory, [the artist] shapes
again the experiences which have shaped him.
He is at once the captive and the liberator.”
When you’re
liberated, you’re no longer angry. When
you finally find meaning, you’re much more capable of forgiveness, and
love. Shaping experience is fun as
well. After all, you can give a story
any ending you want.
John Palcewski
Forio d’ Ischia,
Italia
February, 2004