The Life of a Story in Progress 18: International traveler returns to hometown, yet ends up a City Slicker

41 years ago, I was 17 years old and I had just returned to the U.S. from overseas. (From my time spent in Crete and Karamürsel, Turkey) I believe I mentioned it before, but when a dependent of military personnel becomes 18, they can no longer live with their family on base or have the support previously afforded them (health care, access to the base services, etc). In my case, in 1973, I was almost 18 and I wanted to leave home, so my parents let me.

Arrangements were made for me to live with my cousin Bruce and his newly wedded wife, Nadine, in South Grafton, MA on Main St. very close to the Wilkinsonville town line. While I lived with them, my parent’s paid them $40.00 a month for my room and board. The plan was for me to live with them while I finished high school, but that was not to be.

Once, Bruce and I were driving back from the package store having bought beer. (The fact that I was underage wasn’t a concern to him) I saw a couple of teenage girls walking down the street and he suddenly leaned out his window and made lewd noises, whistled and made inappropriate suggestions to them. I was surprised when he did this. It was embarrassing to be in the truck with him. A half hour or so later, the police came to his house and took us both to the police station. They questioned us separately. I said nothing, and that didn’t amuse the police officer who was interviewing me. He was actually another cousin of mine. His name was Jimmy. But now he was Cousin Officer Huchowski. I sat in a room with him for a while as we looked at each other, neither one of us speaking. Then, the girls (who were there at the station) made a statement saying that it was some other blue truck that had harassed them. This was so very obviously not true. I was never sure if they changed their minds themselves or if Cousin Officer Huchowski had perhaps “suggested” to them that it might have been a different truck. I’ll never know.

There was a time that I glued small 1 inch square mirrors all over the slanted part of one of the walls in my room on the second floor. The perimeter of the room had 4 or 5 foot high walls which then slanted up towards the center of the ceiling. The room also had dormer-out windows. The mirrors looked really cool. I don’t remember where I got them and there were quite a lot of them. The project of applying them to the wall occurred during a chocolate mescaline trip. The unfortunate thing about putting the mirrors on the wall was that they didn’t come off without taking a big piece of wall with them. Ugh. I hadn’t considered what would happen when they were taken down. It totally ruined the wall and I felt bad about it but had no money to pay for the damage. I don’t think I had a job at that time.

Cousin Bruce thought that having a live-in party buddy was great. He became more and more raucous with increasingly wild behavior. One day, I heard that Nadine had left him and that they were getting a divorce. I was surprised, but not overly so. My aunt Ruth (his mother) made a point to tell me that they hadn’t broken up because of me. This was something I already knew. I knew they broke up because he was an out of control misogynist male chauvinist pig.

Now begins the short period of time during which I lived with my grandmother in her apartment in Wilkinsonville. I was still in high school but I was graduating in a few short weeks. As soon as I graduated from high school, I moved to 23 Mott St. in Worcester. Even though I was 17 at the time and told the landlord so when he asked my age, he rented the place to me anyway.

People gave me furniture, I don’t remember who gave me what but furniture wasn’t very important to me at that time. I got dishes too. I don’t know where they came from. The windows even had curtains. I think Memere made all those things happen. I remember she used to come over and sometimes do the dishes and clean. Cousin Henry gave me a bed. He either gave it to me or loaned it to me. It was never really clear. When the bed broke, he decided that he’d loaned it to me and that I should buy him a new one. That didn’t happen.

In the winter, it was the custom at that time in Worcester to place a chair in the space on the side of the street that you’d shoveled to prevent someone else from parking in the spot you’d cleared for yourself. People generally accepted this practice. Of course, some people (like me) just took the chairs.

One day there was a fire in the building next to mine. The buildings on Mott St. were almost all triple-deckers and were very close to each other. Because I worked third shift at the State Hospital in Westboro, I was home during the day and slept from early morning to mid-afternoon. When I awoke that afternoon, I smelt smoke and went outside. The building next door was practically gone. Afterwards, I remember thinking that the adjoining buildings should have been evacuated. After all, I’d just slept through the entire process of the building next door practically burning to the ground!

Across the street from my apartment, on the corner of Mott St. and Barclay St., was a small convenience store on the first floor of yet another triple-decker. Actually, it was more like someone had turned their living room into a store than a real store. Their shelves were almost always bare and they sold canned goods, snacks and sundry items. I would often go there to buy a can of Campbell’s soup or some such thing to have for supper.

During the time that I lived on Mott St., my grandmother sold me my first car, a white 1969 Pontiac Lemans for which I paid $100.00. I think she charged me money because of the flack she would have gotten from some of the relatives if she had just out and out given it to me. It wasn’t unusual back then for her relatives to borrow her car when their car went to the shop for repairs. I guess the thinking was that she didn’t need it as much as they did. Some people abused memere’s generosity and would keep the car for a few weeks or so. In any case, she eventually bought a new car and stopped lending her car out at all.

When I got her old Pontiac Lemans, I spray painted a huge red star on the hood, and others on the side of the front doors. I spray painted something on the roof, but I don’t know remember what it was.

When my father retired from the Air Force and they came back to the states, I picked them up at the airport in this car. They were somewhat taken aback by the car’s appearance but most likely not too surprised that I would “decorate” a car in such a way. My parents (and siblings) moved in with me when they first got back to the U.S. until they could find a place of their own. I was thrilled to have them there; they paid the rent and bought all kinds of real food!  My sister Carol even did the dishes if I paid her a dollar. I think they stayed with me about a month and a half. Mott St. was a pretty rough neighborhood back then and I don’t think they liked it there very much.

My upstairs neighbor on the third floor was a single mom, and I wish I could remember her name but I cannot.  She was a nice person but not the most nurturing mother. She had a daughter that was about 2 years old at the very most.  She went out a lot in the evenings and if I was home, she’d knock on my door and when I answered it, she’d practically throw the kid into my arms and say that she’d be back soon.  Sometimes she would be back soon, and sometimes not so soon. When she would leave the kid with me, she wouldn’t bring any change of clothes or diapers or toys or anything. It was weird. But, I’d go upstairs and break into her house through the bathroom window and get whatever I needed to actually take care of the child.

She had a boyfriend; he used to shoot heroin at the kitchen table. I didn’t really think much about it at the time. I knew that what he was shooting up was heroin and that it was highly addictive and that addicts were, well, less than trustworthy. But he was always pleasant and after he shot up, he just sort of melted into the background.

One night, he decided that I should go with him to steal cars; presumably so he’d get money to buy heroin. We drove to some place where there were cars parked outside of a factory and drove around the dark, unlit parking lot of couple of times. I don’t think he had the slightest idea how to actually steal a car. I don’t know why I went him. I’d say that was a lapse in good judgment. But nothing happens and we drive back without having committed grand theft auto.

On the other side of the building (the side with a triple-decker that hadn’t burned down) lived a woman on the second floor who was extremely obese. I have no idea how much she weighed, but she was really, really fat. The buildings were very close together, perhaps no more than 20 feet. She used to change her clothes in the window whenever someone could see her from my apartment. I desperately tried not to ever look out the windows on that side of the house. Sometimes, visitors to my house would whistle and yell stuff at her and she would just do her thing as if nothing was unusual. It was, by almost everyone’s standards, very weird.

There were two guys who lived on the street that I used to buy speed from. I’m pretty sure they were still in high school. They’d come over now and then and we’d smoke pot and hang out. One day, and I don’t know how I found this out, I realize that the exhibitionist living next door to me is one of these guys’ sister. Wow. Sometime after that, they were at my house when I was having a party and sure enough, she starts her show and people start yelling at her with wild taunts and all sorts of craziness. I looked over at them and they didn’t seem to care at all. Maybe no one knew that they were related to her or perhaps they really didn’t care.

At some point, I allowed two brothers from Wilkinsonville to move in with me as roommates. They were just out of high school and were at least 18. They were well-known in the tiny village of Wilkinsonville as being from the family with the “crazy mother.” I had met her many times while living at my grandmother’s house as I was friends with these guys and had been to their house. Their house was pretty wild. The mother didn’t buy food or clothes for them or much of anything else. She didn’t cook, clean or do much more than complain and moderately berate her sons (she had FIVE!) for things they hadn’t done. The two oldest sons wanted out so I let them come live with me. They stayed with me for a couple of weeks until the day they tried putting my cat (the original Yahnis) into a round light globe from a lamp. The cat actually fit inside but not without a lot of cramping and force. I was really mad and kicked them out right on the spot.

Side note: Yahnis TWICE fell out of the second floor window at different times and didn’t get injured at all. My friends commented that he now only had 7 lives left.

Soon after my cat abusing friends were evicted, I had two women (Paula and Diane) move in with me as roommates. They both worked at Westboro State Hospital, which was where I was still working at that time. My car had died and it was no doubt from my complete lack of care of it and from doing things like racing it down Rt. 146 to Providence, RI at about a hundred miles an hour (possibly faster, the speedometer stopped 100) to see Led Zeppelin at the Civic Center with yet another cousin, cousin Glen.

Both Paula and Diane were pretty fat, and they were both into black guys. They were really, really really fat. One might even say huge. One evening, some of Diane’s friends came over, and they were being obnoxious and disrespectful to me. They did things like point to a necklace hanging on the wall and ask if they could have it. They didn’t ask stupidly, they asked in a bullying manner. Not being a person who could be so easily bullied, I told them to leave, but they ignored me. They were huge guys and there were three of them, so I was not going to be able to make them leave. I told Diane to get them to leave or she would have to move out right then and there. She got them out.

One evening when I was lying in bed reading or whatever, Paula, wearing a black lacey nightgown, came to my door and asked me if I wanted “company.” She had a boyfriend and he came over often, so I wasn’t expecting this sexual overture.  Being completely inexperienced in these matters, I thought I should say yes, I was, after all, 18 and it seemed like a good time to learn about sex. It ended up being a complete fiasco. I was totally embarrassed and mortified by the situation. It seemed like a big deal at the time, yet we didn’t even come close to actually having sex. It was pretty much like being with Pamela Alsobrook back in Texas when I was 14; just a lot kissing without any effort made to go anywhere else. A few weeks later, she came around again to give me another shot at voluptuous 300 lbs. physique, but I was not going to go through that again… I told her that I wasn’t interested. Perhaps not so strangely, she moved out soon thereafter.

The last thing I have to say about Mott St. is about the roof. The roof was flat, and it was accessed by an unattached hatch that would be pushed up and off. I liked the roof a lot. You could see very far and the entire horizon was the city scape of Worcester. Unless you were standing near the edge of the roof or someone was standing on the roof on a nearby building, you could have a feeling of aloneness without leaving the city. It was, however, a limited experience; you could still hear cars and occasionally people talking as well as the background noise of the city itself.

It seemed to me that the city had an attraction to me and me to it. I knew the city very well and for a time, I thought of becoming a cab driver. Worcester was the first city in which I ever lived (on my own) and at 18, I had a lot of curiosity about everything it had to offer. I was completely comfortable living in a city and I didn’t mind the noise or the hectic pace of life that came with the territory. This would be a one-time fling, as I would never again live in or have an affinity for any other city.