This morning was one of those mornings I woke up missing Ana terribly. Must’ve had a dream just before waking up about her. So, I think what I’m going to do instead (of talking about us -her and I…) is talk to you a little about my folks. But first, I think I’ll go to YouTube and listen to one of my favorite Foreigner songs the title of this post was taken from. BRB. OK, back -no Foreigner though, got sidetracked watching another video, “This is Why Farmers Sell their Weapons and Buy Donkeys” 🤠

Now, where were we? 🤔 Ah, yes! Mmmm… I was very young when I got separated from my folks. To make matters worse the separations were not only rather sudden, but staggered -not sure if that was good or bad. Near as I can tell… fact is, I have no clue when my father left us (I know why… but for now, some other time ay?). But I was about 4 when we lost the home my grandparents had bought us on Staples street in San Francisco. My mom, my baby brother Jaime, and I all moved to an apartment don’t Capp street downtown. My sister Debbie had moved out sometime before, since her and mom couldn’t get along. Well not long after, she passed out drunk with a cigarette in hand, and caught the joint on fire! The last thing I remember was Jaime and me on the floor in front of the TV, then being carried thru the hall by firemen, then the inside of the ambulance, and then a large room with lights all around the ceiling.

This is where it all seems a bit hazy (as it is, I’m not terribly certain about the story thus far either). From the hospital I remember ending up at grandma and grandpa Hurds’ (moms’ folks). They were great! Proper folk, good jobs, beautiful home, never any fussing going on. I really wanted to stay -but when I ended up at my aunt and uncle’s house, with their five kids, I felt betrayed/hoodwinked 😒 Again, that’s a whole nother story.

So I did a stint with my aunt and uncke for a year, or a stretch longer. Thank God it was no more than that. After being molested by the eldest son is the sun for a year or so, I began exhibiting acting out behaviors* as you might imagine. So, they dumped me after a little over a year -and it’s off to live with grandma Silva. Yeehaw -as my cousin Tony would say… if he were still with us. I think I told some of this story in a previous post. So my grandmother took me for a trial run run and decided she wanted to keep me. I went back with the Hurds for a few weeks while grandma Silva went down to the LA area looking for a place to live. From what I understand, she had caught a couple of apartments on fire his ire and was looking for a fresh start lol Moral of that story -NEVER OPERATE THE TOASTER UNDER THE PAPER-TOWELS (RACK) TWICE! 🙄

So off to LA I go… San Fernando Valley -Van Nuts, oops lol Van Nuys 😋 to be more specific. So at so not long after, my mom shows up. As I mentioned in a previous post, she starts drinking, acting up… and is asked to leave. What seemed a month or two later, my dad shows up. I distinctly remember him in his fruit of the loom underwear, standing under a door jam during the Sylmar earthquake (of ’71’?). The only other times I can picture my dad as such… eating pie in the kitchen at 2 o’clock in the morning 😄

Well, not long after he found him an apartment on the seedy-side of LA. A little Hamlet known as El Monte. We did the weekend (dad) thing for about 10 years – with a skit in ’74’ where I attended school for part of the year and a summer. 1974 was a bad year for me apparently; I attended 3 different schools that year to include a (shortened) semester in San Francisco. To this point, including the past 2 or 3 years, I had apparently develop a knack for becoming so popular with the kids in various schools… that they even wanted to come home with me (chased/bullied) once school was out 😆

Well to sum up my feelings about my parents: I grew afraid of my mother because of her erratic behavior behavior due to wet brain at a very early age hyphen’s-thirties. I only recall seeing her a handful of times after being removed from the home back in ’68’. The last time I visited her was 1980 with my friend Albert for emotional support. She was living in the projects in patrero hill and a largely black populated neighborhood. Neighborhood. A fight broke out between her and her live-in boyfriend at the time. I was forced to mediate, he split and broke the kitchen window on the way out. Some neighbors across the way heard the ruckus (had to look up sp.), I told them he hit my mom -they came running down the stairs, followed him and beat the hell out of him; leaving him face down in the gutter a block away. The next day I called my Uncle Frank to give us lodgings, while my grandmother (his sister) worked out a flight back to Los Angeles. Around noon the following day – I remember my mother walking out the door and asking what we wanted for lunch… It was the last time I would ever see her alive! 😭

After about 10 years of my dad’s drinking and drugging and womanizing and womanizing and domestic abuse of my is the abuse of my stepmother -along with little or no real attention, except for the constant negative attention I was afforded… I grew tired! So I decided to move to New Mexico with my antenunkel which was a very big mistake. They had moved there from San Francisco the year before.I figured the New Mexico sunshine and being able to spend time with my cousins with cousins would be good for this battered soul python how much worse could it be?I figured the New Mexico sunshine and being able to spend time with my cousins with cousins would be good for this battered soul -how much worse could it be? Well it may not have been much worse, but it wasn’t much better either. After a year of troubles domestically and in school back to Los Angeles I went to. I have been working out that year, even joined the football team (as a benchwarmer lol), and the wrestling team. When I returned to Los Angeles I was somewhat it was somewhat taller and broader -I decided from that point on my grandmother was no longer going to discipline me with whatever she could get her hands on. Well it went well for me I think my grandmother felt she had lost the only way of coping with me she ever had. My grandmother was a good woman but she definitely had anger issues. And I was the perfect catalyst. I don’t remember being angry as a child but I remember being disappointed andisappointed and disillusioned constantly by my father. Though I maintained the deepest respect for him for many years, I had lost it for many a human beings elsewhere -sadly, my grandmother more than anyone suffered the brunt of my disrespect. Looking back, I feel we could have had a pretty good life together, had my father simply moved on and allowed me a chance to heal from my previous wounds/indiscretions. Shortly before my decision to enter military service (the Marines wouldn’t have me 😏 because I had not completed 10th grade -opted for my G.E.D.). I had a physical altercation with my father in ’81’… I only saw him a handful of times over the next 10 or 12 years… After that I was pinging back-and-forth between LA and New Mexico. Finally, I convinced my grandmother to move out their. I thought life would be great living with my grandmother and being around my cousins. But they had their own lives and seemed to have little interest in making me a part of their lives. So off to the military I went… After a year-and-a-half of hanging around the arcade, smoking alot of dope, and drinking! I didn’t manage a year at the local community college where I got a degree and certification in welding.

So off to the military I went thinking they were the key to my maturity and manhood. It’s nothing like the movies I’ll tell you that! And peacetime is nothing like war time! Some point you’ve got the best of the best and in some cases the worst of the worst doing military service. And the military, believe-you-me, has more than its fair share of assholes and control freaks. So it sucks, but I decided to ride it out , with a series of reprimands in-tow. During this time my mother passed away-which turned out to be an opportunity to end my ooh and my distinguished military career on a high note. Having failed to complete high school and never be able to take the walk everyone else did after my completion of am I completion of community college…. I had something of a mental breakdown at the time. I had broken up with Terry and suffered terribly. I decided I was going to stick out my military service and see it to the end. A positive urinalicious for marijuana, 30 days in military-style boot camp, a CO -who believed it wasn’t sufficient to undergo the normal punishment by the Battalion Commander, decided to make things even harder for us by not giving us our basic necessities to pass various inspections. I came out of there mad as a hornet and with even less respect for military life than when I went in -they didn’t care. It wasn’t their time and as far as they were concerned anyone making them look bad had no business been there to begin with. A totally self serving environment I was surrounded by. Not unlike the one I came from. So the commanding officer decided to give me the boot, taking this sweet time of course. By the time the paperwork was completed, and minus the leave I had accrued, I officially had 8 days of military service left in order to receive my honorable discharge. When I spoke to the jag officer he looked at the paperwork and said what kind of an asshole do you have for a CO? The discharge after 90some% of my time served read “Inability to adapt to military standard of living” 🤷‍♂️

So back to New Mexico I go. I had developed no friendships during that time, But a lot of authority who viewed me with disdain and a lot of fellow soldiers who were warned to stay away from me if they wanted to further their careers in a timely fashion. I thought I would simply pass through New Mexico on my way back to California to live with my dad. Shortly after my arrival my grandmother sat me down and gave me the bad news -my dad had been incarcerated for trying to rip off a warehouse out in LA somewhere. Looking back, it wasn’t much of a surprise -my father had long been reliant on my grandmother for money for his drugs. I guess not long after she moved back to New Mexico he couldn’t cut it on his own anymore. I went out there to visit him at the LA county jail -but they required a ton of paperwork. So I returned back to New Mexico where I proceeded to hone and perfect my own drinking and drugging career it’s drugging career over the next 4 years.

Wine, women & and song -that was the theme! And if anyone tells you wine and marijuana don’t lead to other things… at least in my case… not long after I fell in with a bed of heroinatics and off romantics and all if I went for the next 2 and a 1/2 years. Thievery caused me to lose my job, my dignity, my fiance’s daughter, the only thing or one left standing was me (barely), and my poor grandmother. It really is true what it says in the book of Alcoholics Anonymous about a mother’s love… I put that woman through hell as a child; and even more so as a drug addict!

After several stints in rehab… I was finally able to get clean and sober in December of 1989. Thus started a long journey into the mouth of madness. They’re not kidding when they say that drugs and alcohol are but a symptom…. Right now would probably be a pretty good time to mention that at 26 years old I had been struggling with drugs and alcoholism for nearly 27 years of my life (likely, 9 of those months in mamas’ belly -how odd when I think back how I was once in someone else’s belly. We’ll save the stories of my “slobriety” (heard that in a meeting yesterday) for another time -trust me, it’s a goody!

Anyways, by this time I had pretty much put my father in the rear-view-mirror after nearly a decade and a half of disappointments. I think the straw that started to break the camel’s back was after my mother passed away – the fact of how I received the news of my mother’s passing… First of all I had to hear from a commanding officer who clearly loathed me. Secondly, When he asked if I knew so-and-so, I had no clue who I was talking about, as he was using her birth name rather than her adopted name which I was familiar with only. He had not the slightest bit of compassion either. This coupled with a phone call to my father telling me “You’re gonna have to handle this one on your own boy” -coming from a man whom I would have clearly been better off without to begin with! To end the story on a low note once again -this seems to be the story of my life up to this point! Once I had arrived back to New Mexico from my military service and the bad news that I have no place to stay in California, and my own four year stint honing, then battling addiction, I saw my father 2 maybe 3 times after that. The 1st of those 3 was for my grandfather’s funeral. My father looked like shit – Apparently at this point he was homeless for he was very darkly tanned from all the time he’d spent outdoors. He came to live with me for several months, at the behest *orders) of my grandmother who was paying the rent at the time. Oh BTW, As of my grandfather’s passing I had about 9 months in Alcoholics Anonymous – As we were leaving the wake for my grandfather, with seemingly no clue or consideration for my own recovery – before we even got out the room my grandfather lay in, he asked me if “I knew where to score some shit”. My father it seems, was never particularly interested in furthering during the quality of my own life like most normal fathers do. The word from my sister many years later was that her and my mother couldn’t get along and my father and I, all of 0-4 years of age, couldn’t get along either (hail Freud). Two stories in particular come to mind -2nd hand of course. Being thrown into a wall by my father because I wouldn’t stop crying -I was about two; my aunt and grandmother showing up to the house one day with no one there except me in the crib. In finishing off the story, I believe I only saw my father one other time after that. It’s a bit foggy 28 years later. 1992-93 was the last time I ever saw him alive. In May or June of 1996 we got a call that he had passed away. I drove out to California for an open casket get ceremony for his family out there. He was cremated and I drove him back in my truck where we were to have a separate ceremony for his family back in New Mexico.

During my fledgling time in Alcoholics Anonymous, all of 9 months, I had heard over and over again how families had been reunited -(gotta take a walk, BRB)… (All I can think about right now is God, the only one I have left) and that… There would never be a (happy) reunion for us, for this family! I took it hard. Harder than I think I took my mother’s passing -or maybe it was simply that I had to take it sober. Anyways, I’ll get into life sober at a later date.

I think that when you lose your 2nd parent, and become orphaned at any age, you come to the realization that the 2 people you can count on, that you’re supposed to be able to account on more than any other in the-whole-wide-world ARE GONE FOR GOOD! Several things in relation to my parents I recall:***

•I was afraid of my mother

•There was very little about my father I could respect or look up to

•Years into my sobriety, observing young men who seemed to have great respect and admiration for their own fathers, and how they carried themselves and appeared to have very different personalities and demeanor from how I felt inwardly, and projected outwardly (to the world -which so often left me feeling lonely (and quite often alone). I often wondered the extent of the effects of fearing one parent parent, and loathing the other.

•While kids my own age were enjoying life it’s boring life I was in rehabbs and counseling sessions trying to straighten out my own -I felt cheated further!

•Lastly,: this recently came to mind: If you want to screw over your enemy in the worst possible way, find a way to raise them at the earliest possible age and be the most dysfunctional parent humanly possible. A message for all parents out there -who may have no clue as to the impact they are having on their children both presently, and in decades to follow!

So, “budih budih, that’s all folks” (skit from Bugs-bunny). As always, first-and-foremost, any post is intended to be relational and informative. Something for us to connect to as human beings, and something to take away from and build/improve upon.

*A lot of acting up behaviors though abnormal in-and-of-themselves, are actually quite normal reactions to unhealthy environmental… It’s when you don’t see acting out behaviors and unhealthy and environments that one should be very very concerned. When you have a child who is acting out, like Brianna – Once removed from an unhealthy home, you want to give them as much normalcy as possible -then over time see what behaviors persist. Children can be remarkably resilient provided those coping-mechanisms are not stifled or countered.

**Any feelings you may stumble upon as a result of these posts ARE A BONUS! The 1st one is a freebie while any thereafter are 10 bucks a shot! 😉

***It is very clear to me that I loved my parents immensely. Whether by circumstance, by choice, or both -they could not!

•Title is a line m from the 1994 song “Come Out And Play” by the rock band The Offspring.