Cat Shit

They were known as the Greensboro Four. They were brave young men who, in July of 1960, had the balls to actually sit down at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s, which back then we called a “five and dime” store. And yeah, they really did have stuff cheap. The lunch counter was willing to serve black people, but they were not permitted to sit down. They had to stand. The students were refused service, but remained seated anyway, engaging in what was called a “sit-in”. They became famous. The counter is now in a museum. These four brave nonviolent protesters risked much. They drew the anger of whites at a time when that was still extremely dangerous. They very well could have ended up lynched. That’s no lie.

And back then, what these brave men did was not exactly legal. The signs were everywhere: “Colored Only” restrooms, “White Only” restrooms. This was segregation, also known as Jim Crow. Laws that restricted blacks from using the same waiting rooms, restrooms, even water fountains as whites. Laws. I’m not gonna go into that except that I have to say, this was real. It’s the way it was. Slavery was supposed to be gone, but few blacks could count on an equal wage for hard work compared to whites. But there had already been protests long before Greensboro, and these gained in frequency and the numbers of participants, with one very obvious result: whites were angry and scared.

In that climate, Ralph Smith later took his wife, son and two daughters and moved north to Pasadena, Maryland.

He chose a neighborhood called North Shore on the Magothy. It was a developing neighborhood being shaped by Ross Koch, who put his heart and soul into his work. To lay out lots and grade them and dig foundations, he had a single Caterpillar bulldozer and two dump trucks. He knew how to build a four bedroom house and leave trees in the yard. That’s an art long forgotten in the era of scraping huge tracts of land flat, leaving nothing standing, then building rows of shitty homes, transplanting saplings and sod, and raking in the bucks.

It was so different a time that anyone growing up today would be lost there.

Ralph Smith fled the racial trouble and came north to work for a trucking company. Within a few years he had his own company, but never hired black truckers. There weren’t many who owned their own truck tractors anyway, and that’s what he used. Men who owned their own trucks and leased on, pulling Ralph’s trailers. They made money and he made money, running the company out of a downstairs room in the house on Dutch Ship Road. A neighbor worked for him part-time, and they worked hard. The house had no air-conditioning, so on hot days, with the windows open, it had to be miserable.

In the neighborhood, it started out okay. Ralph and Betty Smith had friends. We went to crab feasts, Christmas parties where the there was a Santa, and swam at the community beach.

How all of that went South is beyond me. After a time, they no longer mixed with anyone, and us kids were cut off from the crabs and the beach.

That last one hurt. By the summer of ’68, I was being sexually abused by my parents. Yes, it happened, and yes, boys do react when you rub or suck on them, even when on the inside they feel sick, dirty and guilty. So given a premature sexual activeness, I naturally loved going to the beach and seeing older girls in their bikinis. Oh, I know I stared, and I know they caught me, but they were never nasty about it. They thought I was cute. They sometimes laughed, which bothered me. See, sex abuse fucks with a victim’s self esteem. I thought they were laughing at me, in a bad way. Still, the sight of my first girl in a string bikini made up for it. So when we were no longer allowed to set foot on the beach property, I was unhappy. What I did not know was that my parents had stopped paying dues to the North Shore community association, therefore we had no beach privileges.

A lot happened during the first decade we lived there aside from my father starting a feud with the Association.

In the summer of ’68, there was a girl my age named Barbara who lived a few houses away. We became inseparable. God, I loved her. She gave me my first kiss. She held my hand, we rode bikes together. She had short brown hair, blue eyes and was leggy like a foal, and she made me dizzy. She reached into my heart without knowing it.

One day, one very bad day, she told me her family was moving to Thailand. Later I figured out that her announcement followed the winter TET offensive in Vietnam. Her father must have been Air Force, because Thailand was where all the heavy bombers used against North Vietnam were based.

When she told me where she was going, I knew only that it was far away….and that I would never see her again.

One rainy, dark and cold day when everything had been loaded on moving vans that were long gone, her father loaded his family into their car and stopped by the house to let Barbara say goodbye to me. I couldn’t do it. I’d been miserable for weeks, and this day I dreaded. I hid under my bed, wedged against the wall, a blanket pulled far enough down that no one looking under my bed could see me. I heard the doorbell, heard Barbara and her father, and I wept quietly. Mom came looking for me but apparently never detected my hiding technique; after a few minutes they left. I stayed where I was, muffling my sobs. The only time in my life I was ever so innocently and unconditionally loved was over.

Meanwhile there were things going on that actually made me embarrassed because of my father. Surely there had been grass planted in our big yard, but Ross Koch had made a mistake grading the lot. Summer rains washed dirt and clay along gullies, and there was little grass. When he went to cut the grass, my father raised huge dust clouds. It was embarrassing. Also, I knew he was cheating with a woman out back. He did horoscopes for her, and she worked in a grocery store. When I was the only one with him, I saw the attraction, the flirting and the familiarity they had. Was there no end to this man’s depravity? He’d beat us with belts and make us go to church, but everything was sick. Everything was twisted, and I was confused and post traumatic even though the trauma never stopped. In the class of 1969-1970, when I had to repeat third grade, I met Lee Ann. Of course I shouldn’t have been interested in girls, but the early sexual abuse had made me so. Lee Ann was beautiful, with a bright smile, and I fell in love hard.

But I wouldn’t go near her. I couldn’t. The last thing I could take was her rejection. I kept it to myself and she never knew.

One day, following a particularly severe lashing with dad’s belt, even my arms were bleeding. Angry red welts covered me. I was told to wear a long-sleved shirt. On recess I got overheated. I had to come inside and cool off. The teacher told me to rest my head on my desk, and suggested I roll up my sleeves. I cried. “No!” Because the sleeves had ridden up and bloody, watery welts were showing. I know she saw them. About that time Lee Ann walked in off the playground and saw me. Oh, God, please no! I didn’t want her to see me like this. I put my head back down and ignored her. I’m glad I never told her. Never tried to get close. Her family moved to Alaska. I’d never have been able to get over it. To this day she’s my greatest love.

In 1973 my father made me work for him over the summer. In the warehouse. Another part of growing up too early. I had become too like him. I hated and feared black people, I was turned into a sexual abberation, and I was mean. This attracted the bullies of George Fox Junior High School. My life was officially a fucking mess. By then I didn’t have a friend left in the world. Everything was perverted and disgusting. If not for Star Trek reruns and WCAO AM 60, I wouldn’t have been able to cope. By 1974, I was writing porn, epic stories with developed characters and a loose plot. I masturbated constantly so I wouldn’t “react” when my mother came to my room on Saturday nights. It never worked. Like I said. If you take and suck on or play with a penis, it’s going to react. No matter how disgusted you are. I’m sorry for being so blunt. But people have no idea it’s possible to rape a male without penetration. Women do it more than you think and forced incest happens to more than just girls.

Jesus I was a mess. By then, no one in the community had anything to do with me. In the summer of ’74, a neighbor installed a sun deck for my father and I got a respite from warehouse duty to be his helper. I’d been in so much trouble in school that I was suspended half the time. But working with this kind man who lived at the top of Dutch Ship Road was the best summer of my teen years.

My father came into a shit load of cash. And that summer he installed a deck, double driveway, in-ground pool, and had seed and sod on the newly landscaped yard. Any greener and the shit would have been AstroTurf. The trouble came when he had a white stone retaining wall put in the front yard to keep the grass in place. The community association didn’t like it. They were going to sue to make him remove it. They would have lost on the before and after pictures alone. A shitty place turned into a really nice looking one. What was wrong with that? But he had bad blood with the Association. He’d stopped paying membership dues and withdrawn years earlier. They finally settled for him removing the matching stone pillar on the other side of the driveway. Hell, it was an improvement anyway.

But the neighbor, Larry, I’d been his helper with the deck. I found him to be a friend, perhaps a teacher. Wise beyond his years. A true Christian, a guy who walked the walk with humor, decency and a kindness no one had ever shown me. I idolized him. I wanted to be like that. I decided I was too fucked up to ever be a great man. Something was really wrong with me, and I knew it, but I thought it was me. I didn’t know what PTSD was. Nobody did; the term had not been invented yet. Ashamed of my tangled thoughts, ashamed of my displays of behaviour that I couldn’t control, I no longer aspired to anything that would mark me as anyone history would remember. I couldn’t learn. School was too hard when I couldn’t focus my mind. I decided that all I wanted to be was a decent man like my friend was.

But that never happened. One day my sister and his daughter were swimming in the pool. As soon as I saw his daughter in a blue bikini top, I fell in love with her. I lusted for her and she filled my every thought. How could I be a decent guy with dirty thoughts like these? Because, was it normal? I had read a lot of books. Including large bits of the Bible. And yet I had no idea what “normal” was.

She knew I liked her. That wasn’t good because it left me wide open for a big hurt. Sure enough, that big hurt came one day on the bus ride home. I overheard her talking to Susan, a stuck-up skinny blonde who hated my guts. Her whole family hated my guts. My crush was sitting with her and had mentioned my name. Susan said, “Mike Smith! He’s terrible!”

And my crush never spoke to me again. I never even saw her again because my father pulled me from public school and put me in a private school in Arnold, down past Severna Park. He was tired of me flunking, getting suspended and beat up.

I left the church in Lake Shore. Now unless I saw her in her yard, which I never did, I couldn’t even cross paths. And it dawned on me that her father wanted it that way. It hurt but I loved and respected him.

I no longer had any contact with anyone in the neighborhood. The association hated my whole family. I was rightfully judged mental. It was then that I became an asshole.

I embraced being an asshole. If I could not have friends, then I would fuck with people at will. I keyed cars. Slashed tires. Broke lots of glass. Halloween pranksters had nothing on me; I was getting even.

After getting caught once, I learned stealth and I told no one. It made my anger more satisfying and much more dangerous. No one ever knew when they fucked with me that I’d eaten shit for years, storing anger and hate. They didn’t know when they walked away that they were only able to because I decided not to kill them. I carried knives and waited for the days I’d use them.

I never did. But as much as I could’ve, that knowledge gave me power and satisfaction. Knowing you hold someone’s life in your hands no matter what they think is more than empowering though; eventually it gave me a respect for life so deep that I shook off my father’s teaching and examples of misogyny, racism and elitist isolation. I would vote Republican only once. I became a liberal while somehow remaining an asshole. Near trick, that.

By the time I left that neighborhood, I had no desire to ever go back. I haven’t, either.

I looked up North Shore on the Magothy and it listed an interesting hit. Some dude who lives there calls it a throwback “Mayberry”, the fictional town from the Andy Griffith Show”, and that’s nice. The town Mayberry was based upon is Mt. Airy, North Carolina. Been there. Never going back. Fuck North Carolina. If you’ve been wondering what the point to this post is, it’s this.

Before we had a lawn, there was dirt. I used to play in it with my little plastic soldiers and dinosaurs and a Tonka bulldozer.

No one in that fucking town ever kept their cat inside. I’d be there playing and wondering what the smell was, and much later saw the culprits. Our backyard was a fucking litter box.

Well, I’d like to think that North Shore has become a “Mayberry”. That neighbors really help each other.

I became an asshole. But I really like the idea that it’s a nicer place than it was. I hope people have gotten better.

Me, I never forget the pain and terrors I endured there. And how the neighbors made it all worse, while I sat with a striped back in the sand and frolicked in cat shit.

The House Of Pain

Yes, I have led a life full of misery and pain beyond anything I could have imagined. Even as it all began.

Welcome. Pull up a chair, grab yourself a cup of tea, and I’ll tell you a story. I warn you now that it is disturbing and may trigger you. I advise care, and reading slowly so that if you need to, you can close this post. The last thing I want is to hurt you.

Sometime in or around 1964, I had a bedroom facing east in a brand new house in North Shore On The Magothy, a development in Pasadena, Maryland. I had the room to myself, but I was not alone. I was never alone. Something else was in there with me, something not human. And I could see it. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Kids see things. Monsters, boogeymen. Except this, my friends, was not the Boogeyman, nor was it a big monster that lived in my closet. At the time my young mind knew nothing of what it was or why it was there. It just was. It looked like it was made of a drawing. Gray lines that crossed each other to form a shape. I would liken it to the animated character that represented Dennis the Menace on the live-action TV series: A tornado wearing a traditional fireman’s helmet. But it wasn’t solid, and I never saw it in midair. It was only a few inches tall, and it was always on a wall. It hid a lot, usually in the same corner, but occasionally, it would dart across the room, seeming to stick to the ceiling as it moved. It was fast, challenging my visual acuity, but I still kept sight of it. In daylight, it looked like it had one eye. It was the height of the golden age of chrome-trimmed cars, when bumpers, mirrors, window frames and door frames were all chrome, as were some types of wheels and wheel covers. You know, hubcaps. If I was lying in bed for an afternoon nap, I would see cars going past on the road out front reflect the afternoon sun into my window and on my walls. These reflections changed as the cars moved, traveling along a wall or the ceiling. I had something to compare the shadow with, and I knew no car was causing it.

Besides, I could feel it. It was full of malice, full of evil. I could feel the hate it had, and I knew it was something living. It grew stronger with time, and my fear more than likely fed it. I’d see it, and scream for my mommy. Unfortunately, my father was always there; his office was downstairs. And he hated screaming. If he was working, that was bad enough, but he also had migraine headaches that were relentless. He called them what everyone did back then, “sick headaches.” That’s because migraines often make the sufferer vomit. He had a hair trigger temper, with or without the headache. And did I mention that he hated screaming? Because, even at age four, upsetting him meant the belt. A thin leather men’s belt made long before the 1970s and the stupid extra-wide belts worn by hippies and jetsetters alike. This belt made for an excellent whip. I had two sisters at that time. And two older half brothers. They didn’t live with us. If the three of us did something he didn’t like, he’d line us all up, get behind us and the whipping would start. It would leave blistered stripes on our backs, and these would weep with clear sweat or water, I’m not sure which. He would swing until he was literally physically spent. Our screams of pain and loud sobbing would be met with more lashes until we were reduced to sighs that kids make when trying hard not to cry.

It gets worse. That thing in my room wouldn’t go away. When I saw it, I cried for mommy, not my father. By the age of four, I was already afraid of him, and since my memory doesn’t go back much further, I can give a pretty good guess as to why. Sometimes he would try to sit me on his lap, but I would cry until he let me go. Then later, I would be yelled at for never wanting anything to do with him. Then one day he brought home a Popeye nightlight. I no longer had to sleep in the dark. You’d think that would help. But now, instead of sensing that thing on the wall in the dark and being very often frozen in terror and unable to call mommy, I could also see it. I didn’t care if I got a whipping. Several times I was able to scream, and finally the light was left on in my room. That of course did not help. One night I saw it on the wall above my closet. I called out, and both mommy and my dad came running in. By this time it had happened so often that I could tell they were taking me seriously. I believe they could sense something; this night they were visibly upset, but not at me. Lying in bed, I pointed right at the thing. “Don’t you see it?”

Mommy said something like, “What is that?“

And it jumped on her. She gave a scream, not too loud, but it was full of terror. She could feel it. She ran out of the room, trying to shake something off as if a squirrel had jumped on her.

That was the night she stopped being my mommy. She was never the same. That summer, I had my fourth birthday. Our next door neighbor baked my birthday cake. I got a pop gun and an army helmet. The gun fired a cork tied to a string, so you could put the cork back in, cock the rifle and shoot again. Outside, on a sunny July day, with no one to play with, I played soldier by myself. And just outside my father’s downstairs office, I spotted something I had never seen. Wondrous creatures, like tiny birds. They hovered around something stuck to the brick wall. Never imagining what would happen, I shot at the thing on the wall. Yellowjackets immediately set upon me, and they hurt. Stinging and burning, I screamed, cried, and ran to the kitchen door for my mommy. But before I could get treatment for my stings, I got the belt for screaming.

Everything changed. She used to defend me from my father. She used to put salve on my stripes. She used to hug me. One day she brought home an orange drink in a half pint carton, opened it and put a straw in it, and told me to go outside and drink it so my sisters wouldn’t see and get jealous. Times were hard, and she could only afford the one. I never forgot that day. I felt so special. I felt loved. Mommy was so kind, gentle, always humorous, always ready to give me a bit of attention because I was sandwiched between two sisters. I was lonely. She would draw me pictures of Batman. If I was sick, she took me to the doctor and then to Bob’s Village Drugs for my medicine. If I could handle it, she would let me have a fountain Coke at the soda fountain counter. Served in an old-fashioned Coca-Cola glass with crushed ice and a paper straw. Once in a while a small toy would find its way home with me. Well, maybe it was small, but it was priceless to me.

A year earlier, when we had almost no furniture, and no carpet yet, she would sit in a dim light with us in the living room and we would play games. But after the night that thing jumped on her, she wasn’t my mommy anymore. Never again. Anything good in her died there and then.

But the horror was only beginning. In 1966, my older sister was given a Ouija board for Christmas. She got weird shit, too. I liked my Captain Action and G.I.Joe dolls, but I always asked for things that went with them but were sold separately, like the Captain America outfit for Captain Action, and the Jeep and the Sea Sled for Joe. You know who got them? My older sister. It was like my father was torturing me even without the belt. Even so, most of my memory during this time is full of gaps. One thing, though. A year, maybe even two, after my older sister got the Ouija Board, she had two friends over. It was after school, in the fall, when it got dark early. They turned out the light. They came out screaming. My father had the worst time getting rid of that bloody thing. The two girls, I never saw them again even though one lived right down the street. She was older, so I didn’t ride the same school bus and I just never saw either one of them after that. My sister would not, even decades later, tell me what happened. She told our parents. He threw it in the trash.

Next day it was back on her closet shelf and as she was getting ready for school, she saw it and screamed. Now my tough big sister, who often bullied or pranked me into shit that wasn’t funny, to hear her scream, that was extraordinary. I ran into her room, a forbidden zone for me, and I saw the thing sitting there along with older games like Candyland, Hi-Ho Cherry-O and Green Ghost, and a stack of others. Our father broke the board in half. I swear he was hysterical with terror. He stomped the glass and plastic planchette and smashed it.

After the next trash pickup, it was back. Same place, in one piece, even the box. He wound up burning them in a nice hot wood fire in the fireplace. I cannot recall whether blue or green, but the board, box and plastic melted and burned with a color I asked my father about. He had no real answer.

That was when everything in that house changed for the worse, when real evil was done. Again, you and I are here having tea together, but I warn you, this gets very dark from here onward.

There’s a belief about Ouija boards that goes like this: If you have made contact with a hostile entity with it, you must close the session by moving the planchette to “Goodbye”, and you cannot burn the board if the entity has entered your home. Some say it may still be attached to the board, and burning it releases the entity into your home, where it essentially has free run. Well, that’s exactly what happened.

Mom and dad began to take me out of my bedroom at night and into the den, in order to teach me about sex. They did some things together, but most of it was her having sex with me. I was seven-years-old.

At one point, they did something that would ultimately prove their undoing: They had me and one younger sister together doing things with them, and a few times, each other. They showed us 8mm porn reels, and moved me out of my old room into the old office downstairs, because dad had a warehouse and trucking terminal in Glen Burnie, a town between Pasadena and Baltimore. Usually, though, my night was Saturday. At the time, I had no idea that all of the kids were going through this except the older sister, who for some reason was left out. Probably because she was cold-blooded mean and had threatened to run away or call the police. But whatever, I didn’t know. As kids were added to our family, eventually four girls and two boys plus two half brothers, that house saw more child abuse than I can picture even to this day.

Years went by. Dysfunctional and afflicted, I would make friends, then lose them. I had horrible nightmares, trouble sleeping, and even though I never saw that shadow thing again, I guessed it was still in that room upstairs, or in my mother. It was the beginning of my experiences with demons, dark spirits described and fought by Jesus of Nazareth.

Every Saturday night, just hours away from Sunday School, my mother would come into my room late, after everyone else was asleep, and fondle me. I tried to pretend I was asleep. Sometimes I tried to fake being sick. She would put a hand to my forehead, say “You don’t have a temperature,” and if I still resisted, my father would come in and say, “Get your ass out here, boy.” And threaten me with the belt. How sick could you get? Threatening to beat your son for not wanting to have sex with his mother?

Oh, I know what some of you are thinking. That every adolescent dreams of having sex with his mother. Well, there are three things I’ve studied in my life. One is the paranormal. One is PTSD. The other is incest. All three still baffle me, but there are some things I’ve learned. First of all, having a sexual fantasy, no matter what it is, should never be allowed to come true. Reality is not the same. People get hurt, scarred, and victims commit suicide or crimes in the aftermath. Second, not many boys really do fantasize about having sex with their mothers; it may occur for a short time, but it’s fleeting. I always had this sick feeling in my gut that it was wrong, all wrong, and that there was a good reason for me to be sick about it, to resist the way I did. Another thing I’ve learned is that first-person porn stories, like the old “Penthouse Forum” letters, are very often about incest, but they’re bullshit. Today these types of porn live on with the internet, but much of the time, it’s written by men who have little sexual experience and less knowledge of anatomy and physiology. Many stories written as if by a woman talk about being penetrated in their cervix. Sick, but laughable; it’s almost impossible. Women who need cervical exams often have to be given pain medication, it has to be dilated by drugs, and any procedure may involve general anesthesia. Because it fucking hurts. But I digress.

Incest happens more often than I can stand to think. It usually involves rape, although sometimes even a fourth degree sex offense is so traumatic that the victim’s development arrests at the moment it is initiated. Whatever their age, their psychological, emotional maturity will stop and proceed abnormally from there. There is no cure for post traumatic stress disorder. Only time and treatment can help the most severe cases, and personally, I count every case as severe. Until the age of sixteen, I went through this. My social behavior got worse and worse. I wound up with literally no friends but tons of enemies. Any relationship I did have was dysfunctional from the beginning. My teen romances ended badly, with a girlfriend’s parents totally freaked out and pissed. By the time my father was involving himself in threesomes with my mother, I was finally able to defy him and demand it all stop. Sensing something in me he didn’t want to test, he agreed. But the damage was done.

In a community called North Shore On The Magothy, in a house no longer resembling the one I lived in, there was once a bunch of children tormented, tortured and raped. It has a new owner now; has for years. I’ve seen it on Google Street, and I don’t recognize it. But I will always know it as the House Of Pain.