The Family Tree
It All Tracks Back
Family dysfunction gets passed down from generation to generation. When I was growing up, I felt the conflict of thinking the insanity that was going on in our home was normal and at the same time understanding there was something very wrong happening under our roof. I mistakenly believed that ours was the only family that was a mess. Now I know that so many other families suffer from dysfunction and unspoken secrets that are kept hidden from the light of day, tragically transmitted to innocent and trusting children by well-meaning and loving but damaged parents. Some families seem destined to repeat their dysfunction with each generation, as was the case with my mother.
Frank and Mary Stephens, who both died before I was born, had three children; two boys and a girl. Frank, Jr., was the oldest, and my mother, Helen, came along 13 months later. The youngest, my Uncle Dennis, was born 12 years after my mother. I never met my Uncle Frank; my mother and Uncle Dennis fought with him at Mary’s funeral. They fought about money. According to my mother, Frank refused to contribute to the cost of the funeral, so she and Uncle Dennis had to pay for it all. As I listened to my mother repeat her grievance over and over through the years, it made less and less sense. It always felt like something was missing, as if there had been some unresolved and possibly unspoken conflict that ate away at the family and exploded into the open when Mary died. Suddenly everyone permitted themselves to hold nothing back, and neither my mother nor Uncle Dennis ever spoke to Uncle Frank again. Uncle Frank was the odd one out.
Because Mary was an alcoholic and a self-absorbed, neglectful mother, much of the responsibility of taking care of baby Dennis fell to my mother. And although the truth didn’t come out for many years later, Uncle Dennis was gay.
But for a few minor details, my mother created the same family as Mary did. Just like Mary, she had 3 children, two boys and a girl. Janet, my sister, was the oldest, and my brother Bob came along 13 months after Janet. And then came me, 12 years after Bob. The last time I spoke with either of them was at our mother’s funeral. And just like my mother and her brothers, my siblings and I fought over our mother’s money. The details weren’t quite the same, but the result was. My mother and Uncle Dennis against their brother Frank, and my sister and brother against me. This time, I was the odd one out.
My mother wasn’t an alcoholic like her mother was, but she did enjoy her highballs with her Rat Pack-like friends and was somewhat of a party girl herself. One of her favorite things to say after she had a few cocktails in her was “All of my kids were born with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other!” Like Mary, she was a self-absorbed and neglectful mother who delegated many of her mothering responsibilities to my sister. And just like Uncle Dennis, I, too, was gay, but the truth didn’t come out until many years later. Although Janet never admitted it, she was angry that she had to step into the role of my surrogate mother. Because she was unable to appropriately address this injustice with my mother, Janet directed that anger toward me. It started with the pinching in church and got worse from there. I wonder if my mother had the same resentment toward Mary and if she mistakenly targeted Uncle Dennis with her anger.
Uncle Dennis was the only extended family I knew. I didn’t know my grandparents, and my father was an only child. I had heard that Uncle Frank was married with children, so there were some unknown cousins somewhere in Florida. And because of the age difference between me and my siblings, I never felt as if we were peers or of the same generation. We had completely different experiences growing up even though we had the same parents. And once my brother went into the Air Force in 1966, and my sister got married and moved to Michigan in 1967, it was just me. And my mother and Stan. That was the odd and artificial family that arrived at my Uncle’s apartment in California on that rainy night in June, 1968.
Uncle Dennis was single and dashing and had magnificent interior decorating skills. He was a superb cook and knew how to set an elegant dinner table. He was quite handsome, and as I’ve told you before, he looked just like Napoleon Solo from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. He had a glamorous-sounding job with United Airlines and a series of beautiful stewardess girlfriends. He almost married one of them, but didn’t quite make it to the altar. And when he broke off his engagement, he never told my mother. Just like my mother never told Uncle Dennis that Stan was coming with us to California. Uncle Dennis was not expecting to meet Stan when we arrived on his doorstep, and we were expecting to meet his new bride. Instead, Stan was introduced to Uncle Dennis as my mother’s new husband, and Don was introduced to us as Uncle Dennis’ new “roommate.” The pretty stewardess was out of the picture, never to be spoken of again. Family affairs. Family secrets. Don’t ask, don’t explain, don’t feel. Just go along.
Even though Uncle Dennis and Don lived in a fabulously decorated, modern apartment that looked a little bit like the glamorous hotel suite in the Hollywood episodes of I Love Lucy, my Uncle tore it all down after a few short months. One afternoon, Uncle Dennis came over unannounced. His eyes were bugged out and he was manically jumpy. It was as if he was about to fly right out of his skin. He was frantic. He sat down on the couch, but couldn’t sit still. He lit a cigarette, jumped up, and paced around the room. He sat down in the armchair and then jumped up again, only to plop back down on the couch.
“What the hell is the matter?” my mother asked.
“I have to go. I have to go. I can’t stay here anymore,” he said.
“Go? Go where?” my mother demanded.
“I can’t stay here anymore,” he said, as his voice got higher and he began to speak faster. “And you have to help me. We have to go back to the apartment and get my things before Don comes home from work.”
Then he jumped off the couch again and went into my bedroom saying “Stevie, I need your typewriter.” I loved my typewriter. It was an old-fashioned black manual that I had back in New Jersey and helped me keep the madness of home at bay. Instead of playing ball outside with the neighborhood boys, I stayed inside typing up made-up stories about happy children who didn’t have self-absorbed parents. I never showed my stories to anyone, but Stan would always scowl at me “your wasting paper, fat boy. You should be outside playing with the boys instead of acting like a little sissy in the house.”
Uncle Dennis sat at my little desk and started typing. The sounds of the clacking keys were urgent, and after a quick minute he came rushing back into the living room, saying frantically “After we get my things, we have to drive to the airport so I can quit my job.” As he waved the single sheet of paper in front of my mother’s face, he continued, “I’m quitting United and getting the hell out of here. Now!”
And just like that, without warning, Uncle Dennis upended his life without discussing his plans with anyone. I never knew what happened between him and Don or what caused him to quit his job without notice, but by the end of the day, Uncle Dennis had packed what he wanted into his car, left the rest behind, and was on his way to live in a trailer in a place called Bethel Island, in the Sacramento delta.
The afternoon Uncle Dennis fled from his life in a panic was just the beginning of some very bizarre behavior of his over the next several years. At first, my mother didn’t have much to say about the odd way my uncle ran away. After all, oddness was just accepted as a done deal in our family. One day living in a beautiful California appartment with a “roommate” and a good steady job and the next day living in a trailer in the Delta and unemployment seemed perfectly normal. No need to talk about it or to figure out what’s going on. After all, if you dig too deep, you may get an answer that you can’t handle, so it’s best to just pretend that everything’s all right. But it wasn’t all right. Uncle Dennis was a possessed man that day, and a blind person would have been able to see it. I now wonder if maybe he was bi-polar, which of course, we didn’t know about in 1968. And it also occurred to me that maybe he was high on speed. I didn’t know exactly what speed was, but I had heard about it, and Uncle Dennis’ bulging eyes and jitteryness certainly seemed to point to the possibility.
My suspicions were confirmed later the next summer when my mother let me spend two weeks with Uncle Dennis in his trailer on the Delta. It had been a year of non-stop and nasty fighting between my mother and Stan. My brother Bob had been discharged from the Air Force and was now living with us, and I continued to adjust miserably to our new life in California. Bob did what he always did when things got too hot at home: he went out and partied. That was not an option for me. I was stuck in the middle of it, night after night.
At first, I was excited that Bob would be living with us when he got our of the Air Force. We would be sharing my bedroom, and I thought having Bob around would offer a reasonable amount of protection from Stan. But the Bob who came back from Thailand was not the same Bob who went there. While he didn’t see active combat in Vietnam, he still came back changed. He was meaner than he was before. I wasn’t old enough to understand it then, but now I know he came back from serving his country addicted to drugs and alcohol. And it wasn’t long before he started picking on me the same way Stan did, and a lot of time teaming up with him.
Overnight, it seemed, I developed a horrendous case of acne. Overweight, unathletic and a face full of pimples was not a winning combination, and Bob, a 23 year-old man was relentlessly cruel to me, an 11 year-old boy. The day I came home with my 7th grade school picture, Bob took a pencil to it and said “let’s make the picture really look like you.” And then he drew pimples all over my face, causing me to shriek with anger and break down into hysterical tears, which only seemed to encourage him more. And while Stan called my “fat boy,” Bob upgraded the taunt to “fat brat.” Everyone, even my mother, thought this was funny. The Saturday morning after Bob drew pimples all over my school picture, I sat at our kitchen table crying to my mother about Bob’s cruelty. My mother said “I talked to Bob and he shouldn’t have done that. But he feels that you have those pimples because you don’t wash your face enough. And you’re fat because you eat too much. If you took better care of yourself, you wouldn’t have pimples and you wouldn’t be fat.” So that was the answer. As an 11 year-old, I should go on a diet. And never mind about seeking out help from a dermatoloist. Just wash your face more often.
School was even worse, as I was bullied mercilessly from day one and I couldn’t understand why. I knew that I was different from the other boys. I knew I preferred doing things that girls did and I couldn’t throw or catch a ball. I couldn’t run as fast as the other boys, and I couldn’t climb the rope either. I just hung there at the bottom of the rope, mortified as everyone tormented me by laughing at and making fun of me. I had to give my lunch to the biggest bully every day as he stuck straight pins into my arms. The bullying was made worse by the fact that one of my teachers, Mr. Seivert, had lost complete control of the class so those two hours with him were literally like being in a never ending prison riot. Mr. Seivert was being bullied even worse than I was, and he couldn’t seem to do anything about it either. It’s amazing to me that the school let it go on for months.
One day it got so bad that I ran out of the class in tears and said I was going to report the situation to the Principal, but I didn’t. I just stood in the hallway crying, too ashamed to walk to the Principal’s office and tell him what was happening. And I never told my mother, either. It was too shameful. Being hated, tormented and abused. Both at home and at school. I felt there was no one who was on my side or could help me. I knew I shouldn’t allow anyone to treat me like that, but I didn’t seem to have any power to stop it. It seemed preferable to be beaten up instead of standing up for myself. And if I did tell anybody what was going on, I didn’t think I would be believed. Or I would be told it was my own fault. And in a way, I believed that it was.
So when I was told I could spend two weeks with Uncle Dennis at his trailer on Bethel Island, I had my suitcase packed in an instant. I couldn’t wait to get away and take refuge with him. But that’s when I began to see how odd Uncle Dennis’ behavior really was. He hadn’t worked in the 6 months since he left United; somehow he was able to get put on disability and collect benefits from the VA. I didn’t know it at the time, but know now, that he did a stint in rehab at the VA Hospital shortly after moving to the Delta. It didn’t seem as if his stay at rehab worked. There was still something wrong with Uncle Dennis when I got there. Instead of being manic like he was before, he was now slow moving and listless, and he slept a lot. And on Saturday night, we drove to the VA Hospital, with an ice chest full of ice and two bottles of scotch, and a sleeve of paper cups. Three of Uncle Dennis’ friends were there, and they came out to the car to visit with us. The four of them drank scotch and got drunk in the hour that the inmates were allowed to visit. His friends were downright creepy and I knew there was something terribly wrong with them and with Uncle Dennis. I felt as if I were in danger the whole time and was relieved when they went back inside. I only had to hope that Uncle Dennis wouldn’t drive us off the road in his drunkenness. It was hard to believe, but I was glad to get back to the insanity of the Belmont duplex after that, and I said nothing to my mother about the incident.
I didn’t see then that there was a connection between my shame and silence and growing up in the dysfunction that I did. I didn’t understand that my mother and Uncle Dennis had inherited that same shame from Frank and Mary Stephens and passed it on to me and my brother and sister too. All I could see that life was intolerable, everyone around me was messed up, and nobody was talking about it.
As usual, I took refuge in television. My favorite Friday night sitcom was Nanny and the Professor, starring Juliet Mills who played a loving Mary Poppins-like English nanny with ESP. Nanny’s powers weren’t nearly as magical as Samantha’s on Bewitched, nor was she as funny. But Nanny was mystical and charming in her own way, and I liked the theme song. Sandwiched in between The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, it made my Friday night TV lineup complete.
Uncle Dennis came to visit us over Thanksgiving weekend. His appearance was shocking. He had lost an unbelievable amount of weight, and his face was gray and ashen. No longer slow and despondent like he was in the summer, his agitation of the year before was back in full force. I was assigned the seat next to his at Thanksgiving dinner, where he put himself in charge of making sure I ate my turnips and brussel sprouts, both of which I hated. On Friday, instead of Thanksgiving leftovers, Uncle Dennis took us out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant. The kind of place where the chef slices the beef and vegetables with a gigantic sharp knife and grills them right in front of you. It was my first time at a place like that, and I was over the moon at being there. But at the same time, I felt guilty about how expensive it was because I knew my uncle didn’t have the kind of money to throw around at a restaurant like that. And there was tension in the air. I could feel it in the tone of my mother’s and uncle’s voices and the looks on their faces. Something was about to blow up.
I mentioned that I hoped we could get home by 8:00 so we could watch Nanny and the Professor. Uncle Dennis said “Don’t worry. It doesn’t start until 8:30. We have plenty of time.”
“No, Uncle Dennis,” I said. “Nanny and the Professor starts at 8:00.” I knew my TV listings better than a network executive.
“It starts 8:30,” Uncle Dennis said in a tone that said do not argue with me. At that point, my mother jumped in and said “The godamned show starts at 8:00, like the kid said. So let’s hit the road so we can get home on time.” I didn’t know if I was more surprised that my mother spoke up to defend me in an argument or frightened of the blow up that I knew was coming.
We didn’t get home until ten after eight, so there was no Nanny and the Professor that night. Instead it was The My Mother and Uncle Friday Night Fight of the Week Show, live and in living color, right in our living room. They fought with each other just as dirty as my mother fought with Stan. Cruel name calling that must have been a result of years of bottled up rage at each other, and at their own dysfunctional family dynamic that finally exploded into the open. Cruel, but not particularly witty, the fight concluded with my Uncle threatening to walk at the door if my mother didn’t apologize to him, to which my mother replied “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!” And so Uncle Dennis left, the door did not hit him in the ass, and we didn’t see him again for another 35 years.
I think my mother resented my uncle because she had to be a surrogate mother to him, but she really must have resented her own mother for putting her in that situation. I think my mother had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility which caused her to be controlling and domineering, especially with him. And I think Uncle Dennis loved my mother dearly, but resented her controlling and domineering ways. And they never ever talked about it. They would tease each other, be sarcastic with other, but essentially kept everything swept under the rug until the pile of dirt was too high to walk over. And then the explosion came.
And I think the same dynamic played out between my sister and me. I think my sister was angry that my mother delegated her responsibility for my care to her, and she had that same overdeveloped sense of responsibility that made her controlling and domineering. And I resented her misplaced anger toward me when in fact it was meant for my mother, and my sister and I never had the skill or the courage to address it. So we had our own little explosion, just like my mother and Uncle Dennis did.
It gets passed on, and it all tracks back.
Wow!