I wasn’t into anything but trying to fit the hell in somewhere. My friends were still in school like me, they were into the same things that I was. They all knew my mother was the town drunk and by now, she was doing a lot of sleeping around. She obviously did that previously, or I would be a Shelly .
drunkeneese
We all stuck together, we were a part of a bigger crew of older teens who called themselves H n O. That stood for Howard and Ontario streets. The intersection in Kensington, where it all started. My drinking career took off at that spot. I remember it like it was yesterday. It’s a wonder that I can remember anything, but I remember that day. It was steaming hot and humid, the crew was there my crew and the old heads. It was completely normal for 30 people to be hanging there , on the Cramp Elementary School wall at any given day in the summer , winter too , but after school let out . My crew consisted of my friends, rarely did my brother Patrick hang with us, and Barbara hung with a different crowd too. They were more into drugs then. I wasn’t into anything but trying to fit the hell in somewhere. My friends were still in school like me, they were into the same things that I was.
DRUNKENEESE
I was smart enough to get out of that. I got a job at a factory that made disco lights. It paid 6 bucks an hour, and my best friend’s mother was my supervisor. God rest her soul. She put up with a lot of shit , from me and my friends , but she knew my mother , shit everybody knew my mother , and she treated me as her own . It seemed that we were all pretty much poor, my friends were in the same boat, except for the drunken disappearing mother part.
DRUNKENEESE
I was Shelly by name only. Everything eventually came out in the wash. Another one of mom’s drunken fits brought it out into the open. Eddie and Coleen now knew. I confronted Charlie about it one day, when Eddie and I went downtown to swim in his penthouse pool. It was no big deal to him. To me it meant the world, I thought I was now rich ,I wasnt, it meant nothing . At 13 I had to work, so I got a job on top of my other job. I became a paperboy, and I worked sometimes for the World Wrestling Federation as a ring boy, until I found out that the ring announcer friend of mine molested another friend of mine.
OUTTA THE BOX
DRUNKENEESE
My mother took in Eddie and Colleen, and abused them, just like she did her own kids. Charlie’s driver, would drop off cash to my mother to take care of Eddie and Colleen. But, I’m sure that she drank it up. It was as we say every man for himself, in that house. No job, no food. We had to work, we were kids, but we had to work. We also had to pay board, no moolah, no bed. Eddie and I hit it off pretty well. I didn’t say anything to either Eddie or Colleen about what mom told me earlier. I was one of them, and not a Shelly.
THUG ?
DRUNKENEESE
I thought damn I’m rich, not really. I knew Charlie’s kids; he had 2 sets from 2 different marriages. The only set I knew were his spoiled bratty kids, Eddie and Colleen. They went to school in Europe, were sent to my mothers for a year , because Charlie wanted to show these spoiled kids what it was really like to grow up on the streets with nothing . And yes we were on welfare; I thought that we were lifers on it and that the family photo would someday appear on the 10 dollar food stamp.
IM ACTUALLY SMILING
DRUNKENEESE
Then one day it happened, shot out of my mothers drunkenese mouth “you’re Charlie’s kid! “ I was like who the fuck is Charlie and how am I his kid? I knew that I was different but damn, that hit like an arrow. The only Charlie I knew was a friend of my mothers who seemed to have more money than God. He drove a Rolls Royce; he lived in a high rise penthouse, in Center City, Philadelphia. That Charlie? Yes! That Charlie. It made sense. I knew Charlie, and I knew his kids. Come to think of it, I looked more like them, than I looked like Patrick and Barbara.
ME
Drunkeneese
Did I mention that mom loved to throw her hands at us? In drunken fits of anger and anything would have set her off, we paid the consequences. I am the middle child. I was always treated differently, and I acted differently than my siblings. I don’t want to brag, but I was smarter than my brother and sister; I knew things that they simply could not comprehend. They hated school, and cut all the time. I liked to go to school. I didn’t look like them. I was even treated differently from the grandparents, both sets. I was treated like shit.
angry ? ..... nah!
DRUNKENEESE
It was in 1980 when the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series that my mother started to drink. She is still celebrating that last series win today. Mom, was never home, she was either at one of the neighborhood bars or out with a drunken date. She would go on benders and sometimes we wouldn’t see her for a few days. We were poor, really poor. Oh, I’m sorry, the we, that would be my younger brother and older sister. We were the three musketeers, we raised each other. I had to help them both with their homework, chores, cooking, cleaning, because if I didn’t, it meant ass whooping.
DRUNKENEESE ….
un drunk
I am going to briefly give you a short history of my life. I started to drink at the age of 13, by the age of 16; I was a full blown alcoholic. My mother, who tried to raise three decent kids, was then, and is still to this day an alcoholic. I was raised, if that’s what you would call it, in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. This area was known for its share of drunks, mostly blue collar, Irish, and other misfits. Google Gary Heidnik. My mother tried to raise us I suppose to best of her ability, we all fall short sometimes.
