FIFTEEN MINUTE BREAK May 29, 2003

Continuing with 'the tales of my evil stepfather'. On second thought make that 'Evil Incarnate Stepfather Tales'.

When I last left off, My mother had remarried a bartender of whom she met while waitressing in a restaurant in Morris Plains, New Jersey and from there I was taken from a 'life of luxury' in the quiet suburbs of East Hanover to be whisked away to a developing suburb of Parsippany to grow up in a low rent apartment building.

This was not to my liking. Not in the slightest bit.

I went from having my own spacious bedroom to setting up camp on a dining room hardfloor.

In a relatively short time, I came to the conclusion that my mother had married a monster named the "ROGER" and I really had trouble adjusting to the fact that I had to answer and obey the commands of a guy who wasn't really my flesh and blood. Well, maybe at the time at 3 and a half, I didn't know the technicality, but it was a deep rooted feeling that this was a transition I immediately wanted out of. It was disturbing and what I mean by disturbing even though it was relatively easy going at the time when I was a single child, but as soon as my sister arrived (and we still lived in that drab one bedroom apartment when she entered the world) the relationship between me and the ROGER immediately began to sour.

Even though the guy went out of his way to prepare good nutritious meals and bought me the occasional toy or two- (he was even at my birthday parties and Christmases when I lived in East Hanover)- there was just a dark sinister drawback to it all. For one thing, he didn't like to see me looking at comic books and I had a tremendous love for them back when the Batman tv show craze was in full swing. That was the only thing needed for me to be kept in line was when my aunts used to watch over me. They would usually buy me those cheap plastic bagged 3 in 1 packages that were usually stuffed with the latest Batman, Superman, or Flash at the Two Guys department store. And during the time when I made the move to the new neighborhood, I accumulated quite a pile of these, even my stepfather thought it was a good idea to effect as he made sure I always had the latest Tales of Suspense or Tales to Astonish on hand because I also became a big Captain America fan by watching the cartoons on tv, but this psychology also had a reversal side to it. He would reward me with new comic books if I was good at nursery school or kindergarden- but if I had made a mess in my pants or generally pissed him off with a temper tandrum or anything that set him off when I was in the picture- he would take each book and rip it right in half right in front of me. AND. BOY. DID. THAT. PISS. ME. OFF All those Silver Age greats instantly vaporized before your eyes. This infuriated me beyond mere stability for a four or five year old, and I think not long after several of those incidents, I went so berserk I got myself kicked out of nursery school for taking a block of wood and slamming it across a kid's head. I couldn't take it anymore, I had to take it out on someone- ( and as a gentle reminder- I think it was payback time for all the times I got my face stomped on by the East Hanover Eradicators just for having all the coolest toys at the time- even though these nursery school kids weren't the original perpetrators ). Things could've cooled between the school and me, if the father of the boy whose face I smacked didn't threaten my stepfather and mother with a lawsuit and wasn't a major surgeon doing residency at the hospital of where my sister was born. So naturally I got expelled and had to wait until Kindergarten to go back to school, and from there I think both my mother and stepfather took turns in taking out the garbage with a pitstop along the way with some certain four colored periodicals to the recycling center.

There also had been some incidents concerning 'roughhousing' that I was not particularly keen on. If you think Micheal Jackson dangling a baby from a villa balcony in Germany was terrifying then- try to imagine be ing hoisted over a bridge by your feet when you're three years old ( in fact another memory pops in of him doing the exact same thing to me over a bannister at my grandfather's house- before he married my mom). I remember one evening it was us and some of his friends having gone out to dinner in Boonton, NJ and I was doing nothing but looking over some Topps' RAT PATROL trading cards and I think somewhere along the line that I was told not to chew the gum and I put the gum in my mouth anyway- and the ROGER, right in front of everyone takes me by the legs and dangles me over a small bridge over a roaring waterfall that we were walking over, all while screaming at the top of lungs until the gum fell out of my mouth. Well, the gum certainly fell out, but in addition, I also dropped the RAT PATROL cards right into the Jersey City Reservoir.

Well tomorrow, I'll divulge into my grade school years as the violence begins to further manifest.

I'm all out of fifteen minutes.

~

Coat