Living in a hovel has its privileges. The poor don't call the bug exterminators, so our home was always filled with Florida roaches. I viewed these large palmetto bugs—three to four inches long and capable of self-powered flight—as simply an irritant. If they walked across your mouth while you were sleeping, it might wake you, or it might not. The trick was learning to sleep with your mouth closed.
We also had what we called swamp rats. They weighed in at an average two pounds plus, and traveled in and out of the street gutters facing the house. They looked a lot like small, narrow-hipped groundhogs. As a kid who was usually hungry, I always thought they'd probably make a great meal. While somewhat ugly, these were simply troublesome pests, something you just dealt with. We kept a broomstick in a corner by the front door. I didn't know it at the time, but that was why most people living in the projects didn't have cats for pets: The hunter could become the hunted. If they had dogs, they were big and nasty, capable of defending themselves. Of course my mother always viewed these rodents as a direct threat to her young. I didn't know about rabies at the time, or any of the other diseases they carried.
There were other problems. At five years of age, I couldn't equate the cast on her arm to her unsuccessful defense of a week's food money from a drug-addicted street bum. How could I fathom that she lived in terror for herself, and must have worried about us? This was far beyond my ken at such an early age.
So, when I disappeared from the front porch for twenty minutes, struck up a conversation with a stranger, or chased my ball into the street, there was no way I could comprehend the rage it would seemingly generate within her. There was no way I could see that it was really love buried within fear that drove her to punishment.
Sometimes her fears, further aggravated by my lack of comprehension for why she might be demanding a certain behavior from me, would only fuel the fires within her. Early on, this resulted in severe spankings across the buttocks with either her hand or a long-handled hairbrush. Later, when I was larger, harder to handle, and seemingly more callused or unaffected by her early choice of tools, she upgraded to a belt, and quickly from there to an open-handed strike across the face. It must have hurt her more than it did me, as she quickly switched to a backhand. I remember as a teen being struck so hard and so many times that I had ringing in my ears and my nose or my lips would bleed. It's odd that I can't seem to remember the offense that resulted in such abuse.
In any event, I learned that the best way to deal with it was to stand there and stoically take it. I mistakenly thought that by not crying or reacting in an overt way, I was demonstrating my ability to "take it like a man." In fact, my lack of reaction only generated a greater sense of fear, which increased her internal conflict, resulting in more frequent and more violent strikes. Our relationship quickly went from one of love to one of a contest as to who could dominate the other through sheer force of will. She may have had the muscle and the size, but I quickly developed an ability to read her.
Herein is where I discovered the birth of my natural ability as a psychic. I believe, as steel is forged in fire, my ability to read humans was forged in pain as a child.ii Over the years, I began to display an almost uncanny ability to read my mother's actions long before even she knew what she was going to do. In hindsight, I'd have to say it was the natural evolution of a survival skill.
Some may feel that I am betraying my mother by writing this. But what I am reporting has nothing to do with how much I loved or didn't love my mother. It has everything to do with understanding what drove her, and hence what might have driven me. It is terribly difficult to understand where someone's psychic behavior might have bubbled from, so I offer this history as a possible origin.
My sister Margaret and I were twins in every sense of the word. She seemed to always know what was on my mind as I did hers. She, of course, being female, was always just a bit more mature than I was at just about any age. But she wasn't having the degree of detail in recall I was having. So, we talked about it. Sometimes, on what we considered "bad nights," we would talk into the wee hours of the morning. It was the way we kept our sanity.
Sanity was a premium around our house at times, a direct result of parents that were at best emotionally—and at worse, physically—abusive. They were alcoholics. I am saying this without any rancor whatsoever. It is purely a reflective statement based on fact. It was of course a whole lot more complicated at the time we were experiencing it. My perceptions were certainly quite different as a child. On a really bad night, alcohol reigned, and reason didn't.
I recall many nights as an early teen, lying in bed and praying for something to happen, for some stranger to come along and adopt me and my sister, and take us away to live somewhere else. Anywhere would have been nice, anywhere but there. To my child's mind, even a stranger would have been preferable to my parents.
I've long since grown out of that desire, and in retrospect I can see how pressures suffered at the early age of thirteen or fourteen can be dramatically different from those we endure in later adulthood. We are better armed to deal with them at a later age. But, back then it seemed more than just a reasonable request. If parents truly understood the stress they bring into their children's lives, they wouldn't be so "flip" in some of their responses. If they knew how it could drive their kids to even accepting a stranger in preference to them, well . . . best to not go there.
On really bad nights, my sister Margaret always took it much worse than I did. Being a male provided some degree of protection that females don't automatically get in the American culture. In America, it is assumed that males are tougher by nature—males usually don't reflect the intense and internalized damage that is done when struck violently across the face with the back of an adult's hand. Nor do we react the same to a belt across the backs of the legs as a small female would.
I am talking about my mother, not my father. I'm not sure if it was the alcohol or the differences in their relationship, but the child-to-parent connections within our household differed significantly from what one might normally expect.
My father was always a gentleman, given only to very short fits of incoherent rage when numbingly drunk. His own father had left him when he was in seventh grade—sometime around 1925. Since he was the oldest, he felt responsible for his mother, brothers, and sister, and quit school to become the man of the house, the primary wage earner. His situation was somewhat complicated as a child, because he had polio and wore braces on his legs. I was never convinced that he actually quit school because the family required support. It might have been because he was tired of being called a cripple or "The Crip." In any event, that's what he told me once while he was warmly enveloped in a refined cloud of bourbon vapor.
He did numerous jobs, but the one he truly liked the best was being a caddy at the Palm Beach and Miami country clubs. I think he liked carrying the golf bags for the gangsters who frequented the
South during the winter months. He said, "They were never threatened by a young kid with braces on his legs, who could keep his mouth shut."
I never pointed out the "playing with fire" aspects of his comfortable involvement with gangsters. He always left me with the impression that he felt his lack of formal education didn't allow equal opportunities when it came to employment. This is somewhat stunted logic in my own mind.
My father once told me about being on the fourteenth green at Palm Beach with Al Capone and a couple of his men, probably his bodyguards, when they suddenly heard the sound of a car coming up the lawn. As it approached, the engine began backfiring. Everyone dove into the sand traps, pulling guns out of their golf bags.
I laughed.
He didn't. He never smiled. Continuing his story, he told me how a year later they machine-gunned someone to death on the next green over. Whether it was true or not was never material, at least not to me. My father discovered early on that he could make a lot of money carrying gangsters' golf bags.
My dad also made a lot of money making bet
s with hoods. He would bet that he could outdrive them off the tee. Now, he never weighed more than 145 pounds soaking wet—the result of having only half the normal muscle mass in his legs. And, everyone who's a golfer knows that distance off the tee is almost always attributed to weight shift in the hips and legs. But my dad had enormous strength in his upper body from hauling his leg braces around. Also, they didn't know that my dad spent almost all his spare time on the driving range hitting free balls. As a result of his betting, he was driving his own car by age sixteen, and carrying a flask full of booze in his hip pocket. During the early 1930s, he was walking around with a wad of twenty-dollar bills jammed in his pocket, which was very unusual—especially for someone his age.
Somewhere in that period, he decided to throw his leg braces away—a mistake he paid for dearly later in life. It resulted in significant deformity to his left foot, which was causing him almost unbearable pain by the time I was in my teens. This was the primary cause for his alcoholic stupors. He was always lost in his own vapor cloud before sundown, especially after work on weekdays, and beginning with sunrise on most weekends.
Whenever I feel like I'm having a hard time, I think about my dad, and his lifetime.
Over the years I've come to understand that one of the greatest reasons for alcoholism in the poor is the use of booze for self-medication. As a nation, we cannot continue to ignore the need for free medical support to the poor and expect them to not fall as victims to alcohol and illegal drugs. It's a vicious cycle with a very simple remedy. I watched my dad destroy himself and those around him with that cycle, and I've seen other good people fall victim as well.
There were good days, too. I remember when I was nine, when we lived in the Miami projects. They were old government duplexes built after the war, located just off of 79th Street and NW 2nd Avenue, an area they now call Little Haiti. One night, my dad brought a stranger home with him. Dad had been working a second job over on Miami Beach, where he had met the man, and one evening he decided to invite him home to share a meal with us.
The stranger was a short, heavyset man with dark hair. When I first saw him, I immediately felt sorry for him. I remember looking at his face and wondering where he had gotten all the scars. His nose was only a suggestion of what it had been—it was sort of just flattened in place. His ears were really ugly, covered with hardened lumps of scar tissue. He would have been a frightful fellow, except for his very kind and giving nature. He was as gentle and loving as any human I've ever met. When we first met, he got down on his knee and looked me directly in the eyes, and spoke very softly to me. He treated me with a great deal of respect, something I wasn't used to as a very young child. He left me with an impression of incredible strength and surety; he had an innate confidence and there was a genuine core of kindness in him. The stranger was introduced to me as Rocco Francis Marchegiano. Of course, back then he was known to many as "The Brockton Blockbuster," and most of the world knew him as Rocky Marciano—the undefeated world heavyweight champion boxer.iii
What I didn't know at the time was my dad was working part-time as his sparring partner over on the beach where he was training. Over spaghetti and meat sauce in our kitchen, Mr. Marchegiano told me that my Dad was a small man, but he was quick and could take it as well as dish it out. I didn't understand what he meant at the time. I didn't understand what boxing was.
Despite his size and weight, and obvious problems with his legs, my dad was an excellent fighter. (This was something I didn't find out about until much later.) Most who knew my father always commented on how gentle and quiet he was. I suppose that comes with being confident that you can take care of yourself. Long after I joined the Army he finally admitted to bare-knuckle fighting for money in some of the back parking lots of the projects on Saturday nights. It was a secret he kept from a lot of people. I'm not sure he won all his fights, but I seldom saw him with a black eye or cut lip. But I can't say the same for the condition of his hands. Later in my life, it began to make sense to me.
I remember once when I was about ten years old a couple of the local gang members beat the hell out of me. I came home with a broken nose, my eyes blackened, swollen, and filled with tears. My dad refused to let me into the kitchen, blocking the screen door with his body. Looking down at me, in a stern voice he said, "Come back when you have blood on your knuckles, then I'll let you in." This was followed by him slamming and locking the inner door.
It took me almost an hour to find one of the kids who had jumped me. I came up on him from the rear, his blind side, and just piled on. I pounded on him till I was out of breath. I returned home with the blood on my knuckles. My father let me in. While treating my wounds in the bathroom, he told me: "It's not about winning or losing. It's only important that you stand up to them. If they get hurt whenever they pick on you, they'll stop." As distressed as I was that night, I found out that he was right. From that point on, I never backed down from a fight. The number of fights I got into seemed to mysteriously slow in numbers, eventually stopping altogether.
The man who made almost as great an impact on me as my father was my dad's brother, William Thomas McMoneagle. Because of his hair color, to me he was Uncle Red. He served in the Navy during the big war—WWII—piloting the landing craft that put the Marines ashore. My dad told me on one run his small boat took a direct hit from a shore battery and went down without reaching the beach. Uncle Red crawled ashore with the survivors and spent quite a bit of time in the jungles before being evacuated to some place in Borneo. I once saw a black-and-white photo of him standing between two very dark Borneo women, both more than four hundred pounds, with bones through their noses, and wearing woven grass. It was the kind of picture that went way beyond anything your imagination could produce.
I always thought he was "different" in a strange kind of way, but could never put my finger on why I felt that was so. After serving in Southeast Asia, I understood those differences.
He was hyper-vigilant, prone to sudden and extravagant expenditures, and almost obsessive about having enough food. On Sundays, he would barbeque three or four chickens with all the trimmings and open up his house to family and neighbors. He had a heart as big as the ocean and was kind to everyone he met, although to a casual stranger he might have appeared loud and angry most of the time, even belligerent. He always seemed to live as though he might die at any moment.
Later, when I joined the Army, he pulled me aside and told me to never trust in luck. He told me to listen to my gut, pay attention to the little voice I had buried down in there, and to never doubt its authenticity. He also told me if I wasn't sure if I should shoot or not, shoot first, shoot to kill, and sort it out later. I can still remember the look in his eyes when he told me that. It was like looking straight into the eyes of a tiger about to kill its lunch.
My second sister, Mary, was born a few months before my eighth birthday, a few months before I met Mr. Marchegiano. Today I could never express the love I carry in my heart for my sisters, but back then I felt that her birthday was the worst day of my life. At the time, the only thing good about it was the fact that I got to spend more time with my father while my mother was in the hospital, and I wasn't being controlled. When she returned home, carrying Mary in her arms, I climbed the tree in our backyard and told everyone that I would not come down until they gave my sister Mary back to the doctors. I sat huddled high in the tree for hours, until finally darkness closed in around me. Eventually hunger and the dragonfly-sized Florida mosquitoes changed my mind. I figured I could live with "it" being in the house, as long as I didn't have to look at "it." If I had known then how the next three years would eventually turn out, I probably would have left home.
To put it succinctly, in her first few years, my sweet little sister Mary was a major screamer. She screamed for her bottle when she was hungry. She screamed to have her diaper changed when she was wet. She screamed to be picked up whenever she saw another human. But for some strange reason, whenever she saw me, she'd sud
denly stop. So it was a no-brainer as far as the rest of the family was concerned: Mary and I got to spend a lot of time together. Wherever I went, Mary went. She became a permanent fixture riding on my hip. As a boy in a tough neighborhood, that meant I had to be a whole lot tougher to get by with it. In retrospect, I'm now sure that Mary never opened her eyes until she got home from the hospital. When she did, like a newborn little bird, the first thing she saw she imprinted on—and it happened to be me.
Mary had an almost insatiable curiosity. Whatever I was doing, she would bury her nose in it. Margaret was my actual twin sister, my other half, my companion child, whatever—but Mary was my shadow, always right there in my face.
In truth, Margaret acted much more the shadow. Of all the people I've ever known, she was the most intelligent. She never had her IQ formally measured, but had it been, my bet is they would have found it to be somewhere in the 150s. Whatever I didn't know—and that was a lot—she did. By age seven, she was reading books out of the teen area of the local library, something my mother actually encouraged. Before she was twelve, she was designing, cutting, and sewing her own clothing, a relief to my mother, who made almost everything we wore.
Psychically she was far more gifted than I. We used to discuss visions of a secret world within our own. But we always kept these discussions to ourselves. She almost never spoke in front of my parents, or any other adult. She'd always stand in the shadows and observe.
From day one, she was my mother's favorite. Always obedient, always one step ahead of everyone else, always doing the right thing, and never a problem. I couldn't see it at the time, but she was absolutely, perfectly tuned to her entire environment, something one can only do paranormally. The down side, of course, is that in being that way you quickly lose your identity.
From the very beginning there were two Margarets: the one everyone experienced and the real one, the one I alone knew about. We were connected spiritually, emotionally, and in many cases mentally. When she hurt, I hurt. When she laughed, I laughed. And we didn't have to be together to do the sharing.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 3
