The Road Through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes

by Dawn Schiller

  A couple years later, when Dad finishes his enlistment with the Army, we head back to Toms River.

  It isn’t long before Dad starts to go stir-crazy as a civilian. His moods become wild, and he is gone a lot.

  I don’t remember Dad being like this before, but Grandma says it’s because of Vietnam. According to Mom, though, it’s because he’s a liar and a cheat. I think it’s because he is angry at Mom.

  Mom and Dad yell a lot.

  Dad is angry at us a lot now too.

  Being settled down is not Dad’s thing, and New Jersey doesn’t have the best jobs to suit his qualifications—so he says. Of course, Dad deserves better than this; he is a vet! He has walked through hell and back!

  Believing different states will offer opportunities better than any “this place” has to offer, Dad goes out to find them. He constantly tells us he wants nothing but the best for his children, and, though there seems to be something much meaner about him now, we always believe him.

  Aunt Ella dies in May 1968 before Dad gets back from his job search. A series of small strokes paralyze her, and she needs twenty-four-hour professional care. She has trouble remembering who we are.

  The day they take her to the nursing home on a stretcher, I cry. Before they carry her out the front door for the last time, she lifts her arm in what appears to be an effort to hold one of our hands.

  The ambulance drivers are moving too fast, and I can’t reach her in time.

  We visit her only a few times in the nursing home before she dies in her sleep. She has horrific bedsores and doesn’t know anyone in the end, I’m told, but I can’t believe it, and I miss her terribly.

  Things only seem to get worse from here.

  While searching for a job in Florida, Dad secures a position with Southern Bell as a telephone communications technician: a “telephone man.” He returns to New Jersey to talk my great-grandmother into selling her beautiful home and moving to Carol City, a middle-class suburb of Miami. He says he can be happy in the warmer climate, and he promises to never leave her alone again.

  My great-grandma says yes. After all, he is the man, and everything he says and does is right.

  She will live to regret her decision and never speak much about it in the end.

  Grandma sells her house to Dr. Bricker next door for a pittance. He is ever so pleased that Dad wants out fast and the house can be had at a steal. He tells us his intentions are to turn it into a retirement home for the elderly. Whether he does or not, I never find out; but later, in our big backyard, a pool takes the place of our beautiful climbing trees.

  Our new house in Carol City, Florida, is nothing like the hand-built one we left in New Jersey. The yard is much smaller. The house, built of cinder blocks instead of wood, has metal awnings to protect the windows from the seasonal hurricanes.

  Quickly, we kids comb our new home for things familiar. In the backyard is a kumquat tree and a lime tree, and in the front, a royal palm. All are much smaller than the trees we are used to, and we instantly disapprove.

  Sporting the décor of the 1970s, the house is an aqua color. The walls have wood paneling, and the floor is covered in green shag carpet. “It’s da latest ting,” Mom informs us while we make frowning faces.

  Roaming our yard are frogs and giant toads that foam poison when we come near. The creatures have the sad, terminal habit of sleeping on the cool road at night, and their slimy webbed feet aren’t fast enough to jump out of the way of oncoming cars. So in the mornings, we always find at least two freshly splattered ones on the street out front. It’s disgusting.

  Mostly it is hot, hot, hot! So hot we can’t sleep at night. Although we’ve adapted to different climates in the past, the dense humidity of this miserable place is too much to bear. I get up in the middle of the night to rip off my clothes because I can’t stand it.

  On the stifling nights when I can’t sleep, I trudge to the bathroom to search for water to cool off. When I switch on the light, masses of loud, scurrying cockroaches dash to their hiding places. Screaming for our mother becomes a nighttime practice for us children, until Mom contracts an exterminator and installs air-conditioning in our swamplike Florida home.

  My first job at our new house is to clean the yard. The royal palm tree in front needs its dying fronds peeled away and put in something called a trash pile.

  Trash pile? What’s a trash pile? I think.

  I don’t know, but everyone has one.

  I am grudgingly yanking off branches when suddenly something slimy jumps out and glues itself to my face. Screaming and in a panic, I run in circles, yelling for help, and my brother and sister run out to see what’s happening.

  Wayne, not afraid of creepy things, simply pulls the creature from my face, looks at it, and laughs. A little tree frog’s sucker fingers have stuck to my skin so hard they’ve left tiny round marks on my forehead and cheeks.

  I cry hard.

  My mother tells me I am stupid.

  But I know why the tears are there. My sadness has risen too high, and like an awkward, toppling stack from the roadside trash pile, I can hold it in no longer.

  Everything is too different, and no one is happy.

  Mom always screams, and Dad is mad.

  Dad even starts to take the belt to us when we are bad, just as Mom has always done. He calls it “the snake,” and he is strong.

  Dad doesn’t call me princess anymore, and my heart is broken.

  I just want everything to be like it was before. I want to go back home to New Jersey. Before, we could always go back. This time is different, though. We are stuck here, in this awful place; here, where they have things like trash piles; here, where it is always summertime; here, where, no matter how hard I look, there is never any magic—and never, ever any fireflies.

  Dad goes to work at the phone company right away, but he isn’t happy there, either.

  School starts, and I begin the third grade at Carol City Elementary. I am eight years old, my sister is seven, my brother is four, and my great-grandma is eighty-two. Mom and Dad, in their thirties, are ageless in my eyes.

  In no time, Dad is restless again and decides to find work elsewhere. This time, overseas is “where the real money is,” and he’s determined to tap into it “for the family.”

  Putting our faith in him again, we say good-bye as he leaves to seek out our fortune in far-off countries. He has been with us in Florida for only six months.

  As the years roll by without Dad in Carol City, we struggle, waiting for him to return. Trouble begins within a year of our arrival. Things get bad fast. Really bad.

  In the schools, angry students plant bombs and stab teachers; on the streets, robbers target the elderly.

  Grandma makes friends with our next-door neighbor, Owello, a Cuban man in his eighties who speaks through a hole in his throat. One day, after walking into town to cash his Social Security check, he staggers home with a fresh stab wound in his hand. Punk thieves hid in an alley waiting for him to walk the few blocks home with his meager monthly cash folded neatly in his pocket next to his freshly smoked cigar.

  Owello’s arms flail wildly as he explains, without a voice, how he bravely fought the robbers at first. Then his shoulders slump, and he shakes his head as he describes how he was overpowered. Tears run down his leathery cheeks, and with broken nods, he agrees to let Grandma bandage his hand.

  Afterward, the two of them sit on his porch, numbly looking out at our lost neighborhood and in at our deteriorating lives.

  My first fight is on our street in front of an entire block of kids. While I am out walking our dog, a girl jumps me. I am ten, and she, a girl who used to play with me, is twelve. Taking a beating, I am devastated.

  Being small for my age and still a child, I am terrified to walk down the streets again. But in order to prove myself and not be marked as an easy target, I have to learn to throw a punch and challenge the girl who jumped me to another fight. This time I’m prepared, and she loses a tooth. Stag
gering home, my only injury a hole in my knuckle, I am oddly triumphant yet scared out of my mind that I might have to fight again.

  I do.

  Once the ball begins to roll, gang activity in my community escalates faster than lightning speed. For me, school is becoming the worst place to be: a place where a person can get killed.

  In fact, going anywhere alone in Carol City or the surrounding towns is becoming very dangerous.

  My brother, sister, and I have to grow up fast. My childlike demeanor, the innocence of my age, is now stuffed into the deepest recesses of my psyche, hidden and safe. I keep my guard up and feel protected only in moments of absolute privacy. All too soon, my childhood has turned upside down forever, leaving my mind focused every waking moment on survival: How do I avoid a confrontation? Where do I go to be safe? How do I protect myself? Like a mantra, an internal prayer, these questions chant constantly in my mind, keeping me ever vigilant.

  One day, knowing a big black girl wants to beat me up, I skip a seventh-grade class. Instead, I walk to a local convenience store to buy a Coke and waste time till my next class. I hang out aimlessly on the cement curb out front as the hot Florida sun beats down on my head. A carload of Cuban men approaches me, gang members who threaten to throw me into their car and rape me. In a split-second decision, I break the cool Coke bottle against the curb, point it at the closest man, and shout defiantly, using my toughest street voice: “Fuck you! Go ahead! You may be able to take me, but I swear, I’ll kill one of you.” Screaming at the top of my lungs I scan the area and hope to bring attention to myself.

  The gang members sneer.

  “So which one will it be?” I continue. “Which one of you is going to die? You?” I lunge my jagged weapon forward. The leader stops, lifts his brow thinking, and nervously backs away from the sharp point of my bottle and the wild fury of my voice.

  The four men fumble into their car, hissing poisonous threats of revenge. “You wait, little gringa,” they scream, anger raging in their eyes. “We come back! You not gonna be so tough all the time!” But the ploy works, and not turning their backs, they burn a trail of rubber behind them. I am almost thirteen and have now gained the reputation of a “fighting crazy.” They are right. I calculated the situation correctly. Sheer terror and panic bring out a side of me that holds no punches when being backed into a corner. To the death—a tough title to hold, but to me, it’s one way to get some desperately needed reprieve. Little do I know I am learning the life skills to do just that in the short years to come—save my life.

  Heavy-duty thieves find our house an easy target, and Mom is also forced into dangerous confrontations. After a double shift at work, Mom drags home from her waitress job and accidentally walks in on the toughest criminal of the neighborhood. “Cleveland” is a dangerous, nineteen-year-old black boy, with scars so thick along his head, his hair no longer grows on most of his skull. He is well-known as mean and deadly for starting fights with baseball bats at neighborhood parks, and there he is in our kitchen, raiding our refrigerator.

  “Vhaaat is dis?” Mom screams with all her five feet one German might, furious with the intruder. “You get out of my house, you son of a bitch! You take food from my childrrrren! You, you, I call da poliiiice! Get out!” She backs the now-frightened thug out of our house, pointing her finger and threatening to kill him if she ever sees him near her family again. Neighbors crawl out of the woodwork like gnats to a streetlight to watch, gaping, as the woman in the white shirt and black waitress skirt backs the toughest guy in the neighborhood out of her house with only her finger. It isn’t hard for anyone to see who I imitate.

  Mom, Terry, Wayne, and I get tougher and tougher in our attitudes, and Grandma grows more and more weary. She is very elderly now. As the built-in babysitter while Mom works her many jobs, it’s tiring for her to deal with us children and our rebellion at the growing hostility of our neighborhood. Mom not only takes her rage out on us children, but on Grandma too. As far as I know, she only threatens to hit her, never really making contact with her fists.

  We lose Grandma to pneumonia in January of 1976, just a few months before Dad makes it back. She has waited loyally for him to return—almost seven years. I watch her as she rocks in that same rocking chair from New Jersey, Bible in hand, crying daily until the end. What a horrible feeling it gives me to watch her wither away, sad and abandoned, disappointed by the one she loves the most.

  Some weeks before her death, near Christmastime, I have a succession of terrifying dreams that Grandma will leave us: three dreams in a row that frighten me down to my bones. I become hysterical. Mom tells me everything’s all right, but I know better. I pay attention to my dreams anyway, and those last weeks that Grandma is alive I am extra nice, offering to help her do her chores and cook the meals. I do kind things again for her and share happy thoughts about Aunt Ella and the snow in New Jersey, like it was before we got here, before the hardness. I remember sitting out on the backyard patio, she in a green and white lawn chair, my head in her lap. She strokes my long sun-kissed hair with her bony, wrinkled hand and I tell her I love her, hoping she loves me back.

  “Grandma,” I ask, “am I a good girl?”

  “Yes,” she replies, “you are a good girl, Dawn. You are a good girl,” and she pats my head softly. I am taking in every ounce of her that I can—her touch, her smell, her look, not wanting the moment to end. She smells of faint lavender and mold from the hand-rinsed Ace bandage I help her wrap around her varicose-veined leg. I wish she wasn’t so tired anymore and that I had been nicer to her in the past. I want her to be happy. She deserves to be happy.

  On the third day, after her death, I see her one last time. She walks through the house floating in a cloud of pink. At first, I think it’s my sister wearing her favorite pink pajamas. But when I hear Terry’s voice at the other end of the house, I know it can’t be her. Grandma’s hair is a fuzzy gray, and a warm glow surrounds her. Her presence seems soft as she passes by my side and glides toward the back bedrooms. I jump up to follow her through the house, desperately willing her to stay, as the delicate pink figure disappears at the end of the hallway. Grandma’s gray hair and pink outline slowly dim to nothing and I stand in amazement, staring at the blank brown paneling, feeling only the sense that she has come to say good-bye and that she knows she is loved.

  With Grandma gone, there is less money for the household bills, and Mom is under much more stress to make ends meet. I am the oldest. Mom reminds me of this constantly, especially during her rages. I need to help the family, help my brother and sister. It is my responsibility. I think I have found the perfect solution: a job through a work program at school allows me to work half days and get credits at the same time. This means money for Mom and the house and less time at a school I dread.

  I am proud the day I land a cashier job at a Burger King a few blocks away. I love wearing the orange and yellow polyester bellbottoms and puffy patch cap. I get a free Whopper meal each day and memorize the “Have It Your Way” rules at the back table, right where Grandma used to take us out to eat for a hamburger on her Social Security payday. Mom will be happier now. Not worry so much, I tell myself. But that doesn’t happen.

  She dislocates my jaw on a morning that I am late for work. It is a few days after my first paycheck. I have given her money for food and the house and bought her a gold necklace as a belated birthday present. Three charms hang from a real 14 karat chain, silhouettes of the profile of two girls and a boy. On each of them is engraved “Dawn,” “Terry,” and “Wayne.” The morning she attacks me, I try to rip the necklace off her neck, but she protects it as she throws wild punches with her strong right fist. I scramble off the utility room floor and out the back door, limping and crying the four blocks to work.

  My uniform, my pride and joy, is torn at my chest. I am bruised, swollen, and hysterical as my day-shift manager tries to console me. I tell him it is my mother; she does this all the time. I thought she wouldn’t be this way if I was w
orking and helping with the bills. I thought she would stop. It is always the money that makes her so angry, or that’s what I believe. But Mom still needs to let me know that she is boss, and now I know that I will never make her happy, that she will not love me more even if I’m working and trying to help her out. I give up. My manager offers to help and find me a safe place to stay, but I am too embarrassed.

  Eventually I lose my job. I stop showing up. I stop showing up for school too. Instead, I hang around with the outcasts of my neighborhood. They are my new family now. I stay at various friends’ houses for days and sometimes don’t even call home to tell Mom where I am. On the streets at night, I listen to heavy metal, get high, and hate life.

  The time draws near to Dad’s expected arrival. Two hours before he is supposed to show up, we are dressed in our best, keeping vigil at the windows. I wear my coolest clothes: magenta elephant bellbottoms, beige midriff top, and desert boots. I fling an oversized, green Army jacket with a smiley face patch on the front pocket over my shoulder. (It is too hot in Florida to actually wear such a jacket.) My down-to-my-waist, light brown hair is parted in the middle and pulled behind my ears to keep it out of my face and a pale splattering of freckles dust my nose. At fifteen I want to show my father how cool I am and how much I love him…still.

  Terry dresses in similar clothes. She also wears elephant bells and some kind of fashionable knit top. She paces anxiously, jumping at the sound of each passing car. Her hair parts down the middle and is a bit darker and shorter than mine, and her face is covered in more of the family freckles. Her cat-green eyes are lined with worry that Dad will be devastated at the news of Grandma’s death a few months earlier, and so we decide to let Mom break it to him.