"Dane," my father said after reaching
back to close the ice chest behind the passenger's seat. "You know ...
you're not my real son ... You have a different father than me."
That revelation
rocked me as much as it did my brother.
As I look back at that revelation, I can say that
it took quite a while for the idea to fully sink in, as I wasn't yet mature in
my understanding of the sordid world around me, even though the previous 15
years of my life had been imbued with an underlying parental tension. That
tension (I now know) had been the creation of a father and his real son, vs. an
obliged mother and her bastard son. My mother had been raped by a Catholic
preist while in the confessional.) The situation (which I had been trapped into
as a Syrian star seed ) hadn't yet generated its full socio-psychological havoc upon me, but even so, I was already
“damaged goods.”
This particular road trip (at this particular
mile marker of my life ) had been presented to me and my three siblings as an
emergency "rescue" operation, but in the mind of the father/career
Marine who was driving … it undoubtedly could be found in the “war operations manual” under the heading
of "SEARCH and DESTROY".
My mother had run off with a married man from
Italy. She’d met her co-conspirator in infidelity while my father was
“physically” half a world away, and he was in the middle of fighting the Viet
Cong. Each time my father went to a war
of military combat action, his wife and children stayed at my maternal grandmother’s house, in
Jersey City. I'd heard my relatives say that the Italian man (interloper) had
intentionally scalded his arm, in order to be transferred from his ship to an
inland hospital. After that, he had been convalescing in a hospital room. A
hospital room which was not far from my ,then, dying grandmother.
So here we
were: four kids, a father and a cold case of beer. We would spend ten hours,
traveling across five states. We were driving towards the apartment of my
mother's illegal immigrant Italian boyfriend. Upon arrival, my father and my 17
year old brother donned Inspector Clouseau style trench coats (Courtesy of the
US Marines). My father then left us (the three younger kids) in a small station
wagon, with out-of-state plates, parked on a dark Jersey City street, at
four-in-the-morning.
Later, my brother Dane would tell me about how
when the offending boyfriend answered the door, he and my father flashed their
Military ID cards to impersonate FBI officers. After quietly gaining access to
the apartment of my mother's boyfriend, they
went in and found my mother there, naked in the bedroom. Dane said that
the beat beat the boyfriend to a pulp. My mother was also Injured during the
fray when she tried to intervene. She had fallen on the sharp edge of a broken
dinner plate. After the Marine
successfully extracted that member of his unit, she was taken to her New Jersey
sister's house to be cleaned up before her final journey back to Jacksonville,
North Carolina.
