Chapter 1

Was there ever a point in your life when you sat down, looked back over your life and wondered “How in the hell did I get here?”

Think back to when you were a kid and wanted to be a cowboy when you grew up. Or maybe a fireman? A police officer? An Army hero?

As you got older did it change to a football star? Baseball player who took your team to the World Series? Be better at basketball than Michael Jordan?

I’ll bet all I have (which is admittedly not all that much) that the one thing you never saw yourself as was married with three kids and a nine to five job as a mid-level manager of a small corporation.

My “How the hell did I get here” moment came as I sat with my wife and waited for our son Robert to cross the stage and receive his high school diploma.

As I looked around at all of the others that were there watching their kids graduate my mind went back in time.

My earliest memory was of me playing cowboys and Indians with the kids that lived in my neighborhood. I was around six or seven, but I do remember some of it.

I have no recollection of school before the second grade, but I do remember the second because a good portion of those who would be a part of my life were my neighbors and also my second grade classmates. Billy Neubert, Dickie Moore, Bobby Holbrook, Harry Short, Eugene Ellsworth, Marlene Gresh, Beverly Abbeg, Nancy Wilde, Nancy Neubert (Billy’s sister) and Carol Meis were all classmates and would be in my life, in one form or another for the next twenty or so years.

I had my first fight (but by no means my last) with Norm Snider in the second grade. We were out on the playground during recess and running around playing tag. Off to the side there were a bunch of girls sitting and talking. About what I had no idea and didn’t want to get close enough to them to find out. Girls had cooties; everybody knew that so you had to stay away from them so you wouldn’t catch cooties from them.

Beverly Abbeg was one of the group and she stood up just as Billy Neubert jigged to his left to avoid getting tagged by Harry Short. He bumped into Bev and she dropped a bag she was carrying and some candy spilled out of it. I stopped, picked up the bag and candy and handed it to her (okay okay I know she had cooties and I should have stayed clear of her, but she had a bag of candy and she just might give me a piece right?)

Just as she reached to take it from me Snider started laughing and he pointed to us and started chanting:

“Bobby’s got a girlfriend, bobby’s got a girlfriend. Bobby’s sweet on Bev. Look; he’s giving her candy.”

Like I said, everybody knew that girls had cooties so no way was I going to have anything to do with Bev. I planted myself in front of Snider and said:

“I am not sweet on Bev! Take it back!”

“No. Bobby’s got a girlfriend.”

“Do not! Take it back!”

“Not gonna.”

“You better.”

“Not gonna.”

I got right in his face and yelled “Take it back!”

He shoved me and I stumbled back and fell and then I got up and went right at him. Two teachers finally broke it up, but not before I’d given Norm a bloody nose.

We ended up in the principal’s office and our parents were called. I ended up getting spanked when my parents got me home.

Three things happened that day that were to have long term consequences. One was that Norm would be holding that bloody nose against me forever. The second was that Bev got it in her head that I was sweet on her. I guess girls at that age didn’t understand that boys didn’t think of them then the way they would later on in life. At that age they were weird. They had cooties, played dress up with dolls and had pretend tea parties for Christ’s sake.

But the third one was the whipping my father gave me and the threat of more to come if he ever got another call from the school over my misbehaving turned me into a pacifist (not that I even knew the word at seven).

From that beating on (until I was a little older) if there was trouble Bobby’s default position was to turn and run. This of course got me named as a coward. Remember back when you were a kid? Who got picked on the most? It was always the kid who never fought back.

Snider was the worst of them. Since giving him the bloody nose he felt the need to get back at me. Because my cut and run philosophy he began to get the idea I was afraid of him so he was always after me and of course other guys picked up on it.

I really, really wanted to fight back, but every time I started to I remembered the beating with the belt I got from my father and I backed off and ran.

It was kind of funny in a way. It seemed like the more the bullies tormented me the more Bev and the other girls wanted to be around me. By the fourth grade the girls are weird and have cooties mentality had faded and I no longer avoided them and while I had a lot of guy friends my best friends all seemed to be girls and of all the girls it seemed that Bev considered herself to be my very best friend forever.

I didn’t realize it until her twelfth birthday party. I received an invitation in the mail and my mom took me shopping to buy Bev a card and a birthday present.

I ran the doorbell and Mrs. Abbeg answered it and welcomed me. She walked me into the living room and Bev ran over to me and I handed her the present. She thanked me and kissed me on the cheek. It was my first kiss from a girl and I’m sure I must have blushed redder that a stop sign. Then I heard “Bev’s sweet on Bobby; Bev’s sweet on Bobby” from several voices and I looked around the room. Carol Meis, Nancy Wilde, Helen Liss, Marlene Gresh and both Nancy’s (Wilde and Neubert) were there and all of them were pointing at Bev and chanting over and over:

“Bev’s sweet on Bobby, Bev’s sweet on Bobby.”

I noticed one other thing when I glanced around the room. I was the only boy there! Well Mr. Abbeg was there, but he wasn’t a boy.

Then Mrs. Abbeg said “Now that Bobby is here we can cut the cake” so we all got up and went into the dining room and sang Happy Birthday to Bev while we watched her cut the cake.

I was sitting on the couch eating my cake and ice cream when Mr. Abbeg sat down beside me.

“Tell me Robert; what are your intentions toward my daughter.”

I didn’t realize until later that he was pulling my leg. I looked at him and said:

“Huh?”

“Simple question young man. Are your intentions honorable?”

“Huh?”

“I will not stand for her being trifled with.”

“Huh?”

“You will keep your hands to yourself until after the wedding right?”

“Huh?”

Mrs. Abbeg came to my rescue.

“Leave the poor boy alone George. Can’t you see you are embarrassing him?”

He chuckled, got up and went into the kitchen. Then something really weird happened. Nancy Wilde said to Nancy Neubert:

“Mr. Abbeg doesn’t have to worry about Bobby and Bev cause I’m going to marry Bobby.”

Nancy Neubert said “Oh no you won’t; he’s going to be mine.’

Marlene Gresh sat down on my lap and said possession is nine tenths of the law and I’ve got him!”

Bev ran over and pushed Marlene off of my lap and said:

“Get away from my boyfriend.”

Mr. Abbeg had come back into the room and he was laughing.

“Tell me Robert; just when did realize you have this power over females?”

“Huh?”

After that party it seems that I always had girls hanging around me. You can believe it when I say that later when I was older I would look back and say “Why couldn’t that be happening now?”

Of course there were consequences to being around girls as much as I was. “Bobby is yellow” was joined by “Bobby is a sissy.” I only got it from the three or four who were bullies, but it still pissed me off.

By the fifth grade the boys were playing ball. It started out as just playing catch and moved to playing ball on the vacant corner lot during summer vacation. When school started in the fall we started playing on the ball diamond at school after school let out for the day.

In the sixth grade we had a physical education class for the first time and by the seventh we were involved with sports programs. Not against other schools, but against kids in our own classes. We learned to play basketball and volleyball in the gym during cold weather and softball outside in warm weather.

We learned about exercise and did calisthenics for twenty minutes at the start of every P.E. class and we started to be involved in sports programs. The one that interested me most was football.

Also by the seventh grade guys started getting interested in girls. I know some think twelve and thirteen is a bit young for boy/girl stuff to start and it might have been for other kids, but not for the group I hung with.

Dickie Moore came to school one day with some playing cards he had sneaked out of a deck of cards his dad had. They were eye opening to say the least. Naked men and women doing things to each other. I got my first boner looking at them.

I had a strange effect on me. I started trying to catch looks at my mom when she was naked to see if she looked anything like the pictures on the cards that Dickie had. She did and every time I caught her naked I got an erection and then had to go to my room and get rid of it.

But because of my paying attention to mom I became aware of things of a darker nature. It probably had been there all along, but I hadn’t recognized it or realized it.

My father was an abusive drunk.

Looking back on it he had always been one, but growing up in our home it was always there and so it just seemed to be the way of things. It wasn’t until I was exposed to other families, like Mr. and Mrs. Abbeg that I began to see what was going on in my family was not the norm.

The way my father routinely cuffed my mother, sister and I for the slightest reason just seemed to be the way it was. I can’t even remember how many times mom, sis or I were cuffed and then heard:

“I am the man of the house and by God you will (fill in the blank). The hits were never really hard or brutal, at least not as brutal as my whipping with the belt. I had large welts on my ass and the skin broke and bled in several places.

He did sometimes hit hard enough to leave a bruise and many were the times mom walked around the house with a black eye and a bruise or two.

He stopped at the bar for ‘a few’ with the boys after work and then slapped mom around if dinner wasn’t ready when he got there or if it had been ready, but had gotten cold before he got there. I got it if I hadn’t cut the grass, cleaned he garage of the basement to his satisfaction.

When I reached an age where I could ask her why she put up with it she either couldn’t or wouldn’t give me an answer.

By the time I was in the seventh grade I’d wised up a bit. I finally came to realize I didn’t have to put up with the bullying all the time. I’d have to avoid trouble at school so my parents wouldn’t be called, but I damned sure didn’t have to put up with it away from school. The first one to find out there was a change in Bobby was Norm Snider.

It happened in the parking lot behind the Rialto theatre. It was a Sunday afternoon and Billy Neubert, Dickie Moore and I had ridden our bikes to the Rialto to see the afternoon double feature. There were bike racks along the back wall of the theatre and the three of us had just parked our bikes in the last three open spots in the rack when Snider showed up, saw the rack was full and pulled my bike out, threw it to the ground and put his bike in the empty hole.

Then he turned to me and smirked as if daring me to do something about it. He knew I would run away right? Well I did run but it wasn’t away. It was straight at him. Both hands hit him in the chest and he stumbled backwards and his head hit the brick wall. It stunned him and I don’t think he saw the punch coming that bloodied his nose. He was so stunned he made no attempt to avoid the next four or five punches I hit him with as I tried to make up for years of running away.

Billy and Dickie finally pulled me of Norm and I went over to the bike rack, pulled his bike out and threw it to the ground, picked up mine and put it back in the rack. As we headed for the ticket window no words were spoken, but both of them were looking at me like I was some kind of space alien. The Robert Dalton they knew would never have done what I did right?

Over the weekend Billy and Dickie apparently spread the word about what happened at the Rialto because it seemed like everyone at school knew about it when I got there on Monday. It had to have been Billy or Dickie (or both) because I didn’t tell anyone and I seriously doubted that Snider would have said anything because it would have made him look bad.

What I didn’t expect was for Norm to come looking for me. I guess he didn’t like hearing that old yellow had kicked his ass and he had to show everyone it was bullshit.

He was waiting for me when school let out and he got in my face and I said “Fuck you Snider” and walked away from him. He followed me yelling insults and I ignored him. Until we were off school property. I turned to face him and he stepped forward and poked me in the chest. I don’t know what he was going to say because before he could say it I punched him in the mouth. Now keep in mind I was a twelve year old kid and I didn’t know beans about fighting. I didn’t know anything about upper cuts, jabs or stuff like that. All I knew about fighting was you had to hit the guy and keep hitting him until he was beaten so I went after him flailing away at him like an out of control windmill. Norm went to the ground and while he was down I kicked him a couple of times and then, just like at the movies, Billy and Dickie pulled me off of him.

I looked around and was surprised to see that we had drawn a crowd. I found out later that kids had seen Norm approach me and then follow me and since they had heard about what had happened at the Rialto they had tagged along to see what would happen. One of the crowd was Bev and she rushed up to me.

“Did you hurt your hands Bobby? Can I kiss them and make them better?”

Billy and Dickie started laughing and chanting “Bobby’s got a girlfriend, Bobby’s got a girlfriend” and I just smiled and rolled with it. The crowd broke up and we all walked away leaving Norm sitting on the ground and crying.

The rest of seventh grade was uneventful except for two things. I didn’t get bullied anymore and Bev had attached herself to me and was telling everyone I was her boyfriend and I didn’t tell anybody any different.

We walked to school together every morning although it was in a group with the other kids in the neighborhood. We ate lunch together although we did have others at the table with us. Usually it was the other kids from the neighborhood, but even then it changed from day to day.

The tables sat eight and who sat there depended on who got there first. That first come first seated arrangement caused problems that I was unaware of at the time.

There were times when Bev didn’t get to the lunchroom in time to get one of the eight seats and there were times when she got there in time to get a seat, but it wasn’t the one next to me. It seemed that when those times occurred the person sitting next to me was one of the Nancy’s –Wilde or Neubert – or Marlene Gresh. Several times two of those three would be sitting on either side of me and you need to remember that those three had all laid claim to me at Bev’s birthday party.

I never knew it until much later, but from Bev’s birthday party on the four of them constantly argued over which one of them was going to get me. They were all good looking girls and I began paying more attention to them since seeing Dickie’s playing cards, but most of my attention, at least girl wise, was on Pauline French.

Pauline had an advantage over the other girls. Two advantages actually. One was while the other girls were advancing through puberty Pauline had exploded through it. She had tits were the other girls had small bumps. The other advantage, at least where I was concerned, was that Pauline bore an uncanny resemblance to one of the women I’d seen on the cards Dickie had shown us.

The problem was that even though she had my attention I wasn’t even a ghost image on her radar. The things that had attracted me to her had also attracted others and a lot of the others were older. I hadn’t yet had my first real date and Pauline was already dating guys two and three grades ahead of us.

My first real date came about not because I asked a girl out, but because she asked me. Marlene Gresh came up to me on a Friday just after classes let out.

“Would you like to go to the movies with me tomorrow?”

I said yes and we set a time to get together the next day. I had no idea of the explosion I’d just set off. From what I found out later Marlene no sooner got home from school than she called Bev and rubbed her nose in the fact that Marlene had a date with me for the movies on Saturday.

While that was taking place things were going to hell at my house. Mom had dinner ready at 6:30 which was our normal dinner time, but my father didn’t come stumbling home from the bar until 7:45 and things were cold. He started to give mom a ration of shit over it and I went and got stupid. I guess the way I started standing up to bullies went to my head.

“It’s not her fault” I said. “She had dinner ready on time. It’s no her fault you came home late.”

He didn’t say a word to me. He just turned to me and backhanded me so hard that the chair went over backward and my head smacked into the wall and I fell to the floor. When mom saw that she slapped him and called him a drunken asshole and he punched her. A closed fist punch! She fell to the floor and he kicked her in the side while calling her names.

I have absolutely no idea of where it came from, but seeing what he was doing to mom triggered something in me and I got up off the floor and grabbed a frying pan off the stove and swung it at his head as hard as I could. If it was a modern day aluminum frying pan it probably wouldn’t have done the damage that the pan I used caused. The pan I used was an 18” cast iron frying pan and it put my father on the floor with blood running from his head.

I didn’t stop there. Whatever it was that tripped my trigger was still in charge and I went to my knees next to him and wailed on him with that frying pan. The whole time I was beating on him I was yelling:

“Leave my mom alone, leave my mom alone, leave my mom alone.”

I might have killed him if my mom hadn’t pulled me off of him. I kept trying to pull away from her to get back to him. My sister was huddled in the corner crying and mom finally smacked my face and yelled:

“Snap out of it Bobby; settle down.”

I stopped trying to pull away, but I was shaking like a dog shitting peach seeds. When I finally calmed down to the point where she thought she could let go of me she turned me loose and I collapsed on the floor and she called 9-1-1 for an ambulance.

The ambulance showed up, the EMTs took one look at my father and told mom they were going to have to tell the police. They loaded him into the ambulance and left.

Fifteen minutes later two policemen showed up and wanted to know what happened. I could tell mom didn’t want to tell them what really happened and I don’t know if she already had some other story to tell them, but she had no choice in the matter. The policemen were no sooner in the door than my little sister Ilene, who was eight at the time, asked:

“Are you here because my daddy was hitting my mommy?”

After the cops hearing that mom had no choice but to tell them what really happened. One of them looked at me and I shrank back from him when he reached out a hand to me. I looked at it and mumbled:

“I had to do it. I had to stop him.”

Then it dawned on me that he wanted me to take his hand. I tentively reached out and took it and he shook my hand and said:

“You did good son. You did what a man is supposed to do. You protected your ladies.”

Maybe twenty minutes after the police were gone the phone rang, mom answered it and said it was for me. I took the phone and said:

“Hello?”

“How could you do that to me?’

It was Bev.

“How could I do what to you?”

“How could you make a date with Marlene? You are supposed to be my boyfriend.”

Now keep in mind I never asked Bev to be my girlfriend and while she always claimed I was her boyfriend I had never acknowledged it and I’d just gone through one hell of a bad experience and I was still wired from what had happened so I snapped at her.

“Marlene asked me to go to the movies with her and I didn’t see any reason to say no. If it bothers you so much you should have asked me first.”

“Girls aren’t supposed to ask boys. Boys are supposed to ask girls.”

“Maybe that just shows that Marlene likes me more than you do” and I heard her hang up the phone.

Saturday morning I got out of bed and headed downstairs. Mom was in the kitchen and she asked if I wanted pancakes and bacon for breakfast and I mumbled an “I guess” and went to the fridge, got out the milk and poured me a glass.

Mom had brought the morning paper in and I was at the kitchen table reading the comics while mom fixed breakfast. I’d finished the comics and passed them to Ilene when she came into the room and sat down at the table and I was eating my breakfast when the doorbell rang. Mom went to the door and opened it to find two men in suits standing there.

They were detectives following up on the report turned in by the policemen who had been here the night previous. They wanted to get signed statements from us and then have mom come down to the station to file charges against my father. She told them she wasn’t going to file charges. Then one of them said if she didn’t it was likely that Social Services would remove my sister and me from the house and we would probably end up in foster care because they would not leave us in a situation where we could be exposed to physical abuse by a known abuser which my father had proven to be by what occurred the previous evening.

I could tell that mom really really didn’t want to do it, but faced with the possibility of losing my sister and me she caved and told them she would come down to the station after showering and getting dressed. The two detectives left and mom got ready to go. Then she told me I would have to babysit Ilene until she got home.

“It might take a while. I’ll have to go by the hospital and tell your dad what I have to do and why.”

At one-thirty the phone rang and when I answered it was Marlene.

“Where are you? You were supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago.

With all that had gone on I had totally spaced out that we had a date. I told her my father had been taken to the hospital, mom had gone to visit him and I had to stay home and babysit my sister. Then I was honest with her and told her with all that had been going on I’d forgotten all about our date.

“That was your house? We saw all the flashing lights (she lived two blocks down the street from us) but didn’t realize it was your house. What happened?”

I wasn’t about to tell anyone what really happened so I just said my father had fallen and hurt himself.

“If we can’t go to the movies can I come over and keep you company?”

I couldn’t see any reason why she couldn’t so I told her to come on over. When she got there Ilene was at the kitchen table hard at work with her crayons and coloring book so Marlene and I went into the living room and sat down on the couch.

We talked about school and other stuff and she had been there maybe half an hour when she said:

“Don’t you like me Bobby?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then why haven’t you ever tried to kiss me?”

“I don’t know; I guess I never thought about it.”

“If you really liked me you would kiss me.”

So I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

“Not that way Bobby; on the mouth.”

I’d seen grownups do it and it looked, at least to me, like there was more to it than just putting your lips together. Keep in mind that I’d just turned thirteen and I didn’t know shit from beans. I turned my head away from her and mumbled:

“I don’t know how.”

She giggled and said “I can teach you.”

And that’s how mom found us when she got home. Making out on the couch. When she walked in we quickly pulled apart. She saw what had been happening and it looked like she wanted to say something, but hen apparently changed her mind and stayed silent.

Maybe it was because I was feeling guilty of something or other, but I felt I had to fill the silence with something so I said:

“I was supposed to go to the movies with Marlene, but I had to stay here and watch Ilene. She came over to keep me company.”

Mom looked at her watch and told us we could still make the two-fifteen showing if we hurried. Marlene had ridden her bike over to our house so I got mine out of the garage and we rode over to the Rialto.

How and when it happened I haven’t a clue, but about half an hour into the movie I found out that Marlene and I were holding hands. I shifted a bit on my seat and Marlene must have thought I was trying to pull away and she squeezed my hand tighter.

The movie was a double feature and during the intermission between pictures, while the ads for soda pop and popcorn were showing on the screen Marlene said she wanted to practice kissing. I looked around and other couples were doing it so I went along with it. I noticed that some of the guys were feeling up their dates so I thought I’d give it a try and Marlene didn’t shut me down, but before I could get too far along the second movie started and I stopped to watch the picture.

When the movies were over we went to Marlene’s house and sat on the front porch swing and necked for a bit before I had to go home in time for dinner. As I was getting up to leave Marlene said:

“I’m your girlfriend now, right?”

I still didn’t have a good grasp of the boyfriend/girlfriend thing, but I still had the images from Dickie’s playing cards in my mind and I had gotten a boner while kissing Marlene and feeling her up and she hadn’t told me to stop so I said:

“Yes you are.”

When I got home mom asked me if I’d had a good time and I said yes. Dinner was a quiet affair. The elephant in the room was that my father wasn’t there and the reason he wasn’t there. Dinner over I helped mom do the dishes – she washed and I dried – after which we left Ilene at the table with her ever present crayons and coloring books and went into the living room.

“I went to see your father today. He is in pretty bad shape. A fractured skull, a broken nose, four cracked ribs and a lot of bruises. He is going to be there for a while.”

“I’m not sorry. He was hurting you and I had to stop him.”

“I know baby and I appreciate what you did for me, but because your father is going to be gone for a while you are going to have to step up and take on more responsibility. I’m going to have to take on more hours at work because we won’t have your father’s paycheck coming in. That means you are going to have to babysit your sister and help out more around the house.

“It means you will be spending less time with your friends after school and on Saturdays. I won’t be working Sundays so you will have free time then. I don’t know how long it will last. It will be up to how fast your father heals and then what the courts do with him.”

Monday when I left the house to go to school Billy, Dickie, Marlene and both Nancy’s – Wilde and Neubert – were waiting for me so we could walk to school together, but Bev wasn’t there and I wondered if she was sick or something.

When we got to school and went to our lockers I saw Bev at hers. I started towards her to ask her why she didn’t walk to school with us, but when she saw me coming she turned and hurried away. At lunch there was only one empty seat at our table and it was next to me. When Bev got there and saw she would have to sit next to me she went across the room to an empty table and sat there.

Every time during the day I tried to approach her she managed to avoid me. When the group got together to walk home from school that afternoon Bev did not join us. When I asked the group if anyone knew why Bev was acting the way she was Marlene laughed and said that Bev was mad that I was Marlene’s boyfriend now.

The thought that Bev didn’t like me now bothered me all the way home. Bear in mind that I was young and naïve, but I just couldn’t understand how we could be friends one day and then not friends the next. It ate on me most of the evening and I finally left the house, walked down the street and rang the Abbeg’s doorbell. Mrs. Abbeg answered the door and I asked if Bev was home. She invited me in and then went to tell Bev I was there. She came back a minute later and told me Bev didn’t want to see me. When I asked her why she said she didn’t know, but the Bev was adamant that she didn’t want to see me. I left and on my way home I decided that Bev could just go to hell as far as I was concerned. From now on I would just ignore her.