Sunday, June 27, 2010

Setting The Scene, Part One

My mother, Anne Radosti Calkins Carosone Sasowski Redington, died on May 11, 2010 at the age of eighty-three, from complications of dementia and Parkinson's disease. I was at work when I got the news via Facebook. Before I could stop myself, I grinned and exclaimed, "Holy shit! My mother's dead!" My co-workers turn to stare at me, aghast. I quickly packed up my purse, told my supervisor what happened, and took off for five days of bereavement leave.

Bereavement, my ass. How do you mourn a parent who tried to kill you?

Anne was born in 1926 on the Lower East Side of New York. She was a very private person---but also notoriously prone to lying---so I could never be certain that whatever she told me was true. She claimed that when she was a baby, her parents gave her away to her Aunt Giuseppina (Josie), who operated a neighborhood numbers racket. Anne said she became a numbers runner before she turned six years old, and that Josie would often hand her twenty dollars as pay, telling her to "go buy candy".

When Anne was eighteen, she married a man named Johnnie Calkins. She said he died of renal failure on their honeymoon, and soon after that, she married a Mr. Carosone. She had two children from that marriage: my half-brothers Joel (Joseph) and John. She told me that Mr. Carosone was an alcoholic, was physically and verbally abusive to her, and had thrown her out of a second-story window; some of her ribs were broken in the fall. She decided to divorce him, and took the kids.

She insisted that she scrubbed toilets to keep a roof over my half-brothers' heads, but I find this unlikely. She had once mentioned that she'd been employed at Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn for a time, but I can't verify whether this is true or not. What I do know for certain is that during the time she was raising Joel and John, she met my father, Stanley Sasowski.

My father was born on New Jersey Avenue, Brooklyn, in 1915. His family was very poor. When Stenley was a young man, he worked for the CCC in Tennessee and sent money back home to his family. He then came back home and lived in his car to save money to purchase what was to be a series of body and fender shops in Brooklyn. He married, and a few years later divorced his wife because she was mentally ill. He had a son of his own from that marriage: my other half-brother, Stanley Junior, of whom he had custody.

In 1960, Stanley and Anne married. I was born in 1962. All of us lived in East New York in Brooklyn, right by the old Piels brewery. One of my earliest memories was sitting on my father's lap while my mother taught me to read out of the Dr. Seuss Dictionary. I was about two years old at the time.

When I was four years old, my father purchased the burned-out shell of a mansion in a residential area about a mile away from our home. The building was known as "The Haunted House", and my father restored it. Within a year, we had moved in.

Very early on, I remember my mother screaming for no apparent reason, and being brought along to evening doctor visits for which my mother had appointments. I also recall my father telling me that Mother was "talking to the doctor", so later on, I concluded that she was seeing a shrink.

When I was about six, everything seemed to go haywire. Stanley Junior was in the Marines and was serving in Vietnam. Johnny graduated from high school. Johnny and Joel kept getting into trouble. I learned a new word: heroin. I watched a drug dealer beat the shit out of Johnny in front of our house while the entire neighborhood watched. I saw the dealer try to beat up my father while my mother was hysterically crying and on the stoop. My father was covered in blood. Terrified, I hid in the broom closet---but then left the house and careened into the boulevard, nearly getting hit by the oncoming cars. As soon as I was across, I ran into my best friend's house and into her mother's arms.

I stayed there for a couple of hours and didn't want to go home that night, but my friend's mother coaxed me into it. She brought me home, and my mother started in on me with her fists. That was my first memory of being beaten severely.



I'll continue this tomorrow.

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