I couldn’t tell you how or why these things were happening. I started losing track of time. First it was a couple of hours and then it was days. Was this a side effect of trauma or was it something else?
I woke up in my room and couldn’t breathe. As I gasped for air, I heard loud noises coming from outside. As I opened the door, thick black smoke seeped into my room. It sounded like a party was going on outside. It felt like an elephant was on my chest. Desperately needing water, I ran past at least twenty-five people in the front yard, grabbed the garden hose, opened the faucet and put the nozzle in my mouth as excess water sprayed all over the lawn. The first person I recognized was Gill. ”Where’s my mom?” I asked.
His response to my question was, “She went for a package run!” Then after seeing my look of concern, he said, “She’s on the front porch, dumbass. You just ran by her.”
When I went back to the front porch, I asked my mom what had happened. Drunkenly she said, “The furnace broke and made the black smoke, so we called the fire department. It was really exciting, but you were sleeping so we left you. The fire department said you would probably be okay.”
“What?” I said. “You left me to die?”
She said, “No, you're okay. We figured we would tell you about it when you woke up. We didn’t want to wake you.” As I looked around I saw another fifty or a hundred people in my yard. All types of people were there, girls, guys, hippies and bikers.
I walked up to Gill and asked, “What is happening here?” He said, “Town party, town party, buddy!!” as he sucked down a Budweiser, crushed it on his forehead and threw it on the walkway. What a character this guy was, I thought to myself. So let's get this straight. My family threw a town party, the furnace went out but the party lived on while the youngest son is left carelessly sleeping inside to suck in the carbon monoxide. At least I survived. The real question was how many brain cells I lost.
Parties became a normal occurrence at my house. It was pretty cool for a middle school kid to get to go to high school and college parties in their own front yard. Sometimes there was a line for the bathroom so Janie and I charged a quarter per use. We made money and most people didn’t care. They seemed to like us and thought it was cute, but we treated it like a business. Girlfriends and family could go for free, but the rest had to pay a fee.
Jason went out to a popular bar in Quincy, called the Beach Coma, and at closing time he invited everyone back to our house for the after party. Other times they posted a sign at the top of the hill, that said, “party tonight BYOB.” When the police went by, he kicked it over.
One night Jason hired a rock band and they set up right in the front driveway. They were a very popular cover band in the area and a thousand plus people were in my backyard. My brother didn't charge anyone for this town concert. He paid the band with drugs, alcohol and girls. They were actually pretty good. The band let me run the lights. Eddie, the lighting man that I helped, was really cool. He had long curly hair like the lead singer and the girls thought he was a musician. They played cutting edge 70’s songs like Tom Petty’s “American Girl” and Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.”
Mid concert I decide to take a bathroom break. Unfortunately the door wasn't locked and I awkwardly caught the lighting man getting a BJ in the bathroom. Apologetically he said he was sorry and even asked my mother to forgive him for his behavior. Thank God she didn’t even know what he was apologizing for. The girl with him was really pretty I thought. I wanted to be a rock star after that, looking up to a lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.
After midnight, the band played an encore and the police came to shut down the party. Luckily the cops were pretty cool about it as they let them finish their set and told the band to announce afterwards for everyone to go home. I even witnessed the cops dancing a little to the music. That was kind of a fun bust for them. They didn't have a choice to get orderly since they were outnumbered a hundred to one.
At the end of the party, my sister Peggy’s boyfriend Timmy had a final stunt. He had broken his leg the weekend before when my brothers had tossed him over the hedges like a human catapult. Even with a broken leg, Timmy still had more life in him than most. It was his drunken genius idea to ride the beer cooler down the driveway like a horse on wheels. As he sped down the driveway and lost control, I witnessed a frightening disaster of a wipeout. I thought he was done but he stood up on his one good leg, smiled, glanced at the road rash and yelled, “Well that’s going to hurt tomorrow!”
Then he cracked open another beer. To my bewilderment, he was fine.
“Is this the answer for all my pain?” I thought.
Impressed by the drunken shenanigans, I started sneaking a couple of beers on a regular basis. I started getting night terrors in the middle of the night. I woke up panic-stricken, screaming and sweating. Something awful had been embedded deep in my mind. I had seen too much, too young. Knowing nothing about my experiences with Ziggy and Father Paul, my concerned parents blamed themselves for my trauma and allowed me to drink wine every night before bed. The Europeans did it, why couldn’t we? My father bought a crystal wine bottle that sat in a wrought iron frame and was filled with red wine. It was sweet, but I started getting headaches every morning. At least it helped me fight the demons through the night.