Song of a Misspent Youth 2

by jotadavida

Posted to Stories on 2003-05-24 06:59:00

The summer of my first kiss – with Suzie Schiaponyak – we heard the news on the radio that my old man had kidnapped Donna, his fourth wife.

School had just let out for the year, and it was the first Sunday night that I got to stay out late. It was dusk, and I was playing cars in the gravel dirt in the schoolyard across from my grandmother’s house, where I lived with my mother and older brother.

Jerry Barber, my best friend, and I were using sticks and a plastic shovel to build a network of roads for our matchbox cars. I was furiously digging away the gravel rocks to get down to the moist, cool earth when I heard a door slam and footsteps racing toward me.

It was my brother and he stopped to catch his breath just at the edge of the chain link fence that surrounded the school yard and the church parking lot. “You’re not gonna believe this,” he shouted. “Big Sam’s on the news! He kidnapped Donna!”

I looked up wordlessly. Jerry, squatting beside me, turned his face up. My brother nodded his head several times.

“Oh yeah,” he said, panting. “We just heard it on the radio. I was listening to the Royals play with Babci when the guy on the radio said: ‘We interrupt this broadcast to tell you about a Kansas City man who’s kidnapped a Savannah woman.’ And then they said his name! Really!”

Jerry mouthed a “wow.” I shot up and ran across the schoolyard and started climbing the fence even though my mother could probably see me and had warned me not to do it ever since my brother had nearly torn his arm clean off doing the same thing. I hopped the fence and ran across the street, following my brother who had already raced inside my grandmother’s house.

Now, let me tell you about my grandmother’s house. First, it always smelled like boiled cabbage, because she seemed to make stuffed cabbage rolls just about every day for some reason. The smell was like a combination of wet rags and rotten eggs. Second, she was the tightest woman I ever knew. She would rather light a candle than pay extra for the electric lights, so it was always gloomy as hell inside. Last, she was deeply religious and had these shrines and madonna pictures all over the house that were really creepy, especially the bleeding Jesus cross she put on the wall facing our bed. The one thing she really did like to do was to listen to baseball games on the radio. For a Polish woman who could barely speak English, this sounds odd now, but we loved her for that and for the thin, crepe-like Polish pancakes she made for us every Sunday – the ones you sprinked sugar on and rolled up like a carpet before chopping into bite-sized pieces. Plus, she let us drink coffee with as much sugar as we wanted.

When I entered the house, the candles were lit in the front living room. My brother and Babci were in the kitchen, which was in the back of the house. She had this old tube table top radio and she bent down next to the speaker to listen closer. My brother, wide-eyed, sat across from her and was pounding the formica top of the table with the flat palms of his hands.

I took up a seat next to my brother and started slapping the table, too.

“What happened? What happened Babci? Tell us, tell us!” I shrieked.

Grandma shot me an angry look and put up a finger to shush me.

“Bad boys! Bad boys! Stop it with the hands, stop it!” she said, and I could see a drop of spit spurt towards me.

My brother looked at me and we both grinned.

Big Sam a kidnapper!

The radio announcer was saying something about a hot pursuit. And I couldn’t make much sense of it. We sat there for several minutes and then my mother wandered in. She had been sleeping, and her eyes were puffy.

“What is it, mamo? I heard Sammy say something.”

My grandmother turned to my mother and began speaking in Polish. Whenever they talked in Polish, it always seemed as if they were yelling at each other and somebody was going to get clobbered, although they could be talking about the weather and you’d never know. One would repeatedly interrupt the other and about the only words I could ever understood was “ta”, which meant yes, and “gene dobre” or thank-you and yakshemash, which I forgot what that means.

Anyway, pretty soon my Granpa Joe comes shuffling up out of the basement stairs. Now Granpa Joe had this walrus mustache and pale, watery eyes the color of a faded blue marble and by this time has pretty much lost his mind. That spring, he used to walk up and down the alleys, picking broken toys out of the trash barrels, and half-ass fixing them and handing them out to kids during recess. The kids all called him crazy Joe and I would try to disappear whenever he came around like that. Still, it was cool of him to teach my brother and I how to make a farting sound by placing one hand under your armpit and flexing your other elbow.

Granpa Joe preferred the basement to living upstairs with the rest of us. We never dared venture down there since it looked like some kind of dungeon. Plus, we weren’t allowed to go there ever since my brother had lit one of Granpa Joe’s musty old suits with a match and nearly burned the house down.

Granpa Joe started saying something to my mom and Babci and they just ignored him. He stood in the doorway for about a minute, looked at us and winked at me. Then he shuffled back downstairs.

In the meantime, we could hear the guy on the radio saying that my old man had taken Donna against her will and was last seen leaving the TraveLodge motel on the Belt Highway.

My mother ordered us to go to bed. We immediately howled back in protest.

“Now, I said so! This minute, go!”

“Mom, it’s not a school night, school’s over!” my brother rushed to declare.

This irritated my mother to no great end.

“March!” she said and pointed out of the room.

My brother and I slowly eased off our chairs and slouched out of the room.

About an hour later, we were lying in our bunks when we saw the red flashing police lights and heard the knock on the door. Sam and I crept out of bed and snuck around the corner to see and hear.

A policeman was at the front door and was talking to my mother. My mother was trembling. My grandmother was at the door too, rubbing her two hands over each other.

We couldn’t hear what was happening.

After about fifteen minutes, the policeman left. We scattered and jumped into our bunk beds. My mother entered the room, looked around, and then closed the door.

Years later, my Uncle Jerry told me the real story. My old man had started going to college and was taking a lot of diet pills to study. Apparently he hadn’t slept in nearly two weeks and became psychotic. He drove over to his ex-wife Donna’s house and forced her to drive around with him. He didn’t have a weapon or anything but he was scary enough that Donna went with him anyway and called the police from a gas station, while my dad was freaking out about “bug” people staring at him from the bushes at the edge of the gas station.

The police finally caught up with him after a confrontation at the motel where he had checked in. He surrendered and Donna took off with one of the policeman. They never charged my father, being an ex-cop and all. They just took him to the State Hospital in a strait jacket. The funny thing was, he would put my mom in there a year later.







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