Hiding Out

by Lloyd B. Abrams

Before we moved out of Brooklyn around my sixth birthday, the bigger boys played hide-and-go-seek in the side alleys and basements of apartment buildings looming above Montgomery Street and Schenectady Avenue. I was scared to go anywhere near – even to look down into – those dark, menacing, stinking places.

Then we moved to Long Island.

We lived next to a family that seemed to fight every weekend – the Friday evening ritual of the wife screaming at her husband for drinking up his paycheck, the kids being punched and slapped for things they did or didn’t do, or mouthing off to their father, and the wife probably being knocked around, as well. They didn’t seem to care – or were oblivious to – anyone who could have been an audience to what was going on.

My mother and father considered those kinds of people scum-of-the-earth lowlifes, and were contemptuous about the way they lived, with their drinking and cursing and fighting and especially with not being able to keep it to themselves. Mom and Dad also used nasty ethnic slurs when vilifying them, while at the same time warning my brother and me to “never repeat what we’re saying. It wouldn’t be nice.” Not “wouldn’t be right,” but “wouldn’t be nice.”

It took me years of introspection, and trying to figure things out, to fill in the details and come to terms about my own family – the way my mother and father fought in quieter but more insidious ways.

“Hey, Mom … where’s Dad?” I was looking at my father’s work schedule, written in his own elegant fountain pen script and adhesive-taped to the refrigerator door.

A curt, “He’s still at the store.”

My father often stayed longer than necessary in the pharmacy he owned with two partners, claiming that the store’s cooling system was healthier and more comfortable than being at home. That excuse worked until my parents had central air conditioning installed.

My father also medicated my mother. Both had an unhealthy disrespect and dislike for doctors although much of the pharmacy business was generated by, well, doctors. And didn’t everybody have a stock of mood-alterating drug samples like Librium, Elavil, Triavil and Miltown in a kitchen cabinet next to the green glass dishes and Tupperware cups, courtesy of obsequious and obliging pharmaceutical detail men?

I never knew much about my father’s background – something that remains puzzling to this day – but I knew a lot about the depression and alcoholism that were in my mother’s genes. She never drank alcohol per se, but rather, she was a dry drunk. And when my mother did blow up at my father’s perceived slights or at her fucking ungrateful kids – yes, that being us – or at anything else that she regarded as limiting her and ruining her dreams, my father engaged in enraging days of his trademarked and perfected silent treatment® – something that I, too, have resorted to – but fortunately, on a much more minor and less frequent basis.

So my brother and I were exposed to episodes of maternal intensity and resentment followed by paternal silence. There was no joy in Mudville during those tempestuous days.

When bitterness and animosity and using silence as a weapon prevailed, my brother simply disappeared. He was old enough to get away with coming home late at night, if at all. I sometimes perched on the edge of the bathtub while my father sat on the toilet in his hemd’l – a sleeveless white t-shirt – smoking unfiltered Camels while cursing “your son-of-a-bitch ungrateful brother” for his thoughtlessness about “never bothering to pick up a goddamn phone.”

I found safety and solitude, however, in our plywood-paneled basement, setting up elaborate Lionel train layouts on Saturday afternoons. Or I felt protected and soothed in the darkness of our shared clothes closet. Once, when I was hiding out, in the space I illuminated with a Rayovac flashlight, I memorized the entire periodic table. At least I got something constructive done.

And thus it went on.

Our family hid dysfunctionality behind closed doors and storm windows, so by any outward measure, we appeared normal.

But as Whoopi Goldberg and others, including my wife, have said, “Normal is just a cycle on the washing machine.”

Rev 15 / November 15, 2022

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November 15, 2022 … Copyright © 2022, Lloyd B. Abrams