A surreal journey through the life of the Author, this "Traumoir" is now available for free. If what you're reading inspires or moves you, please consider purchasing Toughen Up for $30.
Or purchase a subscription to Memoiry Lane with Stephen Kearin for access to all the author's work.
Resources & Hotlines
DIAL 988: Immediately talk or text to chat with a trained crisis counselor 24/7 for anyone who needs support for suicidal, mental health and/or substance use crisis or other kinds of emotional distress. People can also dial 988 if they are worried about a loved one who may need crisis support.
Veterans Crisis Support: Dial 988 then PRESS 1 or text 838255
National Domestic Violence Hotline 24hrs: 1.800.379.SAFE (7233)
National Suicide Hotline 24hrs: 1.800.273.8255
Alcohol & Drug Abuse Hotline: 1.800.454.8966
NAMA – National Alliance of Mental Illness: 1.800.950.6264
Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families: www.adultchildren.org
Alcohol Anonymous www.aa.org
Even with our dad helping out, Mom was hustling pretty hard to make ends meet. She had borrowed money from our scary former neighbors The Perry family and when they came to collect one night, the three of us hid in a closet until they stopped cursing and pounding on our front door. One evening, a guy who lived around the corner came knocking and asked for my mom, saying that she owed him money. I told him she wasn’t home and he paid himself with one of our lamps and a small end table. I learned that that’s what you get for opening the front door.
We never really knew what was going on with our mother and money. Mom would routinely tell us that she had put clothes on layaway at department stores, and after going to pay for them, they were stolen before she could get them home. Packages, birthday presents, Christmas gifts, purses, wallets…all routinely stolen. “I looked one way, and when I looked back…they were gone” Mom would say, over and over again. We came to expect it. Mom going out shopping was just another way of saying Mom was going out to get robbed. It created the impression that our local suburban mall was a lawless, crime riddled war zone, teeming with thieves. We never or rather, I, never questioned it at that time. For all I knew, it might have been the Perry family collecting. I couldn’t figure it out.
Pretty soon, my mother got a proper job at H.M.S. Fish & Chips, and she started working behind the counter with kids who were just a little older than I was. It was there that she first met a giant Pacific Islander named Big Wally who worked the fryer. Big Wally tipped the scales at over 300 pounds, and he wasn’t overweight mind you, he was just 300 plus pounds of raw Tongan MAN. He drove an AMC Matador, one of the widest cars ever made, and when he got in, it would go, KEEEIEE! and when he got out of it, it would go KEE AHH AHH AHH! Wally thought of my mom as a second mother and would come over after work and make us Indonesian food like chicken satay on the skewer. I’ll tell you one thing, I felt safe to answer our front door whenever Big Wally was in our kitchen and I knew he could have easily killed the Perry boys by knocking their empty heads together and then tomahawking their lifeless bodies into the ditch next to our condo. Wally had a sister named, Lorraine, who was married to Henry, and they both worked at the Anabolics Vitamin Factory. They got my mother a job there, and in exchange, my mom allowed them to move into our place and start renting her bedroom. My mother moved across the hallway and shared a bed with Sheila and I was still flying solo in my room. Mom, Henry and Loraine would go to work at Anabolics during the day, and they would all come home in the evening, lightly coated in a fine vitamin dust. If you open a bottle of vitamins, and spray in a little Chanel No. 5… that's what our mother smelled like...oh, and Benson and Hedges Menthol…and a Black Russian. Our life finally felt like it was starting to come together now, and pretty soon, my mom even made a friend in the condominium complex who would soon be described as her best friend…her best friend, Connie.
Connie lived on the edge of town by choice, with her husband, Randy, who was the top realtor in all of Mission Viejo. He was so good, that his face was on the bus stops…yeah, he was THAT good. Connie and Randy were suburban royalty…she was from “Back East” which made her “good people.” Connie was a hairdresser, stood about 6'4'' in stiletto heels and ankle zip jeans and weighed about 94 pounds. Our mother came in around 4’11 on her tippy toes and they made quite a pair. Connie was pale as a ghost with giant jet-black, Ann Miller showgirl hair, that had a jagged white streak in it, that we never knew if she put there on purpose. She wore Cleopatra blue eye shadow and thick black liner and favored long blood red nails…Halloween had nothing on Connie. She would come over and sit with my mother at the dining room table and they would drink coffee, tell stories and smoke like a couple of East Coast factory chimneys. Connie loved my mother…the little Irish magnet…a magnet for all sorts of things, some good and some not so good, but people young and old, loved my mother and were drawn to her. People, on the whole, somehow pulled for Maureen…and so it was with Connie, but she never called my mother Maureen, it was always Mo, and I remember one day I was in our kitchen staring into the empty pantry and I heard them talking at the dining room table. I heard Connie’s tone change and she said: “Mo, I got a problem” and Mom flicked her ash and said, “What is it?” Connie said “Look, I got a friend, she's a model, and she's just about to start a two-week photo shoot and her husband is roughing her up pretty bad. He's leaving bruises on her, and if we put her at my apartment, that's the first place he'll check. Can we put her here for a couple of weeks?” And without missing a beat, I hear my mother say, “No problem, we'll put her in Stephen's room, and we’ll put Stephen in a sleeping bag, under the stairs…problem solved” and I remembered two things: Number 1: I was now going to be living under the stairs in a mummy bag and 2…the word model.
That Friday night, at around eight o'clock, the doorbell rang and a little too loudly, I said, “I'll get it! I will get it!” I ran up and peered at the slim silhouette standing behind the pebbled glass. I turned the knob, swung the door open and there she was: Rebecca, wearing a pale-yellow halter top, sensible hot pants, a cork platform wedge and sporting a little blue hippie purse with fringe on it. She had long, straight, red hair with blonde streaks in it, down to there, and growing up in Southern California, she could only be described by those two magical, almost mystical words; You see, Rebecca, at least in my mind, was a “Surfer Girl.” She came in, and she met my mom and Sheila…and me…she met me! She met Henry and Loraine, and Big Wally and Frank and of course, Connie was there, and on that Friday night, we all just sat around and got to know Rebecca, who was going to be staying with us for a couple of weeks, so my mother started asking her questions, “So, you have a job coming up?” And Rebecca said yes, as she smoked her long, brown, exotic More brand cigarettes, that I was fairly certain were probably from Europe, though they weren't and she said, “Yeah, my job starts next week. I hope I don’t break my nails…I’ve been growing them long and they just told me I have to scramble down some rocks for my photo shoot.” It was at this time that you could almost hear the coils of my mother’s on-board Jersey City Early Warning Detection Engines start to hum as she followed up with: “Rocks, huh? You have to scramble down rocks? What's this job for?” And Rebecca said, “A magazine” and my mom, slowly trailing smoke out of the side of her mouth and waving it away, asked, “Which one?”…and Rebecca said: “Playboy…with any luck, next year, I’ll be a Summer centerfold!”
I was fifteen years old.
Now any normal fifteen-year-old boy would go to the bell that alerts all the other fifteen-year-old boys in the world and start—Ing-glong-gling-glong-gling-glong! Come! Assemble! Mount thy Stingray bicycles with banana seat and sissy bar and come! HORN! All ye who have recently grown pubic hair! Come all!” But I didn't do that. I didn't tell anybody.
Playboy always described their centerfolds as The Girl Next Door, but in my case, she was now The Girl Upstairs…in my bedroom. Now it was Mom, Sheila, Henry, Lorraine, Miss June, July or August and me…living under the stairs, in a tiny condominium next to a meandering, overgrown ditch on the edge of town.
The next morning, Saturday morning, my mom, Henry and Loraine got up and went to work at the vitamin factory. Shelia got up and went to work at that pillagers paradise known as The Laguna Hills Mall, where she worked at Hallmark Cards, directly across from Organ Exchange, where they would try to sell you organs by playing organs and looking at you: (Dr. Zhivago theme organ sound) So, I got up, made my bag, and still in my pajamas, I went over and poured some cereal, and sat at our wobbly dining room table…until I heard someone coming down the carpeted slat steps, then down the two steps into the living room, and I looked over, and it was my new roommate, Rebecca.
Now, I don't know the French origins of the word negligee, but I believe it is rooted in “neglect”, as in, “someone has neglected to put enough clothing on” That's what Rebecca was wearing, a negligee, that came down to the highest part of what might be described as her tan thigh, and over it, she was wearing a robe? That came down to roughly a millimeter below the same place on said thigh, both of which were made of sheer material, as if by layering sheer material over sheer material, one would create a solid material—which this did not…and Rebecca walked up to me, and said, “Where is everyone?” And because I wasn’t in my body at the time, the body answered “Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh.” Then she leaned in and asked my body: “Do you have Monopoly?” During this time…everyone in America owned fucking Monopoly, and so I got down our Monopoly, and we set up Monopoly together, on a Saturday morning, at our battle-scarred dining room table…me a two-dimensional cartoon rendering of a boy in pajamas, and Rebecca, a mature, beautiful, fully formed young woman in her negligee ensemble.
It soon became clear Rebecca was no stranger to Depression era real estate board games and quickly began to amass a small fortune. After a particularly profitable fictional land grab, Rebecca looked up and said “I need a cigarette.” In the 70’s, you didn’t have to ask if someone minded if you smoked, you simply announced that in a moment you would be smoking, and then you smoked.
She got up and walked over to the living room, where she had left her hippie purse the night before on the floor next to a chair. I remember watching her cross the room and then stopping, and very slowly arching over, reaching down into her purse without bending her knees, letting her long, surfer girl hair crash like a dirty blondish red wave onto the carpet. I remember her holding that position for what seemed like a long time, long enough for her to presume that I was noticing her and just long enough for the earth to stop rotating on its axis. She was coyly fumbling around for her cigarettes and then she stopped, and I watched as Rebecca slowly peeked her head around one side of her leg and she looked at me, looking at her and even though her head was upside down and peering through her shameless hair, I could tell she was smiling and I quickly looked down on Monopoly…sweet Monopoly, a place I could look.
And I didn’t tell anybody.
I don’t remember the rest of the Monopoly game, or that day, or even much of the weekend that followed for that matter. I do remember that on Monday, Rebecca started her “job”
During that following week, some nights Rebecca would come home, and sometimes she wouldn't, and someone took notice of that.
Early the following Saturday morning, long before anyone was getting up to go to work...it was just starting to get pre-dawn blue in the little area under the stairs where I lived now, and I awoke to the sound of the front door slowly opening, Chick-eeeeee-and I watched a pair of cork platform wedge sandals through the slats of the stairs sort of totter in, and they just wobbled there, as the door quietly closed. Chick-ooom. But, instead of heading up the stairs, they came down the two steps into the living room, and through my lashes, as I pretended to sleep, I saw Rebecca peek under the stairs, and look at me. Then, I watched her take off her hippie purse, slowly sink down to her hands and knees and languidly crawl over to me like some hot puma with a tranquilizer dart in its shapely haunch. She then carefully gathered up the lower half of the sleeping bag I was in, and held my trembling legs tightly together about a foot off the carpet, while her preposterous hair cascaded down onto the rip stop nylon. Rebecca then slowly lowered my legs and laid her perfectly proportioned head down on my knees and gently fell asleep...for an hour. The longest and shortest hour of my young life. Normally, this would be more than enough to kill a fifteen-year-old American boy, but for some reason, I was spared, and after those 60 sacred minutes passed, she stirred, wobbled to her feet, gathered up her purse and hair, and I peered through my lashes, as she ascended the stairs.
…and I didn't tell...anybody.
A few days after that, I was out kicking ass with my sister Sheila in her white 65' Falcon, red interior, Three On The Tree, listening to an 8-track of Breakfast in America and after taking “the long way home,” we rolled up on Via Damasco. Parked in front of our condo was a red Fiat Spyder Coupe, which belonged to Greg, Sheila's boyfriend, who was eighteen at the time. He was a star athlete on one of the athletic teams for The Mission Viejo High School Diablos. That's right…our school mascot was The Antichrist. Greg was physically intimidating to me and he knew that, and was dating my sister and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it…and he knew that too. I missed my dad a lot during those years, but I never missed him more than when Sheila was dating Greg, because I'm pretty sure my dad would have made Greg cry. We parked and Sheila said, “That's funny, what's Greg doing here?”
And so, we walked up and opened the door and the first thing we heard was laughter. It was Rebecca's laughter, and we came down the two steps into the living room and looked over and there, on the dining room table, was Monopoly, mid-game, and sitting at the table was Rebecca, with her long tan legs crossed and her long sun-drenched hair, smoking a long More brand cigarette and she was laughing long and hard at something hilarious Greg had just said. Something like: “Wow, if my girlfriend and her little brother were to come home right now, this would not look good” because there, standing in front of Rebecca, wearing 1970’s era P.E. shorts, which if you'll remember, was not very much P.E. short at all, and wearing nothing else, was star wide receiver, Greg, pumping iron on my never having been even close to being fully loaded, but fully loaded this time barbell set—and for reasons I don't understand, yet I completely understand to this day, Sheila yelled, “Greg!” and she ran over and she jumped on Greg's back, causing Greg to stagger backwards, and crush my sister into a bookcase, which then caused him to pitch forward, with the weight plates falling off of the bar left and right, then he fell onto the carpet, and my sister Sheila now fell on top of him—and Rebecca's laughing even harder, and books are now cascading down onto my sister…books like, Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Exodus by Leon Uris, books my mother was reading at the time.
…and I did tell someone this time. I told my mom.
I told her what happened when she came home from the vitamin factory that day. I remember Greg had gone home by then and Rebecca was off laughing somewhere. Poor Greg, I mean after all, when a Playboy centerfold moves into your girlfriend’s place and you’re an 18-year-old high school athletic star with the devil on your uniform, you’re basically just taking orders at that point. Rebecca had left her hippie purse behind again, and my mother went straight to that purse and she TOKE found what she was SNIFF looking for, and when Rebecca came home later, my mother threw her out of our house and told her where to go…reminding her “not to stop on the way, honey.”
I never saw Rebecca again, at least not in person. When the magazine came out on newsstands early next year, our mother gave us “one look.” I remember standing with Sheila at the door to mom’s closet as mom, cigarette dangling from her lips, rifled through the pages waaay too fast and there was ginger haired Surfer Girl Rebecca, looking beautiful near some rocks…her nails were perfect. Mom even opened the centerfold page and matter-of-factly turned the magazine sideways so we all could see it “just once.” She then folded it back up, and put the magazine in her closet under a pile of sweaters in a place that I took extremely careful notice of, as I would be visiting that pile of sweaters again very soon and quite often.
Not long after that, Henry and Lorraine moved out, I moved back upstairs and my mom moved out of Sheila’s room and back into her own bedroom. When she did, my mother found a number of hardcore pornographic magazines between the mattress and box spring on the side that Henry had slept on, and when she asked him about it, he said: “They’re not mine…maybe you should ask your son about them.” Mom leaned down and peered under the bus I’d just been thrown under and she did ask me, and I somehow mustered enough teen cheek to say that whenever I brought pornographic magazines into the house, I always stored them under my mother’s mattress. She squinted and took a long drag on her cigarette, the length of which spoke: “Point taken” Besides…why would I settle for looking at naked pictures of total strangers, when pictures of Rebecca, The Girl Upstairs, were just under a pile of sweaters in my mother’s closet?
Share this post