"Very funny! Do you want to get punched in the nose?"
I hugged her and laughed. "I just wish I had a tape recorder going. I could play it back over and over, for the rest of my life!"
"You are really asking for it!"
I laughed some more. "It's just too easy. You know what else I want to do?"
Marilyn snorted and nudged me in the side. "Say 'I told you so?'"
"Bingo!" That got me another nudge to the side. "Nothing to do about it now. Suzie will call us sooner or later, and let us know what's going on."
Suzie didn't call us later, she came over that night! Dad had dragged Hamilton up to Newark the day before graduation, for the nurse's pinning ceremony (I guess nurses get a special pin for being an RN) and had brought up a U-Haul van to take her stuff home. They had loaded it and left it overnight. Hamilton would follow Dad home after graduation, driving the van. After the disaster following the graduation, Dad had stomped off to the parking lot and left Hamilton and Mom behind. Mom was reduced to riding home with Suzie, with Hamilton following behind them in the van. Suzie dropped Mom off and peeled out of the neighborhood before Mom could stop her. Dad wouldn't let either her or Hamilton back in the house!
We let Suzie stay the night, in one of the spare bedrooms. She drove back the next day and Dad helped her move into her apartment. He told her he had thrown both Mom and Hamilton out, and was calling a lawyer on Monday.
What a clusterfuck! The road to hell may be lined with good intentions, but in this case, I was the one going to hell, and my sister and my wife had the good intentions. I didn't want to find out where this was all going to end up, but I didn't like any of it.
Chapter 77: Reunion
Saturday, June 25, 1983
Intellectually I knew that my family's meltdown was not my fault, but rather the fault of my insane brother and his equally culpable mother. I was as much a victim as anybody. Emotionally, I knew otherwise. They were all the same people as on my first trip through, only I was different. That made it my fault, ipso facto, ergo sum, quod erat demonstradum, etc. etc. etc. Intellect had nothing to do with it.
Marilyn helped me. She simply couldn't understand my family; she had no idea how to react to them. Her family was so much closer. It was one of the things I found so appealing on my first time around. I had spent far more time with them than my own family.
Over the next few weeks things continued to fall apart back at the Buckman homestead. Dad had been absolutely serious about not letting the pair of them back into the house, and Mom had to load Hamilton into her car and spend the night at a motel. They stayed there until Monday, and then snuck in when Dad went to work. He got home and then threw them back out on the street. I heard from John Steiner that Dad was going a bit loco himself, and wanted John to be his divorce lawyer. John had refused and had given him the name of a good divorce lawyer in Towson. Dad didn't back down and Mom was served papers by the end of the week. John did mention that he didn't think Dad knew anything about the Buckman Group, so presumably Suzie was keeping her counsel on that.
On the plus side, the only person in the family who knew my address was Suzie, and she had come to the realization that giving it out would be a really fucking bad idea! My dad had our phone number, but it was unlisted, so nobody else could get it. He didn't call. Suzie told us that Mom was trying to enlist our aunts and uncles on her side of the fight, which probably wouldn't work out so well, since they were all on Dad's side of the family. I hadn't seen or heard from them since the wedding, either, so presumably I was not one of the good guys as far as they were concerned.
Suzie asked me if I wanted to use this chance to get back together with my dad, but I killed that idea real damn quick! I didn't have any use for him either. After putting up with this since I was fourteen, he had burned all his bridges with me. I knew that he loved Mom far more than he loved us kids. What if he decided that the way to get back in her good graces was to hurt my baby? I couldn't believe that he would actually have the gumption to stay away from her for good. They'd get back together. No way was I about to chance it. I just didn't trust him anymore.
What a damn nightmare!
There was nothing to do but slap a smile on my face and pretend everything was just peachy. On the plus side, it had been forever since I had really been involved with my family, other than my sister, so I still didn't have anything to do with them. It was simply depressing, but it didn't have any day to day impact on me. Marilyn worked at keeping my spirits up, and watching Charlie and Dum-Dum was amusing in its own right. I argued several times with my wife over which one of them was smarter, occasionally on different sides of the question. How much trouble could a 20 month old boy get into? The answer - an immense quantity!
Two weeks after the graduation we had our official house warming party. Everybody from the Buckman Group was there, along with their families (not including Missy's ex-husband), along with Andrea and Taylor and their families, Bill Marsbury and his foremen, some friends of Marilyn's from her church, Tusker and Tessa and Bucky, and Barry Bonham and his family. We just kind of threw it open to anybody who wanted to come. Suzie showed up, too. The weather was fine and we held it out on the back deck, which was brand new, and did hamburgers and hot dogs on an immense Weber gas fired grill Marilyn got me as a pre-Father's Day gift. That and a couple of galvanized steel tubs full of ice, beer and soda, and a bunch of lawn chairs, was all we needed to have a very nice time. Even Dum-Dum got in the act. Somebody, probably one of the little kids, managed to let her out into the back yard without being put on her tie-out, and she ran romping all over the yard until Jake suckered her with a hamburger and we could grab her and re-incarcerate her in the laundry room. We already had the back yard staked off for a potential future swimming pool and fence, but wanted to delay that for another year.
Marilyn was still making noises about another baby, which I had resigned myself to. I agreed that the next vacation was going to be a family vacation, maybe to Disney World in the fall, when Charlie turned two, and then over the winter we'd do a parent's vacation, and start working on our next child then. That got her so excited I got very lucky that night! If somebody had invented Viagra back then, I could have used it!
And then we had the next big event of the summer. Why I agreed to it I will never know. Marilyn certainly wanted to go, and Tusker and Tessa were behind it, and they talked Marilyn into pushing it. I think she actually got me to agree when I wasn't wearing any pants, so by all rights, the contract was illegal and invalid. Still, I couldn't get out of it.
It was 1983, and it was the 10th Reunion of the Graduating Class of 1973 at Towson High School.
I had only gone to my 20th reunion before, and that was because we had planned to be visiting Maryland that week anyway. On my first trip through, Towson High was something that I endured and survived. I hadn't even bought a high school ring until my mother found out and forced me to buy one. Certainly by the time the reunions started, I was hundreds of miles away, and had absolutely nothing in common with my old life.
I didn't have any excuses this time. I had missed the 5th reunion because I was living in North Carolina at the time, but now I was only 20 miles away or so. Either Tusker or Tessa must have given my new address to the planning committee, since we found several invitations and reminders in the mail. Marilyn wrote them a check for two tickets without even asking me if I wanted to go.