8:36 am - Wed 6/05/02
My Life Story (Part II)

The 70s

The biggest event of the 7Os had to be my ending up with the Pupo family. I think I was around nine years old at the time (I spent some indeterminate period of time in three different foster "placements" in between Mrs DeHaven and the Pupos, but beyond a handful of anecdotes, I don't really remember them).

The Pupos were my family, for better or worse, through most of the decade, from the time I was nine years old till I was a junior in high school (Since I started first grade late--I spent some time in a "special school", because it was thought I might be retarded--I was eighteen years old in '79, a legal adult with a year of high school left to go).

If Barbara Pupo, the mother, had any feeling for me at all, she never showed it. Mark Pupo, the second oldest son, actively disliked me, at least that was my take on his silence (We passed maybe a dozen words in my time time there), and Omar Jr., the oldest, was just odd. John, who was close to my age, and Debbie (Later "Debi"), the youngest (And the only girl), were the two kids I felt closest to.

It was hard for me to assess how "strange" or how "normal" this family was, but my take on it now is that things happened that didn't happen in "normal" families. I remember what seemed like a pretty high level of violence--the oldest kids beating up the younger ones, physically fighting with the mother, and the father going from disciplining with the belt to his fists--in addition to sexual goings-on between the siblings, and in my case at least, sexual abuse from Mr Pupo (I never thought about it until recently, but the sex between the siblings makes me wonder now if Mr Pupo confined his sexual interest to me, or if he abused his own children too at any point).

The most important person in my life in the 70's, sadly, was Omar Pupo, the patriarch of this unhappy clan.

Like with Mrs DeHaven, after all these years, I'm not sure I have any clear "take" on him now. I don't remember a lot of "good stuff," though I know there had to be something. But there was sexual abuse (A brief period early on in my time there), there was physical discipline (Did it rise to the level of "abuse"? I don't know), but probably most destructively, in my own mind, there was verbal abuse. He called me "lazy" and "clumsy". "Herman Munster" and "Clem Kadiddlehopper" (For those too young to remember, "Clem Kadiddlehopper" was a Red Skelton character).

When he wrote in a letter a couple years back that he had "loved" me, I believed he was sincere, which makes his behavior during my time in his house all the more confusing. My armchair analysis of it is that he hated himself at some level, and saw me as a reflection of himself at that age (I remember him telling me one time, "You're more like me than my own children).

I had an angry exit from the Pupos.

When I think about it, it seems like there had to have been more going on than this precipitating incident; It was a Sunday morning. I remember I'd made a mess in the bathroom--the toilet had overflowed, and I had "cleaned up" with a bunch of towels, which I then just left there.

Mr Pupo stormed into my room a few minutes later, propelling me into the bathroom, yelling about the mess I had made. He grabbed me around the back of my neck, and tried to push me down onto the bathroom floor, I guess to stick my nose in the mess. I said "Get your fucking hands off me!", and knocked his hands away. He backed up a few steps, looking shocked (And maybe a little scared), then gathered himself and said, "If you don't like the rules here, you can leave".

And I did.

(My feelings around that event have grown more complicated in recent years. There's an element there that feels triumphant to me. Empowering. And I wonder what was going on between the two of us. And I've wondered whether it might have been better to have any family at all, dysfunctional as it may have been, than to have no family at all, which is where I've ended up. That debate will probably go on the rest of my life.)

An important element of my life in the '70s was church (I have a few, vague memories of church before that, but so few and so vague that I would be genuinely surprised if I regularly attended church before the Pupos).

The Pupos attended church three times a week, at least in the first years I was with them (Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday prayer services). While we were still in West Virginia, there was the Church of the Nazarene (Where I have vague memories of Mr Pupo leading some services), and the Pentecostal church (Which scared me), but the church I remember as "church" was when we moved to Michigan, and started attending the Free Methodist church in Durand.

The bad part of church, for me, is that it made me feel more guilty and scared than anything. I think I took the "original sin" stuff to heart, while the "love of God" stuff eluded me. I remember being "saved" at least once, but it didn't take; To this day, I'm a man without a God who is at the same time afraid of dying and "burning in Hell".

I remember the church placing particular emphasis on punishment and fear and "the blood of the lamb", and what you shouldn't do, than on anything that felt very positive to me. As I grew older, I also grew more aware of the hypocrisy of the Pupos as "christians", and also of the contradictory currents in my own being, between wanting to believe, and wanting to reject this institution, this "God", that felt more hurtful than anything else.

The good part of church, and I've tended to gloss over this, is that it was my first real outlet for performing (I have exactly two memories of performing in the 60s, both of them disasterous; One was when I was "Peter Cottontail" when I was maybe five or six, when I burst into tears and had to be led off stage, and the other when I was asked to sing for an audition for some Boys Club choir thing, and once again burst into tears from having to sing by myself in front of other people).

The first performing I did was in Xmas programs and the like (I even led the "Young Peoples Service" once or twice). I don't remember much in the way of feedback--the Free Methodists didn't applaud after a performance, they just murmured "amen" and "hallelujah"--but I guess I got enough from it that it started me on the road to acting (I remember a Mrs Anibal telling me, "The Lord's gonna call you to preach, Butch", Butch being my nickname at that point. I also remember one Xmas program where I had gotten pretty full of myself, deciding I could just glance at the piece I was supposed to have memorized before I went on, and of course, totally blew it).

I certainly drew pictures when I was younger, but it was in the 70s when I first remember trying to draw in earnest (For some reason, I didn't become an artist--Probably because no one noticed or nurtured whatever talent I had--but it has meant something to me over the years. It's something I have the urge to do every couple years or so--I do seem to have some degree of untapped talent for it--and it's always something I tell myself I want to develop and do more with).

I drew, almost exclusively, superheroes from my comic books, still the dominant "theme" when I do get out paper and pencil.

I taught myself to dance during the 70s. I remember that Omar Jr. had a phase where he was trying to dance like the people on Soul Train (My memory of his dancing is that he wasn't very good), and I remember thinking to myself, "Well I could do better than that...".

I started watching Soul Train and American Bandstand, I watched the Jackson Five (Especially Michael), The Spinners, The Temptations. I watched Grease and Saturday Night Fever (The first suit I bought with my own money was a white suit, a la "Tony Manero"). I danced alone in my room for what seems like hours now.

I've never thought much about it really, but it must have been quite a release for me--and maybe a challenge to Mr Pupo, who had called me "clumsy"--and I know I got a lot of satisfaction out of being able to dance (In tenth grade, I won the high school talent show by dancing a solo to "You Should Be Dancing" by the Bee Gees. I hadn't seen Saturday Night Fever at that point, but I had seen a clip of Travolta dancing to the song. I won $25, which was maybe the first time I'd gotten money from performing).

Two people who come to mind as "important people" from that time are Tim Foley and Carrie Mead.

Tim was my best friend for a number of years, though like a lot of things from my past, he seems kind of fuzzy to me now. I remember being very impressed that he could draw, and play an instrument, and he just generally seemed very creative and funny to me (I have that trait to this day, but maybe everyone does; I want to be very impressed by what my friends can do).

I don't really remember our friendship in a day-to-day sort of way, but we had a lot of "creative collaborations" (Though I think he really did most of the "creating"). There was a movie called Montana Madness (And another, a "Frankenstein" ripoff called Ramanthus, that his parents put a stop to when his grades slipped), a bizarre comic strip about a worm and a slug's adventures in a dead body, a magazine/underground paper called Fecal Matter, and a very strange band we called The Roxxville Illinois High School Marching Woelfs" (The spelling was intentional)

That relationship ended when Tim got a girlfriend. I got jealous, and he was basically over it at that point.

I'm not sure, but I think I knew Carrie from as far back as 4th grade (She was in the grade behind me), though my real memories of her are basically from junior high on.

There were a group of us who hung out together (I think that maybe started in junior high, but really developed in high school).

I hit a pretty rough patch for awhile there. I'd left the Pupo house, Tim and I had "broken up", and I pretty much alienated everyone with a couple episodes of bad behavior (One was telling the director of the school play--You Can't Take It With You, in a burst of embarrassed anger--he had yelled at me in front of everyone--to "suck my dick", and quitting the show. The other was when I got drunk at a party and had some kind of nervous breakdown/psychotic episode, something serious enough that I was taken to the emergency room to get my stomach pumped, it being assumed that I had to have been on drugs or something).

When the dust settled, Carrie was the only friend left standing.

Carrie became my best friend, my only friend, for that last part of high school. It was only many years later, in an offhand comment she made, that I realized she had thought of us as "boyfriend/girlfriend", while I never had, even though I lost my virginity to her when I was 19. I just considered us "buds".

Looking back on high school (76-80), the things I remember most are the social life--the friends I had, then lost--and the performing (In addition to the plays, I did the morning announcements with Tim at one point, was in forensics one season, in the "Radio Broadcasting" category, and was in vocal music--first chorus, then choir, and from choir, Madrigals--throughout the four years. At the senior class banquet, I was voted "Best Actor", which I was very proud of, especially since it meant I'd beaten out Keith Hoshal for it).

(Next Time--"The 80s")

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