Chapter 16 Like Father Unlike Son
Determined not to be like his father, Little Ralphie ended the cycle of bad behavior by using his father, the male stereotypical image that feminists want everyone to accept as the norm for all men and as an example of how not to act. He hated how his father belittled his mother, abuse that escalated whenever he had been drinking. Then, when you combined that with when he had a bad day at the track, his behavior was worse, much worse.
"You're stupid," he said with a look full of hatred. "Coma Connie," he said. Coma Connie is what he called her when he was full of booze.
He called her Coma Connie because whenever he started his tirade against her, she always had a comatose expression on her face, a self-protection mechanism that she wore like a suit of impenetrable emotional armor that she developed after years of enduring his verbal and physical abuse.
Although, she still heard every word and they still hurt as much, her self-imposed comatose condition emotionally removed her from the scene allowing her not to react to his words and antagonize him to beat her, again. She severed her emotions, otherwise; she might pick up a knife and stab him as he slept. It helped her not to feel the sting of his hatred now, nonetheless, later, after he left the house, it manifested in bad behavior on her part, and unfortunately; she directed that at the children.
She yelled at and hit the kids for no good reason other than for not cleaning their room, picking up their things, a dropped dish, disobeying her instructions or challenging her authority. A challenge to her authority sent her in a rage worse than any hostility that Big Ralphie directed at her. The act of getting seven kids up, dressed, and out for school, children who had stayed up late watching television and eating junk food the day before, was emotionally disturbing for anyone within earshot, which included the entire neighborhood within half a block radius. The morning ritual of angry abuse charged with screaming, slapping, and crying traumatized anyone who experienced it, as well as witnessed it.
"Too much smoking," he said picking up her cigarettes and flinging them in the sink full of dirty dishes. "It robs your brain of oxygen and makes you lazy, Coma Connie."
"Don't touch my freakin' cigarettes." She made a grab for the cigarettes, but Big Ralphie's hands were too fast. Connie jumped up from the kitchen table and rushed over to the sink. She rescued her cigarettes, pocketed them in her housecoat pocket, and sat back down. That was her last pack of cigarettes and she had no chance of buying more until she stole money from Big Ralphie's pants pockets, as he slept. Big Ralphie never smoked. He boxed s a kid and preferred picking up his first rather than picking up a cigarette.
"What do you do around here, anyway?" He surveyed the room. "You don't work, you don't cook, and you don't clean house." He picked up a dirty dish left on the table from the night before and flung it breaking it in pieces against the wall. "All you do is smoke and talk on that damn phone." He walked towards the phone. "I'd like to rip the Goddamn thing out of the wall and throw it out a freakin' window."
"Don't you dare touch that fuckin' phone." Connie armed herself with scissors. Her faced developed the look of a patient angry with another resident in an insane asylum. She got up, stood beside the phone, and raised her scissors at shoulder level.
The phone was her escape and Big Ralphie knew that when Connie said the word dare that he had better back off. He learned that when she gave him a concussion with a frying pan after he flung the cat out their second story window. A direct hit on the cranium, the blow sent him reeling to the emergency ward by ambulance. Big Ralphie went down for the count like a boxer taking a dive in a first round knockout. When he regained consciousness, he told the doctors that he fell in the kitchen and must have hit his head on the stove.
The cat, Figaro, continually licked itself, licking its paw and wiping it across its face and up on to its head. They assumed it had fleas but, even after flea baths and flea collars, Figaro constantly licked itself, a nervous habit that unnerved everyone, especially Big Ralphie, which is why he flung it out the window. Figaro landed with a screech on all four paws and ran up the street. They never saw her, again.
Although Little Ralphie had never seen his father hit his mother, he suspected that he had, when no one was around. Big Ralphie, an enforcer and collector for the local bookies, knew how to hit someone, hurting them internally, without showing bruises or bleeding. Little Ralphie did not like that his father was mean and that people feared him. When walking with his father, whom he avoided at all costs, people hid in doorways waiting for him to pass before stepping out or ducked down side streets when they spotted him approaching.
Instead of having a normal conversation, his parents argued. They argued about everything. They argued about nothing. They argued when they woke up, during the day, and before going to bed. The circumstance that started the argument might differ but after arguing for only a few minutes, the heated dialogue reverted to the standard argument, an argument that neither Big Ralphie nor Connie ever won. Whenever Big Ralphie left slamming the door behind him or when Connie resorted to hiding herself in her comatose state, they put the argument on hold until they could return to it that night or the next morning.
Little Ralphie memorized every word. He mimicked them, moving his lips without sound, as he lay in his bed listening with the covers pulled over his head to their inane and never ending argument.
"You're never in the mood."
"You're never here."
"I'm here, now."
"I'm not in the mood."
"See."
"See what?" She looked at him with a face full of hurt and contempt. "I'd be in the mood if you gave me the money that you give to your whore girlfriends."
"I couldn't give you enough money to get you in the mood."
"You give me a headache."
"I'd like to give you something else."
"You're too drunk to get up your something else."
"I drink because you reject me."
"You drink because you are a drunk."
"You drink more booze than I do but, you don't call it booze, you call it wine."
"Go fuck one of your whores."
"Maybe, I will."
"Fuck you."
"Fuck you."
They played this game of verbal hostility everyday. While some of their children huddled in corners with the same comatose expression on their faces that Mommy had, others showed signs of growing up just like Daddy.
Ralphie did not hide, become comatose or imitate his father, he went out. Just as his mother could not wait until his father left the house, Little Ralphie could not wait to leave the house to roam the streets of the North End. He'd rather be working selling newspapers at the corner than staying at home listening to their bickering.
As much as he hated being home when they argued, he hated being there when he was alone with his mother. She trashed Big Ralphie whenever she had his ear. He was the oldest and when Connie was not complaining to one of her sisters about Big Ralphie, she complained to him. He suspected that this was his mother's way of making him understand that he should not behave like his father and that his father was not how a man should act, especially to his wife and children.
"He's a no good son of a bitch," she would say in-between sips of black coffee and drags of her unfiltered cigarettes when complaining on the telephone to one of her three sisters. "D'ya know what Big Ralphie did, that no good son of a bitch?"
Even she called him Big Ralphie to distinguished him from her father-in-law, Little Ralphie's grandfather, who was just plain Ralphie and who was much smaller than was his son but much nastier in temperament. Big Ralphie's father hated her and had nothing good to say about any of the kids, except for little Ralphie, maybe because they shared the same name, and maybe, because he saw something in Little Ralphie that he saw in himself. He was small like his grandfather and was shrewd like him, too.
"He's a no good son of a bitch," she said again taking a long drag of her cigarette and exhaling a cloud of blue haze that hung round her head like a rain cloud filled with thunder. The phrase, he's a no good son of a bitch, punctuated an hour-long conversation that ended only when one of her other sisters called or came to the door. She spent more time talking with her sisters than she did interacting with any of her seven children. The children took care of themselves with the eldest one raising and responsible the younger ones.
While other kids were playing ball or hanging around getting into trouble, Little Ralphie worked a double paper-route. He did not deliver newspapers like some of the kids outside the city; he sold them while standing outside the subway station in the cold, the rain, the sleet, and the snow. He only had a thin sheet of plastic to protect him from the elements. He hawked the early edition before school to those customers going off to work and he sold the late edition to those coming home from work. He was always out there selling his newspapers and scrapping together whatever money he could to buy the things that he wanted. He was of the belief that if he did not take care of himself, no one else would.
He only returned home between newspaper editions in time to make himself a sandwich. Then, after he sold his last late edition newspaper, around 6:30, he went home to do his homework, grab whatever food was available and collapse to bed hoping that he was tired enough so that he would fall asleep and not have to listen to their continual arguing.
