Teepees and house pets

My sixth birthday I celebrated in a tent during a rain storm in Phoenicia, a small town near Woodstock in Upstate New York. My parents gave me a cupcake with candles in it to blow out,a boxed set of The Lord of the Rings, and a small ornate jeweled dragonfly statuette. I am not sure what happened to the dragonfly or even why I had wanted it or if I had a desire for it in the first place. I honestly cannot give an accurate accounting of how long we spent living in the teepee but it was to my knowledge almost a complete summer.

Ostensibly we lived in the teepee to experience nature and test ourselves. I think that the true motive for our living situation experiment was to see if such a drastic change could help my dad clean up his act. When I was very young, four or so, we lived in a house near the Highschool I would later attend. The family that owned the home had split it into a duplex and rented to us. I remember watching Thundercats and some of the Disney channel there, and making a snow triceratops in the winter with my dad. The house itself was an older home with tall ceilings. It could easily have been two stories but instead had lofts at the ends of a large living room with vaulted ceilings. This was before my sister was born so it was just my parents, our cats, and I. I don't think we had kitty boy yet, my first cat, but we had Muskrat who was a pretty terrible cat at times. I remember he didn't like me and would intentionally use my bed as a litterbox.

In that home I have some of my earliest memories of my parents fighting. The kitchen was immediately to the right as you entered the home, to the left was the living room and dining area, above the kitchen was the loft my parents slept in, across from that on the far end of the living room was another loft that my mom used as a studio, and below that off to the side was my bedroom. I am sure the house is smaller than I remember it being.

At the time I didn't piece everything together, but this particular night was so confusing and troublesome that it has stuck with me my entire life. I think it was a night in the late summer when my mom didn't come home. David, my dad, asked me to come up to the loft with him and keep him company. He was an expert at asking me questions that children should not be asked. As a baby I had answered some of them remarkably well which I think gave him reason to continue this habit throughout my entire life. An anecdote about my precociousness as a toddler (?) was that once I came to him and asked what was at the end of the universe.

"I don't know, bud, what do you think?"

After a short pause, "The past."

Who knows if this is true. I also had a very convincing story that I told them about my other family. I invented a black family that I lived with in San Francisco. I said that my father was a poor trumpet player who drank all of the time and that my mom had to work so she could feed me and my 5 brothers and sisters. This was not so different from my future.

On that strange night my dad asked, "Do you know where your mom is? She's with another man tonight. Do you know how that makes me feel?"

I am not sure I would have an adequate response to this even today 22 years later. I didn't know then nor did I know for years but apparently my parents had agreed that when they got married if they felt like they had met someone who they had a special connection with they could pursue that without betraying their marriage. This experiment was a huge failure.

"I don't know dad, maybe she'll come back. I know mom loves you. Its going to be okay."

I spent the night upstairs with him and mom didn't come home. We talked and he showed me the book he cherished, it was some sort of ancient Rosicrucian book, small leather-bound and gold leafed. After he died that was one of my two requests that I receive from his possessions but it was no where to be found. The other is a piece of the Golden Gate Bridge that sits on my dresser as I write this. What I've learned is that this isn't a true piece of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it was used as a promotional material for a book by the same name by Alistair Maclean. The novel is a conspiracy thriller about the President being kidnapped in plain-sight as his motorcade crosses the Golden Gate. I'm sure my dad knew what it really was but he let me go on thinking that it was a real piece of the bridge for most of my life. It is fitting that the one thing I wanted from my dad was something used by a writer. I stayed up very late with him and did my best to comfort him.

The next day my mom came back and immediately they were screaming at each other. My recollection is hazy but I remember David putting a hole in the wall with the shillelagh, how is that for Irish by the way? A shillelagh is a club used to cudgel people and wild dogs. For most of my life at home we had it in place of an American baseball bat, you hear a loud noise you grab the shillelagh. I think ours was made from blackthorn sapling. Its bark was pitch-black and the wood beneath it was a deep red. It felt deadly and looked intimidating despite its relatively small size. It was probably no longer than two and a half feet. As a terribly small and innocent child I stood in the middle of their screams trying to calm them down. I remember being shocked at how angry and careless they could be while I hoped with all of my heart that something I was saying would make them stop fighting. Nothing ever did. The fight would escalate until my mom would become afraid for her safety, then she would take me and leave. I believe the subject of this fight wasn't only her sleeping with this other man (who knows what really happened) but also that my mom was threatening that we would leave.

"I'm going to take him back to my mom and start a new life. This is wrong. David, you aren't listening, David I can't take this.. Look what we're doing to him. David calm down."

In all likelihood he was drunk by now, and my father was a particularly malicious venom-tongued drunk. At some point during her attempt at communicating David grabbed the shillelagh and smashed it through the wall. "You're going to take my son from me? Therese you weren't even here last night. Where were you? Who's going to watch him when you're off doing whatever that was?"

My mom grabbed me and left. We flew across the country to Los Angeles and her mother took us in. David soon followed. He tracked us down and somehow convinced mom to take him back. Shortly after my sister Emma was born. Later that year we moved back to New York and started this whole teepee business.

Rita and Chris were a lesbian couple that were family friends. Chris had a stable with an Appaloosa and was more handy than I will ever be. She had lived in a teepee for a couple months and loaned us hers to use. She helped us set it up but we didn't do a very good job of things. The top of a teepee is supposed to be very tight, in order to allow smoke to leave but not much rain to enter, our opening was about four or five times the size it should have been. The property where we made our semi-permanent camp was owned by an older couple that were friends of friends. I would lurk around outside their house, well as much as a five year old can lurk, until the woman would give me shortbread cookies. Because of our lacking teepee skills when it rained the water would put out whatever fire we had burning and collect inside the teepee, quickly turning the earth into mud. For this reason we kept our three person tent set up in case of rain.

That summer there were record rains. We spent entire days inside that tent. At the beginning of the summer we brought a small zoo along with us. I brought my turtle, Five Dollar Bill (his cost), my hamster (which ate all of its young and would readily attack even me), and a cat. Unlike the humans of our family, including my less than one year old sister who was learning to crawl on the forest floor, the animal family members quickly realized that there was no benefit to living with a family outdoors.

As unlikely as it seems, Five Dollar Bill was the first to escape. Our campsite was half a mile from a healthy river and the noise of rushing water could be heard during the night. On a night early in June, Five Dollar Bill slowly and purposefully walked out on me, right into that river.

The cat occasionally still came for food but had become even more aloof until one day it altogether stopped showing up. Most likely it replaced us with another family, a family with a house.

On warm, dry nights we slept in the teepee and took full advantage of the extra space. We kept some of our belongings in the tent, mostly books and things that had to stay dry. Among those things was the hamster's cage and in it the hamster. So on this night my sister and I were already asleep when my parents heard something rattling the cage. I must stress that this hamster was a terrible creature. Even at an age where I loved all living things and refused to eat meat, I knew this animal would never love me. It stood on its hind legs and hissed at me, barring its petite fangs whenever I tried to feed it.

So upon hearing this rattling, my mom says "Gee, it really sounds like something is trying to get into the hamster's cage.. Don't you hear it honey?"

"I don't think I hear anything."

"Are you sure? I sure wouldn't want anything to happen to her."

And as my parents feigned concern my last pet, although it was a poor terrible creature, was eaten alive by a raccoon.