Home » Books » Self-Help » Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional

Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional

Author: Isaac Fitzgerald

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Genres: Self-Help

Publish Date: July 19, 2022

ISBN-10: 1635573971

Pages: 256

File Type: Epub

Language: English

Book Preface

My parents were married when they had me, just to different people.

That’s the way I open every story when I’m asked about my childhood. I was a child of passion! A happy little accident. Or, put another way, I was born of sin: a mistake in human form, a bomb aimed perfectly to blow up both my parents’ lives.

My mother grew up in a big old red house in North Central Massachusetts: a hill town surrounded by river towns, all of them now emptied of hill people and river people, their main streets boarded up after most of the industrial jobs moved down south, before moving out of the country entirely.

The house dated back to the 1700s, set on a farm on an ancient turnpike. My mother grew up there among sheep and chickens and geese and even a few horses and a goat, her parents flinty and unforgiving people who loved the land. My mother worked hard, went to a respectable college in Maine, married a Unitarian minister. They had a little boy, Joel. Her life was idyllic, apart from the restlessness in her heart.

My father was born to mill workers in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In the 1800s the town had been one of the world’s largest and most important whaling ports. Melville mentioned it in the opening pages of Moby-Dick. You can still visit the Seamen’s Bethel today and admire its bow-shaped pulpit. You should know, however, that the church installed it only after Moby-Dick was published—the image an invention of Melville’s—and that the novel itself was mostly written far from the sea, closer to where my mother grew up, in the whale-shaped hills of Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

My mother’s family didn’t have much, and my father’s family had less. New Bedford, like any good fishing port, was a rough town back then, and when he was growing up my father made trouble the way children in rough towns do, but he was also the first of his family to go to college, after which he got a job selling textbooks and eventually married his high school girlfriend. They had a daughter, Kerry.

My parents’ lives mirrored one another’s in many ways—both had married their high school sweethearts; both had kids already; both had nice lives that they could have kept on living until they died. Both were smart, itchy, unsteady people who had read too many books, if such a thing is possible, and I’m pretty sure it is.

When the whaling industry began to fall apart, many of the whalers moved west to California, hoping to find their fortune. I mention this only because before they met each other, both of my parents did the same: moved to California, looking for a better life. But both returned to the East Coast without discovering whatever kind of gold it was that they’d been seeking. Years later, believing I was the first in my family to do so, I would do the same. Only to find that in an attempt to escape my parents’ shadows I had simply been following their stained and tattered map.

My parents met at divinity school, which is a pretty funny way to start an affair. I could add that to the story next time I tell it, although it’s also not funny, especially to my parents. Divinity school wasn’t a joke to them. They entered as two separate people, both in their thirties, confused and lonely and searching for some kind of salvation—but they wanted to find it the hard way.

They met in an Old Testament class taught by an older professor named Dr. Holladay—I called him “Doc Holliday,” like the cowboy—with whom they would eventually end up living when I was a baby when they had no home to call their own and zero support from their families—my father’s having none to give and my mother’s so disapproving that they chose to withhold it all.

I believe it was my mother’s only affair. I know it wasn’t my father’s. They would tell their spouses they were going on spiritual retreats—then abscond to the White Mountains in New Hampshire to spend time with one another, camping to save money.

My mother would eventually break it off. She had a son and a husband with a good job and a house. A family. The beginnings of a life. This was just a panic fling, she told herself: one final push against the life that was expected of her before she settled down.

My father, not new to this game, talked my mother into one last trip to the mountains.

In what can only be described as the dictionary definition of TMI, I know that both my parents were using birth control during this trip and that despite their precautionary measures I was conceived on top of a mountain. Mount Carrigain. I know this because my mother told me. Telling a child at a very young age, whom you’re raising in the Catholic Church, that he was a miracle conception is a choice. Messy parenting, maybe, but it makes for another good story.

My mother debated telling her husband that I was his. She didn’t know what to do—she and my father had broken up, after all, and he was predominantly out of the picture.

On the cover of my baby book the name WILLIAM ISAAC HELLEN is lovingly embroidered in red cloth letters onto dark-blue patterned fabric. The first name for my father, the middle name for me, and the last my mother’s maiden name. My whole life has been spent with teachers and officials asking, “William … do you prefer Bill? Or Will? Or …” “Isaac,” I’d respond to their surprise. And then add breezily, “My mother didn’t understand first names.”

Eventually my father came back on the scene, his wife having grown weary of his infidelities. After a year living with the kindly Dr. Holladay in his cramped apartment, our little trio finally landed at the Catholic Worker, a socialist Catholic charity that housed the homeless and fed the hungry. Soon my parents were a part of their community, and so was I. We were living in the South End of Boston, first on Dartmouth Street when I was a baby, then on Tremont Street as a toddler, and finally at John Leary House—a low-income apartment building run by the Catholic Worker on Massachusetts Avenue. It was called Mass Ave for short, and as a child, I used to think our street was named after a church service, not the state we lived in.

I loved those early years. I loved growing up in Boston. My father would go running along the Charles River, as I biked beside him, pumping my little legs in an attempt to keep up. Or he’d take me to Fenway Park. This was the eighties, before the Sox were a winning team and before Fenway was almost constantly sold out. My dad would buy standing-room tickets, the cheapest you could get. Come the second or third inning, he’d have us in seats down by the field, so close you could smell the grass. Sometimes the seats belonged to season ticket holders who hadn’t shown up; sometimes they were just empty. But if the ticket holders ever did arrive, or security got curious, my pa would turn and say, “Oh, I’m very sorry. It’s just that the seats were open and, well, it’s my son’s first game.” We almost always got to stay in our seats, or would sometimes be ushered to even better ones.

I must have had a hundred first games.

I loved hanging out in the soup kitchen, too. Haley House. I was surrounded by all sorts of people there, people just like me, or people not like me, from various walks of life; but because we were at the soup kitchen together we were like each other; we shared something important. Community. I was surrounded by stories of the highest comedy and the deepest tragedy, by the sounds of pealing laughter and suffering silence. I didn’t know my experience was any different from the way other children grew up. I was poor but cared for; back then my parents were good to each other and to me, and nobody told me I was supposed to be miserable. I was taught magic tricks that were more like street hustles than anything you’d do with a top hat and wand—tricks that trained you to ignore the patter and the dazzle and keep your eye on the cards, searching for the sleight of hand.

One Haley House regular taught me bar tricks I’d use later in life, demonstrating them to me with the small glasses meant for communion, filling them with apple juice instead of whiskey.

“I bet I can drink these two big glasses before you can drink those two small glasses.”

“No you can’t!” I’d respond, even though I already knew the trick.

“It’ll be hard, but I can do it. Give me a little head start: I’ll drink this big glass first and then you can try to drink those two little glasses before I finish the second big glass. But there’s just one rule: You’re not allowed to touch each other’s glasses. That way nobody can cheat. Okay?”

“Okay,” I’d agree. I watched as he chugged the first big glass. The moment he finished it, my hand darted out to reach for my first little shot of apple juice, which I quickly drank. But before I could pick up my second shot, he placed his first empty glass upside down over my second little glass. Then he slowly sipped his second drink, savoring every drop and smiling as I laughed and tried to figure out a way to remove his glass without touching it.

Even before I learned how to read I learned to respect books as a second religion. My parents’ faith in literature was as strong as their faith in Catholicism; maybe stronger. No matter what else we didn’t—couldn’t—have, my parents surrounded us with books. Our apartment was bare save for milk crates overflowing with novels and plays and history books and collections of Shakespeare and, of course, the Bible. Stories matter to my family. My earliest memories are of my parents reading to me. Every time we moved, they always left our hand-me-down chairs and rickety tables on the curb, knowing they could get cheap furniture elsewhere. But the books were packed away in boxes and stuffed into whatever old, rusted car the family was driving that year.

Your parents’ obsessions can so often become your obsessions, especially if your parents themselves are hard to hold. I fell in love with the idea of adventure after my father read me The Hobbit at five. I fell in love with and also gained a deep respect for the sea after he read me “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—not to mention an almost ridiculous fear of seagulls when he failed to explain that an albatross was a completely different type of bird.

Even from a young (too young?) age, I knew what a great opening line I had in “My parents were married when they had me, just to different people.” I had been read so many books, heard so many opening lines, that those were the shapes I thought and spoke in. Everything was books; or no, wait, everything was stories.

In my story of my family, everything went to shit when I turned eight years old. Happy to sad, light to dark, together to apart. The stark divide of it in my memory makes me think of Sara Crewe, the heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, who is having an incredibly baller birthday celebration at her boarding school when the headmistress receives word that her heretofore-rich colonizer father has died and left Sara penniless. The headmistress goes yoink! “Party’s over, give me your stuff, here’s a burlap smock to wear while you work as an unpaid servant at the school you attended until just two seconds ago.”

Maybe it wasn’t that sudden for me. But when our lives changed, it had hinged on one decision: My parents decided that city life was no longer for them. I had gotten mugged at gunpoint around the corner from where we lived (I wasn’t hurt and the mugger apologized to me when he saw that I’d peed my pants), and a man had recently been shot on our apartment building’s front stoop while we were asleep in our beds, the dried blood still visible the next day. But whatever the reason, my parents believed that the solution lay in blowing up their lives yet again.

While my father stayed in Boston for the time being, my mother and I moved to the small rural town in North Central Massachusetts where she had grown up. We lived in a gray house right next door to my grandmother’s big red one. My mother’s mother, who still could not believe or accept what my mother had done to her life. Whose disapproval and anger was powerful enough to spread far and cloak both houses.

I’m sure the move looked like an appealing next chapter to my parents. Running away from the “dirty and dangerous” city to the “fresh and unspoiled” countryside. It just sounds appealing—romantic, even. Yet it all turned out so horribly that I still can’t believe they didn’t read the warning signs. That it might be a bad idea for a married couple to endure long periods of separation, especially when one of them had previous issues with monogamy. That it might be a bad idea for a daughter to move next door to her harsh and judgmental mother, whom she’d been lucky enough to escape once already, with her bastard child in tow. That it might be a bad idea for a mother and son, accustomed to living in a city around people and life and heat and voices, to uproot themselves and move into the woods, and its silence.

Each time I retell this story, I feel the urge to stop it. Like shouting at a horror movie. Don’t go down into the basement. Don’t go. Don’t.

Though we moved, we brought our poverty with us. We went from city poor to country poor. In the gray house, the paint was chipped and the rooms drafty. A large cast-iron stove sat at the center of the house, which we used to heat ourselves, and also the bricks we’d bring up to warm our freezing beds. Out in the backyard was a rusted-out water pump that froze in the winter, as did our clothes that we hung on the line.

I missed my father the way you miss something you don’t know is missing, which is to say I didn’t know why he was gone. I could feel the trouble but I couldn’t put words to it. Meanwhile, my mother cried herself to sleep most nights, asked me to stay in bed with her some nights, and spoke to me more like a friend she could confide in than the child I was.

Because of this, I began to treasure my private time. My deep loneliness transmuting into something else, but something related—an aloneness. I was changing. I came to love those hours each day when my mother was at work, teaching at an elementary school many miles away, and I had the house, my whole life, to myself. Living at the edge of town, I was the first child picked up on the bus route every morning and the last one dropped off every afternoon. Walking a half a mile to the end of our road, I often popped into the woods to smoke a cigarette, a bottle of stolen cologne hidden in the knot of a tree nearby, as if spraying it would cover anything up.

My bus driver was a wise woman named Trudy who would pretend not to notice the tears on mornings when my mother’s sadness managed to work its way into my heart, who was well aware that whatever was going on in my home wasn’t good. Trudy never pushed, was never obvious, but would say something light, something comforting. I didn’t have to ask for her reassurances, and I never would have asked for them. Trudy just knew.

Almost immediately after my mother and I moved to the country, my father had an affair in the city. An affair my mother would come to know about and which proved everything her parents had said was true. An affair that would wreck her, and us.

But they stayed together. Eventually, my father was able to leave the city and reunite the family, living next to the in-laws who hated him even more than they hated me and my mother’s choices. Then I learned about my father’s anger. And I learned that these things—her sadness, his anger—were mine as well. Life at home got so hard that trying to make everything better, trying to hide away, was impossible. Instead, I claimed my inheritances.

When I was eight, my mother told me that she had almost aborted me. The sun was shining, and we were driving in her beat-up white Toyota Corolla station wagon on the one road that went to the center of town. We’d been living in the gray house for just a few months; my father hadn’t yet come to join us.

The heat rose off the small highway in waves, making it look like the asphalt was covered in water. I was wondering what made that happen—a very eight-year-old thing to wonder—when she suddenly spoke the words aloud.

The still, humid air in the car hung between us as we crawled up the crest of a hill, the engine noisy with lack of oil. I concentrated on the heat shimmer ahead, hoping that the conversation was already over.

“Maybe it would have been for the best,” she said. And then, as they always did, more words spilled out of her.

I didn’t react. I just stared at the glistening blacktop, wishing the waves were real and the water below so deep it could swallow up the entire car, taking us along with it.

My mother was sick. She was in a desperate place. She told me too much about the eight years of my life and how they came about, as if it were a way to pass the time, to keep her madness at bay. She would talk and talk, and I would listen, probably more than she realized. Letting it all pour into me. All these family stories.

I divide my life into two time periods. There is before eight, and then there is everything that came after. There is before my mother told me she almost aborted me and then there is everything that followed. My mother had yet to reach the bottom of her sadness. The violence of my father hadn’t yet crept into our house. The coming decade stretched long and terrible in front of us.

“Maybe it would have been for the best.”

The car drove over the shimmering asphalt. We didn’t sink into the water but continued down the road. Crashing into whatever would come next.