now?
That was my childhood. I was asking myself a lot of questions. I remember the first time I heard the words “I love you” spoken out loud in a spontaneous way. It happened when I was eighteen years old, picking up one of my best friends for a night out. As we left the house he called back to his parents.
“Bye mom, bye dad – I love you.”
To which they responded: “We love you.”
I remember I was teasing him about it. I’d never known anything like that. It certainly didn’t happen in my family.
My mom and dad would never say anything like that. They would never say, “I’m proud of you.” We either got ignored, or we got the crap beaten out of us when we weren’t doing what they wanted us to do.
As a little kid, growing up in an environment like that, where there’s no affection, your natural instinct is to feel that something is wrong with you. You start to think that if you’re not loved, you’re not worthy of love. You’re not lovable, and you start looking for answers.
People who grow up in abusive situations – whether it’s physical, mental or emotional abuse – will often become spiritual in one way or another as a result. They look inwards for answers to the questions they feel they need answers to. They start spending time in nature, and wondering why the world is the way it is.
I had this fort in the back garden that my dad and grandfather built when we were in elementary school. There was a turtle pond built out of concrete with a long streambed my grandfather helped me build for my turtles. It had a pump and a little waterfall.
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I used to go there after school and sit for hours, listening to the wind blow through the fence. I would listen to the breeze in the trees, and watch the turtles, and the goldfish – if the local cats hadn’t snatched the goldfish.
I used to feel like an alien from another planet. I had a hard time relating to others my age. I felt different.
I was contemplating the big questions in my life:
Why is my dad kicking my ass? Why do my parents not love me? Why don’t they care about me? Why is life so hard? Why are my grandparents so mean? Why does everyone in my family seem to dislike each other so much?
Everything had seemed pretty good in our family in the early days – from when I was really young. There were times when we truly seemed happy. We moved around a bit. My mom moved from Florida and lived on a military base in Warner Robbins Georgia while my dad finished his tour of duty in Vietnam.
My aunt showed me letters that my mom had written back then, and she seemed really happy being married to my dad and being a mom. We lived in Illinois for a while. We were way out in the boonies by the cornfields, and it was cold. Sometimes we couldn’t attend school because of the weather.
My parents said they paid $5,000 for a three bedroom, two bathroom house there – it sounds hard to believe, given what we pay for a house today. We lived there for five years, and they eventually sold the house for $25,000. It’s interesting from the point of view of my real estate business, but that’s not why I mention this part of my life. Besides the terrible weather, it was also a testing time for my mom, and it offers some insight into her state of mind, as well as the atmosphere in the home.
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First her father died in 1976 from a massive heart attack, and then she had to watch her mom slowly pass away from cancer.
My grandmother knew her time was limited, and so she had an outfit made that she was to be buried in. By the end her leg was so riddled with cancer that it had become enormous. My brother and I weren’t allowed to go see her anymore.
My mother and her two sisters used to care for her, and watched her slowly pass away. She would have to bandage up the leg all the time, because every time it moved, the skin would rupture. It must have weighed heavily on my mom. The last few months my grandmother didn’t even recognize her own three daughters or know who they were.
In later years I also learned that my great grandmother suffered from mental illness, and got locked up in asylum for the latter part of her life. They say it skips a generation. In a later part of the book I’ll talk more on this subject, but there were influences on my family from that side too.
By the time I got to sixth grade, my folks bought a coin laundry business. The people they bought the business from were dirt bags, and swindled my parents. They had to work hard to make the
business stay afloat, and they probably didn’t think of it as a success in the beginning – but for me it was a positive experience. My dad stayed working in retail until the business grew enough to where he could leave and work with my mom full time. They eventually built it into a very successful and lucrative business. They had the self- serve coin laundry business, wash-dry-fold, dry cleaning, draperies and large hotel and restaurant accounts.
When I wasn’t at school I worked at the laundry doing wash-dry- fold, customer service, folding towels and sheets, and interacting with customers. It instilled a good work ethic in me. I liked working, and making money, and it helped me come out of my shell and get
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some experience in dealing with people. I started developing the people skills that would be of such great value later in life. My brother was lazy and would talk about how hard he was going to work and how much money he was going to make, but most times, shortly after we arrived at night, he just crawled underneath the folding tables and went to sleep next to our dog.
Slowly but surely I was starting to fit the pieces together. I was learning the things that would eventually shape my own path, and my own destiny.
I could see the patterns of behavior that was keeping my family trapped.
It’s not like my parents were horrible people. They just didn’t know any better. They grew up in dysfunctional families, where everybody was cold and emotionless. It seemed to be a tradition that came down from the time of my great grandparents – who knows, maybe even further back.
My grandparents moved away from New York to get away from their parents, and my own parents did the same thing. It was a perpetual cycle. It was generation after generation of loveless relationships. There was really no change.
Meanwhile we were living in an atmosphere of tension and hostility. The Vietnam War came and went, but social events closer to home were starting to come to the boiling point. Racial hatred was at an all- time high, and the middle school I attended was a battlefield. Black kids and white kids were in a kind of war – except instead of rifles and shells, it was fists, rocks and bottles.
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