The New Discipline
The summer brought socialization during the day while Dad was at work. I neglected my chores and stayed gone from home a lot. Mostly it was harmless cutting up at Janet Roberts' house. We listened to music, danced a little, told stupid jokes and stories and just hung out. There were no drugs or alcohol but some of the kids started smoking cigarettes and actually did kiss the girls. Not me, however. Full puberty was still a few summers away. It was during this summer that my dad discovered the way to control me was to keep me away from girls, turn off the music and shave my head. I wasn’t that attractive to the girls anyway but shaving my head would only make people laugh and point their fingers at me. All the guys had long hair and that kept the girls away from me.
The head shaving started one summer afternoon when I came home from Janet’s house late. I can only remember one trip to the barbershop in my whole life until I started working. My hair was never long but as I grew a little older I was allowed to have a little more on top. Dad had always use electric clippers to cut the boys’ hair rather than take us to the barbershop. This time he didn’t just cut my hair. He shaved it down to the nubs. I looked like a convict. And now I was preparing to go to public school with new kids and I looked like a geek. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment…
Eventually Dad found Mary Lou. After a short courtship Dad announced one Sunday evening that he was going to marry the Junior High School gym teacher from Champagne, Illinois. She had one son, Tim, who was about two years younger than me. He had never known his father, who had disappeared before Tim was born.
It wasn't that we didn't like Mary Lou. We just didn't really know her and it had only been a little more than a year since Mother had died. We hadn't had any normalcy in our lives. Where our Mother had been warm and loving Mary Lou was perceived to be cold and logical. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized what a challenge it was for Mary Lou to take on 7 more kids. I should have been thankful. We all should have been.
The changes came quickly after the simple ceremony. They bought a new house a few miles away on Parker Road, just far enough so that we would have to change schools. I was not going to graduate from 8th grade with the kids I had grown up with. My choices were St. Dismas, another Catholic school that had always been Our Lady of Fatima’s arch-rival, or public school, Florissant Junior High. I chose what I thought was the lesser of two evils - public school.
Soon the gym teacher disciplinarian in Mary Lou began to come out and Dad jumped on the bandwagon. I think the first sign we were in for a bumpy ride was the merit/demerit board that Dad built and put up in our dining room. Each child had a little section for merits and demerits with the sharp end of a nail sticking out from the board. We all started with $2.00 allowance and had to accomplish certain chores to get the basic buck. We could do additional chores, which offered additional merits worth .05 cents each. If we failed to do any of our basic chores we got demerits worth -.10 cents each. If we didn't do the chores correctly we got demerits. If we acted up we got demerits. If we talked back we got demerits. I don't remember getting much allowance in that house. The board was placed just behind the seats that my brother and I were assigned to for meals. I remember that the little nails were at just the perfect height to stick us in the back of the head when we started yucking it up or tried to escape a backhand quickly. I got stuck regularly and nearly impaled once.
There were so many other things that were unusual about Dad and Mary Lou compared to our friends' parents. To keep us from watching TV when they left the house Dad cut off the plug and installed a socket so that you needed a piece of wire with a plug on each end to make the connection. It took us a while but we eventually learned about electricity and made our own plug. Dad and Mary Lou came home one night after being out and felt the top of the TV. Noting that it was very warm he surmised that we had graduated to deception. A search of my room produced our own device and we were grounded.
Mary Lou used to call us to dinner with a gym whistle. That was bad but it was worse on Saturday mornings when she would wake us up from a deep sleep the same way. I slept in the basement with Tim. The sound of the whistle echoed down the clothes chute into our little heaven. When we still laid in the bed, out of rebellion, she would pull out the big guns; a large glass of cold water in the face. We were constantly beat up verbally with sarcasm and anger. I remember Mary Lou telling me regularly that I had “diarrhea of the mouth and constipation of the brain” and being told that I was acting "retarded" a lot. There wasn’t much positive reinforcement at all during those years. We were treated like her own little gym class. And the head shavings continued.
None of our friends would come over to our house more than once. I think it was more my parents attitude. They didn't care about our friends. They didn't try to make them feel welcome. Their discipline was perceived to be meanness by the few friends we had. It made it even more difficult to make new friends. In retrospect I don't think it was meanness, just ambivalence. Some of my friends’ parents allowed their sons to have longer hair. If they were seen by my Dad he would make it a point to ask them “whose little girl are you?” He would say to me later that they “have hair like a God … damned dog”. Dad always wore a flat-top haircut in those days. Yeah, that was some funny shit back then, to a lot of adults, but for us…not so much.
