As the divorce process ran its course a new twist occurred. I’m assuming that Mom and Dad had agreed in principle on the distribution of assets, even though the final divorce decree had not been issued, because there was another change in resident parenting at the house on Cayuga Rd. Mom was leaving and moving into a Condo closer to Cardinal Gibbons, and Dad was moving back in. I loved both my parents, but finally a little less estrogen and a bit more testosterone… ya, at the house was me, all my brothers, and Susie, and we would be living together again… or so I thought. Mom moved out and into a motel while her condo was being freshened, and Dad moved back in. During the week, it was Dad and I, it wasn’t awkward anymore, it was ‘things back to normal’. After a month or so Dad talked to me at dinner one evening, he said, ‘Michael, I want you to go and live with your mother and take care of her’, my heart sank in my chest, this was completely out-of-the-blue. I said, ‘Dad, do I have to?’, he said, ‘yes’. Ah, crap, back on the estrogen roller coaster. That weekend I packed all my things and was driven to mom’s condo. Are you getting to see that I’m never ever consulted on decision concerning me?
At mom’s condo I had my own room, and it was a nice place, but not as big as the Sea Ranch house, no beach club, no beach, no Sea Ranch friends, no brothers or sister. The only plus was that it’s shorter walk to school, which also made it easier to skip school. Mom work everyday at Largo-Mar, so the condo was empty all day long. I had made new friends at school some of them lived in condos just down the street from mom’s. We all would walk to school in the morning and start talking before the homeroom bell. We would look at each other and say… ‘do you really want to go to school today?’ The usual answer was, ‘No’, we would walk out the front gate and down the street as the homeroom bell rang, we would just laugh. Skipping school and staying in a condo all day got very old, very fast, so we started taking field trips to different sections of Ft. Lauderdale and Miami. This went on for months, not every day, but lots of them.
All the absents came to the attention of the Dean of Boys, kind of a judge and executioner, I’d get summoned into his office and make up one excuse after the other. Eventually the lies were uncovered and I got detention, after getting my ass paddled. Now the dean of boys was the Basketball Coach’s brother and I was the basketball score keeper, so I thought to myself… ‘this will be an easy detention, a couple of hours and I’m free, he’s part of the family’, well, no, detention was early Saturday morning. I showed up for my first detention and was told that my detentions were indefinite… I said, ‘what does that mean?’, he said, ‘you’re here every Saturday until I tell you not to come anymore’. Ah, double shit… For the first two Saturdays I cleaned bathrooms in the boy’s locker room, it is the most disgusting job in detention and it’s where all newbies start. The dean poked his head in and said ‘how you doin?’, I say ‘doing great, love’n it, hell I’d do this with a tooth brush if you had one’. The dean disappeared, I figured he was out testing other detentionee. A few minutes later he pokes his head in again and says, ‘here’, as he throws me a toothbrush, I says, ‘it would go a lot faster if I had 2, one for each hand’, he just laughed and walked away.
I should stop for a moment, there is an unidentified mutated gene that the Scott’s carry from there origins in Ireland, a sarcasm gene that most other people don’t have, and can frequently make things seem funny to us, but make things worse too.
By the third Saturday, the dean of boys gathered us all together to distribute tasks for the day… he looks at me and says, ‘go get me a cup of coffee and donuts from 7-11, here some money… get some for yourself’, I say, ‘OK’ and start walking toward the gate in the parking lot, he says to me ‘where you going?’, I say, ‘walking to 7-11’, he throws me the keys to his car and says, ‘this will be a lot faster’, I say, ‘sure will’. Now, let’s remember I don’t have a driver’s license as yet, but no matter, 7-11 is only 3 blocks away. For the remainder of the year, I showed up every Saturday, I was the designated ‘go get’ guy, driver and toward the end of the year I started managing the newbies, while the Dean sat in his brother’s office, drinking coffee, eating donuts, and reading the newspaper. Finally, a few weeks before the end of the school year, my detention term was finally commuted.
As the end of the school year got closer, we all started talking about the fun we would be having during summer vacation, going to the beach every day, meeting the girls, going skiing, living the dream. All that changed when report cards were handed out, I had flunked one semester of three different subjects and I would not be allowed to move to Sophomore year without a passing grade in all three subjects. That meant summer school, two sessions of summer school, summer school all summer. I remember thinking my life is over, no beach, no girls or at least they would be all picked over by the time I was out of school each day. Oh, crap.
Every time I was at the Sea Ranch house visiting my family… see how strange that sounds? Visiting my family, it’s like I’m an inmate on work release. Anyway, every time I was at Sea Ranch and my brothers were there, my oldest brother would start talking mom down, trying to convince me that she was the reason the family was split up, mom was a bad person, stuff like that. This had been going for a while, but I just let it go in one ear and out the other, I wasn’t getting in the middle again.
One of my other brother’s got married in late fall and would be spending his honeymoon and summer at the house in Stone Harbor (SH), with no parents present. Now that got my attention, no parents, just us… adults. I wanted to be there too. My other two brothers had spent the entire summer the year before in SH and didn’t get into any trouble so they were allowed to do it again. Somehow, I had to get in on this, but there was summer school, how could I go and do summer school? I told Dad about summer school and that I wanted to go to Stone Harbor with my brothers, he said he would call Gibbons and ask about options. He finagled something where I could attend an accredited school in Middle Township, NJ and get the credits I needed to move on to Sophomore year. Middle Township was about 5 miles away from SH and one of my best friends in SH, Joe, went to summer school there every year, so I had a ride and best of all, we’d be back in SH by noon. Ya man, I can do this.
I told mom I want to go and she eventually said OK. My newly married brother left for SH two weeks before my older brother and I were to leave. We decided, the night before we leave, I get all my stuff from the condo and stay at the Sea Ranch house to make leaving easier. That night my brother picked me up, I had everything packed, and said goodbye to mom… she said she would miss me. A little later that evening I remembered that I had forgotten some stuff I needed, no one was at the house to drive me over, so I walked. I rang the bell, but mom wasn’t home and I had given my keys to mom when I left… no matter I always left one of my windows open so I could sneak in and out as needed. I got into my bedroom and turned the light on and there was men’s cloths lying on my bed, they weren’t there when I left earlier. Just then I heard the elevator door open and footsteps heading toward our end of the floor, I turned off the light, rolled open the door to my closet, lied on the floor and rolled the door closed. I heard someone open the front door and I could identify mom’s voice, but there was another voice too, that I could not identify, it was male. I lied very still and made no noise, they came into my room and picked up the cloths and moved them somewhere, turning off the light as they left. A few minutes later they went out the front door, I waited another 10 minutes before I moved, opened the door and got out. The cloths on the bed were gone, I looked around the condo and found them in the closet in mom’s bedroom. I walked back to the Sea Ranch house and the next morning bright and early we left for Stone Harbor.