Counter Culture Adam Matcho
This was torturous for us, and I kept quiet. I felt it would be wrong to show any sort of resentment towards the unlucky children my parents had dangled over our heads like mistletoes. I always tried to imagine what they looked like, but I had never seen a real homeless person walking the streets of our Air Force base. The children I had in mind were products of television, kids out of Oliver Twist in ragged and patched clothing. Tiny Tim sorts speaking in cockney accents, eating mush by the spoonful and whose toes showed through the fronts of their shoes. Wouldn’t these children be better off with a new jacket and meatloaf sandwiches, rather than the Secret Wars Spider-Man with the black symbiote suit?
I even began to question why Santa Claus wasn’t taking care of these unfortunate children, leaving it to my parents instead. The only logical answer (according to church and my parents) was that they were rotten children. They must have been terrible and Santa and Jesus knew this and instead of receiving presents, they got lives of destitute. The one time I asked my father about it, he told me to stop thinking of myself all the time.
My brother, Carter, used a different form of logic.
“I wish I was homeless,” he said. “That way you would actually buy things for me.”
My father was quick to remind us that Santa Claus was watching and if we didn’t walk the aisles of the store, picking out fabulous gifts for the underprivileged, we would wake up to a barren tree on Christmas Day.
“Do you think I like buying these gifts for kids I don’t even know?” my father said. “I would rather buy them for you guys, but not if you keep acting like spoiled little bastards.”
This was one of my father’s favorite epithets for us — little bastards. It didn’t matter if we were at a family gathering, at the movies or if he was picking us up from school, we were his little bastards. Later in life, when I discovered that I was conceived out of wedlock and was a literal bastard, my father stopped using the phrase.
Although to this day, he often responds to us calling him father by claiming that we don’t know if he really is our father or not.
“I haven’t seen the test results yet, you little bastard,” he would say.
My mother never attempted to disown us, but used good old Catholic-Italian guilt to keep us quiet and humble. She would lead us through the aisles of Jamesway, or some other store, forcing us to point out the things we had desired most for the entire year.
“Oh, so you like this G.I. Joe?” she said, holding the latest version of Snakes Eyes in her hand.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s the only one I need and it comes with his pet wolf too.”
“Well great,” my mother said, placing it in the shopping cart, “Those poor kids will love it.”
“But what about us?” I said.
“I thought I did a better job raising you than that,” my mother would begin. “You want things for yourself when there are children who are starving and don’t have toys. You already have a G.I. Joe, but you always want more. I must have failed as a mother somewhere along the way.”
This would become my mother’s mantra to any sort of family crisis in the future, whether one of us was brought home by the police or caught smoking or didn’t do the dishes that particular day. But, at nine years old, I wasn’t able to see past it. I would feel terrible for upsetting my own mother and concede to the imaginary poor children.
“Those homeless fuckers,” I would think to myself.
For years I would hold a grudge against those less fortunate than myself. I knew the trick: they acted all hungry and diseased as they opened the presents that were rightfully mine. Then they would go back to their foster mansion, ride the elevator up to the toy room and toss my Christmas presents onto a pile of toys my parents and other bleeding hearts all around the world had given them. The kid who ended up with my Castle Greyskull probably didn’t even know how to properly use the slime chamber.
Up until then, I had always displayed empathy for others. My parents taught me compassion and, even at a young age, I understood that I could go without if somebody else was in need. One of my mother’s favorite stories to tell took place when I was in kindergarten and we had a Christmas gift exchange at school. Every child was told to bring either a boy or a girl toy ahead of time and the gifts would be distributed accordingly. Well, apparently somebody’s parent mixed up the message because there was a boy in the class who ended up with a My Little Pony. I had lucked out with a nice, unisex paddleball game. But seeing my classmate crying over his pink and lavender pony must have struck me somehow because I offered to trade.
