MY HAPPY CHILDHOOD.

I was born in Brooklyn, NY in September of 1965.  My parents were married but I've never met my father.  Shortly before my birth he told my mother to "choose between him or me".  Needless to say she chose me .  My parents divorced and my father disappeared, presumably to start over elsewhere. He never paid child support nor did he ever write or call.  My mother was born and raised in the backwoods of Puerto Rico in poverty, ignorance and abuse. Her biological father never acknowledged his paternity until years later. Along with her mother and her mother's boyfriend she moved to Brooklyn, NY in the 50's.  Although my mother's upbringing was harsh she never inflicted anything like it on me.  However, it left her with scars.  During my childhood and adolescence my mom was a drug user and in several abusive relationships. Drug use was a fact of life in my home and in the homes of many of my peers.  We lived in a somewhat more honest time when a ghetto was still a ghetto and not an urban center.  I grew up in the Brownsville and Bushwick neighborhoods of Brooklyn.  I went to high school in Harlem.  I regularly purchased "grass" from Jamaican dealers for my mom.  I also purchased and transported, in my school back pack, "black beauties" for my mother and her friends.  Cocaine was called "the rich man's drug" and I bought it for my mom in ten dollar quantities tightly wrapped in aluminum foil.  All of the above may strike you as a horrendous example of parental neglect on my mother's part.  My mother loved me, fed me, cooked and washed for me and taught me many good things.  My mother taught me a love for reading and art. My mother, perhaps as a result of her own overly strict and abusive upbringing, gave me the space to be myself. She taught me how to survive and how to deal with sexual predators.  Yes, my mom was a drug user but she was my mother.  Try to understand that all of the drug use by my mom and her friends was just a part of the landscape.  I never thought about it.  My peers parents, for the most part, were doing the same thing.  We never talked about it.  It was...normal.  A trip to the Jamaican dealers for "grass" was as prosaic to me as a trip to the grocery store.  Many of the adults in my neighborhood were welfare cheats, scammers, con artists, house burglars, small time dope dealers,pimps,prostitutes and petty criminals.  The local park was an open air drug market and a hunting ground for homosexual predators looking for young guys.  (I know it's not PC but that's the truth.)  Violence was one offhand remark, one lingering stare away.  This was my childhood.  One of the defining conditions of childhood is powerlessness.  This is why so many fantasies are about kids who gain access to power.  Comic books, horror and science fiction films, novels and art were the only constants in my formative years.  My mind soared above and beyond the grimy streets of my youth.  It's funny in retrospect but we didn't think of ourselves as "poor people".  We were just who we were and nothing more.  Politics and world events happened to other people in another part of American society.  The ghetto is a world unto itself and like a foreign country, they did things differently there.   If you're still with me then I'll leave you with this: my childhood was a happy one.  My teenage years are a tale for another day.