Family Life

July 10, 1971 at Truman Medical Center in Lee's Summit, MO was a momentous occasion for all mankind, even though it seems a bit of a blur to me.  If memory serves me correctly, at 6:51 pm, I was born the son of Doris Jean Wolf (mother), and Ronald Wayne Wolf (father).  I don't remember much of my first two years of life except for living in a house in Sugar Creek, MO and traveling to Tucson, AZ to visit my dad's parents on my 3rd birthday, where I subsequently have a very fond memory of "shaking hands" with a cactus.  It wasn't pretty, but I did get a $1 out of the deal .

Sometime early on, my dad had enlisted in the US Army, and in 1975 the family relocated to his new duty station...in Germany.  We lived over there on the top floor of an apartment building.  As opposed to America, there are not a lot of families who live in houses, but rather high-rises or apartments.  Even though I was only 3 or 4 years old at the time, I still remember visiting some of the magnificent castles such as the Heidelberg and the Hohenzollern castles.  The scenery is simply beautiful in that part of the world.  Somewhere in my basement I have pictures, so if you want to see them, you'll have to come over.  New Year's Eve '75-'76 provided a couple firsts in my life.  It all started out as an innocent New Year's Eve party with a bunch of my dad's Army buddies and an abundance of alcohol.  While adult beverages were being imbibed, and the Iron Butterfly blared from the speakers, the guys decided to make a tape of the occasion.  I don't know what brought it on, besides the drunken haze covering the room, but dad got me to say "Fuck You" on the tape.  Needless to say, when mom heard this little tasty morsel the next day or so, she failed to see the humor value of the situation.  The other first for me was waking up with a hangover.  I was sipping Tequila Sunrises the previous night, and apparently anything else I could sneak.  I had a good time over there and as mom and I were on the airplane heading down the runway to come back to the US, she said that someday we'd come back.  Unfortunately we never had that opportunity.

Dad's next duty station was Fort Sill (aka: Fort Silly) in Lawton, OK.  We lived there from '76-'77 and this was my first mass exposure to other kids my age.  Yup, that's right.  For those of you doing the math, these were my Kindergarten days.  I attended B.C. Sweeney Elementary, which was only a few blocks away from our duplex.  I don't recall how I got to school, but after a grueling day of playing with blocks, having milk & cookies, story time, recess, and napping, I would walk home with the neighborhood kids.  Mom would have a little snack waiting for me, and when dad got home from doing whatever he did at the Army base, we'd have dinner and settle down to a night of quality family time.  That would include watching such intellectually stimulating television shows as "The Six Million Dollar Man", "S.W.A.T." or "Little House on the Prairie".  If nothing else exciting was going on, we could always count on our neighbors to be screaming at each other, in which case, we would put a glass to the wall and eavesdrop.  Living in Lawton was probably the last time I can remember my dad being in the Army.  From what I understand, he received a Dishonorable Discharge.  So, after this we moved back to the Kansas City area.

All this time, mom was a military wife, so she just stayed home and took care of me while dad was at work.  Once I started going to go back to school, she went back to work at INA (Insurance Company of North America) in downtown Kansas City.  It was located on the 21st floor of the Commerce Tower building.  In the mornings, she would drop me off at grandma's house and would pick me up in the evenings.  Occasionally she would work overtime on Saturdays, which was great.  I actually looked forward to waking up early in the morning, and going to work with mom on those days.  We would get there around 6:00 in the morning when it was still dark outside.  I always went to the break room and stared at the city lights until the sun came up.  When that happened, I'd turn the TV on and watch "Looney Tunes" all morning.  Eventually, mom would commandeer me to help her pull files and organize them.  This was before everything was on a computer, so finding specific files was all sorts of fun.  Mom was adamant about keeping me in the Independence school district for some reason.  Even though we lived in other school districts, we used grandma's address to determine what school I went to.  For 1st through 4th grade, it was Ott Elementary.  We were the Ott Otters...how gay is that?  Luckily, in time they changed it to the Ott Cubs or something like that.  Dad worked at some car radiator factory at the time, and we'd pick him up after work.  Mom and I would park in 7-11's parking lot across the street from the warehouse and would wait for dad to come into view after walking up the gravel driveway.

In November 1979, one of the worst times in my life took place.  It was a Saturday afternoon.  Dad and I were watching a western on TV, and we were going to cook some popcorn in the kitchen when suddenly we smelled smoke.  Dad jumped up noticed that the pan of oil had caught fire.  He picked it up screaming and ran outside and threw it in the backyard.  When he came back inside his forearms were all burned up and he had to go to the hospital.  Later that evening, mom and I went to grandma's house to take her to the store.  This was a weekly routine, so there was nothing unusual about it.  Except for when we arrived, nobody was home except for the dog, a German Shepard named King.  At the time my two uncles still lived with her.  Dennis was 19 and his brother, Terry, was 21.  The next morning while getting ready for church, mom received a phone call from grandma, when she suddenly broke into tears.  She told me as gently as possible that my uncle Dennis was dead.  That explained why nobody was home the previous night...they were called in to identify the body.  He was found by two kids, lying at the bottom of a creek bed in a park near the house.  The official autopsy indicated that death was due to a high BAC of .31 and sniffing glue.  But the family leaned more on the belief that he was beaten to death due to the black eyes, swollen face, bruised knuckles, and numerous lacerations.  All we know is the last person to be seen with him was one of his hoodlum druggie friends and they were heading towards the park, where he was later found dead.  After the funeral, this same motherfucker is suddenly in the Army.  Supposedly there was a homicide investigation, but nothing ever came of it.  I was only 8 years old at the time, but that marked the first time in my life I have ever been so deeply saddened over an event.

Less than a year later, I can remember coming home on my birthday only to discover that dad packed his shit and left us.  We were renting a couple bedrooms from a friend, and everything was cleared out.  This was after he got a nice sum of money from an insurance settlement stemming from a car wreck that my dad and I were involved in.  We were in the left lane and some non-driving bitch in the right lane decided to take a left turn in front of our car.   So with all that extra money I guess when you have a wife and kid to support, the most appropriate thing to do is go out and buy a truck, a baseball uniform (huh???), a couple rifles, and leave your wife with your fucking unpaid debts.  He was seeing another woman, whom he eventually married.  But in the meantime he decided it would be neat to steal a car, thus going to jail and then the local half-way house.  If only every 9 year old kid had such an amazing role model, what a society we would be.  One thing led to another and they got a divorce.  From that point I remained with my mom, and never saw my dad again until 9 years later.  He never visited me, and I never got child support, so I guess it all worked out.  The only other time I saw him was a few days prior to me leaving for boot camp, and that was only a quick meeting outside his workplace in the parking lot that none of us really cared to be at.  It was a bit uncomfortable trying to pretend that I cared about the bastard who had abandoned mom and I for some bitch who he later had a kid with.  At this point he was already a world class loser, but he later improved upon that dubious title 8 years later by demonstrating what a worthless piece of shit the son of a bitch truly is.

In the winter of 1981, my mom married James.  His first wife died, and his second marriage ended in divorce.  Due to this new marriage, I acquired two step-brothers which wasn't so bad, considering I was already good friends with the youngest, Randy.  We were basically the same age, but the older step-brother, Brian, was a few years older than both of us, so he had his own circle of friends.  Since I've never had brothers before, the concept of competition was new territory for me.  Competition between the step-brothers and myself, the competition between my mom and step-brothers, the competition between my step-dad and myself.  It was kind of like "Survivor" and there were tribal alliances.  Jimmy (as we called him) bought us boys stuff, but his boys always got the better end of the deal.  When mom would buy us boys stuff, I'd come up with the better end of the deal.  During birthdays or Christmas time, his boys would always get the cool toys from that side of the family, while I would get the less-than-cool toys.  While they're getting Lamborghini multidirectional remote control cars, I'm getting a Stomper 4x4 or a Rubik's Cube from their side of the family.  His boys had the cool BMX bikes, while I was stuck with the purple Western Flyer with accompanying vinyl flowery banana seat acquired from some farmer's barn, or from the shady old man who operated a pawn shop and sold bicycles out of his garage.  This episode of tender bliss lasted about two years until they decided it'd be best to get a divorce.  So, mom and I lived with grandma a few months before we found a duplex to rent.  In the meantime, Jimmy married and divorced some other woman with 3 kids.  Around Christmas '84, mom started seeing Jimmy again, and after a few months they got remarried.  Sure enough it's dejavu after a few months, and they split up over that summer, just in time for me to go to Independence schools.  More precisely, William Chrisman.  That's where my mom graduated from, and during her marriage to Jimmy, I was going to Fort Osage schools, therefore there was always some sort of rivalry that I was caught between.  Given that, we moved back in with grandma, until we found a townhouse to move into.  After this divorce, Jimmy found another specimen to add to his collection of wives.  Soon enough, he and his 2 boys, and her and her 3 daughters moved into a house in the Independence school district not more than 1/2 mile away from us.  Unbelievably that marriage lasted quite a while (5 or 6 years).  At least until they separated.  Then for some dumbass reason, my mom started to see this guy again.  By this time, I was serving overseas in Okinawa, Japan in the Marine Corps, and I could really care less.  His boys are married with kids, and I'm about to get out of the Marines, so whatever they did really wouldn't be effecting me much.  Like clockwork they were married in September '93 and like clockwork, they separated in December '93 with a divorce soon thereafter.  But not content in being alone, he remarried his previous wife.  Are you confused yet?  I am.  Enough with the baffling mix of marriages, let's move on to my more immediate family.

My grandma (my mom's mom) who I've been mentioning in this pseudo autobiography was a big influence in my life.  She was a feisty old woman and generally cynical of everything.  You name it, she had a problem with it.  Preachers, politicians, rich people, cops, football, and anyone who didn't like the KC Royals.  She smoked 2 cartons of Marlboro Red's every week, and consumed large amounts of Pepsi.  This was a woman who was set in her ways.  During the 80's, every time a story about Ronald Reagan came on the nightly news, she'd go off on a rant about how he's a senile warmonger who's just waiting to push the button.  And God forbid if you change the channel while she's watching a Royals game, or tune the TV to a football game with all those "queers smacking each other on the ass".  She would always be willing to help me with homework (especially math).  She worked at York Archery making bows, arrows, targets and everything else.  She would get discounts on equipment and get me goodies.  Because of that, she would always take the time to help me on my archery skills.  All that changed in November 1990.  I was stationed at Camp Pendleton, CA awaiting my turn to head over to Saudi Arabia to be with the rest of my unit, when one night I had a note on my barracks door saying I need to go see the Duty Officer at the Battalion office.  The Duty Officer had a message that I needed to call home.  When I did, I found out that my grandma had passed away of cancer.  I was on leave just a couple months earlier, and she was having troubles with her right arm, but that's about all we knew.  I took emergency leave to come home for the funeral.  That was a terrible time in my life as well.  The next month I was shipped over to the Persian Gulf.

In 1992, my mom went to the doctor and found out she had cancer.  I was in Japan at the time and was shocked.  Fortunately, after a few radiation treatments, that was the end of that....or so we thought.  Two years later in 1995, it was back.  She spent the next two years doing miscellaneous chemotherapy treatments and taking all sorts of drugs.  In June 1997, she went to the hospital for surgery.  That's when the doctors told me that mom said she did not want to go through any more cancer treatments, and that she would be placed in Hospice care at home.  While recovering in the hospital from the surgery, I could tell things weren't looking too good.  She was later released and taken back home where she could live out her last days with familiar surroundings and familiar faces.  Ironically enough, one of the volunteers to stay with my mom was Barb.  Barb was the woman whom Jimmy remarried after divorcing my mom.  Stranger things have happened I guess.  After a week or so of literally withering away in the living room, mom finally passed away around 5:00 on the morning of July 5, 1997.  Word spread like wildfire and everybody, even people whom I didn't know, showed up for the visitation and funeral.  Everybody except for the one person who I figured would show up for no other reason than he was once married to her and was my dad.  I wouldn't say that I was hurt by him not attending the funeral, but I was more perplexed than anything.  His brother Frank (aka: Sasquatch), who I haven't seen in probably 15 years, could make it, but my dad couldn't?  That just showed me that he didn't care about mom and I to begin with, and still didn't care about us during her death.

As far as I'm concerned, I have no immediate family.  On my mom's side, I have some aunts and uncles who are farmers in northern Missouri, but I haven't seen them in years.  My dad's side of the family are a bunch of hillbillies in southern Missouri, and I have no desire to talk to them.  I have my friends and that's what matters to me.  People say that I'm a fucked up individual, or that I'm a coldhearted bastard.  I can see where they're coming from to a certain extent, but I've learned by experience that the only person I can really trust is myself.  That could be one of the underlying reasons why I haven't gotten married.  Maybe one day.  If I want something bad enough, I'll get it.  I can't rely on anyone else to help me survive.  I can't just lay back and expect life to treat me with kid gloves.  Sure, I could mooch off my friends and depend on the government to house, feed, and clothe me, but I have a little more self respect than that.  I'm not blaming my past for the way I turned out, but it definitely helped shape my outlook on life.

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