UNCLE CHARLIE & THE
CANDY MAN
by
Anthonystjoseph
Life in Arizona was turning out to be a
little better than life in St. Paul but some of the same old pitfalls were rearing
their ugly heads and of course my mother and her wonderful stories and nightly ‘Jack Daniels’ binges were always
present. My relationship with my mother was
starting to take an ugly turn. I was
getting tired of her stories and she was getting tired of my willpower. My willpower was becoming something of a curse
to me and a nightmare to others. My
maternal Grandmother, Theresa, had even nicknamed me ‘So’ because every time she tried to get me to do something I would
say, “No”. At my refusals to do some of
her bidding my grandmother would say, “If you don’t do… I am not going to cook you dinner”, or “You
won’t get to go out and play…”. I would
simply answer all of my grandmothers threats with “So”. She told me one day, “I’m going to call you
‘so’ because that’s all you say!” My
mother showing her Scorpion like nature combined with being born during the
‘Year of the Snake’ had resorted to the female art of psychological warfare to
try and get me to do things. She never
stood a chance with me in the mental challenge area. I had nothing to lose.
It had gotten so bad that I refused to do
anything but clean my room. I liked a
clean room. As a child, I would joke and
tell others that she had to put in an application for me to do the dishes and
that I had a stamp prepared to stamp all her applications ‘denied’! I think I was just
angry at the nomadic childhood of television and crazy stories that she was
providing. I didn’t think she deserved
my help. I would always tell her, “I
didn’t tell you to have me.” She lost
every singly battle up until the end.
She would always go into overdrive in her game like manner trying to use
others thinking and opinion of me to try and sway me to do
some of her request but I would not care at all what others thought of me. I cared more about the fact that I could not
be forced to do anything I didn’t want too.
A prime example is when she would try and get me to cut the grass in the
front yard. She would go out to the yard
at a time when all the neighbors were home, which was her intention. She wanted the neighbors to see her cutting
the grass while her no good son was
at home and think that the neighbor’s opinion of me would force me to cut the
grass against my legendary willpower. I would shove her own game right down her
throat and go out with a lawn chair at the age of fourteen and sit right there
in the front yard while she huffed and puffed as if she was an Egyptian Slave
building the pyramids! I didn’t care
what the neighbors thought! The
neighbors did in fact develop a dislike for me as these games were constantly
played out for their benefit. Later in
life I caught my mother in one of her severely inebriated moments with her husband Jack Daniels and asked her about
the yard cutting incident and if she was trying to trick me into cutting the
grass with the antics in front of the neighbors and she fell out laughing and
agreeing that that was exactly what she was trying to do. Epic failure on her part.
When my mother realized that she had no
say when it came to my actions she thought she should send me back to St. Paul to
spend the summers with my Uncle. This
wasn’t Auntie Connie’s twin brother, this was my mother’s twin brother
separated by a few years; this was Uncle
Charlie. Now I had already had some
history with this Uncle Charlie when he lived with us in Los Angeles. Uncle Charlie had his own little sneaky ways
but he was a man that I respected and cared for. He always seemed wise and like someone I
could trust. I look back on my summers
with Uncle Charlie and his wife as some of the best times in my life. Uncle Charlie’s wife cooked full course
meals for us every night and we sat at the table and ate dinner; I finally had
a family like the ones I saw on television; including a little cousin who was
my best friend in the world. It was the
childhood I always longed for. I never
acted up with Uncle Charlie except for normal childhood behavior and always did
my chores and whatever he or his wife asked me to do. I was happy.
Uncle Charlie suffered from the same
debilitating problem as my mother. Uncle
Charlie and my mom were both, in their opinion, cursed with light hair, blue
eyes, and white skin but classified by the world and themselves as Black
people. Uncle Charlie may have had green
eyes. They came from a time where no matter
how much African blood you had in you; if you had a drop in you then you were BLACK!
As children in Minnesota all
Black folks lived in the same so the black kids who were dark skinned always
teased my mother and her siblings. They
would tell my mother that because she was light skinned, she thought she was
better than them. In my opinion, this
put a childhood complex on my mother and all her siblings that they could never
break free of. My mother and her
siblings would spend their entire lives under this behavioral conditioning they
underwent as youths. Both of my Uncles
were so burdened by this situation that they both changed their names to
African names to confront the confusion head on. If you met my uncles and they told you their names
were Yusef or Ohadiwe then you might assume they were of African descent. I have felt sorry for them in this aspect for
most of my life. My mother saying she
was Black is about as ignorant as me saying I’m White! My mother with her blond hair and blue eyes and
my friends always asking me, “Is your mother White?” One friend even stood behind her when I
introduced him to her and made hand gestures of a pregnant woman while lip
synching to me from behind her, “You mean
that’s your birth mother.” I nodded
to him, ‘yeah’. I was used to it
happening and the constant question.
One thing that happened on my first visit
to Uncle Charlie’s house was my introduction to the act of a lie.
As far as I knew, I had never been lied to before nor had I ever
lied. As I told you, my mother gave me a
very sheltered existence and my lack of knowledge regarding lies is what had me
believing a little boy took a girl’s nut out of her vagina. I clearly had been lied too; case in point,
my mother and her crazy stories like the one about the ‘thirteenth floor’. I just had not known that I had been lied too.
It was the first week of my stay with
Uncle Charlie when his adopted son Victor hit me and I hit him back; he was
smaller than me so hitting him back wasn’t a threat. He then went and told his mom that ‘I hit
him’. I said, “He hit me first.” He said that ‘he didn’t hit me’. I was in shock. I had never experienced someone lie
before. To me it was the first time I had
seen someone lie. I remember the foyer
we were standing in to this day and where each one of us was standing. I never looked at him the same after that and
never trusted him again. He was capable
of fraud and deception in my opinion and not to be trusted. The summer was eventually over and I had to
go back to Arizona and live with Ms. Jack
Daniels who doesn’t cook and return to my dreary existence of life all
alone with the crazy woman and her crazy stories, my mother.
My mother had finally purchased her first
home so it looked like we had finally grounded ourselves and were going to
stick around some place for more than two years. The woman who lived next door to us was a
large southern black woman who became quick friends with my mother. Her son was two years younger than I so we
were expected to be friends. Since we
lived right next door to each other, we hung out together, but we were anything
but friends. We inwardly hated each
other and I am sure it’s because his spirit belonged to the dark side and mine
belonged to the light. His name was
Sammy. Sammy was my first real nemesis. I always seemed to have them wherever I went,
but Sammy knew he was my nemesis and I truly believe he received his orders
directly from the man who lives down below. I have come to realize that all people who
shine tend to attract those who can’t stand the light.
Sammy and I would play marbles and
secretly yet openly stare at each other like Clint Eastwood and Burl Ives
getting ready for a death duel. Guess
who I was. Sammy endured a hard life
with his mother. Sammy’s mother was
missing her index finger so whenever she pointed at you it would be with the ‘phuck-you’
finger so it was always funny to watch her point at something for Sammy to
do. My friend Sean and I would sit on
the six-foot fence whenever Sammy had to pick out a switch to get his whippings. His mom would send him out into the back yard
to tear a switch off the tree and he would take his sweet time picking one
out. Wouldn’t you? There is apparently an art form to picking
the right switch. Sean and I would tell
Sammy, “Pick one that will break!” He would
say, “No I’m NOT!” We asked him why and
he said, “Because then she’ll come out here and pick it herself!” He had clearly tried the process of picking a
harmless switch before.
Even
though Sammy and I were sworn and unstated enemies we continued to hang out
together since geographic boundaries gave us no choice. During one huge Hatfield/McCoy Eastwood/Burl
Ives feud Sammy and I had, the death of bees and my ability to pee straight
became issues. I woke up one morning in huge
anticipation to check on bees that I had captured and trapped in a jar and left
in a tree overnight having put holes in the lid of the jar so they could
breathe. I was going to be a bee
keeper. When I went up the tree to
retrieve my bee-farm-in-a-jar, I was shocked at what I saw. The jar had been riddled with shots from a bb
gun. Burl Ives, I mean Sammy, had pulled
his rifle on my bees. It was an act of
war. I had my own Benjamin Franklin pump
action pellet gun as you recall but this duel wouldn’t involve rifles. It would be purely physical because this
action would be punished by my own hand.
The hand of the local law, my hand.
I got down from the tree and stormed over
to Sammy’s front door. I knocked on the
door with an audience of Sean and two other friends who had come to see my Bee
farm. Sammy’s mom Helen answered the
door and could immediately tell that something was up. She looked over my head at the gathering
crowd and said, “What’s going on?” I
said, “Sammy killed my BEES! And I’m
going to GET HIM!” She squinted one eye
because she didn’t have her glasses on and said, “What do you think you’re
going to do to him?” I said, “I’m going
to SLAP HIM!” She said, “Oh yeah! Sammy! COME HERE!” Then she saw I was serious enough to do it
and pulled him back.” She decided to
just handle it herself and she really did handle it. She proceeded to point her ‘phuck-you’ finger
at me and tell me at the top of her lungs in front of the crowd that had now
grown to at least ten neighbors that I wasn’t even old enough to pee straight
so how was I going to slap someone. The
crowd roared with laughter and that old cloud of shame made its way all the way
from Minnesota and looked down at me and laughed. My familiar cloud of shame was back in my
life. I was getting use to that old
cloud at this point so I bounced back easily.
As young boys who live right next door to
each other do, Sammy and I still hung out with each other. Sammy told me about this man who came to the
neighborhood in his van and took the boys out to the nicer neighborhoods to
sell candy and make extra money. Believe
me when I say I had learned the value of a dollar. My mother was always tight with the money so
any extra always come in handy when it came to my Seven Eleven runs. Slurpee’s and two cent candy in a small brown
paper sack were a way of life. There was
nothing like a bulging brown bag full of two cent candy when I was growing
up. Hot dog gum was my favorite. I started loving the dollar when I use to
give Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Carnivals in the backyard of Uncle
Charlie’s house in Minnesota with help from Seven Eleven which provided cans to
collect money door-to-door and logos for the carnival. I would have booths with made up games. I have to be honest and say I lived like a
king with slurpees and candy during those summers because it was always ‘some
for Jerry’s kids’ and ‘some for TONY!’
God forgives all. Even presidents
of charities get paid a salary so let’s just say that I was on salary.
So, I start to go out in the evenings
traveling to far out neighborhoods selling candy door-to-door with a smile on
my face and a manufactured sob story coming from my mouth. Aunty Connie would later say that everyone in
our family is a natural salesman and this was very true in my case. I would rely on sales for most of my life and
it gave me a relatively cozy existence. Our
stories as children regarding why we were selling the candy door-to-door would
change based on suggestions from Dave the Candy
Man. This is where I learned and
fine-tuned the power of persuasion and the fact that if I persuaded these
people to buy candy then I didn’t need Jerry Lewis and his cans of door-to-door
donations I got from Seven Eleven to get my slurpees. I could get them on my own. I was clearly blessed with a natural ability
to persuade so I was very good at moving chocolate bars and became one of the
candy man’s best sellers. He would take
the top two guys at the end of the month up in his piper airplane and let the
number one guy take over the steering wheel up in the air. I flew an airplane at the age of fourteen.
One of the kids who sold candy with us was
another bully-on-tap, another nemesis. This
kid had the villain look with over pronounced eyebrows, huge perfect teeth, and
he smiled like Jack-In-The-Box. He
looked like a male Mamie Sue. This child
villain had decided that the reason I sold so well was because I got lucky all
the time. He had decided that he was
going to take my sales route. He
followed me and jumped in front of me to knock on this house’s door before I
did. I tried to stop him and he pulled a
knife on me. Now I could deal with Sammy
and his mama and her ‘phuck-you’ finger but this little demon and his knife
were more than I could handle. I let him
have the house and decided maybe candy sales weren’t so hot after all. This child villain had thrown me off my game
so my sales declined. I couldn’t get my
charm on at the doors because I was always checking the bushes for the kid with
the knife. The candy man didn’t take to
well to his top seller coming in with poor results.
After a few days of low candy sales, the
candy man turns into Mr. Hyde on me. He
looks at me in his van while he’s driving us kids back home and spits venom
like an angry child and says to me, “I gave you the best neighborhood and you
screwed it up!” I keep an eye on the kid
with the hidden knife while not paying attention to the candy man and this
upsets him even more. The candy man
tells the other kids to jump me in the back of the van while we’re driving down
the highway going around thirty miles per hour.
I’m starting to get use to the attacks at this point so I’m ready when
it comes. I open the sliding side door
to the van and scream with determination, “IF you don’t stop the van I’LL
JUMP!” He sees the look on my face and
its determination in not getting beat up so he pulls the van over and yells,
“GET OUT!” to my body as it’s already jumping.
He drives off and I walk to a phone to
call my mom to come get me and retrieve me from another one of my perilous adventures.
By
Anthonystjoseph
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