Beating the Odds: An Autobiographical Rags to Racing Story

By Caesar Gonzales

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 12, 2006
• ISBN: 9781465320872

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Copyright © 2006 by Caesar Gonzales.

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Contents

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INTRODUCTION

I was inspired to write about my experiences in my childhood after attending my 20th Year high school reunion. I have no pictures of myself as a child and was curious to see how I appeared then. The child that I saw in the pictures displayed there looked frightened, and I could see bruises on his arms. My classmates said, at the time, they knew something was wrong but didn’t know what to do about it.

Here it is 30+ years later and I still see and hear about children being starved, abused, and killed by their parents in the news. There are many more that don’t make the headlines. Children are still being lost in the system, with social workers and politicians alike scrambling for excuses and taking measures that amount to little more than symbolism over substance. One politician, who was running for President of the USA was forthright enough to tell me that children cannot vote, so he was orienting his concerns to viable voters.

Child abuse occurs at a rate ten times that of childhood cancer, yet spending on childhood cancer research exceeds funding for child abuse programs by a ratio of 49 to one!

Children with a rebellious nature and no fear of reprisal will say anything to anyone. They are aware of what to say to whom to get the result they seek. To the guidance counselors and social workers involved, these are victims, regardless of cause or motivation. In these cases, logic and common sense usually take a back seat to taking action for a noble cause. On the other hand, truly abused children are usually too frightened to say anything to anyone for fear of reprisal. They are more inclined to hide their condition as best as they can, although some signs are obvious but typically ignored. Why does it seem that Social Services caseworkers do not have the motivation to follow up or seek out the true victims of child abuse until it is too late? We hear so much about how social workers are overworked and underpaid, yet we hear of no solutions to remedy their predicament. There is no sense of urgency by society and government to intervene and rectify the situation. Consequently, the system remains clogged with cases of abuse that may be unwarranted while the most heinous cases fall through the cracks. And Social Services will continue to lose credibility until necessary changes are made.

Our country has focused primarily on community or predatory violence; however, the key to understanding the roots of such violence is to recognize that these behaviors resulted from interfamilial violence during childhood. Intervention urgently needs to include therapy for the victims, which would be far less a burden to society than dealing with the very same victims later as inmates in a penitentiary or patients in psychiatric wards. In short, we need to focus our attention and tax dollars on effective measures for intervention and rehabilitation of victims instead of putting a Band-Aid on a flawed and largely ineffective system designed to suggest effectiveness rather than engage in real time solutions.

Most non-profit organizations who promote child abuse awareness here in the USA focus on prevention. Their methods, however, are limited to setting up facilities to counsel families in crisis. These facilities are funded and operated on the premise that families in crisis will voluntarily seek out help for their respective situations. While I can appreciate their efforts, I do not feel that this is the most effective method for eliminating child abuse, as their campaigns suggest. It is my experience that most perpetrators of child abuse are in a state of denial. More often than not, they hide their situation from others until it is too late. Seeking help for their situation would merely be an admission of guilt, which is what they vehemently try to avoid. This does little for the victims.

By putting my experiences down on paper for you, my hope is that you, the reader, will see that the trauma of abuse does not end with the removal of the child from the home. We struggle with the effects the rest of our lives. If we are lucky, we tap into our inner strength to realize our potential and pursue our dreams.

1

In The Beginning

We were my father’s first four children. My mother left the family early in 1967, when I was three years old. Juan, the oldest, was four. He was my father’s pride and joy. My sister was two. I remember my father doting over her, dressing her up, and calling her his doll. Daniel, at 11 months, was the youngest of us. We lived in Long Beach, New York, about a block from the beach. My father worked as a greens keeper at a local golf course.

In retrospect, I remember times being tough, but we never felt it then, as we always had nice clothes and food to eat. My father would take us to his place of work to go fishing off the dock, or to the duck pond to feed the ducks. In the evening we would go to Dairy Barn for a few gallons of milk and chocolate syrup. Later, when times became more difficult, he would take us to his job but would tell us to remain in the car. I could see him walking over the greens and disappearing behind a hill. When he returned, he would have four or five ducks. We would have duck for dinner the following evening. He would bring home rabbits too, or we would go fishing for flounder. Rabbit was my favorite, as my father would season and cook it just right.

My father struggled with working full time and tending to us by himself before finally recruiting several different babysitters. Our stepmother, Joanne, entered our lives a few months later. That day, the babysitter had not shown up before my father had to go to work that morning. My father locked us in our room while he went to work. Joanne’s family lived in the upstairs apartment and became concerned when they heard Daniel’s incessant crying. Upon further investigation they found us alone and began babysitting us afterwards.

My first memory of Joanne was of her giving us sunglasses and chewing gum. She was Italian, overweight, with a grating voice and heavy Brooklynese accent, but we liked her. She was a good cook and made sure we were clean and well dressed. Her brothers would come and play with us, while Joanne would cook and clean. Somewhere, somehow, a relationship developed between my father and her.

Joanne later produced a brood of her own, two girls and two boys. When her first daughter was born in 1968, we began seeing her darker side. We were not allowed anywhere near her infant daughter. She snapped at us and would smack us at random. When she brushed our hair in the morning, she would almost always hit us with the brush. We were sent outside during the day, only coming into the apartment to go to the bathroom and eat lunch. Later she would take us to the beach, rain or shine, dropping us off in the morning and picking us off in the afternoon when my father was due home. When my father came home, however, everything seemed normal again.

We either stayed on the boardwalk or, during the summer, went on the beach. There were so many colorful characters that would come by and chat with us or bring us candy. There was Karen, who would sit with us and read letters from her boyfriend who was in Viet Nam. Or the old lady from the senior citizen center who always promised to bring (us) chocolate candy but never did. In the summer, when we stayed on the beach, there Joan, the ticket taker who would watch over us and buy us ice cream if we were well behaved. In the mornings, we would go by the waters edge and dig for sand crabs or play lifeguard. We got to know all the regular lifeguards that patrolled the beach, who would also look out for us.

It was around this time that my father’s parents came from Cuba and moved into an apartment adjacent to ours. Straightaways they saw how we were being treated and compensated by spending as much time with us as possible. They took Daniel to live with them, easing the burden on my father and Joanne. My grandma would make sure that we were fed, and my grandpa would give us haircuts and indulge us in projects around the apartment. We would help my grandma to learn English by pointing at different things and calling them out in English. For a moment in time, we felt a sense of belonging and normalcy. Then Joanne and my grandma got into an argument over Joanne mistreating us and Joanne complained to my father. We were forbidden to go to my grandparents’ apartment and lost our only allies. Soon after that we moved.

2

20 Sagamore Street

I was in first grade when we moved from the apartment in Long Beach to the house in Freeport. My stepmother and her brood stayed upstairs in the house while my older brother, younger sister, and I stayed outside in the yard or in the basement. My younger brother Daniel remained with my grandparents and wouldn’t live with us until a few years later.

Our beds were in the attic. We each had a blanket but no sheets or pillows. There was no heating in the attic but we were shielded from the elements by wood and Owens-Corning fiberglass insulation. In the winter, it was very cold, in the summer it was unbearably hot. During the day, we spent most of the time in the basement. The basement was warm but unfinished. It was musty and damp, with a cantankerous old boiler on one end and benches on the other. The basement had walls of whitewashed cinderblock with a bare concrete floor. The remainder of the basement was filled with tools, landscaping equipment, and a washing machine. Clothesline hung from the floor joists. An old paint can resided in the corner, which we used when it was too cold to pee outside. We were only allowed upstairs when we had to do number two or to go to bed. When it rained, the basement would flood, so we had to stay down there to sop up the water. My stepmother would stomp on the floor when she needed Juan or me to come upstairs to dust out the doormat or collect our dinner, which was passed out the kitchen window to us.

Juan and I were assigned chores and we helped my father around the house. Later, when my father started raising homing