1968 to 1970
On the advice of several people and to give another perspective are the biggest reasons I’m writing this.
From the age of seven onward, fear was a constant in my life. Later, I would read Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. The lesson there being that it’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it. I freely admit that I did not react well to this period of my life.
We never lived in public housing, but some of places I stayed during the ages of seven through nine were truly scary. Those two years fucked me up for a very long time. I’m a seven year old white boy in a predominantly black, Chicago neighbor…in 1968. Do the math. For the really clever, check out what schools I went to for the third and fourth grade.
My mother moved into a ghetto apartment in Chicago. It wasn’t pretty. She got a babysitter for my two younger, non-school aged siblings. This was a lady that was a friend of her boyfriend. (An interesting fact about her is that her boyfriend was a black Chicago police officer.) Myself and my two other brothers, the oldest being ten, were left alone during my mother’s working hours. We rarely went to school. It was a war zone.
I was beaten up almost on a daily basis. For instance, I’d be walking down the street and someone passing by would hit me for no reason. I was sucker punched more times than I can remember. On top of that, I was molested numerous times by people in the neighborhood. Myself and one of my other brothers were even molested by the very people my mother thought were protecting us. When we told her, she said we were lying. At that point we knew we were on our own. My brother said it was like “having no one on your side”.
© John Bielecki 2024
