Breaking Brooklyn (16 page)

“I see. Yes. Yes. I see,” Sy repeated over and
over, thinking about my answer. “I find a difference divisible by
seventeen. Yes. Yes. I find by seventeen. I see. Yes.
Yes.”

While Sy was talking to himself, staring at
the numbers on the wall, I slipped out of the garage. I promised
myself to never go back in there.

Despite my promise to myself, I stumbled into
the garage one evening when I thought Sy wasn’t home. All I needed
was a bike pump for five minutes. This time Sy was working on a
funny looking metal box with the words “Commodore 64” on the front.
I was afraid to ask what the metal box was for. When Sy saw me
looking at it he explained it was a personal computer, and he was
disassembling it to see how it worked.

Sy was wearing a pair of magnifying glasses on
his head that made him look like his eyes made up half of his face.
I couldn’t help but laugh. Looking up at me with his magnified
eyes, he stared for a moment, then said, “Do you want to know what
I really think this is?”

I didn’t want to know, but being nice to Sy
was always advantageous.

“
What is it?”

“
This is how the government is
going to spy on us in the future. See, we plug this into our
televisions and then they can watch what we do. They have rooms
full of mainframe computers collecting all this data. I’m finding
out how it works because I can reverse engineer it. I can then
possibly figure out a way to watch them! All I need to do is follow
their connection, track the relays back, and learn where their
control center is located.”

At this point he was talking to the computer
console. I grabbed the bike pump and got the hell out of there as
fast as I could!

There were times when Sy’s mood turned so sour
that he was truly evil. It normally came after he started drinking,
or when he had a fight with my mother. In her usual manipulative
pattern, she would frustrate him then storm out of the house,
leaving me to deal with the aftermath.

My mother was a master manipulator. She knew
how to work people, and Sy was one of her favorite victims. If she
wanted the house to herself she would pick a fight, then kick Sy
out. If he refused to leave she would threaten to call the police.
While he was gone, she would throw all of his stuff on the front
lawn. My mother would go on a rampage destroying Sy’s things,
throwing dishes and glasses, shattering them on the walls. It was a
mess.

During one of her fits of rage I joined her.
she was drunk and I was on an adrenaline high. My mother was
throwing dishes at the wall and tuning over furniture. At first I
was discussed because my brother and sister we in their cribs
crying at the top of their lungs. They were scared and that really
pissed me off. But there was nothing I could do about it. My mother
was like a tornado destroying everything in her path. If got in the
way I would just become part of her destruction.

So, I let go. When I say let go I mean I lost
it. I started hammered holes into my bedroom walls. It felt so
good! Every whack of the hammer made me feel better. Before I knew
it the room was filled with a fog of drywall dust.

When my mother saw the damage the next
morning, she nearly flipped her lid. She knew if Sy saw this he
would go crazy. She was afraid he would hurt me badly. Not knowing
how to fix drywall, she went to K-Mart and bought as many posters
as she could find. Before Sy returned home she had the walls of my
room completely covered. Not one hole could be seen.

Cindy

Chapter
sixteen

"The chains of habit are generally
too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken."
~Samuel Johnson

Cindy Napier’s Diary

November 13, 1993

Here I am again two years after Fairbanks
reinventing myself. I have moved in with my father, who now lives
in Bloomington in an effort to get away from Sy. It wasn’t long
after Sy and I were out of rehab that we started living together.
Within a few months on the outside, I realized I needed Sy's income
to survive. So, I gave him subtle hints. Eventually, he asked me to
marry him.

We went to the local Justice of the Peace
where we tied the knot. Then it was straight to a place where
neither of us should have gone, the Not Here Bar and Lounge to
celebrate. After a few stiff drinks, a niggling bit of dread
invaded my mind. I stopped myself and concentrated on all of the
benefits of being married to Sy.

We moved to Beech Grove which is very similar
to Broad Ripple and its era of architecture. Amtrak is the main
employer. The mostly Irish population loves to drink their native
whiskey after a hard day of work. Never the less there’s never a
dull moment! The gossip lines are like telepathic vibes from person
to person where no one is left out.

A few months after we were married I got
really sick. When I went to the doctor he said I was pregnant! How
could this have happened? I was on birth control! I considered
having an abortion, but I decided that maybe a baby would be good
for me. It would secure my financial future by tying me to Sy. Nine
months later, Danielle was born.

A month after that I was pregnant again! When
the neighbors found out they would joke, saying, "Welcome to the
Irish twins club." This time I was determined to have an abortion,
but Sy found my pregnancy test in the trashcan. When he questioned
me about it I was forced to confirm what he already knew. There was
no way Sy would agree to an abortion and I was afraid to do it
behind his back. So, I gave birth to my second son Michael. I was
now trapped in another loveless marriage. I turned to my old
friends, sex, drugs, and partying for relief.

While I was drowning in self-destruction, Sy
was in freefall of his own. He was drinking every day and his
mental condition was getting worse. Sy’s paranoia had grown to the
point where he was hearing voices. He actually thought Russian
spies were watching him through video cameras that were planted in
our house and at work. He was talking to himself and seeing things
that weren’t there. He tried to convince me he was seeing patterns
in his work orders, in the numbers themselves, which gave the
Russians the location of U.S. nuclear missiles.

Sy had become extremely violent. I was afraid
he was going to hurt me. His mood swings were happening every day
now and when he drank they were even worse.

When I noticed bruises all over Jack’s body, I
had a bad feeling that Sy was responsible. When I asked Jack about
it he got really anxious. He told me he had gotten into a really
bad bike wreck. I could see in his eyes he was lying to
me.

I decided to take him to the park for a picnic
to try and get some answers. I could see that he was in a lot of
pain. When I tried to touch him he would flinch. Pushing for
answers got me nowhere. So I just rubbed his back as he slept on my
lap. I have not been a good mother to him, but I love him very
much.

Despite my feelings for my mother the best
thing I can do for Jack at this point is let him go. I need to let
my mother keep him 100% of the time. I am trying hard not to mess
up his brother and sister’s life like I did his. He needs so much
more than I can ever give him. My mother absolutely adores him and
will care for him like I never could. It breaks my heart, but I
need to let him go…

Sy started talking about his conspiracy
theories at work and important people were noticing. They tolerated
it for a while but when it started distracting other workers Sy's
manager finally confronted him. He immediately got defensive,
yelling that everyone was conspiring against him.

His boss had to call security. By the time
they arrived Sy was completely out of control. He fought them while
they tried to get him to calm down. So, they called the Beech Grove
police who took Sy into custody.

At his bail hearing Sy stepped clear over the
line into crazy world. He didn’t understand the legal procedures
and wanted to represent himself. When he spoke to the judge he
started babbling about conspiracies, making absolutely no sense.
So, the judge remanded Sy to the local mental institution for an
evaluation. What was only supposed to be a few days turned into a
few weeks. Eventually the commitment was for an indefinite period
of time.

Sy was diagnosed as “schizophrenic” and deemed
a danger to society. I divorced him as quickly as I could say his
two-letter name.

While all this was going on with Sy, my father
had found a way to get himself clean again. This time, he took his
Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and his sobriety seriously. He moved
from Broad Ripple to Bloomington in an effort to separate himself
from his old drinking buddies, favorite haunts, and bad habits.
Plus, Bloomington is only thirty minutes from his hometown of
Spencer.

My father found a job working as a maintenance
man for the Boys and Girls Club of Bloomington. In only a few
months he worked his way up to the head of maintenance.

Life for my father was easy and simple, just
like the hotel room he lived in. The Gaslight Inn was a dive on the
south side of Bloomington. It was a place where people who had hit
rock bottom came to make a new start. It was a pay by the day,
week, or month hotel. The majority of the people that lived there
were long-term residents. Most were recovering alcoholics like my
father.

Each room had a small kitchen just off the
sleeping area. The bathroom was tiny, with just a standup shower
and small sink. But that’s all my father needed. He went to work
during the day then to his AA meetings at night. When he was done,
it was back to the Gas Light to sleep, and do it all over
again.

It’s the perfect place for me and the kids to
make a new start. I know it will be hard on my father but I can’t
help it, I’m in financial trouble with nowhere else to
go.

Chapter
seventeen

“Many abused children cling to the
hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the
personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not
well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental
problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches
the task of early adulthood establishing independence and intimacy
burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in
memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable
relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting
to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.”
~ Judith Lewis Herman

Jack Napier - Day 34

Unfortunately for me, it wasn't long before Sy
discovered the holes in my bedroom walls. What followed would kill
any self-esteem I ever had, leaving in its place a terminal fear of
the night.

It all started one Sunday morning when I was
visiting my mother in Beech Grove. My mom had done a good job of
keeping Sy out of my room and the holes in my walls a secret. But I
made a careless mistake. My friend Tim was waiting for me to go
dirt bike riding at the park and I was in such a hurry to have a
good time I left one of the wrenches in the driveway. It rained
that night, and by Sunday morning it was rusty. When Sy found it,
he confronted me immediately.

Before he had a chance to interrogate me my
mother started in on him about not helping enough with the babies.
He tried his best not to argue, but he let loose when she picked
his last nerve. All their screaming and fighting roared throughout
the house like thunder, making Danielle and Michael afraid. Crying
kids soon accompanied the adult screaming. I quickly retreated to
my room, hoping to become invisible.

That set the tone for the whole day. I took
quiet steps everywhere I went in the house, avoiding both my mother
and Sy. After hours of arguing with Sy, my mother took my brother
and sister and left the house for the night. I’m not sure why she
didn’t take me. I was so elusive that day she must have forgotten
that I was there. Nonetheless, I was left alone with a ticking time
bomb.

When my mother frustrated Sy past his breaking
point, he went straight to the kitchen, plopped down at the table,
and crawled into a bottle of booze. Then he erupted into a rage.
Things that he might have overlook on another day became a personal
crime against him. I was always the first outlet for his
madness.