Christopher MacNeil was thrown from his home at 15. First he had to learn to survive. Then, after a return to face his dad, where to go from here.
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What milestone in a boy’s life constitutes his right of passage from boyhood to manhood?
Does the boy become a man when he graduates from high school or college, when he loses his virginity, when he gets married or becomes a father? Or could it be when he knows that the house he grew up in is not his home anymore and is just someone’s house lived in by people who aren’t family any longer and are just acquaintances who don’t need him anymore?
I had turned 15 years old six weeks before that unseasonably cold Thanksgiving Day those many years ago. Seven months earlier I had become another homeless kid on the streets after my father, in another drunken rage over another of my many wrongs, threw me out with a stab wound in my leg and the threat he would kill me the next time he saw me. That I had no place to go or live probably should have been my paramount fear but, at age 14 and leaving home for what I knew in my gut was the last time, a long overdue and welcome sense of relief sheltered me. “It’s over,” I remember thinking – no more “whooping,” no more being called a “goddamn ni**er lover” and “f**kin’ queer.” No more wondering if my father would come home drunk again and asking myself if I had done something wrong that day and brace for another beating.
I also remember telling myself as I set out on that uncertain journey without a home and toward an unknown future that I wasn’t a kid anymore: I had to grow up. So was my rite of passage. I was not written in the societal and cultural script for easing from childhood to manhood. I would not be one of the boys whose worst worry was if the girl he liked also liked him, nor would I compete for a spot on any sports team or beg my parents for a car to be one of the school’s elite hot shots. I would not have to decide which girl to ask to the high school prom.
I had no time for girlfriends, sports and anything else that consumed the lives of other kids my age. My goal was to eat that day, find a place to sleep – survival mode. The highest priority was to avoid law enforcement and child protection agents whose systems in those days was to treat the homeless or unwanted kid as a “juvie” to be housed in regimented group homes where eating, sleeping and bathroom schedules were strictly enforced. Freedom, to the extent it exists in homelessness, was non-existent for the kid in the “system.”
Survival for me was tossed-out food in dumpsters behind restaurants and sleeping in heavily brushed areas in parks and along river banks. There was the occasional meal and bath at the impoverished home of friend whose parents sounded apologetic that they could not afford to take me in. Winters and their bitterly cold nights required desperate methods of survival. Suffice to say I crafted the art of whoring and came to rely on liquor to shut down any inhibitions to serve the man who offered a meal and bed in return for “young meat.”
Even at age 14, I received mail and filed a change-of-address with the post office after I “moved” out of my parents’ house. My mail now went to the house of my mother’s sister. My aunt had a strange allure for me: divorced and unable to have children, she was foul-mouthed, skeptical and on guard against people, rough around the edges. As my aunt bragged often, she didn’t “take anyone’s s**t.” But I recognized a human side in her years earlier as a young, young child. If called on for a favor by family, my aunt complained bitterly about being inconvenienced but always – always – was the first in line if someone needed help.
My aunt knew the house where I lived was a land mine and seemed to accept without question that I didn’t live there anymore and had moved into the home of my friend’s impoverished family. She hit the proverbial roof three years later when she got a call from police that I had been picked up and taken to juvenile lockup on a charge of underage drinking. My aunt hauled me out of juvie and took me to her house where she told me which bedroom would be mine and set down her “ground rules.” One of them was that she “better never catch” me lying to her again. She was furious that she had been told I was living with a friend and did not know I had been on the streets for three years.
Until I moved into her house, my aunt let me use her address for my mail, and I made one of my periodic treks to her house to pick it up the first Thanksgiving Day of my becoming homeless. Like me, my aunt treated holidays as something to be endured, just another day, and did not participate in family gatherings and events.
At her house on Thanksgiving Day, my aunt handed me my mail and eyed me suspiciously. She told me bluntly I needed a bath and asked where I got the booze: I “reeked of it,” she said. I wasn’t going to tell her I spent the night before in bed naked with a grown man also naked and who had given me whiskey to be able to do what we had done. I didn’t answer my aunt and shook my head as I sorted through my mail. As I did, I saw a letter intended for my father and blurted out a “goddamn it.”
I had no desire to see my parents or siblings that day, but wanted more to be done with getting rid of my father’s mail. I told my aunt I was going back “home” to deliver the mail that wasn’t mine. She protested that it was too cold for me to walk the distance but gave up when I didn’t give in. She told me to come back to her house for a bath and something to eat when I was done.
The six- or seven-mile walk to my old house was too cold as my aunt warned. Wearing blue jeans shredded with holes and an unlined jacket, I was shivering when I knocked on the door of the house I had not seen since I left it seven months earlier. My mother opened the door and gave me a momentary look that seemed to be one of unrecognition. She then smiled a slight but uneasy and uncertain smile as she asked me in. I stepped inside my old home for no other reason than to get warm if only for a couple of minutes.
The house inside was ablaze with light, and the aroma of turkey, candied yams and my mother’s unique peppermint cocoa permeated the air. In my field of vision as I handed my father’s mail to my mother and asked if she would give it to him, I saw my father, my brothers and sisters, my brother-in-law and his parents seated in the living room on the sofa and at makeshift tables working on plates piled high and dripping to overflowing with traditional Thanksgiving food fare. My youngest sister jumped from her chair and flung her arms around my waist; some of my other sisters and brothers nodded at me with a weak “hello” to which I returned an unenthusiastic “hi.” I do not know if my father glanced at me from his recliner, leaning back in it with his legs on the foot rest, a dinner plate piled high with turkey, potatoes, dressing and gravy in his lap. He said nothing.
My mother asked if I would stay and eat something. I couldn’t, I said, and had to be on my way. I went no further into the house than the front door and, in less than a minute, emotions flooded my senses like a tidal wave. A little boy who had been part of this group a year earlier wasn’t there anymore but stood now at the half-open front door shivering in torn jeans and an unlined jacket. And in that moment, the little boy who was a year older, thrust into early adulthood too young and tinged by life’s harsher realities knew that the home he grew up in was now just a house and the people in it no longer family but acquaintances.
I was in the house no longer than two minutes. In that brief time, the feeling that my home had become a house in which I now was a caller took on reality. There was no feeling of loss or regret, just another cold reality of life to acknowledge and accept. I also knew with the certainty of a clairvoyant that I would not see the house again – and I didn’t.
I trudged back to my aunt’s house as she had ordered with the blast of wind that had whipped up and chilled my very soul. Along the way, my half-frozen brain served up reminders of a Judy Garland line she repeated as Dorothy waking up from her journey to Oz: “There’s no place like home.” Then a line from some Christmas song: “There’s no place like home for the holidays.” But both were shouted down by the truth of another old saying: You can’t go back home.
Home, for me, was gone and would never be reclaimed. But what probably should have been some sense of loss or sadness was displaced by the feeling that the little boy in me was gone and had been forced into half-manhood in a twilight zone of no sign posts to direct where and how to proceed.
A rite of passage from boyhood and adulthood that many have endured but few talk about: knowing that some of us can’t go back home again.
Photo: Flickr/Nicki Varkevissor
Mr. Macneil, please don’t internalise the corrosive idea that you’re anything less than a WHOLE man.
Your story hits home with me because that is how I feel about my family because for many years, they did not accept me as a person even to this day with the same equal human rights. I finally gave up and have not gone back home for the holidays for the last several and now view the holidays as just another bunch of days to sleep in or take a walk/car ride around town. As Paul McCartney stated in his song Another Day – Its just another day.