Chapter 2: A Haunted House

I was born in Southern California, Norwalk to be exact, to Harvey and Barbara Buss in the summer of 1964. We didn't stay in California long, my parents packing up the wood paneled station wagon for a cross country jaunt to the east coast, moving our young growing family to New England in my first year of life.

 

We landed in Tewksbury, Ma, just off Interstate 93, about 25 miles NW of Boston and an equal distance from the New Hampshire border. It was America in the mid 1960s. With urban flight in full force, once sleepy bedroom communities like Tewksbury were growing wildly as safe and desirable towns to raise young growing families like our own. 

 

Not a lot exciting happened in Tewksbury. Sandwiched between its flashier neighbors Lowell (birthplace of Jack Kerouac) and Andover (home to famed prep school Phillips Academy) Tewksbury was working class, where land was a plenty, with a growing tax base to pay for all the attractive lures of big city suburbs. For every new school or subdivision, Parks and Rec got in on the act, building new spacious parks with acres of open green space and endless fields, all anchored by rows and rows of newly built tennis courts.  

 

The United States was in midst of the Cold War. My father, a rocket scientist and software developer, was firmly enlisted in the Space Race side of the conflict. He worked on the Apollo missions for a company named Avco, writing the computer programs associated with re-entry heat shields. Everyday he wore a badge to work with his picture on it. I just assumed that made him important.

 

My father held a high security clearance, forbidding him from discussing the intricacies of his work with our family. Though I was young at the time, I was able to sense his work was stressful, particularly when the rockets lifted off. Our nation held its collective breath as precious human lives hung in the balance. Dad was responsible for getting them home in one piece, a weighty responsibility for sure. When the lunar modulars splashed down safely, his mood seemed more relieved than joyous that all went as planned.

 

Dad parlayed his Apollo success in to a robust career in Aerospace. He became a man in demand. His work would eventually take our family back to the west coast for the first Space Shuttle. But as with all industries, in spite of the unfathomable exploits of the space industry, it was a business just like all the others as my father would soon discover.

 

All those pretty space pictures from the Hubble Telescope? You can thank my father. He worked tirelessly to save TRW 100s of millions of dollars on the late and grossly over budget project. They were to give him a bonus he could retire on. But somebody changed their mind. He got a plaque instead. He was already bitter at the industry by then. The snub made little difference.

My parents had few friends. They rarely had people over for dinner, nor did they venture out much to socialize. They met in Southern California, my Dad from Whittier, my Mom from neighboring Downey. They were a handsome couple, my Dad young and 50's G-Man slick, my Mom a runner-up for Miss Downey. My Father worked at the first ever McDonalds. He met my Mom there. He gave her free fries. They were married a year later. That's just how it was done back then.

 

I never saw or heard my parents fight, never heard them raise their voices or say a belittling word to each other. I also never saw them show affection toward each other, never seeing them hold hands, or catch them kissing or fooling around. Nothing. Maybe it was the German in them. They stayed married over 50 years. Something was obviously working.

 

My folks were disciplined and extreme. They worked 9-5 their whole lives, though my father would be at work before sunrise. Not that he didn't like people, he just preferred it when they weren't around. We rarely went out as a family. My mother would cook every night. We would eat the same thing nightly. Spaghetti on Mondays, Enchiladas on Tuesday, Wednesday was pork chop night, Thursday we ate salads. Saturday was pizza night, giving Mom a night off from cooking. Sunday Dad would pull out the BBQ and the Kingsford charcoal, grilling burgers and steaks. We all ate our meat the same. Rare. Anything more cooked was uncivilized. 

 

My parents drank a lot. Piping hot industrial strength black coffee all day, warm burgundy wine from a box every night. My father supplemented his fluid intake with a few room temperature Guinness stouts before dinner. And they smoked constantly, two packs of Salem menthols daily for over 40 years.  

 

With such extreme fare on the menu, one could safely surmise my first experiments with things I wasn't supposed to be trying were memorably unpleasant. And they were, slightly delaying my entry to the world of mind altering substances. But I would soon make up for that lost time. And then some.

I have two brothers. Larry two years older, Jerry three years younger. Larry Barry and Jerry. Don't ask. We all graduated from the same high school in Torrance, Ca. We all moved out and went to college right away. We all failed out in our first semester. Straight F's across the board. All of us. Needless to say, getting out of the house and away from our Dad was all that seamed to matter to us back then.

 

The three of us were very different. My older brother Larry couldn't play anything, but could fix everything. I could play everything, but couldn't fix shit. Our youngest brother Jerry got a mix of both. Larry eventually moved to  Baltimore, Jerry to Kansas City. They got as far the fuck away from Southern California and my Dad as soon as they could. And they never came back. 

 

Yet in many ways we're the same. None of us have any children. We all battled our respective demons throughout our lives, depression and other assorted maladies creating all types of personal dysfunction. One of us worked harder on themselves than the others, to make better sense of our upbringing. The others found refuge in selective memory and denial. And I hold no grudge nor pass judgment there. Only a select few in this world dare reckon with the weight of where they've been. In the end, we were all just trying to survive.

 

We had some lean years in there, rarely seeing each other, speaking once a decade, whether we needed to or not. During one heated discussion with my older brother about a book I had written, he threatened to come to California to beat the shit out of me. I responded by giving him my address and that I would feed him his fucking teeth upon arrival. 

 

After that, I didn't see much need for further talks...

 

My father wanted us to be tough, to take no shit from anyone. If a bully ever picked on us, he would implore us to pop the guy right in the kisser, then we'll see how tough he was. Did that include him too?

 

I was too little to pop my father in the mouth, my brothers too. So we took to pounding on each other like only brothers could. We would fight all the time, especially my big brother Larry and I. Yet Mom and Dad would go on about their evening conversation like we were playing a civil game of checkers, never telling us to stop or breaking us up, even when the brawling got hairy.

 

But from the corner of my eye, I could see my father steal glances our way. Tiring of what he was watching, he eventually intervened. With three sets of boxing gloves. If we were going to fight, he wanted us to fight properly, with technique.

 

So on those nights when he had a few too many, which was often, out would come the gear. Dad would clear the living room as my brothers and I would warily lace up the cumbersome red boxing gloves. Pairing us off, Dad would referee the action, imploring my brothers and I to pound each other senseless. 

 

A haymaker to the bread basket he would scream out in joy, as one of us landed a clean shot. Left hooks and right crosses, delivered with reckless disregard, would rain down through tears and anguish on those odd hellish nights. Fun times. Fun times. 

 

Whatever his intent, the result was divide and conquer in its sickest manifestation. In his mind, maybe he thought this would help us become more independent, to never have to rely on another to defend ourselves, that somehow this would harden us. Oh, it hardened us alright. In all the wrong places.

We tried a family reunion some years back. Having not all been in the same room in over a decade, we were all a little tense for the occasion. I brought my girlfriend with me for cover, a highly sensitive empathic type she was. We were the last to arrive. Walking in to the house carrying gifts for all, we reached the living room where everyone sat, staring blankly at the blaring television. Nobody got up, only my Mother proffered a hello. 

 

Approaching the room to greet my brothers, from the corner of my eye I saw my girlfriend spin around, running out the front door in obvious distress. She would gather herself momentarily, yet within an hour of our being there, both my brothers would leave with hardly a word spoken between us. My girlfriend and I soon followed suit. 

 

On our drive home I asked her what happened back there when she ran outside. All she could say is that was the saddest most haunted house she'd ever walked in to in all her life. All I could say in response was 'Yeah'.

I was a smart kid. After acing my first battery of standardized school tests, I was found to have a genius IQ. Dad dug this. So he got to thinking.

 

Our house was full of books, books about famous people. Churchill, Kennedy, Patton. Feynman. Biographies about self made men, men considered special. My father was fascinated by them. With my high test scores, he got a gumption. Maybe I could be special too.

 

So he devised a home schooling plan, after regular school of course. It started with reading Encyclopedias. He would pull a random volume from the shelves, opening to an equally random page. After a quick perusal of the page, he would instruct me to read up on that topic, to be discussed after dinner later that evening.

 

Being all of 6 or 7 at the time, my reading comprehension skills weren't quite up for the task. So Dad shifted gears from Encyclopedias to The Great Books Collection. The Great Books chronicled the history of intellectual thought, with a strong emphasis on the early Greeks. He would read them to me late in to the night: Archimedes, Socrates, Plato, Euclid.

 

My father, being a mathematician, settled on the teachings of Euclid. Staying up way past my bed time, I would listen attentively to Dad across the table as we worked through complex geometric proofs late in to the evening. 

 

Somehow I must have been keeping up, for his tutorials soon became a nightly occurrence. And as we trudged through the first chapters of Euclidean geometry, an array of tests soon commenced.

 

I don't recall the questions exactly. I'm sure I answered some right, I know I answered some wrong. But it was the wrong answers that stuck with me, for that's when the barbs began. With every wrong answer, his yelling magnified, calling me numbnuts, stupid, dumb as a screw, all for not being able to answer what fucking  X was. I still shake my head to this day. What the hell was he thinking?

 

And so began the mixed feelings about the mixed messages. With all the attention on my academics, I knew I was smarter than the other kids my age, but somehow in Dad's eyes I wasn't smart enough, that I didn't have it, didn't have the right stuff in Math to be different, to be special. 

 

And as the math lessons stopped, my passion for mathematics would fade. But being told I was stupid and thick and worthless would stick with me. The mixed up messaging. I would became an egomaniac with an inferiority complex, a hybrid of what I would accomplish balanced against the harsh defining words of my Father. And we would do this dysfunctional dance for all our years.

Euclidean geometry safely put away, the year was 1972. I was eight. The World Chess Championships between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky were taking place half a world away in Reykjavik, Iceland. Dad was a tournament chess player with a masters rating at one point, whereas I had won the battle among my brothers for chess dominance, securing Dad's obsessive attention once again. 

 

It was my job to transcribe all the chess moves as they came in over the teletype of the local public television station, then set up the pieces on our chess board so Dad and I could play out the adjourned games well in to the night. The problem was the moves came in fast and in bunches and in a language I was barely familiar. PK4 BxP RE6 and on and on. Sometimes I'd get them all right. Other times I'd miss some moves, making our attempts to play out the games near impossible, and that wouldn't go over well with Dad, the not getting everything right part. But on the times I did, there Dad and me would be, just the two of us, squared off against each other across a chess board, playing out games often deep in to the night and I just loved it.

At first he would slaughter me. Then I began to hold my own somewhat. Not much longer, I was giving him a good run for his money, which intrigued him. Maybe this was the activity I could be special in. Soon, he looked to enter me in my first chess tournament, but not before giving me Chess' version of the bible, the three inch think hard backed copy of MCO: Modern Chess Openings. My father would solemnly hand me the sacred text, telling me which defense to study that day and be prepared to use it in that evening's game.

 

And then it happened. At age 9, I beat him straight up, and then I beat him again. And just when I thought I had it going on, my father's interest in me and my chess waned. He knew I was good, just not good enough. That once again, he decided I didn't have it. Didn't have the right stuff to be special, and that I should just give it up. Too young to present any kind of persuasive counter-argument, I always did what Dad wanted. And before long, Dad would be off on his next obsession, this time woodworking, where he turned our garage in to a makeshift lumber mill. He would proceed to build all the furniture in our house by himself in his latest spell of mania, my far handier brothers winning this round for Dad's undivided attention. I would wait the furniture building phase out in my room, all alone.

A few years later, after acing another round of standardized testing, I qualified for admission to Mensa, the high IQ Society. I was barely a teenager at the time. I remember it cost ten dollars a year to join, which was 10 dollars more than I had. I asked my Dad if I could join. Without explanation, my father said no and wouldn't pay for it. I never asked him why.  How could that not have been special enough? 

 

With my high test scores, he once again became captivated with my mathematical acumen. So resumed after school home schooling. Come Sunday night, he would peruse his vast library of engineering books, eventually settling on a math book he'd want me to consume. 

 

One that stuck out in my memory was Linear Algebra, a subject strictly for Math majors at University level. The fact I had yet to take beginning Algebra meant little to Dad. The way he figured things, if I had what it took, I'd figure it out. He would instruct me to read the book front to back and prepare to be tested on it the following weekend. And I would. And when I failed to show total mastery of the subject matter, down came more chastising, more belittling, more conclusions that I didn't have the right stuff required to be special, and to keep investing in me so was a waste of his time. 

 

With his patience run out, it was banishment to my room again, waiting to see what his next obsession would be and if it included me. And I recall those moments and many others just like them as a long protracted series of events that made me want only two things from my young  life. To get the fuck out of that house as soon as I possibly could, and upon growing up, to do everything in my power to not become like him.

 

Then came tennis. I had some game, not a pretty game, not a complete game, but I could hit a tennis ball. A relative late starter at age 8, I played my first tournament at ten, won my first junior tournament six months later. Not soon after I beat my Dad for the first time, continuing on to win the Men's adult open at my club on my 12th birthday. By then, I was traveling the country playing National level events, and though not excelling at that level yet, my father saw in me something, that I had a chance, a chance to be really good, maybe even special at something, and that something was tennis.

Though I wasn't the biggest kid, or the strongest kid, or the fastest kid, my father did play every sport, so I had some athletic gene pool to draw from. And though I wasn't the smartest player, or the calmest player, or the toughest competitor, right from the start I could always rip a tennis ball. And when I was hitting them well, good things were starting to happen for me. And my Dad loved that, thinking maybe this was the activity to focus on.

 

Because the rankings didn't lie. I was already among the best in my section at an early age, with Dad seeing enough game in me that maybe I could make it in tennis, that this was the activity to focus on. But to make this happen, he knew it would take his full undivided attention, a commitment he soon relished. And from that point forward, it was on. 

 

Dad was all in, with me and my tennis, for all the foreseeable future to be...