Humans of My (THEIR) Life

Diane St.Pierre

Growing up was fun in New York. We lived in Queens, Astoria. The building was an apartment house. There were like four tenants in it. It was nice, in a good section of Queens. We were able to walk where all the businesses were. There were a lot of places to go but I didn’t visit that many cause I was younger at the time. One of my favorite things was the Theater House. We used to go a lot, myself, and my sisters. On Sundays we used to go to parks, Central Park and other ones close by.

 

I had a crazy environment growing up. Both of my parents were drinkers, alcoholics. There was a lot of fighting going on. We were not taught a lot of the right things. My parents came over on boat I guess. My father came from Russia and my mother came from Poland. 

My first school was about five blocks away from my house. I used to walk to school, come home for lunch, go back, and then come home at 3:00. My second school was right down the street from where I lived. It was a shorter walk so it was easier. When I first went to school, I should have went when I was 5 or 6 but I didn’t get started until I was almost 9. My mother didn’t think I had to go. People didn’t even know I existed in that neighborhood cause we didn’t go out as a family. Just on the weekends.

 

I didn’t know cause we were kept in the house when we were younger. We weren’t allowed to go out at all. The weekends, I didn’t go out when I was real little, but I would go out when my mother was sleeping. I used to have to climb out the window down the fire escape and get out that way. I had two girlfriends that I used to go see. They would help me out. We didn’t have, we could have had, anything in the house, like no T.V. We didn’t really have anything. I used to play with clothespins as a kid. And sometimes, my father would give me a quarter to buy some candy and cakes and stuff, whatever like that. We used to play with those machines that you used to get those little plastic containers out of. In one of the apartments that my mother and father lived in, there was a lot of cockroaches. So, I used to catch them in the plastic containers. Little baby ones, mother ones, teenage ones as I called them. Roaches come in two colors, white and brown. And it reminds me of how society is today. The fight, they don’t get along.

 

My mother would stay home. She drank a lot. I used to pour her beer and light her cigarettes until about 12, 1 o’clock in the morning. Then she’d pass out at the table. My father was a truck driver, so he used to leave early in the morning. He’d get home, and my mother would give him some money and he would go down to the bar and come back every night with a couple of quarts of beer for my mother. Then, on the weekend, that’s when they would fight more cause they would drink more. I didn’t have that many friends, so I didn’t know how life was. If you’re lucky you had two meals a day. Our suppers were around 10 o’clock at night. We would have good food, but there was no breakfast, and maybe lunch like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But dinner wouldn’t start until late. Then my mother would start cooking whatever. And then we went to bed at 1 in the morning and then tried to get up to go to school at 7 in the morning. I didn’t know how people really lived.

Then it got a little rougher in New York. If you wanted to go downtown to go shopping, you had to go really fast. There was no dillydallying. You hurried up to get there and back. When I got into high school, I used to travel to the different bureaus. I used to stay with my aunt in the Bronx for the weekend. It was right next to a Macy’s department store. And that was like a two-story, big shopping mall by itself.

 

I dropped out of high school when I was a freshman. Then I was thrown out of the house when I was 15. I didn’t follow the rules of the house. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. I lived in the hallways in New York up by the roof. In the Summertime, I used to sleep on the roof. Usually, it was people I might have known but I couldn’t stay with them. Sometimes people would bring me up a container of water to wash up and brush my teeth, things like that. Late at night I used to go to the different bakery shops, and I guess you might as well say beg for food cause back then there weren’t any food stamps or stuff like that.

 

When I had your mother, Carmen, I was 18, and it was too hard to be in New York as a single parent. I lived with her dad for about 8 months with his parents. But he was not fit to be a good father for Carmen. At some point in the Bronx, I lived in a rooming house with your mother. You had to share a bathroom, so you only had one room. I had to cook dinner on a hot plate. One time, while I was cooking, the hotplate was between two windows and the wind blew the curtain into the hotplate and it caught on fire. I had to rip them down and put out the fire. I remember another time before we left New York, I went upstairs to get Carmen’s bottle. She was in the carriage downstairs. I lived on the second floor of the rooming house. When I came downstairs there was a couple pushing the carriage down the street. I had to go run and grab it. That’s how I learned you couldn’t leave anything around New York. It was not safe. But we learn as we go.

When this one guy moved out, he still owed the landlord money. When he left, the landlord got mad and followed him to his new apartment. He shot and killed him. It took them, between the police report and everything, 9 hours to remove his body from the building. I have pictures of the police cars. The scariest moment though was when I was in the subway coming to go back to the Bronx because my mother’s house was in Queens. There was a flasher in the subway. It was a man of course. All he had was a raincoat on, and then he would flash it open. It was a scary site. I had to travel back and forth to see my mother so we could feed Carmen. She used to give me money to buy formula and stuff like that. Sometimes, I used to have to get food for your mother on my own. It wasn’t always bought. Sometimes it was taken without knowledge. Stolen, you know. I didn’t have any baby furniture as far as that, so your mom used to sleep in a big cardboard box.

 

Eventually, I packed up and went to Maine. I stayed with my sister Joni until I got my own apartment.

Up in Maine, I started to work at the Mills in Sanford. When I first moved up here to Sanford, it was nice and quiet. I could leave the door unlocked. There was no robberies or crimes, or anything like that. Whereas in New York, you could get your bag stolen off your shoulder, or if you didn’t watch yourself, you could get mugged easy.

I worked at the shoe factories. One of them I was a fancy stitcher in. My sister babysat for me while I worked. She was a stay-at-home mom with 6 kids. I wound up getting married and having three more kids.

 

I went back to New York in 1971 when my mother died to do her financials. When I went back, I wasn’t used to the rushing around. In Maine, everything is smooth going. It’s not a rush job.