22 My Motorcycle Ride With the Principal’s Daughter (on My Friend’s Motorcycle). Song: “Proud Mary”. Photo: My Motorcycle.

The summer before my high school senior year, my father made me live in Kent, OH where I had no car, or wheels of my own to get back home, and since I couldn’t cash and keep any of my Brandywine paychecks, I had no money except the money I earned on my own. So, I found a job in Kent sandblasting the insides of railroad cars, and they hauled corrosive chemicals, so the pay was very good. I wore headgear fed with air, and I was always blowing out, or spitting out black stuff. I sandblasted all summer, and purchased a motorcycle, a 306CC Honda Scrambler(see photos). It got excellent mileage, and I enjoyed riding it around everywhere, including back to our rented house for quick visits, until my father found out I had been visiting there.

My father had moved me, my mom, and my little sister from the trailer behind the ski lodge into a rented house, then into a 2nd rented house even further away from Brandywine, and then moved me into a room in Kent (a full 20 minute drive away from Brandywine), all while he stayed working 24/7 in his new 2nd floor addition to the Brandywine lodge. But, when I purchased a motorcycle, I began taking the 20 minute ride from my room in Kent, to our rented house where I’d use the restroom, then ride back to Kent. On one of my brief visits, I fell off my chopper motorcycle at the bottom of our driveway, and it looked like gravel had been purposefully strewn around in the street at the end of the driveway so that as a result, on my way out, I fell, and seriously scraped my knee. Another time, around ten years later, gravel was strewn on the road causing me to be in a serious car accident, and it was definitely, purposely, and strategically placed (story on page 31 “No Mon, No-Fun, Your Son.” “Too bad, So Sad, Your Dad”) by a city-works employee, a paramedic, and his younger EMT (all in uniform, and all involved).

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When my father made my mother drop me off to have to live in a little room under the stairs of an empty rooming house in Kent OH during the summer before my senior high school from hell year, she told me that I could count on having her (our) co-owned bank account when she died. I was only determined to get back home, but I didn’t know about how I could. I thought about how my father treated my mother, and I was as worried about her as I knew she was about me. I wasn’t thinking about bank accounts, or being “self sufficient”, but I sure hated my father for separating me from my mother, and from Brandywine. This time, making me have to go live in some room again, happened right after he blurted out loud while I worked at Brandywine that I was a momma’s boy, and he made the declaration that I needed to have my apron strings cut with my mother. He definitely hated the bond that my mother and I always had, and because he was always in a war to separate us (even while we worked at Brandywine), I could only accept my latest reality which I was stuck in, again. Luckily, I found a much better paying job than the washing dishes jobs I grew accustomed to in order to feed myself with each time he demanded that my mother go drop me off in a rented room somewhere away from Brandywine. This time, however, I found one sandblasting the insides of railway cars in Kent, and I earned the money to buy a motorcycle by the end of that summer (the one in the above photo), and started riding it back home to the rented house for quick visits, but I wouldn’t dare ride it to the Brandywine lodge because of how much I feared my father.

During one of my visits to our rented house, our mother arrived after working all day at the Ski lodge. She was delighted to see me, delighted to learn that I had worked all summer to earn the money to buy my own wheels before I even finished high school, and after my little sister appeared, started getting her two children dinner. This was during the time when my little sister could chose either being at Brandywine all day, staying unsupervised at the rental house, or going down the street to stay with a stockholder’s family until dinnertime when mom usually came home to the rented house. (By the coming wintertime the ski area would have been so packed with skiers that my mom, and I couldn’t come home until the ski area closed each night at 11PM.) That was when my father made both my mother, and my little sister keep the secret from me that my little sister started staying at the house on top of the hill at Brandywine, and I was to naive to even figure that out, then. He also didn’t want me knowing that he had purchased that house because he didn’t want me knowing about having anywhere to go but living in another rented room somewhere, or in the streets, again, after the rental house lease expired. He either didn’t have the time to deal with me, himself, or didn’t care. He got good at continuing coercing my mother to drop me off in rented rooms, so that when the rent was due, and I couldn’t afford to continue paying the full rent, myself, I would be forced to live in the streets again. In fact, my father predicted, “You won’t have a pot to piss in, but you’ll have your Martin guitar that your mother bought for you, won’t you”! And, his prophecy very nearly came true, because even after both of my parents died, again I suddenly had zero funds, and no place to go (probably exactly as my father knew it could happen, wanted, and planned).

While I visited our second rented house on my motorcycle from Kent, and our mother was fixing my sister and me dinner, she commented that she was worried if I, like most teenagers, wasn’t eating correctly. She insisted that I stay for a home-cooked meal, and she also told me to spend the night, but I vividly remember noticing that made my little sister look surprised and agitated hearing from our mother that I would be eating, AND staying home all night. My mother worked nonstop caring for everyone’s needs at Brandywine, while also trying to keep our lives as normal as possible at the rented houses by making dinners for her divided family, but the ski area had made the fabric of our family go haywire, and it remained that way up to the very day of our father’s death. While the three of us ate dinner, mom told my sister to please not mention to our father that I had a motorcycle, but he definitely, and immediately found out. I came back again a week later from my rented room in Kent for another visit to the rented house on the day that my mother suggested that I do so for a home cooked meal, and I arrived again on my motorcycle. My father called during dinner, and an argument ensued with my mom because, somehow, my father knew that I was visiting on a motorcycle, and being there was against his orders. Mom was arguing back, and insisting that I be permitted to visit, AND I should be allowed to stay overnight while insisting that she didn’t want me riding after dark on those rural Ohio back roads on a motorcycle. During that phone call, my dad, apparently, agreed to let me visit weekly, eat, and stay. However, he insisted that my mother tell me that “she” instruct me not to park my motorcycle inside the garage. Somehow my father(?) knew that it leaked a very few tiny little drops of oil on the highly shiny painted polished cement floor that were, however, very easily wiped off. I was so naive and out of the loop that I didn’t even know that my world history teacher lived right next door. I think he purposely flunked me 2 years in a row because he was hoping, by doing that, that I’d be drafted, and sent to Vietnam. My mom had to tell me that if I didn’t comply immediately with my father’s order to park my bike outside of the garage all night, that my father would confiscate my motorcycle! So, I had no choice but to park it outside of the garage door at the top of the driveway that night, all night. That was the night that my motorcycle was stolen from the exact spot where it was parked in the photos (above), and I never saw it again!

Our mother had lost both of her parents to a car accident when she was a teenager, and our father never knew his own father (he was murdered in a case of mistaken identity when my dad was just three). Soon, when the lease expired, I wouldn’t know where my home was. But, I had to return to attempt to finish my senior year in my “high school from hell”, and until our rented house lease expired, being back home was good for providing adult supervision for my little sister. But, as it turned out, I believe that both my sister, and my father didn’t WANT me providing adult supervision for my little sister. In fact, I believe that my father didn’t want me around providing any semblance of adult supervision for HIM at Brandywine.

In the winter, my mother was working triple-time shuttling between the lodge and the rented house, and even my little sister wasn’t around when I had an appendicitis attack just after dark on a school night. Even after I got through to a real person on the phone at the ski lodge, my father wouldn’t let my mom get away to take me to the hospital. He simply didn’t believe me, and I nearly died. I was dry heaving non-stop for several hours while waiting for a way to get to a hospital, and It wasn’t until 2AM that I received an emergency appendectomy. I was told that I was very lucky to survive because it could have burst.

Our father treated each one of his three children differently, because to him, I believe, we were each his separate experiments (I often felt like I was a low card in his poker hand, and discarded). He helped my two year older brother financially all through his life. He helped him purchase three houses, and provided my little sister with houses, too, plus paid to send her to a private school in nearby Hudson, and for my brother’s college (most of my college was on the GI Bill). But, suddenly I wouldn’t know where our rented home, or any home we had even was (as was my father’s plan because I felt that he despised me), and proved that he did. I remember when my father became engorged with profit and cash, and how he became furious when my mother purchased my 12 string Martin acoustic guitar. That happened to be after I had lost my amp and electric guitar to my second band, and she had every right to buy it for me with her hard earned money from her salary. But, my father won the battle forcing me to be left in the streets with nothing but my expensive 12 string guitar, all while he kept 100% of what I had ever earned working at Brandywine. He never understood why I had an apparent bad attitude, and chip on my shoulder. I didn’t know why I felt that way either, then.

Our father had given all three children (In the 1960’s) the chance/choice to work for their parents, then made his offer to us again in 1991. In my case, I accepted both times, while both siblings refused both times, and our father set up an investment account for me with what I had earned working for my father. Then, my mother gave me our co-owned bank account which I had forgotten was what she wanted me to have ever since we co-owned it together since the 1960’s (she explained to all involved, it was what I had earned working for 12 years in a row full time recorded hours in Naples. The account I earned co-owned with my father was my Merrill Lynch investment account with broker Scott Shookman, in Bath, Ohio, and it was started using the sum total of all of my paychecks which I earned working at Brandywine (totaling $169,053.10), but I lost it in entirety. My brother used his trustee status to move my Bank of AM #4900 which I earned working for my mother for my 12 years in Naples, which was co-owned with her which my mother wanted for me to have ever since my father made me go live in Kent. I witnessed my brother remove our parents’ signature stamps right in front of me, and I also saw when he returned them! What I earned working much of my life earning, and what both parents wanted for me, as well as what everybody involved knew about, was sabotaged by my siblings, and I feel devastated knowing that I wasted most of my adult life working for nothing, but I survived.

My father threatened to ban my mother from both home, and Brandywine exactly as I had been, if she didn’t obey him “To a T”, which included lie if necessary to keep the fact that he had purchased a house at the top of Brandywine. What my mother did tell me (with serious fear in her voice) was that my father threatened to have HER end up living WITH ME in the same rented room situation. (She told me this when he made her drop me off out in the middle of nowhere in Cleveland’s iron ore district during the middle of a Brandywine winter.) My mother wanted me to chose for her, whether I wanted her to divorce him, and that was when I realized that she was just as afraid of him as I was. My father was filled with so much hatred toward my bond with my mother that he had my motorcycle stolen just to prevent me from getting home from Kent, followed by making my mother immediately drive me straight back to my room in Kent where I would be stuck living under the stairs, again, with no way of getting home until it was time for me to finish high school (my last year in my high school from hell). On our way back to Kent was when my mother stopped with me at the downtown Akron Bank of America, and explained that she wanted me to have the money in her bank account (which I remembered because the last 4 digits of it were #4900) when she died. I learned after decades because I was contacted by the bank in Naples that the same bank account had been our co-owned bank account after all that time, and then discovered that although we still had that same co-owned bank account with the same account number for over 30 years, it was purged on the date of my mother’s death… stolen along with every dime that I ever earned from all of my years of punching in on a time clock at Brandywine, and included everything that I earned working for 12 years on the clock recorder full time hours in Naples. This was obviously done by using our parents’ stolen signature stamps (documents for proof shown on pages 46-49).

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My motorcycle ride (on my friend’s motorcycle) with the principal’s daughter…

I came back from my rented room in Kent to finish my senior year of high school minus my motorcycle, so had to take the bus to and from school. My bus stop where I got off was the very last bus stop, and it always ended up being just me left on that bus, to ride it down to the very bottom of the very long hill (see photo),

where it would drop me off in front of Brandywine’s gate. Going down that steep hill on that rickety old school bus really was dangerous, and doing so really creeped me out, especially at first. The bus driver looked kind of like the shifty type, and looked so old that he shouldn’t have even been driving a bus. But, when I got to know him (name was Rex), I learned that he was actually a retired truck driver., so I felt better about that hill. He told me that we’d both just have to “brave it out” going down that long dangerous hill together. After getting dropped off every school day at the Brandywine front gate, I would walk (see photo) over a mile and a quarter, sometimes muddy, sometimes snowy, dirt entrance road,

to go to work. (see photos). I was still working on and off at Brandywine to see the roads graded, widened, and eventually paved.

Until we were open for skiing, which was when my father needed me working on time, and for as long as possible, my father gave me the choice – to take the bus to work, or take another bus to go straight from school to our rented house. One day, I was on the bus on my usual way to work at Brandywine. When the bus was nearly empty except for a few students, it stopped again, for the last of the students to get off. I went to sit on the front seat by the bus door when the bus stopped, and the door opened, when I saw my best friend fellow student, and fellow Brandywine employee, right outside the school bus door on a new Harley Davidson 50cc dirt bike motorcycle (see photo above). When he saw me, he jumped off and held on to the end of the handle bar, as if he was inviting me to ride it, then motioned to me to do so with his free hand! I was thinking that he meant that he was working that day, too, and we could ride the rest of my way, together, down the hill to work at Brandywine. So, I jumped off the bus with all of the other last students, and stood there admiring my friend’s bike while all of the kids walked past, and on each of their ways home, except for one cute girl who I didn’t know (she had red hair which was just like the principal’s hair)…and I had no idea what the reason was that she stood next to me marveling at this Harley Davidson dirt bike. I had no idea that she stood there because my friend had been giving her rides everyday from the bus stop, to her house on his bike. All I knew was that my friend was so happy about having a motorcycle, that he let me jump right on it to ride it, I thought, in order to check it out. So, I hoped on, and to my complete surprise the cute girl who had stayed there admiring his bike next to me (who I had no idea even knew my friend), climbed on behind ME on the bike, and without any of us saying another word, my friend let go of the handlebar, and waved an arm while bowing his head, which expressed “take it, and her, for a ride”! I tossed my scrapbook (which I had taken into school that day to Mr Cowel’s English class as a “show and tell” assignment), somewhere over into the grass, and then completely forgot about it – “out of sight/out of mind”, which was miraculously returned to me over nearly a year later. I just thought that this cute girl was just as excited as I was about riding this cool bike together, and as the two of us rode off together, my friend yelled, “Be sure to come right back”.

I rode through the grass behind the first house, and immediately saw that there was a long gentle dirt bike path hill that was the perfect place to ride a dirt bike. It looked like it went all the way up to the top of that backyard hill. So we climbed clear up to the top of this dirt path, and then briefly stopped at the very top and got off in the deep grass, where we spent what turned out to be for both of us an impulsively brief, but very special moment together. Just as impulsively, both of us jumped back on that dirt bike and rode clear back down to the bottom of that hill. When we reached the bottom, she pointed toward where she wanted me to drop her off saying that her house was just a house away and to drop her off at the side of her next door neighbor’s house. So I dropped her off and rode back over where my friend stood impatiently at the bus stop. I arrived so happy that I had an ear to ear smile on my face like I never had before ever in my whole life. Ironically, my friend greeted me with a surprisingly WIDER grin than even mine! He excitedly asked me, “Do you know who that girl IS?”. Since she hadn’t told me her last name, and I didn’t immediately recognize the significance of his question, he quickly answered his own question exclaiming, … “She’s the PRINCIPAL’S DAUGHTER!”.