Charlie X was Xman's dad. He was the closest thing I had to a father figure in my life.
From the time I started dating Xman in 1978 until Charlie died in 1982, it was as if we always understood each other. Now I realize it was a mutual concern that Xman not accidentally or willfully immolate himself.
Charlie was one of five kids born to Irish immigrants in the Depression. Not long after the last child was born, Charlie's dad had a stroke and thus they began living hand-to-mouth. Charlie and his older brother Johnny would pick newspapers out of the trash and sell them on the streets of Newark for a penny. When they got older, their crime syndicate expanded to include stealing copper and tin roofs off of abandoned or quasi-abandoned or occupied buildings.
Charlie remembered wrapping newspaper on his feet in the winter because his shoes were worn through.
He was drafted in WW II and sent to New Guinea as a procurement clerk. He wasn't even issued a weapon, despite the fact that they were getting fire from the Japanese. It didn't take long before one of his brothers in arms died and he got a weapon.
One of the apocryphal tales he told was of waking up one night to go to the latrine, finding along the way a Japanese soldier, killing him, then finding out the Japanese guy was wearing an American shirt - with Charlie's name in it.
I don't know if it's true, but it makes for a good story.
Before he left for war, he married a girl who was a friend of his brother-in-law. Mary Alice waited back home and the minute Charlie returned, Mary Alice got pregnant with Xman's older brother. It was another seven years before Xman came along.
Not long after, it was obvious that the marriage was deteriorating but neither one of them would get a divorce due to their Catholicism. They couldn't love each other, but they could love the boys. Mary Alice took Mike and poured all her love into him. She hounded him, poked him, made him strive. It worked. Mike is now a gazillionaire.
Charlie took Xman. There was a very brief time that Charlie went into business with a partner and they did very well until similar Japanese products came onto the market, far cheaper than they could produce it. The partner, a Jew from Brooklyn, decided he'd had enough of New Jersey and he was moving up to Vermont to start a new company. He asked Charlie to go and move his family, telling him he would be a son of the family.
Mary Alice refused adamantly to go anywhere with "those Christ-killers." She wouldn't go to their house and wouldn't have them over.
His partner moved to Vermont without the Xes and Charlie had to find a job. He got one, working on the loading docks at a local pharmaceutical company. He worked his way up to a quality control supervisor.
So Mary Alice had Mike and Charlie took Xman and raised them as they saw fit in the same house.
Charlie also found himself catting around, looking for more attentive female company - and would take Xboy along with him, visiting all his father's pretty young friends. I remember it stunned me when Xman regaled me with this, thinking none the worse of it because he worshiped his dad. Meanwhile, I was thinking, um, your father was committing adultery. He was cheating on his wife. He was cheating on your mother. Eventually, I said this to him and Xman merely shrugged.
Of course there was a parting of the ways. By this time, Mike was through college and married, starting on one of his two graduate degrees. Mary Alice moved down to the Jersey shore. Shortly after the divorce, she married a lifelong bachelor and seemed to live contentedly with him for the remainder of their lives.
Charlie and Xman moved into an apartment together. Xman was 18 and drifting, working as a night watchman at the pharma company, reading voraciously at night, sleeping by day. And eventually, Charlie got up the nerve to marry his long-time love, Annushka.
It was a second marriage for both of them and their love of each other was strong, steadfast, and enduring.
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