I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I was 7, an old lady was driving too fast in my neighborhood and hit me with her car. I was running out of the house, and when I got halfway into the street, my mom saw the car and yelled for me to run back. As I turned around the car hit me, dragged me five houses down the road, and I fractured my collarbone.
I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle - a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own - and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.
I remember the first time I pulled out of my driveway in my grandparents' Nissan Ultimate or Centra. I just remember getting in a car that smells like my grandparents, with both my parents standing on the lawn, so petrified. That was my car up until I was 18.
I remember riding my bike down the boardwalk with nowhere to go and looking at the girls. It was really innocent.
I remember having mice in the house and my father taking some newspaper and beating me because mice was running on me while I was asleep.
About 25 years ago, I was in an apartment, and next door, they put on the radio, so I struck the wall with my fist, but they did not put the radio down. I took a tool and banged until I made a hole through the wall. It was like a comedy movie.
I started running away when I was five years old. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized what I really wanted was somebody to come after me when I was running away.
I was hit by a car when I was 13, and the rumour was immediately that I had been playing chicken with the car with my best friend Kenny in front of the Nutmeg Pantry, which was the only shop in Sharon. In fact, the guy who hit me was inebriated.
My mom had me at 16 and took me every place she went. I remember going on peace marches. She tried to take me to Woodstock - it was pouring rain. It was on my birthday, and I was crying so much in the car they turned the car around and dumped me at my grandmother's house... I had a little attitude.
It was my father who - after, at age 15, I had attempted unsuccessfully to drive the family car using a 'borrowed' key and knocked down a wall of the garage - convinced me over the telephone not to run away from home and who then came home from work not to punish me but rather to console and comfort me.