Dawn Schiller - The Road Through Wonderland - Surviving John Holmes

The dark notes and doomed lyrics of bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple become our leaders. We understand each other.

Dad probably never thought he was leaving us in one of the worst neighborhoods in Florida, but Mom is bitter. “Et seems like et’s happening overnight,” she keeps saying in her sharp German accent. “Efferyone just starts moving out in vun year. Et’s going from a nice neighborhood to dis,” she daily repeats with disbelief.

Mom is losing her children to the cruel streets of this impoverished inland Miami City, and she feels helpless. Maybe if I knew this, I would be more compassionate.

But I doubt it.

At fifteen, I’m trying to survive, and I blame Mom for everything.

Mom works three waitress jobs just to keep up the payments on our house, because Dad isn’t keeping his promise to send money. When she comes home at night, Mom is tired, angry, and sometimes, on scary nights, vicious and ready to snap.

After Vietnam, Dad took off in 1969 for a job with AT&T in Iran. “Laying cable in the desert will bring us quick riches,” he pledged. But his luck has changed, and the only thing he sends in seven years is one sad, lonely letter. The words on the rough-textured and stained paper taped crudely together tell us he is in a Thai jail, his passport has been stolen, and he needs us to send him some money.

Mom scrapes together what little she can from her hidden tip jar and sends Dad a MoneyGram, hoping this will be enough to help him come home. But there is no response from that far side of the world, and the one spark of hope she has kindled is silenced for another endless stretch of time.

In the evenings, before I can fall asleep, I ritually listen to Mom’s muffled weeping seep out from beneath her bedroom door. I listen because it is my way of making sure all is in order and she hasn’t left us too. But it’s on those random nights, when Mom’s pain is so great, that I hear her cry out to God, “Why?” It is on those nights that my heart breaks with hers, and our voices and tears blend into one long, pitiful wail, rising up into the splintered, hollow walls of our house. She can’t believe her dream for a better life in America has deteriorated to this—working so brutally hard and watching her children be consumed by the streets. Mom fears that we are damned, and this terrifies me.

Mom gets the call one April morning in 1976. Dad is not only in the States, but he is in Florida, not far from us, and is coming home this afternoon.

When I first hear that Dad is coming back, I think the world will begin to turn in our direction again. The way I see it, life can now be something to look forward to, not to cower from. Somehow, in my desperate need to find hope, I create an image of my father, the man who abandoned us to this hopeless place, as my hero.

My mind reels. I flash on the idea of “normalcy,” something we can have again. I yearn for my life to be like the happy family television shows I spend my afternoons escaping into. Maybe we can have a family like the Waltons. I’d even take the Bradys. I don’t care. I do care that we be like them: supportive, compassionate, and never experiencing a problem that can’t be worked out. They are perfect families. The fantasy makes me feel warm and tingly with anticipation. Can all the wrong or missing things in our lives suddenly be whole because Dad is coming back? Can we be a family again?

We are thrilled. My brother, sister, and I race around the house, screaming at the top of our lungs, running in and out of each other’s rooms, frantically attempting to straighten up for Dad’s arrival.

Mom gets caught up in our enthusiasm at times, but a strained, nervous look never really leaves her face. She sees that we are quick to forgive. There is no way we can really understand her burden of raising us alone these past seven years.

“Vee’ll see,” she mumbles and tries not to dampen our spirits. Perhaps she foresees how easy it will be for Dad to win us over, that his absence will make him seem kinder to us when he arrives.

I can sense how much she hopes it won’t happen.

It does anyway.

Wayne William Schiller. An all-American, blue-suede-shoes kind of guy: That is my father.

In 1957, he sneaks out to make a short hop to Philadelphia from New Jersey with his older cousin, Lash, to stand in line at ABC-TV. At sixteen, he is chosen as one of the first American Bandstand dancers, but back home, he gets a beating from his father for disobeying—and he never returns.

My dad is a very bright man who likes being hip with his hair combed back in a cool “duck’s ass” and wearing his peg-leg pants. Accused of being “incorrigible” by his mother during his parents’ divorce, he is rescued by my great-grandmother, who thinks boys can do no wrong and is passionate about bailing her grandson out of everything.

Awed by the art of savoir faire, Dad fancies himself a master. He can always find a way to get out of an uncomfortable situation and look like the good guy. His grandma has taught him that.

The world is his oyster as he strikes out on his own at a young age.

Soon he is an Army man stationed in Germany, where he meets Mom.

In a bar in 1959 on base in Amberg, Dad dances with Edda Therese Ilnseher, a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. Mom’s a babe, and it doesn’t take Dad long to swoop in with his charm.

Standing five feet tall and looking awkward next to my dad’s six-foot-two stature, Mom, like many other German women, is looking for a better life, away from the hard times she grew up with in postwar Germany.

Born on a farm in Bavaria in 1939, she and her brothers and sisters were displaced war refugees, Old World survivors. Dad calls them Gypsies, and I think of her family living in caravans, wearing turbans, and reading fortunes on the side of the road. They were orphaned when my grandmother, whom I never met, died on a meager farm in the country. Mom was eight years old and the youngest of six children.

A few years after World War II, Mom was shipped to a Catholic orphanage, where she remembers the nuns being strict and cruel. She lived in one of Munich’s cold, crumbling brick nunneries for several years, until her older sister raised enough money to bring her and her brothers and sisters back together again.

There, in that bar in Amberg, it is my parents’ night out to dance.

Mom thinks the streets are paved in gold in America, and she is feeling pretty lucky that the American GI smiling at her is also very handsome. When Dad speaks perfect German to her, she takes it as a sign that God has answered her prayers. She knows very little English and innocently trusts that he will guide and protect her in the New World.

On December 2, 1959, they are married at the city hall in Munich, Germany. It is a simple wedding with a justice of the peace and two witnesses, who are friends of Dad’s from the base and strangers to Mom. A few months later, he is stationed back in the States near his home in Toms River, New Jersey. Happy and in love, Mom and Dad take off for America.

We live at 718 Main Street in the big house my great-grandfather built. Since his passing, my great-grandmother, Cora Hilbert, has lived in the house and now lets us live with her and her sister, Great-Aunt Ella.

“Grandma,” as we call Cora, is a thin-faced woman with broad hips and tight, gray, bobby-pin curls pinned painfully close to her scalp.