Gallagher's Delicatessen

  My Mom,  (Becky) grew up during the depression. She was surrounded by many brothers and sisters (ten) all of my grandmother, Clara Magdalene's children. I never met this mysterious grandmother, as she succumbed to ovarian cancer when my mom was only ten years of age- (Becky was born in '33.) 

  My Grandpop, Mr. B. obviously had his hands full, trying to support all these  children he co-created in Trevose, Pennsylvania, then a rural Catholic township outside of Philadelphia.  He conducted trains driving up and down the Allegheny Railway, making delivery stops.  Exhausted, he barely had time for his youngest children, ages 13-7... 

   After a year or so he married an educated and tailored "Marguerite."  Her family was then considered 'well to do' but she was not very attractive physically- was still single and was also quite Mennonite!  She was also the high school teacher in Quakertown, where everyone eventually attended, including my mom and her siblings!  

   This set up an odd dynamic for the kids at school and at home with the nagging Marguerite.  She took care of the five youngest of the brood who were not married off yet, but was controlling and a critical perfectionist.  Each could not wait to get away from her and each did it in their own way.  The resentments of the children, lasted a lifetime. 

  My mom, a Virgo, was considered the favorite youngest daughter of PopPop B. and he used to call her "Queenie." She was always pretty and later featured in a local paper in a beauty pageant and was well billed in the Philadelphia Enquire!  Men were really after her but she was quite religious in her youth, promising her mother Clara that she would only "marry a Catholic Man." 

   Becky had her first kiss at age 16 from her crush, a handsome guy named Dave Cruise.  He planned to join the service for 2 years and be back to marry Becky after his stint.  They wrote love letters and were smitten and both expected to get hitched         one day.

   Becky disliked Marguerite's disdain and moved away at age 17, to my Aunt Ruth's house. close to a brand new high school.  Within a year she was to graduate in the first class of Lincoln High.  She even ran for president of her alumni!  "Becky for President!"   She could type well, cook well, and was well-liked by her friends.  

   After graduating High School, Becky applied for a job at Gallagher's Delicatessen, a successful restaurant and deli on Torresdale Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia.  My Uncle John hired her as a waitress on the spot as my dad worked behind the counter making sandwiches and root-beer floats! 

  My Dad, Bill Gallagher, was about 5' 10," with a slight build, curly brown hair, and round spectacles.  He was a kinda shy Pisces, but always had a wise crack to add humor to the scene. Of course he was attracted to Becky and asked her out several times, but she always replied, "Bill, I have someone special I am waiting for...his name is Dave Cruise!"

  My grandfather, John J Gallagher, was the owner of the Deli and my Grandmom, also worked within the business, which was doing very well until PopPop decided to expand to a property across the street. Because it was bigger and nicer.  He hired an architect/builder who, after contracts were signed, absconded with my Grandfather's life savings, never to be seen again.  This was a great blow to the family.

   But yet another tragedy was about to emerge.  My grandfather, in a state of utter despair, depression, and alcoholism, gassed himself in front of the unlit oven at the delicatessen!  My father found his body slumped on the kitchen's floor.  The word "suicide" would never be mentioned for 30 years, as the act of self-destruction was considered a taboo sin, punishable by Eternity in Hell, according to the Catholic Church.  My dad was 18 when this unspeakable act traumatized him. 

  Around this time, Dave Cruise came back from the Navy and took Becky round to meet his Mom.  Everything seemed to be peachy until Dave's mom discovered that Becky was CATHOLIC. "None of my grandchildren are going to be raised Catholic, was his mother's last retort as the young couple hurriedly exited.  A last kiss... It's all over, the wedding is off.  What a shock!  OMG.

   Perhaps first to assuage his grief or hers, Becky decided she would finally go out with my dad on a date.  After all they worked together and he was Catholic and a gentleman, not pawing at her like a lot of other guys did.  They would go out for a drink or go jitterbugging at local hangouts. After a few dates, Becky laughed at dad's corny jokes, and he acted very chaste with her, respecting her virginity.  He was honorable toward her and she liked that.  Later she'd say it was "on the rebound." 

    Six months later, they were married in the Church in 1953, and started a new family straight away.  The first baby girl born on Christmas Day a year later!   

Let's celebrate!     How about a beer...and a cigarette?    Sure!    Why Not?

  And so fast forward into the sixties with FIVE more babies, hundreds more beers, cartons more cigarettes.  Each new baby born on a "special" day:  The Vernal Equinox, D-Day, the Feast Day of St. Gabriel, Veteran's Day, and finally the Winter Solstice.  I'd say that their rhythm method was just short of miraculous!  

   So lets do the reality check.  Dad makes fifteen Grand a year at an electrical engineer job, and his pregnant wife is home raising babies. Four grand goes to Beer and Cigarettes, and they live on the rest.  Somehow we scraped by...

   Eight people in a row house in Philadelphia with one bathroom. Think about it.  Four boys in one small hot sticky, room where humid nights with no air-conditioning.  We are cooled by a wet cloth to the face,  OMG!

   Alcohol and physical abuse first manifested when Christmas baby was just two years old.  Becky was beaten and left bloodied on the kitchen floor for the first time by my drunken father.  Packing her bags, she left for four weeks.  After two broken appointments arranged to see my sister, Becky was lured back with apologies and  promises of "it would never happen again." My dad was promising to change.  To stop drinking and never strike my mother again.  But it did happen again, and again. 

   I was not yet born to have witnessed this early sequence of events, but we all knew the story, as it was told many times over.   As children we were subjected to the limited powers one had to survive an abusive alcoholic's crazy and scary acts.

   Things got hairy scary in 71-72, with mom going out dancing "with her girlfriends" returning to a barrage of scathing accusations of infidelity.  Gowns were cut up with scissors in drunken rages, or burned, and fistfights ensued.  Arguing and fighting...

  Broken fingers, black eyes, damaged egos and all while we cried and begged them to stop... or we ran away to call the police.  Booze was a losing game, with more yelling and screaming and chaos and threats.   Except on Sober Sundays when we all dressed nicely and went to church, pretending all was well.  My dad, the hypocrite.

   Mom was now checking hats at the Hilton Hotel "with her girlfriend," to make extra pin money.  That's where she met a tall dark and hairy Italian "vampire" who stole her poor soul forever.  He was still married to another woman in Carolina. They never divorced.  Becky wanted him.  She was now forty and also flirty.

 "Now that's the kind of man I could really go for!"  And so she did go for him. Of course no one knew that The Affair went on for a year before Becky finally left my Father in DEC 1973 ---leaving Vern (13) and D-Day (12) with my dad, given their choice to stay at the time.  She filed for DIVORCE.

   We all had to make that sickening choice.  Who did you trust more?  Mom or Dad?  And oh, the twists of fate that would lead us all to grief, loss, and a lifetime of abandonment and trust issues.  The days of innocence and authentic experience as children were over.  Now there were more lies and more violence, more beer, and more fear. Betrayal and abandonment were not far away...

  Did our dad discipline us...?  Yes.  With his hard hitting hand or the belt to the buttocks, over his knee.  Was it because you did not eat your steak?  YES.  It was also if we told a lie or struck our siblings in a fight. Sometimes it was because the four of us couldn't sleep in that hot room and we'd be goofing off, making noise.

   He'd come up and whip each of us, one by one, with his leather belt, in our bunk beds.  I wonder what our neighbors thought of our yelps?  If ever approached by a neighbor, Dad would say "mind your own god-damned business."  Think Archie Bunker.  That was my dad's favorite television hero for years, yet he never realized it was pure satire... He thought just like the bigot, phobic Archie Bunker was for real.

   Did he ever go overboard with trauma and vulgar words.   YES. Threatening to kill all of us in the car driving one hundred miles an hour while we are all panicked and in fear as Vanilla ice cream oozed down our wrists.  Many bad memories, outweighed any levity.  Too many traumas to list in this brief story.

  Things got uglier when my mom started making more money than my dad as a receptionist/ book-keeper at an x-ray office.  She rented a house on the corner above Valenti's Italian Delicatessen!  She could walk to her work or take a short bus ride.  

   For a while it was the four of us, mom, me, Barbie doll, and Ken.  We secretly took the bus to Catholic grade school each morning, even though we were living outside of our Parish boundaries.  I now had to wear silver braces on my teeth.

   The Divorce was ugly and expensive lawyers were draining.  Bitterness and contention followed along with estrangement and confusion.  What was going on?

    Suddenly our mom is dating this tall dark stranger aptly named, Rob.  Then he moved into our new escape house!  None of us liked him, we all thought he was a phony, but Becky was completely head to over heels in love with this gigolo gorilla! Etched onto his coffee mug were the words, "The Boss." We watched our mother become completely subservient to this loud-mouthed intruder, and soon we were all sent to fetch groceries so that they could be alone.  His Lincoln Continental was parked right outside our house.  I always resented that lazy slob now on DISABILITY.

   We were shocked that our mother acted like a fawning teenage girl around him, fetching his slippers and cooking him his filet mignon.  I was asked to make High Balls and Brandy Alexanders in the evenings and fetch his paper down at the corner news stand on Saturday mornings.  Personality clashes quickly crept into the jealousies of children.  How could we plot to rid ourselves of the Italian Stallion who crashed into our lives and was now watching cartoons and boxing on our TV,  feet up on the coffee table, remote in hand. 

    Becky now wanted to please this guy in every way, unfortunately to the detriment of our simple needs.  This guy was a big Taurus bully, with a passive aggressive personality, using our mom as he would a new wife!  Resentments grew intense and there were psychological abuses taking place within the household.  Rob was a suave grifter who thought he was Frank Sinatra, and there was nothing we could do or say to change our mother's insane infatuation!  She slept with Rob in the same room as my little sister, age 6.  Nightly noises did not go unnoticed.  How crazy were they?

"You should be happy that I found somebody I love." "If you don't accept him, you don't love me."  "I'll send you back to your father if you don't change your rotten attitude!"   We heard it all.  And we started hating Rob more and more.  After nearly three years, things boiled over and I was the first to be kicked back to my Father's house, the sick alcoholic, depressed, and obsessed man who condemned Becky and Rob to hell for "living in sin."  He called them every name in the book, and even hired a detective who found out that Rob actually spent time in jail for Armed Robbery after leaving the army as a young man.  He was married twice before and had one daughter, in Tennessee.  He was still technically married to his second wife, never settling his legal divorce.  He sold used cars on the side to make some money under the table. 

   And so these years were a really rough time for me, because eventually all of us were kicked back to our Father's house, and my mother went on the lam and flew the coop to Florida, where they rented a trailer home in Sarasota. This all happened suddenly after my dad sent a sheriff to serve papers to Becky to get support money from HER!  She faked it and pretended not to be herself! 

  Rob then gave her the ultimatum... "Hun, it's either them or me!"  She chose to abandon us and was now a thousand miles away in Florida and I never even got to say "goodbye."  We were all now back "home," and I was now the family cook, Saturday vacuum cleaner, and garbage dumper-- those were my chores.  My dad was often terrible to me, calling me derogatory slurs and demeaning sexual inuendo when he drank heavily.  I was not the only target of his misplaced rage.  He kicked my 17 yr old brother D-Day, into the streets, because he had a girlfriend and was smoking pot with his friends.  We were forbidden to let him in the house, but we still made tuna fish sandwiches and fed him from the backdoor.  He was living with a high school friend on a downstairs sofa.  He had one pair of pants and shoes.  Trauma.

   It was during this time that I felt depressed and suicidal. I was forced to quit my HS sports because there was a lot to do taking care of my two younger siblings at home.  I began writing poems as a catharsis, and started painting artworks in the cellar, to get away from the daily chaos.  The multi-dimensional music of the Beatles helped me enormously, as did Elton John's, "Someone Saved My Life Tonight."  And someone did--save my life that winter.  His name was JOHN.  Come June 1980, I graduated in top 50 of my class, winning a partial scholarship to Art School and the St. Francis Gold Medal for Excellence in ART presented to me by Cardinal Kroll.  I should have been happy, but my mom was not there and I felt cheated.  I was secretly in love with the man who saved my life, and yet I was also leaving the City of Brotherly Love.  A strange and bittersweet time to remember another loss.

  Unbeknownst to my father, I had arranged an escape plan.  Against his will, I bought a one way ticket to Sarasota, Florida to visit Becky and Rob.  Luckily, I had sold several paintings and had some money in my pocket!  The night before I was to leave, my dad got pretty angry about it all, and threatened a backlash when I returned.  I would now be expected to pay room and board!  

   I never said goodbye to him when I left Philly the next day.  Unfortunately, my dad was a tyrant during this period of his life.  (He mellowed out over time, and finally sobered up for the last 11 years of his life.  By then he was a happy camper, enjoying a platonic relationship with a charming church lady named, "Marie."  She offered him a kind friendship and endearing respect, but was still in love with her deceased husband of 35 years.  But I'm jumping way ahead.)   

   That summer after graduation, I spent ten days in Florida, happy to see my mom, but Rob was still an obnoxious A-hole.  No pictures of us kids were displayed in the house, just poses of the happy couple.  I don't recall much happening, mom was still gaga for her "Robert," but I was not impressed.  He was so uneducated and ignorant.  My mom insisted she never left us, she only left my father because he threatened to kill her.  He did have a gun and would spy at the second house in his car, waiting... I was glad to have left, too, being the main target of his disrespectful, and sadistic tirades.  Rob also had a gun and actually threatened brother D-Day with it during an argument.  What a Jerk!  (In the end he actually stole my mother's estate and against her wishes, took it all and transferred $300,00 to his daughter, acting as his new legal guardian two days after my mom's funeral in 2019.)

  Back to the summer of 1980-

   My next destination was on to Los Angeles, where Becky's brother, my Uncle George lived with my aunt Yvonne.  They invited me for a summer visit to their large adobe abode in Studio City.  Both were astute high school teachers.  George taught English and Theater, and Yvonne was an American History expert.  They were fun people and had a large circle of creative friends in Hollywood.  They were not surprised that I hated Philadelphia.  They also recognized my unusual talent as a painter and offered to help me.

   After hearing about my stressful life at home, they proposed that I stay in California, go to school here, start a new job, and get an apartment.  They did help me out in a really big way.  George taught me to drive a used station-wagon.  I got the first job I applied for at Ma Bell as a repair operator in North Hollywood.  Within a month I had a job, a car, and a quaint bachelor apartment bordering tony West Hollywood-- one of their long-time gay friends owned a courtyard complex there. 

    And so my new life started at age 18 and I was finally free to pursue my career as an ambitious young artist living in Hollywood!  I was away from my angry father and was slowly finding my own way, working and going to school.  At last I had found respite and a small measure of happiness and freedom from the madhouse.  I escaped.       

  Johnathon G.        Jan. 2024