Just A Waitress (eBook)

Chapter 2

I grew up in Northport, NY. Northport is a beautiful little town on Long Island with so much charm. I still often visit as an adult. There are many shops and restaurants along the harbor. There are boats along the dock and there is a long dock that goes out into the water with a gazebo with benches at the end. The view is breathtaking! My parents had a house built in 1970 in an area called The Pit. It used to be filled with sand, but they dug out the sand and built houses. In 1970, my parents paid $52,000 for that house. That was a lot of money back in those days.

I was born in 1971. My mother called me a “surprise.” My parents already had my brothers Tom, James, and Paul. Tom was from my mom’s first marriage. She had been married to a police officer, Tom Sr., who was killed in a motorcycle accident when Tom was just a baby. My parents had James and Paul together, and then me. I was the only girl. When I was born, my mom was forty and my dad was fifty-two. My dad was married before as well and had three boys from that marriage—Steven, Robert, and Billy. He divorced his first wife because she was an alcoholic. He left my mother in 1975 for another woman, Diane.

We stayed in the house with my mom after the divorce while my dad got a condo in Ronkonkoma. We saw him every Saturday, just one day a week. My dad was a retired police officer who got hurt on the job many years prior. A suspect that he was chasing threw a broken beer bottle at his face and my dad lost an eye. After that, he became a private investigator for insurance claims. My mom’s parents, Eva and stepdad Carlos who lived in Glen Oaks, Queens, came on the weekends to help my mom.

In 1975, when I was four, our house burned down from faulty electrical wiring three days before Christmas. We lost everything. We lived with my grandparents in Queens until the house was repaired. In the meantime, my mom drove back and forth to school in Northport so we wouldn’t have to change schools. It was an hour-long drive.

When I was seven years old and we lived in my grandparent’s house in Queens, I was chasing my brother out the storm side door in the kitchen. Instead of pushing the handle, I pushed the glass and my whole arm went through the glass. I got thirty-seven stitches, from my wrist to my elbow. When I was ten years old, my brother had a bb-gun and pumped it up. He pointed it at me and shot me in the chest one inch from my heart. My mom and my grandmother were at a prayer meeting in the Bronx and my grandfather was watching me. He didn’t want to call and disturb them, so he waited until they came at 3:00 a.m. to tell them. They took me to Long Island Jewish Hospital in New Hyde Park to remove it. I remember crying so much when they were starting to remove it. The doctor told me there was a girl in the next room getting a steel bar removed from her chest and she wasn’t crying as much as me.

When my brother Tom was fourteen years old, a friend’s mom who practiced witchcraft gave Tom and his friends LSD. Tom went into a catatonic state for three months. He was hospitalized and placed into a psychiatric hospital. Tom was never the same. He began doing drugs regularly soon after the incident. He dropped out of school, became very violent and mentally ill. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was in and out of different psychiatric hospitals.

He began doing heroin and was going to methadone clinics daily. He never could eat enough sweets—donuts, cakes and just junk food. His mind was like a child even as an adult. He would stay up all night every night watching shows and just laughing and laughing at all hours of the night. His favorite shows were The Odd Couple, The Honeymooners, Star Trek, and even Tom and Jerry! He would fall asleep sitting up, while holding a cigarette and would have burn marks all over his blankets and even the rug. Sometimes he was really nice and talkative and then sometimes he was nasty and violent. When he was violent, he would break the walls with his fists or even his head. He would break dishes, glasses, and sometimes windows. When he was angry at my mom for not giving him money, he burned her clothes with cigarettes. He would steal her jewelry, collectible coins, and cash.

Unfortunately, my two other brothers, James and Paul, eventually followed in the same footsteps but they were both hooked on cocaine. All three acted insane sometimes. Soon TVs, VCRs, and cameras started disappearing—even the lawnmower. Everything was being sold for drugs. My mom cried all the time. She was physically and mentally exhausted all the time. She didn’t work, so her income came from renting out two bedrooms in the house upstairs as well as renting out two houses she owned with my grandmother.

My mother and grandparents were born again Christians who believed God would help the boys. They thought that praying every day would make a difference. I look back now and don’t understand why it didn’t. The police began to know the Mullagan household very well. They were called to it constantly. My mom was very passive, always trying to avoid confrontation with her sons, but my grandmother would go after them with a cast iron frying pan if she had to. She wouldn’t put up with their cursing at her or disrespectful attitude. They would say to her, “I can’t wait until you die so I can laugh at your funeral.”

My mom decided to send me to a private Christian school in sixth grade. I was not happy, but I met up with a couple girls I knew there. In sixth grade, I had my first major crush on the pastor’s son, Brady. I stayed in that school until eighth grade and then I wasn’t invited back. I had been suspended from school for two days because I brought in a Michael Jackson magazine. I also got in trouble a lot with my friend Tara, but nothing serious at all. The school felt Tara was a bad influence on me and wanted me to stop hanging out with her, but I refused. Hence, the decision to have me not invited back. In 1992, Tara was at a party and got drunk. Her friends drove her home, but instead of waking up her parents, they left her in her car to sleep it off. It was the coldest night of that winter and Tara froze to death. She was twenty years old.

My mom sent me to a different private Christian school for ninth and tenth grade. I absolutely hated it. Everyone was so mean and so fake. But I met one girl, Danielle, who became my best friend, and we were inseparable for two years. In eleventh and twelfth grade, I went to a Lutheran school. I liked it a lot. My friend Raina from when we were four years old was there. I made a lot of friends and I started dating.

Every summer since I was twelve, I went to a Christian camp with my church for one week. It was called Couriers Camp. This was the highlight of the year. It was so much fun and I loved it. I got to meet so many people from Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. When I was seventeen, I met a boy named Jose and I really had a thing for him. He lived in Brooklyn and he began taking the train to come see me all the way in Northport. He was my first sexual experience and I got pregnant.

I was scared out of my mind to tell my mother, since we were always fighting. She was against abortion, and I was raised to be against it also, but I was a kid and I did not want a baby. I saw my dad every Saturday with my stepmom. I told them I was pregnant. My dad took me for an abortion a couple of weeks later. My mom somehow sensed and knew what was going on. I don’t know how. At this point, things really took a turn for the worse with us and we fought constantly. She acted like she hated me. She called me a tart, which was slang for a prostitute.

She began to punish me in different ways like taking the doorknob off my door, so I couldn’t lock it. She took my stereo out of my room. She would lock the phone in her room so I couldn’t make or receive phone calls. She locked up the laundry detergent and then the food. She eventually bought a small refrigerator for her own bedroom and would lock the food in there except for cereal and milk. This was all because I would not admit that I had gotten pregnant and got an abortion.

My mother never punished my brothers for all the terrible things they did to her over the years because she had no power over them, so she became unhinged, trying to control my every move. The final straw was when she tried to stop me from going to school. She would tell the bus driver that I was sick and wouldn’t be going. I was crying all the time, begging her to stop. Finally, I decided to walk to a pay phone to call my best friend Raina and tell her mom. The nearest pay phone was two miles from my house. Raina’s mom, Stella, who was an RN, couldn’t believe what I was telling her. She picked me up, drove me home and tried talking to my mother, telling her she can’t be behaving like this. My mom told her to mind her own business. I started back to school, though.

Shortly after, 17 years old and weighing 98 pounds, I became sick with tonsillitis. My tonsils were so huge they touched each other. My mom refused to take me to the doctor, since she was still angry at me, and she also did not have any health insurance for us or herself. Everything was paid out of pocket. I again called Raina’s mom to tell her, she picked me up against my mom’s wishes and took me to the doctor. The doctor said I needed to have a tonsillectomy, but I was extremely anemic. Stella called my dad and told him...