Life in Rewind. Terry Murphy Weible

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СКАЧАТЬ was faced with the challenges of an older son who struggled with negative outside influences, she served up an endless stream of affection and support for her youngest, telling Ed that one day he would do something really important with his life. She snuggled with him while they watched movies together, carried cookies and ice-cold pitchers of lemonade out to the back garden while he played wiffle-ball or swam in the pool. She invited neighbourhood children like Rudy Harris, who would later play football for the NFL, to have sandwiches with them after school. Rita was ubiquitous in Ed’s happiest memories, and when she would pass away the tapestry of his life would change dramatically as he would be cared for by his less nurturing, seemingly antithetical father.

      Bob Zine was the dark, handsome, volatile son of a Lebanese-born prize fighter-turned-bookie from South Boston who, at age 16, forged his mother’s signature, lied about his age and went off to fight for the Marines in the Second World War. During his induction, as the drill sergeant yelled, ‘I am your mother and your father now, son,’ he was frightened and homesick. Having second thoughts about what he’d done, he rang his father to bail him out. ‘Take it like a man,’ Bob was told. Whatever gentleness there was inside of him disappeared that day. His wartime experience would later inform his decisions as a father, and the regimented way he ran his family and home.

      After surviving the Second World War in the Marshall Islands, and serving another term of service in the Korean War, Bob returned home to South Boston where he met and fell in love with Rita Grace Nice, a petite blonde beauty with a poodle-cut hairdo. Her name perfectly matched her quiet demeanour and style. She was ‘the prettiest girl in the neighbourhood,’ remembers Bob, ‘and I fell in love with her the minute I laid eyes on her’. The early years of their marriage were lean but loving, as Bob worked long hours as a plumber to support his burgeoning family. Eventually, though, he became a master builder and came to own his own business, enabling his family to move into Boston’s suburbs to live ‘the good life’.

      Ed remembers his mother’s scent. She always smelled ‘shampoo fresh’, mingled at times with smoke from the cigarettes she dangled between her fingers as she sat at the kitchen table playing dominos and Yahtzee. She was the centre of Ed’s universe, with television coming in a distant, though not insignificant, second.

      To this day Ed can recall the days and times when his favourite shows from the seventies and eighties aired. He never missed programmes like The Incredible Hulk, The Greatest American Hero and Magnum P.I., and he developed a passion for the ones that had veritable heroes in the leading role. A quiet, sensitive child, he connected emotionally with their power and honour, and used the storylines of good and evil to begin developing his own simplistic code of ethics. In one episode of The Incredible Hulk, Hulk impersonator Lou Ferrigno stops a man from using physical force against his son, and despite the fact that Ed’s father, like so many men of his generation, frequently employed physical discipline to rear his kids, Ed instantly recognized that dads are not supposed to hit their children. ‘In that moment I realized that it wasn’t something that was inherited, or predestined,’ recalls Ed, ‘and I decided, right then and there, that I didn’t have to be that way. I was never going to hit my children when I grew up.’

      But it would be a fallacy to paint Bob Zine as chronically abusive. Ed and his father were actually quite close, and shared many special times during his childhood. On weekends, when his dad was at his most relaxed, away from the stresses of work, Ed would crawl up on the sofa next to him in his pyjamas and, together, they would watch the Sunday Night Movie of the Week: movies like The Dirty Dozen, The Big Red One and the James Bond movies. Having a father who was an ex-Marine and, in Ed’s eyes, a real-life hero only served to make the experience more powerful for Ed, allowing him to connect to his father in an emotional and loving way.

      But television also became a necessary audio distraction for Ed. Before VCRs were a regular part of the American household, he would take his cassette tape player, hold it up close to the television and record the sound while he watched the show. When the programme was over he would go to his room and play the sounds of the show back, over and over again, rewinding to his favourite moments, to block out the arguments his parents would be having in the next room. ‘I used to see my Mom and Dad fight, which was very hard, but I chose to look past a lot of it,’ recalls Ed.

       Bob and Rita Zine fought constantly about their oldest son, and issues of discipline. Adding to the stress, around this same time the formerly petite beauty had nearly doubled in size, making her a target for her husband’s explosive and often cruel verbal lashings. Unaware that the reason for her weight gain was ovarian cancer, Bob made little secret of the fact that he was planning to leave his wife.

      In fact no one, not even Rita, knew she was sick. Although Ed compares his mother’s size and immobility during this time to the profoundly large mother in the movie What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, he doesn’t ever remember being embarrassed by her size, only concerned when she could no longer climb the steps to her bedroom. His older sister Tami recalls, painfully, a comment that her boyfriend made at the time when she told him her dad was going to leave her mum: ‘If my wife was that big I’d leave her, too.’

      Ed’s last great memory of his mother was a trip to the cinema in May 1980 when The Empire Strikes Back came out. It was a special experience that marked the beginning of his Star Wars passion. Shortly after, Rita surprised Ed with a set of Empire Strikes Back sheets for his bed and a Darth Vader costume for him to wear at Halloween. Whenever he and his friend Rudy got together to play Star Wars, he would put on the full costume and swing his light sabre, while his mother joined in the fun with her best imitation ‘…ahhhhhh, Luke, I am your father!’

      But Ed’s happier memories are interrupted by later conversations overheard in the kitchen and hallway as he passed by, hushed conversations between his older sisters and aunts when the diagnosis finally came. No one ever said, ‘Mom has cancer,’ but Ed knew something was wrong, even if he didn’t know exactly what it was. Relatives seemed to always be making an effort to get him and his sister, Deena, out of the house to do as much ‘fun stuff’ as possible. But for a happy, intuitive young boy to suddenly be pushed away from his mother, watching as she spent more and more of her time in bed, there was little fun in leaving the comfort of his home.

      These were the days when Star Wars fun and pitchers of ice-cold lemonade in the back garden would come to an end. All of those things Rita did so effortlessly to keep the house running smoothly and provide a loving atmosphere-things everyone had taken for granted for so many years-were coming undone. The house, and all of its order, was falling apart, and the ensuing chaos took the greatest toll on her husband, the ex-Marine whose life had been so carefully regimented. He was also heavily burdened by the guilt of having cruelly blamed her for her weight gain, all the while having one foot out the door. Worse still, for him, was the realization that his children were about to lose the woman he describes as ‘their best friend’, and during the holidays no less. The building frustration, guilt and sadness were understandably more than any man should have to bear, but his implicit reaction to this perfect storm of emotions would have devastating and lasting repercussions.

      On Sunday 19 December 1982, as his mother lay down the hall in the hospital bed delivered by the hospice, Ed spent the wintry day inside, sitting in front of the television set playing ATARI. Looking back, the only memory that could have clued him in to the pending tragedy, had he paid greater attention, was an argument his father had with someone in the background, but he was too wrapped up in his game to listen to what was being said. That evening, he put his video game on pause, went into the kitchen looking for something to eat and managed to scrape out the last remains of dried-out peanut butter from the jar and on to a piece of white bread. After slathering the whole thing with jam, he returned to his game.

      The realization that this would be Rita’s last night on earth was just beginning to sink in for Bob when he walked into the kitchen and saw the jam jar sitting open on the counter. Ed had no context for his father’s СКАЧАТЬ