Frank Damico, Part 1: The Non Deer Hunter

This episode is about Frank's rather Dickensian childhood, and it starts before he was even born, when his mom Barbara got knocked up at 15.

Not with the baby who would be Frank, but with his older half-sister Debbie.

The year was 1950, long before legal abortion, and Barbara's parents were very Catholic.

So the night they discovered she was pregnant, her dad drove around the town until they found a boy, Johnny, who was 16, and they gave him a choice.

Marry her or get charged with statutory rape.

Two days after Barbara's 16th birthday, she was married to Johnny in a shotgun wedding.

Four months later, she gave birth to Debbie, and four months after that, she and Johnny broke up.

Their young marriage was over, and Barbara moved back in with her parents.

At 19, Barbara married Frank's dad, Tony, mostly to get out of her parents' house, she once told me, and they soon had a baby daughter, Elizabeth, and then 18 months later, Frank.

But by the time Frank was born, Barbara was already sneaking around on Tony with another man named Ernie, who happened to be the brother of her first husband, Johnny, and who would soon become her husband number three.

She was 22 years old.

At some point during his parents' short and volatile marriage, Frank was put in that Catholic orphanage from which he has a vague memory of a nun leaning over him.

He doesn't know how long he stayed there before his parents reunited for a spell and brought him back home.

What he does know is that he was three or four when his mom left his dad for good.

She dropped off her oldest daughter, Debbie, with her parents and she left Frank and Elizabeth with a random older couple whom she paid a bit of money to take in the kids.

To us, they were perfect strangers.

The old man, all I remember of him is he was silent and sat in a big chair in the living room.

I was always being punished for not eating and for bedwetting.

And I just remember that there was no hope anymore.

And I felt it, I think, as soon as we stepped over that threshold.

As soon as we stepped over that threshold, all hope was gone.

If he had any hope at all, it was that his parents would come back to claim him.

But the next time Frank saw his mom, she'd come for a different reason.

She was going to leave Poughkeepsie with this guy, Ernie, and they were going to move to New York City.

So she had come, I guess, to say goodbye.