The first time I ever heard them, I was being babysat by a girl about 8 yrs my elder, Rachel Self. I was about 8 at the time. She had just received her drivers license and we were driving along the road, myself, rachel and a couple of my friends. we were listening to the radio and all of a sudden Rachel SHH'd us all and turned the radio as loud as it would go.

She started singing along and by the time the song was over she had to pull the car to the side of the road. She was apoplectic.

My parents never listened to music, so I was a sheltered kid. I had no idea that music could have that effect on people. ESPECIALLY GIRLS!

Later that week, Rachel again babysat us on a Sunday evening. I really liked that because I could watch one the forbidden shows in our house, The Ed Sullivan show. My parents hated The Ed Sullivan show, rock and roll and just about everything so we never ever got to watch it.

A bunch of Rachel's friends came over to watch the show with her. Teenage girls all over the place. they all sat eagerly for the Beatles. I can't tell you when they came on in the show but when they finally did come on it was pandemonium. the girls all screamed fainted and swooned. I had never seen anyone act this way. These girls were flipping out. No longer were they demure girls, but they were freaking animals! All they talked about the rest of the night was The Beatles and who they were going to marry. Who was going to do what to whom and the pros and cons for each member of the band.

All I knew was, this music really got these girls going, going like nothing else. It changed them. It made their little teenage panties wet and I think it was the first time I was aware of sex.

I also knew that I wanted to be a Beatle. or something like one. Just like every teenage or pre-teen in America.

So we bought Beatle boots. we pegged our pants. We all begged our parents to buy us guitars.(Mine would only allow me to play a pedal steel, it was not a Rock and Roll instrument). We bought Beatle wigs.

Suddenly everything that we had been taught and told by our parents was wrong. Totally wrong. Here were these mop topped kids, having fun, pranking on everything in society and we loved it. Our parents hated it. Some passionately. Mine would not let me see the films (I had to sneak out my window, put on my pegged pants, wig and boots stashed in the bushes and meet up with my friends the night they opened). My parents did not let me have any of their music or wear any of the clothes. My dad was always "They are laughing all the way to the bank" and all that.

Of course that just made me rebel even more. No longer could my parents tell me what to do, what to wear, what to listen to. i was going to do it no matter what and there was nothing they could do about it.

It became a constant battle. I wanted to play music. I wanted to see music. They caught me sneaking out to go see the Beatles at Candlestick park and grounded me forever. It made no difference that I did not have tickets, I was going anyway.

in reading this thread it is nice to know that I am not alone. It gives me good perspective on the why's and such and how to end the cycle as best I can and deal with my own demons and how they came to be. For a long time I just thought I was fucked up and everything my father told me I was. But now I know, it was him and my Mom that are the fucked up ones and at least I am trying to better myself, at least mentally.

But as my father has begun the all too slow deescent in his own demise, any good things about him have disappeared and only the horrible are evident with him now. And I am the only one that gets to deal with it. And until the past two weeks most of the things I needed to say to him, I have not. but I have told him exactly how I feel aout him lately and it is hard, but it needs to be said.

So thanks for the words and everything will be okay for all of us if we learn about what went on and take care of it if we see things in ourselves that mirror those horrible things about our relatives.

My mom would not let him drink in the house until I was about 13.

He hid a bottle behind the toilet, drank on the job (as a tile contractor) and was generally a pretty good father.

But every once in while he would come home late and have huge violent fights with my mother. Called her every name in the book, questioned her sexuality etc.

Once in while I would find him sleeping face down on the floor. At the time, I did not know what the deal was, but now I do.

My Father has always been a very intimidating person and would use violence or the threat of violence to dominate and abuse everyone in the family.

When i was 13 my uncle and his family came out from South Carolina, my Mom's family. They drank, and in the open. A martini every night at 4 PM. When they came it gave my Dad a license to be open about his drinking. And drink he did. But he is one of those drink till it's gone types (me too at times). So the drunken fights were more frequent. The abuse intensified. Although up until that point he had only given spankings, he was always very controlling and verbally abusive. Once I was at my Girlfriends house across the street, lost track of the time and literally kicked my ass across the street. In front of everyone. Then the threat of real violence became part of my life. getting backhanded at the table, that sort of thing.

As his drinking became more pronounced, he became violent to his friends and lost most of them. He would fight with anyone, over the littlest things.

Once he came home from drinking with his working buddies and looked through the mail. He found my checking acoount statement in there with the cancelled checks. Now, I was 15 I think, and this was my first checking account. I worked for my dad after school and on weekend and during the summer, so I had a checkbook. He noticed that everyday I made out checks to someone for five dollars. He asked me (more like browbeat) about it and I had no idea who it was. He accused me of buying drugs with a check (yeah right). At the time he became so abusive that I could not remember the checks. It seems that every day the roach coach guy came by and I wrote him a check but he wanted me to leave the payee line blank. So he had his wife cash the check and I did not recognize the name. In the hubbub I could not figure it out.

Of course the fight escalated, he started towards me in a menacing way, and I finally stood up to my Father. I told him I was going to kick his ass. Of course this is something that every father and son go through and they get over it. Not my father, He went to the bedroom and brought out a gun and pointed it at me. I was terrirfied and left the house then. Of course I came back eventually, after my dad threatened the family that was putting me up.

Since then he has done the gun thing so many times that I do not have a clear reccollection of any one incident, but only a composite of them all. Once he pulled a gun on me because I would not unload the trailer from camping fast enough for him. I have had to take him down many times, any time he even gets upset he fakes like he going for a gun and I wil never ever let him do that to me or my kids, so I take him down. He of course, thinks that I have beat him, but the truth is, I never hit him with my fists or kicked him. I just wanted to make sure he did not get the gun. As he has gotten older we have had to take the guns away from him a bunch of times. But he goes to a card room and gets another one so we are not sure if he has one or not.

He would drink (always double shots) and get very abusive to my Mom, Accused her of being a lesbian, a whore, sleeping with the people they were out with etc. In restaurants, church (yes church), on camping trips etc. But by now he was this way drunk or not.

As I got older and dealt with my own issues with alcohol (thank God I am a happy drunk) I have found out some things about my Father. One was he was married before he and my Mom were married. He beat his first wife when he was drunk to a pulp and was threatened by her family and never saw his two kids again until they we in their late 20's. They too have many issues with drug and alcohol abuse and his daughter abandonded a family of her own. She is now a great person and a great parent but spent her twenties abusing all kinds of drugs and once tried to commit suicide. I always thought of them as the lucky ones, they did not have to deal with him everyday like I did.

My father has always said "I want to be rich enough to get drunk and lie in the gutter all day". he still says that, but he can't drink anymore. But he is still the biggest asshole I have ever met. My Mom, although I don't have as much animosity towards her as I do my father, has always been afraid of him and let him terrorize everyone in the family. And for that I will always wonder why she let him do that to her, her children and granchildren.