The Crocodiles Will Arrive Later

By Kathy McCoy and Elizabeth McCoy

Kathy McCoy had three major fears: first, that she would grow up to become a suburban housewife with no power of her own; second, nuclear annihilation; third, that her father would kill her. One wasn't out of the question; her alcoholic, mentally ill father threatened his children's lives on a daily basis. Her dad called his explosive mood swings 'crocodiles,' he feared they would devour him as they had his mother. He wasn't the only one.

A memoir of horror and humor, "The Crocodiles Will Arrive Later" tells the story of growing up in mid-century suburban Los Angeles. It is a story of hope and learning how to let go of a painful past to create a very different future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098328160

Book preview

The Crocodiles Will Arrive Later is a work of non-fiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright © by Kathy McCoy

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, addressed Attention: Permissions at [e-mail]

www.drkathymccoy.com

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Print ISBN: 978-1-09832-815-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09832-816-0

Printed in the United States of America on SFI Certified paper.

First Edition

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

McCoy, Kathy

The crocodiles will arrive later: a memoir/Kathy McCoy

Subjects: Mental illness, Childhood Trauma, Alcoholism, Child Abuse, Recovery

Books by Kathy McCoy, Ph.D.

We Don’t Talk Anymore: Healing After Parents and Their Adult Children Become Estranged

The Teenage Body Book

(with Charles Wibbelsman, M.D.)

Understanding Your Teenager’s Depression: Issues, Insights and Practical Guidance for Parents

Purr Therapy: What Timmy and Marina Taught Me About Life, Love and Loss

Aging and Other Surprises

Making Peace with Your Adult Children

The Secrets of My Life: A Girl’s Self-Discovery Journal

Growing and Changing: A Guide for Pre-Teens

(with Charles Wibbelsman, M.D.)

Solo Parenting: Your Essential Guide

Changes and Choices: A Junior High Survival Guide

Life Happens

(with Charles Wibbelsman, M.D.)

Crisis-Proof Your Teenager: How to Recognize, Prevent

And Deal with Risky Adolescent Behavior

(with Charles Wibbelsman, M.D.)

The Teenage Survival Guide

The Teenage Body Book Guide to Sexuality

The Teenage Body Book Guide to Dating

To my brother Michael and sister Tai

To our spouses Bob Stover and Jinjuta McCoy

To Lex, Maggie and Henry, the next generation

And to

Sister Rita McCormack

(aka Sister Mary Virginia)

Who gave us love and hope when we were children

And a lifetime of joyous friendship

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

Chapter Eight

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter One

When I was five years old, at the dawn of the Fifties, my greatest fear was that I would grow up to be a San Fernando Valley housewife.

My second greatest fear was nuclear annihilation.

These two terrors dwarfed my everyday fears: that my mother would slip a raw egg into my daily chocolate malt or that someone else’s mother would give me a sandwich with mayonnaise on it and expect me to eat it; that everyone loved my baby brother Mike the most; that I would never be as beautiful as my mother or as brilliant as my father; that the crocodiles I suspected lurked under my bed would snap my toes off during the night if I didn’t keep tightly curled up and covered.

Regular drop and cover drills at my pre-school had spawned my fear of a nuclear holocaust. Even as we were growing up, treasured and pampered in our post-war housing development in suburban Los Angeles, there was the sense that trickled down from adults whose memories of World War II were fresh and searing to the smallest of us: this could all be gone in an instant.

But it was eavesdropping on my mother and her circle of neighborhood friends that had given rise to my greatest fear.

They lived in a different place at a singular moment in time. La Canada Flintridge was a small, upscale community wedged into the foothills between Pasadena and Glendale and with an uneasy mix of old money and nouveau riche families. Now, on the town’s eastern boundary, overlooking NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Devil’s Gate Dam, there was a tract – a tract of small, plain ranch-style homes at affordable prices in this community of custom-built homes. Locals sniffed at the thought of this and referred to the area disparagingly as The Rancho. It was carved out of vineyards, bordering a riding stable that would give way to St. Bede’s Catholic church and school. The bridle trail, leading from the former stables and into the hills, remained at the edge of our backyards.

For returning World War II veterans facing a housing crunch in 1946, this hastily built neighborhood was the promised land. They came from a variety of backgrounds and life paths and, for the years of my childhood and, in some cases, well beyond those years, we all lived together as a large extended family.

The wives were a curiously dissimilar group of women, the most economically diverse that the neighborhood would ever know. Their husbands were attorneys and auto salesmen, airline mechanics and engineers, college professors, bartenders and insurance adjusters. The men were all war veterans. The women had spent the war years as secretaries, working in factories, at military installations, in bars and, in my mother’s case, as a stewardess-turned-emergency services nurse at an Air Force testing facility, riding the ambulance out to crash sites while praying that her test pilot husband was not among the victims.

Now they were suburban housewives.. Living the dream of economic stability after a lifetime of Depression and war, they struggled to make sense of the women they were becoming.

Lying on my stomach in the hallway, inches from the closed living room door, I would press my ear to the grating of the floor furnace and listen as my mother and her friends talked late into the afternoon about their lives before and after their strange wartime marriages.

The disembodied voices wafting through the furnace grate were sometimes muffled by sobs, sometimes tight with anger or lightened by laughter. They spoke of longing, frustration, loneliness and dead-ends.

When Ollie and I make love, he tells me how much he loves me. But then I wonder, how could he? How could he love me after all I put him through…Oh, Ollie! Ollie, poor soul.. and a sob escaped, as she rattled the ice in her gin and tonic.

It was Leanna, our next-door neighbor to the left. She and her husband Ollie had met at a Norfolk bar during the war. He was in port with the Canadian Navy and she played honky-tonk piano in the bar. The quiet Canadian, destined to become a post-war college math professor, was instantly attracted to the fun and gregarious Southern belle. They spent the night together and, wanting to do the right thing, he proposed the next day, overlooking the fact that she had already been married and divorced and had a sullen seven-year-old son named Doug. They married and, before he shipped out to Europe, she was pregnant with their daughter Merrily. Just weeks before this coffee klatch, Leanna had given birth to their son Luke.

I shifted, pressing my ear closer to the floor furnace, as Leanna paused to pour herself another drink. Drinking was a problem for Leanna. She had knocked over our paired mailboxes so many times trying to maneuver her wood-paneled station wagon into the driveway after a drunken evening with her friend Barb at the local bar that we finally had to get a P.O. box for our mail.

My parents often shook their heads over her casual approach to parenting. When Merrily was a toddler, a disheveled little urchin clad only in a rumpled diaper, Leanna would give her a fistful of nickels for the ice cream truck and lock her out of the house each morning. By afternoon, Merrily’s face was smeared with chocolate and her diapers wet and full. Tired, hungry and out of nickels, she would come over to visit, cuddling up to my father in his makeshift home office, wanting to be held, and would be rescued by my mother who would change her diaper, clean her face and hands, brush her hair and give her a sandwich and milk along with hugs and kisses.

Leanna loves this little girl so much! she would tell my father, who was frowning and busy swatting Merrily’s curious hands away from his office paperwork, pens and postage stamps. It’s just that she has this drinking problem. She’s really such a good and loving person…

Leanna did love everyone. Almost everyone.

Caron, I love you like a sister! she would say, swaying slightly as she appeared to reclaim her child. And Kathleen….

She reached for me, gathering me into an embrace with Merrily as the two of us giggled and poked each other. Kathleen, my sweetheart. I just love you, baby girl.

She bent over and stroked my little brother Michael’s black hair as he played at our feet. And Michael….I could just kiss you all day, baby.

But Jim McCoy, her face darkened as she turned to my father, sitting at the kitchen table, smoking Chesterfields, stirring a rum and Coke and pointedly ignoring her. Jim McCoy, you are one silly son-of-a-bitch.

Father smiled and said nothing, until he discovered, moments after their departure, that Merrily had swiped yet another pen or sheet of postage stamps on her way out.

Dammit! he roared. I’m going to enclose this goddam place with a goddam six-foot fence!

A formidable cyclone fence, complete with barbs on the top, was in place a few weeks later. Merrily walked up to the gate, rattled it and, with great effort, pushed it open just enough to wedge one foot inside.

Hey, Jim McCoy! she called out cheerfully as Father peeked out the front door to discover the source of the gate-rattling. Jim McCoy, you silly son-of-a-bitch, I have my foot in your yard!

Eavesdropping was my guilty pleasure that summer when I was five.

Ear to the floor furnace grate, I listened as Vonda, who lived across the street, talked about the pain of her second divorce and the difficulty making ends meet with her job as a waitress at Foster’s Freeze and of raising her kids Diane, 8, and Danny, 3, alone. I wrinkled my nose, puzzled at her distress over her job. Working was cool. Working at Foster’s Freeze was extra cool. Yvonne was something of a neighborhood hero to the kids. She knew how to make every soda fountain drink there was. We were in awe.

I listened as Barb, Leanna’s drinking pal, wondered just how she ended up with four children under the age of five and a lawyer husband who worked too many hours and whose mild demeanor in the face of her drunken screaming at him only enraged her further. As I listened to her express her frustration and disappointment with her life and her marriage, I shuddered as I thought of the screams we had heard from her house, across the street from Leanna and Ollie, the night before.

It had been the screams of her two eldest children – Nancy and Wendy – only four and five years old. Mommy, don’t! they had screamed. Mommy, put down the knife! Please don’t kill our Daddy!

As doors opened at adjacent houses and neighbors ran over their carefully manicured lawns toward her house, Barb had stormed out and into her car.

My father, halfway across the lawn, stopped and shook his head. That is one mean woman, he said, sitting down on the front porch to keep watch with a drink and cigarette, squinting out into the night.

I listened as Eloise, prematurely graying in her early thirties and famous in the neighborhood for her incomparable chocolate cream pies, talked about feeling tired and overwhelmed, despite her kind and unusually helpful airline mechanic husband Marvin, with her twins, two-year-old Diane and Drew. I love my family, she said with a heavy sigh. But I just didn’t think it would be this hard….

I listened as Jackie, who had always frightened me with her hard face and cold, dark eyes, honked with mirthless laughter about the hard knocks of her life: three divorces, raising a daughter Sandy, now 8, alone during the war and the precarious nature of her recent marriage to night club bartender Jack.

I smiled at the mention of Jack. He told great stories about his famous cousin, the stripper Lily St. Cyr. And he had made every Halloween in our neighborhood extra special by dressing up in drag, complete with high heels, fishnet stockings, flowing lingerie and a mask with flaming red lips. He accompanied Merrily, Sandy and me on our trick or treat rounds. We would giggle as he flirted with neighborhood men, causing Barb’s startled lawyer husband Fred to drop his bowl of candy as Jack scooped Fred up into his arms. We scuttled like crabs at their feet, picking up the candy, as the two men laughed.

I listened as Penny, our quiet, kind next-door neighbor on the other side, talked about her life and misgivings. She was due to start back to work as a secretary soon to boost the family budget. But she was concerned about leaving her four-year-old son Ricky in nursery school. She wished that she could talk more honestly about her feelings to her husband Waylon, an ex-Marine and used car salesman. I used to run my own life pretty well before I got married, she said. I worked. I had a little apartment. I made ends meet just fine. But now it’s a struggle sometimes. I wish I could just sit down and talk with Waylon. But he insists on making the decisions and handling the money and sometimes it just scares me…

Hearing the stress and concern in her voice, I felt guilty for adding to her troubles. But the temptation was just too great sometimes to keep from tormenting her vulnerable, somewhat peevish little boy. Knowing his fear of getting his face wet, I would jump into Ricky’s play pool and dump a pail of water over his head, watching with malevolent glee as he squeezed his eyes shut and whimpered through clenched teeth.

I had distressed Penny even more during my gender discovery phase when I delighted in undressing Ricky through our fence and urging him to dance around, totally naked. I pointed at his bouncing penis and laughed until a parent – his or mine – would intervene.

My mother hadn’t seemed all that upset, but her voice was firm. I can see why you’re fascinated, she said. My goodness! For a little kid, he is very well endowed. But it isn’t nice to laugh at him. And it upsets Penny when you undress him. So please don’t do that anymore, okay? It’s fine to be curious, but enough is enough. Agreed? I nodded solemnly and my behavior improved, marred only occasionally with a bout of water torture.

I listened as Helen, a middle-aged woman who lived across the street, to the right of Vonda, talked about her new life. Severe depression slowed her speech as she talked about how hard it was to be left behind by a husband of twenty years who had fallen in love with someone younger and prettier just as their teenage daughters Joan and (yet another) Diane needed a father most. I really don’t…. she said, struggling not to cry. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.

I felt an aching in my throat for her and a fierce determination to never find myself so helpless and hopeless.

Then my mother was talking. My aching sensation didn’t go away. My mother, once so beautiful, once famous, had given up a career she loved to marry and have children. I knew she loved us and that giving up her glamorous life was her choice. But I caught her wistfulness when she looked at her expanding waistline in the mirror, pulling at her shapeless housedress. And I heard her breath catch and escape in a deep sigh time after time when Father would launch into one of his drunken rampages.

My mother and I had our fun times. When I was really good and ate my vegetables, rinsed my plate and made my own bed, she would let me look at her old scrapbook, a treasured link to her glamorous past.

I turned the pages carefully, reverently, as I reviewed her earlier life and career.

Graduating from a rural Kansas high school in 1931, in the height of the Great Depression, she was aware that her options were few, but was determined to have a more exciting life than her classmates in that farming town. Her farmer father was able to feed the family from his own crops, but there was no money for college. She signed up for nurse’s training – the only form of higher education where students were paid to attend classes – and developed a special love for psychiatric nursing.

Once she was an R.N., however, a new opportunity beckoned: commercial airlines were hiring stewardesses. They had to be registered nurses, be no taller than 5’4" and weigh less than 115 pounds to work on the new DC-3 aircraft. With dreams of travel and excitement, my mother applied and became a celebrated pioneer stewardess for American Airlines.

She was like the Sally Ride of early commercial aviation. There were photographs of my mother with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and other celebrities of the day. She had been featured in ads for milk, for silk stockings and creamy face soap and for permanent wave lotion in those days before truth in advertising (she had naturally curly hair).

Her life story – from farm girl to famous stewardess – appeared in newspapers and magazines nationwide. She shed her homely birth name of Ethel Curtis for the more appealing Caron Curtis. She appeared in films and represented American Airlines at key publicity events. Her social life was fodder for gossip columns.

Then she had met Jim McCoy, a former child movie actor, engineering major at UCLA and pilot in the Army Air Force. Jim was under the command of Col. Mac Mackenzie, an aviation pioneer who was engaged to Caron’s stewardess roommate Aggie Spence. One summer night in 1940, the four of them met at the airport in El Paso for an evening on the town in Juarez, Mexico. It was love at first sight for Jim and Caron both.

He was so charming, I heard my mother saying as I pressed against the furnace grate.

He can still be so charming and funny and we do have a good life together. But there are times when, just with the family, he can change completely. The people who work for him at his engineering company just love him. But in private, at home, he has this reservoir of anger and bitterness and hatred. I fear for the children. I fear for me…

Listening, I shuddered. I understood what she meant.

What I didn’t understand was how and why a beautiful, smart, glamorous woman had become the frightened, frazzled mother I knew.

Even when my mother laughed and told the others Oh, I’m sorry! I don’t mean to be so melodramatic! I don’t know what got into me!, my aching throat and my fear lingered.

What scared me most, even then, was growing up and becoming her.

Chapter Two

My favorite stories during those early days were never fairy tales, but true stories: sometimes brave, sometimes frightening, often sad accounts of the imperfect lives of my parents and those who came before them.

I listened for clues: Was Father ever normal? Or was he always in the jaws of the crocodiles, a term he used for his disabling bouts of depression, rage and episodes of physical and emotional abuse? Why was he loving and funny one moment and monstrous the next? Why did our mother both love us and betray us again and again? Who were these people who happened to be my parents?

I lived for those stories, begging my parents to tell me about their childhoods and about their parents, the grandparents I never knew or hardly knew: my paternal grandparents having died years before I was born and my maternal grandparents living hundreds of miles away on their Kansas farm.

Knowing their stories, the thwarted hopes and the realized dreams of those who came before me seemed critical to making sense of the tension and chaos that surrounded us.

The family tales were a cacophony of fugitive flight, of altered life dreams, of uncommon achievement and wrenching tragedy, of secrets and lies and humor and levity, of bright promise and the dark generational underpinnings of alcoholism and mental illness.

My paternal grandparents – Henry Patrick McCoy and Elizabeth Lyons – were fugitives from the ordered expectations of their youth.

Separately, they crossed oceans and continents to flee what seemed inevitable.

Henry fled fame and acclaim after he earned a law degree from Northwestern University, getting wide newspaper coverage and the offer of a Carnegie Hero Medal after rescuing a man from a well filled with poison gas in rural Illinois.

He had been visiting his sister on a farm near Quincy, Illinois when there was an outcry from farm workers: a man named Frank had fallen into a well filled with carbon monoxide. As others protested that going down after the man would mean certain death, Henry climbed down a ladder into the well, seized Frank, who was now unconscious and, with considerable difficulty, carried him to the surface. Then Henry collapsed, losing consciousness. Both men were taken to a local hospital where Frank died and Henry, after frantic resuscitation efforts, survived. When he regained consciousness the next day, Henry was grief-stricken to hear about Frank’s death and horrified that efforts were in progress to declare him a hero.

I’m not a hero! he protested. Anyone would have done what I did. And, besides, I didn’t save the poor man’s life.

When he heard that he was being nominated for a Carnegie Hero Medal, he insisted That’s not for me! before slipping out of the hospital and vanishing.

But this only led to more fame. He was a news item immediately.