Life in Rewind

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 rage. He didn’t know his mother’s life was about to expire nor that his father, who would later say, ‘She didn’t deserve to die like that, it should have been me,’ was on the verge of emotional devastation. Nevertheless, that night Rita’s baby boy, Eddie, became the lightning rod for his father’s anguish and despair.

‘When he hit me, it just came out of the blue,’ Ed recalls. It’s not that Ed was ever completely surprised by his father’s temper, but most of the time it was just words. ‘A lot of times when my dad would scream,’ remembers Ed, ‘he’d throw things in the air and say terrible things, but that night he came over and started kicking the ever-loving shit out of me. I had no idea what I’d done, or not done, to deserve it.’ It would have been pointless to fight back or even run from his father, so Ed stood there and took the beating, trying not to cry and anger his father further. When it was all over he did precisely what he was told to do: he went into the kitchen, put the lid back on the jam jar and went to bed, head severely throbbing from his father’s violent outburst.

Ed lay awake for a few hours, still petrified from what had just taken place, when he began to hear a painful groan coming from his mother’s room. Quietly, carefully, he got out of bed and headed down the hall. Ed stood frozen in the midnight shadows of the hallway across from his mother’s room. His 11-year-old mind knew instantly what his heart rejected. Listening to the gasp, the groan and that final, unforgettable hiss of life as it escaped her lungs-he watched as his mother took her last breath. It would be years before he would tell anyone what he’d seen, and even longer before his father would accept the possibility that Ed’s story could be true.

In the late hours of that December evening, just one week before Christmas, among the whispers of old ghosts living in the Stoughton, Massachusetts, home-rumoured to have once belonged to the cousin of Paul Revere-Ed shivered, violently. In that moment his entire life changed for ever. In the recesses of his mind, he worried that his father might catch him out of bed, but as he wandered back to his bedroom he was in shock over what he’d just witnessed.

It wasn’t long before Ed heard the sudden rush of people coming and going outside his door. In a frenzy, his father told to him to get up and get dressed, and he was taken to the home of an aunt. No one mentioned his mother’s death, and Ed feigned ignorance, still in shock from the physical and emotional trauma of the evening.

Two days later, while Ed was having a breakfast of bagels and cream cheese and hot tea, his father arrived to break the news of Rita’s passing. Ed was taken by his father out of the kitchen and into the den. His dad said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you, son.’ But before he had a chance to speak, Ed looked up and said, ‘Dad, I know. Ma’s not here any more.’ Surprised, Bob assumed that Ed had overheard a conversation, and asked how he knew, but Ed refused to say anything else. This was the beginning of a silent treatment Bob would have to endure for a long time.

‘Before his mom passed, he was always a quiet kid, always happy,’ recalls Bob. ‘But he was a really good kid-who wanted to spend time with me. We always watched movies together and things like that. But after her death, everything changed. I couldn’t get him to do anything. He was shellshocked. He wouldn’t talk to me, at all.’

Even if Ed had had the emotional capacity, and the words to express what he had seen and what he was feeling, he didn’t dare tell anyone; with the beating he had sustained for leaving the lid off a jam jar, the consequences, he felt, of admitting that he had disobeyed his father by leaving his room and subsequently witnessing his mother’s death were too great. He would carry this impossible secret, buried underneath the grief of extraordinary loss, for years to come, until he could no longer manage its profound effects.

At his mother’s wake, Ed sat quietly in the back of the church, trying to figure it all out, as everyone else was busy dealing with his or her own individual grief. He had become an outsider, alone, left behind in the sorrow of his mother’s wake, and his mind was filled with a mix of memories that he could not reconcile. At one point, as he stood in a queue at the front of the room, greeting mourners with his family, he turned to look at his mother lying in the open casket, and thought he saw a facial movement, a tic of some sort, indicating she was still alive. He watched her for a long time, hoping that her death was a mistake and that she was maybe just sleeping, because she looked so peaceful and thin, all of the fluid of her cancerfilled body now gone.

Ed, who had always been at the centre of his mother’s world, was now someone else’s worry. He remembers family members scurrying around to find something of his to place in the casket, and they came up with a toy airplane. It should have been a Star Wars toy…that would have meant something. His mother would have understood the significance of that-but there was no one listening to him now.

Back at school, after the Christmas break, Ed’s friend Rudy didn’t understand why Ed wasn’t in class. Rudy had spent the holidays with family and didn’t hear about Rita’s death until the headteacher came in and made the announcement to the class. Rudy, whose own mother had died when he was seven, had lost not only his neighbourhood mother figure but also his best friend, whom he greatly missed and who would not return to school for a long time. When Ed did finally go back to school, his home life was so unsettled that he struggled to get through the rest of the year.

After Rita’s death, everyone in the family seemed to scatter. While his older siblings were off living their lives as they had before his mother’s death, his brother Tommy, with whom he shared a bedroom, went off and joined the service. His older sister Tami moved out of the house and into her own apartment down the road, while Deena, who is closest in age to Ed, withdrew into her own world and spent every night crying herself to sleep.

Ed spent a lot of time thinking about the fights and the harsh words that had passed between his parents before his mother’s death. He wondered if his dad, whom he describes as ‘disconnected’ during the funeral, never crying once, even cared that his mother was gone. But then one night, as he passed outside the room where his father was packing up some of his mother’s things, he was witness, once again, to a rare expression of his father’s despair as the strong, proud Marine broke down and wept.

Like most men of his generation, raising and nurturing children did not come naturally to Bob. It was something that women were supposed to do while men worked for a living. Now, without a wife, he was completely at a loss as to how to deal, sensitively, with his two youngest children. ‘I kept Christmas in the new room for them. I didn’t know what else to do. I tried to talk to them, but I wasn’t any good at it. They’d had a bomb unloaded on them. And then Eddie started to act strange, standing in the corner, talking to himself, all mumble-jumble,’ recalls Bob. ‘He would stand in the corner making strange noises, waving his arms and grunting to himself. I didn’t know what to do. I swear to God, I didn’t.’ Before heading off to the service, Tommy remembers, at night Ed would lie in bed making strange sounds in his sleep. Tommy knew something wasn’t right.

As Ed’s trauma over the loss of his mother continued to manifest itself in bizarre physical affectations, his inability to articulate his sorrow and pain created concern. ‘The problem is,’ says Ed, ‘nobody knew what I saw; only I knew. So they’re thinking, “Poor kid, his mom just passed away and he doesn’t understand what’s going on.” At that point I not only understood what had happened, I had more going on inside of me-more emotions stirring-than anyone could possibly understand.’ The one person who would have understood was gone, and life was confusing. Ed was wrestling with many strange new feelings and fears. ‘Suddenly, whenever I would get in the car with my sister to go do something fun,’ he recalls, ‘I felt like something bad was going to happen if we went a certain way, or did a certain thing.’

As the situation grew more desperate, and Bob’s frustration increased, he made a decision that he thought was in the best interests of his children: he sent Eddie and his sister to live with his brother and sister-in-law. He hoped they would be better equipped to bring Eddie back to life than he would be on his own. But for Ed, being uprooted from his home, and the place where the memories of his mother were alive, was devastating. It was also compounded by a certain fear. Even at his young age he was trying to conceptualize death, and the idea that his mother had gone to a place where Ed couldn’t see or touch her was terrifying. He didn’t want the same thing to happen to his dad. He wanted to stay by his side, be near to him, watch him to make sure nothing bad happened to him. Ed nevertheless yielded to his father’s wishes, and the traumatized boy went to live with his aunt and uncle. ‘I didn’t have the words to express myself, and what I was feeling,’ remembers Ed. ‘I could only do what I was told to do.’

Ed may not have had the ability to express his thoughts and feelings aloud, but his deepest emotions rose up in silent expression as he related to the scenes of the movies and television shows he watched. He connected with storylines dealing with the issues of love, honour and family, as they played out before him on the television set.

Ed recalls a specific moment during this time when he was visiting his Auntie Queenie’s house. Auntie Queenie was upstairs making his favourite chocolate-and-marshmallow sweets, while downstairs he watched Uncommon Valor with his Uncle ‘Crunch’ Mac in their new entertainment room. ‘When you see moments like this on television, or in the movies-the love of a son, played by Patrick Swayze, for his father-those are real moments of emotion that live inside of us, and stir us at the very core,’ Ed remembers. ‘I was raised on moments like that…television brought it out in me.’

According to Ed’s father, ‘not much changed’ while Eddie lived with his Aunt Betty and Uncle Junior. And while Ed was drawn to Junior’s strength and integrity, and cites him as a role model for living a life of honour-being a man’s man who meant what he said, firmly believed in being truthful, and never talked bad about anyone-it wasn’t enough to erase the feelings of being so desperately unsettled. At the urging of Ed’s sister Tami, Bob took Ed to see a psychiatrist, hoping to find answers for his son’s silence. Ed refused to talk to the doctor.

In an attempt to bring his family back together and give Ed and his sister, Deena, a fresh start, Bob thought it would be a good idea to sell the house in Stoughton and make a permanent move to their summer home on Cape Cod. It was not a decision he discussed with his children-he just did it. Suddenly, inexplicably, Ed was taken to live in a world far away from the smell of spring lilacs outside his window, the tyre swing hanging from the tall tree in the back garden, and his best friend Rudy. It was the only home he’d ever known-the refuge he associated with his mother’s love and protection. As he watched his dad load boxes into a removal lorry to take down to their summer home, he had no idea he was leaving his childhood home for ever-and he was never given a chance to say goodbye to it.

Time just kept moving forward, and the changes it inflicted upon Ed were too many and too fast. He wanted it all to stop. He wanted to turn back time and make everything the way it was before. He wanted to stay in the one place where his mother lived in his heart and mind, but it had all vanished in the rearview window of his father’s car as they left Stoughton for the last time.

The house on the Cape was a brand new ranch with all the modern conveniences. It didn’t have a long history, or rumours of ghosts. It didn’t smell like an antique shop. There wasn’t even a hint of his mother’s shampoo freshness, or the lingering scent of cigarettes she’d smoked at the kitchen table while playing her games. Other than Ed’s sister, Deena, his grandmother Sitto-who temporarily acted as their caretaker-and of course the television, the house was a vast, unfamiliar, five-bedroomed emptiness. The joy that Ed had once got from playing outside was gone. The scenery was foreign and he had no friends in the neighbourhood to play with. He missed Rudy, he missed the tree swing, he missed the swimming pool. So he retreated inside to live among the things he could touch, that had once been touched by his mother. He began to seek comfort in the physical objects, the toy Transformers, GI Joes, the Star Wars figures and the Darth Vader costume his mother had bought him, all of which had a calming effect on his mind. He would curl up on the sofa, watch his usual cartoons and television programmes, and relish the familiarity of it all, reliving the warm and cosy feelings from the childhood that felt a million miles away. The toys and television had become Ed’s mental catharsis.

When Tommy came home from the service he would come by to help Bob get the kids off to school. He recalls it was hard to get Ed moving in the morning. ‘The harder I pushed, the longer it took for Ed to get his things together and make his way to the car,’ says Tommy. Ed, he reports, was always going back to check and recheck things he needed to bring to school, and touch certain things before he could move out the door. ‘Looking back,’ recalls Tom, ‘it was Ed’s OCD starting to reveal itself. It wasn’t because Ed was lazy, but we didn’t know that at the time.’

A self-described ‘geek’, Ed was the skinny new kid in a new environment, and he quickly became the target of neighbourhood bullies. He wasn’t comfortable at school, he wasn’t completely comfortable at home and, by the time he hit 13, he wasn’t comfortable in his own body. ‘I was trying to become an adult and deal with the fact that my mom wasn’t there, and there was no one in the family for me to talk to about adolescence.’ Emotionally, Ed says he continued to identify closely with the young kid inside himself and still enjoyed his cartoons and toys in spite of the growing pressures of being a teenager. And while Ed wasn’t as close to his father as he had been as a child, there was a constant undercurrent of worry in his life that he, too, might die. His dad wasn’t home much, but Ed always made it a point to know where his father was, checking in on him to make sure he was OK. Life was confusing and, he admits, ‘I lived a lonely motherfucking life, always asking myself, “What the hell about me?”’

Ed says that he quickly realized that his survival, and gathering friends and family around him, depended on his personality. ‘Being a sweet, geeky, book-smart kid helped me make friends.’ Ed’s attachment to his friends was intense and loyal. The more preoccupied he became with his friendships, the more he was distracted from the constant thought of dealing with the loss of his mother. ‘I didn’t get closure to the problem, and never developed the coping skills I needed, but I felt I was honouring her by trying to be happy,’ says Ed.

By the time high school rolled around, Ed had grown into a tall, good-looking teenager. Tommy, who had always been a terrific athlete, encouraged Ed to get involved in sports. Ed never considered himself a jock at 10 stone, but managed to make the football team in years 11 and 12. By this time Ed had naturally developed a quick wit that made him popular with his friends, and became part of a small group of guys. Kevin Frye, captain of the Falmouth High School football team and one of Ed’s closest friends, remembers: ‘Eddie would always go above and beyond to help his friends out, and he wanted everybody around him to be happy. We all knew he didn’t have much of a home life, he and his dad were not the closest, so his friends pretty much became his family.’

No one ever really talked about the fact that Ed’s mother died, but his friends all knew, and there were times when Ed would become suddenly pensive. When someone would ask, ‘What’s up, Eddie?’ he would simply tell them he had a lot of things on his mind. It was clear these sporadic interruptions in his otherwise upbeat mood reflected much deeper issues. Kevin remembers times when it would be hard for Ed to go home after they’d been hanging out together because he really had nothing to go home to but an empty house.

Ed’s high school football career was unremarkable. He was tall but skinny, and not by any stretch the most physically gifted athlete on the field. His playing time was usually limited to the few minutes at the end of the fourth quarter. Ed may not have seen a lot of game time, but he remembers overhearing one of his coaches say, ‘The kid’s got a lot of heart,’ and that made him feel good. Even when he did play, there was rarely anyone around to watch who could later pat him on the back and offer words of encouragement. The only reason he played football, he now admits, is that he wanted to make his brother Tom proud of him.

Tom would show up at practice whenever he was in town, but Ed’s dad was always too busy working to come to his games. Ed says he never pressured him about it because he figured work was something his dad did to bury the feelings he had for his mother. In the back of his mind, though, Ed always knew that if his mother were alive she would have been sitting in the grandstands at every game, supporting him even on days when he did nothing more than warm the bench. It was the ‘what might have been’ that was a constant source of heartache and sadness in Ed’s life. On his final game in his last year in high school, Bob did finally show up with Tom to watch him play-but there was another heart-breaking turn of events. Ed was sidelined for the entire game. His dad never got to see him play.

When he wasn’t out with his buddies, Ed found solace in the soft glow of his television set in the basement. It was the VCR, however, that changed his experience in a whole new way as he watched his favourite television shows and movies over and over again, hitting the rewind button as often as he chose, dissecting and analysing the actions and reactions of his favourite scenes and characters. If he watched a tape and caught someone saying the word ‘death’-what Ed calls the ‘d-word’-he would rewind it so they would repeat it an even numbers of times, because if something was said an even number of times it was like ‘an eraser to a chalkboard’-it simply disappeared. If he saw something he didn’t like, he would fast forward past the scene to ‘wash it out’. He says he would always time it perfectly, because he could ‘feel’ it, before hitting play again.

Rewinding gave Ed complete control of time within his movie and television world, and gradually, between 1992 and 1995, he would shift this power from a process with videotape to a mental and physical process-a process that would consume him completely.

For the next few years Ed continued to suppress the painful secret of his mother’s last moments, but as he watched his heroes on television he made a conscious decision that he would live his life like a movie. He would become a hero, too. The idea that someone would be willing to lay down his life for another human being resonated deeply within him. As a child he hadn’t been able to save his mother, but as a man he would find a way to save the rest of the people he loved.

I dreamt my dreams forwards and backwards-Ed Zine

Chapter 2 Time Equals Progression, Progression Equals Death (#ulink_6996b5da-48aa-5a83-bd6e-130960c82abf)

Times were tough in New England. In 1990, banks up and down the Eastern seaboard of the US were fore-closing as the property market collapsed, sending the economy into freefall. For guys like Ed’s dad, working in the construction business, the pressure of the recession was unrelenting. Tensions ran high all round, and dreams of big fortunes degenerated into modest quests for survival.

But Ed was a dreamer. A year out of high school he still believed his mother’s prediction that he was destined for something special, and wasn’t prepared to accept the status quo. He was a talented self-taught artist who’d done his first oil painting at the age of four, and drawing had become his passion. But without support or direction he didn’t have any idea what to do with his talent. His dad didn’t think being an artist was a ‘real’ job, so Ed floundered-doing odds-and-ends jobs for his dad in the plumbing business, yet fighting the pressure to make the family business a full-time career. The rest of the time he locked himself up in the basement and watched television, contemplating his future, but also taking refuge from the deep feelings of loss that consumed him when his friends left for university.

‘Do something or get the hell out of my house.’ It wasn’t easy trying to figure out one’s life goal under the constant pressure of a threat, but it was the only way that Ed’s father knew how to motivate him. Pushing and prodding is what had worked for Bob when he was in the Marines, and threats worked in the rough-and-tumble world of construction. But Ed was programmed differently. As a child he’d been taught by his mother to respond to gentle, loving, nurturing support and direction. He didn’t respond well to Bob’s ‘tough love’ approach, and was quickly becoming immobilized by anxiety.

Ed’s childhood friend, Rudy Harris, was off at university living his own dream as a starting fullback for the Clemson University Tigers. After Ed and his family had moved to Cape Cod, Rudy had become something of a local celebrity as the star player for Brockton High School’s football team, the number-one high school team in the country in 1989. Years later, Rudy would wonder how different Ed’s life might have been if he had been able to stay in Stoughton and the two of them allowed to grow up together. Each of them understood what it was like to lose a mother so young, and with his family frequently absent Ed perhaps could have benefited from Rudy’s ‘older brother’ compassion and positive attitude. Maybe Ed, too, would have developed as a star athlete.

As it was, the two continued their long-distance friendship through their high school years. There wasn’t a high school football player in Massachusetts who didn’t know the name Rudy Harris, and Ed was proud of his childhood friend.

In the autumn of 1990, tired of his loneliness, Ed spontaneously decided to visit Rudy down at Clemson University. After the 14-hour drive, Ed pulled his car up just a few streets away from the campus and made his way Rudy’s hall of residence. The sun was shining, the weather was crisp and there was an excitement in the air that felt fresh and alive. As Ed looked around at the happy faces of the students, he could feel the anxiety of his life melt away.