The Luckiest Unlucky Man Alive: Chapter 1 

I Can't Believe This Is Happening to Me...
It's Just Too Stupid! 

"I can't believe this is happening to me!" The thought blasted through my brain, accompanied by a series of images of my nine-year-old life. 

I was watching a slide show in my mind of me and my little friends, of me and my family, of me in grade school. I knew I was dying, and this was what happens just before you go, these pictures of people and events. I didn't know it would look like a slide show. 

Then, WHAM, it hit me. I clearly saw the front page of the New York Times and the headline that screamed out to all of metropolitan New York and New Jersey --- "Goss Boy Drowns in Sink" 

It was just too stupid. My family would be embarrassed. It would be the ultimate humiliation. How could they explain? What would they say? And people would laugh, I knew they would. I was drowning in a sink! I'd be dead soon, and people would laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. 

You're probably wondering how anybody could drown in a sink. For me, it was easier than you'd imagine. Out of the necessity that comes from raising six kids under one roof, my dad had put in a second toilet and sink off the kitchen. It was in a closet that was so small a full size sink would never have fit --- or if it had, a person couldn't be in the room with it. So Dad installed a tiny little sink, a lot like those in dental offices, only with faucets. 

This particular day I had come home from school for lunch and gone to wash up. After washing my hands, I decided to wet down my hair and slick it back like Dad's or maybe Elvis Presley's. There were, after all, several of my friends and family waiting for me in the next room and I figured they'd be impressed. I filled the itsy bitsy sink with water and stuck my head in to wet my hair. Instantly, the faucets reached forward and clamped themselves to the back of my head, successfully trapping my face under the deadly pool of water. I felt it happen and knew that tidy hair wasn't worth this. I jerked my head back. No luck. The faucets tightened on my swelling skull as if they were possessed with some demon determined to rid the world of young William A. Goss. I tried to twist my head but it was hopelessly locked and wouldn't turn in either direction. The seconds ticked by. I kicked the wall behind me, trying to get my mother's attention. I made gurgling noises that would have been screams except for the fact that my face was immersed under water. 

Unaware of what was happening to me, no one came to my rescue. But what would they have done if they had? I thought I could save myself by pulling out the rubber sink stopper. Again, no luck. My head was too big and the basin too small. There was simply no way I could get my hands around my face to unplug the lifesaving stopper and drain the water. Neither could I move my face down enough to pull it out with my teeth. That's when I knew I was going to die. There was nothing I could do to save myself and no one was going to save me. The slide show started as my brain depleted of oxygen and I began to give up the struggle to regain the breathing world. 

Innocuous little pictures clicked on and off in my mind. There were about fifteen of them. And then that dreadful headline, that clearly readable front page article that told the world of my stupid death. It was more than a proud nine year old could stand. In a final burst of strength and resolve I threw my head backward as hard as I could. 

I crashed into the wall behind me nearly knocking a hole in the wall and rendering me practically unconscious. My lip was bleeding profusely --- I had bitten through it, and there was a trickle of blood in my boyishly blond wet hair. The faucets had torn at me, trying to thwart my escape. Still, they had the worst of it. Those faucets were bent and bent good. Dad had to replace them. 

Anyway, there I was, bleeding and hurting. The crashing noise of my escape brought my mother and friends rushing in. "What in the world have you done?" she asked. I was gagging and started to cry, then thought better of it and stopped the tears before my friends noticed. She cleaned me up, fed me lunch and sent me back to school with the others. The entire adventure --- drowning, slide show, lunch and all, took less than an hour. That was my first near death experience. 

Later, I found out that everyone had heard me in the lavatory, banging around and making noise. They thought I was intentionally making animal sounds to amuse them. Brother Larry, sister Peggy, and neighbor Chris McHugh, or "Cubie" as we called him, were all having a grand time laughing at my foolishness. Stupid noises like that were not uncommon out of my mouth. I was lucky that day, but then again, I was damn unlucky as well, all things considered. It was to be a trend in my life. 

Like Dad always says, "Billy could fall into a pile of cow manure and find a diamond buried in the tread of one of his sneakers when he finally climbed out." Eugene Joseph Goss is the deep thinker in the family, making us kids think too. He's also very physical. Dad and I sparred together from the time I was old enough to put on the tiny leather boxing gloves he had bought for me and my brothers. Later, he would box me wearing the fencing mask that I had worn briefly on the school fencing team so he wouldn't have to go to work with a black eye. "Don't ever be a bully," he'd say, "But if you're sure somebody's going to hit you --- hit him first." A firm disciplinarian and loving father, he toughened me at an early age, much like his dad, a powerfully built stonecutter and sculptor of cathedral angels, had toughened him. 

When my father's little sister died of pneumonia, he witnessed his normally stoic parents grieve for months. He watched my grandfather in their tiny backyard, carve an eight-foot angel from a giant piece of limestone he had painstakingly selected for her tombstone. Her death and its effect on my grandparents gave my dad an early insight into a hard world. He grew up "Down Neck," a distinctive part of Newark, New Jersey, known for its ethnic diversity, where nothing came easy and success was hard to find. 

My mother, on the other hand, had decidedly more white collar upbringing. Barbara T. Dacey Goss, while undoubtedly as strong, intelligent and charismatic a character as my Dad, has a much more powerful sense of the "here and now." There's always been a lot of adventure and curiosity about her. I think of her as an "optimizer." She taught us to always find a way to extract the very most from any situation. There are no strangers in my mother's world. None. Zero. Before she can finish a cup of coffee at a gathering of strangers she will know everyone in the room. And discover some familial link with each of them, even if it goes all the way back to Lucy. Oh, not our Aunt Lucy, but the Neanderthal Lucy whose three million year old remains were discovered by famed anthropologist Donald Johanson on the plains of Africa. 

Mother's middle name is Tennyson, which I thought would have been difficult to handle for a girl growing up. Nana, her mom, never missed an opportunity to proclaim herself and my mother the namesakes of Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson. Although the famous poet laureate of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" was once believed to be a great, great uncle on my mother's side, I've always identified with William Shakespeare, who was born and died on my birthday, April twenty-third. 

Nana had a profound effect upon my life in a very obtuse way. I was naturally left-handed and she insisted that I learn to eat and write with my right hand, saying I'd smear the wet ink and bump elbows at the dinner table if I did these things "lefty." But she didn't give a hoot which hand I used for throwing or which foot I used for kicking. So, athletically, I stayed a "lefty." Nana never let up until I had successfully switched over to her school (or hand) of thought. Psychologists now discourage this sort of thing. My wife, with a background in education, believes that irreparable damage was done to my child psyche. I, however, think it forced me to use both sides of my brain more. It made my brain ambidextrous. Even my SAT scores were very evenly balanced between verbal and math. I owe Nana a debt of gratitude for her strong encouragement in making my left and right lobes work extra hard at getting along with each other at a critical juncture in my early childhood development. 

My mother's dad, Charles Dacey, or "Pop" as we kids called him, had flown JN-4 Jennys in World War I. He was an artist, a musician, a fine woodworker and an all around handyman. The paintings and furniture he created now grace all his grandchildren's homes. Both Pop and Nana graduated from college, he with a master's degree from Rutgers. They were unusually well educated for a couple of people born in the 19th century. Pop, a Newark high school teacher, had a great sense of humor. He was fond of telling me, "Billy, money isn't everything, but it's a reasonable facsimile." 

Every summer he and Nana would have my parents and us six Gosslings up to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for a couple of weeks. There they had put together a prefabricated cottage that the forever innovative Pop had built in their garage in New Jersey. They flatbed-trucked it up to the Cape and placed on a wooded lot they had purchased for two hundred dollars. I asked Pop once how he managed to do so much. "Nana and I took advantage of everything cultural," he said, "and we weren't afraid to take chances. I decided years ago that I would accomplish something, anything, no matter how small or large, each and every day. I built the Cape house while the two fellows next door listened to Red Sox games." With the impeccable timing and smiling eyes he was so famous for, he'd conclude with "...they're both dead now...." 

After Pop graduated aviation ground school in 1917 at Princeton University, the U.S. Army Signal Corps (there was no U.S. Air Force back then) transferred him to Love Field, in Dallas. When he was in his eighties, Pop gave me his leather flying vest --- from one aviator to another --- to commemorate my having soloed a military training plane like he had 62 years earlier. The vest carries the faded signatures of all his long-dead pilot buddies. One was his best friend, a man whose body Pop had to return to Massachusetts in a pine box after a spin demonstration had gone fatally awry. In 1918, pilots hadn't yet figured out how to recover airplanes from a spin, pulling the stick back instead of pushing it forward to break the stall. Hell, Orville had only met Wilbur at Kitty Hawk just fifteen years earlier. No doubt about it, Pop had piloted planes before most of the world even knew planes existed. To me, he was absolutely amazing. 

"Billy," Pop said, holding out the vest as if it were a precious and fragile newborn child, "I want you to have this." I could feel the tears welling up behind my eyes as I accepted his gift. I breathed in the fine, sweet leather smell as I clutched this special prize, and read and reread every one of the 75-year-old messages scrawled on its back by his long gone comrades.

Our family was blessed with two parents, who, no matter how hard things got, were committed to keeping their marriage together. Barbara and Eugene Goss set a powerful example of marital commitment. I came to understand how a two parent family provides a sense of security and stability that is very difficult to achieve in a single parent home. Lauren Bacall, whose father abandoned her as a small girl, once said, "No matter how much my mother loved me...no matter how often she told me I was talented, beautiful, good...one parent can't make up for the one that walked out, no matter how lousy he might have been."

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