The Luckiest Unlucky Man Alive: Chapter 1 

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I owe my self-esteem and respect towards women to the devotion I witnessed daily between my mother and my father. Even when they were yelling at each other, which was often, I always knew their love for one another would keep them together. That was a comforting thought. It was remarkable how, with all the years of yelling at one another, I never heard them utter a vulgarity or use words to demean or hurt. Bad language was not permitted in our home. Loud language yes, bad language, no. 

A friend once commented to me, "Bill, your parents must really love each other." 

"Why's that?" I asked my buddy. 

"Well, if they weren't passionately in love with each other, they certainly would have divorced by now. . . .!" 

Research has indicated that marriages like that of my parents, one with lots of arguing and disagreeing, aren't destined to the divorce trash heap as it was once thought. Instead often they're the ones most likely to last a lifetime. My mother was never afraid to speak out in our household. She was confident that my father's respect for her and for women in general was so ingrained that he would never physically lash out at her. Sexual equality reigned in their marriage and set the standard for my brothers and sisters to follow. 

Being the fourth of six children, I shared a room with my two older brothers. At least I did until they couldn't stand my snakes anymore. At one time I had over a hundred snakes of various shapes and sizes. My brothers were always complaining that the snakes smelled bad and took up too much space. Their complaints were not well founded as I saw it. I kept the snakes clean and everyone knew our room was THE best zoo in town. 

My sisters were always involved in the recapture of snakes that escaped in the house, unbeknownst to my parents. Greta caught one with a laundry basket, Jackie caught one with a canister vacuum cleaner, and my favorite sister, Meem, well she just wasn't a very big fan of having loose snakes in the house. 

I had box turtles, too, and I used to watch them mate as they crawled across the bedroom floor. A small boy can learn a lot by watching animals have sex. There were assorted other creatures that moved in and out of my life and our household --- as large as raccoons and opossums, as smelly as skunks, as unpopular as bats. All were at one time or another caged in my room or in the back yard. 

We all worked hard doing something, anything, to make spending money, and when I wasn't working at the Arboretum (for the magnificent sum of $1.25 an hour) I was up on a mountain ridge behind our house in South Mountain Reservation with my friends, Rat, Cubie and Gureenie. When we weren't catching snakes, we'd lay on our stomachs in the sweet smelling grass and watch magnificent hawks soar along under the clouds. Because it, like me, was a rare bird, the goshawk was always my favorite. As a whole, we were mesmerized by all birds of prey, envying their power, freedom and spectacular vision. We wanted to fly like them, with them. So we'd watch the soaring raptors and dream of flight and catch as many earthbound snakes as we could, which was plenty. 

When we weren't hunting for serpents, we would often trap raccoons, possums, skunks and other wild animals with Havahart live animal traps, which caught them unharmed. We'd keep them for a few days in a big cage I had built behind our little garage before letting them go. Except for the big striped skunks which we had to release immediately -- although we could not resist chasing them through our neighbors' yards. Just to see where they would go, and it was usually under a neighbor's porch. Routinely these skunks would do what skunks do best --- to annoying young boys that is --- stink up both us and the backyards of our kindly neighbors. Rat, Cubie, Gureenie and I weren't always that popular with the surrounding households, but the neighbors held their tongues --- and their noses --- and never complained. 

Sometimes, I'd wander deep into the woods alone, on a serpent hunt, in pursuit of the legendary pilot black snake. (It eventually was caught by Rat on his back doorstep and was almost seven feet long). On these snake hunts, I would crawl deep into the underbrush usually emerging with a harmless milksnake or garter snake and not a deadly timber rattlesnake or copperhead. Days later I would be covered head to toe with a deep raw rash from poison ivy. It would sometimes seal my eyes and mouth tightly shut and my mother would feed me through a straw. It hurt terribly to open my mouth or move my face. My sisters loved it because it was the only time that they could shut me up. It was great sport for my brother Larry, who would go to school with the sole intention of collecting the funniest new jokes from his friends. Then he would run home to tell them to me, one after another, hoping to watch me crack a smile. It was brutal. My skin would split open across my cheeks and at the corners of my mouth when the jokes became just too funny not to laugh. 

Moments later, my mother would hear me screaming in pain. After blasting Larry, she'd hold me as the clear, oily smelling lymph dripped from the cracks in my face which she dabbed with Clorox bleach to dry out. Boy, oh boy, it stung, but it sure did help. For me, while growing up, the expression "he cracked a smile" had special meaning. Hell, poison ivy covered my face during most of my preteen class photos. I was a mess.

Late one evening a scream pierced the night. One of my sisters had awaken to find a black bat orbiting above her bed. Dad, a semi-pro baseball pitcher with a pretty good strike-out record, nailed that bat with his first pitch of a balled-up wet towel. Against all my humanitarian, or maybe batitarian pleas, he flushed the live bat down the only toilet we had at the time. While the church down the street had bats in the belfry, we had bats stuck in toilets and heads stuck in sinks. That was the Goss household in a nutshell. 

My brothers and I, with the exception of our differing opinions about the snakes, normally got along fine. I even thought I had converted them to my herpetological way of thinking a time or two. I wouldn't have minded sharing that room indefinitely, but Larry and my big brother Bob (six feet-two, 250 pounds worth of big) moved out soon after all the baby snakes got loose. The cages were designed for big snakes, not little ones. So when the tiny babies were live-born, well, they just instinctively slithered away through the large screen mesh. After that, my brothers settled themselves into tiny alcoves in the attic. My snake collection just kept getting bigger. 

One afternoon I came home to find my brothers and sisters in tears. The same boy I had taken the school bus with that morning had come home that afternoon and shot himself in the head. That suicide across the street brought a reality check to our neighborhood and especially to our home. It was my first major lesson that not everything is as it appears. Sometimes beneath the seemingly benign surface, deadly dynamics might be taking place. I learned that everybody needs a close friend and a reliable shoulder to cry on before the insidious, deeply hidden anguish of depression becomes intolerable. Since then, I've read that teenagers taking their own lives is reaching epidemic proportions. Peer intervention can be incredibly helpful, but most kids haven't been educated to recognize the signs of an impending suicide. We hadn't been.

I did all the normal things that a guy did back then in high school. Normal for a jock, that is. I wrestled, played football, tried to get past first base with the girls, the usual stuff. 

One day "Jungle James" Mardis, Steve Kauffman and I borrowed some cheerleader costumes from the girls' locker room and put them on. It was a pretty ugly fit with our big backs and all. Anyway, we had a soccer player, a football player and a wrestler run out on the Millburn High School football field trying to teach the real cheerleaders a thing or two about conducting a cheer. Derry Riddle was the captain of the cheerleaders at the time and she joined right in. It ended with Steve Kauffman, who looks like actor Patrick Swayze, walking the length of the football field while standing on his hands. People walking by thought he really was a female cheerleader. We saw them stop, their jaws hitting the pavement, while this long haired "girl" cheerleader walked all around the field on "her" hands, as casually as if walking upright. It was a riot! 

Steve and I became very close friends at Millburn High when we realized we shared dual passions, girls and animals. Steve was the first person I ever knew who had a pet ferret. Named Athena, he would take her swimming with him. Being from Short Hills, the rich side of town, he could afford to support a large menagerie of exotic snakes and lizards, unlike the backyard variety of which I was familiar. 

Steve was the only one of my friends who had a swimming pool behind his parent's house, and there were always high school beauties in bikinis sunning themselves by it. As you can imagine, I loved spending time at his house.

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