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| Paria © Robert Sommers |
I don't know why I opened up the way I did about my childhood. It has brought up a few interesting comments and clearly made my uncle uncomfortable. I feel the need to finish up a little bit and try to kick the can down the street once and for all. One more dip into the dark reaches of the past and we won't come back to it for a long time, I promise. Or you might just want to skip this one.
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Living with a twisted, alcoholic sadist is never a walk in the park but I can't say I didn't have a choice. I did. My brother and I could choose between let's say a hundred wacks of the hand and twenty with Don's weapon of choice, a two by four. Sometimes the whippings for our real or imagined transgression were applied prophylactically, for those crimes he was sure that we would commit when he had to take off, let's say, on a short trip. I would be the last to say that we were angels but you ever get beat on by a full grown man with a length of lumber? The results weren't always pretty. Splinters could be a real bitch.
Don applied his art with the cold precision of a Nazi camp doctor. He was good at his trade and the alcohol neither squelched his passion or his delivery. People talk about Stockholm syndrome and the mixed emotions captors have for their jailers and I understand completely. I remember confronting him after a savage beating when I was 11 or so and telling him that he really was sick, not because I hated him, on the contrary, I loved him, but because he was just not right. My uncle reminded me in a note about visiting us and every wall in the house had a hole in it that he had punched. I have a strong memory of him naked in the back yard, crying, having smashed a bottle of clear liquor on the concrete. He was a brilliant and complicated man who had a real knack for punishment. Liked to fund anti semitic political causes as well, later I discovered his contributions to the Liberty Lobby. So maybe he was just doing his part for the cause?
I don't think the scars of childhood victimization can ever be fully vanquished, as hard as we try. You can attempt to do so intellectually but your capacity for trust and your emotions are much more fragile when you are the powerless young recipient on the receiving end.
He took my brother and I alone to a new job in New York for a year in the late sixties. We holed up in a Howard Johnson's for a couple months. It was the darkest period of my life and I am not going to revisit it in detail now. My brother and I couldn't take it any more finally and tried to move back with our real father, a wealthy who had built the perfect life with my stepmother and my two stepsisters that did not include us in their plans. I got shipped off to boarding school, Buzz military school. After a year I went back to New York to live with my mother again. I was bigger now and finally confronted my stepfather, not when he was beating on me, this time stopping him from beating my mother. I stepped in between them and said, "Let's do it." He left and didn't come back for a long time.
I guess my mother liked the abuser types. There were a chain of boyfriends with a similar mien. Sal the biker punched me silly and left me completely bruised on a regular basis. Walter the loanshark held me down and poured a whiskey bottle down my throat. Lostritto was a good guy, only went after me once. Mom was ultimately married at least five different times. Manfred, Murray, I can't even remember all the names. Her world revolved around herself.
The worst was an ex dutch soldier turned leftist revolutionary named Tony V. He hated me and the feeling was mutual. Said a fourteen year old was old enough to be out on the streets on his own. We were living in the lower east side of Manhattan one night when it came down. It was a hot august night and I was on the couch when he decided to show me who was boss and finally throw me out. We were both near naked and fought savagely for close to an hour. No defense, no grappling, just the hardest haymakers we could deliver against each other in an almost protean struggle. Bones were broken, ribs and faces pummeled. My mother stood there with her arm around my little brother John and rooted for my opponent, who ignobly beaten by a kid, packed his bag and left, never to return. I never really forgave my mother for siding against her son in the altercation, which she conveniently denies. I couldn't make it out on the streets alone. I was completely emotionally devastated and never recall feeling more helpless.
She ended up following Don back out to California with me in tow. He was now shacked up with another woman and my mother had a nervous breakdown. Twice I pulled her out of the Pacific after a phenobarbital overdose which required a stomach pump. She wore dark sunglasses for a year and was just worthless and I had to assume a different role, the whole mother/son authority thing totally out the window since she was such a basket case. That genie can never get put back in the bottle, all the historical revisionism aside.
I hitchhiked down to see my father, a five hour thumb and was refused entrance to the house. You see I had a ponytail and they didn't want my filthy hippie tendencies to infect my young sisters. I headed back up north alone, up against the world and afraid. I remember walking down a certain road near San Diego, thinking about jumping into traffic so that I could get hit by a car and end it all. I still can't stifle a shudder when I traverse that road to this day, I came so close.
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What does it all mean? I don't know. Do I blame the world, my mother, my father, my stepfather for a childhood fraught with peril, pain and uncertainty? Not really. I mostly am angered by the selfishness and self absorption that allowed her to be desensitized to the cruelty inflicted on us. I have noticed that many people from similar circumstances end up in relationships where love is delivered with the same barbaric edge that it was received in childhood and I have tried to avoid that. But I understand it.
I think it is a good bet that any issues that I may have had with authority stem from my childhood. And I certainly felt a lot of anger and envy for those people who were lucky and fortunate enough to live normal, entitled lives. We never had that luxury in our family. Only Buzz had children, and he was adamant that they would not have to go through what we went through.
There's no dress rehearsal, we all get through this thing the best way we can. Some wounds never heal. I believe that my own healing will be a life's work in progress. Peace.
