I couldn’t figure it out. Why me? Was I doing something to attract this? Was there a KICK ME sign on my back that everyone else could see but was invisible to me? Seriously, what the hell?
Since writing is all about seeing things from someone else’s point of view, I looked at it from the perspective of the bullies, and the answer became very clear. High school is as primal and vicious as the African veldt. Most of the animals are in the center of the bell curve, big enough or fast enough to avoid getting eaten. At one narrow end of the curve are the predators that prowl the tall grass, looking for easy prey; at the other are the wounded, the sick, the slow, and most attractive of all, the solitary, those who walk alone, outside the herd’s protection.
The bullies needed targets they could attack in order to demonstrate their strength, but they could only go so far in beating up local kids whose parents knew their parents. But no one knew my family, and my father was happy to keep it that way, so there would be no consequences for coming after me. I also lacked a posse of friends who could ride in on my behalf, which was why it was important not just to hurt me but to humiliate me in front of the other kids. They wanted to scare off anyone who might want to help me by making it clear that if they befriended the goat, they would become the goat and get the same treatment. So when the bullies jumped me, the other kids just walked past, eyes averted, looking anywhere but at me. I felt shame, violation, and a sense of being utterly alone.
At five foot three I was smaller than most of them, skinny and malnourished, but I fought back anyway. While I was still on my feet I had a chance, but once they swarmed and I went down all I could do was ball up with my back to the curb to protect my kidneys and endure the blows until they got tired of it. Most of the bullies were just mean and spiteful and wanted to show off. But for some of the others, the pathology went far deeper. They beat me up because they liked it. They had the same look in their eyes my father did when he beat Evelyn, as dark and dead as a shark.
Though I finally understood why I was a target the knowledge did me no good. There was no way for me to win against kids who were older and bigger than me.
Then I realized that while I couldn’t win, I could refuse to lose. All I had to do was change the rules of the game.
So the next time they beat me to a pulp I waited until they started walking away, laughing and high-fiving each other—
—and mouthed off at them.
They stopped and looked back at me, scarcely believing that I was telling them to fuck off. Not just them: their sisters, their mothers, their whole families. By now I had developed a solid vocabulary of profanity and I used every bit of it.
Furious, they ran back, pummeled me back into the ground, and started away, exhausted from the effort.
I mouthed off at them again.
They beat me again.
I mouthed off again.
I kept doing it, no matter how badly they bloodied me, until they realized that the only way to shut me up, the only way to win was to kill me, and none of them were prepared to go that far. I didn’t care if I ended up as little more than a smear on the sidewalk; what mattered was denying them a victory, and thus their power.
From that day on, whenever they came after me, I would ball up to ward off the blows, the Supermen of America badge inside my jacket pressed up against my chest, eyes closed, waiting for my chance to mouth off. I pretended that I didn’t feel the blows, that I was invulnerable, that I was Superman.
And I learned just how much I could endure.*
Secrets were my family’s currency, so I was always looking for new ways to learn some of them. This led to the habit of eavesdropping on phone calls via the extension in my parents’ upstairs bedroom when my mother was on the phone with my aunt or grandmother, since those were the most likely to produce useful information. One afternoon, during an otherwise uneventful conversation, I heard my aunt pause, as if trying to decide how to ask something, then decided the hell with it and just asked.
“Does Joey know about his sister?” she said.
My mother’s voice rose sharply. “Oh, no, Theresa, he doesn’t know. He can never know about that. It’s just . . . no, he can’t ever know.”
Then she said she had to go and hung up.
I did the same, then tiptoed back to my room and sat heavily on the bed.
Does Joey know about his sister?
He doesn’t know . . . he can never know about that.
It was clear from my aunt’s voice that she wasn’t talking about Theresa or Lorraine, because she would have identified them by name. Does Joey know about his sister? What the hell did that mean? Was it something to do with the death of my sister Vicky, or something else entirely?
I’d started listening in on conversations in the hope of unraveling some of my family’s secrets, and in return I’d been hit in the face by one I hadn’t even known about. So I stopped the practice that day. Best to quit while I was ahead.
By now I was old enough to look past the violence and tears, the threats and recriminations, to see a larger and infinitely more disturbing pattern to my parents’ behavior, and began to understand how we were being manipulated by both of them.
When Charles would go out for the night after beating our mother, she’d show us the bruises and abrasions to solicit our affection and sympathy. She almost seemed to enjoy the effect they had on us, a satisfied light in her eyes as my sisters cried at the sight of the injuries. I didn’t know the phrase Munchausen Syndrome, nor is there a direct one-to-one correlation, but the shape is the same: the beatings allowed her to get sympathy from us that she would not have received otherwise given her extraordinary lack of parenting skills. She not only liked getting that reaction, I think a part of her needed it in deeply troubling ways.
My father played the opposite side of the coin, telling us that he didn’t want to hit her; it was her fault, she kept making mistakes, she was stupid. He was the one being driven crazy by her behavior when he had to work for a living, so he was the one who deserved compassion and understanding.
The key to my father’s pathology was the notion that if he could elicit sympathy from those he had harmed, even under fraudulent circumstances, it was equivalent to being forgiven for his actions. Sympathy equated expiation, as though the act had never occurred, and thus required neither guilt nor self-examination.
I could trust neither of them.
Chapter 11
Patricide by Proxy
That summer we were booted out of our house for nonpayment of rent and took up residence in an apartment complex on the other side of Matawan. (When moving around inside the same town, my father avoided complications by telling the landlord that he was new to the area, using Sophia’s address as his last place of residence.) As we unpacked, my father called me into his room. I found him holding the German jacket that he kept carefully preserved in his closet. “Put this on,” he said.
I said I’d rather not.
“It’s not going to bite you,” he said, “just put the damned thing on!”
I reluctantly pulled on the jacket. At fourteen I was the right size to wear it properly, the same age he’d been when he wore it. He studied me for a minute, then pulled out the cap that went with it and set it on my head. The worn leather band scratched against my forehead.
I instinctively pulled away when he started sliding the swastika up my arm. He smacked me on the back of the head. “Stand still, goddamnit.”
He got it into the right position, so the symbol faced out. “Now raise your arm, like this,” he said and thrust out his hand in a Nazi salute.
“Why?” I asked.
“I want to see how it looks,” he said. “I want to see how I looked.”
I refused. He cuffed the back of my head again. “Raise your arm!”
“No.”
Another cuff. “Raise it! Like this!” He did it again.
I was determined to refuse no matter what happened. By now I knew enough to realize that this was
deeply wrong.
He hit me again. “What are you, some kind of faggot?” he said, believing I’d want to prove I wasn’t one by doing what he wanted me to do. But I had nothing to prove to him.
“Raise your arm,” he said again, cocking back a fist.
“No.” I’d been beaten up so much over the years that being smacked around was no longer a threat. “You can hit me all you want, I’m not raising my arm.”
He turned away in disgust. “Take it off,” he said, “before you get yellow all over it. You don’t deserve to wear it. And don’t tear the lining.”
I pulled off the jacket and tossed it onto the bed.
As I started away he said, “And you know what? I’m not even sure I’m your father. What do you think about that, faggot?”
I left without answering, but silently thought, You shouldn’t get my hopes up like that.
As I continued down the hall, it occurred to me that if I was on the path to becoming Superman, then my father was very definitely Lex Luthor.
None of us had been taken to a dentist yet, so our teeth were in pretty bad shape, leading to frequent toothaches. My mother in particular had ongoing dental problems, but my father balked at spending the money for her care. Finally, tired of her complaints, he said he’d found a dentist who could help. We learned later that the dentist in question had lost his practice and was operating illegally out of his home. My father apparently met him at one of the bars he frequented and made an off-the-books “arrangement.”
She went to the appointment hoping that he would finally be able to help her.
She believed that even as he put her under.
She woke to discover that all her teeth had been extracted, even the healthy ones.
“What’s wrong?” my father asked. “I said he’d make sure you don’t have a problem with your teeth anymore, and now you don’t.”
For days afterward, she cried every time she saw her reflection in a mirror.
My father made fun of how she looked and the way she lisped around her swollen, empty gums. “Say she sells seashells by the seashore,” he’d tell her, and laugh.
A week later a pair of ill-fitting plastic dentures arrived in the mail. They had not been properly fitted and whenever she wore them or tried to chew, tears of pain rolled down her face. My father just laughed.
And I stopped mentioning toothaches.
My biggest medical problem was that I still didn’t realize that I was nearsighted. This changed the day I found myself sitting on a school bus behind a kid with glasses. When he turned to look out the window I caught a glimpse of the street through his glasses, and for the barest flicker of a second everything was crystal clear!
I tapped him on the shoulder. “Can I see your glasses?”
He looked warily back at me, afraid I would throw them out the window or play keep-away. I asked again, even more earnestly, and he handed them over.
When I slipped them on, I saw the world with a sharpness I had never imagined. Leaves, tree branches, street signs, faces! All this time I’d been wrong about the world. It wasn’t that the teachers were keeping me from the blackboard so the more popular or smarter students could read what was there, the problem was that I needed glasses!
I could be fixed!
I got off the bus and ran home, eager to tell my father what I’d discovered.
“Bullshit,” he said. “You’re just trying to get attention. No kid of mine is going to walk around a four-eyes.”
I tried to revisit the subject over the next few weeks, but he refused to listen and finally told me to stop talking about it. Reluctant to incur his wrath, I let it go until the next time I was dispatched to my aunt’s place.
“Did your father take you to an eye doctor?” she asked when I told her about the incident on the bus.
I shook my head, no.
“Has he ever taken you to an eye doctor?”
Again: no.
“So how does he know you don’t need glasses?”
When I told her what he said, her jaw tightened. She didn’t say it, but I could see her thinking: What an asshole.
“Come with me,” she said, and took me to her optometrist.
“Joseph is tremendously nearsighted,” he said at the end of the examination, “but with the right prescription, his vision can be corrected to almost 20/20.”
My father was furious when she told him about the diagnosis. “He doesn’t need goddamned glasses! He’s pretending, trying to get attention. He wants glasses because you wear glasses, that’s all!”
“Then you take him to the doctor!” she yelled back. “See for yourself! I’ll pay for it.”
With his pride on the line we went to a local optometrist in Matawan. My father conferred privately with the doctor in his office before the exam, and again right afterward. When the doctor came out to talk to me, his expression was grim. He said that my eyes were in a state of extreme decline and that I would be blind within a year, maybe less. He gave me a prescription for glasses that would let me see for the time being but warned that I should prepare myself for what was to come.
I felt as though a knife had been driven through my heart. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus on schoolwork or reading or much of anything. I would lie in bed crying, then force myself to stop, irrationally afraid that the extra saline might cause further damage. Determined to step outside my fear and start dealing with the problem while there was still time, I began counting the steps from the street, and walking through every room with my eyes closed. I learned where things were and what they felt like, and I started teaching myself Braille from a library book. After a while I began to feel confident that I could get by living where we were. But what would happen when we moved? How would I deal with being blind in a new place?
I went through this for two months, until the day my father saw me pacing the hall, measuring the length of my stride to see how much ground I covered with each step, and asked what the hell I was doing.
“Preparing,” I explained to him.
“Preparing for what?”
I explained.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, disgusted with my stupidity. “You’re not going blind.”
“But the doctor said—”
“I didn’t believe your stupid aunt. All she does is stir up trouble. So when the doctor asked if I’d ever taken you to get your eyes checked before, I said yeah, every year, and your eyes were always fine. Wasn’t any of his fucking business. He figured if your eyes went from normal to this bad in just a year that you were going blind.”
My jaw hung there for a moment as I inwardly screamed my rage about having lived with this terror for so long.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He headed past me to the refrigerator for a beer. Shrugged. “You wanted glasses, you got fucking glasses. So what’s the problem, four-eyes?”
Once I knew I wouldn’t be spending the rest of my life in darkness, I decided that now was the time to buckle down and start learning as much as I could about being a writer. I read everything I could find by the best in science fiction, fantasy, and other genres. I’d pick a story at random by Samuel Delany, Mark Twain, or Poe, and copy every line by hand so I could feel the decisions hiding behind every word and turn of phrase. I even tried mixing and matching styles from different writers to see if that might lead me to a creative style of my own.
What would it sound like if Poe had written Jack London’s White Fang in the style of “The Bells”?
“The howling and the growling of the wolves, wolves, wolves, wolves, wolves, wolves, wolves, the biting and the tearing of the wolves.”
I also fell in love with Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, enthralled by the clockwork precision of his words, the trademark of a consummate writer. By the ’60s, anthology television was a lost art form with no sign of coming back any time soon, and I lamented that I would never have the chance to write for a show like The Twilight Zone.
When the other kids in ou
r apartment complex learned that I wanted to become a writer, they would ask me to create scary stories on the spot based on their suggestions. I never wrote down any of them—I still wasn’t ready for that—but the efforts were good enough to merit repeat performances. One of the kids even offered to pay for my services with cigarettes. His dad was a chain-smoker and there were always plenty around the house. At sixteen he already had a half-pack-a-day habit.
“You want to be tough, you gotta smoke,” he said.
I tried it a few times but didn’t like it any more than I liked drinking. Besides, I told him, my dad smoked, and that was reason enough for me not to do it.
Later that night, as I lay in bed, that sentence kept coming back to me, and by morning it led to the most important decision of my life.
I desperately wanted to kill my father. Sometimes just the idea of killing him was enough to keep me going. I would imagine him at the receiving end of an Edgar Allan Poe horror story, that it was his heart buried beneath the floorboards in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his body tied to a table as the blade descends in “The Pit and the Pendulum” or walled up for all time in a dank basement in “The Cask of Amontillado.” “For the love of god, Montresor!”
But Poe’s protagonists rarely got away with their murders, so I decided to go another way: rather than killing him, I would negate him. Whatever he was, I would be the opposite. He drank, so I wouldn’t touch the stuff. He smoked; I wouldn’t. He was brutal to women; I would strive to be chivalrous. He never kept his promises; I would always keep mine. He blamed others for what he did; I would take responsibility for my actions. With each choice I would try to balance out the meanness and suffering he brought into the world.
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