Nothing General About It

by Maurice Benard

  When we weren’t watching baseball on TV or at a game, I usually hit baseballs in the yard for fun with my friends. My father laid down the law, repeatedly telling me not to play ball near the house, but I didn’t listen, and one day I threw a curveball that shattered the living room window. I was instantly terrified of my father’s wrath, so instead of telling my father the truth I made up an elaborate lie that ended with the lamp falling and breaking the windowpane. Of course, my lie made no sense, and when he found out I had defied his instructions my father was far angrier about me lying than about having to replace the window.

  That meant facing his leather strap. Punishment for breaking any rule in our house was the belt, but lying was the worst offense in my dad’s eyes, so those whippings were the most intense—and therefore the most dreaded. Sitting in my room, waiting, full of anxiety, was awful, followed by that long, excruciating walk from my bedroom to the living room to face my father and his belt.

  When my father was mad, he would go on and on, laying into me—my mother tried to stop him and couldn’t—and I wound up with welts that hurt like hell. I felt completely helpless, but worse still, the beatings fed this deep rage I recognized in myself. Unlike my father, I didn’t unleash my anger at home, because I knew if I did it would get ugly with him. Instead, I seethed, and let that anger I saw in both of us simmer and build. As I got older, it was like I was a ticking time bomb ready to go off at any second.

  Really, it didn’t take much. When a guy started making fun of me one day in seventh grade at Valley View Junior High School, at first I ignored him. It was the seventies and I worked that whole Saturday Night Fever John Travolta look—psychedelic silk tops with bell-bottoms and boots—but not everybody appreciated my style, including this guy. When he came up behind me while I was opening my locker in the hall and started flicking my hair, I spun around, got right in his face, and threatened that if he did it again, he would regret it. He didn’t heed my warning, so without hesitating I punched him in the face so hard it knocked him back and his nose started gushing blood all over his shirt. He put his hands to his face to try to stop the bleeding, but it continued and got all over the hallway floor. I didn’t run; instead I stood there defiantly, fists clenched, ready for more, and didn’t even care that I was going to get hauled to the principal’s office. Needless to say, that guy didn’t bother me anymore. In fact, eventually we even became friends.

  H.J., unlike me, never got in brawls and always stayed clean, doing the right thing, getting good grades, and avoiding drugs, maybe because my father hit him as much as, if not more than, he hit me. While H.J. was being a good citizen, I was not named Most Likely to Succeed. In eighth grade I did achieve the title Biggest Flirt, a moniker I proved was warranted over and over in life.

  I had learned that from my father, too, as a little boy, watching him flirt with all kinds of women, and I also became incorrigible in that way. Still, whenever I saw him at a party standing too close to or slow-dancing with a woman who was not my mother, I got uncomfortable. Deep down I knew something was not right, and the older I got and the more I saw him do it, the more it bothered me. Again, it only fueled that pent-up anger I harbored inside.

  I could hear my father and my mother arguing about those women at night in their bedroom and I didn’t like that my mother, who made the perfect home my father demanded, was clearly hurt by his behavior. As I got older, I also realized my father wasn’t just flirting. When he went out, he did what he wanted, and sometimes that actually meant being with other women. I suppose it’s no surprise that when I started dating, I dealt with my girlfriends the same way, and cheated on them. That macho attitude toward women was all I knew, and what had been modeled for me my whole life.

  I also instinctively knew my mother was powerless to do other things—like stopping my dad from hitting me, even though I could tell it devastated her. This made her sad and resentful, but she didn’t really feel it was her place to stop him. She had grown up in the same culture, a culture in which women didn’t make, or break, the rules. So, as with the whipping, the same invisible chain kept her from giving him an ultimatum about philandering. I never asked her why she stayed and put up with this, I just thought that’s the way it was supposed to be.

  She told me years later that her mother instructed her that in order to be a good wife, she had to keep her husband happy, no matter what it took, and that when a man went out alone, a wife should say home and take care of the family. When my father stayed out all night drinking, my mother waited for him to come home and cooked breakfast for him without interrogation, and then he would go to bed. She and my father had met and gotten married when they were only eighteen, and they loved each other very much, despite it all. My father in many ways provided a good life for her, so she lived with it because that was all she knew.

  I started up with girls around the time H.J. moved out, when I was about twelve—he had graduated from high school and started working. My mom still thought I needed supervision while my parents were at work, so a babysitter came over to babysit me occasionally. One day she asked if I knew how to give a hickey, and, of course, I wanted to prove I was the big man. I started kissing her, giving her a respectable-sized mark on her neck before she stopped me. As I look back, it seems obvious that I had some problems to sort out, but the need for physical validation won out. That need filled something inside me and was a form of self-medication I would use as a go-to many, many times.

  I didn’t realize anyone knew what I’d done until the babysitter’s father showed up a few days later at a party my parents were throwing. I knew pretty quickly that he knew, and what’s more, I knew it was not going to be a good scenario for me. He was a big dude, and I was sure when he took me outside he was going to hit me. But he didn’t. He did, however, give me a talking to with a tone that was a clear warning.

  I was scared of him and could only muster, “Yes, sir,” before jumping on my bike and taking off.

  My brother started dating another girl, Cory, and right after moving out, worked at a bakery. Much like my dad, he had a head for numbers and quickly developed a business plan and personal goals. Sure enough, he also married Cory and started a family without delay.

  Not me. I didn’t have a clear path, let alone a goal, and I wasn’t interested in math or studying or good grades; my only interest in school was the social opportunities it opened up for me. Friends, parties, and girls, now, that’s where it was at.

  I also loved movies and escaping into different worlds and adventures on the big screen.

  But one movie exacerbated my fear of the dark. My mother and father forbade me to see The Exorcist, but I disobeyed them and snuck out of the house one day to see it with some buddies. As I sat in the theater in the dark, I wished I had listened to my parents, but I wasn’t going to let the guys know I had any regrets. It was almost impossible to hide my fear as the movie unfolded, and when I came home I was so rattled I refused to go to bed for fear of what I might see when I closed my eyes. Of course, I couldn’t avoid sleep forever, and when I finally did drift off, I had terrible nightmares. Demons were surrounding me and I couldn’t escape. The undercurrent of good vs. evil and the battle between God and the devil in the film had burrowed its way into my subconscious. It continued to lurk even as I grew older, and fed into my sense that whatever I was running from wasn’t good.

  Needless to say, I didn’t see any more scary movies. I did, however, love action movies, and my heroes, the guys I wanted to be like—aside from my dad—were the larger-than-life men I saw fighting bad dudes on the big screen. When I was younger, my favorites were Bruce Lee movies and Billy Jack, and as I got older I discovered Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.

  After I saw a Bruce Lee movie for the first time, like every other kid who’d done the same, I wanted to take tae kwon do. Sure enough, my dad took me to martial arts classes every week, and when I was thirteen I competed in my first match. Although I was very good on my feet and could side kick, I was
up against a seventeen-year-old who was huge, and I remember standing there looking at him and shaking with fear, desperately wishing I were bigger.

  The guy looked at the referee and asked in disbelief, “You want me to fight him?”

  My mom was in the stands and I could feel her fear as she watched us begin. When the guy kicked me in the stomach, he did it so hard that it knocked the wind out of me. The referee actually had to stop the fight to pump my chest, and my mom was so upset she came running out of the stands and hovered over him, crying, yelling, and begging God to save me.

  When I finally gasped for air and sat up, I’ll never forget the master sitting next to me and explaining it shouldn’t have happened. But, he added, it would make me stronger.

  I guess it did, because at my second tournament I won a trophy. I went on to earn the green belt and then the red belt, but then, after three years, I stopped practicing. It would have taken another year to get a black belt, and by that time I felt I had the moves I needed.

  I didn’t get involved in a sport again until I tried out for the football team my freshman year at College Park High School. It seemed like such a cool-guy sport, and at the time I loved watching the 49ers on TV with my dad. I liked the quarterback, John Brodie, but the team didn’t make it to the Super Bowl. I did well and made the team, the Falcons, playing defensive back, but my first clue that I wasn’t going to enjoy football, other than watching it on TV, was the training. We practiced in the mud, heat, and rain and the coach had no mercy—it was horrendous, and it’s also a brutal game. As a defensive back, I got hit a lot covering the wide receiver to make sure he didn’t get the ball, and after all that training and getting hit, we weren’t even a great team. We won maybe three games, so I decided not to play the next year because it wasn’t my kind of cool after all.

  By this time my father considered me a man and had stopped the whippings, but the anger and fear that accompanied them had already become a deep part of my consciousness. Whether or not I realized it, those feelings had infused my life and informed my behavior.

  After school and on weekends I hung out with my close buddies Jeff Bigby, Teddy Toribio, Richard Viallanueva, Mo Pagan, and Murray Kehrlein, who were a mix of Filipino, Spanish, Mexican, and African American. I was the lone Salvadoran-Nicaraguan in the group and we proved to be a motley crew—and an inseparable one, at that. I had a particularly competitive relationship with my friend Randy Gallerin, who wanted to be a musician and thought he was cooler than anybody else, and we would vie for everything from the same cars to the same girls for years.

  Once me and my buddies were old enough to drive, we found our way into trouble, and Main Street in Walnut Creek was the drag where all the action took place. Whenever we got a chance, we piled into lowriders and cruised up and down the strip with all the other carloads full of guys driving around looking at each other and talking trash—a recipe for disaster.

  One time I was in my dad’s Datsun 510 hanging out with Kurt and Greg Olsen. They were massive, burly guys who made us feel untouchable, so we could talk as much trash as we wanted. While we were cruising, some guys in a lowrider pulled up beside us, keeping pace for a while as everyone yelled shit back and forth. Suddenly one of them threw a beer bottle at my window, and the chase was on.

  We skidded around backstreets, chasing them all the way to a parking lot, where they unexpectedly stopped and waited, idling. We idled, too, ready to jump out and throw some fists. A few tense moments passed with only the sound of the motors rumbling.

  Then we heard one of them yell, “Hey, man, get the gun!”

  That did it for us. We heard the word gun and hit the gas, squealing right out of the parking lot. Luckily, they didn’t follow us. Me and my friends did a lot of things, but we were not into weapons. We liked making mischief and trouble, but we needed to be alive to do so.

  In my junior year a new kid, Peter Durant, came to school and became part of my crew. Since his brother, Marco, was a professional boxer, I got hooked on the sport and bought a boxing bag for myself. I hung it in the garage, thinking it was another cool sport I could conquer. I also watched fights on TV with my dad all the time and loved Muhammad Ali like everyone else—he was the greatest because he had enough power to get respect and his speed and footwork were second to none.

  One day when I was about seventeen, Peter brought his brother to my house to hang out and as I started punching the bag Marco watched for a while.

  “Mauricio, you have the talent to be a professional boxer,” he said. But there was a kicker. “You have to lose twenty pounds, and you’ll get your nose broken.”

  That was that for me.

  I figured I wouldn’t pursue boxing, but it’s lucky I learned around this time something I really liked: the sound of applause. My parents often entertained and always had plenty of tunes, drink, and food, and after everyone had been drinking and dancing awhile, my father usually gathered everyone around in a circle to have me sing Michael Jackson’s ballad “Ben.” The first time he did this, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to, but once I saw the reaction and experienced that feeling of adoration from a crowd, I was enthusiastic. I loved the attention, and from that point on perfected my performance to elicit the maximum applause.

  At these parties there was always alcohol, which proved to get me in trouble, starting at a very young age—but, surprisingly, not with my father. Lying was punishable, as was smoking or doing drugs, but alcohol . . . now, that was a different story to him. You’re a man, so you drink. What was the harm in a little beer now and then? There was some harm in it, of course, like the time our family traveled to Nicaragua to visit my father’s family, and I got so drunk I fell asleep in someone’s house and my parents couldn’t find me. When I finally showed up, I had bruises and a swollen eye from a fight I had gotten into, although I couldn’t recall how it had started. I didn’t get hit for being gone all night or getting drunk, because drinking was what a man grew up to do.

  Less troublesome was my natural ability to dance. Turns out I had some pretty good moves. In ninth grade at a school dance, I was out on a crowded dance floor when one of the senior girls came up and started dancing with me. After we danced for a few hours, she talked me into entering a dance competition with her at school.

  Instead of hanging out with the guys, she and I started religiously practicing the routine we choreographed to “Galaxy” by War at my house. For weeks we went over and over it meticulously, because I was determined to win. Competitions had started to mean too much to me and I didn’t just want to win, I needed to win, so whenever I fell short of a goal or didn’t achieve the perfection that had been engrained in me to pursue, I went into a funk.

  The competition took place in the auditorium at school, filled to the rafters with students. From the moment I heard the whistles and applause from my buddies and the music started, I felt a rush. As we started moving across the floor, we executed our routine flawlessly, and when we finished, the auditorium—including the judges—erupted into thundering applause. I basked in that energy.

  After the last couple danced, the judges tallied the scores and announced us as the winners, so we took home the trophy. The high from the victory was one I could get used to, even hooked on—and now we were eligible to compete against thirty other dance teams at the Concord Pavilion, a huge stadium in Concord, California, where me and my buddies attended rock concerts all the time.

  To prepare for the new dance competition, my dance partner and I came up with another great routine, choreographing the steps to “Groove Line” by Heatwave, but this time there was more competition, and it was more challenging because we weren’t in an intimate setting with cool lighting. This event started in the daytime and was outside in the heat in a big, stark stadium, and really only those lucky ones dancing later when the sun went down had a chance.

  My mom and dad came to watch us perform, and as we were waiting to see what number we would be assigned, I started getting nervous.

 
“You okay?” my dance partner asked.

  “I’m good as long as we’re not first,” I said.

  What do you know, we were assigned number one. I had a bad feeling down in my gut.

  When the emcee announced us, we made our way to the stage, where I smiled at the judges, hoping to make a connection. They were all business, so my nerves were frayed a little more. As the music started, I began to sweat profusely and missed a few steps, which threw us out of sync, and we never did recover. Maybe I had psyched myself out or let the anxiety get the better of me, but I couldn’t wait to get off that stage.

  That was it for dance competitions for me. However, I didn’t think much of it—there were plenty of concerts and parties ahead. I figured maybe I’d find another place to perform, and I would always figure out more ways to be around girls and music.

  One time me and the guys were out on the strip in Walnut Creek and some girls invited us to a party, but when we walked inside everyone stared and the music stopped. It was an all-white party, and their looks screamed that we were the motley ethnic crew stumbling into the wrong place. I was wearing a black cut-off shirt with STEEL emblazoned across the front and a brown leather jacket, and among our group was Bob Hanes, a huge black guy. We were the toughest guys in school and no one at the party was happy to see us, but we helped ourselves to drinks and tried to mingle. It didn’t take long for somebody to say something derogatory to Bob, and he gave me a look I had seen before, so I prepared to cover him.

  “Have my back,” Bob whispered to me, and I nodded; I knew the drill. Then he turned and said to me, loud enough for the room to hear, “This guy said something about me.”

  Raw hate spilled off the guy as he glared at Bob, and he showed absolutely no fear or remorse. “Yeah. I called your friend a nigger,” he repeated, loudly, for the benefit of the crowd.