by Frank Zafiro
Sometimes, she’d fall asleep in the chair. When that happened, he always cleaned up the pictures. He didn’t bother to look at them. Most were of people he didn’t know. A few showed his mother and father much younger and smiling. He put them back in the shoebox his mother kept them stored in and covered her with a blanket. He always hoped in vain that she’d wake up and hug him in the morning like she did on those nights. Maybe she’d even make him breakfast and repeat that it was the two of them against the world. But she never did. Instead, she awoke in a foul mood, demanding silence all day because she had a ‘splitting headache.’
Other times, her mood would turn before she even fell asleep. She’d push him away, toppling him to the floor. Then she’d throw down the box of pictures and hurl invectives at him. He was worthless. He was an anchor pulling her to the bottom of Puget Sound. He was everything that had ever gone wrong in her life.
Once he told her he was sorry for being all of those things. She responded with a vicious slap. “Don’t patronize me, you little bastard!” she screeched.
His head humming from the blow, he blinked back and didn’t reply.
“And don’t you sit there and give me your father’s look, either!”
He struggled to put a neutral expression on his face. And after that, he didn’t say anything when her mood turned. He sat and endured it until she shouted herself out, turned and staggered away. Then he’d slip off to his bedroom and go to sleep.
There were times, though, that her weepy affection and reminisces led her to take him to bed with her. In those instances, she took him by the hand and led him into her room. Together, they curled up under the blankets. She held him close, her chin resting atop his head. The warmth of their bodies surrounded Jeffrey like heated cotton. He closed his eyes and let himself drift, always hopeful that this is how it would be forever. While she slept, her arm rested gently across him. Her breath plumed lightly in his hair. Even the rattle of a snore deep in her throat was somehow comforting.
He soon learned that even on those rare occasions, nothing good can last. When she woke first, she expelled him from her bed, calling names ranging from ‘little baby’ (which he understood but didn’t agree with) to ‘dirty little boy’ (which he didn’t understand but knew he didn’t like to hear). In either event, she’d send him to his own bed with an ear ringing from a slap and the blankets of his bed cold. So after that, if he was lucky enough for her to want to snuggle with him, he tried hard to wake up first. Sometimes that didn’t work, either, because if she remembered the night before, he’d still get the slap in the morning. But the nice thing about vodka, Jeffrey discovered, was that sometimes it made his mother forget the previous night. Maybe that’s why it was a whore’s drink, he figured. That’s what his father said about vodka. Jeffrey thought that maybe a whore was someone who forgot things in the morning. Or maybe it was just another word for a mean mother. He wasn’t sure exactly, though he had figured out that only a woman could be called a whore.
At school, he found an oasis of safety — the library. In the library, everyone had to be quiet. They couldn’t call him Jeffie Pee-Pee Pants or queer-bait or any of the other dozen names that kids kept coming up with. No one was able to take his place in line or steal his milk money. There was always a librarian on duty who made sure of these things, though Jeffrey figured out that it wasn’t him she was worried about so much as the sanctity of library silence. He didn’t care, though. He was able to find a book, hide away in one of the study carrels in the corner and read.
The books took him to worlds far away from Seattle. He read about pirates and wizards and monsters. He read about sports heroes and war heroes and super heroes.
For his birthday that year, he convinced his mother to get him a library card at the public library. Unlike the school library, which only housed children’s books, the public library had a wide array of books about anything he could imagine. She balked at first, but he said he wanted it more than any presents (she would have only bought him some clothes, anyway, he figured), so she relented. Besides, he explained to her, it was free. There was a library branch just six blocks from their apartment. This quickly became his sanctuary. He spent hours among the shelves. When he wasn’t there, he holed up in his room, reading the books he checked out.
His mother only occasionally objected to his absences, but since he’d turned ten he started making his own meals and taking care of himself in every way, which left her more time to drink her whore’s drink and watch her programs. About the only thing they did together on a regular basis was sit in the Laundromat once each week and watch the three loads of laundry as they were first washed, then dried. Every other interaction seemed to be in passing, sometimes punctuated with a sharp word or a stinging slap. He learned to absorb those without crying. Crying in front of his mother was almost as bad as crying in front of his father and there were far more opportunities for it.
So they settled into a routine of sorts, Jeffrey and his mother. She seemed to accept his bookishness because it freed her of dealing with him. He accepted that the cost of being her son remained the frequent slurred, angry words and hard smacks, but that they never lasted forever and he was eventually allowed to escape into a book.
Then his father came home and disrupted the truce. For those few days, Jeffrey tried to hide his reading habit while at the same time needing the escape all the more. The arguments between his parents grew fiercer and more frequent. The bruises and swollen lips appeared on his mother’s face more often. At the same time, it seemed like his father only ever slept on the couch. Sometimes he went out, staying away until late in the night. Every time he left, Jeffrey hoped he was going back to the best damn ship in the Navy (even if it was full of idiot officers) instead of coming home in the middle of the night, slamming doors and singing incoherently.
Once, he ordered Jeffrey out of bed in the middle of the night and into the living room. He stood at attention, blinking stupidly through his sleepy eyes, while his father criticized him and gave him advice on how to stop being such a sissy queer boy. He punctuated his points with heavy slaps to Jeffrey’s shoulders, along with admonitions to ‘stand up straight like a man.’
Jeffrey stood as tall and rigid as he could at three o’clock in the morning. He pretended he was an Army soldier and stared straight ahead, refusing to cry. He knew his father hated the Army even more than he hated and loved the Navy, so pretending to be a soldier gave him a strange sense of satisfaction and strength. It must have shown on his face because his father lit into him for having a “smart ass look on that mug of yours.” He followed that up with a series of hard slaps to Jeffrey’s head.
“You think you’re something? Huh?”
Slap.
“You aren’t shit, you little shit.”
Slap.
“You little whore’s son. You’ll never be shit.”
Slap.
“Don’t you fucking look at me like that.”
Tears sprang to Jeffrey’s eyes. He willed them not to fall.
The appearance of tears seemed to satisfy his father. He stopped slapping and laughed uproariously. “Oh, there it is. The little queer crybaby I know.” He waved him away with a flick of his hand. “Get out of my sight.”
Jeffrey retreated gratefully to his bedroom, but it was a long time before the burning in his belly allowed him to sleep.
On another occasion, he heard two voices come into the apartment late at night. One was unmistakably his father’s deep rumbling, but he didn’t recognize the other voice. It was definitely a woman’s voice, though. There were some whispers and laughter and the clink of glasses, followed by some other noises that he couldn’t exactly place. He heard the woman’s voice cry out as if she were in some kind of pain. That’s when he figured out that his father was putting her in her place. He was laying the whammo on her, just like he did to his mother.
After a while, the noises leveled off and he drifted back to sleep.
In the morni
ng, he waited for the argument to begin, but it never came. Eventually, his hunger drove him out of his room. In the kitchen, his father drank coffee and read the newspaper. His mother sat in her chair and watched television. No one said anything.
Jeffrey made himself some toast. For now, he decided not to say anything, either. Instead, he ate his toast, then slipped into the living room. He stood next to the window and watched the sky for snow.
August 1982
His father missed his twelfth birthday, which was no surprise.
Slightly more surprising was that so did his mother, even though she was there. She tried to make up for her forgetfulness several days later. She took him to McDonald’s for a cheeseburger and then to the movies. Together, they sat in the darkened theater and watched E.T., the Extraterrestrial. She even bought him popcorn and a soda.
More importantly, she wasn’t being mean to him.
That part lasted the entire movie and until they made it out to the parking lot. In the car on the way back to the apartment, though, she noticed that he’d wiped his buttery fingers on his jeans. Her hand whipped out and caught him alongside his head, accompanied by harsh words about how he “never took care of his things” and how he “ruined everything he touched.”
He clenched his jaw and said, “Yes, Mother.”
At home, he tried to slip away to his room and lose himself in a book. But she caught him first. Reaching out with her thumb and forefinger, she gripped the tender skin under his chin and pinched. This was even worse than the slaps. If he tightened the muscles that ran under there, her finger pinch turned into a finger-nail gouge, followed up with a slap to the head.
“Don’t think you can just run and hide,” she carped at him. “That’s all you ever do, is read your stupid books. You don’t know how hard it is to be a single mother and to try to keep this house in order.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Oh, get out of my sight,” she told him. “You disgust me.”
He fled to his room. The book he was reading now concerned a boy who was thirteen and going through changes. The boy discovered things about girls that Jeffrey was just starting to be interested in. Beyond that, things were happening to that boy that were also happening to Jeffrey. The one that worried him the most until he read about it in this book was that sometimes he woke up in the night and realized he’d wet the bed. At first, he was horrified because of the difficulty he used to have with wetting the bed and wetting his pants. But this was different than pee. Instead, there was less of it and it was sticky. The boy in the book called them “wet dreams” and he always had them when he thought about his best friend’s sister. Jeffrey couldn’t always remember what he’d been dreaming about, but the times that he did remember were confusing to him. Sometimes, he knew he’d been dreaming about the sounds that the strange woman made in the living room when his father was laying the whammo on her. Other times, he knew he’d been dreaming about his mother, though he couldn’t remember what happened in the dream.
Eventually, he learned that he didn’t have to be asleep or dreaming to make those things happen. He could think about things, touch himself and after a while, there was a wonderful feeling, followed by that same wet, sticky stuff. He marveled at what a wonderful secret he’d discovered. He wondered if anyone else knew about it, but he instinctively knew to keep it private.
All of the changes in his body that made him think that maybe when his father came home again, he’d talk to him differently when he saw that he was becoming a man. He’d grow big and strong. Maybe he’d join the Army and even though that would make his father angry, he’d get over it when he saw how tough Jeffrey was. He’d show him. He’d lay the whammo on lots of different girls. He didn’t know how many it would take before his father would love him, but he knew that if he did it enough, eventually he would.
February 1985
High school was a nightmare on all fronts. He’d hoped he’d grow out of his troubles, but they only evolved along with him, taking on different slants and hues but finding him all the same.
His retreat into the library was a permanent one. He graduated from hiding in the stacks of books, to working as a library aide and an audio-visual aide. Returning books to the shelves and setting up film projectors occupied his time. More importantly, it kept him flying underneath the radar of some of the school’s biggest bullies. He still took his share of casual barbs, as well as enduring the occasional act of intimidation. But he’d discovered a truth at home that carried over to his school experience.
He could handle it.
It would pass.
When they called him a name, he didn’t react. He just waited until they got bored and moved on. Whenever some jock or head-banger knocked his books from his hands, he merely knelt down and picked them back up. Did he get angry on the inside?
Oh, yes. He fucking seethed. But he learned to hide it. He learned to put it away for another day. A day would come when he’d get his revenge. He realized now that it might not be until he came back to the twenty-year reunion as a wealthy success that could buy and sell every one of the loser assholes who thought they were so much better than him, but his time would come. He’d roll into town in an expensive car with a big-tittied blonde trophy wife on his arm. Everyone would try to remember what he’d been like in high school, but all they’d be able to think about would be the nice car and nice rack in front of them.
All the girls in school would be jealous, too. They’d be sorry they didn’t get their hooks into him when they had the chance. Every one of them, especially the ones he thought about when he touched himself, would wish they wouldn’t have been such stuck up bitches.
Still, he knew that was years away. That didn’t make it easy to bear things, but it made it possible. He read books about anything and everything, learning everything he could while working in the library and hating every minute of high school.
Home was worse. His mother seemed to grow harsher each passing year. She had him doing all of the housework, even including her laundry. Her thin fingers still found their way under his chin for that demeaning pinch. “You can’t do anything right, can you?” was her favorite refrain.
She’d taken to walking into his bedroom without knocking. He didn’t know why she did that, other than the fact that she seemed to delight in watching him scramble to cover his erection and hide the fact that he’d been dreaming of girls at school and revenge. She’d order him out of bed to complete some mundane task like taking out the kitchen garbage, then stand there and watch him squirm while he made excuses to delay things long enough for his erection to subside.
Other times, out of the blue, she seemed to refer to his activities when she told him he was “still a dirty little boy.” He pretended not to understand as embarrassment and shame swallowed him whole.
His father’s visits grew more infrequent and more intense. His parents would usually drink together, which devolved into a fight without fail. Either they’d end up in the bedroom or his father would storm out. Sometimes he just didn’t come back. Those were Jeffrey’s favorite times. But often, he did return and never alone. He brought women home with him, turning the living room into a sexual playground. Jeffrey was at once attracted and repelled when this happened. He lay in bed and listened to the voices and the sounds of sex in the living room. Excited, he found himself masturbating furiously to the noises, then lying in bed afterward, full of shame.
The next morning, no one left their bedroom until his father roused the woman and sent her on her way, although Jeffrey sometimes sneaked out to get a look at his father’s conquests. He felt a strange sense of pride while hating him for it at the same time.
Other times, his father felt the need to assert his alpha wolf status. Despite Jeffrey’s efforts to avoid him and not to offer any affront, it required very little drinking before his father took offense at some slight, real or imagined. Then he was called into the living room, where he stood at attention to be berated and slapped. This
worked into his father theorizing that Jeffrey thought he was “tougher than the old man.” He’d challenge Jeffrey to “take his best shot,” demanding it until he reached the conclusion that Jeffrey was “too much of a queer little pussy” to do so. “Get out of my sight,” he’d bellow at Jeffrey. “You make me sick.”
Rarely, though, and for some reason he had never been able to pinpoint, the three of them were able to co-exist in an easy, quiet truce. Jeffrey read his books in his room while his parents drank slowly and watched television. On these days, he was able to escape the house and go to the library.
Sometimes, he’d take his books and go to the mall where he’d watch the same bitchy girls from school ignore him there, too. But he’d pretend to read his book and stare that their bodies. He’d imagine tearing the clothing off of them. He saw their surprise at how tough he was, what a man he was. As that realization seeped into their eyes, he knew that his father was right about what every woman wanted deep down inside. So he imagined laying the whammo on them. If they didn’t cry out with enough passion, he’d punctuate matters with a good slap upside the head.
He stored those thoughts and the sights of the girls at the mall for when he returned home at night. Lying in bed alone, he’d recall them over and over again. He obsessed and studied and dreamt and watched and masturbated.
His day would come.
He knew it would.
June 12, 1987
High school ended on a Thursday. He left just like it was any other day. Only the librarian, Mrs. Bryant, wished him a happy summer. He thanked her, wishing he could spend it with her at the library, but knowing he’d be spending as much time as possible at the public library or at the mall, looking at girls. Still, the librarian’s farewell reminded him oddly of his kindergarten teacher, Miss Reed.
He wondered about Miss Reed as he walked toward home. Did she still teach? Was she even Miss Reed anymore, or did she marry some guy and change her name? He imagined she probably had. Looking back, he decided she was fine looking. Someone would have come along and snagged her.