If I had a good year, it would have been sixth grade, when I became one of the oldest kids in my elementary school, and some of the kids who’d bullied me the previous five years had all moved up to junior high school. For nine months during the school year, I was no longer afraid of leaving the house or getting on the bus. I made a few friends, was able to concentrate in class, and I enjoyed learning about the physical sciences. I even enjoyed the more challenging math that we were being taught. Yet I could not forget, entirely, the way things had been before, and I worried that the relief I felt was only temporary, a kind of false hope, because I knew the older kids who’d bullied me were going to be there when I got to junior high. The closer it got, the more I worried, making my first day of junior high school one of the most dreaded days of my life. Were things going to be different, now that my tormentors had all had a year to mature, or would they simply pick up where they’d left off? Would I be just another student, or would I find myself back at the bottom of the pecking order?
It’s the first day of seventh grade. My knees are weak and my legs are rubbery as I walk onto the school block. I’ve been dreading this moment for weeks, unable to think of anything else, and I am nearly shaking from fear. Some kids from my grade recognize me and laugh at my obvious discomfort. The bell hasn’t even rung, and it has begun. My anxiety is supplemented by the usual culture shock kids experience going from an old school to a new one, with lockers that have locks and combinations to learn and memorize (a lot of kids have anxiety about learning to open their lockers, but mine was particularly acute because I felt like if I failed, and the bell rang before I could get my locker open, everyone would notice and laugh at me), and seven different classes in seven different classrooms, and new alliances to form, or in my case, to fear. I’d held out a very small amount of hope that maybe things would be different, and that I’d make new friends who would take me in and protect me, and that I would find my way forward. . . . Instead, I am immediately identified as a loser. For all I know, word has spread about me before school even starts. Nobody volunteers to be my friend, and I’m hesitant to initiate friendships for fear of making a mistake and being rejected, or worse, tricked, like the girl who wrote me the fake love letter. Kids I don’t even know avoid me. I feel alone, and that’s terrible, but it’s still better than being belittled and humiliated. I try, at first, to keep to myself, keep my head down, hoping I’m invisible.
But of course, I’m not invisible, and in a way I can see now but couldn’t see then, keeping my head down and trying not to look anybody in the eye signals weakness and serves as an open invitation. My new seventh grade tormentor is a boy named Ben. Ben is the sort of kid who, if you lined up a dozen kids from that school and said, “Pick the biggest loser,” would get chosen every time, just from how he looks. He has long greasy hair; is at least twenty pounds overweight; favors black T-shirt, jeans, a black leather jacket; always has heavy-metal blasting in his headphones so loud you can hear it from ten feet away; and all he does, as far as I can tell, is hang out on a street corner, smoking cigarettes. He gets terrible grades and has no interesting personality quirks or characteristics that might redeem him, no sense of humor or way with words that makes him popular, and yet all I can think is that he has a group (The Burnouts, they are called) and I don’t, and he bullies me, so if he’s a complete loser, but he’s still above me, where do I rank? His strength is in numbers. I think I could probably kick his ass, one-on-one, but I know that if I ever take a swing at him, five other Burnouts would jump me and beat the hell out of me.
One day, though I’ve done nothing to provoke him, he comes after me after school with some of his friends, and I’m certain that everything I’ve been fearing could happen is about to happen. They see me and call my name and start running toward me, but fortunately I have a good lead on them. I don’t look back. For all I know, they took a few steps towards me and stopped, but I run all the way home in fear, and I cut classes for the next two days, and then it’s the weekend. I’m hoping that over the weekend, he’ll have forgotten about it, but the instant Ben sees me on Monday, he picks up right where he left off.
I realize—you can’t make yourself invisible. You can’t even make yourself small.
Across the room from me at McDonald’s, I saw a father and a son, eating hamburgers and sharing a large order of french fries. They didn’t say much, but perhaps that’s normal, even in a healthy father-son relationship. I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if the kid was getting bullied at school, and he came home and told his father about it.
“What’s the name of the boy who’s picking on you?” the father would say.
“Ben.”
“Why don’t I have a little talk with this Ben?” the father would suggest, and then the next day, he’d either corner Ben in the parking lot and threaten him with bodily harm or else just beat the crap out of him. That would be wrong, of course, but it was a satisfying fantasy. It was even more fantastical for me than for most people, because I never had a father I could talk to about my situation in school.
My contact with my father, Mark, was minimal. He was the second oldest of four boys. He and his older brother, Terry, were adopted. His younger brothers, Greg and Rex, were not. His father, Dwaine, was an accountant for the Racine school system if memory serves me correctly, and his mother, Virginia, or Ginny, stayed home and raised the boys while being very active in communal activities. My uncles had fathered two kids each, and held down white-collar jobs, while my father remained blue-collar. The family would all get together for Christmas, and they still do. It struck me as odd that as dysfunctional as my mother’s childhood was, my father’s was the opposite, and yet he did not come out of it any more prepared to be a parent than my mother had from her family.
Mark was an X-ray technician, like my mother. They met in X-ray technician school. He was twenty-six years old when I was born, younger than my mom was. I have been told they divorced sixteen weeks after I was born. The obvious question then is, was my birth an intentional event, and if it was, was it ever welcomed?
He remarried soon after getting divorced to the woman he’d been having an affair with, according to my mom. Between the ages of four and five, I’d spend Wednesdays and Thursdays at his house with him and his second wife, Robin. She worked at the same hospital as my dad. Robin hated and resented me because I was the living representation of my father’s past connection to my mother. Either that or she was just a mean person. She was a cruel, overweight Wisconsin farm girl who was emotionally immature for her age and had a short temper—over two hundred pounds of pure intimidation to a small boy.
All I understood, those first few years that I went there after school, was that she terrified me. When I knew she was coming to pick me up, I’d be so afraid, I’d get physically sick to my stomach. In the car, I’d try not to make eye contact with her and stare out my window.
“There are things to see out my window, too, you know,” she’d say, as if she had the right to demand I look in her direction. So I’d time myself, looking out my window for three seconds, then hers for three seconds.
She served cottage cheese all the time, even though she knew I hated it, and she’d make me sit at the table until I finished it. It’s not uncommon, I realize, for kids to wrinkle their noses at certain foods, but she’d get up from the table and say, “That better be gone before I get back,” and I had good reason to fear her. One time, I saw her go to the door to call the dog in, a husky named Reagan, and when she wouldn’t come, I saw Robin grab a section of pipe my father had left by the door and was prepared to throw it at Reagan if she didn’t come as called. When Reagan finally came in, she told the dog, “You’re lucky you came back,” and put the pipe down, but I knew she was prepared to use it.
I spent the afternoons with her, between the time I got home from preschool or kindergarten and when my dad got home, and I’d be on pins and needles. Once I was lying on the floor, pretending I was in a spaceship, and sh
e watched me for a few seconds and then said, “We have toys we bought you in the other room—get them out and play with them right now or I’m going to give them to some kid who wants them.”
I couldn’t tell my dad about how she treated me because I knew he’d take her side and not mine. He’d tell me I was making things up, or exaggerating, or that I’d misunderstood, or that what I was saying wasn’t true, because Robin knew how to hide her behaviors when he was home. The behaviors he did see didn’t seem to concern him. I felt, again, that I was alone, and that no one would believe me. How is it possible, I thought, that I could be so scared and miserable, and not one adult could see it?
And suppose I was exaggerating—even if I was over-stating the case—wouldn’t a normal parent want to know the reason why I was exaggerating? Even a little kid who thinks there’s a monster under his bed and is terrified doesn’t want to be scolded and told there’s no such thing as monsters under the bed. He’s a little kid. He wants to be comforted and sympathized with, and he wants his dad, or his mom, to do something about it.
The kid across the room with his father at McDonald’s in Page, Arizona, looked to be about eight, which was about the age I’d reached when the living arrangement changed and I only saw Mark and Robin at Christmas or during holidays. I couldn’t say if it was because my mother finally listened to me when I complained and told my father, or if it was because Robin finally convinced him she didn’t want me there. Probably some combination of the two.
Then the kid at McDonald’s says something, and the father laughs.
I’m fifteen, and my father is driving me back to my mother’s house, shortly before Christmas. Things have gotten better between us. As I’ve gotten older, he has taken more and more of an interest in me. Despite having next to nothing to do with each other, it feels like we’ve discovered we actually have something in common. He has an ordered curious mind, and his interests are, like mine, more scientific or mechanical than aesthetic or cultural. We talk about how a nuclear cloud would work if the Russians ever attacked America with their missiles. He explains to me how deep sea divers get the bends and why they have to breathe helium under pressure. It’s not exactly a heart-to-heart, but I’m impressed by how much he knows. It makes for some novel conversation as we sit in his car for over two hours.
When it’s time for me to go inside, he says, “Gimme a hug.” I’m shocked to hear this, but I give him a hug, and afterward, it’s almost like he’s going to cry. He says, “I’ve been waiting fifteen years for that.”
Then I’m twenty-one, and a Marine. My becoming a Marine has clearly impressed him. On our way back from six months of deployment overseas, we’re told the ship is going to offer a “Tiger Cruise,” from Hawaii to San Diego, where Marines are allowed to invite family members to join them. I invite my father. When we reach Hawaii, he says, “I’m glad you invited me on this trip. This is one of the highlights of my life so far.” Being on a large troop ship appeals to his mechanical way of thinking, and he is constantly asking questions about how the ship works. Our relationship seems stronger, sturdier.
But then I’m twenty-nine, about the same age he was when he walked out on my mother and me. I try to put myself in his shoes and understand how someone could abandon a kid, but I can’t do it. I ask myself, what would I do if I had a kid? I can’t imagine walking away from my own child. The hurt is too deep to let go of, and when I think of what I went through without a father to step in and protect me, or at least advise me while I struggled with all the fear and insecurity and low self-worth, I get angry. There is a great imbalance, and a great injustice, when I feel him expecting loyalty or love from me, as if he’d earned it, or deserves it, after giving me neither for so long. On a subconscious level, I find the idea of a relationship with him less and less acceptable, because he’s not saying, “I’m truly sorry for not being there all those years. What can I do to make it up to you?” Rather, he’s saying, “Don’t ask me to try to make up for the past because I can’t. Let’s just move forward like things are all rosy.” It’s about what he can get from me, for free, and it has nothing to do with accepting responsibility for his past actions or for the way he treated me, and it has nothing to do with what he wants to give.
One Saturday morning, standing on his front porch, apparently he decides he’s had enough, and he confronts me and says, “What’s the matter, Zak? I thought we had a relationship, but you’re pulling away from me. From me and Robin both. I will not tolerate being treated the way you treat your mother. Either we go back to where we were, or it’s over.”
Really? I think. You’re giving me an ultimatum? You dare tell me it doesn’t feel good to have somebody pull away from you? You’re a grown-up. You don’t like it? How do you think it felt to a little kid?
“You want an answer? I’ll give you one when I’m ready,” I say.
A couple nights later, against my better judgment, Michelle and I honor a dinner invitation made before the falling out. I feel like it’s not going to go well, but Michelle is a peacemaker and argues that we should all try to get along. For the first two hours, we do. We make small talk and eat, ignoring the proverbial “elephant in the room,” and then we move to the living room. The elephant follows us.
“So, Zachary, we need to talk about something,” Robin says. This is a challenge on two levels: first, that she knows I hate being called Zachary, and second, that she has decided to confront me on the issue. Her tone is nasty and condescending, while at the same time making a gesture I’m sure she thinks is magnanimous—she’s putting on a show again, a public display. She has decided she is calling the shots and has authority over me, and she thinks she can intimidate me, the way she did for years. Not anymore. “I thought things were going well between you and your father.”
I’ve had it with her, and realize I don’t have to sit here and listen to her scold me.
“Are you kidding me?” I say. “You’re acting like I’m supposed to owe you something. As far as I’m concerned, you were nothing but a shit to me my whole life. You were abusive to me, and you terrified me, and you knew you were doing it.”
I spell out for her the things she did. She starts crying.
“Maybe I could have treated you differently,” she says, “but lots of kids have been through much worse. Why can’t you learn from the past and be stronger for it? Why can’t you get over it?”
Get over it? Who is she to tell me to get over it? She wants me to learn from the past, as if I’d made mistakes that could teach me something. I did learn one thing from my past—I learned, when I became a Marine, to stand up for myself and hold my ground.
“You’re not entitled to tell me to get over it, Robin,” I say. “You’re not entitled to do anything other than apologize and ask for my forgiveness. You’re completely full of shit. You might be able to fool everybody else, but you can’t fool me. As long as I’m alive, I’ll know what you did, and who you really are.”
For the first time in my life, I see her break down. I don’t feel good about it, but I don’t feel bad either. There’s no lasting gratification. She made me feel bad for years. If she feels bad for a few minutes, it’s not like now we’re even.
“It’s because of both of you that I don’t want to have kids,” I tell her.
“Maybe I was hard on you, but I don’t know what you expect me to do about it now,” she says between sobs. How do I feel? I don’t feel sympathetic. I’m surprised, but it’s all too little and too late, and nothing she could say can undo the damage done. Her tears are meaningless.
My dad has been surprisingly quiet throughout our interaction, until now.
“Why don’t you grow up and be a man?” he says to me.
In his mind, it’s my job, my responsibility, to fix what went wrong in the past. He continues throwing stones.
“And what’s this crap about you not wanting kids? Don’t even think about using me and the way I treated you as an excuse to not want to have kids of your own.�
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I think, What the hell is going on here!? Who are these people? These self-centered narcissists?
I’m borderline furious, ready to turn things from verbal to physical. The sheer disrespect directed at me is too much to handle.
“You’re not just a pathetic excuse for a father,” I tell him. “You’re a pathetic excuse for an adult.”
“Right now,” my father says, “you are waving a red flag at a bull.”
But he has no idea which one of us is the bull. Suddenly I know that if the conversation continues, we’ll fight, and if we do, I’ll kill him, or at the very least, put him in the hospital. The irony is not lost on me that I am standing up to him, the way I might have stood up to all the kids who bullied me. He has indeed taught me how to be a man, by serving as a poor example of one.
“Come on,” I tell Michelle, who is in tears, and I feel bad that she has had to see this. “We need to go.”
Then it’s two and a half years later, and I’m thirty-two, living in Southern California. My father and I haven’t spoken in more than two years. It’s 8:30 on a Wednesday night when the phone rings, and my caller ID tells me the call is coming from Wisconsin, but I don’t recognize the number. I know it’s not my father or my mother calling, so I pick up. It’s my Uncle Greg. I’ve managed to stay reasonably close with him over the years. I sit down on the steps that lead into the living room to take the call.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news, Zak,” he says. “I’m heading over to the hospital with Robin. She said your dad went unconscious at home on the living room floor and she called an ambulance. They’re taking him there now. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ll call you with an update.”
Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself: A Man and His Dog's Struggle to Find Salvation Page 5