by Dave Pelzer
“It’s over, sweetheart. After this moment, I want you to forget any of it happened at all. You will try to be a good boy, won’t you?”
I shook my head.
“Then, I’ll try to be a good mother.”
After making up, Mom let me take a warm bath and put on the new clothes I had received last Christmas. I had not been allowed to wear them before. Mom then took my brothers and me bowling, while Father stayed home with Kevin. On the way home from the bowling alley, Mom stopped at a grocery store and bought each of us a toy top. When we got home, Mom said I could play outside with the other boys, but I took the toy top to the corner of the master bedroom and played by myself. For the first time in years, with the exception of holidays when we had guests in the house, I ate with my family at the dinner table. Things were happening too fast, and I felt that somehow it was too good to be true. As happy as I was, I felt as though I were walking on eggshells. I thought for sure Mother would wake up and change back to her old self. But she didn’t. I ate all I wanted for dinner, and she let me watch television with my brothers before we went to bed. I thought it was strange that she wanted me to continue to sleep with Father, but she said she wanted to be near the baby.
The next day, while Father was at work, a lady from social services came to our house in the afternoon. Mom shooed me outside to play with my brothers, while she talked to the lady. They talked for more than an hour. Before the lady left, Mom called me into our house. The lady wanted to talk to me for a few minutes. She wanted to know if I was happy. I told her I was. She wanted to know if I got along all right with my mom. I told her I did. Finally, she asked me if Mom ever beat me. Before answering, I looked up at Mother, who smiled politely. I felt as though a bomb had exploded deep in the pit of my stomach. I thought I would throw up. It had suddenly occurred to me why Mother had changed the day before; why she had been so nice to me. I felt like a fool because I had fallen for it. I was so hungry for love that I had swallowed the whole charade.
Mother’s hand on my shoulder brought me back to reality. “Well, tell her, sweetheart,” Mother said, smiling again. “Tell her that I starve you and beat you like a dog,” Mother snickered, trying to get the lady to laugh, too.
I looked at the lady. My face felt flushed, and I could feel the beads of sweat forming on my forehead. I didn’t have the guts to tell the lady the truth. “No, it’s not like that at all,” I said. “Mom treats me pretty good.”
“And she never beats you?” the lady asked.
“No . . . uh . . . I mean, only when I get punished . . . when I’m a bad boy,” I said, trying to cover up the truth. I could tell by the look Mother gave me that I had said the wrong thing. She had brainwashed me for years, and I had said it badly. I could also tell that the lady had picked up on the communication between Mother and me.
“All right,” the lady said. “I just wanted to stop in and say hello.” After saying goodbye, Mother walked her visitor to the door.
When the lady was clearly gone, Mother closed the door in a rage. “You little shit!” she screamed. I instinctively covered my face as she began swinging. She hit me several times, then banished me to the garage. After she had fed her boys, she called me up to do my evening chores. As I washed the dishes, I didn’t feel all that bad. Deep in my heart I had known Mother was being nice to me for some reason other than wanting to love me. I should have known she didn’t mean it, because she acted the same way when somebody like Grandma came over for the holidays. At least I had enjoyed two good days. I hadn’t had two good days for a long time, so in an odd way it was worth it. I settled back into my routine and relied on my solitude to keep me going. At least I didn’t have to walk on eggshells anymore, wondering when the roof was going to cave in on me. Things were back to normal, and I was the servant for the family again.
Even though I had begun to accept my fate, I never felt as alone, as I did on the mornings that Father went to work. He got out of bed about 5:00 A.M. on workdays. He didn’t know it, but I was always awake. I’d listen to him shaving in the bathroom, and I would hear him walking to the kitchen to get something to eat. I knew that when he put on his shoes, he was about ready to leave the house. Sometimes I turned over just in time to see him pick up his dark blue, Pan Am overnight bag. He’d kiss me on the forehead and say, “Try to make her happy and stay out of her way.”
I tried not to cry, but I always did. I didn’t want him to leave. I never told him, but I am sure he knew. After he closed the front door, I counted the steps that it took him to get to the driveway. I heard him walking on the pathway from the house. In my mind, I could see him turning left down the block to catch the bus to San Francisco. Sometimes, when I felt brave, I hopped out of bed and ran to the window so I could catch a glimpse of Father. I usually stayed in bed and rolled over to the warm place where he had slept. I imagined that I could hear him long after he was gone. And when I accepted the fact that he was truly gone, I had a cold, hollow feeling deep in my soul. I loved Father so much. I wanted to be with him forever, and I cried inside because I never knew when I was going to see Father again.
CHAPTER
7
The Lord’s
Prayer
About a month before I entered the fifth grade, I came to believe that for me, there was no God.
As I sat alone in the garage, or read to myself in the near darkness of my parents’ bedroom, I came to realize that I would live like this for the remainder of my life. No just God would leave me like this. I believed that I was alone in my struggle and that my battle was one of survival.
By the time I had decided that there was no God, I had totally disconnected myself from all physical pain. Whenever Mother struck me, it was as if she were taking her aggressions out on a rag doll. Inside, my emotions swirled back and forth between fear and intense anger. But outside, I was a robot, rarely revealing my emotions; only when I thought it would please The Bitch and work to my advantage. I held in my tears, refusing to cry because I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of my defeat.
At night I no longer dreamed, nor did I let my imagination work during the day. The once vibrant escapes of watching myself fly through the clouds in bright blue costumes, were now a thing of the past. When I fell asleep, my soul became consumed in a black void. I no longer awoke in the mornings refreshed; I was tired and told myself that I had one day less to live in this world. I shuffled through my chores, dreading every moment of every day. With no dreams, I found that words like hope and faith were only letters, randomly put together into something meaningless— words only for fairy tales.
When I was given the luxury of food, I ate like a homeless dog; grunting like an animal at Mother’s commands. I no longer cared when she made fun of me, as I hurried to devour even the smallest morsel. Nothing was below me. One Saturday while I was washing the morning dishes, Mother scraped some half-eaten pancakes from a plate, into the dogs’ dish. Her well-fed pets picked at the food until they wanted no more, then walked away to find a place to sleep. Later, as I put away some pots and pans in a lower cabinet, I crawled on my hands and knees to the dogs’ dish and ate what was left of the pancakes. As I ate, I could smell traces of the dogs, but I ate anyway. It hardly bothered me. I fully realized that if The Bitch caught me eating what rightfully belonged to the dogs, I would pay dearly; but getting food any way I could was my only means of existing.
Inside, my soul became so cold I hated everything. I even despised the sun, for I knew I would never be able to play in its warm presence. I cringed with hate whenever I heard other children laughing, as they played outside. My stomach coiled whenever I smelled food that was about to be served to somebody else, knowing it was not for me. I wanted so much to strike out at something every time I was called upstairs to play the role of the family slave, by picking up after those slobs.
I hated Mother most and wished that she were dead. But before she died, I wanted her to feel the magnitude of my pain and my loneliness for all these ye
ars. During all the years when I had prayed to God, He answered me only once. One day, when I was five or six years old, Mother had thrashed me from one end of the house to the other. That night before getting into bed, I got down on my knees and prayed to God. I asked Him to make Mother sick so she couldn’t hit me any more. I prayed long and hard, concentrating so much that I went to bed with a headache. The next morning, much to my surprise, Mother was sick. She lay on the couch all day, barely moving. Since Father was at work, my brothers and I took care of her as though she were a patient of ours.
As the years passed and the beatings became more intense, I thought about Mother’s age and tried to calculate when she might die. I longed for the day when her soul would be taken into the depths of hell; only then would I be free of her.
I also hated Father. He was fully aware of the hell I lived in, but he lacked the courage to rescue me as he had promised so many times in the past. But as I examined my relationship with Father, I realized that he considered me part of the problem. I believe he thought of me as a traitor. Many times when The Bitch and Father had heated arguments, Mother involved me. She would yank me from wherever I was and demand that I repeat every vile word Father might have used in their past arguments. I fully realized what her game was, but having to choose between them was not difficult. Mother’s wrath was much worse for me. I always shook my head, timidly saying what she wanted to hear. She would then scream for me to repeat the words to her in Father’s presence. Much of the time she insisted that I make up the words if I couldn’t remember. This bothered me a great deal because I knew that in an effort to avoid a beating, I was biting the hand that often fed me. In the beginning, I tried to explain to Father why I had lied and turned against him. At first he told me that he understood, but eventually I knew he had lost faith in me. Instead of feeling sorry for him, I only hated him more.
The boys who lived upstairs were no longer my brothers. Sometimes in years past, they had managed to encourage me a little. But in the summer of 1972 they took turns hitting me and appeared to enjoy throwing their weight around. It was obvious that they felt superior to the family slave. When they approached me, my heart became hard as stone, and I am sure they saw the hate etched in my face. In a rare and empty victory, I’d sneer the word “asshole” under my breath as one of them strutted by me. I made sure they didn’t hear me. I came to despise the neighbors, my relatives and anybody else who had ever known me and the conditions under which I lived. Hate was all I had left.
At the core of my soul, I hated myself more than anybody or anything. I came to believe that everything that happened to me or around me was my own fault because I had let it go on for so long. I wanted what others had, but saw no way to get it, so I hated them for having it. I wanted to be strong, but inside I knew I was a wimp. I never had the courage to stand up to The Bitch, so I knew I deserved whatever happened to me. For years, Mother had brainwashed me by having me shout aloud, “I hate myself! I hate myself!” Her efforts paid off. A few weeks before I started the fifth grade, I hated myself so much that I wished I were dead.
School no longer held the exciting appeal that it had years ago. I struggled to concentrate on my work while in class, but my bottled-up anger often flashed at the wrong times. One Friday afternoon in the winter of 1973, for no apparent reason, I stormed out of the classroom, screaming at everyone as I fled. I slammed the door so hard I thought the glass above the door would shatter. I ran to the bathroom, and with my tiny red fist I pounded the tiles until my strength drained away. Afterwards, I collapsed on the floor praying for a miracle. It never came.
Time spent outside the classroom was at least better than Mother’s “hell house.” Because I was an outcast of the entire school, my classmates at times took over where Mother left off. One of them was Clifford, a school-yard bully who would periodically catch me when I ran to Mother’s house after school. Beating me up was Clifford’s way of showing off to his friends. All I could do was fall to the ground and cover my head, while Clifford and his gang took turns kicking me.
Aggie was a tormentor of a different sort. She never failed to come up with new and different ways of telling me how much she wished I would simply “drop dead.” Her style was absolute snobbery. Aggie made sure she was always the one in charge of a small band of girls. In addition to tormenting me, showing off their fancy clothes seemed to be the main purpose in life for Aggie and her clique. I had always known Aggie didn’t like me, but I really didn’t learn how much until the last day of school our fourth-grade year. Aggie’s mother taught my fourth-grade homeroom, and on the last day of school Aggie came into our room acting as though she were throwing up and said, “David Pelzer-Smellzer is going to be in my homeroom next year.” Her day was not complete until she fired off a rude remark about me to her friends.
I didn’t take Aggie very seriously; not until a fifth-grade field trip to one of San Francisco’s Clipper Ships. As I stood alone on the bow of the ship, looking at the water, Aggie approached me with a vicious smile and said in a low voice, “Jump!” She startled me, and I looked into her face, trying to understand what she meant. Again she spoke, quietly and calmly, “I said you should go ahead and jump. I know all about you Pelzer, and jumping is your only way out.”
Another voice came from behind her, “She’s right, you know.” The voice belonged to John, another classmate, one of Aggie’s macho buddies. Looking back over the railing, I stared at the cold green water lapping against the wooden side of the ship. For a moment, I could visualize myself plunging into the water, knowing I would drown. It was a comforting thought that promised an escape from Aggie, her friends and all that I hated in the world. But my better senses returned, and I looked up and fixed my eyes directly on John’s eyes and tried to hold my stare. After a few moments, he must have felt my anger because he turned away taking Aggie with him.
At the beginning of my fifth-grade year, Mr. Ziegler, my homeroom teacher, had no idea why I was such a problem child. Later, after the school nurse had informed him why I had stolen food and why I dressed the way I did, Mr. Ziegler made a special effort to treat me as if I were a normal kid. One of his jobs as sponsor of the school newspaper was to form a committee of kids to find a name for the paper. I came up with a catchy phrase, and a week later my entry was among others in a school-wide election to select the best name for the newspaper. My title won by a landslide. Later that day the voting took place, and Mr. Ziegler took me aside and told me how proud he was that my title had won. I soaked it up like a sponge. I hadn’t been told anything positive for so long that I nearly cried. At the end of the day, after assuring me that I wasn’t in trouble, Mr. Ziegler gave me a letter to take to Mother.
Elated, I ran to Mother’s house faster than ever before. As I should have expected, my happiness was short-lived. The Bitch tore the letter open, read it quickly and scoffed, “Well, Mr. Ziegler says I should be so proud of you for naming the school newspaper. He also claims that you are one of the top pupils in his class. Well, aren’t you special?” Suddenly, her voice turned ice cold and she jabbed her finger at my face and hissed, “Get one thing straight, you little son of a bitch! There is nothing you can do to impress me! Do you understand me? You are a nobody! An It! You are nonexistent! You are a bastard child! I hate you and I wish you were dead! Dead! Do you hear me? Dead!”
After tearing the letter into tiny pieces, Mother turned away from me and returned to her television show. I stood motionless, gazing at the letter which lay like snowflakes at my feet. Even though I had heard the same words over and over again, this time the word “It” stunned me like never before. She had stripped me of my very existence. I gave all that I could to accomplish anything positive for her recognition. But again, I failed. My heart sank lower than ever before. Mother’s words were no longer coming from the booze; they were coming from her heart. I would have been relieved if she had returned with a knife and ended it all.
I knelt down, trying to put the many pieces of the lett
er back together again. It was impossible. I dumped the pieces of the letter in the trash, wishing my life would end. I truly believed, at that moment, that death would be better than my prospects for any kind of happiness. I was nothing but an “It.”
My morale had become so low that in some self-destructive way I hoped she would kill me, and I felt that eventually she would. In my mind it was just a matter of when she would do it. So I began to purposefully irritate her, hoping I could provoke her enough that she would end my misery. I began doing my chores in a careless manner. I made sure that I forgot to wipe the bathroom floor, hoping that Mother or one of her royal subjects might slip and fall, hurting themselves on the hard tile floor. When I washed the evening dishes, I left bits of food on the plates. I wanted The Bitch to know I didn’t care anymore.
As my attitude began to change, I became more and more rebellious. A crisis erupted one day at the grocery store. Usually I stayed in the car, but for some reason Mother decided to take me inside. She ordered me to keep one hand clamped onto the cart and bend my head towards the floor. I deliberately disobeyed her every command. I knew she didn’t want to make a scene in public, so I walked in front of the cart, making sure I was at least an arm’s length away from her. If my brothers made any comments to me, I fired back at them. I simply told myself that I wasn’t going to take anybody’s crap anymore.
Mother knew that other shoppers were watching us and could hear us, so several times she gently took my arm and told me in a pleasant voice to settle down. I felt so alive knowing I had the upper hand in the store, but I also knew that once we were outside, I would pay the price. Just as I thought, Mother gave me a sound thrashing before we reached the station wagon. As soon as we were in the car, she ordered me to lie on the floor of the back seat, where her boys took turns stomping me with their feet for “mouthing off” to them and Mother. Immediately after we entered the house, Mother made a special batch of ammonia and Clorox. She must have guessed I had been using the rag as a mask because she tossed the rag into the bucket. As soon as she slammed the bathroom door, I hurried to the heating vent. It didn’t come on. No fresh air came through the vent. I must have been in the bathroom for over an hour because the gray fumes filled the small room all the way to the floor. My eyes filled with tears, which seemed to activate the poison even more. I spat mucus and heaved until I thought I would faint. When Mother finally opened the door, I bolted for the hallway, but her hand seized me by the neck. She tried to push my face into the bucket, but I fought back and she failed. My plan for rebellion also failed. After the longer “gas chamber” incident, I returned to my wimpy self, but deep inside I could still feel the pressure building like a volcano, waiting to erupt from deep inside my soul.