"Hey," I said, wishing I had never agreed to do this.
My father turned around slowly and actually smiled. "Harlan, just in time. Go in the garage there and grab the poles. They're right next to the lawn mower."
I stepped into the garage and grabbed the fishing poles. I remembered the last time I had gone fishing with my dad. I was only about six, and I had tangled up my pole. He got extremely angry and shook me violently, scaring me so bad I never went again. Touching the pole seemed to trigger the memory. He was always like that, it seemed. He never had any patience for any mistakes I may have made, which always left me even more paranoid and nervous around him. Being more jittery made me prone to even more accidents, like some vicious cycle.
After awhile, I learned to avoid my father altogether.
He took the pole from my hand and I felt myself feeling like little Harly again. My heart was roaring in my chest. I wiped my sweaty palms against my khakis and did my best to appear calm.
"Still refuse to wear jeans I see," he said, staring down at my tan pants. "What kind of man can't wear jeans to fish?" He then abruptly stopped talking, and seemed to try to think of something else to say. "That's okay, though. No big deal."
I couldn't help but laugh to myself, knowing full well my mother had coached him not to be critical. Well, at least he was trying. We both stood there in an uncomfortable silence.
"At least it's not supposed to rain," he said desperately.
"Yeah," I said, kicking at the grass with my boots. "It's supposed to be sunny."
The funny thing about this was I don't think I had ever even discussed the weather with him. This was a new thing to me. A civilized conversation with my father was something for fantasy books.
He checked to make sure the boat was hooked up securely and we got into the car. As we pulled out of the driveway, he turned on the radio, which was a relief. We had nothing to talk about. This day was going to be maddening. He turned the dial over to a local country station and turned it up slightly. Some cowboy was singing about silver and gold. It was kind of cool actually—a bit on the death obsessed side.
On his right arm was a tattoo I had never noticed before. It was simply the word Crowley. Underneath the word was a red demon carrying a pitchfork. A long forked tongue protruded from his leering mouth. Aliester Crowley was a satanic religious figure. I had read one of his books once and found it rather tame.
"Does that tattoo stand for Aliester Crowley?" I asked, wondering if there was more to my father then I had realized.
"Who?" he asked, pulling a Kool cigarette out and lighting it. "Allison Crowley? Who the hell is that?"
"He was a Satanist in the earlier part of this century."
My father smirked. "There you go again, always trying to make me feel stupid. No, that tattoo is from the song Mr. Crowley, by Ozzy."
I tried not to laugh. I was afraid to tell him that the song by Ozzy Osbourne was actually about Aliester Crowley. He would only accuse me of trying to make him feel stupid again, which was something he did a lot. Anytime in my life I had ever informed him of something he didn't know, he would fly off the handle and punish me. He was a very insecure man.
As soon as I had learned to read at the age of five I read everything in sight. Nothing could stop me. I devoured one book after another, spending every spare minute in the library. I suppose it was an escape from a reality I didn't like. When you're just a child, you don't think about why you do something. After awhile, my father began to feel threatened by my reading. "No son of mine is going to be a loser," he had said, as he put all of my books in a garbage bag and left the house. He then forbade me from ever entering the library again, instead encouraging me to play sports. "A big boy like you ought to play football."
I then had to smuggle books into the house by putting them into my pants, or my backpack. Once in awhile, he would catch me reading and I would get out of it by saying I had to do a report on it for school. I would spend hours in the bathtub reading books, hiding a book underneath the bathroom sink. I suppose the fact that he forbade me from reading them only made me want to read them more. So in some sick way, I read because of my father. I have read books ravenously ever since.
"Why the hell would I put a Satanist on my arm?" my dad asked, dragging me from my thoughts with a sudden jolt. For a brief moment, I had no clue in the world what he was talking about.
I felt bold. "Well what is a demon? Isn't that satanic?"
My father looked at his arm dumbly as if seeing the tattoo for the first time. I guess he had never thought about the religious connotation of having a demon on his arm. "I got this one night when I was plastered. It was taken from a black light poster that was on my friend's wall. I thought it looked pretty neat so we took it to the tattoo parlor and asked the guy to put it on my arm. Hurt like a bastard too, all that color."
For the rest of the trip we said very little of importance. After about ten minutes, the country station began to grate on my nerves. Sometimes I can listen to it, but if I hear too much of it I began to feel slightly psychotic.
We pulled onto the shore of Lake Angel and my father began to back the boat into the water. The waters swayed peacefully in the sunlight. The deaths of Alisa and Ross had no effect on the tranquility of the lake, surprisingly. I expected the lake to be tainted somehow, but I felt at home here more than ever.
My father parked the car, and in a few minutes we found ourselves floating gently on its surface. He grabbed the earthworms from a white Styrofoam container and threw one at me. Putting the worm on the hook was sort of disgusting.
"Well, Harlan, I guess you're wondering why I asked you to come out here with me," he said, staring at his line and tugging it ever so gently. I didn't say anything and he continued. "I was wondering how you would feel about moving back in. I want us to be a family—"
"No," I said, firmly. "I'm happy where I am."
His face flashed red with anger, but he held it in check. "I know I've treated you bad in the past, Harlan. I haven't had a drink in four months."
"Dad, I am sorry to tell you this but I will never live with you again. And you didn't just treat me bad, you made my life hell for sixteen years. I don't care if you become the next Pope, I'm staying where I am."
"You wouldn't be the man you are today if it wasn't for me, you ungrateful little fuck. I toughened your ass up."
"Are you kidding me? I am so psychologically messed up because of you. I suffer from depression; I'm always contemplating suicide. I may be the most abnormal kid in school. And besides, you didn't make me, books did. Books raised me. You think you banned them from me? I read them all the time. I read them with a flashlight underneath my bedcovers. I read them in the bathroom. I read them every chance I got. I used them to escape from you."
He clenched his fists angrily. "You think I'm going to let you live up there with that slut? I can take you back anytime I want. You are only sixteen years old."
I smiled and I could see that for some reason it made him afraid. "I will get myself legally emancipated. Even if the court doesn't let me live with Suzanne, I won't live with you. I will live in a foster home if I have to. I'm seventeen now and, though you are my own father, you didn't even know that. In less than a year I will be eighteen."
He slammed his pole down and the rod broke off. "You think you are so goddamn clever. You little know-it-all-little bastard. I will destroy you."
The smile stayed on my face. "Well, I can see you've changed so much. We are not even out here for thirty minutes and already you are threatening to hit me again. Let me tell you something, Dad. I'm only a teenager and I know more about what makes this world tick than you ever will. I don't have any love for you. In fact, I hate your guts."
He leaned forward, the veins popping out on his forehead in anger. "Harlan, if you say one more fucking word I will break your neck."
I moved towards him and brought my face to his. My smile widened. "Fuck off, you low life scum."
His
scream sounded primal and he grabbed my throat, pushing me backwards. For some reason, I had no fear whatsoever. I met his stare head on.
Just when I thought he was going to hit me, he started crying. "I'm sorry," he chanted over and over again, hugging me.
It was the most sickening feeling I ever had, because at that moment, I realized that I didn't have one iota of feeling for him. It nauseated me.
My father is a little man and a poor excuse for a human being. I didn't even get any perverse pleasure out of seeing him suffer. I wanted him away from me and out of my life.
I pushed him off, fighting his embrace. I moved away from him, actually having to pry his hand off my jacket. I rowed the boat back and stepped onto the shore. I looked back at him once as I walked away. He was staring into the sun.
I felt nothing.
Chapter 27:
Suicide?
This is the last thing I write in my journal. You are probably asking yourself at this point if I'm going to kill myself. I mean, after all, this journal was supposed to chronicle the final year of my life, was it not?
Well, for starters, I am now eighteen years old and I am just about to graduate from Rawley High School. Believe it or not, only one more person that I know personally has died in the last two years. I know, I know—get to the point.
I'm not going to kill myself.
Sometimes, the depression still hits me, but I always seem to come out of it if I give it a little time. What made me change my mind? Well, looking over my journal many would get all romantic and conclude that Samantha's love stopped me. While Sam's presence in my life certainly helped, she is not the real reason. To be honest, I do not know how long we will last. In the fall, Julian and I head over to Covenant College up north while Sam goes to Princeton. Julian's cousin, Clive, convinced us that Covenant College was a good place to get a decent education.
I love Sam dearly, and hope that we will stay together, but my sense of reality threatens to overwhelm me and points out those long distance relationships rarely work. Four years is a long time to live like that. I hope we can do it. And I doubt we can. I sure as hell will try and make it work.
Vlad died last summer of a brain aneurysm that may, or may not, have been tied to the beating he received from Ross Morrissey.
His death took its toll on all of us—especially Julian. It happened in gym class. We were running track when I saw him fall over. At first, I thought he just passed out from exhaustion, but then he started going into convulsions, which scared the hell out of me. He died that night leaving me a wasted wreck. He had such an impact on me in so little of time.
Are you listening to me up there somewhere, Gary? I love you, man. I miss you so much. I think about you daily.
Though Vlad's death devastated me, he was not the deciding point in my change of heart about putting suicide from my mind forever.
Believe it or not, it was my father.
The last entry I wrote in this journal was my father's fishing trip. Writing it made me physically and emotionally ill and I found myself unable to continue this journal for a long time.
This week, I picked this journal up and began to reread it. I was shocked at how often I experienced so many emotions while reading it. It was such an uncomfortable experience. What a year that had been. When I got to the last line, "I felt nothing", I realized I had not written an ending.
If someone had picked the journal up, without knowing me or who I was, they would have no idea what became of me. I am a much different Harlan Sexton than the sixteen-year-old who first started this journal. While reading it, I had many moments where I was too embarrassed to continue. Was I really that pretentious, silly, and downright egocentric? Indeed I was. As many of us were at that age.
Also, reading it was like bringing Vlad back from the dead. Reading some of the scenes between Vlad and I were almost too painful to bear. At least now he is preserved here. I think I captured him pretty well.
Now back to my father, and how he made me change my mind.
That day on the fishing trip, I came to the realization of who had created the mess I had become. Despite all my hateful feelings toward my father, I realized I loved him deeply. It was this love that almost killed me. I always either saw him as the father that I wanted him to be, or the monster that threatened to drag me to Hell.
That day of the fishing trip I saw him differently. I saw that he had killed himself the first time he had taken a sip of alcohol. It is said that alcohol kills brain cells every time you drink it. My dad must have half a brain by now.
I also discovered on that day that some part of me had always wanted to be desperately loved and accepted by him. His rejection of me is what made me so fragile. To have the love of a parent denied you is very damaging. I strongly believe that it almost killed me.
The day after I left my father in the boat, I felt better. For the first time in my life, I felt I understood myself. I no longer sought acceptance or approval for my father. I no longer felt anything for him. My sick love for him had died. It took seventeen years and it died hard. I buried it deep within my psyche. It was as if I was reborn. I felt burned, yet new. I still have the scars, but I have learned from it.
I have friends who love me. And that is all I need.
I also noticed what a fighter I was. The journal wasn't a chronicle of my suicide. It was a chronicle of the fight for my life. I am thankful that I won.
This whole year, I wrote a novel. I'm proud of it. It's a bloody science fiction/horror novel with many elements of dark humor. I am currently looking for an agent.
In the fall, I will be majoring in psychology with a minor in English Literature. I may even try to sell this journal someday. I will have to change all the names of course and call it fiction. I'll dedicate it to Samantha and my father. Heroes and Villains. "For Samantha, I love you. Dad: I hope you read this."
To kill yourself is cowardly.
If there is one thing I have learned in my life, and especially the year of the journal, is life is precious. Life is worth fighting for. I will go down fighting the whole way. I promise.
There are many fights to be fought in my future. Perhaps I will have a whole new journal to write in a few years. A whole new chronicle in the life of Harlan Sexton. I will leave you with the fighting words of the sixteen year old Harlan Sexton. They are words that I find quite pretentious now, but they are for the Harlan that I was:
Fucking Boom, Dear Reader.
Fucking Boom.
HARLAN Page 18