Fatal Flaws

by Clyde Lawrence

  Her third fatal flaw was that she, herself, was a passionate individual. Once she believed in a person or a cause, her commitment to it was essentially unshakable. She was almost compulsively driven to find a way to sustain and justify her beliefs, even if evidence began to accumulate that would lead a ‘normal’ person to change his or her mind about a topic or an individual.

  For instance, although music enthusiasts of the generation following hers were the main base of the fans for Michael Jackson, my mother was a stalwart aficionado of the musical icon. She had loved him from his early days as the lead singer for the Jackson Five and had enthusiastically followed his career as he evolved into a pop music superstar in the 80’s and 90’s. Like many of his fans, she believed he was the musical savior incarnate and that he could absolutely do no wrong.

  As stories about MJ began to show up on the news which, at a bare minimum, began to expose his idiosyncrasies, my mother repeatedly jumped to his defense. She began developing conspiracy theories about the music industry in order to explain his eccentric and sometimes bizarre behavior. Was it strange for a single adult male to build a private amusement park on his estate and to bring unaccompanied minors there for sleepovers? Of course not. Was it an indication of an extraordinary case of body dysmorphic disorder that he somehow had his African American skin depigmented to a shade much fairer than the skin color of a typical white game show host? Not at all. Were his progressive facial feature transformations an indication that he’d become addicted to cosmetic surgery, and did the final results give him the appearance of a mutant space monkey from the planet Wathufuck? Don’t be ridiculous! What about his marriage to Elvis’s daughter? He and his bride clearly shared a deep and profound love for each other. Okay then, what about his insistence that his children would be covered by a sheet or blanket when in public? Gosh darn it, she insisted, he was just being a protective father. Even after his death, when information surfaced regarding his employment of a personal physician whose primary role was the administration of general anesthetic agents to the King of Pop so that he could sleep, she insisted that he must have the world’s most extraordinary case of insomnia. “What was he supposed to do,” she asked, “die of sleep deprivation?”

  This was only one of many examples of my mother’s refusal to acknowledge the concept known by the rest of the human race as reality. Most of the myriad examples of this character trait just made her seem a bit eccentric. Some, like her refusal to acknowledge that Bill Clinton did, in fact, ‘have sexual relations with that woman,’ made her super annoying and difficult to talk to about current world affairs. Others, like her mistrust of cellular phones, which she believed were primarily a way for the government to track our movements, were laughable and embarrassing to me and Amanda as we grew older.

  Another example, however, was probably the most destructive influence in her life. My mother and father had met in high school. Neither came from a happy home and each of them had found the first real joy they’d ever experienced in each other’s arms. Once they had found each other, they were able to endure the remaining time living in their respective households largely because their main focus in life had become the anticipation of the future they would build together.

  Because she had fallen so deeply in love with her young beau, she was forever convinced that he was her soul mate. Even as he changed over the years into a man who was incapable of controlling his temper, and more than willing to trade his own pain for the pain he inflicted on others, she remained loyal to him. She would never be able to shed her belief that he was the man of her dreams, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge the evolving reality that he had become a cruel and bitter man. She refused to see my father for who he really was and realize that her initial judgements of him as a worthy mate and an excellent choice as the father of her children would prevent her from condemning him in her mind. This was the folly that would repeatedly convince her that she could not survive without my father, preventing her from taking definitive action to protect herself and her children from him.

  Chapter 4

  I’m eleven years old and my parents are driving me home from a Saturday hockey game at The Eagles Ice-a-Rena. This was a local ice-skating rink run by the regional franchise of The Eagles Club, and which could be rented out by regional hockey clubs for practice sessions, scrimmages, and games. I had been playing hockey since the age of seven and, although I was not the fastest skater or best puck handler, I possessed the ability to read the angles and anticipate where the puck and the players were headed. This skill, as well as the fact that I was large and strong for my age helped me to stand out among my peers. My coaches recognized my potential and were molding me into an exceptional defenseman.

  My father was a hockey enthusiast who had never had a chance to play growing up, so he had been living vicariously through me for several years. Whenever the opportunity arose, he would boast about my statistics and predict that one day I would achieve notoriety as a highly sought-after hockey talent. As with many other pathological parents I have met throughout my life who drive their children to excel in athletics so that they can live vicariously through them, my father liked to share in my successes. I’d heard him boasting many times to his friends or the neighbors when I’d achieved some type of distinction, like being chosen as the league MVP or being recruited to play on a select team. Not surprisingly, he took it personally when my performance wasn’t up to par.

  “What the hell was wrong with you out there today?” he asked, shortly after starting up the Honda Accord that served as our main means of transportation. “You looked like shit and played like you’d never worn a pair of skates before.”

  “Sorry,” I replied lamely. I was feeling crummy about my performance already and knew a copious quantity of salt was about to be poured into my proverbial open wounds.

  “Well, sorry just doesn’t cut it,” he said. I could see that he was starting to get worked up, so, as I had many times before, I automatically started thinking of the different ways that this conversation could go. His simmering anger could sometimes be kept from progressing to a full boil if I chose the correct way to respond. Sometimes I could defuse him by apologizing for being so lame and promising that I would never stoop to such depths in the future. Other times, that approach would just infuriate him, and he would tell me to stop being such a pussy. Sometimes I could deflect his annoyance toward someone else, like a teammate or my coach, so he didn’t have to feel like his son wasn’t measuring up. There were times when this worked if I failed to achieve an acceptable level of academic performance at school. I could always use my ‘lazy’ or ‘incompetent’ teachers as my scapegoat, which would periodically deflect his anger away from me and onto the losers—in his mind—that had been drawn to careers in teaching, mainly so they could have their summers off. Other times he would get pissed that I wasn’t taking responsibility for my own shortcomings and he’d tell me to man up and quit trying to lay the blame on somebody else. In reality, in any given situation, it was almost impossible to know how to respond in order to prevent yet another ass chewing and/or ass beating. For this reason, I usually took a minimalist approach to my responses and let fate determine how my asshole of a father would react.

  “David,” my mother began to interject, “he did his best. You know that his ankle is sprained and that—”

  “Shut your damn mouth, Kim,” he growled. “I’m talking to my son right now and don’t need any lip from you!”

  She nodded and then turned her head to gaze out the passenger side window. I hoped she’d be able to keep herself from interrupting him or otherwise speaking in my defense. From my vantage point in the back seat of our car, I’d witnessed plenty of vicious slaps and seen her head slammed into the side window too many times when she had dared to say something that was displeasing to my father. I really didn’t want to see it again, so I was silently willing my mother to keep quiet.

  “Well?” He had adjusted the rearview mirror and his eyes w
ere boring into me. “What do you have to say for yourself other than that you’re sorry? I need to know that I’m not wasting my time and money even letting you play in the first place. Are you really going to say that your pansy-ass ankle was the problem today? You know, hockey is a rough sport. You can’t just decide not to play hard and tough every time you get a little booboo. Maybe I need to take you out of hockey and sign you up for figure skating. That way it’ll just be you out there on the ice and we won’t have to worry about anyone bumping into you and hurting my little precious boy.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “What did you say, you little shithead?” he barked at me.

  “I said whatever,” I replied.

  As I think back on this episode, I don’t think it was what I said. I think the mistake I made on that particular day was that, as I replied, I stared directly into the reflection of his eyes in the rearview mirror. Although my words were fairly neutral, my glare was most definitely perceived as a challenge and an affront.

  He suddenly braked hard and quickly pulled off the road into the parking lot of a dilapidated building that had clearly been a gas station and convenience store at one time. As the car screeched to a stop, he threw open his door and rapidly strode around the vehicle to the right rear door. He yanked it open, grabbed the front of my hooded sweatshirt, and jerked me out of the car. After slamming the door shut, he got a double-fisted purchase on the front of my sweatshirt and pushed me up against the door. Glaring into my eyes, he spoke slowly and softly, all the while projecting disgust and fury through his ice-blue eyes.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess you’ll need some time to think about what I asked you. It’s about five miles from here to home. I’m going to let you walk the rest of the way, so you can use the time to come up with a better answer. Get your shit out of the trunk, you can carry that too. Maybe it will help you stay focused on the topic we were discussing—hockey versus figure skating.”

  “Dad,” I said. “Are you serious? It’s cold. I’ll freeze my butt off if I have to walk home from here!”

  “Guess you better get moving, then,” he replied, without even a trace of sympathy in his expression or tone of voice.

  Instead, he returned to the open driver’s door and climbed in. After closing the door, he rolled down the power window as he activated the trunk release button.

  “Get your bag out of the trunk so that we can be on our way,” he called out. “I’ve got places to go and people to see. You’d better not dawdle, either. If you’re not home in two hours, by the way, you’re gonna get an ass whuppin’ to boot.”

  As I bent over to grab my hockey equipment bag out of the shallow trunk, I heard him yelling at my mother.

  Their voices were distorted, but I could hear my mother repeatedly saying, “Please let him back in, David!”

  With the strap of the 30-plus pound gear bag over my shoulder, I closed the trunk and looked at my parents in the front seat having a heated discussion.

  I watched him pause for a moment before yelling, “FINE!”

  Then I saw him unlatch her seatbelt and reach across her to pull the door latch. Her door suddenly flew open and he began shoving her out the door. She knew that resisting him would be futile, so she allowed herself to be ejected from her seat. My father didn’t give her time to swing her legs out of the foot well, so rather than stepping out of the vehicle, she fell out, landing on her right shoulder. He then leaned all the way across the car and was able to stretch his long arm out and grab the door handle. He began pulling the door shut before my mother had gotten her legs completely out of the car and her right foot was nearly slammed in the door as he yanked it shut.

  I came around the side of the car and helped her up. The shoulder and elbow of her jacket were scuffed and several small pieces of gravel were stuck to the black leather. As I brushed off the debris I became increasingly angry at my father. Not for making me walk home or even for pushing my mother around, which I’d seen countless times before. It infuriated me that he had damaged her black leather jacket. It was very stylish, and I knew she loved it more than any other garment she had ever owned. She’d had to put the coat on layaway at Macy’s and pay on it for six months before she could bring it home. I was so angry, I felt like picking up a rock and smashing it through the window of the car to punish him for being such an asshole.

  “You can accompany your disrespectful little shit of a son on his walk home,” he called out through the passenger side window, which he had lowered. “Maybe you can help him figure out if he’s a hockey player or a little faggot ice dancer.”

  Having hurled this one last insult at us, he closed the window and drove off.

  “I’m really sorry, Mom,” I said. “I wouldn’t have acted that way if I knew you were going to get into trouble with him, too. I’m so sorry about your jacket. It doesn’t look too bad though.”

  “Listen, honey,” she replied. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter what you say or don’t say—he’s already decided to be angry and there’s just no stopping him from doing and saying mean things. Oh, and don’t worry about my jacket. It’s just a thing—you and Amanda are all I really care about.”

  The fact that she didn’t include herself and my father in her short list of what mattered to her was not lost on me. I wondered if she would ever choose to somehow break free of him. I also wondered if she would ever be truly happy or if she would spend her entire life trying to make it through one day at a time, figuratively tiptoeing around my father as she tried to avoid upsetting him.

  I shouldered the bag and we set off in the direction of home, making it there in an hour and forty-five minutes. When we were about halfway there, it began to snow and by the time we arrived, our hands and feet were numb from the cold. As we entered through the front door, which opened into the living room, we noticed my father sitting in his recliner which faced away from the entryway and toward the television. On the end table next to him were four empty beer cans. He made no effort to greet us other than to say, “It’s about time. You’d better get started on dinner, Kim. I’m getting hungry.”

  Chapter 5

  Nearly every night, as I lay in bed, waiting to fall asleep, I’d think about what our lives would be like without my father. I hadn’t been raised with any concept of religion, but I assumed there was some kind of divine being who ruled The Universe, and I hoped he was responsive to human beings as they petitioned him to intervene on their behalves. My daily prayer included two requests, either of which I’d be eternally grateful for, if God would just see fit to answer my prayer. First was that my mother would somehow find the strength and courage to escape from my father, so we would be able to leave him far behind as we started a new life without him. The alternative request was that my father would die.

  There was one other topic that repeatedly ran through my mind as I waited for the Sandman to grant me temporary reprieve from my bleak and depressing conscious world. As I grew, I became increasingly bitter that Amanda and I had been carelessly placed by fate in a dysfunctional prison of a household with a heartless and brutal warden. My mother did her best to provide us with a loving and nurturing home environment when my father was not around. However, when he was present, she focused mainly on avoiding any behavior which would wake the sleeping giant within him. The net result was that there was rarely any hope of happiness and the expectation of making it through each day unharmed was not one that any of us could take for granted.

  Being ever daunted by the bleakness of my childhood, I increasingly chose to focus on the limitless potential which would be attainable once my undeserved prison sentence was served and I was, finally, free of my father’s constraining influence. I spent countless hours lying awake and planning out my future. One thing I knew for sure was that I would need a career that would provide enough income and security that I’d be able to maintain my independence from my parents for the rest of my life. Beyond that, I knew that I wanted t
o work in a profession focused on helping others. My father’s negativity and inclination to bring those around him down had created in me a need to do exactly the opposite. Whereas he brought pain, so I would bring relief. He had shown impatience and hostility, so I would show longsuffering and compassion. He inspired fear, so I would do my best to provide hope. The idea of what I would do for a living started as a tiny flame in the darkness of my mind, but continually grew until it became a bright pillar of light which shone down from above and clearly illuminated the path that I would take as I advanced toward my future career. I would, I decided, become a physician. I knew that the educational process involved in training for a career in medicine would not be easy, but I was willing to put for the effort and make the sacrifices which would be necessary to reach my goal. I would be the antithesis of my wretch of a father.

  I made the mistake, one time, of mentioning my aspirations to my mother within earshot of my father.

  “What the hell makes you think you’re smart enough to be a doctor, you cocky little bastard?”, he called out from the recliner in the living room in which he sat drinking his fifth Pabst Blue Ribbon of the evening. “Besides, who the fuck do you think is gonna pay for all that schooling? I can tell you one thing, buddy-boy, it won’t be me!”

  “Just forget about it”, I quietly said to my mother, who just closed her eyes and shook her head, embarrassed and ashamed of her obnoxious and unkind husband. I said nothing more as I walked away with my head hanging low, having one more reason to hate the son of a bitch.

  I never regretted that I’d shared my goals with my mother on that day, nor did I regret my father’s predictably insulting interjection. I knew that such comments were meant to discourage and demoralize me so that I would abandon any dreams or aspirations that I would accomplish anything beyond what he had in his own pitiful and joyless life. What he didn’t realize was that his insults and disparaging comments did not break down my self-esteem or my desire to dream of a better life in which I could be a positive influence on those around me. The actual result of his verbal abuse was that it cemented my goals and bolstered my determination to build a life for myself and my future family that was exponentially better than what he had settled for.