Pain Don't Hurt

by Mark Miller

  “All right, now you need to imagine your feet are nailed to the floor. Get in that fight stance and only turn from the waist, and don’t look all scared. Wipe your stupid mouth and quit gawking. Pretend you’re not a scared little idiot.”

  Looking back on it now, it makes me laugh. I was so shit scared of him back then, I did whatever he told me to do without question. Now I know he was giving me terrible advice. You always step with your jab, remain loose in your stance, and whip punches starting from your feet all the way up. You don’t “imagine your feet are nailed to the floor.” So stupid.

  “Now throw that jab out there. Throw like you actually want to hurt somebody, not like you’re just some pathetic princess. You want me to start calling you ‘princess’?”

  I balled up my fists and threw them as hard as I could into the center of his giant palms, trying as hard as I could to focus on keeping my feet, floating in my big brother’s shoes, from moving even a little bit. Sweat was rolling down my forehead, and my stomach was clenched into an angry tangle of nerves. I was in danger of throwing up, which seemed a better alternative than standing there in front of him right then, except that I knew if I did, he would kick my ass even harder. My punches weren’t hitting hard enough. I knew they weren’t because he was looking more and more irritated. I couldn’t seem to generate enough power to have an effect. I imagined my hands punching clean through his palms to the other side and slamming him in the face. I imagined him, with a surprised look on his face, laid out on the floor. I imagined him scared of me.

  My father’s favorite quote was “It is better to be feared than respected, for fear lasts longer.” He loved to tell anyone and everyone this. When I was diagnosed as being a type 1 diabetic very early in life, followed shortly by being diagnosed as having a problem with my aortic valve, something in him seemed to decide that he needed to “toughen me up.” As though that disease was my choice. He hated that I had any natural frailty.

  “You call that a punch? Come on!” he roared. Everything in me wanted him to disappear, to just explode into a puff of dust with my next punch. I begged, pleaded, made deals with God or whoever. I wished as hard as I could. Nothing will encourage religious tendencies more than the feeling of absolute helplessness. Maybe that is why my mother never missed a service. She attended morning mass every day, both in her church and in my father’s. While my father professed to be a Catholic, my mother preferred the Russian Rite church, but she liked to attend both churches. I think she would have gone to a synagogue if she thought they would have her. She would drag me with her every Sunday to her church and then to the Catholic church. I still think the rituals affiliated with both churches are beautiful. I mean, you want to see Christ presented with a lot of pomp and circumstance, go to a Catholic or Russian Rite church. The costumes, the lengthy services, the constant stand, kneel, bow your head . . . There appears to be a level of dignity there, or at least effort. The production alone demands some appreciation. Not to say that other religions don’t, and not to say that I really believe much of what any of any religion espouses. But it was pretty spectacular to watch as a kid. In the beginning I used to like going to church with her simply because for those few hours, I knew exactly what was going to happen to me, and I could blend in. After a while, that comfort faded, as I had gone through my confirmation in the Russian church very early, which put a spotlight on me in the Catholic church when all the other kids were going through their confirmations as young teenagers. If I wasn’t the odd man out by way of physical difference, somehow my parents found a way to force me to be left of center and, once again, seen as a “weird kid.” Plus, my father started to enjoy arguing with the Russian priests. In fact, I think he attended that church specifically to drum up new ways to get into arguments with them.

  My mother was always looking for peace. At her age, church was one of the only places she had been taught to seek refuge. Sometimes she would drive me around in her car and tell me, “I’m going to get us out of here, Mark, we’re going to go looking for apartments today and then we’ll be out of there.” By the end of each day, either her guilt over thinking of walking out on a marriage (us Catholics and Russian Rite have truly cornered the market on guilt; feeling guilty is practically a skill we have perfected) or sheer exhaustion from thinking about how much it would take to actually leave would pull all the steam from her engine. It always ended the same: with shame and booze. We would go back home, she would pour herself something, then she would go to her room and shut the door, and I would be left to face him, his questions, his beer breath, and all that pent-up anger. Colin had learned over time to stay scarce, so he was never there to save me, not that I can really blame him. When he was there, he got it so much worse. . . . Sometimes my parents would spend months not speaking to each other, existing on opposite ends of the house, using me as a carrier pigeon if they needed to deliver information to each other. They never slept in the same room, not for as long as I can remember. She claimed it was because he snored; he claimed it was because she was a bed hog. The truth is, they were totally codependent but they just couldn’t fucking stand each other.

  “Come on!” He grabbed my shoulders and yanked them up, nearly lifting me off the ground. “Come on! Let’s go!” he bellowed. His anger had reached an all-time high now. This was the boiling point. If I didn’t deliver now, I would get tossed, smacked, all the while being showered with soul-crushing belittlement, characteristic of his “boy named Sue/toughen up” regime. The more of a target he made me, the harder he figured I would become. His intentions were to build a callus around my soul that was so big I would never be fragile to anyone. The onslaught was fully intentional. He would either beat me into a greasy smear on the floor, or eventually, I would rise up and become this armored beast that couldn’t feel pain. It was a bad plan from the very start. Later on in my life, when I would be standing over him, watching him take his last animalistic rattling breaths of life, instead of being able to generate love, remorse, empathy, or even hate, that callus would prevent me from achieving either catharsis or forgiveness for a long, long time. I would watch every muscle in his face relax as he growled out a final gasp, and I would, for two solid years, feel nothing.

  I took a quick breath and threw my last punch so hard it nearly pitched me forward straight into his chest. My fist skimmed off his hand and glanced right into the center of his wide, leathery cheek. If my heart could have burst through my ribs and run out of the room to hide, it would have. I felt all of my organs just huddle into the center of my body, and all of my extremities went cold. I know now that what really enraged him was not that I had hit him in the face, but the fact that it had been accidental. If I had hauled back and just plowed my tiny fist straight into his eye, he probably would have respected it. I can’t say he wouldn’t have slapped the bejesus out of me, but I doubt my skin would have tasted leather that day. He browbeat everyone, but he had this odd admiration for hopeless acts of courage. Had I actually intended to throw that punch, I might have gotten off lighter. As it stood, though, I had clearly not. The punch landed on his face because I was “sloppy” and “out of control.” In short, my ass was grass, and he was about to become the lawn mower.

  He stood up completely straight, towering over me, his head pitched at an odd angle. His neck was fused in one position after sustaining a serious injury in World War II. He could hardly turn it at all, so instead he would shift his entire torso in the direction he was looking, making him look like some sort of dinosaur. He grabbed my wrists inside of one of those giant hands and I could hear the jangle of his belt. I had no idea what he was doing.

  “Tomorrow, we are taking you to a gym and you’ll learn how to do this the right way, since you are obviously too stupid to learn it here. You’ll learn it, one way or another.”

  I was on my tiptoes, my arms yanked completely over my head, my shirt having crawled up to expose a patch of skin right above the top of my pants. I had forgotten how to breathe, and the fear I
felt made me go completely limp. I wasn’t fighting him, and he just got angrier and angrier. . . . The skin exposed to air bristled with goose bumps. It was hot enough to fry an egg in that room, but sheer terror was confusing my body to the point of making my hair stand on end.

  “Look at you, you aren’t even trying to fight. You just let things happen. You’ll learn one day, or the entire world is just going to walk all over you. . . . You’ll learn.”

  There was a quick “ssssssssp” sound as the wide leather belt slipped from inside his belt loops. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. The only sentence that ran through my head over and over again was “Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry.” My face was frozen. He spun me around to face the opposing wall; his dresser was there, and one of his collections of watches sat on top of it. He loved collecting them, used to say, “A man isn’t properly dressed without a nice timepiece,” despite the fact that he never wore any of them. I used to love sneaking into his room when he was gone to hold some of the pocket watches from his dad in my hands, feel the cool, smooth metal and read the inscriptions, some of which were so old they had mostly rubbed off. I tried now to remember what some of them said. . . . I tried to focus on remembering. . . . Something I could just repeat in my head to get me away from this moment . . .

  “You’ll learn one way or another. If you keep doing it this way, you’ll always learn the hard way. My way or the highway.”

  The belt whizzed through the air and landed right across that exposed patch of flesh. I felt lightning run through me and the room flashed bright white. The pain was brilliantly surprising. I prayed my mother would come in, would hear it and save me, though I knew she wouldn’t. I prayed that Colin would come in, rise up, and tear my father off of me, but I knew he wouldn’t. I prayed for the neighbor to see what was happening and to come rushing in, shouting and shaming my father into tears. I prayed for him to understand that what he was doing was wrong. The belt came zipping at me again and cut into my skin. I disconnected; it felt like I was floating. I remembered one inscription and began singing it in my head. . . . “Time waits for no man,” spelling the words out slowly, giving my mind a place, a pattern, to hide in. . . .

  The belt continued to land across my back and behind, until finally, he released my wrists and I dropped to the floor. He carried me to my room. I remember feeling idiotically happy I was being held so close. He laid me down on my bed and told me to take a nap. I was not going to go to sleep, but I closed my eyes anyway. My back was stinging, and my blood sugar started dropping. He brought me a glass of juice. I sipped at it and pretended to be sleepy. He walked out, saying, “Tomorrow we are going to the boxing gym and you’ll learn how to really fight,” closing the door behind him carefully.

  Moments later I heard his car start in the driveway. He was going to the bar. Twice in one day. Not that uncommon. My mother was downstairs, likely cleaning something she had already cleaned several times in the last hour. My brother was out with his friends, getting into some sort of trouble. I sat up, finished my juice, and walked to the mirror in my room. I started trying to stand the way I remembered seeing the boxers on TV stand. I tried to imitate them and threw a few punches. I made the meanest faces I could muster, twisting my mouth into a grimace, growling and cursing, using every foul word I had ever heard uttered. My shirt was sticking to my back, so I knew I had been cut. I demeaned myself in my head for noticing and shouted, “Toughen up!” I would disappear into fantasy worlds often as a kid, where I would create athletes in my head, complete with stats and strengths, all fleshed out in my mind. I would pretend that I knew them. . . . Or that I was one of them . . .

  I stood throwing punches until my shoulders ached and I was exhausted. I then went into the bathroom and washed up, cleaning my own back with a wet rag, marveling at the crumbs of dried blood that came away with every swipe of the wet cloth. I changed my shirt and buried it in the hamper. My mother must have seen it, though she never said anything. My father came home later and we had dinner. He talked calmly about how he planned to take me to a boxing gym the next day, and I smiled back at him, thinking that one day I would know how to fight, and I would soon be stronger than him.

  He made good on that promise. The next day I was dumped into the center of the dingiest brick building in Wilkinsburg, on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. The heavy bags were gray, duct-taped in spots, and lumpy. The ring had flakes of dried blood in it and giant dents in the floor, so men circling would occasionally trip or falter, cursing and stomping the ground like animals as they chomped on their mouth guards. For the first time I smelled what a real fight gym smells like. That mix of dirty, wet hand wraps; a musty mildew smell; the inside of gloves—a leather and sweat mix, body heat, and the sweet smell of Vaseline, which boxers use to prevent cuts in sparring. All of those smells converged in that thick blanket of steam that just blended together into one now thoroughly recognizable and familiar perfume. I was the only white face in the room other than my father, and I was by far the youngest. Every single person took a minute to sort of bemusedly gawk at me as I walked in, glanced at my towering father, and then went back to what he was doing. I was handed a small pair of gloves and a tall, onyx man sheathed in sweat sat next to me and said through few teeth, “Okay, we gonna wrap ya hands now, kid.” I stuck one hand out and he began wrapping a thin layer of gauze around my knuckles, grabbing single strings of tape dangling from the edge of his shirt to secure the gauze as he wrapped. My father had already left, scooted out the door to head to the bar the minute he knew someone was watching me. I was alone in that place, and yet, with this stranger, this wiry black man in a sleeveless T-shirt, bobbing his head to the soul music cranked in the gym, smiling through more gaps than ivory, and yanking my shoulders into place, I felt this surge of opportunity rise in me. “You like Motown, son? Yeah, you do, everybody like Motown. Yeah!” he shouted, grinning, and I couldn’t help but smile back. I didn’t even care that sweat was running into the cuts on my back. I didn’t care that I knew absolutely nothing about the sport and now suddenly was being forced, once again, to throw punches, the very thing that had caught me a beating the day before. As the sweat began to build up on me once again, my shirt went transparent. This tall man glanced down as my shirt pulled up, exposing my raw back. He gently pulled the shirt down and said, “You got some of that rage in you, kid, you let that out, this is where you come to let that out.” I pounded as hard as I could straight into the center of the bag. I was learning the art of exorcism. These men around me, all of them, were working through something. They laughed loud, danced, made silly jokes, and threw punches at each other with a force I had only ever seen on TV, but what brought them here was something else, something deeper and individual. I recognized this; we were all broken pieces of pottery here, and for the first time I believed I had a place in the world.

  chapter two