You think, because it’s quiet, it must be over. After everything that’s happened, it must be. Thank God, right? If only I were so lucky.
Being born into the family I was born into, you learned things quick. You didn’t have a choice. Choice was a pipe dream, that no drug ever made come true. My dad drank, a lot, and my mom, well she couldn’t tell him no. She tried, but he didn’t let her, and I found myself in the middle more often than not. You’d think it would become normal, and to some extent, it does, but only as normal as completely off the rails, batshit insane, can be. Which is to say not at all.
I grew up playing baseball, but I hated it at first, and grew to love it. My dad and I would play for hours, it was the only time we ever got along. A game of catch was the closest to family therapy we ever really got. I’d throw it to him, he’d throw it to me, and very little, if anything was said, but nothing needed to be. Little me, loved that shit. I’d go until my arm hurt so bad, I felt it for the next week, but still played again the next day.
The reason I hated it was because my left eye is just about worthless. I can’t see all that great out of it, and in a bout of frustration, because like my brother, who’s autistic, I didn’t come out the way he wanted me to, which deeply bothered him, so he thought baseball would be the way to get my eye to work better. My brother on the other hand, always hated baseball. He was high functioning, but still obviously on the spectrum, social cues, just didn’t apply to him. Which I always found funny, not in the laugh at him way, but in the “why aren’t all people like this”, kinda way.
Needless to say he didn’t appreciate it to much, being the older brother, and having your dad pick up a hobby with your younger brother, and not you. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, seeing as I loved doing it, but it got more and more obvious as I grew up. I just kept playing, it was a coping mechanism, there were a lot of other things going on in the background, that no one knew about, because well, I never really spoke to anyone.
I was always quiet, even from a young age. My parents thought something was wrong with me, but I just didnt feel like talking most of the time. Unlike my brother, who could not stop talking. When I was really young, before I started playing baseball, and long before I got good at it, my brother’s autism was a lot worse. He hadn’t been taught all of the things that became critical to his everyday life now. He was still going to special doctors, and groups, and trying alternative therapies, and treatments, and there wasn’t a whole lot of time spent paying attention to me. Which was fine, I didn’t want the attention, but I felt like I didn’t exist. Something that later, became all important.
So playing baseball, was my way of getting recognition, being the good kid, in my parents eyes. Although, that didn’t really matter, because everyone would smile when you list your achievements, but no one would stick around to listen to the rest. Well like I said, my dad drank, and often times too much, so it wasn’t unusual for him to come home from the bar, and unleash hell whenever he felt like it. He come in and say, “Boy, what the fuck are you doing? Looks like you’re sitting on your ass, while I been out working my ass off all day, (smack) Do me a favor, open the fridge, and grab me a beer.” Couldn’t have been more than ten, when it started. My mom got sick, and he got real quiet, wouldn’t talk for weeks. When he did talk, it was orders, “Go to the store and pick me up some fucking dinner.” Or, “Get the fuck out the house, I don’t want you here.” One day, I walked in and asked him, “Why are you so angry?”, a simple enough question coming from a ten year old boy. He responded by getting up out of his chair, only to punch me in the face, and say, “Why do you ask so many questions?”.
He never did give me a straight answer to why he did the things he did, even years later. I wonder which answer I would’ve accepted, if any. I always wanted to know why he’d do the things he did, yet the only answer I ever seemed to get was, “it was my disease”. Did your disease really tell you to strip me down to nothing but my underwear, while you whipped me with your belt buckle so hard, that I still have all the scars on my back, after 20 years? Did it say, “put cigarettes out on him, and laugh while he writhes in pain?”, did it say, “Throw beer bottles at his head from the living room sofa?”, did it maybe say, “Stop. This is wrong. This is my kid.” No it didn’t, and I know that, because he didn’t stop, for years.
My body is covered in scars, and most aren’t visible. The ones that are, are ugly, but nothing in comparison. I wake up, to the image of him, over me, swinging, yelling, blood on his hands, a smile on his face, cigarette smoke replacing the air I was breathing. The smell of sweat, and stale beer, mixed in with old spice aftershave, unforgettable. Like when you find an old sweatshirt, hiding in a drawer, and it had that scent that brings you back, and you can’t help but cry, except the opposite. I smell that and I lose my breath, my heart rises into my throat, and my stomach drops to the floor, and I just need to run. Where ever I can, I just need to escape. Whenever I hear a whistle, it’s like an air raid siren. Whenever he was looking for me, he’d let out this whistle you could hear from the next state line, and whenever he did, we all came running, we didn’t have a choice, we knew the consequences.
When I was twelve, I had a few friends, despite my complete social ineptitude, of my own making, I didn’t like talking, talking didn’t like me, that’s how it was, and I’d accepted it. When I say I had a few friends, I mean maybe three, and they weren’t the friends for life friends, they were the, oh what’s up, kinda friends. So I was sitting at the fence the went around the schoolyard, watching car go by, because that’s what I did during recess or lunch, and I’d see parents dropping their kids off at school. Innocent enough, but I was focusing on all of the tiny things, things no one saw. The way my friends mom grabbed her kids hand, how my friends dad looked at his kid, they seemed happy. Something I just didn’t understand. Like it wasn’t even on my agenda. Yet it was all I wanted.
The teachers at school, all knew what was going on, they had to have. The bruises, black eyes, casts, and I didn’t even ride a bike, something was going on, but no one ever said anything. Everyone loved my dad, or they used to, he was the local mechanic, you broke something, you went to him. Naturally, when he fixed it, you’d be grateful. He crossed all his T’s and dotted all his I’s when it came to his image, he could never be anything less than perfect. In his own drunken way I guess. It was no secret he drank, he was 86ed from pretty much every bar in town when he finally stopped drinking, which he only did, cause of the court case. He’d finally beaten someone else up, and they got him on video, beating some dude to within an inch of his life, outside a gas station someplace in Arizona, he’d been running for two years, crashing on one friends sofa, to another, avoiding the warrant. When they found him, he was asleep, half naked, jack daniels in hand, with a loaded gun sitting on the table beside him, he’d also recently gotten on meth, so they got him for that too.
Prison did not do him well. He didn’t bitch out, but they still took their pound of flesh from him. He been stabbed a couple times, a couple fights, but a majority of the time, he spent in the library, reading all the classics. After he stopped drinking, and using meth, he became quite well read, he’d quote Jules Verne, into Ayn Rand, into Plato, into Watts, into Socrates. All a masquerade. The philosophy he lived his life by was theoretical, not real. The words he said, he’d never lived. Compassion, was not something he knew how to do, or the meaning of. Amends, for him, were just as they are in AA, a step, expect not towards the goal of healing, they were just another step towards getting what he wanted.
I stood up the first time at 14, he came at me, and I just wouldn’t let him touch me. He was drunk, so it wasn’t hard, I just danced around him, while he look like a baby giraffe, but that only pissed him off more. He just bum rushed me, and tackled me, and my brother walks in the room, and pulls him off, well then he becomes the target, and now he’s wailing on him. Well now I’m screaming at dad, dads screaming at my brother, and my brothers just screaming in fear, and my dads just swinging, Left, right, left, right, each one hitting either side of his jaw, then the straight ones come in, landing square on the nose, blood pours out, his heads hitting on the concrete, sounding like a deflated basket ball. I don’t even recognize him by the time he’s done, and my dad has got tears coming down his face, blood covering his fists, teeth sticking out his knuckles, and looks over at me, and says a phrase he’s only ever said to me once, “I’m sorry.”. Then walked out the room.
My brother survived, barely, a black eye, severe concussion, crack skull, broken jaw, displaced orbital bone, several lost teeth, missing chunks of his tongue. He recovered, but it took a year, and two separate CPS visits. I still find it funny that he did this to my brother, yet, he had to do it to completely random person, for someone to notice, and even then, for all of the wrong crimes.
The worst part of it all, was that my dad wasn’t pure evil. I made good memories with him. Those memories made me love him, even after all of the fucked up things he did to me. Teaching me baseball, going to the movies, he actually laughed, and was funny, and wasn’t always a despicable asshole. When he was sober, he was a decent enough appearing guy, who seemed like he was capable of real change. I fell for it, and to this day still maintain a relationship with him, on entirely my terms, but I’m secretly hoping he has in fact changed. That he is capable of real remorse. We won’t know till we know, but maybe.