The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes From a Life

by Robert Goolrick

  Every day, every night of that hot summer, there were long discussions about what was to be done and what had happened and how it had happened. We went over it a thousand thousand times. And then we went out to parties to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon.

  I had suggested that he needed to see a psychiatrist, but my mother said we didn’t do things like that, we didn’t air our private affairs in public, even if public meant the confidentiality of a shrink’s office.

  My mother was crying. She cried a lot that summer, a hopeless kind of drizzle that fell from her eyes almost all the time. She and my brother were Discussing the Situation.

  “Just tell me,” she pleaded, because my brother had remained mute about the whole thing, had not bothered to explain or justify his behavior in any way, just thrown around idle threats about becoming a conscientious objector or going to Canada like Jesse Winchester had done, “just tell me how all this began.”

  “I’ll tell you exactly,” said my brother. “It started because you wouldn’t say, ‘Eat your lunch, cowboy.’”

  She stared at him for a long moment, as though he were still eight and standing in his chaps and his vest and his sheriff’s badge and his six-shooters and his hat.

  And then they both began to laugh hysterically. They laughed so hard they cried. They laughed until the sweltering afternoon turned cool and Lyndon Johnson was a cardboard cutout and every eye was blue and my brother’s academic career was relentlessly brilliant and everybody was unremittingly kind. And that was the way we dealt with trauma and pain and sadness in my family. At least, that’s the way we dealt with my brother.

  Such Charming Hands

  On the night of September 6, 1952, I woke up in the moonlit dark of a dead hot night to find that my father was fucking me. It was a month and two days after my fourth birthday.

  I was a handsome little boy, beautiful my mother said. I didn’t look a thing like I look now. I looked hopeful. I looked as though life was riveting with possibility.

  I was in my mother and father’s bed, in a pair of short striped pajamas. I was in my mother and father’s bed because the next day was my aunt’s wedding, and there were houseguests. I had gone to bed in my own bed and, after all the guests had left and the bartender Tiny had cleaned off the bar and washed all the glasses and the drinking had finally stopped for the night, I had been carried into my mother and father’s bed so that one of the houseguests could sleep in mine. My mother and father were always having houseguests, house parties, and it wasn’t a big house, it had five bedrooms but everybody was young and they liked camping out, and my parents were such lovely hosts, so the children were sort of shuffled around: my parents’ bed, a chaise longue in my parents’ room, or army cots set up in corners. Canvas and sticks in corners while the grownups snored in their underwear.

  Two rooms away, my grandfather lay dying. He was wearing striped pajamas, too. His glasses were on the night table next to the bed. I had sat on his lap while he read to me. He was too sick to read now, but he had been kind and good-hearted and distant but good with children.

  It was in one of these army cots I had the first dream I can remember. I don’t remember how old I was, but it was before, it was just before the September night. I must have been three. It was during one of the house parties. I was on a cot in the corner. It was almost dawn.

  I was in a big city, even though I had never been in a city, standing on the top of a tall skyscraper, even though I had never seen a skyscraper. There were three identical buildings, square and tall, arranged around a central space, with one side open to the city, the way Lincoln Center is today. Two of the buildings were navy blue aluminum and one, the one I was standing on the top of, was maroon.

  As I peered down from the great height, as I was looking over the edge at the large square below, the wind blew and I fell off. I was a tiny child. I began to fall faster and faster, the ground rushing at me with terrifying speed. I could see the paving stones. As I got nearer to the ground, I began to slow in my descent, slowing and slowing until I was wafting downward, back and forth like an autumn leaf. When I was about three feet off the ground, a beautiful angel, a rococo angel out of the Bible story books, swooped down and grabbed me in his arms and held me gently like a pietà and flew up and into the sky and through the bright blue until he flew into my own room in the first light and deposited me gently in the cot in which I was sleeping.

  I woke up and I was in the bed where I had started. There were grownups snoring softly in the room. The room smelled like liquor and night sweat. It was getting light out. The birds were beginning to sing.

  Later, I used to dream that I was in a plane crash, before I had ever been in an airplane. The plane crashed into a tall building in a city. Everybody on the plane was killed, in the dream, but I walked away without a scratch. This happened over and over again, but the angel only caught me once.

  When my grandfather died, two months after my aunt’s wedding day, he was still wearing striped pajamas when they carried him, dead on a stretcher, not covered up or anything, just dead, down the stairs and up the walk. I remember how still he looked, how white. He didn’t have his glasses on. I still have the tortoise-shell glasses he wasn’t wearing.

  Actually, at the moment I woke up, my father wasn’t fucking me yet.

  I was lying on my side, my left side. The top of my pajamas was open, perhaps he had opened them, perhaps it was just a hot September night. His thin arms were around me, I could feel his naked chest against my back. His long arms were around me, his thin beautiful hands rubbing up and down my body.

  He had the family hands, his mother’s hands, his sister’s hands, with long, thin fingers, and delicate, thin skin, narrow and beautiful hands. He bit his nails, a habit he simply dropped one day years later, the way people go cold turkey with smoking. I bit my nails, too, as a child. I don’t do it anymore. My father was tickling me, running his beautiful hands over my thin ribs, down into the waistband of my pajamas, his beautiful fingers playing over my penis and my balls as though he were playing arpeggios on the piano, his thin arms around me, and I woke up giggling and squirming. Moonlight was coming through the window, thin and pale.

  His left hand began to play with my left nipple, his thin fingers thrumming across it like strumming a guitar string, his long thumb brushing and brushing until my tiny nipple rose from my chest. His right hand, the beautiful fingers, began to play over my lips. I was laughing softly, twisting in his arms, my head moving from side to side.

  SOMETHING TERRIBLE WILL HAPPEN. I was told that, and I believe it. Terrible things did happen, of course, terrible things later, but worse things are coming.

  THE SLIM FINGERS of his right hand, the flesh soft and smooth, merely a fragrant sheath for the beautiful bones, began to open my mouth, began to play with my tongue, one and then two and then three in my mouth. The tips of his fingers ran over my tongue, ran over my teeth, pulled at my lips to open them farther.

  His left hand strumming, a whispering flutter, across my left nipple, beat, beat, beat, like a hummingbird sipping at a flower, his right hand deeper and deeper in my mouth and then it wasn’t fun anymore, it wasn’t funny.

  WHAT MAKES A CHILD of four realize that something awful is going to happen? Something awful in the dark? I began to know this, began to know it in my body.

  HIS RIGHT HAND WAS DEEP in my mouth, reaching the thin fingers down my throat, and I began to gag. I began to squirm, trying to get out of his grasp, trying not to throw up with his hand down my throat, the round fingers of his soft hand on my windpipe.

  That room. That dark room which I had to enter a thousand times again in later years. I don’t go in there anymore. That room where the worst things that have ever happened to me in my life happened.

  Then there was something poking and prodding at my behind, something thin and stiff and hard. My pajama top open to his hands, my mouth open to his fist, my pajama bottoms pulled down and something poking at me and then he was inside, inside my
body, moving quick as a rabbit inside me, pushing and pushing, tearing my skin, small and quick as a rabbit, and he wouldn’t stop strumming my nipple and his hand moved deeper into my throat and the moonlight was shining off the white door of his closet and I could see the furniture in the room, his clothes thrown any which way over the furniture, and he moved behind me, his hands in front, and he began to moan in my ear.

  Something about my father. When he was sixteen, he was sent to college, a military school still known as the West Point of the South. He was, there’s no other way to say it, pretty. He was delicate and bone-thin and pretty, with soft brown hair and fine features and beautiful hands. His introduction to military life, the hazing, was, as it was for all cadets, brutal and dehumanizing and strident, but he made it through.

  He was an athlete. He was a flyweight boxer, and he got beaten again and again but he kept on at it. He was a runner, and he once had cinders scraped from his knee with a horse currycomb after a fall on the track.

  His years at VMI were some of his happiest memories, before everything, when he was still just a pretty child.

  When he was in the war, he once sent a picture to my mother: my father standing in a combat helmet standing on a beach. On the back he wrote, in his beautiful handwriting, “I don’t remember much about taking this picture; I just remember how badly I wanted a drink.”

  I could smell his hot bourbon breath. I could feel the beard on his cheek, the stubble sharp now in the night. He was whispering to me, calling me his darling maybe, whispering words I don’t remember. My legs were restless as though running and the pain was sudden and startling and excruciating and I couldn’t get away, could not run away from the hand on my nipple or the fingers down my throat or this strange hard thing inside me. My father.

  My father was a handsome man. As a child in the twenties, his blond hair was cut in a kind of pageboy style, as though his mother wished she had had a girl. In photographs, he always looks fine. He has perfect posture. Somewhere in all of this, there is the pleasure of being held by my handsome father, somewhere in all of this there is the moment at which it all began, the sensuality, the desire, even the willingness to hurt myself later, years later, because it was the only sensual experience I had at hand, because I could not bear to imagine being touched with love or affection by another human being anymore, and cutting was a kind of affection. It all began in that dark room with the moonlight, with his hands. Somewhere in the pain there is pleasure, and that is the most awful part, perhaps.

  The moonlight was coming through the window. I could see the door of his closet where he hung his smart clothes, where he hung his uniforms, the raw sweat smell of the woolen cloth, the uniforms that he wore to teach, the smell that never went away, the smell that all the men and all the cadets left behind them when they left a room.

  He had shoes that had belonged to his uncle who was in the legislature, fine old brown leather shoes. He had white bucks he kept immaculate with a solution that came out of a bottle. Sometimes he let me make his bucks white again, cover the grass stains and the scuff marks so they were perfectly white and unmarred in the summer sun. There was an old gun in the closet, although he didn’t hunt, changed the subject to something else when the men talked about ducks or deer. Maybe the gun didn’t even work. It disappeared and we never knew.

  He was inside my body and the pain was enormous and the moon was coming in the room and I was wearing striped summer pajamas and I was gagging because his long thin fingers could go so far down my throat. He held me tighter to him. I could feel the fine brown hair on his chest, his thin legs between mine, forcing them open. He pulled the bottoms of my pajamas down farther so they were around my ankles, and I couldn’t speak or cry out because my mouth was full of his hand and the fun was all gone now, whatever pleasure there had been was killed, all forgotten, and I was afraid and in pain.

  He was thirty-five years old. His hair turned dead white by the time he was forty, beautiful fine white hair. He was born in 1917. When he was four he looked like a girl. He was thin, not just his hands but his whole body, and there was bourbon, sick-smelling liquor on his breath and in my ear and the house was filled with people, people in every bed, people sleeping, and there was nowhere to go and my aunt was getting married the next day and so there had been a party with a lot of drinking and laughing even though my grandfather was dying upstairs and knew it and I couldn’t get away. I was four. He was five-foot-eleven. I barely came as high as his thigh.

  The next time you’re walking down the street, look at a father walking with his tiny son. Just take a look.

  I turned my head, the hot tears on my cheeks, trying to get his hands out of my throat, but my arms were pinned by his arms around me.

  He told me later that he had decided as a child to be like the Spartan boy who let the fox eat out his entrails. Because his father was a drunk. Because, as a teenager, he had to drag him home from saloons, go get him when he had smashed another car. Because he had a miserable childhood, I suppose.

  When I turned my head, I could see my mother, on my father’s other side. She was just coming awake, murmuring in her sleep and opening her eyes, her party makeup still on, her lips black in the moonlight, her nails black, her nightdress transparent in the weak white light. I could see the curve and shape of her body, could see the curve of her breasts as she sat up and held herself up with one arm. She looked.

  She screamed my father’s name, and she raised her free arm straight up to the ceiling and slapped him just once, on the shoulder. She said his name once. And she slapped him once. She slapped him hard, I could hear the smack on his bare skin.

  And he stopped. His fingers stopped moving on my nipple, his fingers came out of my mouth, and I felt the soft suck of him leaving me. He got up and went into the bathroom. My mother just sat there in the moonlight. She sat there staring as I pulled the bottoms of my pajamas up from around my ankles, as I lay shivering in the hot sheets. I didn’t look at her. I turned away. I didn’t cry, I don’t think I was crying anymore. I just turned away and pretended I wasn’t there.

  She didn’t touch me. She turned over and slept.

  My father came back into the room, his boxer shorts baggy and white in the moonlight, and lay down next to me. Between my mother and me. He was asleep immediately. Sometimes, in the night, he would move closer, and his skin would touch my skin without menace, but still I would move away, move away until I couldn’t feel the touch of his skin on mine. The casual, slight, unconscious touch of a man’s skin on a boy’s, the thin arms, the hair on his chest, the thin cotton of his boxer shorts, his waist already going soft, nobody cared in those days, his shoulders as he turned, his hands, slightly grazing my own sweet skin, which was ruined forever.

  TERRIBLE THINGS WILL HAPPEN. Things you can’t talk about. Things that bring death.

  No angel came, like in the dream. No angel came to carry me into my own safe bed.

  MY FATHER TURNED OVER. I could feel his thin, elegant back, the bones of his ribs, his spinal column, like a bird, he was so fine. He was dead to the world. He didn’t know he was touching me. Somehow, the fact that he didn’t know he was touching me made his touching me worse. I have never been able to bear the casual, unknowing touch of a stranger or even a friend.

  Three figures in a bed. Three figures in a white, hot landscape on a night when the party had gone on one drink too long, when all the beds were full and my grandfather was dying in striped pajamas and something was done that could not, that could not, that could not ever be undone.

  My father taught young men English history. He could recite all the kings and queens of England in order. He was a failure; he had never completed his thesis and so was an object of some pity, but he was a good teacher, and the kings and queens thing was a good trick, and he could tell a funny story, drink in hand. He was never the same, either, although I didn’t know it for a long time.

  The next morning there was blood when I went to the bathroom. The next morn
ing there was fear when I thought of any part of my body.

  The next morning there were Bloody Marys and the hearty laughter of young men and women who have had too much to drink the night before. People in those days had drinks in the morning because they thought it was sophisticated and comical to be hungover, like Mary Astor or Katharine Hepburn in the movies. The next morning, dresses and hats were laid out on beds, and Queen Anne’s lace and magnolia leaves and autumn clematis were put in vases on the mantels after breakfast.

  I sat on a sofa in my grandmother’s dining room. It was small and upholstered in beige linen covered with large cabbage roses. Everything in the house was fresh, so fresh and clean for my aunt’s wedding. People were bustling around, people I didn’t know. It was different in those days in the country. You got married in a church and had a reception at the house, with Mrs. Cake Agnor, that’s what she was called, making the cake, and country girls to pass the sandwiches, and black men in white coats to pour the champagne.

  In those days it was simple. It was sweet, and it was a simple and sweetly happy occasion. Just cucumber sandwiches and ladies in hats and short white gloves and a bride who glowed with pride and joy.

  I sat on the linen sofa while the women moved around my house, my grandmother’s house, fixing sandwiches, laying out the tablecloths, and I told her what had happened. I told her everything, the night, the bloody morning, everything. She must have been so distracted. Her husband dying upstairs, her daughter being married and so much to be done, and a four-year-old boy with a distasteful story to tell.

  My mother used to say that when I began to talk I talked so much she turned to me one day when I was four and said, “Do you have any idea how much you bore me?” She used to tell that story all the time.