by Poppet
Steve weighs me every Monday and even I’m surprised by how fast I’m bulking up and growing tall. It’s like my body was just waiting for the optimum situation before reaching full potential. By the time I go home I’ll be ready to face my nemesis. Father, dear father. I’m now 6 ft 2, just turned 17, and weigh a magnificent 211 pounds. I didn’t think it was possible to get such huge muscles so fast, but the protein high diet I’m on seems to foster might. This is my final year of school, so if I go home I have to be mean enough to keep Adam off my ass cos there’s no way that waste of air is going to rob me of a medical degree.
It took me awhile to decide what I wanted to do after graduation, yet the more I thought about it the more the answer was obvious. If I’d had medical knowledge I might’ve been able to help Amy. She died because I was too small and ignorant to save her, and too weak to protect her.
For months I’ve been watching Reg Park and his bodybuilding regimes, now there’s Joe Weider and Arnold Schwarzenegger on the scene. I’ve seen the potential I can reach if I train my body as hard as I train my mind. I’m never going to be weak again.
It took me three nights of sleeping in Steve’s fight club before I could define why I like the place. The smell is of strain and stress, sweat and pain. I thought maybe it was the familiar aroma of blood that called to me, after all it’s a familiar face in a world of shadows, but no, this club doesn’t smell of agony. The scent that made it feel like home, that called to my mind and soul like a religious experience, was a subtle ingredient. It’s not pain, it’s power. The place smells of power.
Power is muscle, skill, speed, rewarding the warrior with money and freedom, it enables, it untethers the victim from the ties throttling his hungry heart. Power is knowledge to murder, maim, or simply punch unconscious. Power is knowing how to build each muscle group, understanding the benefit of fitness and agility, comprehending that contact sports are also a means to a very powerful end. This is a place of power. It’s my church. It’s a place of sanctuary and peace, the boxing club is my monastery.
The first time Jack punched me I didn’t even slow down. He rained down on me with blow after blow, but what these peers can’t know is that being woken with a punch to the face is my normal. I’ve a lifetime of conditioning behind me and it’s made me formidable. I’m the kid who keeps on coming harder and faster, no matter how hard you hit me.
Bizarrely I welcomed the sparring, getting a thrill as my speed increased, ducking and weaving out of reach, seeing a punch before it was even communicated to the arm. It’s like I can read my opponent’s next move before they make it, and it’s made me lethal.
Again, I have my father to thank for raising me with paranoia. I look for the slightest feint of movement, the shift on an eye, of weight barely moving to the other foot, of muscle tension, reading the entire organism as one cohesive unit rather than moving parts, which is why I see the next move before my opponent even knows they’re about to make it. In forty years they’ll call my condition PTSD.
They’ll call it post traumatic stress disorder, and I’ll call it paranoid tension sensing disease. No one will ever know what it’s like to be raised in abject violence, with hatred as your daily bread. Parents call it love, but it’s not love, it’s lunacy, it’s psychosomatic.
I’m looking back, telling you this tale of mine as a sixty year old man, and the mental illness exhibited by my father reached a bittersweet fruition on my graduation day.
June 1973
Graduation:
It’s the second best day of my life so far, graduating as valedictorian. I didn’t tell Adam shit. He doesn’t know a darn thing about my life now. I stop by the house once a month just to see if he still lives there, to see if he’s kicked the bucket yet.
I should be so fucking lucky.
The bastard is like a devil. He’s always high and drunk, stinks like a sewer, his teeth rotting, his hair thin, his skin withered and covered in zits, yet he continues to survive on zero nutrition and paltry hygiene. Logic tells me the human body cannot possibly sustain such ongoing abuse, yet the dude still attacks me when I walk in the door, swearing at me, spitting and wanting to fight.
And that’s the kicker. Now that I can fight and am strong enough to take on my old man, now my conscience won’t let me. I know I’m too powerful, I know I’ll kill him with one punch.
Now that karma can finally collect I can’t find the motivation to put that man in a casket. I’m not willing to stoop to his level if it’s not a life and death situation. It’s the last resort, the final frontier, and I loathe him so much I don’t ever want to be like him. He killed Amy, and to this day I still don’t know if she was my mother. Did he prevent me from calling her mom because he knew the truth? Was she just another transient fuck on his way to LSD nirvana?
While the country was preaching free love and growing their hair I was living in my own Vietcong battle. My home was a war zone, father against son, father against‘wife’. She might not have been my mother, but she’s the only mother I know. That makes her mom.
I’m thinking of her as I cross the platform, shaking the headmaster’s hand, turning and smiling to my peers as I accept the highest honor of the year, when I see him.
How the hell did he know? And what the fuck is he doing here?
Steve is here, over there at the edge of aisle two, Mrs Rizzo on his arm. Marie Rizzo has to be the best cook in all of Idaho. I want to adopt her and make her my pseudo-mom, or neo-mom, or whatever you call a mother who isn’t your mother. She’s patched me up after fights more often than Steve has.
I like the fight, I love the numb of a decent blow, the way it dulls your nerve endings. The more you fight the higher your pain threshold, and I’m becoming the maniac who rushes to receive the first blows from a fresh opponent, then I feel nothing at all. Then I slaughter them and walk away with the money.
The Rizzo family take half and that’s okay by me. They’ve given me a fight club roof over my head, they’ve given me power, and they’ve given me the peace and solitude to get the best grades of my school career.
Adam stands, clapping furiously, pointing to me and saying loudly, “That’s my son.”
Wait. What?
Now he’s proud of me?
Seriously?
Let me tell you something about parenting. A parent can shout that they hate you and it won’t hurt, but when they grip your shirt tight enough to throttle you and hold you against the wall, lifting you off your feet so you can’t breathe, dangling by their nefarious mercy, then lean to whisper darkly, “I hate you,” that shit’s real. When they whisper it gutturally to you you’ll believe it heart and soul, even more so when you’re facing your mortality when dark spots splinter your vision because your father is throttling you and fighting you like you’re a grown man.
You’ll feel it in your bowels like they took molten metal and made you drink it. It destroys, it annihilates. I learned to hate myself then. No one loved me, not even my own flesh and blood. I thought it was because he was incapable of love, so then what the hell is this abomination pissing on my parade?
He’s cleaned up, looking respectable, making a fool of me.
My smile falters and I have the urgent desire to flee.
Adam being here can’t be good. Someone left the main door to hell open and the worst of it is here, now. The devil came out to play in public. Nodding respectfully to Mister Brenton I don’t hear his words, my mind is racing too fast, my heart is palpitating, the panic attack descending on me so fast I just gotta escape. Striding on the path to exit the podium and platform, clutching my fragile pride on a piece of paper, the one thing that proves I’m worthy of respect and maybe even love, striving to be the best at everything hoping someone will see my worth, my mind fogs when he starts shoving to me, making a spectacle.
“Christopher! Come hug your Pa!”
Like a feral in a cage I look at him, at the school hall packed with parents and students, and for appearance sake I have to
willingly go to the one person on this earth who wanted me dead before I could even reach a light switch.
If I don’t, people will ask questions I don’t want to answer. I’ve worked fucking hard to hide the truth of my home life from all the willingly deaf, dumb and blind teaching faculty.
These upstanding members of staff never once questioned my lack of attendance, my frequent‘illnesses’, how I came to have so many bruises for a kid with no friends to scuffle with, who didn’t participate unless it was mandatory. The guidance counselor was too busy rutting with the PT teacher to give a shit, and now like a fish on a hook I have to leave my water where I have freedom of movement, skill and agility, and go where my gills seize and I can’t breathe.
My palms are sweating, everyone is staring, and like a wound up automaton I move toward the liar pretending we’re a happy family and he’s‘proud’.
He closes in, slapping my back, wrapping his arm around my neck and pulling me in, pulling me down to his level, hissing, “Smile, boy. Or I’ll tell them how you killed your mother. They’ll strip that graduation honor from you so fast. Did you ever tell them you were just a boy when you murdered your mother? Should I go up on that stage and tell them how you ruined our home, treated me like shit, and then abandoned me?”
I’m trembling, the age old conditioning pulling the hood of fear over my face, shoving me back in the bottom of the closet where I pressed my nose to the crack to breathe.
I’m seventeen, he still owns me for another six months of my shitty life. Like iron shackles the prison clicks into place, here in broad daylight, in public, forcing me to be meek, forcing me to play along. He still has all the power.
We pose together for the yearbook. He takes my congratulations as if he earned them, not me. He’s wearing my laurels of hard work and pain as if they were his sacrifices, successfully feigning respectability and pedigree.
Steve and Marie approach, and I can’t face them. My voice is lodged in my anus like a wine stopper. This bastard still holding onto me too tight, his grip threatening while appearing to others as congenial and a gesture of parental pride, he once did that to me. He fucked me and I wouldn’t stop bleeding, I had dysentery from our unsanitary living conditions, so he pulled the wine stopper out of the bottle and shoved it in my ass, the notches that get bigger as it reaches the top, it made me scream even more.
He forced me to wear that wine stopper for an entire week. By then I had severe constipation, and stomach cramps which were utterly debilitating. The space program has taken on a life of its own, and it makes me yearn for that kind of escape. I just wanna get on a shuttle and leave this godforsaken planet.
“Congratulations, you did it,” smiles Steve, reaching out his hand to shake mine, man to man, treated with respect, like an equal.
Men my age are dying right now in Vietnam, fighting for our flag, for me, yet my father cannot treat me like Steve does, can’t talk to me like a human, has to treat me like his victim and bitch right here, in my school, the place he’s not once set foot in, the one place I thought I’d be safe from him.
Adam refuses to release me, gripping tighter, fingers biting through my gown, but this time I resist, forcing my restrained arm out of his hold so I can shake Steve’s hand. “Thank you.”
Marie steps up to tiptoes, putting an affectionate kiss on my cheek. “We’re so proud.”
“Sorry, I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” Steve says to Adam, offering the asshole his hand to shake.
“Adam Ward, a pleasure,” says‘dad’, pumping Steve’s hand, putting on the sane-happy face. “I’m Christopher’s father.”
It happens so fast that I almost miss it. Steve’s smile becomes a grimace and he retrieves his hand, wiping his palm on his trousers. “I’ve been hoping we’d run into one another someday.”
“How do you know Christopher?” asks Adam, and I covertly shake my head to Steve. The last thing I need is for Adam to know that I earn money fighting, that I can fight at all. I need the element of surprise on my side.
Steve, thank god, notices. “He part times for me. Cleaning up the joint.”
Adam looks at me with his stiff smile, unable to hide the blackening teeth even if his suit is new, “Oh? How kind of you. There’s no need. My son doesn’t need to be anyone’s cleaning boy.”
Steve has his arm around Marie now, non-verbally communicating with his hold that he needs her to keep quiet. She opened her mouth to put‘dad’ straight, when Steve speaks over her, “He’s a good kid. You must be proud.”
“Oh yes,” nods Adam.,“he gets his brains from his dad.”
Then he laughs, indulgently, and I look helplessly to Steve, needing him to go, to trust me, to not ask, not now. Adam’s eyes have hardened, the rage simmering beneath the surface is ready to rain agony on me, it’s gonna get ugly real fucking fast the second he has me alone. But to any outsider looking he’s still the proud dad, his smile convincing if you don’t know the‘look’ of impending retribution.
He had to take this day from me. He had to ruin it.
“Right, well … we’ll leave you to it,” smiles Steve, his focus darting to me, silently interrogating.
But I just blank him, faking my own smile. “Thanks for coming today. It means the world to me.”
The second Marie and Steve go, Adam hisses, “You won’t be seeing them again.”
“Yup,” I nod, going along to prevent a scene. “Can we go?”
He doesn’t answer, which is a sure sign he’s furious.
All the way to the doors he replies every time I’m spoken to, answering for me, anyone who says‘good job’, every teacher telling me they’re proud and I’ll go far,‘what do I plan to do now’ etc, Adam answers, like a doting parent who knows my business.
Like them, he doesn’t know shit.
I’m marched away from my sole moment of academic glory to a car he got from god knows where. He probably hot-wired it and stole it to be here, to put on the‘face’. I doubt he can even afford the forty cents per gallon to fill up the tank on this Buick Wildcat. I have none of my supplies with me. No clothes, no money, nothing.
The ride home is void silent. He doesn’t acknowledge me, he doesn’t speak, he doesn’t even turn on the radio.
With the interminable silence the tension ratchets tighter and tighter, until I’m queasy with apprehension. In my hand I’m still holding my graduation scroll, I haven’t even had the chance to open it, and underneath my robe I’m wearing a new gym t-shirt and jeans.
I’m dreading his reaction to seeing my hard earned threads. I made an effort for today. I keep my hair short for boxing, opposing the reigning fashion of my peers and age group. The few friends I have belong to Steve’s Fight Club, none of them know where I‘live’. The address labeled‘home’. I have a lot of money saved, Steve keeps it for me in the gym safe. I’ll have to go back to him, I just don’t know how bad this is going to get before I can run again. If Adam has his way he’ll lock me in the basement to prevent me escaping.
I’m his. He owns me. That’s what blood means to him.
That’s what family means to him.
My blood, my sweat, my tears, my misery, my body, my mind, my soul, my spirit, my hopes and dreams, all his.
This silence is breaking my calm, it’s fucking destroying me.
After all the pretended normalcy I held a faint flame of hope to the angels, wishfully hoping his congeniality would continue long enough for him to say‘hi’,‘you did good’, something!
Fuck all.
My father, the empty abyss which sucks the light out of my existence. Siphoning the happy high I had walking onto that stage, accepting my accolades as if he sacrificed to make my achievement possible. I keep my face averted, staring vacantly out the car window, seeing nothing, suffering the trauma of every muscle so strung with tension that I’m wired with cortisol. Essentially I ran away from home eight months ago, now that power is gone.
Fuck! I wish he’d say something!
I don’t know what to expect. He’s giving no sign, no nuance, no forewarning of what will happen to me when we get to 82 Grayfield Road. The place where Amy is buried under the peach tree, in the shallowest grave, without a wake, without a funeral, without any respects paid for all her suffering. Thinking of her corrodes my arteries, galvanizing my strength, preparing me. Mentally I go to a very dark place before a fight. I think of Adam that night. I think of Adam the night after that night.
When he stripped me, beat me, then forced me onto my knees and told me I had to kneel to feel. So I kneeled, afraid and cold and sore. The swelling was so raw it pounded into my eye, it pressed into my spleen, it hurt to breathe, and then he wrapped the belt around my neck and penetrated me.
I couldn’t pull away, I was stuck. On my knees, bent over my rudimentary bed, he thrust into me, tearing tissue and flesh. There’s no way the neighbors didn’t hear that. It was harvest day at the slaughterhouse and I was the one marked for the feast.
Memories flood and drown me, stress sweat pours down my back, trickling from my armpits to my elbows, clustering in my sideburns. Swallowing, my Adam’s apple sticks, the convulsion harsh and uncomfortable. It’s a swallow reflex I haven’t had for months, I’d forgotten I did it when anxious. I hate that term too: Adam’s apple. I want no part of Adam. None!
The car halts and I get out before he’s even killed the engine.
My childhood home is in abject disrepair. The paint’s all but gone, raw rendering open to the elements. The tin roof has rusted away in patches, the front door held shut with an elastic band.
I wait for him to enter first, silently following. What choice do I have?
It’s bright and warm outdoors, but entering the hallway is like falling into a sinkhole. My calm strips to raw bone, gnawing through to get to marrow, the sound of a belt buckle undoing enough to thrust me back to the first time I remember him beating me with it.
