by Wayne Coffey
Hey, A.V., you got any quarters? I’d say.
Here you go, Robert, he’d say, and give me a stack of coins.
Off I’d go to video heaven, to race make-believe cars and shoot make-believe guns or blow up make-believe planets.
My mother spent a lot of time at Joe’s, and at Amber III, another Nashville tavern bar she played for. The team would gather at one bar or another after games. Nobody wanted to leave, least of all my mother, who her teammates described as the life of the party.
I got very good at Pac-Man.
Miller Lite was my mother’s beverage of choice. It surprised me how thirsty she would get from playing softball. A.V. kept filling up the pitchers of Miller Lite, and my mom and her teammates kept pouring them into glasses. I lost count how many times this went on. My mother acted silly after a while—a little loopy—and then we’d drive home in the Vega or the beat-up Impala with an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts.
Joe’s Village Inn was fine at the beginning, but as much as I liked playing Pac-Man and getting the infusion of quarters from A.V., I knew it was a place Jane and I didn’t belong. Of course we didn’t belong there. Joe’s was a bar and we were little kids.
Even at Joe’s, though, my mom was always loving and nurturing. The safest place in the world was being in her lap or her arms, and they were always open. Always. She gave so much comfort, so much kindness. On the sofa at home, she would lie on her side and bend her legs at the knee behind her, and I would hop in the little cubbyhole between her heels and her rear end. It was the best spot on earth to watch television.
We’d spend hours cuddled up that way during the week, but slowly the Miller Lites began to intrude. The empties would pile up fast in the garbage. Sometimes my mom would fall asleep as soon as she got home. She was still loving, just not so available. She did her best to keep up with my teachers to see how I was doing in school, but she wasn’t much for helping with homework or getting to games or activities. She was a single mom who worked hard and was beginning to drink hard. With my dad already gone from the house by the time I was in kindergarten, I learned to be by myself, and to seek diversions. I was good at that. I loved Luke Skywalker, because he was brave and ventured out in the world even though he didn’t have a mother or father. I loved how Luke was his own person, and how boldly he lived. I even named my dog, a German shepherd/golden Lab mix, after him. The canine Luke and I spent a lot of time lying down in the front yard, with my head on his belly, in our own little world. If I wasn’t there, I was with Lowell Dillon, my best pal. He lived right across from us when we moved to our little house on Timmons Street. Lowell and I were constantly playing football or war, the Cold War still enough in play that the object was always to get the Commies.
I made sure to be busy, because it was always better to be busy. I’d eat Cap’n Crunch and watch the Braves on TBS and try to imitate Dale Murphy’s stance, going into a deep crouch and wagging the bat back and forth, just like the Braves’ center fielder. I’d retreat to my room and play with baseball cards or cut out photos from sports magazines and tape them to the wall. This was my gallery of heroes, my own Wall of Fame. I liked cutting up those photos. I liked the safety of my room.
MY FAVORITE TIME of year was Christmas. The whole family would gather at the home of my grandparents, MeeMaw and Granddaddy, in the Green Hills section of Nashville. It had a big yard and sat at the crest of a hill, and we’d go sledding down it if we were lucky enough to get snow. It was so much fun, being around my aunts and uncles and cousins. I would get my bundle of presents and take it to a little alcove area in the corner of the living room, and while all the other kids were ripping into their stuff, I would sit back and wait. And wait. I’d open one. Then I’d wait a little more and open another one. When everybody else was tapped out of presents, I’d still have a pile of unopened ones.
I liked having the discipline to hold off. I liked having so much to look forward to.
The only trouble was, you just didn’t know what to expect from Granddaddy.
Granddaddy was the first knuckleball pitcher in the family. He fiddled around with it as a kid and got the hang of it, and got so good at it that he once struck out sixteen batters in a six-inning game. He showed me a newspaper clipping to prove it. He probably would’ve kept up with his knuckleball after his school days, but he got into a fight when some guy insulted MeeMaw, decking the guy but busting up the knuckles of his right hand in the process.
Most everybody in the family agreed that Granddaddy was like two different people. He loved to cook breakfast and dance around the kitchen with his apron on. He’d make me poached eggs and crispy bacon and he’d always keep fudge graham cookies in the refrigerator for me. He was the most organized person I ever met. He put adhesive-tape labels and rubber bands on everything. He had a can of King Leo peppermints that had PEPPERMINTS in big letters right on the packaging. He taped a piece of adhesive over it anyway, writing PEPPERMINTS in his own hand.
Granddaddy was a big drinker in those days. A whisky drinker. MeeMaw would join him starting around five o’clock in the afternoon. Things were okay for awhile, but when Granddaddy was on his second or third glass, something happened. He’d get ornery and angry and everybody would get on edge. He’d start yelling at MeeMaw and could be real hard on the seven kids, my mom and her twin sister, Lynn, being two of them. When he was deep into the bottle and really angry, Granddaddy would sometimes holler for hours on end and make my mom and her siblings sleep under the bed.
If the kids ever tried to protect their mom, things would escalate in a hurry. My aunt fired a football right at Granddaddy’s glasses one time, breaking them in two. I didn’t see that fight, but I sure did see the one on Christmas when I was nine years old.
Granddaddy had his whisky in hand and he was really getting worked up about something, getting on MeeMaw and his kids. My uncle Ricky, the youngest of the seven, had seen this too many times before. Uncle Ricky was one of my heroes, maybe the best athlete in the family, an uber-competitive guy who was a five-foot-nine-inch All-American basketball player at David Lipscomb University and one of the hardest-hitting 150-pound safeties in the annals of Nashville prep football. If you were playing a game or going into battle, Ricky Bowers was the guy you wanted on your side. And the guy you least wanted to see on the other side.
Now Uncle Ricky had reached his limit.
He and Granddaddy were face-to-face in the kitchen. Uncle Ricky’s face looked hot and red, his jaw set. Granddaddy wasn’t but a few feet away, wobbly and defiant. I was peering around a swinging door between the kitchen and the den, having come upon the scene by accident. Granddaddy would always take a ruler and pencil and carefully measure the height of his grandchildren and put a line with a name and date next to it right in this same doorway.
Daddy, knock it off, Uncle Ricky said. This is no way to act on Christmas Day.
The kitchen was completely silent for a minute. Granddaddy glared at his son.
You don’t tell me what I can or can’t say in my house, Granddaddy said. Who are you to tell me how to act?
If you weren’t being out of line, then I wouldn’t. But you’ve been drinking and you’re mistreating people, and I’m sick of it, Uncle Ricky said. I am really sick of it.
Granddaddy cussed at him and Uncle Ricky cussed back, and then it was on, Uncle Ricky slapping Granddaddy hard across the face, knocking him back against the oven, down to the floor, and sending his glasses twirling off his face like a helicopter blade.
I couldn’t bear to look anymore. These were two of the people I loved the most in the whole world. I hurried back to the couch in the den. I heard loud noises and hollering and lots of commotion. I didn’t want to know anything about it. I didn’t want to be there at all.
After my uncle Ricky and Granddaddy had their Christmas Day scuffle, my mom and sister and I went back home to Timmons Street. Nobody said much. It was the worst Christmas of my life. I walked around the neighborhood and looked at t
he twinkling Christmas lights and the neon Santas and the Three Wisemen at the crèche, awaiting the arrival of baby Jesus. I had nothing to look forward to, nothing at all.
I didn’t know what went on in other families. I didn’t know what normal was. I just knew what I saw that day made me scared of my family and scared of who I was. I had so many questions.
Would Granddaddy and Uncle Ricky hate each other from now on? What would happen the next time we got together? Would I be safe?
I made a promise to myself then and there:
I would never drink alcohol. I would never touch the stuff. All it does is cause problems. I’ve seen it at Joe’s Village Inn and the Amber III and now I’ve seen it at Granddaddy and MeeMaw’s house. I’ve seen people slurring and stumbling and smacking each other, and seen good, gentle people morph into monsters.
And for what? A buzz? A short-term escape from long-term pain? A way to medicate unpleasant feelings?
As I went to sleep on Christmas night, all I could think of was Granddaddy’s glasses helicoptering off his face and Uncle Ricky standing over him, a scene that was now seared on my brain. It made me so sad to think about. The only thing that made me sadder was that I couldn’t figure out a way to stop it.
CHAPTER TWO
SUMMER OF ’83
It is a hot night in the middle of a hot summer, the air as sticky as cotton candy. It is July 1983. I am eight years old, approaching nine. I’m begging every relative I can think of to take me to see Return of the Jedi on the big screen. I’m heading into fourth grade. I’ve spent the whole summer doing summer things: going swimming. Staying up past my bedtime. Losing baseball games.
I am on a baseball team that stinks so bad we make the Bad News Bears look good. The team is the Twins and we play in the Lipscomb–Green Hills Little League. We’re bad at hitting and even worse at fielding. If we lose by ten runs instead of fifteen, it is a moral victory; and if we lose by five, we want to go for pizza. I leave the field in tears most of the time. My season with the Twins teaches me how much I loathe losing.
The Twins are their usual hapless selves one Saturday, and when I get back home my mother tells me she is going out that night and is leaving my sister and me with a babysitter.
Which one? I ask.
It’s somebody new. I think she just started babysitting, but she’s supposed to be very nice, my mother says.
We drive over to a condominium and my mother introduces me to the new sitter. She is thirteen years old, a tall girl with an athletic physique and fair skin and long brown hair. You never know what you are going to get with babysitters, but she does seem nice. I’ve actually met her before, but this is the first time she is sitting for me. My mother goes over the basics—bath, bedtime routine, and the rest—and lets her know what time she’ll be back.
The babysitter and I are alone in the foyer, getting reacquainted.
How old are you now? she asks.
Eight, I reply.
What school do you go to?
Glencliff Elementary.
Oh, I know that school. I have some friends who have gone there.
The condo has a den with a television and stereo equipment and toys. She puts on some country music. I find a big, bulbous set of headphones and put them on, even though they dwarf my skinny face, and bop around the room to the strums of “Elvira” by the Oak Ridge Boys. Twenty minutes, a half hour, I’m not sure how long we listen to music. I take off the headphones and sit down on the sofa to watch TV. I check the listings. I feel like watching a cartoon, maybe The Jetsons, something like that.
I feel like laughing.
Why don’t we go upstairs? the girl tells me. I like it in the den, but okay, she’s the babysitter. She’s in charge. She leads me by the hand. Her grip is firm, as if she were a mother taking her child to a private place for disciplining. It feels a little bit strange. The staircase is dark and leads to a narrow hallway, with soft orange-brown shag carpeting underfoot. She takes me into a bedroom with a four-poster bed and bunch of pillows and stuffed animals scattered around on top of it.
The bedroom is pink and frilly. Not a Larry Bird photo in sight. What are we doing here? Did she bring me up here to play hide-and-seek or something? I think.
She is wearing a white cotton outfit, a top and shorts with little pink flowers. I don’t know what I am wearing.
The whole thing is getting stranger and stranger, the way she’s leading me around. No babysitter I’ve ever been watched by has ever acted like this. I wish we were back in the den, watching cartoons. I wish I still had the headphones on.
Downstairs in the living room, the babysitter’s mother and my mom and a group of friends are having drinks and talking before they go out. I can hear laughter and the clinking of glasses through a heating vent in the floor. The grown-ups are supposed to go out for the evening, but they haven’t left yet. They seem to be having a good time.
The babysitter chucks the pillows and stuffed animals out of the way on the four-poster bed. She peels back the covers. Now she’s acting as if she’s in a big hurry. She looks straight at me and says, Get in the bed.
It’s not even close to bedtime yet. I don’t know why I have to get in bed, but I do as she says.
Take off your top, she says.
She speaks with whispered urgency, different than the way she spoke in the den. Her voice is hard and almost robotic. There are no niceties, no explanations, about as much warmth as an ice pack. I am confused and afraid.
I am trembling.
What is happening? Why is she asking me to take off my top? I start to sweat. She tells me to take off my shorts. Everything is going so fast. She tells me to take off her top and shorts, and I watch them fall on the floor, pink flowers on the shag carpet. Her skin feels like porcelain but touching it isn’t pleasurable.
Touching it is terrifying.
Now the orders start coming faster, in the same robotic cadence. I hear more clinking through the vent and pray with all my might that somebody will come upstairs and save me from this girl. That somebody will do something.
I think about running away or saying no. I think about yelling “Help!” into the vent. I do nothing except follow her orders of how and where to touch her.
Sweat is coming out of my every pore now. I pray for this to stop, for me to be anywhere in the world but on this four-poster bed with this girl. Beneath the covers she presses herself into my face. The odor is overpowering, assaulting my nasal passages.
Finally, she is done with me. She tells me to go to the room where I’m supposed to sleep.
I feel discarded, like a piece of trash. She acts as though she is mad at me, as if I hadn’t followed her orders properly. I lie on a bed by myself wondering if what just happened is real. I am still trembling, still sweating.
I feel paralyzed, my limbs leaden.
The babysitter has her way with me four or five more times that summer, and into the fall, and each time feels more wicked than the time before. The venues shift to the bathtub and other places. I try to cover my private parts with bubble bath but that doesn’t work. With each encounter, my goal was simply to get it over with as quickly as possible. I couldn’t control what was happening, but I figured I could control the duration.
Every time that I know I’m going back over there, the sweat starts to come back. My mouth gets dry. I sit in the front seat of the car, next to my mother, anxiety surging in me like a hot spring. I don’t know if my mother notices. I never tell her why I am so afraid. I never tell anyone until I am thirty-one years old.
I just keep my terrible secret, keep it all inside, the details of what went on beneath the hot, sticky sheets of a Tennessee summer, of the orders and the odor and the hurt of a little boy who is scared and ashamed and believes he has done something terribly wrong, but doesn’t know what that is.
I TRY TO jam the memory of what happened on the second floor of the condo that summer as far back in my brain as it will go. I try not to think about what will h
appen if a grown-up finds out about it or if someone confronts me about what went on. I become good at compartmentalizing things, boxing them away into secret places forever.
Much better that they stay boxed away forever. Things are safe in boxes.
Weeks pass. I start fourth grade and like my teacher, Mr. Hazen. We read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and I think about what it would be like to go down the Mississippi River. The more time that goes by, the more comfortable I am with the idea that my boxes are in a place where nobody can get at them.
In the waning days of September, my mother, sister, and I drive into the country to visit with family, as we often do. It’s a few hours outside of Nashville and a completely different world, a place with farms and barns and one-room schoolhouses, the kind of place where you don’t make a playdate; you just go out and play. I am out in the yard, throwing a tennis ball off a roof behind a dilapidated garage, an area with a little knoll and a tomato garden. A kid from the neighborhood is there. I’ve seen him before but don’t know his name. He’s sixteen or seventeen years old, tall and wiry. He lives somewhere nearby. He doesn’t talk much. He seems to be interested in my game with the tennis ball. He walks closer and I’m thinkinghe wants a turn, tossing the ball on the roof, seeing if he can catch it.
Maybe we can make a contest out of it and see who gets the most catches, I think.
I turn around and see him unzipping his pants.
No.
I don’t know what he’s doing but that’s my first thought.
No.
I start to run but he grabs me. You ain’t going anywhere, kid, he says. I am back on the bed with the babysitter, except this time there is physical force involved.
A lot of force.
I struggle to get away, but it is no contest. He is rough and strong, and he forces himself upon me, overpowers me. This time there are no words, no vents or clinking glasses. There is just submission and so much sadness. I can’t do anything. I close my eyes and wait for it to be over. When people ask me how I got the scratches and bruises on my face and lip, I have a ready answer.
