The Gift of Our Wounds

by Arno Michaelis

  Until one day I took it up a notch, and the principal got involved. I held Timothy’s head to the bus seat with my left hand on his throat, gave him a good slap across the face with my right, and sneered, “Hey, maybe I can slap that snot out of your nose for you, Tim?” Timothy had long since realized that putting up any sort of verbal or physical resistance would fuel the twisted fire that drove me to make his life hell, so, as usual, he responded to my slaps with grim silence, calculating that either the fire would burn itself out or the bus would get to school, ending the situation one way or another. That made me even madder and I influenced other kids to beat him up, too.

  We were all called to the principal’s office. Mrs. McCurdy was letting us have it and the other kids were shaking in their boots, but not me. I told the principal I wasn’t afraid of getting in trouble. And I wasn’t afraid of her, so there was nothing she could do to me that would make any kind of an impact. She was as stunned as my schoolmates were in awe. Apparently my dad was impressed as well. I heard him tell his best friend Roger during one of their marathon drunk-dialing sessions, “Arnie sure has old Shirley McCurdy up a tree!” They had a good chuckle over that.

  It was no laughing matter, though, when the next time I headed to my throne at the back of the bus and the hairy fist of Frank the Bus Driver grabbed me by the collar and yanked me back. “Hold up there, Michaelis!” he said. “You got a new seat assignment.” Frank proceeded to unceremoniously spin me around and plaster my butt into the front seat. “Didn’t yer parents get the memo, kid?” he sneered. “Any more trouble from you and yer walkin’ every day … heh!” That was the end of that, for a little while.

  As strange as it may sound, I liked school, at least at first, because it gave me the chance to be around other children. Our neighborhood was made up of mostly childless couples or empty nesters. Even in places close by where kids lived, the houses were so far apart, with big yards separated by woods, that you wouldn’t necessarily see them. I remember what a happy day it was when Mom announced that our new neighbors had a couple of boys about my age. They were in the process of moving in when I walked over, knocked on the door, and asked, “Hey, are there kids here?” Sure enough, two boys about my age came running. Chris was one year older; Phil, two years older. Their parents were happy to get rid of them while they moved things in, so the three of us went into the woods to play. We had wandered in pretty deep when we discovered the ruins of an old tree fort. The only way up was a rickety tree ladder, which consisted of a few boards nailed to the tree. Being the genius that I was, I convinced Chris that it was a good idea to climb it. Reluctantly, he went up. He was almost at the top when he stepped on a broken board and took a wicked fall. He hit the ground with a sickening thud and broke his arm. His parents, Ellen and Big Phil, blamed me, but good-naturedly. They nicknamed me “Arnohead,” their code name for “Shithead.” I thought it was pretty cool and the name stuck.

  Mom talks about my idiosyncratic personality and how different I was from other youngsters. That’s putting it kindly, I think. For as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a warrior. I learned to read early and I chose stories with warriors both real and fantastical. In elementary school, when other kids were joining Little League, I preferred digging into Greek and Norse mythology. I devoured medieval folklore, tearing through tales about King Arthur laying waste with his magic sword, Excalibur, and Thor, the Nordic God of Thunder, crushing encroaching giants with his slayer hammer, Mjolnir, imagining myself wielding legendary weapons against hosts of foe.

  I don’t know which came first, my fascination with the idea of waging war or the anger that drove it. It’s not like I had much to be mad at back then. I came from a nice, middle-class family and I never went hungry or took a beating. Mom was an artist and Dad was an insurance salesman. Both were Milwaukee natives, but otherwise they were different as night and day, and that made life interesting—for a while anyway.

  Mom came from a broken home and was raised, along with two siblings and two half-siblings, by her mother. They all lived with my grandma in Milwaukee. As the firstborn, and a bit spoiled, she was queen of the household, and she never let anyone forget it. She was beautiful, creative, and brilliantly artistic—and she had an ego to match; she was an “It girl” before the phrase was ever coined. She met my dad while she was waiting tables at a Milwaukee bar called the Safehouse. (It’s still there, and customers are still required to give a password at the front door to get in. Don’t ask.) The old “opposites attract” rule applied. She was as open and progressive as my father was old school, but she was taken by his sharp intellect and good looks. He liked her confident, sassy manner. She says her decision to marry him was made, first and foremost, because she wanted tall, smart sons. He saw her as the ultimate challenge: the girl he couldn’t let get away.

  Dad hails from a long line of Arnos, all of whom were charismatic, underachieving alcoholics with big intellects. His father, Arno II, had the intelligence and education to become a medical doctor, but he sold medical supplies instead. Dad inherited from my grandfather, as I did from him, what I have come to call the “Arno Curse” for booze, danger, and excitement. From what I can tell, my father’s upbringing was similar to mine. His father could be disapproving and cruel when he was drunk, and his mother made up for it with saintlike behavior and unconditional love for all living things. Talk about confusion!

  I’m not sure how much love entered the equation of my parents’ marriage, and I don’t know how much their precarious relationship affected me—or exactly how much it had to do with me acting out in destructive ways. I’m pretty sure it didn’t help. Thinking about it, though, I wonder if my aggression wasn’t more rooted in boredom than anything I was experiencing at home. Early IQ tests suggested that I was a genius, and those standard fill-in-the-ovals-with-a-#2-pencil exercises corroborated it. Schoolwork was less than challenging. I was borrowing my parents’ Time magazines in the first grade, so reading a book in the fourth grade about the friendship between a pig and a spider didn’t do it for me. Instead of paying attention in class, I drew battle scenes from medieval times and world wars and daydreamed about slaying dragons.

  By the sixth grade, I had graduated from hard to handle to out of control. I ganged up with like-minded ruffians and terrorized the students and staff at Lake Shore Middle School. It was there that I started my first “radical group”: the Kids Liberation Army, a takeoff of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the self-styled left-wing revolutionary group that had kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst a few years prior. I really had no idea what the SLA was all about, or what they did, but “Liberation Army” sure sounded cool. Our mission was to free ourselves from teacher oppression. “Oppression” as in the teachers wouldn’t let us run amok and victimize all the other kids. We littered the school with a series of drawings I did of teachers being beheaded. Needless to say, that didn’t go over well. My punishment was a week’s suspension in the principal’s office, during which time my comrades stole the hubcaps off a Mercedes-Benz parked at the dentist’s office next door and brought them to the playground in a show of solidarity. The message was clear: we were not to be fucked with.

  Mom chalked my antics up to growing pains, but I was seething inside. Things at home were unraveling by then. My mother was constantly stressed out. Between her art and our need for a roof over our heads and food on the table, she worked all the time. Dad sold just enough insurance to coast on the premiums. He knew the insurance business like few others, and his clients loved him, but he didn’t work up to his potential by any stretch. My father was (and is) a great guy. He was well liked, not just because he was the life of the party but because he was a good friend who cared about the people in his life. Still, there were times during my childhood when things he did while he was drinking scarred me, as I imagine he was scarred by Arno II, who was likely scarred by Arno I, and so on. Sometimes he’d come home after last call and hassle my sleeping mother to get up. The memory of being startled awake
by the sound of Mom screaming at him to leave her alone and go to bed still haunts me.

  Mom did her best to try to insulate my brother and me from the craziness. She would do cool things, like announce on a sunny spring morning that we were all playing hooky and going to ride roller coasters at the amusement park. For a few hours, the middle-of-the-night theater would be forgotten and we could pretend to be a normal family again.

  If I had to sum up my relationship with my father back then, there are three directions I could take. My brother says he was the best dad anyone could ask for. Mom says he was supercritical when he drank, and I could never do anything right in his eyes. I’m going to take the middle road here and say that all of this is true, but we had fun. It wasn’t the greatest relationship, but it wasn’t the worst by any stretch.

  My journey since then has taught me that those early memories must be met with compassion, and not just for me but for my dad, who was shaped by similar childhood trauma, as I suppose my grandpa also was. No matter what, I always knew my dad loved me, and today he is one of my biggest supporters. I’ve only heard him cry twice in my life: once when his beloved Corgi, Henry, died; the other when he told me how proud he is of the work I do. As we both have grown older and wiser, my relationship with my dad has turned into one of the most rewarding of my life.

  I certainly can’t say that my parents did anything to lead me into the life of extremism I chose as a teenager. I did that all myself. Yeah, there were issues at home. Their constant fighting certainly fueled my angst and added to my growing dissatisfaction with life. But our dysfunction paled in comparison to the billions of people on the planet with real problems who didn’t turn out fucked up like me.

  I was thirteen years old when I started my first gang. I did a lot of the things other boys my age did. I climbed trees and ran in the woods and swam and played tackle football to blow off steam—but none of it was stimulating enough to quiet my hyperactive brain. I thrived on chaos and destruction, hence my foray into wilding out. I recruited a bunch of kids from the block and we menaced the neighborhood like a pack of vicious dogs. Our headquarters was a tree fort we militarized with trenches and turrets. After dark, when most kids were doing homework, we went on raiding missions, desecrating other kids’ tree forts, kicking off car mirrors (the more expensive the car, the better), and upending those big blue federal collection boxes and burning the mail inside (which, by the way, is a federal offense).

  I was big for my age (I still am) with a foul mouth and an ominous stare, and after a while even adults began to steer clear of me. Looking back, of course, I understand that my hard shell covered up the insecurity and fear I felt inside. I think maybe somewhere in my subconscious I knew how vulnerable I was, so I terrorized others to be in control.

  For the most part, my reputation as a badass protected me, but not always. I was shaken to the core when, during recess one day in seventh grade, a bunch of jocks jumped me. It was a premeditated attack, and I didn’t see it coming. At the time, I was into breakdancing and Grand Master Flash. My group consisted of a couple of other white guys, a Filipino kid, and the handful of black kids who lived in my town. A kid named Jason had the richest parents of the bunch, and every weekend we’d watch VCR copies of Beat Street and Breakin’ in his rec room and try to teach ourselves breakdancing moves. We got so good that my mom, who loved all kinds of culture expression, took us to a spot on the south side of Milwaukee where a group of kids gave breakdancing lessons behind a dilapidated storefront. She’d pay them twenty bucks and they would teach us complicated backspins and fancy floor moves. The lessons took us to a whole other level and we were really good.

  So one day, my group and I were showing off during recess, practicing our six-step on the school playground when, with all of the teachers watching, the jocks ambushed me. There had to be twenty guys, and they came at me all at once. I was a rough kid, but I couldn’t hold off a group of dudes that big. Some held me down while others beat me up. Then they pulled off my bandanna and cut off my prized rattail with a pair of scissors from the art room. I fought back like a cornered animal and it took some time for them to subdue me, but there were just too many of them.

  When the jocks ran off, I stumbled around in a daze. That’s when I realized my breakdancing homies were still there. They had all watched from the sidelines, and not one had jumped in to help me. Those guys were supposed to be my brothers. We had a promise to stick together, no matter what, and they let me down. I didn’t snap at that point, but I was hurt and disappointed enough to hold a grudge. Not only was my pride badly bruised, but I had been betrayed by the very people I trusted to have my back, and that took my bitterness to another level.

  That was pretty much the end of my breakdancing career. In the best of scenarios, the assault should have taught me empathy for the people I had persecuted over the years. But that’s not what happened. It was a turning point, but I turned in the wrong direction. Suddenly it was “those black guys” who didn’t come to my aid. It was the first time I remember cueing in on someone’s race. Shortly after that, I dropped rap and breakdancing in favor of white friends and punk rock.

  And my simmering anger turned to rage. Soon, Arno the class bully turned into Arno the racist street fighter.

  Pardeep

  My family story begins in the rural village of Dogal, about thirty miles southwest of the glittering city of Patiala in the Punjab region of India. Dogal was a poor farming community, but our family was better off than most of the people there because my grandfather owned twenty-seven acres of farmland and leased most of it to other farmers in the village.

  My father was the seventh of nine children and the only one who didn’t leave home to study in the city. He stayed on the farm with his parents. His siblings became doctors and professors but Dad, a deeply religious man, discovered that he could cultivate his spirituality by working the land, which made him a natural to take over the family operation after my grandfather retired.

  Farming was in his blood. It was hard work, but working hard is one of the fundamental principles of Sikhism. The family grew fields of sugarcane, wheat, cotton, and mustard, depending on the season. Dad worked alongside the farmhands and led by example, working the hardest. The men did the heavy work, tilling the soil, planting the crops, and digging irrigation canals to bring water from the river. The women worked in the fields, harvesting the crops. “Work is worship” is a favorite saying my father used throughout his life.

  My mother was also raised in a farming community, but many hours away from Dogal, in Uttar Pradesh, near the Nepal border. Her family started out with several acres of jungle that her father bought cheap, and they toiled for over two years to make it plantable. Once it was ready, they harvested sugarcane, wheat, and corn and used buffalo to plow the fields. With no irrigation system, getting water to the crops was left to “God’s will.” As the crops and the family flourished, they were able to move from a hay hut to a proper farmhouse built of brick and mortar.

  Mom’s role in the family was helping her mother with the household chores. She was ten years old and expected to cook, clean, and care for her younger siblings in addition to her studies. Whatever spare moments she could steal, she taught herself stitching, sewing, and knitting, and she was skilled enough to make clothes for the family. She got as far as the sixth grade when her mother became sick, and Mom had to leave school to take on more of the responsibilities at home.

  Mom’s was a cloistered world and one in which she lived until her parents arranged for her to marry. She had just turned twenty when she was shown a picture of my father and told that he had been chosen as her future husband. The arrangement was made by a bachola, someone who brought two people together based on the quality of their families. In their case, the bachola was a distant relative on Mom’s side who was also familiar with Dad’s family. By the time Mom knew anything about it, a dowry had been offered and accepted by Dad’s family, and wedding arrangements were in the works. Asking qu
estions would have been to go against custom, so there was no choice for Mom but to go along.

  The wedding was set for December 30 of that year, 1974. My father and his family took the seventeen-hour train ride from Patiala to Uttar Pradesh to formalize the arrangements. A day of pre-wedding festivities followed, beginning with the offering of the ring, a traditional ceremony attended only by the groom and male relatives from both families at which gifts are also exchanged. While the men partied, Mom’s family hosted a bridal ritual called a Sangeet, where the women gathered to sing and dance to traditional folk music and draw henna art, the symbol of a couple’s love, on each other’s hands. The bride and groom saw each other for the first time at their wedding ceremony.

  It was only after my father’s death, during late-night conversations with Mom, that I learned the intimate details of my parents’ early life together and the difficulties they faced coming to America. How could I tell the story of the man I am today without telling their story? I asked questions and Mom was generous with details. I think those talks helped us both: Mom, by sharing some of the most poignant moments of her life, and me, because it made me realize how much she and Dad endured together and how what began as an “arrangement” grew into a partnership based on mutual love and respect.