Dear Father, Dear Son

by Larry Elder

  “Wait ’til your father comes home.”

  He treated infractions like misdemeanors, misdemeanors like felonies, and felonies like capital offenses. He’d go to the dresser, open up the top drawer, and pull out The Belt—a tightly coiled, shiny, brownish-orange “crocodile” belt. I didn’t know if it was real crocodile. Kirk said it was.

  With a short flick, Dad would uncoil it, fold it in half, and crack it.

  “All right, dammit, I’ve had just about enough.”

  Once I said, “Why don’t you wait until you’ve had all of about enough?” Kirk laughed.

  Dad whipped us both extra hard. I never said it again.

  “I’ll whip you until I get tired,” he’d say. Or, “Boy, if you don’t stop cryin’, I’ll give you somethin’ to cry about.”

  When the crying continued, he said, “All right. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stop.”

  I guess it didn’t occur to him that if I could stop crying and put a stop to the whole thing, I would. And that if he’d stop whipping me, I’d stop crying.

  “Oh, so you think you’re grown,” he sometimes said, as he cracked The Belt.

  Sometimes he came home a little earlier than usual. To his chair he went.

  “Where’s the TV Guide?”

  The magazine arrived each week in the mail. By Wednesday or Thursday, it could be anywhere. Dad wanted it right there, on the little stand next to his chair. When he reached for it, he expected to find it. And it damn well better be there.

  “I said, where is the TV Guide?”

  Whatever we were doing, it was now all hands on deck.

  “Dammit, where … is … the … damn … TV Guide?”

  “Here it is!” One of us would say, out of breath, after having retrieved it from beneath a stack of comic books under the bunk beds. “It’s right here, Dad.”

  Disaster averted. As you were.

  Once, Dad pretended to be angry. Dennis and I were arguing, except we were more quiet about it than usual because Dad was in his chair in the living room. But he hit the ceiling.

  “I told you to cut out all that noise!” He got up and walked to the dresser and opened the top drawer. By now, Dennis and I were shaking and crying—and a little bewildered. We weren’t that loud, were we, even for him?

  “C’mon you two,” he said, then closing the drawer without retrieving The Belt.

  “I was just kiddin’.” He laughed and sat back down.

  Our reaction should have made him re-think his whole approach to discipline, and realize that there’s something deeply wrong when a joke causes that kind of sheer panic. But it didn’t.

  I decided to do something about it. The Belt had to go. I told Dennis, and he advised me not to do it.

  “Don’t try and stop me.” He didn’t. That made him a coconspirator and therefore unlikely to tell on me. So far, so good.

  “I’m going to get rid of it,” I said. “And you better not tell.”

  Kirk, under pressure, might fold. So I didn’t bring him in. I waited until Kirk was not home. Mom was in the kitchen. I went into Dad and Mom’s bedroom with a phonebook in either hand. I put them on the floor in front of the dresser, stepped on the books, grabbed a knob in each hand, and pulled. The drawer wouldn’t budge. I pulled harder. The right side of the drawer slowly opened, but the left side barely moved. I pushed the right side back and started over. Pop! I stopped and waited. Had the noise alerted Mom? Now I knew I needed to pull both sides with equal force. Too hard, and the drawer might come out, spilling everything onto the floor. Too soft and it wouldn’t open.

  “Wait ’til your father gets home!” I could just hear Mom’s famous words if I failed.

  Carefully, I tugged again, and tried to evenly pull both sides of the drawer. It balked, but with each tug, the drawer came out a little more. I saw cuff links, tiepins, pens, coins, and a lot of little boxes. But there, in the lower left-hand corner, I saw it. The Belt. I grabbed it up, pushed the drawer shut, picked up the phone books, and left. Mom was still in the kitchen.

  Now where to put it? In front of our house was a big curbside sewer opening. When it rained, dirty water flowed in and drained down, en route to who knows where. Perfect. I threw The Belt down the hole. Dad had been disarmed.

  When Mom punished us, it was almost like being sent to summer camp.

  We’d do something silly and she’d say, “Stop playing with your food. John Lesley knows better than that.”

  When she found strings of bubblegum stuck to the bed sheet, “Dennis, you fell asleep with gum in your mouth. John Lesley knows better than that.”

  “Who’s John Lesley?” I once asked.

  “He’s the village idiot.”

  “What’s a ‘village idiot’?”

  “Never mind. Go polish your shoes.”

  When she really got angry, she’d “whip us.”

  “Go get me a switch.”

  She sent us out in the yard, and told us to break a thin branch from a nearby tree. She waved it around like Zorro.

  “It’s too thin. Bring me another.”

  Outside we’d go, break off a thicker one, and bring it for her approval.

  “This’ll do.”

  Then she whacked us until we cried. It almost never hurt, and we’d wait until she gave us a reasonable amount of whacks before we “cried.” Once we cried, she stopped.

  Dad worked fiendishly hard. He left earlier than anybody’s father on the block and came home later. On Sundays, he came home just a little earlier. Though he never went to church, my mother made us go every week, and she even taught Bible school. But Dad never went. Mom never asked him, and we didn’t want him coming anyway. There was no telling what would set him off on the way there.

  He seemed to resent us for being alive, for having to be fed, housed, and clothed. There was always tension between Mom and Dad, as if a low-grade siren or alarm was constantly going off. And much of it was about “the kids”—what we’d done, what we wanted, and whether they could afford it.

  They never went out, not even to dinner. Even when my brothers and I were little, they never went anywhere together unless we went, too. The last time I saw them go anywhere together—without us—it had something to do with taxes or insurance.

  We never had a party, even a small one, at our house—not even a friend over for the Super Bowl. Her friends never stayed for dinner—lunch, sure, but not dinner. And he had no friends. They stopped sleeping in the same bed so long ago, I can’t recall the decade. And when I went away to college and created a vacant bedroom, they stopped sleeping in the same room.

  Yes, “normal” was hatred and anxiety and fear and dread. Kirk, Dennis, and I never discussed our feelings about Dad. We didn’t have to. I knew how they felt. They knew how I felt. When we were even younger, before a getting a whipping, we had tried running and crying to our mother in the hopes that she’d intervene. That just made him even angrier. So running was out of the question. By running to another room, you just wrote yourself a check for a longer and harder whipping.

  From the time he said, “I’ve had just about enough,” to the time he cracked the belt, you stood and waited. If he was whipping all three of us, he started with Kirk. Though Dad whipped us hard, Kirk did not cry easily. I watched him twist and struggle and snake to avoid the lashes while trying not to cry. Eventually he cracked. Then it was my turn. If you cried “too soon,” he kept going. If you fought the tears, he assumed he wasn’t hitting hard enough. No strategy really worked. Dad just wailed as long as he felt like it, depending upon his mood. Dennis was last, standing, watching, and trembling through two whippings before his turn. It wasn’t exactly like storming the beach at Normandy when everybody ahead of you had been cut down by enemy fire. But to little kids, it was close.

  Not long after I ditched The Belt, Dennis and I got into one of our fights.

  “Stop it,” Mom said.

  “I said, ‘Stop it.’”

  “I’m not going to tell
you again. Stop it.”

  “That’s it. I’m going to tell your father.”

  She did.

  “Dammit, I work and work to keep a roof over your head, food on the table, the lights on, and I come home and have to put up with this!”

  He walked to the dresser, opened the drawer and—nothing. He opened the drawer underneath. I hadn’t thought to look there!

  “Where … is … the … belt?”

  Dennis and I looked at each other.

  “Dammit, where … is … the … belt?”

  Dad closed the drawer and unbuckled the belt he was wearing. Zip! He folded it in half and whipped us. It hurt just as much as the crocodile. I don’t think he ever suspected that one of us would have the cashews to take his belt.

  It wasn’t just whippings. He blew up in different and unpredictable ways.

  “Pick up your stuff,” Kirk told Dennis. “Dad’s home.”

  “Get your stuff, Larry, or you know what’s gonna happen,” Kirk warned me.

  Too late. I picked up my Slinky and most of my other toys. Dennis gathered up his marbles and some parts of his Erector set. But my toy dump truck—the red one I got for Christmas—was right in the middle of the living room, directly in his path.

  Dad came in, walked right toward the truck, and wham! He kicked it like a punter going for a field goal. It smashed against the wall and shattered into big red plastic chunks.

  “What’d I tell you about those damn toys!” he said, as he sat in his chair and opened the paper. “Next time you’ll know better.” He had destroyed a toy that he got me for Christmas because it was in the middle of the room.

  Dad could smile. And sometimes did. When he smiled, he lit up like a big neon sign. He had a big, deep southern laugh that came from deep down in his hometown, Athens, Georgia. I could count on two hands the number of times he laughed—I mean really laughed—not the fake one he used when my mother thought something was funny but he didn’t.

  He was a walking volcano, always on the verge of erupting—and on its own schedule. No reason was too trivial. Sometimes he’d explode over something said or something done—the same something that he completely ignored at another time.

  Take the time we were in the car and Dennis said he needed to use the bathroom.

  “Boy, didn’t I tell you to empty it out before we left the house? Dammit!” Dad yelled. “Now I have to find a fillin’ station. Why didn’t you listen?!”

  The rubber ball Dad bought Kirk rolled into the sewer. Kirk said nothing about it.

  “Where’s that ball I gave you?” Dad asked three days later. “Why’d you stopped playin’ with it?”

  Kirk told him what happened, and Dad screamed at him.

  “You boys can’t keep nothin’!’”

  For crying out loud. All balls get lost, don’t they? That’s what balls do. They get lost. This wasn’t the first time one of us lost a ball. The last time, Dad just shrugged and bought another one.

  “Do you know how much that ball cost, dammit?”

  When I wouldn’t eat my lima beans or the egg yolk or the boiled potato, my mother complained but I was able to excuse myself from the table.

  “Dammit,” Dad sometimes said. “You’re just gonna sit there until you get hungry!”

  One time he made me sit for a couple of hours until I force-swallowed the Brussels sprouts.

  “Boy, do you know how much food costs?!”

  Dad took us to a drive-in movie every few months. We preferred a movie theater where we could sit away from him, and where he couldn’t raise his voice. But the movie The Fly killed the theater outings.

  In the film, a guy became a little fly with a human head.

  “Help me! Help me!” he cried.

  Dennis excused himself to go to the bathroom. Five minutes, ten, twenty—and still no Dennis. Dad went looking for him, and found him shivering on a couch in the corner of the lobby. The movie scared him to death.

  “Goddammit, I work my behind off to pay for us to see a movie and you sit out in the lobby! I thought somebody kidnapped you!”

  We left before the movie ended, and Dad yelled all the way home.

  The Century Drive-In was the first in Los Angeles with a giant, curving “Cinerama” wide screen. The new technology fascinated Dad, but to us it just meant spending several unpleasant hours closed inside a car with a human hand grenade. My brothers and I dreaded the whole ordeal. Our friends loved going to the movies, even to stupid Disney movies chosen by their parents. But with Dad, sooner or later, someone would say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, or do the right thing in the wrong way—and the evening was spoiled. I’d rather have stayed home, but it wasn’t like we got to vote.

  One time, Dad sent Dennis to the snack bar to get popcorn. He made me go with him to make sure Dennis found his way back, because the last time Dennis went alone he didn’t come back for almost forty-five minutes, and then only because Dad sent Kirk to find him. Dad’s yelling and Dennis’s crying spoiled the rest of the movie.

  “Shut up,” Dad said, “or I’ll give you somethin’ to cry about.” So for the next hour-and-a-half, we all sat half-watching The Parent Trap—Dennis trying not to cry, Kirk and me angry at Dad for being so rough on Dennis, and my mother saying nothing. Just once, I wanted her to gently intercede like June Cleaver: “Randy, Dennis didn’t get lost on purpose. Let’s not ruin the evening for everybody.”

  Another time, Dad sent the three of us to get a big pizza with extra cheese.

  “Don’t turn the box upside down,” he warned.

  At the Art Deco–style snack bar, Dennis insisted on carrying the pizza.

  “Remember what Dad said,” Kirk reminded him.

  “I’m not stupid.”

  So back to the car we went. I carried the drinks, Kirk the popcorn, and Dennis the pizza—which he promptly turned upside down. When Dad tried to open the box, the cheese stretched tightly from the pizza to the top of the box and the top practically snapped back. My mother laughed which, Kirk and I thought, might give us permission to laugh. But we thought better of it. Good move, because Dad went nuts.

  “Dammit, I work all week, and I ask you to do one damn thing right.”

  5

  THE TEMPTATIONS

  Traffic was better now. I looked at my watch. Fifteen minutes more.

  God, his temper. The anger. The unpredictability. So fucking ridiculous. And he needed to know. Whether he was ready or not—he was going to hear it.

  Dad never really knew—or cared—about how working at the restaurant left little time for me to do things with my friends like everybody else did. Friday was a big going out night. Everybody went out, but I had to work the next day and getting up at 4:30 a.m. meant going to bed at 9 p.m.

  When I got home on Saturday, after working all day in the restaurant, I was exhausted and rarely went out.

  “Be thankful you have a job, dammit,” he said. “When I was your age, I had to hustle. You don’t have to.”

  I just wanted one Saturday off.

  The big thing on weekends was the Sportsman Park’s Hunter Hancock Record Hop, a big bash about once every two months sponsored by radio station KGFJ. Because I worked, I never went. But I heard about it in school the next Monday. Friends said over a thousand kids came.

  Just once before I died, I wanted to go. The popular Hunter Hancock was a white man who spun records at a black station. Everybody loved him. And he knew what we liked.

  “All right everybody, let’s go hunting wi-i-i-i-ith Hunter.” And then he played the latest song from Brenton Woods or Little Anthony and the Imperials or Dobie Gray’s hit, “The In Crowd.”

  “What, I’m supposed to cook and serve at the same time?” Dad said, whenever I asked for a Saturday off. “How many hands do you think I have?”

  “Well, like most upper primates—” Or, “Unless you got one or two growing out of someplace I can’t see and would rather not know about, I’d have to say two.” But those responses only
played in my head—I never said those things.

  “Sure, take off, dammit, and how are we goin’ to pay the house note?” he said.

  “If my taking one day off means we lose the house, maybe we’re over-leveraged.” I never said those words, either.

  “Why don’t I just close the place down and work for somebody else?” he said.

  “Well, with your attitude, Dad, I’d pretty much say you’re darn near unemployable.” And, of course, I never said that.

  KGFJ was the “black” station that played R&B music—the Four Tops, The Supremes, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, Marvin Gaye, The Contours, The Impressions, Mel Carter, Gladys Knight and The Pips, Gene Chandler, Hugh Masekela, The 5th Dimension, Mary Wells, The Toys, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, and Jackie Wilson.

  Kirk, at first, listened to KRLA and the other top 40 stations that played Elvis, the Beach Boys, Bobby Vee, Bobby Rydell, Shelley Fabres, and Ricky Nelson. Kirk was a big Elvis fan, the only self-admitted one any of us knew. Elvis wasn’t cool in my neighborhood or at school. And KGFJ didn’t play Elvis. Kirk didn’t care. He played Elvis’s records all the time on the little portable phonograph at home.

  He went—and dragged Dennis and me—to all of The King’s movies, from Love Me Tender to King Creole to the ones that even Kirk admitted were awful: Double Trouble, Roustabout, and It Happened at the World’s Fair.

  My mother let Kirk choose the movies; Dennis and I had no say. She gave us each 25 cents, plus 15 cents for popcorn, and it was off to Blue Hawaii.

  Finally, even Kirk couldn’t resist The Temptations, and switched to KGFJ, Hunter Hancock’s station.

  In the restaurant, Dad played “background” music. He wouldn’t play KGFJ.

  “It offends the customers,” he said.

  “How?”

  “It’s black music. We have black and white and Mexican customers. I don’t want just black music. I ain’t servin’ soul food. We ain’t playin’ black music.”

  So he played the station that ran instrumental versions of “Moon River” or “Lazy, Hazy Days of Summer” or “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.” Nobody was offended because nobody listened.