Round Up And More Family Jewels

I used the term 'family jewels' in the CIA sense of the word. A new CIA director once ordered the entire CIA to write down all instances where CIA operatives had broken the law or killed someone. The resulting telephone book of offenses were known around the CIA as the 'family jewels.' I like the analogy.

So I've been writing about my family's family jewels. This is all the crap that we all hid from everyone else for decades. This is all the shit we're all so embarassed about. I have to decide whether it's better for me to ignore my father for the rest of his life or persevere and keep taking shit from him. He just can't help himself, I'm afraid.

I used to think he didn't like me. I considered the possibility recently that he liked me too much; that he liked me so much that he wanted to keep me out of the path of all of the difficulties he had encountered in his life. I think I've concluded that my brothers and I were his show dogs; we were to excell so as to draw attention away from the deficiencies in his character and life.

Of all of the things he did, the drinking, the fighting with my mother and older brother and his parents and nurses and school teachers, and the rest of it, the thing that damaged me the most was being locked in a room for three days to randomly memorize a page out of a history book perfectly. It was absolute insanity and I sat in that goddamn bedroom with pink shag carpeting for three days, trapped, missing school, being terrorized every hour when my father was at home, wondering if it was ever going to end or whether I was going to have to kill myself or run away to make it end. This was the most powerful statement ever made to me about life; and unfortunately the statement made was that life was completely random, you just couldn't tell when your father was going to go psycho on you and shake up your life, and the lesson it tought me were the limits of my capacity to tolerate abuse and that there were no limits on the psychotic behavior man could devise.

In retrospect, I wish I had run away from home, just fled out the door one of those three afternoons while my father was at work; just blowing past my mother. I wish this for two reasons. First, it would have been great to fuck them up, and they would have been fucked up if I had just split and disappeared into some inner city somewhere. They fucking deserved it. Second, my life would be completely different, and I'm curious to see how it would have gone.

But they would have caught me, and they probably would have physically killed me for running away.

There are a few more family jewels and I will just spit them out randomly, to be organized at some later date. I want to get these down before I have another cerebral vascular accident that strokes out my memory.

Mom drank. She bought bottles of Lancers white wine at the grocery store and went threw one or two of them a week. She drank alone, in the afternoons, while we were playing.

My father hated his mother. When he was a child, his parents ignored him -they would give him a quarter and tell him to get lost. He could not stay in a room with her for more than five minutes before getting infuriated, screaming at her, and stomping out of the room. Years later, I caught myself running a similar routine on my mother. Whenever she came over, all I could talk to her was why she didn't divorce my father and why she didn't stop him from going mental on my ass and why she jumped right it after him. It used to make her uncomfortable, and she would leave in a very polite way when she'd had enough.

We were fat kids - surprise, surprise. My older brother was a lardass - 143 pounds in sixth grade. Our parents put all of us on diets. I remember being hungry all of the time. My father was on our shit about being fat.

He sent my older brother and I to Camp Deerwoode, a farm for fat kids located in Brevard, North Carolina. It was horrific. The camp owner was a redneck named Bill Mayes, and he was psychotic like my father. He got angry at me twice during that session and scared the hell out of me. I wanted to go home, but my parents would not let me come home.

My counselor was Kent McCullough, a homosexual who liked to watch the little boys in the showers. Kent used to force me to eat foods I disliked, and this culminated in me projectile vomiting all over the dinner table after eating some cantaloupe. My father boasted to me over the telephone that he had "stood up for me." I felt loved until I read the actual letter a few months later when my father brought it home from his office. He had written McCullough that I knew everything there was to know about diet and nutrition but was too stupid to eat properly, and he ought to leave me alone instead of continuing to flog me.

There were a number of occasions that come to mind when my father drove us children to apartment complexes we'd never really noticed before and left us in the car while he went inside one of the apartments. He would come out sometimes reeking of perfume. Mother used to find lipstick on his shirt from time to time.

I sensed my father was taking up with other women. I definitely got that impression on the few occasions he made me go into one of these women's apartments with him. I felt uncomfortable and queasy as I watched him being too familiar with the young woman who lived in the apartment.

As a child, I liked to build things. I built furniture and multistory tree houses. I knew to ask my father for money just before he passed out on the couch. He would get angry at me any other time.

The Family Jewels - Part Seven

One summer night, our father picked us up from an overnight camping trip. We asked where our mother was, and he said she had an operation and was in the hospital.

Over the next few days, our father took care of us, drove us to school, and picked us up. We begged to see our mother in the hospital, but he refused.

A month later, our mother came back home. She never said where she had been.

The Family Jewels - Part Six

My father's cars were always beat to shit. He drove drunk every night coming home from his office, so it wasn't a surprise that he dented his cars all up.

The trunk of his car was filled with empty vodka bottles. He would drive to a liquor store, buy a quart of Smirnoff, drink it while driving home, and put it in his trunk when he was done. Bottles were stacked under his bed. Bottles were stacked on the top of his closet. All empty. He would disappear into his closet to take a stiff belt once he got home.

In later years, he abandoned all pretense of hiding his drinking. He could come home, pour an ice tea glass of vodka, and slug it down in one shot. He'd be asleep on the couch a half hour later. The fighting would start when he woke up.

The Family Jewels - Part Five

My parents fought every night. Every single night. And during the day during the weekends. Most weekends we wound up being taken by my mother to a big park in a rich neighborhood.. We would play and she would sit in a park bench and cry. Some times she's stay in the station wagon.

She'd usher us into her station wagon, and when we asked where we were going she'd say we were going crazy.

The Family Jewels - Part Four

We came from from grocery shopping with my mother one Sunday, only to find my father passed out in his bathroom, bleeding from the head. My mother put him to bed. It was a small bathroom, with small baby blue tile, and a hard white ceramic sink with chrome legs.

He used to keep lots of pills in his medicine cabinet. Lots and lots of pills.

The Family Jewels - Part Three

My parents used to lock their bedroom door and fuck occasionally. Usually on Sunday afternoon. One Sunday afternoon they were fucking and my older brother wanted them, so he threw a log through the bedroom window above the bed. Glass rained down on my parents.

I was three, and my older brother and I heard my parents arguing in their bedroom. Then we heard my mother scream for help. We came in and my father was punching my mother. We managed to stop him.

I found stacks of hundred dollar bills in my mother's closet. It was about 10 grand. She told me she was keeping it for one of her friends.

The Family Jewels - Part Two

Shortly thereafter, my brothers and I were fighting as brothers do. My father, enraged, lined up up, oldest to youngest, in a straight line in the family room. He instructed my older brother to fight me. My older brother promptly knocked the shit out of me. He then instructed me to fight my younger brother. In a blind rage, I flailed at him. My father quickly stopped the fight because I was about to do some damage to him.