Cats
“Yeah, I always hated cats. I’d catch them by the tail and spin them around, then throw them. Sometimes, I’d tie a cherry bomb to its tail, light it, and boy did they run when it went off!”
I couldn’t react as I listened to my father recount this story like it was just a harmless prank. To react badly wasn’t possible, or I’d be in trouble. But I was also a kid, and he was telling this like it was no big deal. He laughed. We laughed.
But inside, I was trying to wrap my head around that story. First, what was so bad about cats that he thought they deserved that? Didn’t it hurt them, especially when the cherry bomb went off?
WHY would you do that to an animal?
His confidant and co-conspirator
Right from that toddler car ride when he molested me, car rides with Dad in later years were no better. In fact, as the years went on, they became a special form of hell.
It was bad enough that I had to go with him on Saturdays to the lot (our property in the country), knowing he’d try yet again to grope or abuse me. But sitting there through the “car ride conversations” of everything I wish I didn’t have to hear only added to my disgust.
In his conversations, I think he saw me as his friend, peer, confidant, and of course, a willing co-conspirator who enjoyed him sharing all these personal things, appropriate or not.
Regular life things
Sometimes it would start out okay. He would just share things from his life that were actually “normal” and kind of touching. He spoke with fondness about a guy who worked at a newsstand in his neighborhood when he was a kid. Then explained how the man was drafted into the Army during World War II and was killed in the Battle of the Bulge near the end of the war. He then explained some of the history of World War II, as he was a young boy then, and described what the Battle of the Bulge was all about.
Another time, he shared his sorrow about a friend who got hurt and died from a bacterial infection. Or how his brothers got into a fight and he didn’t defend them, then got into trouble with his father for not taking care of them. So that was why he always taught me to look after my younger siblings.
Any of those stories was an interesting glimpse of his childhood, or history, or whatever. But it wouldn’t take long to veer off into the things I “didn’t need to hear.”
The tough guy…overcompensating?
It was important, I guess, for my father to be super macho and take no shit from anyone. So he would regale me with stories of his “prowess.”
Apparently, one time when he was in his late teens, he got into a fight in a men’s room with someone and described how he stuffed the guy’s head in a toilet bowl while flushing it.
And it was a special slice of life to hear how he would go to the movie theater and get chased around the theater by guys who apparently wanted to molest him. But he said he always outran them. I wondered about that.
Then, my father always kept his hair cut military-short even after the Navy, and his bearing was that of a tough guy. Whether it was always spitting out the car window, flinging his cigarette butts everywhere, or keeping that naked statue on his cellar workbench, whatever, he was tough, and everyone needed to know it. Even in his old age, it was the same. By then, he had made his haircut more extreme by buzz-cutting it. And on winter nights, even though he was cold in the house and my mother suggested he get a warm robe, his response was that “Men don’t wear bathrobes.” Yeah, whatever.
I look back and question what he was overcompensating about. I wondered if he was actually gay and wanted to project to the world that he wasn’t by being so “alpha-male.” This was also reflected in his other stories and tidbits.
His brothers held out on him
He mentioned how mad he was one time with his brothers for holding out on him about a “sexual opportunity.” I can still remember cringing when this story started. I knew it could only get creepier. But even I hadn’t expected the next part.
He had come home on leave from the Navy, and it sounds like he was about 19 or 20 at the time. Apparently, a family relative — a young girl about 11 or 12 — was staying with his family for a bit. He said that his brothers were “getting some” from her, and he was angry that they didn’t tell him so he could too. The number of things wrong with that story still boggles my mind. I was just speechless back then.
And in later years, given that story and what he did to me, I wondered how safe his baby sister was around him. As a young teen, he had to babysit and talked about having to change her diaper. I wondered whether that was all he did. In fact, he would always say how much he always wanted daughters, and again, I wondered, “Why?”
Totally unaware of how inappropriate any of this was and of how much I wished he’d go back to talking about World War II, he would share how he would get turned on when his mother, who was nursing his baby sister, would walk around in her bra. He talked about how his mom was always giving him enemas and that he was the only one of the kids who had his own room.
Then he would share how his teen brothers were messing around with married women and getting chased later by their husbands. All of this was delivered as “good-natured fun” and stories that I would surely find amusing.
Moving forward in time, he talked about how “proud” he felt seeing my mother pregnant and knowing “He did that.” But he would then wistfully note that while early marriage is a lot of fun, things change as time goes on.
This was followed another time with his comment about how married men, the first time they cheat, feel like they committed murder. But then he added more positively that after a while, it doesn’t bother them anymore. Who was he talking about?
The cringe factor only increased when he would say how much I reminded him of my mother, and then tell me that he was doing these things to me to help ME, to “help him with Mom,” or to teach me so I’d be ready for my future husband.” And he’d thrown in some biology tidbits, like did I know that when women have an orgasm, they can get a red flush on their chest?
At that point, I remember trying to retract deeper into the seat while I thought, “Why do I need to hear this?!”
He’d move on to talk about proper rules around sexual things, like women are the ones who have to be strong because men can’t control themselves, and women have to keep them in line. And for good measure, he’d throw in Catholic dogma about men not climaxing during masturbation so they don’t “waste their seed.”
Sometimes he would change the approach by telling a joke. I thought, okay, something different. But I should have known better. It was a joke about two bulls discussing screwing the cows down in the pasture. The young bull suggested they run down and screw a few cows, but the older, wiser bull said, “No. Let’s walk down and screw them all.”
All of this was, of course, the prelude to what I knew was coming. And the comment that just made my skin crawl. After all this “prelude conversation to bring us closer,” he would always ask if “I had hot pants and did I need relief?” Then he’d try to reach across the seat to pull me over so he could “help me.”
To this day, that phrase makes me want to throw up.
The Ultimate Car Ride Experience…
It was one of these moments that he nearly got us killed. He had borrowed a neighbor’s truck to pick up something, and as usual, had me there. We were driving down the steep, windy country road. On the right was a precipitous drop-off with no guardrails.
He was droning on with one of his stories, and I had tuned him out, but I suddenly snapped into awareness as he tried to reach for me to pull me over.
I had just had enough of this, and for a split-second, I rebelled even as I knew I risked his rage. As he reached, I subtly pulled closer to my side door to avoid him.
Apparently, he didn’t realize I avoided him and must have thought he just didn’t reach well enough. So the second time, he leaned much further over to get a better grip on me. That was all it took for him to lose control of the truck.
The passenger front tire slipped off the road, caught something, twisted, and suddenly veered off down that embankment. He quickly sat up and grabbed he wheel, struggling to regain control. He managed to stop the truck before we plummeted down the hillside, but not before blowing the tire.
He was pretty shook as he got out of the truck and inspected the damage. When he realized the truck was okay and he just needed to change the tire, he seemed to relax a bit. Then he started to laugh and made a joke of how “WE better figure out a good story about this,” as if I was his willing partner-in-crime and this was all just some good clean “mischief” that we would keep between us…our little fun secret….
I was scared to death and furious. But all I could do was bottle my outrage at his stupidity. Of course, I didn’t dare show it. He might have been the jerk who did this, but if I rightly pointed it out, his rage would turn on me.
All I could wonder was how many more years this would go on, and HOW could I stop it? It was the constant of my life, that question. I had no answer, but it was always there.
With each passing year, the urgency, my frustration, fear, disgust, and despair just mounted. Surely, if he was doing this to “prepare me for a husband,” wouldn’t this have to stop at some point? Maybe soon?
Exactly WHEN would that point of “transition” arrive, and he would finally hear my requests to stop?
Soul Mosaic 
Leave a comment