M,
Last week, I sensed that you are growing weary of the teen-romance theme (it might have been the email you sent saying as much - I'm a man - you have to be blunt to make me understand). Well, unless we skip to present, where I'm a boring old man who works like a dog at a job he hates, when he's not goofing off on Facebook or video games, I will have to get back to my trouble with drugs. Marijuana is supposed to be bad for the memory, but for me, it created some very memorable moments. Pain of the heart and the body have ways of making lasting recollections. My next story has both.
After my infamous suspension for 'suspicion of smoking', my friend pool all but dried up. No one in my class wanted their parents to find out that they were hanging out with that guy. One of the few people that would suffer my presence was a senior who worked for my dad. My father owned a service-station which employed a mechanic and several pump jockeys (guys who rush out to check the oil, fill the tank, and check the tires - this was when 'service' was still a word that meant something). Mark had been working for Dad for about a year. We had worked together at Dad's station during the summer, when my father would make me work for slave-labor wages, so we knew each other well.
One night, months after the bust, I got the approval to ride along with Mark and his girlfriend to a basketball game at the high school. It might have been the first time I was allowed to do anything besides go to school and do chores (I had horses and a dirt bike to keep me company, so don't feel too sorry for me). I was thrilled. Not only was I to get out of the house on a Friday night, I was quite possibly going to get high as well. Mark owed me for all of the homegrown I had shared with him when my dad would go off to the bank.
At half-time he didn't disappoint. We braved the cold Illinois winter and found a place behind the auditorium to sneak a joint. This, of course, wasn't enough. When there was more weed left in the bag, you could never be satisfied with only one joint. He fired up four more on our drive home. The last was still burning when we pulled into the drive. I took a long toke, coughed like hell, before exiting his vehicle and quietly entering our backdoor.
The television was blaring; not a good sign. My dad was the only one who would be up this late watching TV. Mom would have been reading. Walking casually behind the couch he was laying on, I headed up the stairs to my room. When I had gotten halfway up the stairs, I made a huge mistake.
"Goodnight, Dad," I yelled.
"Get down here!" he yelled back.
My heart fell into my shoes. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to lie my way out of this one.
Before I got caught at school, I never worried about coming home stoned. My parents were clueless. Allergies were the reason for my red eyes, and the reason I smelled like weird smoke was from the burn-pile I had helped my friends with. My poor mother was beside herself when she found out that the poster I had on my closet door was not of a little old lady holding a random plant that had won a blue ribbon at the county fair with, it was a little old lady holding a prize winning pot plant. "I always thought that that was weird that you would have an old lady on your door," she said, before she made me rip it down.
I walked down the stairs and sat in the chair furthest from the couch, hoping my father's nose wasn't very good.
"Look at you!" he yelled, getting up from the couch. "Your eyes are so red I can barely see any white!"
It was some really good weed.
"And you reek of that shit. Do you think I'm so stupid that I wouldn't notice? Do you!"
Of course, I wasn't about to say, "yes." I kept my mouth shut and prayed for my mom to come out and settle him down. She didn't.
"You make me sick!" he yelled, before smacking me upside the head with an open hand.
I held my arms and legs up in front of me as he started throwing punch after punch at me. After a few hits to my limbs, he stopped. I uncovered enough to see what he was up to. He was standing a few inches in front of me, looking like a wild-man waiting for a piece of meat. For a split-second I considered punching him in the family jewels like my Jiu Jitsu teacher had taught me. He read my mind.
"Go ahead! Hit me. Be a man for once."
I hated my dad, but I guess not that much. It seemed so wrong to simply entertain the thought of hitting him in the testicles, not to mention really doing it. I resumed the fetal position.
"I didn't think so," he scoffed, before pounding on me for a while longer.
I don't really remember how long or how many times he hit me, or if any of them other than his first slap on my ear hurt very much, but I do remember how much it hurt inside. I was used to a heavy hand from my father. His belt left many welts on my backside when I was much younger. This was different. His rage was so intense that it scared me. When he finally told me to go to my room, I went to my bed and cried from way he had made me feel so small and insignificant. It was not the way to convince me that he was right.
So, are you wishing for teen-romance now? How do you follow that?
DB
Dear DB, Sometimes I wish I had an assistant beavering away in another room (she’s in another room so I don’t have to talk to her), to whom I could call out “Mary, please write a blog for me in the first person that manages to entertain everyone effortlessly, while at the same time conveying the impression that I am absolutely wonderful.”
It’s one of those weeks where Mary would come in very handy. Because the truth of the matter is sometimes I feel neither wonderful nor interesting, and while I haven’t been beaten up by a scary angry father lately, sometimes life can do that to you instead, can’t it? You can end up feeling like the headline in this blog even without the actions of a scary angry father. Small and insignificant sums it up nicely. I guess we all feel like that from time to time though, unless we are psychopaths or sociopaths, who never feel that way, I believe, presumably because they live in a crazy deluded world and happen to be the most important person there. Must be nice…
I thought your story this week was both very powerful and very sad. My own father was a violent man too, only unlike my brothers I was mercifully shielded from his excesses. He was a strange man, was my father, and I often think that the reason I never married was because I was subconsiously terrified I’d end up with someone just like him, as women so often tend to do.
Roderick was a vicar, as I think I told you at the start of our correspondence, who then went and got himself defrocked. But what I haven’t told you is that before he was a vicar he was in the SAS – that’s the Special Air Services. I think they are a bit like the US Marines or something, a unit that was expected to do a lot of dirty work. The dirty work Roderick was involved in was killing communists in south east Asia back in the fifties.
And I mean he was literally killing communists – men, women and children, the lot. It screwed him up big time, in much the way any kind of killing screws people up. It hardened him to the point where he turned into a man completely lacking in empathy and compassion. He became one of those abovementioned sociopaths in fact. Now that is not the sort of man who should become a vicar, is it? I mean, what was he thinking? At the very least vicars should come equipped with a modicum of empathy and compassion…
Please forgive the brevity of this response and for my being a little distracted at the moment. My life has suddenly gone mad. I’ve got heaps of work (I freelance, and it comes and goes in fits and starts and right now its throwing fits), plus I’m trying to figure out how to launch an audio book (brief excursion into self promotion…)
I’ll try and get back on track next week, at which point I think I will tell you more about Roderick, the charming sociopathic vicar, and the massive falling out I had with him in my early twenties. Till then, your temporarily all-over-the-place friend, Margaret.
Last week, I sensed that you are growing weary of the teen-romance theme (it might have been the email you sent saying as much - I'm a man - you have to be blunt to make me understand). Well, unless we skip to present, where I'm a boring old man who works like a dog at a job he hates, when he's not goofing off on Facebook or video games, I will have to get back to my trouble with drugs. Marijuana is supposed to be bad for the memory, but for me, it created some very memorable moments. Pain of the heart and the body have ways of making lasting recollections. My next story has both.
After my infamous suspension for 'suspicion of smoking', my friend pool all but dried up. No one in my class wanted their parents to find out that they were hanging out with that guy. One of the few people that would suffer my presence was a senior who worked for my dad. My father owned a service-station which employed a mechanic and several pump jockeys (guys who rush out to check the oil, fill the tank, and check the tires - this was when 'service' was still a word that meant something). Mark had been working for Dad for about a year. We had worked together at Dad's station during the summer, when my father would make me work for slave-labor wages, so we knew each other well.
One night, months after the bust, I got the approval to ride along with Mark and his girlfriend to a basketball game at the high school. It might have been the first time I was allowed to do anything besides go to school and do chores (I had horses and a dirt bike to keep me company, so don't feel too sorry for me). I was thrilled. Not only was I to get out of the house on a Friday night, I was quite possibly going to get high as well. Mark owed me for all of the homegrown I had shared with him when my dad would go off to the bank.
At half-time he didn't disappoint. We braved the cold Illinois winter and found a place behind the auditorium to sneak a joint. This, of course, wasn't enough. When there was more weed left in the bag, you could never be satisfied with only one joint. He fired up four more on our drive home. The last was still burning when we pulled into the drive. I took a long toke, coughed like hell, before exiting his vehicle and quietly entering our backdoor.
The television was blaring; not a good sign. My dad was the only one who would be up this late watching TV. Mom would have been reading. Walking casually behind the couch he was laying on, I headed up the stairs to my room. When I had gotten halfway up the stairs, I made a huge mistake.
"Goodnight, Dad," I yelled.
"Get down here!" he yelled back.
My heart fell into my shoes. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to lie my way out of this one.
Before I got caught at school, I never worried about coming home stoned. My parents were clueless. Allergies were the reason for my red eyes, and the reason I smelled like weird smoke was from the burn-pile I had helped my friends with. My poor mother was beside herself when she found out that the poster I had on my closet door was not of a little old lady holding a random plant that had won a blue ribbon at the county fair with, it was a little old lady holding a prize winning pot plant. "I always thought that that was weird that you would have an old lady on your door," she said, before she made me rip it down.
I walked down the stairs and sat in the chair furthest from the couch, hoping my father's nose wasn't very good.
"Look at you!" he yelled, getting up from the couch. "Your eyes are so red I can barely see any white!"
It was some really good weed.
"And you reek of that shit. Do you think I'm so stupid that I wouldn't notice? Do you!"
Of course, I wasn't about to say, "yes." I kept my mouth shut and prayed for my mom to come out and settle him down. She didn't.
"You make me sick!" he yelled, before smacking me upside the head with an open hand.
I held my arms and legs up in front of me as he started throwing punch after punch at me. After a few hits to my limbs, he stopped. I uncovered enough to see what he was up to. He was standing a few inches in front of me, looking like a wild-man waiting for a piece of meat. For a split-second I considered punching him in the family jewels like my Jiu Jitsu teacher had taught me. He read my mind.
"Go ahead! Hit me. Be a man for once."
I hated my dad, but I guess not that much. It seemed so wrong to simply entertain the thought of hitting him in the testicles, not to mention really doing it. I resumed the fetal position.
"I didn't think so," he scoffed, before pounding on me for a while longer.
I don't really remember how long or how many times he hit me, or if any of them other than his first slap on my ear hurt very much, but I do remember how much it hurt inside. I was used to a heavy hand from my father. His belt left many welts on my backside when I was much younger. This was different. His rage was so intense that it scared me. When he finally told me to go to my room, I went to my bed and cried from way he had made me feel so small and insignificant. It was not the way to convince me that he was right.
So, are you wishing for teen-romance now? How do you follow that?
DB
Dear DB, Sometimes I wish I had an assistant beavering away in another room (she’s in another room so I don’t have to talk to her), to whom I could call out “Mary, please write a blog for me in the first person that manages to entertain everyone effortlessly, while at the same time conveying the impression that I am absolutely wonderful.”
It’s one of those weeks where Mary would come in very handy. Because the truth of the matter is sometimes I feel neither wonderful nor interesting, and while I haven’t been beaten up by a scary angry father lately, sometimes life can do that to you instead, can’t it? You can end up feeling like the headline in this blog even without the actions of a scary angry father. Small and insignificant sums it up nicely. I guess we all feel like that from time to time though, unless we are psychopaths or sociopaths, who never feel that way, I believe, presumably because they live in a crazy deluded world and happen to be the most important person there. Must be nice…
I thought your story this week was both very powerful and very sad. My own father was a violent man too, only unlike my brothers I was mercifully shielded from his excesses. He was a strange man, was my father, and I often think that the reason I never married was because I was subconsiously terrified I’d end up with someone just like him, as women so often tend to do.
Roderick was a vicar, as I think I told you at the start of our correspondence, who then went and got himself defrocked. But what I haven’t told you is that before he was a vicar he was in the SAS – that’s the Special Air Services. I think they are a bit like the US Marines or something, a unit that was expected to do a lot of dirty work. The dirty work Roderick was involved in was killing communists in south east Asia back in the fifties.
And I mean he was literally killing communists – men, women and children, the lot. It screwed him up big time, in much the way any kind of killing screws people up. It hardened him to the point where he turned into a man completely lacking in empathy and compassion. He became one of those abovementioned sociopaths in fact. Now that is not the sort of man who should become a vicar, is it? I mean, what was he thinking? At the very least vicars should come equipped with a modicum of empathy and compassion…
Please forgive the brevity of this response and for my being a little distracted at the moment. My life has suddenly gone mad. I’ve got heaps of work (I freelance, and it comes and goes in fits and starts and right now its throwing fits), plus I’m trying to figure out how to launch an audio book (brief excursion into self promotion…)
I’ll try and get back on track next week, at which point I think I will tell you more about Roderick, the charming sociopathic vicar, and the massive falling out I had with him in my early twenties. Till then, your temporarily all-over-the-place friend, Margaret.