Close to four years since my father died. On his bedroom floor, alone, in pain, full of fear and regret. Those words cling together. It could have been no other way. When I was young, a strange teenager, I identified as a poet (pronouns I and me) -- especially after I recognized that poems don't have to rhyme. That's a dangerous discovery, for obvious reasons. Not everything that doesn't rhyme is poetry. I expect it's completely lost now, but I do recall the last line of something I wrote, of him. Don't even remember the title. I was sixteen -- a most difficult age -- and it was, "So die alone, you who did not want, and did not need, our love." When I used first person plural, it always stood for the singular. When we were young.
One of the most destructive things my father did was what my older siblings called the lectures. I, being six or eight, would not have had that word, lectures. Every few months or seasons he would arrange us on the living room couch and stand or sit and go on and on for what, truly, must have been hours. How unhappy he was. What a failure he was. How horrific his childhood was. Details and stories. Always the same ones, across the years. And always what I later understood to be the curse. His parents had done it to him, he was doing it to us, and we would do it to our children. Do what? Some sort of ruination. He wasn't specific. As I recall.
One of the stories was about Queenie, his pony. He grew up in small-town Montana, in the '30s and '40s. So no electricity, no paved roads, no indoor plumbing. Probably a hand pump in the kitchen, and certainly an outhouse out back. He always mentioned Queenie, how much he loved that horse. And the story always ended with how the town boys had killed her, stoned her to death. Tears. "They were jealous."
Years and years later the middle brother, who had been a sadistic monster as a child -- but evolved into a sloppy parasitical self-pitying sentimentalist -- added a detail I had never heard. Before the town boys killed Queenie, they raped her. I am pleased that my father had the decency to hold back that detail from his lectures. I was after all very young. And sex was never a topic for discussion, from adult to child in that family. But maybe he did include it, bestiality, and I was just too young to process and therefore to remember it. The middle brother called the town of the town boys, 'the town from hell.' Butte, a wide-open hard-drinking mining town. That explains a lot. It was Irish boys, attacking the Norwegian.
After the lectures we were excused and I would go down the stairs to my room. I was two stories below the rest of them, in what had been the servants' quarters. It was a Hollywood Hills Spanish castle, built in the late '20s by a silent movie star -- Bebe Daniels, a doe-eyed flapper. A few years later Clark Gable lived there. Seventy-two steps from street to front door. Not practical, especially later, for an old man in his pain-filled and solitary 80s.
I had been upstairs too, sharing -- no, "sharing" a room with the middle sibling. Bunk beds, and he would spit down on me. I look back now and realize I should have dropped a large potted plant two stories down onto his head. That's the victim child speaking, not the adult. But that child has a right to be heard. Heart.
Dismissed, I walked down the dark narrow stairs, silent, barely breathing, to sit at my desk doing nothing. I felt nothing at all. Nothing nothing nothing. I must have been 8 or 9 by then -- I don't remember when the move downstairs happened. I am convinced that's the reason I'm alive, or at least as sane as I am.
I did have the self-awareness to know how completely crazy I was feeling, or not feeling. Internal screaming. I absolutely knew that I should have been crying, inconsolably, or at best unconsoled. I clearly remember thinking that I should cry, to let it out, and if I didn't, it would harm me, later. But I was fierce with the cold self-hatred that does not care about future damage. I wanted future pain. I was not going to feel it in the moment. Of course I was wrong, but that's what neurosis is -- an adaptive behavior that outlives the situation -- a compromising solution that outlasts the specific problem.
After my father died, the eldest, thieving sibling revealed that aspect of his character, and at the same time I became aware of the mental illness and flatly betraying character of my nice kind generous mother. My theory now is that my father had appropriated the firstborn, into whom his hopes and demands were poured. You know, love. The middle one was claimed by my mother, and it became a truly sick codependency. She is the reason that one was such a monster. Spoiled, completely completely out of control.
Then I came along, unwanted of course, three and four years later. And poor little Jackie, who did not belong to anyone. It was a middle-class household, so I was provided for, and the forms were nominally observed. But I somehow learned to never ask for anything. "It's okay, I don't want anything." Want or need. "Oh that Jackie, such a little philosopher, so wise. He has the IQ of a genius, you know." That, plus happiness...
Blindness, then, is a survival mechanism, like a cave salamander, where the resources needed to preserve sight might make the difference between surviving and starving. It's understandable that I didn't figure it out until this late age, that I was the least-favorite, the unfavorite child. It was frankly unthinkable, given that I was the cute one, the smart one, the good one. The little one. It's just crazy. But there it is.
So I could never figure out why my father seemed to actively dislike me. To repeat myself from not many posts ago, he actually said it, outloud, a number of times across the years. When I was a teenager, and in my 20s, and 30s. "I have to love you, because you're my son. But I don't have to like you." I was baffled.
One Christmas we all three got little wooden boxes, for cufflinks and change, etc.
And that summer I went looking for junk jewelry, strings of beads and bangles and so on. I had the image in my mind of a Long John Silver treasure, jewels spilling out like
Pirates of the Caribbean.
A very kid thing. One day my father came into my room in a rage. Absolutely furious. It seemed like hatred. Why do you have these beads. I don't even have words to describe it, but through my tears I attempted to explain about a treasure chest. I suppose at the time I saw how silly it was, this childish pretending. I intuit that I was ashamed. I fill in the blanks of memory by supposing my father pulled back slightly, maybe even, well, not chastened, but mollified, his wrath appeased somehow by the tininess of the little boy in front of him. I don't know. That's the most I can remember.
Every summer we'd take the train -- pre Amtrak -- to the maternal grandparents' farm in North Dakota. Dad stayed home. There was what we called the Bunkhouse -- a cleaned out chicken coop with some furniture. There were trunks of old clothes, and being kids we went through them. I put on a dress and held a flower to my cheek and my mom took a picture. It was hilarious. Everyone laughed. Some months later my father saw the picture and was absolutely enraged. Very violently angry. Very verbally abusive. Dude was totally VVA. I explained, between my sobs, that it was a joke. I was completely confused.
Well it should be obvious. My father thought I was gay. You know, because I listened to classical music, and read books, and didn't care about sportsball. And whatever else he used as evidence, that I haven't thought of. I was little and cute and had white hair. I wore jewelry and dressed like a girl.
Years later, as I have previously written, he argued with me, that I was gay. I took the I'm not gay side of the debate. After that discussion, I didn't see him for quite a few years. It made me put together some of the details I've just related. Recolored my whole childhood, even darker. I really don't think there was anything feminine about me. Now I have a hard ascetic face, like an angry Jesus with sad eyes, but I was a cute kid. Was that my crime? Being a cute little white-haired boy who tried to be funny?
My father talked about the niggers, and the jews, and faggots. My siblings used constantly hateful language. Kill you, faggot. Hate you, faggot. Bash your head in, faggot. Albino. Queerbait. Daily and hourly and by the minute. I attempted to defend myself as best I could, physically and verbally. I may have a gift for invective, but I don't like it. I had no idea at all what a faggot was. I don't think I really understood what hatred was, covered though I was by its bukkake spray. I understand, now.
(I just looked it up, to make sure about what bukkake is, and how to spell it. What a world. And -- just to be thorough, because you know but don't quite know –– queerbait: "Any male who attracts a considerable amount of gay lust wittingly or unwittingly. The new boy on the cell block. An unsuspecting alterboy." This, to and about a little brother. Sick hateful pervert scum. This has made me angry.)
I don't know how unusual these stories are. Everyone has stories. A distinguisher with mine may be that it never stopped, and there was no protection and no safe place, other than solitude. But when those teenagers where busy raping and killing Queenie, well, is that really what they did, or all that they did? Why stop at fucking a horse? I think they raped my father. A good-looking 14 year old boy, held down, turned over, flat or bent over something, maybe the body of a dead or dying pony. Fucked by four or five or more older boys, and maybe some classmates.
Well, that would explain it, this hatred of sodomites. This madness. This cursing. A secret he never could have told. Silent, hardly breathing. Able to express rage, though. Feeling.
So I knew the Queenie story, and I'd thought that he might have been raped as well. But it was only yesterday that I put that together with his, well, it was a sort of hatred toward me.
One of those older boys, I now choose to believe -- the ringleader, maybe -- had white hair.
Not all Irish, then.
I don't expect he asked it, about me, but it was unspoken only because he hadn't put it together: If I was a faggot, what boy would I rape?
All my rage, as I have said, toward my father died with him. For not feeling or showing love toward him, I have guilt and regret. In his solitary old age he felt the same way, I am certain.
J
