Equivocality

One of the most intimate moments I spent with my stepfather involved a fake pink leather purse, three Duracell D-size batteries, and a VHS tape of lesbian porn. He tried to bond with me many times, like a man trying to teach an allligator to read. He was consistent. It was sunday morning football, no matter what I was doing, what I was reading, "Homework? You should’ve done that shit yesterday!" and there I was in front of a dust-laden, beaten floor model T.V., in my grandmothers living room watching the Radiers lose. I think I was the only black kid in Compton happy to see the Raiders move to Oakland. They lost and I got yelled at twice, once for not paying attention and another time for just being around when someone couldn’t "catch a damn pass". I wish the pivotal event was more like that Cats in the Cradle song. But in real life, dads are sometimes assholes.

Sometimes I even wish the event was more gross, but my father was no child molester. He was psychotically protective of my sisters; even to the point of my own poverty and nausea. Besides my sisters were good complainers so we would have known if something Humbert Humpetish was going on. My mother was also too handy with cutlery and blunt objects to make it worthwhile for my father to molest, even if he was a pedophile. As for the boys, dad was a true homophobic. He was scared of other men’s penises. Dildos might have offended but those insdious fleshy, blood engorged members really got to him. He didn’t even like changing baby boys. He and I didn’t meet until I was 6, but I noticed that I diapered my brothers more often than he did, which is something I remind them of as often as I can.

I found porn under my parents’ dresser weeks before weeks before the incident. My father’s homophobia was reflected in his taste in adult cinema. Since penis was the enemy, it was all vag all the time. Lesbian daisy chains and strap-on brigades, naughty frolicking-cheerleader-featurettes like Bring It Dong and Debbie Only Does other Debbies. So I popped the tape into the VCR and watched. I hadn’t seen anything like it. It was fucking absurd. Of course it turned me on, I popped a mediocre nodule of a meat tent in my pants, but really it was like watching a bunch of bad, stoned, soap opera actresses shuffling through their lines mixed with professional wrestling. I think I fell in love somewhere between the strap-on gangbang and the cluster kiss orgy. There were no words. It was awesome and really fake.

I heard footsteps coming to my parents bedroom door. Heavy, angry and surprised footfalls like someone who just found out their son was somewhere he shouldn’t have been, doing something he shouldn’t have been doing. My stepfather had the body of someone who slept on benches and on carpets. Someone who had seen lockup and spent enough times inside to put on that lean primitive prison muscle, the kind that comes from lifting weights, but made soft around the edges from lounging and complaining about the hard world he lost, and the harder of raising kids. A big soft tough guy. It was mom who carried the weight in her steps. Big vicious promises carried in her wake, promises we, myself and my brothers and sisters, all heard and dreaded. But I knew what to do, the ultimate move that every hormonal child cornered by the threat of parental discipline knows. With all the power of my burgeoning masculinity….I grabbed the tape, killed the tube and hid in the closet. It was a mess of shoes, sling-backs, boots, random bits of paper, social security cards, old pictures, purses and unhung clothing, which I hid under. I was ten. My eyes were closed; pinched tight like I was playing hide and seek with my dog.

I heard my parents angry shuffling as they came into the room, and I could see my fathers face. His bared teeth, spitting “you little mother fucker!” at me from under his moustache, and my mother shaking her head behind him, saying "I told you about that boy…" But nothing happened. No one yanked open the door. I wasn’t struck with my father’s belt and my mother wasn’t pulling down a wire hanger, doing him a favor because he was too tired to come kick my butt. That was how whoopins went in my house. A communal effort like no other thing under my parents’ roof. Between my mother and father, beatings were parceled out like work details, shifted with necessity and purpose. Shared efforts. Karl Marx would have been proud. I realize they were even grooming me to carry on the tradition. They would haul me in front of all my siblings and put this thick belt in my hand. A belt thick enough to strap together a bulls calfs. Heavy as bag full of rocks, and they told me to snap the belt on the couch arm. My brothers and sisters would tense up at the sound of all that leather hitting the couch. And when I felt the impact in my arm my heart started pumping vinegar and gasoline into my viens. When mom and dad went to my aunts’, to the grocery store, or drove into Compton, I was supposed to whoop the kids, and be The Man. So there I was in the closet, terrified of the sound of shuffling feet, clutching a VHS Tape full of lesbian pornography. The Man.

But nothing happened. Then I heard a child’s chuckle, and looked out of a crack in the closet door and saw my little brother and my youngest sister laughing “He…heah…heah… he ran into the closet! He thought we was daddy and momma!”

“Get out of here!!” I yelled, dropping my voice to an awkward and uncomfortable register, stumbling over a pair of my father’s work boots and my mother’s heels when I came tumbling out of the closet. “I’m gon’ whoop your asses” I yelled, trying to sound like my father. They took off and ran down the hall. I reached down looking for a belt and picked up one of my mom’s purses and ran after them, swinging it like a bag-lady chasing away pigeons. I only stopped to stuff my father’s tape back under the dresser. Then I took off after them swinging the purse, screaming “I’m gon’ get you…”. My brother wasn’t even trying to outrun me, he was just trying to piss me off. So I swung the purse around and caught him in the leg and he let out the kind of sound you make when your hand gets slammed in the door, the little actor. I kept swinging the purse and missing until both of them banked into my middle sister’s room and tried to slam the door on me. I shoved my way into the room and looked at them. My gawky awkward little brother, with his buck teeth and bowl cut, he looked so much like my stepdad, only painted with a softer brush, with a rounder head and all the hardness sucked out his brown eyes. And my sister with her fluffy crooked pig tails, the hair my mother had to brush for her, the hair she wouldn’t brush herself unless I bribed her with chips…I wasn’t going to beat them.

Dogs and orangutans have somethings in common. When an alpha ape or the alpha dog go too far and beat on a beta too frequently, the beta doesn’t automatically go after next poor sod below them on the ladder, they go for the one who shakes the tree or pisses in the wrong spot or snaps at the wrong bit of food. Its not personal, and they don’t beat the kinder. So I was standing there with a purse, swinging it like a bludgeon, and just like that we were playing. It was easy, when my parents were gone and we weren’t being bad, for us to float from violence to fooling. So, I made my Hulk face and started hitting my brother with the purse. My brother was the worst liar in my family and I’ve suffered for it before. Every time I hit him with the purse he’d tense up and wince. A couple of my swings went wild because I was herding him into a corner, grazing him and trying not to really land a hit. I thought if I did, my brother’s temper would come charging out of him, like it did when I changed the channels too fast when we watched TV.

That’s when I felt the hand on my neck, my feet left the ground and for a moment the whole room went sideways and I was in the air. I could see my legs out in front of me like a pair of kite tails, and it got so hard to breathe so suddenly that I thought I was dreaming. Then I looked down and saw my father’s forearm tensed like a horse leg and his hand around my neck, I could feel the weight of his fingers like five thick vines growing into my neck, burrowing in, forcing the air out of my lungs. Then I was flying for a while, until my face met the floor and I skidded across the carpet. When I looked up my brother was crying and my sister was just staring up at my dad. I couldn’t hear because something was filling my ears, sounding like an inky miasma. But I could see everything so clearly it made my stomach collapse like an empty plastic bag. Dad’s face was bleeding out an impotent rage, the kind that grows sharp and sour with every word you speak to calm it. More bitter with every apology, more toxic with every please my little brother spoke. He was trying to tell him something but I couldn’t hear him, but I could read my dads lips because I had heard the words so many times “What the fuck y’all do’in!? What the fuck is wrong with y’all!?” so I stood up because I knew what was coming next, I knew the dance; a beating was coming and my brother and sister didn’t deserve one. This was another shade of communal violence: when one of us got whipped, just being in proximity was enough for condemnation, belts don’t have eyes, or brains and if you were there in its path-you were next. You edged toward the door way like the eye of God was on you, accusing, reproachful, and huge and all you wanted was to get away from it and hope that what was happeening wouldn’t find you.

This is where things got pear-shaped. I got up and did the dumbest thing I could have done. The thing that always spoiled the order of things, that shits all over the pecking order of the beatings; I stood between my brother and my father. I was still off my steps from my trip across the room and to the ground, but I started to hear again so I started talking. “Dad dey was umm just playin it was me. Dey was just playin…,” then he hit me in the ear with the purse and the inky vacuum came back and I couldn’t hear a thing but I saw my dad reach down and pick up the pink purse. Just before he hit me with it my hearing came back again.

“What, you think this is funny!?” Dad swung the purse and hit me on the shoulder and it stung so much I screamed. Mostly I was surprised, It was just an empty purse, I thought and wondered how much stronger my dad was than me, but my wondering stopped when the purse met my cheek and head and I went down on my knees and I was screaming then, as my dad kept swinging the purse cracking me over the back and head and my siblings were crying and screaming and trying to find a way out of the room and I realized this was the worst whoppin’ I ever had. The worst they’d had ever seen. I was on the ground and I couldn’t move. Then it stopped.

“Damn,” my father’s voice had changed. Not softened, but fractured, afraid, and I couldn’t tell why, but I got scared. I was already scared, “Oh shit I’m sorry!” and I felt his big hands on me holding me up like a baby, one hand holding my head and neck, and I couldn’t move, and his hands felt so big, then I realized they were wet…then I saw the blood covering his hands and I went rigid like a branch, and my head rolled as I tried to hold it up like a drunk fumbling for his keys. I reached to touch the back of my head, I felt this sting like a knife jammed into my skull and I started shaking. “Oh fuck…Gina?!” I heard someone say.

My dad yelled for my mom and then I saw the look on his face, too confused to be forgiven and too scared to know what to do, then my mom came in.“What the ‘ell did you do to my baby!?” she yelled and I saw the pitiable impotent look on my father’s face and he started shaking harder.

“I…I didn’t do nothin’,” my poor dad said, “I just hit him with the purse…" Then he picked up the offending accessory, and there was a thumb-sized dot of my blood on the bottom, and when he turned it upside down three big D batteries fell to floor, clump, dump, thump.

“You hit my baby with them Batteries!” mom said.

“I didn’t know dey was in there!” Dad said then asked me “did you know!?” and I tried to shake my head but it hurt so much. I thought he was going to hit me again. But that had left him, and before I knew it my head was under the tub’s faucet, I could feel the burn on the back of my head as the cold water flushed the wound and I saw the water swirling down the drain, my blood cutting red ribbons in this perfect spiral and I realized how much I was crying. I could hear my parents arguing. My mother blaming my father for hitting me then my father blaming her for not stopping him. After a while it all started to bleed together and I could hear the wounded hollow tone of my father’s voice and I didn’t want to see him or have him near me. And then I realized watching the blood run down the drain that what I wanted was to see my little brother, the one I hit with those batteries.

When I came out of my room a little later everyone was sitting in the living room watching T.V. It was so quiet I wanted to go back to my room and hide but then I saw my brother trying not to look at my father and my father trying not to look at anyone and I got scared of what might happen if I jumped back into my room, back into my artificial womb. I walked out and sat between them holding a rag against my head then my dad said “What you got your period?” and looked at me with these eyes that knew what a stupid thing that was to say, eyes that knew I should be angry and disgusted; pathetic desperate eyes, so I smiled and forced a giggle. When he reached over and grabbed me I frosted up again and expected him to start trying to wrestle with me again, expected to see more of my own blood but he started hugging me, then I realized he was crying into my neck; cold confused tears that were so senseless to me. I was scared but I wouldn’t pull away. Then he said, “You know I love right ? Like you was my own son, right?” I didn’t know if he was telling me or reminding himself. Then all of the sudden he got up “y’all watch T.V. I’m gon’ watch it in my room.” Suddenly I wondered if I had stashed the tape well enough, then I saw my little brother.

When I think of my stepfather as a boy, I only remember one story. His father was a farmer, the lazy kind, which meant he spent the morning shoveling pounds of pig shit, weeding patches of yams and disciplining kids. My stepfather told me about how one day after the pens were clean and the gnarls and barbs were pulled from the ground and the fence was straightened and the old diesel plow was oiled, my stepfather and his brothers and sisters hands were playing in the front yard. Their hands worn, cut, and bloody from all the work they’d done. My grandstepfather sat on the porch watching the kids play with bloody hands smoking his handrolled cigarettes. The front yard was a yellow mess of sun baked grass in the summer and with clumps of nearly dying crabgrass and little hills dirt where fire ants thrived in the heat. Their father sat and smoked his ciggarette, and when the cigarette was done he would flick the burning butt out into the yard, into the thick blind cover of dying grass and sand, and then he would call out to one of his kids, “hey com’ere”. Waving them over toward the porch and the lit cigarrete butt that he’d just thrown, and when it looked like his child was going to pass up the burniing butt he’d say "stop, now take a step to your right…….". I’ve thought about this scene so many times; this old man had done this to these kids before so they knew what was coming next, the pricking sharp-ridged pain of burnt nicotine against the sole of the feet, but they kept walking like there was something worse waiting for them on that porch and in that house if they didn’t walk. stepping toward the heat, stepping toward the burn. They kept walking, and eventually their worn brown little feet would find the butt and be seared and they’d scream and the old man would laugh. What was terrible enough to make a child keep walking, and why would someone keep watching?

My brother was staring at the T.V, staring through it, and I couldn’t think about the porn tape in my dad’s room or my bleeding head or batteries or crying adults, just him, my little brother and how he wouldn’t look at me and how he was getting used to this. So I sat down next him, rubbed his head, grabbed the remote and said, “We were playing before dad came. You know that, right?”

“Yeah” he nodded, but his voice sounded so small. I felt a twist in my chest so tight I thought I was having an asthma attack. I was really starting to sound like my stepdad. It felt like a hand had slipped into my chest and squeezed my lungs to keep the words from coming out like, part of me wanted to stop the words from coming, because if I said them I couldn’t take them back. Because I would have to let my brother know that his father was wrong, and broken, and had no idea that he was broken.

“You know we don’t have to be like that, right?”

“Yeah” he said, then snatched the remote from my hand and said “let’s watch Killer Klowns From Outer Space!” and we did. I hope he remembers me more than those clowns now.