A Man Named Dave (17 page)

What had made Grandmother the way she was? What was it that had hardened her heart? In her day, I assumed, she had to be rigid just to survive the times. However spiteful she may be, at least she was a self-reliant adult.

Maybe after dedicating a majority of her adult life fighting just to survive as a widow, while raising two children, she was worn down and fed up with how hard life could be. Perhaps that was one of the reasons Father advised me, before I enlisted in the air force, when I had brought up my childhood: “You’d be better off forgetting about it. The whole thing. It never happened.” At that time I thought Father was ordering me to sweep the family secret under the rug. But maybe he was protecting me from taking on a lost cause. Maybe that’s why Father had become a broken man. As much as he might have tried, his efforts were futile. That might be the reason, I assumed, why Grandmother always referred to the past as Pandora’s box – once opened, uncontrollable agony of human suffering would follow. And in the end nothing would change. The back of my head began to throb from the overload.
Maybe,
I told myself,
I just think too much.

“Well,” I announced as I stood up, stretching my legs, “I’m off to see Russell. I should only be gone a couple of hours.”

“Oh no, you’re not!” Grandmother said. “You’re not to go there. I don’t want you seeing her.”

“It’s okay, Grandma,” I calmly corrected, thinking she had misunderstood. “I’m not going to see Mother. I’m only going to see Russell. It’s all worked out; Mother won’t know. It’s okay, honest,” I reassured her.

“You’re not to see her. I forbid it!” Grandmother choked up. “You’re not here. Ron’s away. Nobody knows; I’m all alone. All she does is call – all the time, night and day. I’m surprised she hasn’t phoned today. I don’t initiate anything. She’s the one who gets drunk and goes on and on and on. The hell she puts her own mother through. If she catches a whiff of you being here, there’ll be hell to pay, and I’m the one who’ll have to pay the price!”

All I could do was shake my head. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but in my short visit here, every move, every intention, was being questioned and scrutinized. Once again, I was caught between pleasing Grandmother or visiting my own brother, whom I had not spoken to in ten years. A familiar wave of guilt came over me.

“Grandma,” I consoled, “don’t put yourself through it. If Mother calls and goes off like she does, hang up. It’s that simple. Don’t let her get your goat. Just hang up the phone and walk away. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but let Mother stay in her own little world. Go out and play golf. You’ll be fine. It’s only a game to Mother, if you play along.”

“You don’t know,
no one knows,
the hell she puts her own mother through… .”

It was then that I felt as if I was being manipulated. As a grown, independent adult, I was growing tired of walking on eggs with every subject that was brought up, constantly smoothing the waves while practically begging for permission to do something any normal person could do freely. “I gave Russell my word,” I said. “I have to see him.”

In a heartbeat Grandmother’s tone changed from utter despair to cold vindictiveness. “Russell, Russell, Russell! He’s not worth the time of day. I don’t see any good in it. There’s no need to run off all over the place just to see him. Nothing good can become of it. If you ask me, he’s not worth rubbing two pennies together. That’s what I think. I’m not telling you what to do, but if you want my two cents worth …”

I stood in front of Grandmother, waiting for her to order me to stay. And I would have. Without hesitation – just as I always had when faced with a confrontation that dealt with others’ feelings – I appeased her by shutting up, swallowing my pride, and forgetting about it. After a lapse of silence, I grabbed my motorcycle helmet, saying, “It’s gonna be all right, Grandma. It’s not the end of the world. It’s only a visit with my brother.”

Minutes later I was guiding my motorcycle through a maze of road construction, freeing my mind of deserting Grandmother. I parked the Honda CBX on Mulberry Way, where, because of Mother, Russell had been recently taken in by friends from his church. I walked up the pathway not knowing what to expect. My heart raced with apprehension until a tall young man with freckles flung open the door and greeted me with a quick hug. After a fast round of introductions, Russell hopped on the back of the motorcycle, and we sped off to find a place to get to know each other.

Less than a mile away I parked my Honda next to a pool hall. Stepping inside such a place with one of my brothers was a fantasy of mine – male bonding. I marched up to the long bar, looked the bartender in the eye, slapped the palm of my hand against the bar showing off a twenty, and bellowed, “A beer for my brother, future marine extraordinaire. In fact, a round’s on me! Set us up!”

Dead silence filled the hall. Not accustomed to social drinking, I thought the response was normal, maybe even a sign of respect. I could feel Russell tugging on the sleeve of my shirt. “Hey, man, relax,” I stated in my “I’m king of the world” attitude. “It’s on me.” In reality I was broke. But this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I smiled, patting Russell on the shoulder, thinking of him as another escapee from the asylum. A prisoner of war repatriated. A young man taking the plunge into adulthood. Yes, indeed, a proud moment.

“David?” my brother whispered, breaking my concentration.

“Hey, man,” I cut him off. “Don’t sweat it; you’re eighteen, right? Don’t worry, they’ll serve ya. I know my way around these places. Tip ’em a fin and they’ll keep ’em coming. Come on, man, relax, you only live twice,” I advised, jabbing Russell’s shoulder. For once in my life, I threw caution to the wind and lived for the moment. I was a regular guy with no problems, living outside my shell. “Come on, man, don’t be a killjoy.”

“David, listen to me,” Russell barked, “they don’t serve beer.”

“Get the –” I responded.

“This is Salt Lake City, Utah, get it? No bars.”

As my younger brother educated me on the local customs, the look from the bartender confirmed my blunder. By the man’s intense red face, I knew I had, once again, stepped out of bounds. I muttered to the older man, “I’m sorry. I truly am. I in no way mean to be rude, sir.” Whatever adrenaline I had had moments before ebbed away. I politely asked for two Cokes, left a massive tip, and took a table in the back beyond the hard gaze of the construction workers playing pool.

“As you can see, I’m still working on my social graces,” I confessed.

“Don’t get out much?” Russell chided.

“Bingo,” I said after taking a swallow. It was time to move on to something else. “Man, I just can’t get over it. You look great. So, how’s things?”

“Better,” Russell sighed, “now that I’m out of
that house
!” I instantly picked up on his meaning. “Man, you have no idea what she’s like. I don’t mean to say you had it easy, but believe me, you got off pretty good. It’s become a lot worse.” Russell was ready to pour out his soul. “I tell ya, sometimes she’d chase me around the house. I told her if she ever laid a hand on me … I just couldn’t take it anymore,” he said with a heavy sigh. “If she’s not on some rampage, then she’s constantly complaining about everyone, everything, every second of the day.

“When she’s done with me as a sounding board, Mom makes the rounds to Grandma and even Ron and his wife, Linda. No one’s safe. Ron doesn’t even take her calls, but Mom just doesn’t get it.” Russell paused to collect his thoughts. “And Stan thinks he’s a he-man. I mean, what’s he gonna do? He’s bummed; he knows he needs Mom for financial help, and he hates it. If something ever happened to her, he’d never make it. He really thinks he’s Mr Fix-it. Bob Villa Jr.” Russell smiled.

“I understand,” I replied, thinking of what Grandmother had told me.

“I’m not trying to down him, but some of his electrical wiring projects almost started a few fires in the lower part of the house. Mom, of course, used to think that Ron and I were picking on him, but Stan can’t do half the things Mom thinks he can, and she’s so drunk she can’t tell the difference. Stan just doesn’t understand. It ain’t his fault, but Mom’s smothered him so much.”

“What about Kevin?” I asked.

“He drinks so much Coke all the time that he’s practically lost all his teeth.”

“What?” I asked. “No way!”

“You don’t get it, man. The whole setup: it’s all normal to him. Kevin’s a kid, he’s oblivious. He doesn’t know anything else.”

The more Russell described the situation, the more I realized how on the mark he was.
I was indeed the lucky one.
I had been Mother’s outlet as a child, and once I was taken away, psychologically she became a wounded animal, attacking anyone who crossed her path. The main difference was that by then my brothers were older and knew better than to take Mother’s physical abuse, but unfortunately they had to put up with her psychological torture and self-destructive lifestyle.

And yet it all seemed surreal to me, how Mother could turn her hatred against her other children. Part of me had always feared for them. As a young boy surviving in darkness, I had known what to expect from Mother, to the point that I could predict her moods. Thinking ahead, staying a step or two ahead of her, not only kept me alive and gave me a protective armor, but became a way of life for me. Before Kevin was born, I was never sure if Mother would suddenly strike out against Ron, Russell, or even Stan. Before I was taken away, as I sat on my hands in the basement, I would cringe whenever I heard my brothers come through the front door and walk into the house as if they were entering a minefield. With every step Mother could, without warning, detonate, spreading her shrapnel-like fury in every direction. Weeks prior to my rescue I became so cold inside, I was nearly obsessed with hatred toward Ron, Stan, and especially Russell – who used to be Mother’s little brainwashed Nazi – but at the same time I’d still pray for their safety.

As I sat in front of Russell now, I could not imagine the hellish nightmare Mother had put my brothers through. All I could do now was pray that whatever they had experienced would somehow not carry over into their future. Like a broken record, all I could hear in my head was, “Three down, two to go.” Every one of them had endured more from Mother than I ever possibly could. They were indeed the strong ones, while I was fortunate enough to be rescued.

“If this means anything,” I choked up, “I’m sorry … about everything. That’s no way to live. Maybe, maybe as a kid I drove her crazy. But,” I added with remorse, “she wasn’t always like this.” I smiled at distant memories, before Russell was born. Mommy had been the adoring parent who cherished her children, taking them on springtime picnics in the park, week-long camping adventures under the stars, glorious trips to the Russian River. Mommy had embellished her home with lights, candles, and ornaments during the Christmas season. “There were good times,” I confessed. “And for me, sometimes that’s enough to pull me through.”

“I could never understand what you could have done that was so bad,” Russell said. “All I could remember, since I was a kid, was … you were always in trouble. As if that was why she had to beat you,” Russell softly stated. “And that one summer … I remember when she … she threw the knife at you, right in front of me …”

I flashed back to a memory of Russell as a small child, clamped onto Mother’s leg, gently rocking as she swayed drunkenly. Mother had snatched up a knife, screaming that she would kill me if I did not finish washing the dinner dishes within the specified time. At the time, I knew she didn’t mean it. Afterward, as I regained consciousness in the bathroom, while blood poured from my chest, Mother announced to my dismay that she could never take me to hospital for fear of exposing the secret. Yet I knew what she meant. “It was an accident,” I boomed, startling the group of men around the bar.

Russell shook his head. “No way. It didn’t look like an accident to me.”

How could I tell him that I truly believed Mother never intended to stab me? I assumed, from Mother’s point of view, it was just another twisted game she had played to strengthen her position over me. Mother was a control freak who tried to dominate me through threatening and forbidding tactics. Mother would threaten me any way she could, but because of the bizarre nature of her ongoing progressive “games”, she had to constantly up the ante, at times to the point that she drove me to the brink of death. I went from being no longer a member of “the family” to
The Boy
to a child called
It.
As an adult, I believed Mother used those labels not just to demean me, but to somehow justify her treatment, to protect her psyche from some type of traumatic meltdown, from the fact that she was a mother who was brutalizing her own son.

Russell nervously rubbed his hands. “I asked her,” he said, “about when you were in her bedroom … she was beating you bad. I peeked through the door and … when she marched out, I remember her wiping her hands … like she just finished washing the dishes. I asked Mom why she beat you up, and without blinking she says, ‘Mommy loves It and wants It to be good.’”

I nearly lost my breath as I visualized the scene.

“With Dad gone,” Russell continued, “she’s worse. If Mom’s not on my case, then she’s on the phone with Ron and Linda, or Grandma … it never stops.”

Changing the subject, I interrupted. “Can you get word to Stan and tell him I said hello? As kids, before you were born, before things were bad, we used to be tight. Ron and Stan saved my butt a few times.”

Russell merely nodded. “Okay, it’s just … Stan thinks he knows it all and that he’s the man of the house; you can’t tell him anything.”

“Well,” I said, “tell him I said hi. And can you get word to Ron?”

Russell hesitated. “I can give you his number.”

“I’d rather you give him a call first. I know it sounds stupid, but I’m kinda embarrassed. I don’t know, I mean, I haven’t seen or talked to him in years … with him being married and all… being he’s in the army. I don’t want to do anything that might mess with his head.” My heavy breathing made me stop for a moment to collect myself. “Man, what a family. What a waste. At least
we
made it out alive.”