Confessions of a Sociopath (9 page)

We could have taken our chances on the winding road up to our house, but we decided instead to strike out on our own. For my brother, it may have been an attempt to shame my parents out of their bad behavior, the way that small children frequently run away, hoping to prompt their parents to cry heavy tears of remorse. For me, I wanted to see if we really did need my mom and dad, or if having to be a part of their family was all a fiction we were taught by church and television to keep us doing Saturday chores.

We didn’t really sit down to make a plan for our survival, but we knew we needed supplies, so we walked over to the nearby high school, where our older brother’s car was parked. Jim forced open a window while I reached my skinny arm in to unlock it. Inside was a treasure trove of ski equipment from a not-too-recent ski trip. We collected all of the knitwear for warmth and protection for the days ahead, and since we didn’t have anything to carry the stuff in, we wore all of the clothes in layers upon layers. Each of us put on several hats, pairs of gloves, and jackets, many of which were grossly oversized. We looked ridiculously overdressed for a Southern California late afternoon, piled up with knit caps and gloves, but our minds were on surviving through the coming months.

We were very hungry. The obvious solution was to beg, and we were conveniently dressed for the occasion. We tried to find a piece of cardboard and a marker to make a sign but we only found some college-ruled lined paper and ballpoint pens. (Now when I see a beggar on the street, I often wonder at his resourcefulness in finding a thick permanent marker, a piece of cardboard, and scissors or a knife to cut it into an adequately sized rectangle.) But the street was in a forested, residential
area and there was no traffic to which we could appeal. We just hung out, sweating in our homeless-style knitwear and kicking dirt. I’m not sure how long we stood there before we got bored and hungry and decided to give in.

I never resented my parents for leaving us that day. I don’t know why they left. Maybe they just willed us to disappear from their minds for a little while. If they thought about it at all, I think they believed that the only realistic consequence was that we might have suffered a bit having to make that precarious walk home. If I resented them for anything it was for making us believe that they wouldn’t leave. They bought into the “fiction” that we were a conventional family, the kind that looked out for each other, and that they were conventional parents. It wasn’t that they didn’t love us—I know they did in their own way—but at the same time it’s not like it mattered; their love served no purpose to me. Their good intentions did not make my life any better, rather they seemed only to insulate them from the truth, allowing them to live in a dark world of collusion through which reason and objective facts could not penetrate. Anything that didn’t leave permanent physical scars requiring explanation to their friends and neighbors went unnoticed.

I was raised as the middle child in a
Royal Tenenbaums–
ish family with a violent and shaming father and an indifferent, sometimes hysterical mother. I had a group of four siblings that banded together as if we were a small but well-trained militia. Growing up we had the distinct impression we were better than everyone else, and that the only people who could understand and appreciate us were the other members of our family.

My parents married young, my mom at twenty and my dad twenty-three. My mother had been coerced by her own dysfunctional family into dropping out of college. Once back home, she dated aggressively, trying out men who could save her. I am not sure why she chose my dad, but she did it quickly, pinning him down and asking if he was going to propose only a few months after meeting him. She gave birth to my oldest brother in the first year of their marriage and continued steadily to have babies after that.

My father was a lawyer. When he and my mother were dating, he worked for a big law firm, but after that job fell apart he began his own small-time legal practice. He liked to think of himself as a modern-day Atticus Finch, sometimes accepting baked goods as payment from his clients. He was phenomenally unreliable as a breadwinner, and we often came home from a day at the amusement park to find that the power had been shut off, because we were months behind in paying for our electricity. He spent thousands of dollars on expensive hobbies, while we were bringing a handful of oranges from our backyard to school for lunch. The year I was twelve he didn’t file a tax return. He owned his business, hadn’t paid or withheld any taxes all year, and then just didn’t feel like paying them when April 15 rolled around. Of course he got audited and whatever remained of our financial security evaporated.

Much more serious than any financial hardships I experienced, however, my father’s emotional and moral hypocrisy taught me not to trust emotions or anything else that couldn’t be backed up with hard, indisputable fact. If my heart turned hard, I believe it was in response to his maudlin displays of feelings and insincere appeals to virtue.

I am not sure how other people perceived my father, but I know that he tried very hard to present himself as a good man
and a good parent—to the world, to himself, and to us. He liked to think of himself as an admirable person, and almost everything he did was in service to this desire. He had a habit of listing his achievements, as if he carried his own mental dossier in his head for the purpose of recitation: his bar association, his service to clients, his standing in the church, and most important, his philanthropic ventures. He needed the world to know that he was a giving, generous person.

My parents were involved in some of our school activities, particularly the musical ones. Sometimes my dad ran lights for my high school band performances while my mother accompanied the choir members. I think they must have been pillars of our provincial little society. Once we were running late when, in the car on the way to a concert, I realized I had forgotten to bring my instrument. We did not risk their missing their engagements by turning back; instead, I stood in the wings while my mother sang and my father ran the house lights, finding nothing unusual about my parents participating in my school event while I was excluded.

Whenever my father behaved badly, I think he felt more disappointment in betraying that image of himself than for damaging us. It didn’t matter whether he really was this ideal person; it only mattered that he looked that way, even to himself. I could not respect how easily he could deceive himself. We would watch sad movies together as a family, and he would turn to my mother with tears in his eyes, holding out his forearm and exclaiming: “Look! Goose bumps!” He wanted desperately for us to witness evidence of his ability to feel, to be human, and he needed our affirmation of this fact more than anything else.

One day when I was around eight years old I was watching a news special with my father when I made a callous remark
about a disabled child. He asked in horror, “Have you no empathy?” I had to ask him what he meant. I just didn’t know the word, but he acted like I was a monster. The message was clear: His feelings and sense of self-righteousness made him a paradigm of humanity; my lack of feelings made me a blemish on his good name.

It’s hard to overstate how much I loathed him for these very simple things. The very first recurring dream that I can remember was about killing him with my bare hands. There was something thrilling about the violence of it, smashing a door into his head repeatedly, smirking as he fell motionless to the floor, no longer able to parade around the globe in his imagined greatness. It was reassuring to know that I could do it if I needed to, and my dreams were a place where I could practice and plan for it—working out and relishing every detail of quieting him from our lives.

My mother is beautiful. Throughout my childhood, people regularly stopped her in the street and told her so. When she was young, she was very musically talented, or at least we thought so. She taught piano lessons to neighborhood kids, and sometimes it seemed like our family was living off the forty dollars a month she made off each student. For three hours every day after school, kids would rotate through the house, banging on the keys of the family piano, while we would watch television or do our homework. I remember waiting on the staircase for whatever kid to finish, judging his performance and resenting him for making me wait for my mother’s attention. At the end-of-year recitals, I suspected her obvious pleasure had less to do with each child’s individual accomplishments and more to do with her own achievement of coaxing beautiful or semicoherent music out of such unformed things.

My mother loved the spotlight, and it suited her. After my youngest sister was born, my mother got serious about her actress/singer ambitions. She auditioned for and got a supporting role in a professional dinner theater production, and she’d come home glowing from each performance, on a high from the applause and adulation. She appeared in several musicals and concerts after that and became a staple in community productions.

My father especially enjoyed the concerts that involved our church choir, which our friends and neighbors would be guaranteed to attend. However, when my mother’s career took her too far away and therefore had no directly positive impact on his reputation, he would berate her for needing attention and admiration from outside of the family, meaning anyone other than him.

It is true that she did need the attention and admiration from outside of our house. I think it filled in the empty spaces in her, built up a temporary infrastructure to maintain her as a going concern, a functional adult and parent. By the time she pursued her acting dreams, she had already put away her hopes of my father’s becoming a wealthy, successful attorney. Her kids kept multiplying and gaining more volume and mobility, filling her house with chores and responsibilities that further constricted any space available for her own breathing and dreaming. Fictional characters allowed her to take refuge from us and her life, to escape into dialogues and story lines that did not involve scraped knees and stuffy noses. She needed to enjoy the freedom of being a different person for a few nights a week, of being appreciated for aesthetics rather than domestic utility.

Whenever one of us would get sick or hurt, my mother would throw up her arms and cry, “Oh great! Well now what am
I
supposed to do?” And you could see all the ruined plans and missed opportunities for the day flash across her face like ripples in a pond. Every cup of tea she would prepare for you would be accompanied with sighs. Every “Are you feeling better?” was loaded with accusatory urgency, as if your failure to get better was a direct assault on her ability to live freely and well.

When the seasons or plays inevitably ended, she would become deeply depressed—to the point of becoming physically ill. She totaled several cars. I imagine her mind involuntarily searching out happier memories of being onstage or laughing with friends, undeterred by red lights or road signs. Perhaps they were not memories at all that had distracted her, but fantasies of another life she could have had if she had made only slightly different choices.

Her car accidents were like little earthquakes in our lives, reminders of our mortality, and consequently that we (and she) were alive. I respected her little rebellions, even if they meant that I would go hungry for a few evenings or my brother’s head would get split from the impact of the car windshield. I don’t remember ever being angry with her for these things; she was just trying to live, and it is true that our existences, over which she had little control, had interfered with her happiness in countless ways. My dad, of course, would point with recrimination to my brother’s wounded forehead after the accidents. But no one really cared about my brother’s forehead—least of all my dad—and life went on as it always did.

But she did get us soup when we were sick. She fed us and clothed us, as did my father. She put her hand on our foreheads with looks of concern that made wrinkles in her own forehead. She kissed us at bedtime; he did too. And even though I did not, my mother would cry when my father beat me with his belt, for what I can’t remember. And when I graduated from law school,
my father genuinely rejoiced—never had I seen him so happy as that day. I never doubted their love for me, but their love was inconstant. It was sometimes very ugly. It didn’t prevent me from harm; rather, it often caused me harm. The more they felt secure in their love for me, the less they seemed prompted actually to look after my well-being.

I learned a lot from my parents. I learned to limit the emotional effect that other people could have on me. I learned to be self-sufficient. They taught me that love is exceedingly unreliable, and so I have never relied on it.

The question of nature versus nurture for sociopaths is controversial. Arguing “nature” seems to give sociopaths a free pass—being “born with it” somehow makes them more pitiable and acceptable by society. Whereas arguing “nurture” suggests that sociopaths can one day reverse their condition through hard work and therapy, or alternatively recruit more of their kind by abusing children. The answer is more complicated than that, however. Psychologists and scientists believe sociopathy, like almost everything about us, is some combination of genes and environment. While there is a clear heritable link, environment also plays a huge role in triggering those genes and how a particular sociopath develops. According to psychologist and author of
Social Intelligence
Daniel Goleman, if a gene never gets expressed, “we may as well not possess that gene at all,” which raises an interesting question—are you a sociopath if it is coded in your genes but it’s not expressed in your behavior? Sometimes there is no clear answer to how or why a person’s sociopath genes get triggered. As for myself, I have always felt like I am precariously balanced, neither on the right side nor the wrong side of life
but ready at every moment to tip completely to one side or another. I often wonder how different my life would have been if my upbringing were any better or worse than it was.