"I'm not attacking you, Matt. You know that. You're just the messenger here. I take it you told Steve because he seemed all weird when he sent me up here."
"Yeah," he replied, "I told him because he got a little huffy and told me you don't have time to socialize on Labor Day weekend. He said anything I wanted to say could be said sitting at the bar or on the Tuesday after Labor Day. So I told him and he changed his tune right away. He really cares a lot about you, Rowdy. I'm glad you have such friends."
I nodded and sat silent for several minutes while Matt watched tennis on television. As if in a trance, I sat and stared at Matt's bare feet, seeing them and not seeing them. In any case, his feet were beautiful, the kind of feet you see on a man in a magazine advertisement. I almost laughed when I realized I was avoiding thinking about my parents' awful deaths by focusing on a man's bare feet. Freud would have had field day with that one. Finally I stood to leave.
"Look, can we get together a little later maybe? I need to be alone for awhile."
He stood and hugged me tight, patting me on the back. I was surprised because we hadn't been that close.
"I'll be here and I'd really like to spend some time with you. It's been a long time."
"Good, I'll see you later then."
I left the room quickly and took the elevator to the lobby. I put my Nikes in my locker and walked onto the beach. It was 5:20 PM and the beach crowd was thinning. Most of the vacationers had either gone to their rooms to get ready for supper or were already eating. Still, the beach was more crowded than it was at this time normally. I saw a few girls -- and guys -- giving me the eye as I slowly walked toward Pier 60. I walked in the surf, the water cooling my feet as they sunk in the wet sand. When I walked, and sometimes when I ran, I liked to do it in the surf for the added weight pull toughening the workout. Now it was comforting.
I'd hated my father intensely and had probably hated my mother even more because I had absolutely no respect for her. I hated her for allowing him to abuse me year unmercifully after year without one damn word of support from her. We'd followed my father around the world as he moved from base to base. He liked Germany and France and along the way I'd become fluent in their languages, something that arrogant bastard had never even made an effort to do. Growing up I admired him as all children admire and love their parents. Even with as my hatred of him grew I still had a grudging respect for him, I suspect because of his impeccable military skills and the fact he was a war hero. My father had always slapped me around but I really learned my hatred for them starting around age eight when suddenly my parents began to pressure me and became very involved in my education. It wasn't a parental interest in seeing me do well. It was a fetish. My father was a high ranking officer everywhere we went; eventually culminating in his being named a general after his experiences in the first Iraq War, then the second Iraq invasion, and the Afghanistan war.
Dad and Mom were obsessed with the idea that I had to be the best at everything; shine for Dad to make him look good, bragging to his cronies that his son would follow the family tradition at West Point. I did well in school from the beginning but I was considered a goof off with an attitude that started with the first whipping from my father. One of my teachers called him and told him I wasn't paying attention in class and hell split open. School expectations, course levels, and teacher skills vary from base to base, country to country. Some are excellent and some are god awful. I'd spent my kindergarten, first, and second grade years schooled in Okinawa. The school was wonderful and challenging although I didn't realize it at the time. Dad was transferred and I had a new school for third grade. It wasn't bad but it wasn't good either.
By the time we arrived at Fort Bliss, I was fifteen and in the tenth grade. I'd moved through five schools in four countries and Dad had requested Bliss because he was born in El Paso. It was going to be his final station before his retirement. Fort Bliss is located in two states, most in New Mexico but part in western Texas near El Paso. We'd spend a lot of off time in El Paso because Dad's sister, Arleen, lived there with her two daughters Lena and Nancy. Both were older than me, Lena seventeen and Nancy nineteen. Arleen was seven years older than Dad and had been divorced four times. It wasn't really clear to me why Dad wanted to retire to El Paso. He'd been gone so long he didn't know anyone and he and Arleen were not even close. It was easy to understand why. She was a total bitch, as were her daughters, and with Dad being a controlling bastard, civil conversation was rare. Mom was always such a whining whipped dog her opinion didn't matter to either of them.
It was hard for a child to understand why his mother won't defend him against the abuse and cruelty dished out anyone. Mom never once tried to interfere as my father beat and punished me. Instead she actually went along with it, sometimes slapping my face when she knew I'd done something that my father would be angry about when he came home from work in the evening. He treated me like shit, beat me all the time, and her only response was a milquetoast whine that I needed to not upset my father. In retrospect I realized that I shouldn't have expected anything else. If she'd protested, he'd have knocked her to the floor. The only time I saw her seem really happy was when my twin sisters were born and even then I couldn't understand why. Why would she be happy to bring two female children into the world for him to beat and abuse? He never missed the chance to say the only purpose in life for a woman was to stay barefoot and pregnant. Mom would've had a baby every year if her ovaries had worked. The twins were born because the planets were aligned right in the heavens. Or maybe were misaligned, I should say. They had to be my father's children because Mom was too chicken shit to have ever had an affair.
My father would always make me pull my pants down so he could whip my naked ass with his belt and I'm not ashamed to say I cried a lot. If fucking hurt, not to mention it was humiliating, particularly after puberty began. When I first started to sprout pubic hair, Mom walked past during one of my ass beatings. She stopped to stare at my crotch and commented that I'd begun to grow hair 'down there' and I needed to be more of a man. 'Stop crying and take the punishment I deserved like a man' she said. The girls were born when I was twelve and the hair started the same year. I vowed to myself that I'd be out of that hell hole before the girls were old enough to see my naked penis swinging in the breeze while my bare ass was getting beat. The only thing that was funny to me out of the beatings was a time when I was fourteen and my mother passed by during a session. She commented to my father that it looked like I took after the men in her family because my dick was already bigger than his. I proceeded to get an even worse beating as he took his frustration out on me. When he finished with me, he beat Mom with his fists and broke a rib and her nose.
When he beat Mom she always had to go to a doctor and hospital off base to avoid bringing attention to Dad's brutality. There were medical records of her beatings in every city we'd ever been in and Mom was too stupid to use a false name, something Dad never realized. It all came to the breaking point the week of Halloween. I don't deny I did wrong or that I deserved to be punished. It was the nature of the punishment that pushed me over the edge.
My father never really gave a damn about religion. Why should he when he was one of Lucifer's hell hounds on earth? But he played the game; the chaplains were important to him to help him exert his control over the military personnel. The farce he maintained with the chaplains gave him the guise of a god fearing man who was a patriotic zealot. My biology teacher was married to one of the chaplains and she was a fucking ignorant redneck. As would be expected, she not only didn't teach the theory of evolution, she ranted against it like a madwoman. One who believed in evolution not only faced certain damnation but needed to be 'cleansed by the blood of the lamb' to avoid contaminating other innocent minds. She invited her husband to the class to shed more light on the correct theory of divine creation. I've alluded to the fact I'm smarter than the average guy, not a MENSA member, but far from an idiot. With the luxury of hindsight I know now I was an idiot that day.
Chaplain Moses swept into the class like he was the personal messenger of the heavens. He proceeded to preach a load of bullshit while his good wife Dorothy sat behind her desk glaring at us like an avenging angel. I must have had a wild hair up my ass that day because I decided to take him on. I pointed out scientific evidence of the earth's age, dinosaur skeletons, etc. supported Darwin's theory of evolution, and I proceeded to whip the class into a total frenzy of questions the good chaplain couldn't answer. He left the classroom in a rage and when I got home that evening from football practice my father was waiting for me. He tied me to the headboard of the bed in my room, completely naked, and beat me until could see blood on the sheet beneath me. I was screaming and crying because he used a cane he'd gotten on a trip to Singapore. I stayed out of school until the following Tuesday recovering from the beating. And Mom? She added to the punishment by refusing to let me eat for two days, wailing about her wicked child from hell. She did this more for the effect it had on my sisters who had turned three. They were terrified of me, thinking I really was from the devil.
When I returned to school it was to a triumphant Dorothy Moses who immediately asked me to tell the class what I'd learned about divine creation. I kept silent and she wrote me up for insubordination. That same day two of my more criminal classmates urged me to join them in seeking revenge on the Moses family. During sixth period P.E. the three of us slipped out of the gym and I poured sugar into Mrs. Moses gas tank while David scratched the paint with a nail and Howard scratched the windshield with a diamond ring he'd stolen from his mother. Typical of my luck, Magdalena Moses, daughter of the chaplain, walked into the parking lot to put her books in the car before she went to cheerleading practice, something that was a serious infraction of school rules. Students were forbidden in the parking lot during school hours and now the spawn of Satan had caught us.
Within fifteen minutes David, Howard, and I were in the principal's office with the accusing Magdalena and her mother. Naturally, Magdalena also being in the parking lot was 'not an issue' when I pointed it out to the principal. Fifteen minutes later Dad strode into the office, his face like thunder. He ripped his belt from his waist and in one sudden move pulled my gym shorts and jock strap to my ankles. I still had scabs from the previous week all over me as he began to scream and beat me. My eyes immediately went to Magdalena who was watching my penis flop around. Her eyes rose to meet mine and I could see the laughter in her eyes, the total scorn for me. Mrs. Moses smirked at me and occasionally nodded her head as if to say she was enjoying seeing me get my just desserts. Howard and David were in total shock, tears streaming down their cheeks in fear of Dad. The principal and everyone else kept their mouths shut, afraid to take on a general whose command also included the base schools. Suddenly Dad's belt buckle connected with my testicles and I almost fainted, the only thing that ended the beating because I collapsed to the floor. While on the floor, Howard's father and David's mother came into the office. My humiliation was complete. Dad kicked at me and ordered me to pull my shorts up and go home to await further punishment, part of which would be to get a job to pay for the damage to Mrs. Moses' car.
I wasted no time getting out of that office. I grabbed my bike and raced toward home without stopping for my books, my regular clothes, or anything because I knew what I had to do, what I was going to do. I went into the garage and got a rope and a chair. It took me only a couple of minutes to create a noose and throw the rope over a limb of the tree in our front yard. I stripped naked and jumped onto the chair, determined that when my body was discovered everyone who saw it would see the evidence of the abuse I'd suffered for years. Matt lived next door to us and I heard him yell as I kicked the chair out from under me. Looking back, I'm surprised that I felt no fear as I lost consciousness. I tried to jump up and down, to increase the pressure to break my neck. I didn't break my neck but I created a rope scar that will be there until I die.
As the world grew dark to me I felt only relief to be leaving it. Instead I awoke to find myself in a bed in the base hospital with a nurse checking my vital signs. My first words to her were regret that I hadn't blown my head off with my father's twelve gauge shotgun but that I'd take of that as soon I was released and sent home. The nurse totally freaked out at my statement. About that time my parents walked into the room, Mom looking like a whipped dog and Dad was angry I'd embarrassed him. I couldn't take it anymore and I began to scream hysterically that I was going to blow my brains out because I was tired of the years of his abuse. I screamed at the nurse and asked if she was fucking blind to the scars on my back and ass from continuous beatings. I saw anger in her face as she ran from the room. About half an hour later two civilian policemen came into the room and ordered my parents to leave. They examined my back as I told them how Dad beat us, how I feared for my sisters, how my mother was as guilty as him, and told of all the civilian doctors and hospitals over the world where she had emergency room records. I also told them I didn't expect them to do a goddamn thing because Dad was a general.
