Family Values

                        Normal?

My daddy was a helluva guy.

When I was growing up

in the late 1940s and early 1950s

he was the only GP in a small town

and did house calls, even at night.

Of course he was the town’s public-health officer

and a member of the volunteer fire department.

He also played viola in a symphony orchestra in the nearby city

and took oil-painting lessons

from an African-American artist,

who later became the first such

to break through in the art biz.

Sometimes he even had time to joke around with me,

which were maybe the best times of my life,

or watch sports with me on TV – once that became possible.

Perhaps most importantly, though,

he was my only protector

from the almost-constant

emotional and psychological abuse

that my self-centred, megalomaniacal, totally insensitive

control-freak virago of a mother directed my way,

and was even sometimes able to protect me

from my relentlessly malicious bully of an older brother,

although that bullying usually happened when he wasn’t around.

Then, when I was nine and he was 46,

he died of a heart attack.

The rest of my childhood

and my adolescence

was far from a piece of cake.

I’d have to be a dolt

to wonder why

I’m so fucked up.

                  Mumsie & Paul

My mother

was a control freak and a megalomaniac.

My mother

was totally self-absorbed and insensitive,

obsessed with obtaining

immediate ego gratification

with a cold-blooded and blindered focus.

My mother found enormous delight

in one-upping and humiliating people

and in putting people down.

My mother

was incapable of kindness.

My mother

aggressively asserted

that every one of her personal taste preferences,

however accidental, random, or whimsical,

was a universally superior value,

and that anyone who didn’t share any one of them,

or who had a preference for one she didn’t share,

was inferior and deserving of mockery and ridicule.

My mother

respected only power

and never let me have any

or even begin to think that I could.

My mother

treated me like shit.

My older brother

took after my mother

in many nasty ways,

and added a few destructive abuse techniques

of his own.

Unlike her reptilian unawareness

of anything but her immediate objectives,

he abused me with gleeful malice

and made it clear that in his opinion

what she was doing to me was hilariously funny.

         More Unavoidable Ignorance

I wonder how my daddy

perceived and conceptualised the phenomenon

of his wife being consistently and inexplicably

horrid and abusive to his innocent, adorably cute –

I have the photos –

post-toddler younger son,

and of how, despite him telling her repeatedly

to let me have peace,

she persisted in tormenting me.

Since he died young, though,

I’ll never know.

        Not Exactly Nostalgia

I learnt early,

from when I was about three onward,

that when my older male sibling –

the word brother having connotations

that don’t apply –

was developing his chops

for his a life-long malicious joy

in putting down and humiliating others

by bullying me relentlessly,

if I went to my mother for help

she would scold me

and make unfair accusations,

such as that I stayed up nights

thinking up ways to aggravate her.

After all, she bullied me relentlessly, too,

thereby indicating to her other son

that I was fair game.

   Gentle Upbringing and Finer Sentiments

It started when I was little,

the dichotomy of me and what I do.

My mother and my so-called brother

made it clear that I,

myself,

was less than shit,

but that what I did had value

if it was useful to them,

entertained them,

or made them look good.

My mother in particular

considered me to be

little more than a thing she owned,

and did so

until she dissolved into dementia.

How could I choose one

from thousands of salient examples of this?

I felt nothing,

one way or the other,

when the abusive old sheila

finally died.

         The Dorsey Brothers

It was when I was about five or six.

My older sibling

had engaged in some act

of outrageous bullying,

tormenting me,

right in front of our mother.

The maternal unit

responded by telling my crying face

that it was normal for brothers to fight,

that it had always been that way,

citing Cain and Abel –

about whom I’d heard –

and the Dorsey brothers –

about whom I hadn’t.

This, she indicated,

made it okay.

My problem with that was

that I was two years younger than he was,

which meant that our fights,

although perhaps normal,

were always

nasty experiences

for me.

Since he took enormous delight

in picking them

all I could do

was to avoid him

as much as I could.

Still do.

               Hattie’s Whorehouse

I must’ve been maybe six or seven

when my mother left my daddy.

He’d just returned home after a few days away

at a general practitioners’ convention.

I remember sitting somewhere

and listening, uncomprehending, to the shouting,

then staying well out of the way

as my mother stormed up the stairs, packed a suitcase,

then stormed back down and out the door.

My daddy explained to my older brother Paul and me

that Mommy was going to be staying in a hotel for a while.

That was okay with me.

Some time later the phone rang.

After a brief conversation

he called us to him and told us

that she’d forgotten her toothbrush

and was returning to get it,

and that when she got home we were to beg her to stay.

I remember sorta cowering at the top of the stairs

while Paul did the begging,

and of course she stayed.

I don’t recall feeling anything at all, one way or another,

except maybe confused.

Her suitcase had still been in the car.

Paul later told me, sniggering, that the fight had been about

her finding a matchbook in Daddy’s things

from a place called Hattie’s Whorehouse.

I don’t know if he made that up,

but I imagine some out-of-town indiscretion was involved.

I didn’t know what a whorehouse was then, anyway.

Forgot her toothbrush!

Yeah, right.

               The Night My Daddy Died

The night my daddy died

I was writing a skit for my Cub Scout den,

a faux radio news story

about some bullshit incident in the bloody Bible, of all things,

when I heard my mother shout, “Jess!”

and saw her run to the phone.

The night my daddy died

I kept letting people in at the front door,

which was also the door to the waiting room

of my daddy’s GP practice at the front of the house –

the ambulance people with their useless oxygen tanks,

first one doctor in a brand-new Packard luxury car

with an outside light on the side panel

between the front and back doors,

the purpose of which I couldn’t suss out,

then other doctors, and finally the undertaker.

They all acted strangely toward me

in different ways.

The night my daddy died

each time someone arrived I flipped the switch

for the light in the new sign out front

that had my daddy’s name and office hours –

until I realised that the bulb had just burnt out.

He wasn’t going to need the sign again, anyhow.

The night my daddy died

my mother thought it would be a good idea

to send me to a neighbour’s house to sleep,

but I walked back home

in my pyjamas and bare feet to my own bed,

even though it was a cold autumn night

the night my daddy died.

The night my daddy died

I lost the only protection, however intermittent,

that I had, and I needed plenty.

The night my daddy died

I hardly understood what had happened,

and had no clue that at nine-and-a-half

whatever slim chance I might have had

to interact realistically with other people

later on

was gone.

                       The Last Thing

As soon as his eyes rolled back into his head

she abruptly cut off her snarling and shouted his name,

then ran to the phone, but it was already over,

and neither the ambulance crew with their oxygen

nor every doctor who could get there

– he’d been popular amongst his fellow GPs –

could do squat except pull long faces

and mutter shit about ‘so young.’

A few days later

I heard her say over the phone,

‘The last thing he heard was my nagging voice.’

I may have been only nine and a half,

but I understood immediately and without doubt

– and I can still hear this clearly in my memory’s ear –

that her tone expressed amazement, nothing more:

no sorrow, no regret, and certainly no remorse.