The Beating

I enjoy listening to podcasts, especially on road trips.  Some of my favorite podcasts are the ones where you get to hear personal stories of all sorts of people.  Marc Maron interviews celebrities in his "WTF" podcast; a recent one was with singer/songwriter James Taylor.  It was a good interview and covered Mr. Taylor’s bout with depression and his decades-long struggle with substance abuse. One of the things that stuck with me was his description of how his family “came off the rails.”  My own family did something like that too.

Both of my parents were alcoholics. Mom got hooked on Valium a couple of times.  She suffered from depression and had body image issues. But the point when the family came off the rails seems to be centered around Brother and his troubles.

Dad’s parenting style grew out of the way that he wanted to be treated as a kid. He fought with his mother about curfew and such and never felt like he needed a lot of parental monitoring. He really wanted to just be left alone.  He says that he left us alone because that was how he wanted to be treated, but another side to that may be that didn’t know how to be a role model.

I had a pretty good head on my shoulders and a good internal moral compass and Dad's approach, while leaving me lonely and sad for a relationship with him, worked out okay for me.  My brother, however, could have used a lot more parental involvement.

Brother was seven and a half years older than me.  I don’t know all the details but by fifteen or sixteen he started doing all the wrong things.  Cutting school and doing drugs were bad enough, but he also was stealing from houses in the neighborhood.  It got so bad that he was put in Juvenile Detention.

One of the early incidents that he got in trouble for had to do with a case of 8-track tapes. When the case showed up, he said that he belonged to a friend of his.  He even wrote the friend’s name, address, and phone number in the red felt lining of the case lid.

I only remember one of the tapes in the collection, an album from the Partridge Family.  I used to love listening to that tape.  I would play it in Brother’s 8-track player/radio combo.  I would pull the antenna down to the level of my face and pretend it was a microphone as I sang along with the songs.  I would fantasize about replacing one of the young boys in the group, becoming a member of the band.

But before that could happen, Brother’s crime was found out and all hell broke loose.  To top it off, I was a factor in his being caught.  The case of 8-tracks was stolen from the garage of another teenage boy about Brother’s age.  This kid was pretty sure that Brother had stolen the tapes because Brother had been at his house right before they went missing.  One day as I was walking down the sand road in our neighborhood, the theft victim struck up a conversation with me, eventually asking me about any 8-tracks that Brother had.  I gave him good enough inventory list to confirm that the case and tapes were his missing property.  I guess he told his Dad who then asked my Dad about the 8-tracks and then the gig was up.

I don’t think there were any official criminal proceedings this time, but there was hell to pay.  That evening while Sister, Cousin, and I waited outside, the punishment came. I can remember hearing Mom crying, but above that I could hear Dad yelling at the top of his voice, “Why did you do it?  Why did you do it?” Brother was screaming his replies of, “I don’t know, I don’t know!”  The screaming was punctuated by the loud slaps of the end of a leather belt striking Brother’s bare back.

We kids outside thought Brother was going to die. Sister was crying and Cousin and I were just staring at each other and at the house.

The next day I saw the evidence of the beating on Brother’s back – the bruises and marks that I swear were the clear imprints of the end of a leather belt, even showing the stitching and prong holes from the belt.

That beating was pretty bad and to my knowledge was the worst that happened. But there were other incidents. There was at least one fight between my parents that left Mom with a broken nose. Dad almost punched out Sister when she pushed him too far.  And I was there for one knock-down drag-out fight between Mom and Sister.

Dad rarely spoke of that time period when the family went off the rails. I like to think that he was as embarrassed at how he behaved as he was saddened about the pain that he himself had suffered during those times.  I asked him once about that beating and he blamed Mom, said that she pushed him into it with her screaming and crying.  That may be what happened, but it doesn’t absolve him from responsibility.  It was his hand that delivered the blows to a fifteen-year-old boy needing guidance.

Early on, I learned that I could not trust my parents to always do the right thing, I could not trust them to truly take care of us kids. Of all the things they did to themselves, to each other, and to us kids – that lack of trust was probably the most damaging. But in learning not to trust them, I had a better chance of surviving the relationship with my mind and spirit (mostly) intact.

That beating, is something I'll never forget, but it doesn't have deep emotional connections with me.  If it did, I might have hated Dad or estranged myself from him. The beating wasn’t a direct crime between Dad and me and his trespasses against me never rose to that level. Family members usually get a little more leeway in their trespasses against us before we give up on them.