Trick or Treat

The Halloween when I was 12 is the one I remember almost as vividy as if it happened last year. I don't cherish the memory, and indeed, I do not dwell on the memory. It simply surfaces from time to time, like a corpse from the dark depths of a northern lake. PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is like that--intrusive memories of trauma blotting out the light of the current day like a cold black cloud taking the sun hostage. I know how to deal with those kinds of memories now, and to not be taken hostage by them anymore, as much as I can. But they still appear time and time again, triggered by dates or scents or offhand remarks. The mind is like that. I don't know why. I don't think I even need to know why. I am simply thankful to have been given tools for dealing with them. Or, in this case, not so much tools as.... weapons.

The Halloween I was 12 marked a turning point. I really wasn't a little kid anymore, content with trick or treating. Complicated emotions, driven by pubescent sexual desire, swirled inside me, and I was ready for some action. My childhood friend Bernadette was always a willing partner in crime. So she and I hatched a plan to walk the mile into town where the real fun was--kids throwing eggs and toilet paper and spraying shaving cream. We would be back in plenty of time and no one would even know we were away.

And so off we went. It was a straight flat walk into town on the Old Post Road. Took 20 minutes. And there were lots of kids we knew there, having a riot of a time. By the time I noticed my step-father's leaf green Scout pulling up beside me, I was a mess of eggs and shaving cream. My long hair was tangled with it. I saw his face in the driver's side window and he wasn't happy. No, not one bit. I got in the Scout, dutiful as a dog. I remember seeing Bernadette's dad somewhere out there too. Where they got the idea we were in the village, I will never know. Why they decided to look for us--maybe we stayed a little later than we should have? Could be that. I honestly don't remember, I just remember our revels in the village as a wild ecstatic blur of activity lit by street lights, a crazed frenzy of youthful energy let loose. Slightly demonic in its intensity. Halloween, after all.

We got home. Maybe I was berated and verbally abused all the way home, or maybe I sat there in a glowering silence, a silence full of doom and tension. I don't remember. What I remember next is being in the bathroom, preparing to take a shower, surveying the damage that was my hair, wondering how I would ever get all the tangles, caked with raw egg and shaving cream, out. The bathroom had 2 doors, one from the hall, and one from my parent's bedroom. My step-father was in a wheelchair as a result of breaking his back in a drunken driving accident when he was 21. He needed the door from the bedroom for his own privacy. The nature of his debility demanded some, to a kid, particularly disgusting bathroom rituals. That night, he also used it to ambush me. I was half undressed when suddenly he threw the door open and charged like a crazed bull into the small bathroom. Obviously, I was trapped. He grabbed a hold of me and beat the living shit out of me. I was held by his crazy strong arms as he pummelled me relentlessly, venting what felt like the rage of years on me. I had never been beaten so savagely before or since. Probably that's why this memory never dies. It remains as a protective spectre--Hamlet's ghost-- to keep me from ever getting into that position again, to never be so trapped, to never be so helpless. Do you know what it feels like to be so helpless? To be unmercifully beaten while being held so that there is no chance of escape? Let me speak a gross understatement here: it doesn't do good things to your mind.

Finally the storm of violence subsided, and the wheeled monster withdrew, and I was a crumpled little heap of bruises and wild hair and soiled clothing sobbing on the floor. I vaguely remember thinking Bernadette was not suffering such treatment at her house, oh no she was not.

At some point, finally, my mother came in, like a ministering angel, and she helped me as I sobbed, partly in pain, but mostly in rage. Because that was the night that marked a transition in me. No longer was I the child, heartbroken and sobbing after being beaten because I must have been very bad, right?, to deserve such punishment? No, this was a whole other level of torment, and I saw it for the abuse it was, and I was angry.

It was not that being physically abused was an unfamiliar event for me. For example, my step father was left handed, and I was made to sit at his left side at the dinner table so that he could crack me one across the face if he needed to. He usually felt he needed to in response to something I had said; I had what he called a 'smart mouth', which really meant I spoke the truth--then and now, he never broke that in me-- and he never liked that. Abusers usually don't--truth is certainly not their friend! He used those hands to abuse me in other ways too, to leave his dirty psychic mess all over me, but that is, most assuredly, another story.

At first, my mother cooed sympathetically as she helped me disentagle my clothes and finish undressing, as she helped me untangle my hair and start to wash. She started out by telling me we had to wash out the egg with cool water because warm water would make it cook. She then said she wanted me to understand how worried they had been about me, how anything could have happened to me out there. She softly insisted, "Your father was so worried about you, about something bad happening to you, he would be heartsick if something bad happened to you."

She continued on in this manner, all gentle tenderness and concern, and I felt momentarily soothed and relieved that there was some mercy in the universe after all, perhaps. But as the mess began spiralling down the drain, both her tone and the subject matter began to change. Accompanied by the ragged rhythms of my sobbing, she began to tell me it was my responsibility to go out there and apologize to him. Yes, go out there and say you are sorry to him, sorry that he beat you.

Apologize? To him? What kind of mind fuck was this? Apologize to him because he beat me ruthlessly, after ambushing me and trapping me? To him, who was so worried "something bad would happen" to me? Well, something bad had happened to me all right, but obviously she was not seeing the exact nature of what that something bad was, or who, precisely, had perpetrated it.

And so, what at first felt like maternal comfort became a whole other level of messing with my mind. I should go apologize to him, oh yes I should, she reiterated as I responded in angry defiance. I should go apologize to him because someday he would be dead and I wouldn't be able to then. Even in the midst of my own pain and confusion, I could hear this was not me she was talking about anymore. She was talking about herself (actually, with her, it is always all about herself, but, another story, another story) and her own failed relationship with her father. Because now she was crying too, tearfully insisting I go out and apologize to him before it was too late. She was pleading with me to go do this thing before it was too late. Too late? It will never be too late, I thought then. Mind you, throughout this emotional torture session, flying so fast on the heels of the beating, she was helping me wash, soothing the bruises and welts in my flesh. Crying out her own mess and pain. She soothed my battered body as she messed with my heart and mind. Do you know how hard it is to get free from such twisted wreckage?

Finally my body and hair were cleaned up. I was rigid with anger as I walked out that bathroom door. I was determined to not give in to this many-faceted torture. I looked to my left and saw him in the living room. He had hefted his bulk out of the wheelchair and into his recliner. Cigarette smoke coiled from his left hand like a lazy silvery snake up past his face where I could see his eyes were red-rimmed and wet. And I knew as well as I knew my name that he wasn't crying because he was sorry for what he had done to me. Oh no. He was crying because he felt sorry for himself, and that I was supposed to see him and feel sorry for him too--alcoholic wreck of a man that he was, cut flower in soiled water, slowly dying as each year went by (he would be dead at 40 in 6 years). Self pity! The alcoholic's balm! Feeling sorry for him was also the implied message of my mother's (no slouch in the alcoholism department herself) badgering of me in the bathroom. It was not in my heart to accept that warped kind of compassion. Not then, and not now. Apologize to him, my ass. Feel sorry for him--the thought disgusted me. I looked at him through that disgust and went into my room and closed the door.

Trick or Treat. Scary monsters out there. Watch out, children! Scary monsters in here.



Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai