One day Johnny invited me to a Saturday birthday party for one of his classmates who lived on another ranch adjoining ours; I didn't know him but Johnny got the OK. The invitation was unexpected, and ultimately I regretted accepting it. The prospect of cake and ice cream and excitement was fine, but I found out soon enough that my parents had decided to not drive me to the ranch house where the party was being given and pick me up afterwards. Instead, they expected me to ride my bike, although I'd never been to the ranch, much less to the ranch house. So Johnny drew me a map.
The part of central Texas where we lived was low hills and rocks, plus extreme heat in the summer. So by the time I'd ridden my bike to the ranch where the party was, by the back way following Johnny's map, the sun was high and the August heat was extreme. Now, "rocks" on ranches where we lived are too small to be boulders but large enough to be immovably embedded in the ground, turning the parallel paths considered roads on ranches into very uncomfortable rides except for very comfortable vehicles. Many hills are too low for the roads to wind around them, so it's up one side and down the other. Going up a hill on a bicycle was hard not just because of gravity but because the embedded rocks were best avoided. And gravity could be exploited going down a hill only by riding so fast that the embedded rocks were frequently unavoidable, making the ride so bumpy that keeping the bike upright was a challenge When Johnny's map directions became obviously inapplicable to my physical surroundings, I realized I'd missed so many unmarked forks in the road that I'd become totally lost. With each hill, I resolved to continue past the next one, and if I didn't see the ranch house from there, I'd go back by tracing each fork's handle, as it were.
Jim and Johnny and David had dark black, curly blond, and indescribable orange hair respectively, and their hair colors fit their personalities. (Many years later my sister told me they were all three adopted.) Jim was taciturn, Johnny was always laughing and extroverted, and David was, well, David was just strange and quiet little David. Our different ages and distinct personalities pretty much left Johnny and me sharing the most times together of the five of us -- exploring, competing, playing catch-up games on horseback, fishing, and on and on. But the idyll ended when I was ten years old in 1952 and our family moved from the ranch to San Antonio, in order for my sister and me to go to good schools and because the polio scare had passed. And we never saw our erstwhile neighbors again. But five years later, I was getting drunk on beer at a typical Texas-teen party in Austin, and I heard the last thing I'd ever hear about Johnny.
Evidently Johnny had gone to a good school too, in Austin, a special school for boys with "behavioral problems." One of the guys at the party had also gone to the school, and he heard me mention Johnny's name in connection with it. He butted into the conversation I was having and asked me if I'd heard what Johnny did last semester. I said I hadn't. "He hanged himself," the guy said, "He was a queer, you know."
3.
The second and last time I remember that I saw my father cry was when we were living in San Antonio. I was fourteen and I'd finished my second year at a military school after leading my class both years in scholastics, military leadership, a sport, and everything else I was interested in. Two years before, dad had transferred me from a public school I'd been attending because I was only an average student there, and he decided I needed the discipline.
I remember seeing him cry a few minutes after he hit me with his belt for the last time. There had been an argument at the dinner table, and I got up while it was in progress, went to my room upstairs and slammed the door. Then I heard him coming up the stairs, and then he was standing in the doorway taking off his belt. A while later, he came back to my room and said he wanted to talk to me downstairs. In the dark guest room, I saw his figure sitting on one of the twin beds and I heard him weeping. I sat on the bed beside him and he talked to me. I might have expected him to apologize for what had just happened, but he didn't, and he didn't apologize for the years of hitting my sister and me that went before. Instead, I only remember him saying through the tears, "Son, you can be anything in this world you want to be..."
For almost my entire life since I stopped feeling so horrible in my twenties, I'd thought that dad's hitting irreparably damaged my self-respect. And I still think the hitting predisposed me to depression. But I've identified two decisions -- a good one overlooked and a bad one made -- which I believe triggered my horribles in the summer of 1960, and I've stopped thinking about what being hit when I was growing up had to do with who I am. But for more than twenty years now, I've returned to thoughts of whether all the hitting damaged my mother -- the physically uninjured witness who didn't intercede. She never intimated to my sister or me that she had tried to convince dad to not hit us, or even that she had disapproved of it. In fact, I remember my mother coldly telling my father about our misbehaviors during the day, when he came home from work, and then him coldly whipping us. But if my mother had opposed him, how could she ever have talked about it to us as long as we lived together as a family, which we did as long as she lived?
No, mother made her deal with the devil in the 1930's when she abandoned the path to becoming a brilliant woman journalist to marry a rich man's son. And when I asked her why daddy did all that hitting -- when I was home from law school and we were sitting alone in the living room one day -- she told me that he was tormented by tinnitus, incessant ringing in the ears. So of course I construed her reticence about her role in the punishments as continuing complicity. Wasn't it just that?
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