There was a hard, gray
crack on the wall. There were spiders coming out of the crack and
there was food on the kitchen table that my stepmother had made. It
was alright food, but neither she, nor my father were decent people.
He had a wretched life doing menial labor for the government, and she
was a boring person who did nothing but watch TV all day, and had no
interest in me or my sister. We were nothing to her, and as such we
were treated as nothing. We were fed on a regular basis, but were not
treated as her children. That was fine. We did not treat her as a
stepmother. We treated her as though she was nothing.
I remember one very
specific time. I was about 13, a boy, with the thoughts a boy has,
mostly of sex, but also of video games, as they come. It was one
night, before the rise of the internet, when there was a sexy TV show
playing. There were two TVs in the house. One in the “master”
bedroom, and one in the living room. She would not go to her husband
in their bedroom, with their own TV, to leave me to my devices in the
living room. I became angry, as boys are wont to do, and yelled at
her. I yelled because I wanted my privacy, and they would not allow
me to have a TV in my own room. It seems such a petty thing now, with
WiFi all around, and individual smartphones ubiquitous, but as things
were, I was attempting to assert my sexual independence and was
continually being rebuffed for these attempts. This is how it was.
I was in an English class
during middle school. I remember never doing any of the homework
assignments. Homework was an irreducible bore. I never got into it,
and don't think it did me any sort of harm. The lady who taught the
class, she spoke fluent Spanish, and we had to read a story about a
young girl who crosses the border into America to find a better life
for her and her sister. It was a good book, as they go. It was during
this time that I started keeping a binder of completely meaningless
words. I think this was a response to once having seen my father
destroy every single school paper I had ever written during
elementary school.
I was in his bedroom,
doing something that I can't recall. He had a box in his closet that
contained all of my papers from school. He might have been proud of
me. There was no way to tell as he never told me if he was or not. He
took the box out, and started throwing away all the papers. This
might have been just before we moved from one house to another,
because of one of his wives wanting to move. It was a terrible
experience, watching your whole life being thrown away like that. I
never did any homework after that, and attempted to do as little
paperwork as possible after that. If my father had no respect for my
work, why would I have any respect for it?
When my grandmother lived
with us, I was made to sleep on the couch. This lasted until I was in
the 6th grade. I had to sleep on a couch, without a room
of my own, almost as if the needs of my grandmother and father were
more important than my own. That is why they don't receive any phone
calls from me, and never will.
My father was a terrible
man, exploding in anger over absolutely nothing, with no way to tell
if he was going to be in a good mood or a bad mood, and he drank
frequently.
He is no longer a part of
my life, as it should be.