A Memoir Piece

Hello. I get the feeling I’d like to gear this Substack toward writing advice. (Yes, I said something different the last time.) I love the “life of the mind” and I’m down to share thoughts on craft. But, for now, here’s a memoir essay. I’ve tried to sell it for years, no bites, nobody interested in publishing it, and, frankly, I’m past the point of dwelling on it. Creative nonfiction isn’t really my bag. I’ll put it out there and move onto something else. For those of you in the Philly area, I’ll be reading from my new book Weird Black Girls tomorrow at Head and the Hand Books at 7pm.

Content warning: child abuse, sexual assault

Will I Mourn Him When He is Dead?

Friends I invite over my father’s apartment in Swissvale treat it like some hipster museum. He stopped acquiring new things sometime after his kids left the nest and there is kitsch everywhere: VHS tapes, WWF action figures, reels of Chuck E. Cheese tickets never turned in for prizes, a pair of oddly-shaped Ren & Stimpy mugs, the literary pursuits of my sister and I preserved in hundreds of Dragonlance and Baby-Sitters Club paperbacks that Half Price Books would probably buy for a whopping $31.50. 

The two steel refrigerators standing diagonally across the kitchen from one another are mostly empty. Mustard-yellow and drenched in coupon inserts, the stove has never been used. A snowbank of unread mail covers the wooden table. The floor is bubbled linoleum. Magnetized to the pale yellow fridge is a photo of my sister’s newborn daughter among pictures of other children who became adults long ago.

My dad is retired after working forty years as an optometrist. He raised two children on credit and never saved a dime. Now he lives comfortably on social security. I like to think my dad won the ‘80s.

We are drinking. More accurately, I am drinking. Jack Daniels. I have three shots to his one. Dad cut beer from his diet twenty years ago and is more or less a teetotaler. Old now, he remains a tall and handsome man, the curly hairs at the back of his scalp still black. The thinnest I have ever seen him, he wears a pair of faded black slacks and T-shirt under a sleeveless orange down jacket because he gets cold easily. In my childhood he wore dress shirts every day, and even now there is something of the cowboy to him. At the same time, he exudes gentleness.

Well-read, witty, and eloquent, my father can usually be found in good spirits. Lately, he drives to Maryland to perform simple chores for my sister as she adjusts to motherhood. Being a grandparent brings him quiet joy. Aside from his constant listening to NPR—the news from DC about government shutdowns and border walls being horrifying yet tediously predictable—I enjoy staying with him while doing edits on my book.

I forget what we are talking about when, drunkenly, I find the courage to ask what I’ve wanted to ask for decades. “Why did you let mom abuse me?”

Picture 1995. I am eleven years old, being slapped in the face and called a motherfucker.

Picture 2001. I come home to find my mother and sister in my room, going through my things and throwing them away.

Picture 2002. My mother has a breakdown and spends all day accusing me of conspiring against her. She calls the cops on me. Police are at my bedroom door. White men with guns.

Half my life was a nightmare of mind games, insults, and childish rages from the person entrusted with my care. While one parent abused me, the other would listen over the phone as I described what happened in detail.

“Try and get along with your mother,” he would say.

Now I sit talking with that person. He looks thoughtful, not remorseful. He leans an elbow on the faux marble counter. 

My throat constricts. I start to cry. “Why didn’t you do anything?”

In 1991 my mother ended her brief, loveless marriage to my father. She told nine-year-old me, “You need to pick which parent to live with.”

I would stay awake at night, sleepless from the painful decision. How could I choose one over the other? Didn’t everyone love their parents equally?

One day my mother packed me and my little sister into a Honda and drove us from the big yellow-brick house in Penn Hills to a much smaller townhouse in Garfield. Forbidden from playing with other kids, I spent years with only family for company.

Of course a seven-year-old never had a choice in who got custody of him. Telling me otherwise was her first act of outright cruelty. At times she could be affectionate to an uncomfortable extent, constant I-love-you’s and pulling me in for kisses I would resist. She would tell me I was talented, that I had a voice the world needed to hear. 

“Nobody will love you like the mother,” was her refrain.

From the time she gained custody of us, she abused me mentally, physically, emotionally, and sexually. I remember her telling me I was stupid and would never amount to anything; the comparisons to other people; and above all else, the rage that ignited in her at my mere presence. If I performed in a play or went to a dance, she had to start an argument in the car, like my smallest moments of happiness had to be swiftly and harshly extinguished. 

Shortly after my thirteenth birthday she moved us to suburban Maryland, where she married a man who abused my sister and I. That marriage didn’t last long. What did last was her playing M—— and I against each other. “Elwin gets good grades. Why can’t you be more like Elwin?” “M—— doesn’t act strange.” Year by year, M—— grew to hate me and made certain I knew it. I hated her back. But as young children we were close; I remember those moments of sibling closeness with more clarity than anything else from childhood, save abuse.

“You smell,” my mother would say. “You’re offensive.”

“The world will eat you alive!” 

“You’re an arrogant kid! You annoy me!”

“How dare you look at me like that!”

“I hear that tone!”

“Grow up!”

“There’s something wrong with you. In your brain. You’ve always been wrong.”

Her home was a place of anger and anxiety. After school, I would lock myself in my room and retreat into manga, video games, and other fantasies for an hour or two before she returned and I once more became the target of her rage.

In looking back on her behavior, I see the elements of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and the abuses I endured alongside my sister fit the characteristics of narcissistic parenting. But there is no merit in trying to understand my mother at this point. A common trauma I find in other survivors of abuse is trying to pick apart what made our parents the way they are. Thus we waste the prime of our youth making excuses for what elderly people did to us based on the actions of dead people. 

For too long I endured her liking posts on my Facebook author page (I never responded to her friend request), tracking me down whenever I did a reading in DC, harassing my partners on social media, or simply flying out to wherever I was to forcefully insinuate herself in my life. Her creepy and one-sided interest lasted until I finally told her never to contact me again.

The fact that I was abused is not a revelation I came to as an adult, though only now am I realizing how her cruelty shaped my own behaviors. I knew at the time what was going on. In middle and high school I would call my dad collect, as to not run up my mother’s phone bill. I would tell him exactly what she did to me. I asked him countless times to take custody of me and let me finish school in Pittsburgh.

“Try to get along with your mother,” he always said. And sometimes, “Just try and avoid your mother.”

Like many raised by abusers, I became a people pleaser. Unassertive, scared of conflict, and perpetually fearing rejection, we put the needs of others above ourselves. It is a fight-or-flight response; the feeling that failure to please will result in punishment.

“You can blame your parents for who you are at twenty,” my dad always says. “At thirty, you have no one to blame but yourself.”

His brusque, bootstrapping mantra flies in the face of all developmental psychology. Many people spend their twenties subconsciously acting out behaviors hardwired in their formative years. But my dad comes from a time and place where no one dared call themselves a victim. So, being his son, I sucked it up and never asked him why he let someone harm his children. Not until I am 34 years old, alone with him in the kitchen.

For years he has told me let it go, but we have never actually discussed what it is. And for whose benefit was I letting go?

“She was abusive,” I say the word again. There. Now it is forever part of the conversation.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he says, and lingers his gaze on the floor.

“She called the cops on me. She tried to have me killed.”

He takes a deep breath and when he speaks I hear regret, plus a measure of disbelief. “She shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why call the cops on a young black man if you’re not trying to have them killed?”

I want him to agree. I want him to admit the worst-case scenario.

“Your mother thinks she can control things,” he says in disgust. “Fact is, once the police are involved nothing’s in your control.” His mind stays in the past. “I didn’t even learn about that from you. M—— didn’t even tell me, believe it or not. Your mother told me. She says”—he adopts a ditzy voice—“‘I wouldn’t have let them do anything to him.’ No!” he says, as if she stands before him. “She genuinely believed she could have told the Montgomery County police what to do. She’s like that.” So far he hasn’t looked me in the eyes. “She wasn’t trying to have you killed.”

I remember staring up from the floor at a pair of tall white men who look vaguely disappointed, as if they expected some Cops-worthy domestic dispute and found instead a sixteen-year-old trying to distract himself with Playstation. They question me for a minute before figuring out nothing has happened. I consider turning the tables and informing them my mom is having a psychotic episode. But you don’t snitch. 

Impatiently one of the white men says, “Just try and avoid your mother. Okay?”

My father doesn’t think she had it in her to try and have me shot. He thinks I’m being dramatic.

“I asked you to take me away,” I say in rising anger. “I asked you all the time to take me away. You said, ‘Try and avoid your mother.’”

For a long moment he ponders, fingers laced, perfectly still save for his grinding jaw. My father says, “Your mother married me thinking a doctor would have some money. When she realized that wasn’t the case, she left. As to all that talk about if I hadn’t forced her to marry me, she would have taken her son and lived in Africa”—his lip curls—“Your mother was never half as independent as she thinks she is. An independent woman doesn’t get married three times.”

Interesting to hear his perspective. However, he is changing the subject.

“The problem was she took you and your sister to Maryland.” He gets back on topic. “There’s not much I could do from a state away. You know what I mean? As to whether there was any—as you say—abuse going on . . .” He pauses. “I can’t speak to that. You do the best you can. But I couldn’t fix something that was never whole to start with.”

And I’m thinking of what he said: She shouldn’t have done that. What about everything else? Did he think I deserved the rest?

Two things my parents agreed upon growing up: I was fundamentally weak, and the father did the discipline. The terror of anticipating spankings was always worse than the act itself. There were periods he and my mom weren’t even on speaking terms, but he would drive across town when she called him saying I needed a whupping, lay me over his lap, pull down my pants and lash my bare ass with a leather belt. He took to the task with dour seriousness and a kind of a masculine swagger. He promised me—should there come a day I thought myself too grown for a whupping—he would punch me in the face. My father, one of the gentlest men I know, was capable of startling violence when it came to his son. I remember a time I went for a walk without his permission. As soon as I came home, he kicked my fourteen-year-old body into a bookcase so hard the shelf fell on my head.

His generation believed any lessons that weren’t learned in the home, the white man would gladly teach us with more lethal consequence. Maybe I should hate him for it, but I don’t.

“She always told me there was something wrong with me,” I remind him. “You agreed with her. You called me stupid.”

He gives a tight head shake. “Never,” he says seriously. “I never called you stupid.”

My eyes burn with tears, that very weakness he despised in me as a child. “You said I was too weak to survive.”

Like other black elders hate the word lie, he hates the word stupid. His mantra, “Stupid is a stupid word.”

So many years have passed I can’t recall if he truly called me that. Certainly weak, arrogant, and lazy were words he’d use whenever he teamed with mom against me, the two of them terrible to behold as a united force. Remembering those moments—my father acting the role of plantation overseer slinging Jim Crow insults at me—I want to hurt him. The meanness is clawing out of me and I’m prisoner to its bratty rancor.

“When she would say I’m too stupid to live,” I repeat the profanity, “you would agree with her. You stood there in her house and agreed with her. You don’t remember when you blew a gasket ‘cause I was flunking math? ‘Cause that was so fucking important?”

“No, I don’t remember that. But I know I wouldn’t call any of my children stupid.”

“You said I’d get eaten alive.” I laugh bitterly. “Who’s the one with all the debt, you broke motherfucker? I’d say I survived a fair sight better than you.”

With dismal clarity, I realize that not only do I resent his enabling child abuse, his poverty disgusts me. The man couldn’t stand up to a credit card, let alone his ex-wife.

Silence. He smiles with his eyes closed. “Financials were never my strong point.”

Even ten years ago he would have slapped me if he thought I was capable of calling him motherfucker, in defense of himself but mainly his long-dead, beloved mother. I want him to attack me. Taller and heavier than me, he’s still an old man with high blood pressure. I could kill him with my bare hands. As moments pass, it becomes clear he has made peace with his debts, as well as my resentment. Though I never showed my anger, he knew it was there.

When I was around ten my parents sent me to a psychiatrist. At the time, I was aware of being gaslit—my mother was trying to make me think I was crazy. Nevertheless, I enjoyed having an empathic adult to talk to for the first time ever. He was a tall, baldheaded white man who wore tweed suits. During our sessions we would play an MS-DOS game he designed, a text adventure about kids who voyage with aliens to outer space. Not only did they have to make choices, they dealt with feelings of regret and sadness, and talked about their feelings in ways that were productive. That was the first time an adult told me feelings were okay. I enjoyed our sessions, but I wasn’t seeing the doctor for long.

“Your mother wanted to fix you,” my dad says. “She kept asking, ‘How can we fix him?’ She wanted a pill to make you what she wanted you to be. And the doctor said you were fine.”

The most harmful thing he could have said: there was a time in which a licensed professional would deem me fine. And because I was fine, she needed to break me. She needed to make sure I entered adulthood carrying decades of PTSD, depression, suicidal ideation, and, most of all, shame. And this broke, lonely, emasculated doormat watched her do it. 

What do I even want from him? An apology? An answer to why he had kids in the first place, if he never wanted to do the work?

It is a dark night in 199— and my mother is driving us through Homewood. Crackheads on the corner eye our car as she drives past long blocks of vacant buildings. She does marketing for the Jazz Workshop at the Carnegie Library. Perhaps that is our reason for being there.

“I can’t stand you!” she says through clenched teeth. “I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on you. I could have spent that on a grateful kid.”

I say nothing, inside myself, hating, waiting for this latest rage to pass. My sister is peacefully reading Baby-sitters Club, used to this.

“You want to act that way, I’ll send you to Shuman Detention Center,” my mother goes on. “Those boys there will kick your ass.” Not a minute later: “I’ve had enough of you!” She brakes at a trash-strewn curb. “You want to leave? Go on and get out. Get out of my life!”

So I leave.

Overhead, dark clouds coagulate like pudding. The sidewalk stretches ahead of me, cracked, lumpish, empty of life except for overgrown weeds. Hastily I walk alongside a chainlink fence, conspicuous, a small light-skinned child in a bright blue sweatsuit. Shuman, I think. She evokes the juvenile detention center in Highland Park as if she has the power to imprison anyone she wants in there without going through a court. According to her, nothing in this world poses more danger to me than other black boys.

But I’m not afraid. I should be, right? Of all places, this neighborhood must be swarming with boys ready to knife, jump, or shoot me for their super-predator kicks. However, putting one foot before the other, I am free. My imagination emancipates. I will flag down the first cop car, snitch on my abuser and get put in foster care or—better yet—my father’s care. I would testify against her. Every step takes me closer to life with the good parent.

As my mind soars, I hear footsteps and spin around. M—— ran the whole way. Nine or ten, a short and chubby girl in eyeglasses that take up half her face, she wears a sweatsuit, only hers is pink, her hair in afro-puff barrettes. I want to tell her, Come with me! We’re free!

Her tone is businesslike. “She said get your black ass back in the car.”

“She stole my sister from me,” I tell dad. “She always pitted us against each other and she turned her against me.” I weep. “My closest relative and she turned her against me.”

He has no sympathy.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Bub.” Bub is a country-ass nickname he started calling me when I was thirteen. I’ve always hated it and he knows this, yet clings to it like he clings to his senior discount coffee from Wendy’s, or working on his car, or NPR. “You’re thirty-four. She’s thirty-two. You can blame your parents for where you are at twenty. Where you’re thirty, you have no on to blame but yourself.”

Here comes the part I dread. The victim-blaming. Like the drunk I am, I bleed feelings. “I love M——. She has no idea how much I love her.”

“It’s up to you to open that door,” he says. “You can start by sending her congratulations on her baby. ‘Cause you know she’s gonna remember that you didn’t.”

How dare he share wisdom. Even if he is the wisest man I know.

What makes me hesitant is not fear of rejection, but that she will accept me. Abuse made me a people pleaser. It made M—- callous, a child with a child’s spitefulness. A child trained to hate the person competing for her mother’s affection. 

The last I saw her was our grandmother’s funeral. As adults we are nothing alike—my evangelical Christian sister who coaches cheerleading and probably never went dumpster diving for food—but she drove me to the cemetery, perfectly cordial. If she exhibits the same monstrosity as our mother, I will write her off for good. I fear losing her a second time.

But I can’t admit that. “You don’t understand. She doesn’t want to hear from me.”

Insouciantly he says, “I have siblings I haven’t talked to in years.”

“You also have, like, ten siblings.” 

“That’s not as fun as it sounds,” he jokes. “You are correct—I have many siblings and you only have one. But you never know until you try.”

Petty jealousy consumes me. I ask why he and mom never ganged up on her like they did me, expecting antiquated nonsense about girls being fragile.

“M—— could be bought,” he says in a tone I am growing familiar with, a journalistic acceptance of things, a clear-eyed look at the battlefield no matter how bloody. “Whatever happened, take her to the mall and she’ll be happy. You couldn’t be bought.” Now he talks to himself. “Your mother likes awards. She likes the Honor Roll. M—— didn’t get many awards.” His tone is almost whimsical, amused by the past.

“None of that shit was important.”

“No, it wasn’t. But to your mother it was.”

“You did buy us lots of shit.” I gesture around the kitchen at the toys, feeling like Robert the Bruce in Braveheart telling off his father. Action figures. Dolls. Video games. Nothing.

Charming to think he spoiled us so we could have the childhood he never had. Tragic to think he went in debt for it. But it never occurred to me he bought us things to try and bury the trauma.

My dad was born in Charles City, Virginia, the son of a housewife and a mill worker. He grew up in a wood frame single story cottage, three rooms and a kitchen, a hall in the middle. Prior to 1964, when his family got a bathroom with plumbing, they carried in water from a well his father dug by hand. They did their business in an outhouse. Isolated in the woods, my dad had no one for company until his younger sibling was born—a sister. They were close. 

Often he expressed admiration for my mother’s parents. After defeating the Japanese in the Pacific, my grandfather put food on the table for five children. My grandmother worked as a maid in white people’s homes. It didn’t bother my dad that his father-in-law was a serial adulterer who beat women. That his in-laws spent decades married, living in the same house, and never speaking to one another, he saw as noble.

All through my childhood he bemoaned how easily women could get divorced, how their fickle nature destroyed the modern family. I thought he sounded bitter and more than a little pathetic. My mother told us he’d never loved her and—though she lied constantly—he never came across as a man in love. All he’d ever wanted was a wife.

But I wondered: What kind of man lets someone hurt his children? Thirty years and he never even dated. Perhaps Try to get along with your mother meant Don’t talk that way about my wife. If I had an abusive parent, he had an abusive lover. But he has no language for intimate partner violence, and, besides, he would never admit he’d let a woman manipulate him for decades.

Here in the kitchen I think—not for the first time—that perhaps he truly loved her more than us.

Who you are when you’re twenty, you can blame your parents. Who you are when you’re thirty, blame yourself.

And I did. I beat myself up wth regrets, large and small. Mistakes were made and I endured the consequences alone. In denying what happened to me, I denied myself the chance to move forward.

Doing social work convinced me to finally work through the abuse. At halfway houses for the mental ill, I would read case reports that were almost beat-for-beat recitations of my childhood. It became clear that people from families like mine could go down paths more tragic than my own.

For a survivor, I am a success story. I built a life I can appreciate, have goals I’ve accomplished, and other goals I feel achievable. Over the years I have gathered chosen family who are more of a real family to me than my blood relations ever were. 

On the other hand, what my mother did to me could have easily turned to decades of homelessness, unemployment, and drug addiction. Some strength inside of me got me through, one I found without any help from family. And ignoring what happened to protect my father’s feelings certainly never helped.

Growing up, my dad was a bitter, condescending drunk who hated everything—his job, women, white people, “ghetto negroes,” his effeminate son. His life revolved around his children, but he took little joy in us. 

Then a strange thing happened after I started college at Pitt. He became the parent I’d always wanted him to be.

For fun, I would travel around Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland to attend anime conventions and my dad—a capable seamster—helped me make costumes. One time, driving back from Ohio at night, the wheel came loose on the car and I had to pull off at a gas station somewhere near Columbus. Before Google Maps was a thing, before either of us had phones, he drive three hours to pick me up. In the early morning he arrived, and we drove back together; I took the Toyota and he drove the wagon with the trembling wheel. After college, when job offers, breakups, and evictions had me migrating around the country, he unquestioningly stored my boxes of stuff in his apartment.

He always supported my writing career; that I never prioritized being rich meant nothing to him so long as I was happy. Looking back, he was the parent who would buy me comic books and novels, who supported my interest in the imagination. To this day he is the only family member I’ve come out as queer to. Didn’t bother him in the slightest.

During undergrad I did a lot of stupid shit. Nothing egregious, but being black adds weight to any judgment call. One night, the last day of classes, I partied too hard and called him to pick me up, which he did. From there he helped me grab my things from the Towers. I ended up passing out in a bathroom, and the two RA’s on duty called the cops. When my dad returned to my dorm room to find myself, the RA’s, and two Pitt police officers, he assessed the situation calmly. Smooth, he convinced them to let me go. 

For a time that is what we talk about in the kitchen. Crying has left me tired, agitated, and relaxed all at once. Fourteen years later and he still can’t believe the RA’s, “those dumbasses” in his words, called the cops on me during move-out day. 

“There’s nobody in the dorm,” he says. “What were they trying to prove?”

In college I found the supportive, nonjudgmental parent I’d never had as a child. For all that he helped me, I’m sure there’s an equal amount he did for my sister that I’ll never know of. He raised two children. Drove himself into debt providing us creature comforts. Drove down to Maryland to visit us every weekend. Taught us to value literacy. It pains me I will never be able to look at him without seeing negligence and weakness. Will I mourn him when he dies?

Though this would be the chance, I don’t tell him my mother molested me.

At the time it had seemed like everyday abuse—her constant comments about my pubescent form, both approving and judgmental; her interest in my hair, my smell, my dick. Her actions, though inappropriate, blended into a black hole of hate and shame I spent every hour trying not to look at.

Then one day I asked myself: if I made an underaged person strip naked and touched them like she touched me, what might a judge call it? There is no glory in being a survivor of incest. One more wretched thing on the pile.

The title of “good parent” was one my dad earned by default and only lived up to after the damage had been done. Did he view my mother’s psychological torture as any different than his dad making him “get a switch”? Making my small father go in the woods over, and over, and over again for progressively larger tree branches to whip his bare ass?

I apologize to my dad for getting emotional.  

“It’s okay,” he replies, the hollers of street noise reemerging now that my heart has settled. “You’ve been drinking. You’re a crying drunk.”

Right. I’m just a drunk. At these words, I know I can never tell him what she did. Still, I say, “I wanted to leave her house.”

He perks up. “I asked you. You don’t remember? I picked you up on a weekend and drove you to Hagerstown. I asked you if you wanted to go back to Pittsburgh with me and you said you wanted to stay.”

“How old was I? Seventeen?”

“About that.”

“You couldn’t ask me to move at the end of high school. I had friends and shit.”

“That’s exactly what you said. I thought it was best for you in Maryland. A good area with good schools. I thought you were in a good place,” he explains. “It was a good area. I didn’t want you going to school out here.”

“You mean Woodland Hills.” Good old Woodland Hills, the archetypal Pittsburgh public school. I can spot the kids who go there on my daily walk because they reek of cannabis.

“Right,” he replies in a quiet voice. “If you stayed with me you probably would have gone to Woodland Hills. You seemed like you were doing okay in Maryland.”

I admit, “It wasn’t bad. My life was pretty much a John Hughes movie”—I laugh dryly— “minus the abuse.”

“You seemed like you were okay,” he repeats firmly.

I picture us on the hood of the station wagon alongside some field of overgrown grass. My father: younger, dress shirt, blue suede jacket, overweight. Myself: baggy clothes, hurting inside, trying to look wise.

He wants me to know I made the choice to stay with her. I wonder if he’s carried that moment all these years as his exoneration. Like I know we will never speak on this again, I know that I forgave him long ago. My only remaining blood relative, I need to see him as a lovestruck fool, a coward, a loser . . . anything but an accomplice.

Silence. Our lips are stitched together with fraud.