The Bad Guys
When the Abuser Returns in the Echoes of Their Acts
It’s true. You live long enough, and all the bad guys finally ride off into the sunset.
The bad guys are the players in the old stories. The terrible darkness of my mother’s alcoholism, and her brother’s damage, is finally gone with their deaths — or, it should be.
I was sitting still with my eyes closed this morning, this very quiet morning, and was transported to a cliff at the edge of the ocean. I could feel an urgent wind against my face, and I welcomed it because I felt like I was being cleaned, scrubbed. The relentless wave upon wave of the ocean — the sound of it, the sight of it — felt right because it enveloped me in the huge comfort of eternity and familiarity at the same time. This lush sound comes to me often now that I live inland, far away from the sea.
I wish I could remember my first time at the ocean. Probably when I was around five, when we all first moved to California with my mom’s brother. But it wasn’t until I was ten that my uncle taught me how to swim at Santa Monica Beach where the big swells started. Right before they broke, we dove beneath them, holding our breath in the silence as they moved over us — a huge weight of water, swirling green, grainy and opaque when you opened your eyes. Then we popped up and dog-paddled, waiting for the next wave, and turned to watch the people on shore, their voices tiny and distant.
I trusted my uncle completely. He taught me to enjoy the waves, to wait for the right one and ride it to shore. It was thrilling because no wave was ever the same, and once it was terrifying. I was gliding on the surface when the whitewater overtook me and pulled me under. It pushed my chin into the sand and then flipped my body straight up before I lifted and rolled again, and again, and again, and again.
I had no idea when I’d be able to take my next breath. On and on I tumbled until, in an instant, there was sun and air and the hissing of crashing waves, and my face and my shoulders were out of the water, and I was picking myself up, blinking, startled to be alive again. I thought I was going to die, and then I was flung back into the overbright, noisy world, tasting salt, tasting my life again.
My uncle was reckless. A famous story in our family was how he drove his tiny MG sportscar under a semi-truck as it was moving. He had the reputation, at least in my mind, of a rakish sailor. I suppose because of the photo I still remember so clearly. He was very young. His hair was brown, thick and curly, like his dad’s, and he was leaning into the camera with one shoulder, smiling his broadest smile.
He had the same huge overbite that I also inherited. No one else had a smile like that except for my mom, and each of them had a slightly chipped front tooth because if you have an overbite, it’s an injury that’s hard to avoid. It was a gorgeous, fearless smile. I found out later, when he was much older, that he always hated his teeth. As my mom did, as I did.
My uncle died alone of a heart attack, with MS, in a little apartment, estranged from his family. He exposed himself to me, and even got arrested for this kind of behavior another time. But when, as an adult, I asked him about this night, this night after my grandmother died, when we were both lying on the couch watching TV in my grandmother’s living room, my grandfather sleeping in the bedroom — when I asked him about it in a letter, he replied that he had no memory of it. I found out that this is not an uncommon response, this “I don’t remember that” thing. Of course, I doubted myself for a minute, but that passed because of the visceral memory of the incident, as strong and as certain as looking down at something spilled all over the kitchen floor. The dismay of mess. The stuff that belonged in a pot spreading, spreading — not right.
You’ve got to understand the abject grief of that night. My grandmother had just died. My grandfather was sleeping in the next room, just on the other side of the wall. Sleeping without his wife for the first time in decades. Earlier that day, he had sat on the sofa with me and sobbed. Where was my mom? Who knows. But she wasn’t there.
My uncle and I were set up to spend the night on a long sectional sofa that nestled into a corner of the living room. The TV was on. My uncle was at one end of the sofa, facing the TV, and I was at the other end. Maybe the funeral was going to be the next morning. All of us had lost the woman who held the family together. We were all adrift.
And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my uncle’s cock fully out of his shorts. And I mean in plain view, not an accidental wardrobe malfunction, I mean the full length of him draped there, with his legs crossed at the ankles and his arms behind his head, watching TV like it was any other day.
I just remembered! Just now as I was writing. My uncle showed me little pornographic pictures from his wallet right before. I went into this trance and just looked at them without saying anything. I thought he was treating me like an adult. I was flattered. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t think.
When my uncle lay on the couch with his cock out, I froze. It was like he had placed a loaded gun on the table next to me. I stayed absolutely still on my end of the couch until I sensed he was asleep. Did I even breathe? It was hours.
My uncle sexually abused his two daughters. For a long time. Found that out much later, way after college.
Let me see if I can bring this thing around here. I got a letter this Christmas from my cousin, my uncle’s oldest daughter, the first one he sexually abused. She blew the whistle on him when he started going after her little sister. She told me her brother died this past fall. That was Todd.
He was 10 years younger than me. I taught him to tie his shoes. He looked like my uncle and was such a good kid, with his big blue eyes, those eyes that run along my mom’s side of the family. But he started drinking (alcohol rears its ugly head again), had “mental health issues” is how my cousin described it, and was abusing drugs, acting cruelly towards everyone in his family except his own daughter. Oh, this frightens me. He generally made everyone’s lives miserable with his anger and his demons. He finally died of cancer.
My little cousin Todd. He didn’t escape the dark wave that rolled over my family. Five casualties: My cousin, my mother, my uncle’s two girls, and me.
The bad guys aren’t here anymore, but they still reappear, running with their compulsions, their addictions.
They lived in the morass of their emotions. They didn’t recognize their depression and obsessiveness as something treatable. They did great damage to the ones who loved them. Trusted them.
These are the old stories, the stories that continue to visit. And here’s the weird thing. I don’t know how much of the old stories are true. My mother lied all the time. The morning when she came home, her face and body all black and blue and scraped up, and I asked her what happened, she told me she and her boyfriend had gone to the beach, and when they climbed back up the steep hillside to the car, she fell, and bruised herself. I believed her. A safer solution than asking a lot of questions.
It was awful story just in itself — to think of your mother falling down a rocky hillside at the edge of the ocean. Drunk, most likely. But I know now that he had beaten her up. I know that now. I mean, yesterday I remembered that my sister had told me they used to fight a lot, and I think she meant he would hit her when he was drunk. And then I looked back at my old journals, and discovered that my mom’s final story to me was that her boyfriend was going to throw himself down the hill — he was trying to commit suicide. She was trying to stop him.
I know a lot of stuff now. I don’t know anything. I know about suffering.
So when I sit in silence and hear the wind and waves, and feel my face being scrubbed by cold, clean air, I think of my uncle, and I also think of my mother, who tumbled down a cliff in the dark of night. I sit in silence to let the old stories fall away. And they do. They are. It’s taking a lifetime to see clearly.
