Moving Day

I want to tell one story about the actual day that we left Fredericktown. It was a day when everyone in my family was in high spirits, feeling good, feeling hopeful. Even my stepfather. So, of course, it was doomed to end badly.

When you are a kid, your main priority is to make some sense of the world around you. You arrive in a world that has been building on millennia of logic and concepts that you are not privy to. It would be great if you could pop out of the womb, tie a perfect double-Windsor, hop behind the wheel of a convertible, and be off to get your investments started. Unfortunately, you are a blank slate. You’ve never heard of the first keep-right laws enacted in 1792 to regulate the traffic of horse-drawn buggies on the turnpike linking Philadelphia to Lancaster, thus breaking us permanently from the left-hand driving norms of our British forebears. No wonder you crashed that convertible.

No, all you have to work with is pattern recognition. You cry, and a nipple arrives, and this is the beginning of coping. If you cry and a nipple only sometimes arrives, it is the beginning of hoarding behavior coupled with a penchant for binge eating. Why? Because we look for patterns. That is the first step to some kind of understanding: knowing what you can count on, what is a constant. If you have come to think of a man, like, say, my stepfather, as the angry potato—because he is large, lumpy, neckless, and constantly fluctuating between shades of brown and red, depending on his current level of wrath—and if this man you know as the angry potato suddenly gets all playful and cuddly, then some of the consistency you rely on is broken. Then, you are making this shit up as you go.

We were in the new living room. I was drawing again. That was becoming what I did, and because of that, I was easy to ignore at that age. So long as you had paper and a pencil handy, I was good for hours of adult-friendly silence. The people around me could be doing anything, committing any variety of loud, violent crime, and I was unlikely to look up. I had taken to drawing fish firemen. This utterly confounded my mother. I couldn’t explain that this was inspired by an episode of the old Tarzan TV show, the one that starred Ron Ely, who was also a game show host and, around the same time, MCing the Miss America pageant. It was all very confusing. Not least of which was the episode that had me drawing piranhas with firemen’s hats and hoses.

In the episode, a villain—likely a smuggler or a poacher or someone who wanted to put Cheetah in a zoo—was trying to get away from Tarzan in a boat. To cover his escape, the bad guy dumped a barrel of gasoline into the lagoon and set it on fire. Tarzan came to the flaming lagoon and dove into the water, swimming under the flames, popping out beyond the gasoline slick to climb into the boat and thus prevent Cheetah from losing his innocence at the hands of monkey molesters. None of which answers the question of why you would name one wild animal after another completely unrelated wild animal.

I assume that there were never syndication rights as cheap as those for this particular show, because Channel Eleven showed it for two hours after Saturday morning cartoons and another two hours on Sundays, after the TV preachers had retired to the nearest Howard Johnson’s with their flock. All of this is to say that I was learning a lot about the world thanks to reruns of a sixties TV show about a white man in the African jungle who ran around mostly naked and shaved, who had as companions a young boy and an ape, and who lived in a treehouse. One of the things I had learned was that all of these lagoons were full of man-eating piranhas. This had been used as a suspense-building plot point several times, despite the fact that the show was set in Africa and not South America. So, now one of those lagoons was on fire, and someone would have to attend to that. Since fires have to be put out and can’t be left to just burn down the jungle, this responsibility must, by my thinking, fall to the primary resident of every lagoon in Tarzan’s world—the piranhas. And so, fish firemen. With hats and coats and hoses. Underwater. They had hoses underwater. Remember that thing I said about kids having to sort of figure out the logic of the world as they go?

So, this is what I was doing—drawing fish firemen—when the angry potato attacked. It wasn’t that I didn’t see him coming; the man was not a stealthy creature. The floor shook, and glass tinkled and clattered when he walked into a room. I was simply trying to put him out of my mind. I assumed he was going to start telling me all of the wrong places I had already left my jacket, but maybe if I looked truly intent on what I was doing, he might pass over like the Angel of Death—or at least the cherub of temper tantrums. But instead of walking on by or standing over me screaming about the state of my room, he plopped down onto the floor next to me. This was odd. This I had to face.

So, I turned, and the last thing I remember seeing before the attack was my stepfather’s face and the expression there. He was wearing this kind of distant smile that I had never noticed before, his eyes were glassy and watery, and there was a lot of color to his skin. The telltale signs of a good stiff drink were something I hadn’t applied much thought to yet.

Then he was on me! He simply said, “Hey, Brad!” and that was all the warning I got. Suddenly, he was grabbing me and turning me and flipping me this way and that. His hands were curled into little skittering crabs, poking and jabbing and seeking out the sensitive spots of my rib cage and behind my knees. My body was suddenly thrust into paroxysms beyond my conscious control, and no matter where I turned or how I squirmed, another meaty claw was there to get me. He was laughing at me. He was tickling me. This was play-fighting. After four straight years of threatening world-ending violence on a biblical scale because I had left a G.I. Joe in the bathroom, he had now decided to start roughhousing. He’d started a tickle fight. And he was having fun!

For me, the consistency I relied on had just broken down completely. I had zero context for what was happening, so I fell back on what I had prepared for all of these years: The rage-aholic had finally lost it, and this was how the murder-suicides began. Fight or flight kicked into overdrive, and being of redneck stock, my basic animal instincts are never that far from the surface anyway. When push came to shove came to hurled-off-a-cliff, I was suddenly a master of multitasking, fighting and fleeing at the same time.

I twisted my body around, blindly trying to find one gap, one loose spot in the onslaught. I got over onto my belly and dug my nails into the nubby brown carpet, trying to find purchase and perhaps a weapon. I managed to drag myself toward the coffee table half a foot away. It was a two-tiered design, with an undercarriage that spilled over with magazines. In my struggles, my right hand landed in the undercarriage and got a grip on something loose. It was a National Geographic. I spun and twisted the upper part of my torso around, my arm flinging in a stiff arc, my hands gripping one gold-framed corner of America’s most prestigious, not to mention heavy, monthly magazine, and wham! I slammed the spine of that half-inch-thick periodical right across the potato’s nose with all the force of a wrecking ball.

Suddenly, the tickling stopped.

My Stepfather’s eyes went very wide, his body went stiff, and then, very quietly, he said, “Oh goddamn....” Then the blood started gushing from his nostrils. Now he said it louder and started repeating it. “Oh Goddamn! Oh Goddamn!” Then he jumped up and ran for the bathroom down the hall, one hand covering his face. He ran past my mother, who had come into the room from the kitchen just in time to see me bludgeon her husband with his own subscription. She looked at me and said, “Brad, what did you do?” Then she followed my Stepfather down the hall.

That was the end of play-fighting. From then on, all fighting with the angry potato would be for real.