Our theme song for this bloodbath (I love you Tommy):
It was June, sixth grade had just finished. My grandmother had been dead for almost a year. My bike was two years old.
The old man came home and after dinner, said to me, “How would you like a new bike?
“No,” I said. “I love the bike Grandma bought me.”
“But that’s old, I mean a brand new one.”
“No,” I reiterated. I was puzzled this came up, but gave it no more thought.
The next week, he came home with brochures showing new Schwinn bikes. “Hey, look at these. Aren’t these better than what you have?” He spoke casually, but the scary part was ‘the smile’ returned. The demon smile I mentioned awhile ago–broad smile with smoldering angry eyes and slanted eyebrows. I got a deep feeling in my gut, like I was about to suffer some horrible fate.
Nonetheless, I thumbed through them, while he stood over me. Again, I told him I liked what I had, I was happy, loved grandma’s bike.
A few days later, my mother told me to sit down. She had tears in her eyes. “This Saturday, your father is taking you out to buy you a bicycle. He’s trading in your bike from Grandma. If you tell him you want your bike, he will sell it, keep the money, and you will have no bike at all. I’m so sorry.”
Well, that was it pretty concisely. I sobbed like being stabbed. “didn’t you tell him?”
“Yes,” she said. “Over and Over. I told him he would hurt you badly.”
“Then WHY?”
She broke down again. “All he said was ‘because I can’.”
Let’s pause here. Three words. Intentionally inflicting pain for no reason except for his amusement or to make himself feel like a big man. Abuse can take many forms, but the one no one talks about is the mind games and verbal assaults inflicted by a powerful parent on a helpless child. Of all his abuses and arbitrary punishments, this was the worst by far.
“I will never ever forgive him,” I said staring my mother in the face. “Until the day I die, I swear he will never be forgiven.”
Tears rolling off her chin, she nodded. “I Know.”
I prayed to God that night to die, begging my grandma to tell Jesus to take me. But no answer.
I was trapped–a prisoner, doomed to be treated like an animal by a sick man.