Survival of the dimmest.
To survive in our household, you had to win.
Winning meant distinguishing yourself somehow. Separating yourself from the pack somehow. It was pure Darwinism, I suppose.
My father stowed a pair of dumbbells underneath the coffee table in the living room. He’d make a show of peeling off his shirt in the evenings, after supper. He’d open a bottle of beer. During commercial breaks, he’d work through a series of muscle poses.
He wanted to be looked at, more than anything. To be observed, more than anything. Each bicep was the size of baked potato. He’d circulate around the living room, pushing the potato-bicep into faces, one by one.
“Do you see this?” he’d ask me. “That, right there, is what raw power looks like, boy.”
His ponderously heavy eyeglass frames, due to his severe myopia, slid onto the tip of his nose. He reeked of Vitalis and sweat, and insecurity, too, though I couldn’t recognize it as insecurity back then. Back then, he seemed confident, terrifying.
The baked potato would literally be right up under my nose. It brushed against my left cheek. “LOOK, damn it all,” he demanded.
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I ignored my father as best I could. Kept craning my head to watch MASH, which was back from commercial break now. Klinger was in mourning. He’d suffered a loss in his family. He wore a mauve pillbox hat, a black veil draped across his oversized nose. Crossdressing to court a Section 8 from the military. Klinger explained to Colonel Potter that he needed to get home to Toledo, to attend the funeral for his Aunt Petunia, who had sadly passed…
I did my best not to acknowledge the potato-bicep.
“That’s what a real man looks like,” my father explained. “That’s a real man, boy.” The not-so-subtle subtext of this: That’s what you can never hope to be. Not in a million, billion years.
I asked my father to kindly take the bicep-potato out of my face now, thank you. He ignored me. Held it there a moment longer. I’ll take it out of your dumb little face when I’m good and ready. Snorted like a bull. Then he moved along to my brother. Gave him the bicep-baked potato treatment.
My brother, I knew, wasn’t the one he wanted to humiliate. To diminish. He went after my brother in a very lackadaisical way.
I was my father’s number one target. Why? Because I wasn’t as handsome as my brother. I wasn’t as funny as my brother. Because I was a book-reading nerd. And, because I was sickly, and therefore drew more attention from my mother.
More attention, it seems, than my father got from her.
This man needed mothering, too, desperately so. Couldn’t stand to see his son get attention that he felt he deserved. The poor bastard…
My father had plenty of reasons to despise me. I was a kid, but already I was smarter than he was. And I would, much to his chagrin, soon outgrow him. Outpace him in way he couldn’t have imagined. I was, in many ways, his worst nightmare. Still, the main issue, the attention issue, was the primary source of his seething vendetta against me.
As a result, this was a lonely fucking place for me to try to grow up in.
