“My dad never gave up,” I continue. “Because my dad is a hero.”
Then I get to the good part.
“Let me tell you about my dad,” I say, because I think relaying all the historical details will explain me, or make it all add up.
On June 15, 1968, after three weeks in the bush as a marine and an NFG (New Fucking Guy) in Vietnam, my twenty-one-year-old father had his world blown apart when he caught two AK-47 rounds in battle near Khe Sanh. The bullets went through my father’s right eye and the right corner of his mouth, forcing bone and fragments into the prefrontal area of his cerebral cortex, leaving his nose hanging in front of his mouth, his left eye dangling out of its orbit, and his right eye obliterated.
The other men in my father’s unit were instructed not to go back for him. “Stadtmiller’s dead,” they were told. “Move on.” But one fellow marine ignored those orders: Al Fielder, a black man from the South who’d taken a liking to this privileged white college boy, and he searched until he found my father, who was praying at the bottom of a hill, head in his hands, saying, “Please let me die, please let me die, please let me die.”
Because my father was too big to carry, Al instead screamed at him to get him to safety, “You call yourself a fucking marine? You call yourself a man? You fucking pussy! You’re pathetic.” The verbal assault worked. My father crawled up the hill to the waiting helicopter nearby and was flown to the closest medical ship. No one expected my dad to survive the night, let alone the thirteen hours of surgery required to save him.
“Over his lifetime, he’s had more than one hundred and fifty operations,” I tell the therapist as she listens raptly.
What remains of my father is less than 5 percent vision, a patchwork of scars across his sewn-together flesh, a nose built with bone from his left hip, and an unpredictable brain injury that manifests in wild swings of temper.
“I just can’t fucking take it!” my father would yell throughout my life. “I just can’t fucking take it!”
Sometimes, I think about the speech that Al gave my father as he lay dying on the hill and the aftereffects of the war on my childhood. I would hide under the covers as a kid, rocking myself, praying, “Please let me be, please let me be, please let me be,” as my dad would erupt in one of his erratic house-shaking furies.
My dad gave me a master class in how to alienate people—and how to reel them back in. He didn’t just have “no filter.” He had no filter, no sight, and no inhibitions, all these having been ripped out with a surgical hacksaw.
From birth, I absorbed how the world reacted to him and how he lashed out in return.
“There was always a scene,” I tell my therapist. “I always defended him. Life always went on.”
“Childhood by fire,” she observes. “Why don’t you tell me about your mother. Did she meet your dad after or before he was shot?”
“After,” I say, somewhat bitter over the therapist’s predictability. That’s the first thing people always want to know.
Then I go on.
“Actually, you know,” I tell her, “my dad did a lot of the caretaking when I was young. Because my mom was mentally indisposed.”
“Mentally indisposed?” the therapist asks. “How?”
“Obsessive-compulsive disorder,” I say. “And depression.”
Diagnosed in her young adult life, my mom’s OCD manifested in her scrubbing her hands with dish soap for ten minutes at a time under the sink faucet, afraid to touch things because she might get infected.
It is no small miracle that my mom nursed me until I was two and a half years old, considering there were a few awful times when she was worried her dirty baby might be too contaminated, and she could not hold me at all.
Sometimes she warned my older sister and me that she needed to be left alone so she could “go crazy” at the kitchen sink. My mom would then make a loud noise, guttural, like a monster, growling, “SCHHHHHHHHH,” as she washed her hands, scrubbing them furiously until they were pink and raw and clean.
“What was the noise she made?” the therapist asks.
“I don’t want to repeat it,” I say. “That’s nobody’s business.”
My mother’s particular brand of OCD expressed itself in extremes. So either all of the underwear in the house was ironed and folded or nothing had been cleaned for weeks.
My blind dad took care of my obsessive-compulsive mom, and my older sister took care of me. When we fought, we were sent to the back of the house, where my mom told us to “work it out.”
My sister did exactly that, kicking me in the crotch and punching me in the stomach until I was good and sorry.
When my mom took me to a psychiatrist as a child, I did a mental dead man’s float in the shrink’s shabby beige office. I knew loyalty and secret keeping. And I feared that if I acknowledged just one drop of the pain and fear and anger I felt, my whole world would come collapsing down.
“I tried to protect my family,” I tell her, “because somebody had to protect somebody in my family, but a lot of times I failed. Especially my father.”
“How so?” she asks.
“Let’s see . . .” I begin.
There was the time my dad was swinging me around in the expanses of our living room as I cried out in glee, and he cut it too close—it all happened so fast. My head smashed into the U-shaped corner of the sharp archway, which just barely missed my right eye, and the blood came pouring out. Later, in the emergency room, stitches being sewn near my eyebrow, my father hysterical and upset, I told him I was sorry, it was my fault, I didn’t warn
