“But it wasn’t your fault,” the therapist says.
“It didn’t feel that way as a kid,” I say.
I would do anything to prevent my dad from getting upset. Because with one false move, I could sense it coming: An anger explosion would come raining down on everyone. A string of curse words, yelling, throwing, mewling, sometimes a fist through the wall, culminating with one final come-to-Jesus howling-at-the-moon proclamation, his catchphrase if you will: “GODDAMMIT, I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT!”
It wasn’t until years later, during a stray neuroscience course, when I was toying with becoming a teacher, that I learned that what I’d always thought was his “personality” was partially a function of damage done to the prefrontal lobe when he was shot. I read the story—as anyone who has ever taken a neuroscience class has—about Phineas Gage, the railroad foreman who suffered an iron bar through the skull. The man’s personality completely transformed after the injury, with him becoming “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity . . . impatient of restraint or advice when it conflict[ed] with his desires . . . obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of operation which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned . . .”
You get the idea. Welcome to my childhood.
My mom, on the other hand, offered her own case study in brain science.
Because of her OCD, she often became preoccupied with whether things were “infected” with shit. So giving baths was pretty much out. Because we had tympanostomy tubes in our ears as kids, we weren’t supposed to get them wet, so my dad used a wooden board that he would take turns laying my sister and me on in the bathtub to shampoo our hair.
The older we got, the weirder it got. At eleven and eight, respectively, my sister and I were too old to be running around naked in the house, and my parents definitely shouldn’t have been naked themselves, but there they were. Doors were always open, and we could see as my dad changed in front of us. My mom, meanwhile, would be in her threadbare white underpants, trying to figure out what clothes she could stand to wear. I look back at pictures of this time, and I see my sister and me posing with our towels open by the pool making kissy faces. It looks like we’re getting groomed to be sold into sexual slavery.
Of course, we were just the children of naïve hippies. Nothing more.
“But it sounds like it was a hypersexualized household,” the therapist says.
“I just don’t want to criticize my parents,” I say. “I love my parents—so much.”
Then I am quiet. Then I am crass. Crasser than my father even. Crasser than even ol’ iron-in-the-skull Phineas Gage.
“All the same,” I practically spit, “I wish I didn’t have such a clear picture of my dad’s dick in my mind. He was blind. We were not.”
The therapist looks a little taken aback, but she asks me to continue.
“Was your father ever sexual with you?”
“Oh my God, no!” I say.
But, I confess, there was always that sexualized electricity in the house—where that energy just seemed to be swirling around him. Maybe it was the women he flirted with, who always seemed to be so enraptured by the alpha-war-hero energy he put out. I remember one woman who would call our house frequently, and when I answered in my clearly teenage voice, she would speak breathlessly, as if she was in the middle of masturbating, and simply say, “Jerrrrrrry.”
I hated her so much. “YOU WANT TO TALK TO MY DAD?” I’d say, my voice pinched with anger. “IS THAT WHAT YOU’RE SAYING?”
Cheating happened early in my parents’ marriage. My dad would always employ various “readers” to help with his paperwork, and, as my mom candidly told me, one time a reader was doing a lot more than reading. My mom heard the sound of my dad’s belt unbuckle. My mother went in, mortified. My father said, “We weren’t going to have sex.”
This all happened in what was to be my room—before I was born.
“So you have resentment against your father,” the therapist says.
“No,” I say. “Yes. I don’t know. Sometimes. The resentment is muted out by overwhelming love. Does that make any sense?”
As I grew older, I could feel the way my dad’s friends looked at me without my father’s knowledge. At the LA premiere for a documentary my dad was featured in called Vietnam, Long Time Coming, one of the high-ranking officers talking to my father began stroking his finger slowly along my shoulder blade as my dad stood there, continuing to tell his stories, grinning and rhapsodizing, with no idea what was happening.
Even earlier at that same movie screening, a woman got up to speak after the movie, and since it was a pretty heavy film about disabled veterans, she figured she would tell a lighthearted anecdote to cut the tension. In front of this packed auditorium, which included me and my eighty-something-year-old great-aunt, she smiled and proceeded.
“To lighten the mood,” the attractive woman said, laughing, “I’ll tell you what Jerry Stadtmiller told me right before the plane took off from LA to Vietnam. He turned to me and said, ‘Don’t feel too sorry for me. I’ve got a fourteen-inch cock.’ ”
I slunk down into my seat, so embarrassed.
When my father, who became a licensed massage therapist during one of his many careers, told me as a teenager that he could no longer give me massages because his shrink had told him it was “inappropriate,” I felt ashamed. I know it wasn’t his intention—my dad was simply doing the responsible thing. But everything was always so confusing. I was bad? I was inappropriate? I was sexually desirable? Why was he giving me massages in the first place? Why was he telling me any of this?
Let me be crystal clear right now, as I was with my therapist: My father never did anything unseemly with me—ever. Both my parents are wonderful human beings. But there were things lacking in my childhood—namely,
