I couldn’t believe this. He actually counted his money. How often did he count it? Weekly? Was it a creepy ritual that he performed every night before bed? I had a mental image of him as a greedy and miserly Scrooge McDuck, going through his precious stacks of cash one bill at a time to ensure that each and every one of them were accounted for. This was an inaccurate mental image, of course, since Scrooge McDuck was known for joyously diving into huge piles of money. Ebenezer Scrooge would have been a better comparison. I wasn’t really into Dickens at the time.
Much later, reflecting upon this moment, it would occur to me that Dad almost certainly had not been counting his money as part of some obsessive-compulsive ritual, but rather that I’d left behind some sort of evidence that I’d been in the safe. A smudge on the combination dial or something. I wasn’t exactly a master criminal. But at the time, my only explanation was the Scrooge McDuck one.
“Well, it wasn’t me,” I said. “Do you think somebody broke in?”
“No.”
“Did you ask Mom about it?”
“Of course I asked your mother about it.” Dad was not a fan of dumb questions, especially those that implied that he was so careless as to not bother asking my mother—who also had the combination to the safe and would be entitled to its contents—about the missing cash before confronting their child.
“Oh. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Hmmm.” My father was able to convey a lot with “Hmmm.” In this case, it meant: I don’t believe you for a second, but I’m not going to push the issue…for now.
I had to lie. What else was I going to do? Confess to buying a gun from some sleazy guy in a van? Being forced to see a psychiatrist would be the least of my worries. I could say that I stole it to buy myself something else, which would at least keep the “unregistered gun” element out of the discussion, but then I’d have to produce the item. Though my parents couldn’t account for everything randomly strewn around my room—nor could I—there was nothing that I could present as an illicit three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar purchase.
Should I say that I stole the money to pay for some hookers? Nah.
The only good move here was to continue to lie my ass off. He knew I’d taken the money but he couldn’t prove it beyond all reasonable doubt. Unlike a criminal case, I could be convicted and punished without a trial. “We know damn well you did it,” was sufficient.
For now, it appeared that he was going to leave it at “Hmmm.”
I really wanted to go to bed early, but that would be suspicious, and I had to behave with maximum normality. So I waited for Mom and Dad to go to bed before I went to bed myself, where I slept like crap. My previous night’s sleep, when I lay there thinking that the gun under my bed might go off and shoot me through the mattress, was like slumbering on a fluffy cloud as angels played lullabies on their harps. I just stared at the ceiling, feeling absolutely miserable.
When I was eleven, I found a dirty magazine in the woods.
I don’t remember which one it was. It wasn’t Playboy or Penthouse—it had a “just the pictures” format, aimed at an audience that didn’t even seek the illusion of reading it for the articles. It was just page after page of glossy pictures of nekkid ladies, featuring the down-there grooming standards of the time.
Many of these “And that’s when I became a horndog!” origin stories begin with finding a magazine in the woods. I’m not sure how they get out there. Perhaps there’s a pornography fairy who hides them for pre-pubescent boys to discover. You never hear, for example, about middle-aged women finding an issue of Hustler in the woods while going for a hike.
This magazine became my most treasured possession. I showed it to Todd, of course, who calmly flipped through the pages while politely nodding his head in approval at the fine visuals. I showed it to various other kids around the neighborhood, swearing them to secrecy, and they were all suitably impressed. Requests to borrow it were denied.
Then I showed it to my friend Markus, who was my age (though we’d never shared a teacher) and lived at the end of the block. He looked through the entire magazine, not missing a page, and then informed me that he was going to tell my mom.
“You’d better not!” I told him, hoping that a savage beating was implied.
He didn’t tell on me. Instead, he spent the next several weeks threatening to tell on me. Pretty much any time we were together he’d say “I’m gonna tell your mom about that magazine!”
To be clear, he wasn’t blackmailing me. It wasn’t like, “Hey, give me that popsicle or I’ll tell your mom about the nudie mag!” There were no conditions placed upon me. Simply the ongoing warning that today might be the day that he knocked on my front door and had a serious conversation with my mother about how she was raising a pervert.
Clearly, he was getting off on the power he had over me. I was sick to my stomach with anxiety. Why squander his power by telling on me too soon, when he could stretch it out, enjoy my misery? It was awful. I’m not saying that my every waking moment was a living hell, but there was a mild awareness of the situation that never quite receded completely into the background of my mind. I’d be sitting at home watching television and suddenly “He’s gonna tell my mom about the magazine!” would pop into my mind, and I’d want to throw up.
Eventually, instead of telling my mom, he told his mom. She looked at me like I was the Gulfstream Acres Rapist and did the “Either you can tell
