Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

By the time I got home, that feeling of hatred had grown stronger and wilder, an uncontrollable combustion about to explode inside me. Yet I managed to stand in the kitchen telling my mother what had happened. The police had falsely accused me, but my own father had believed them and not me. He’d beaten me up while those lying policemen watched, I railed to my mother like a trial lawyer driven into frenzied indignation by the bewildered, passive stares of the jury, until my voice collapsed into sobs and I stood there horribly mewling. Yoli, the police said he stank like a brewery, shouted my father. He’s lucky they decided not to charge him, this goddamned good-for-nothing. I went down the hall to my room. If someone had put a knife in my hand I swear I would have gone back and stabbed him and maybe my useless mother too.

Before that night, I merely thought I hated my father. Now it was like he’d been truly revealed. A father who could betray his own son like that, in front of those police. It almost stopped being personal. He deserved to be annihilated. Still, nothing happened right away. It wasn’t until the next winter that it did. Even if it was inevitable, I was as surprised as he was when I finally did hit back.

Fists squeezed tight under the bar top and my eyes feel like there’s a hot, dry wind blowing directly into them. The bartender gives me that glance, like he’s wondering if there’s something wrong with me and is about to ask, but I push my glass forward and say, Another refill, please.

About seven years passed between the first bad beating from my father and that last one, seven years of him pretty regularly beating the shit out of me. You can’t put a similar time frame on his verbal violence—against my mother but especially directed at Lexi. What kind of father calls his twelve-year-old daughter a fat fucking pig? Even if it was the messiness of her bedroom that set him off, those words had no semantic credibility as punishment. They weren’t going to make Lexi suddenly discover a yearning for a fulfilling tidiness. But what punishment reforms the father?

I don’t even remember anymore what ignited it, only that it happened on a stingingly cold winter night out in the front yard, covered with frozen snow. I must have run out of the house barefoot, Bert chasing after me, and I was crouched by the hedges in my usual defensive posture, arms clasped over my head to fend off his barrage of hard cuffs and swats. From the bottom of that commotion, my eyes fastened on his chin, which somehow, miraculously, you could say, expanded like I was looking at it through a telescope. And next thing I knew, all the strength coiled in my legs was propelling me out of my crouch, up behind my fist and toward that chin, a jolt like an electric shock inside the bones of my hand, and as my father fell forward I hit him on the back of his head, driving him face-first into the crusty snow. I took off running, the ice in the road cracking under my feet. Bert was screaming behind me: I’m having a heart attack! Yoli! Yoli! He gave me a heart attack! I ran all the way to Space Cavanaugh’s house and hid in his basement for three nights. Space brought me food and lent me a pair of too-large black rubber boots that I wore to school without socks. When I finally went home, Bert was wearing a bandage on his nose. He must have fallen on it, because I didn’t hit him there. No word or sign of any heart attack.

He never hit me again, though. That sure counts for something. But remembering or even sometimes telling this story always makes me feel sick to my stomach, as if striking your father must inevitably result in a permanent ignominy. He was my tormentor and strong as a bull, but he was also sixty years old. I don’t know what else I should finally have done. I’ve never thought I was wrong to have finally hit back. But I’ve always felt some shame and distress over it anyway, over that second punch especially, dangerous, as if driven by a lethal instinct to finish him off. If I’d only hit him just once, I might look back on it as a more cathartic event. It’s the only father-son relationship I’ve ever participated in, and it was a failure in pretty much every way.

Late fall of freshman year in college, I was sitting in the cafeteria with friends on a gray afternoon when I looked up and recognized my father crossing the dun lawn of the quad, that driven trudge, the churning of his arms, fedora tilted down, raincoat flapping around his thighs. My first trimester grades had been straight A’s. What could I have done wrong? He’d come all the way to my college in Upstate New York to punish me for something. Was it the money I’d been spending at the campus bar? But I spent only what I’d earned through my job delivering newspapers around campus in the mornings. I hurried outside to meet him so that he couldn’t make a violent scene inside the cafeteria. What must have been a look of terror on my face brought him up short. Sonny boy, he croaked, holding out his arms. He was driving up to Corning for a conference on ceramics that was related to making artificial teeth. He’d made a detour to take me to dinner.

Like all war stories, the ones you went through yourself, I mean, no matter how many times you tell it, you never feel like you get it quite right.

Well, I never got why you hung out with those guys anyway, Marianne is saying. Trapped in all that boy