"John"

John

copyright by
Michael McAteer

When I lost my innocence at the age of twelve it came without warning. A punch in the face, literally, from my stepfather.

It was a snowy mid-winter day in New Jersey. I had been sledding and having so much fun; I lost track of time and missed supper. Earlier, my buddies and I were playing a game; you lay face down on the sled and shoot past the guys in a line. One by one they dive on until maybe four or five kids are on top of you as you rocket down the hill. This particular hill was a paved alley between row homes. The sled shot out from under me and I became the sled. The weight of the pile shoved my face into the partly ice, partly asphalt, ice, asphalt, asphalt. The skin tore off one side of my face. Covered with blood I called it a day. Then I realized I had missed supper. Torn up bloody face. Good, that will save me. Who can get mad at a kid with a bloody face? And my stepfather John wasn’t a bad guy anyway.

When I walked into the door I was met by a red faced crazed madman, eyes bulging.
"Where the have you been?"
Bam. A fist in the face and I went down. He had become a different person in the course of one day. If I had known more about life then I would have seen it coming.
My mother had been crying and whining in front of John every day more and more, that she missed and still loved my father, who had completely vanished without a trace so many years ago I couldn’t remember what he looked like.

For the next two years it got worse. My punishment for coming home late was immediate confinement to my room everyday after school, no TV or radio. For two years I wasn’t allowed to eat dinner with the family, and was confined to my room, as the madman descended into the darkness of alcoholism and paranoia, violently trashing the house on a regular basis. Once I woke in the middle of the night to see fire reflected on my ceiling. I looked out the window and saw my stepfather orbiting a bonfire fueled by every stitch of clothing my mother owned. He staggered around it with a can of beer in his hand muttering, " You bitch." Everyone in
the neighborhood was out in the street watching, cold stone still and quiet.

My mother had been under confinement for quite some time now herself.
Once John came home from work and noticed a Public Service utility van with a handsome driver pulling away. He exploded into the house screaming "You whore!" I was in my room, she was in hers. He yanked her into the hallway and screamed for me to come out.
"I want you to see what a fucking whore your mother is." She was too terrified to speak or move. My mother and I went quietly back to our rooms.

John was six foot two, and built like Hercules. He was the greatest athlete the city ever produced. In high school, he had played every sport.

At my high school there was the biggest trophy case you had ever seen, fully loaded. It was dedicated to one athlete only. My stepfather John. And it was full with pictures of him too, in triumphant poses, victorious in every game. I had to see it every day.
Now he was a sheet metal worker in a dirty factory in his late thirties, who came home after work and lifted weights in the basement and got drunk in the kitchen every day.
One day he caught me out of my room after school, in the kitchen, getting some cookies. "You fucking thief" and ‘bam’ I was KO’d. When I got back to my room I decided I had to leave. I had heard a rumor that my father was in California. I hitchhiked and hoped freight trains all the way to Texas, where I got wore out and turned myself in. The Texas state police called my parents and put me on a plane back to Jersey.

When the plane landed the stewardess asked me to stay seated, that someone was coming on board to meet me. After the plane emptied, a cop came in, handcuffed me and took me to jail. In a room nearby, my parents were filling out the legal paperwork to put me away until the age of twenty-one for being incorrigible. I was fourteen.

As I waited for the van to take me to the reformatory, a black Camden city detective came by and asked all the kids what they were in for. I told him my parents were putting me away until I was twenty-one.
"Why?"
"Because I ran away."
"Why?"
"Because my step-father knocked me out for taking cookies without asking."
The detective almost blew up in front of me. He went into the room where my parents were and closed the door behind him. Crash, boom, bang.
He came out, holding my stepfather by the scruff of his neck.
"If this motherfucker ever lays a hand on you again call me. I’ll be right over.
I went home with them, but the tension was too great. My mother arranged for me to live in a boarding house, where I did for a year.
One day the phone rang and the lady of the house tried to hand it over to me.
"Your father wants to talk to you." I was stunned.
"I don’t want to talk to that asshole."
She was insistent so I had to get on. It was my real father. It was the first time I had heard his voice since I was seven.

Turns out he really was in California, and my grandmother knew where he was all along. She didn’t like me living in a boarding house and had twisted his arm until he agreed to take me to live with him. Two days later I was in Hollywood and one year later I was back in the boarding house. My real father was an asshole too.

My mother begged me to move back home. "John’s changed’" she insisted. I moved back. He hadn’t changed at all. But he looked much smaller. I had had my growth spurt that year in California, and went from five foot one, one- hundred twenty pounds to five foot eleven one hundred ninety pounds that fast.

The old shit reached a peak to where I knew I had to kill him to be free, even if freedom meant life in prison. After I decided to kill him, a calmness and sense of peace came over me that I had never known before. In ten minutes he would be dead and I would be free! I was feeling giddy with joy.

I took a short souvenir baseball bat that I had got at a Phillies game, hid it behind my back and walked confidently into the living room.

He jumped up and began to shout "What the are you doing out of your room?" But his voiced trailed meekly. For the first time he saw that I had no fear of him and he turned pale and quivered.

"Whats the matter with you? You’ve snapped!" he declared.
"That’s right," I said calmly, with a true smile.
"I’m putting you away for good this time," he said. He moved for the phone. I revealed the bat and tapped it slowly into the palm of my hand.
"Go ahead. Call the police," I said with a grin.
I let him inch toward the phone and dial a few numbers before I let loose with a powerful whack aimed right at his head. But I missed and only broke his hand. He ran out the back door and never came back.

I never saw him again. In the intervening years his high school trophy case was vandalized, ransacked and destroyed. All trace of his victories were gone forever from City High.
When he graduated from high school he did so with a perfect 4.0 grade average, was president of his class, voted most popular, best looking, and most likely to succeed.
At his graduation party he mulled over with friends his professional baseball offers. Yankees? Or maybe the Red Sox? Or take one of the college offers. Should he quarterback for Penn State or Notre Dame? As the party petered out, he went looking for his father for advice. He found him in the garage. Dead, swinging from a rafter, hangman’s noose around his neck; suicide.
There would be no Yankees, Sox, Notre Dame or Penn State. Only alcoholism, a dirty sheet metal shop and paranoia. I knew all this back then, before that snowy sledding day. It meant something different to me now at John’s funeral.

I learned that during his thirtieth year working at the sheet metal shop the owner died. But not before, unbeknownst to everyone, bankrupting the company and draining everyone’s retirement fund. John lived out the rest of his life in abject poverty, added to everything else.
Everything bad I had ever wished for him came true, and I cried at his funeral, broken-hearted over all that had been lost.