“Why couldn’t it have been like this…?”
Originally published on Yahoo 360, September 15, 2006
As I’ve already shared, about a month ago, I came out to my father. And in telling him, I spent a few hours talking about all the things that had occurred in my life as a result of being as I am. There were many things that happened to me as a boy and later as a young man that my father had no idea about. I told him so much, so fast that I doubt he’ll remember it all. I’m still unsure about just what made me tell him as much as I did… Perhaps I was trying to make up for all those years that I didn’t see or hear from him, but had wished I could just talk with him. I do know that I harbored a mild, but deep-seated resentment of my father’s absence from my life for those many years, and that seemed to disappear after I had my say that day… Part of the way I’ve felt stems from my resentment of having to forego part of my youth in order to step into the breech left by my father’s departure from our family. But whatever it was that made me do it, I shared with him many of the twenty-five years worth of memories, some good, most not, that I’ve more or less kept to myself until now.
As I talked, my father was surprisingly attentive and sympathetic; his reaction was one of the greatest surprises of my life. I spent a good long while talking with him about my school days. For me, the incident in kindergarten eventually led to a long standing hatred of school. As a result, although in almost every other way, I was a good and obedient child, when it came to school, I was very hard-headed and I suffered some pretty extreme punishments at the hands of my father because of it.
After that terrible day in kindergarten, my mother walked me to school the next day and after having some brief conversation with the teacher, things seemed to pretty much go back to normal, except that the teacher kept my little friend and I separated for the remainder of the year. Although some of the children would bring up what happened that day from time to time, it didn’t really bother me, and they weren’t vicious or cruel when they talked about it. Then, thankfully, in first and second grades things were pretty uneventful. I had a few friends and I even excelled in class so that by third grade I was placed in a program for gifted children. It was in the fourth grade when things took a turn for the worse.
Although there had always been one or two children in my classes who had also been in my kindergarten class and had witnessed what happened to me that day, by the time we were nine and ten years old, there were one or two who thought they understood the implications of what had happened. And so it was in the fourth grade that I was first taunted about what had happened years before in kindergarten. And it was then that my sexuality was first called into question by other children. I still remember the little girl who’d been in my kindergarten class, who then in the fourth grade began to call me names like “sissy” and “fag.” The strange thing was that at first I didn’t really understand it. I sort of knew what it meant, but why was she “accusing me” and making others treat me poorly too…?
I’ve often thought about that little girl and since I was about age sixteen, not with any hatred or malice in my heart. I remember that like me, she was not well liked by the other children and had only a few friends. I remember that she was the subject of ridicule herself. When I grew older and thought about it, I realized that she was taunting me in an attempt to deflect the cruelty that others were directing at her. It didn’t take too long for the other children to succumb to her enticements, and I suffered because of it.
By the end of the fourth grade, I was terribly miserable and unhappy at school. The few friends I had joined the ranks of my tormenters and although I was not an effeminate boy in any way, I had been labeled a “sissy” and was the subject of much cruelty at the hands of the other children who were awakening to their own sexual curiosities and were somehow able to recognize that indeed, there was something different about me. My solution was to stay away from school as much as I could. I was often sick as a child due to what I would later learn was G6PD deficiency. I would feign even greater illness to ensure I got to stay home from school as often as possible… Although my grades suffered, I got through the fourth grade more or less intact.
It was during the summer between fourth and fifth grades when I turned ten years old that many things began to change in my young life. My younger sister and I had sort of become “latchkey kids” as my mother’s business, started several years before, began to demand more of her time. It was also at this time that my parents’ marriage began to show the first signs of things to come including the physical violence that in a short few years would become commonplace in our home. That fall, when it was time to return to school, I decided for myself that I wouldn’t go to school anymore, a pretty bold move for a ten year old. And although I can’t recall ever being asked why I didn’t want to go, my father felt he had the answer to my belligerence; he’d beat it out of me.
My father would typically drive my sister and me to school each morning, and although we’d go in together, I’d often walk right through and out another door many mornings. I’d walk back home and watch our house from the corner waiting for my parents to leave for work then I’d spend the day at home. Usually just sitting in my room reading or tinkering with watches or electric motors and such. Then, just before school was out, I’d walk back to school and walk home with my sister, who never questioned why she hadn’t seen me in school all day. Eventually, report cards came out and the “jig was up.” When my father questioned me about all the absences revealed there, I didn’t offer him any explanation and I just kept silent… After an “old fashioned whipping” with his 40 inch belt, I confessed what I’d been doing. The next morning before school, when my father reminded me of his expectations and I refused to acknowledge him, he whipped me again, and this time mercilessly until I promised to go to school. I went, and of course the bruises and welts all over my legs and thighs only exacerbated my treatment at the hands of my classmates.
It seemed to me that I couldn’t do anything right in the eyes of the other children in school… I was picked on for so many things. As I’ve said, my father was very concerned about keeping up appearances, and he was a subscriber to the “Assimilationist” movement amongst blacks of the day. He didn’t allow us to use any slang language, and I’ve never forgotten his diatribe on the “jive handshake” which he absolutely forbade my brothers and I to use. And as bad as it was not being able to join in on the social rituals of the time (including that silly handshake) it was made worse by the fact that we were made to stand out even more so by our dress, appearance, and demeanor.
In my youthful days, the “afro” hairstyle was the norm, but my father would have no part of it for us as the afro was associated with the “black power” movement, so my brothers and I had to wear a clean shaven “Quo Vadis” haircut, even in the winter. And my father would cut our hair himself every Saturday morning, so there was no getting around it. We stood out like sore thumbs, and even though he began to relent in the case of my older brothers who were in high school and college respectively, for me, throughout grade school and middle school, he would have none of that, I had a clean head the whole time. Coupled with the taunting over my questioned sexuality, the explicit prohibition over being “too black” and having to come to school marked and bruised from a daily whipping most day, I learned to silently hate, both myself and my tormenters, and to a much lesser, but still significant degree, my father.
By the time I got to middle school, although I loved to learn, I hated school with a passion. I was an incredible loner during those years. My classmates found so many reasons to torment me that I pretty much just shut everyone out. I can remember going more than a month without actually speaking to anyone at school. I had only one school friend my entire time in middle school. I’d grown accustomed to and frankly unafraid of my father’s fierce whippings; and the fact was that although they were painful and left my body bruised and sore, they did not hurt as much as the cruel things that would be said and done to me at school day in and day out. I actually much preferred to endure the whippings if it meant I didn’t have to go to school.
On those days when I’d flatly refuse to go to school, my father would whip me until I would either relent or he ran out of time and had to leave me home so he could go to work. This became such an entrenched pattern, that eventually it became more or less the daily ritual… Whip me until I give in, and then take me to school. It’s a strange thing for me to think about now, but at the time, to my recollection, my father never asked me why I didn’t want to go to school. At the time, I was glad that he didn’t ask why, for I would have lied about the true reasons. But, when I was talking to Father about all of this a few weeks ago, I asked him if he knew why I hated school so and had endured all those terrible whippings…
By the time we got to talking about my school days, I’d already told him the facts about me, but he still didn’t seem to put two and two together and he said he didn’t know why at the time, I hated school… He said he thought I was just being “hardheaded.” When I told him about the tormenting that I’d gone through, and of how somehow, the other children could just seem to tell that I was different in the way that I am, he expressed some remorse about it all. In a way, it was a great relief to be able to finally tell him about it and to hear him express his own sorrow over it. I’d carried with me a smoldering resentment of those terrible whippings and all that went with them ever since those early days in my life. I think I’ve always felt that somehow my father should have known what was happening to me, despite all my efforts to hide it from him. But now, and since, I’ve recognized that he was distracted by other extreme issues in our lives at that time.
To know me, or even to look at me, I don’t think most people would ever suspect the truth of what lives in my heart, or that I’ve witnessed terrible violence between people I loved and who were supposed to love each other. By the time I was thirteen, my parents’ marriage had devolved into a “battle royal” punctuated by regular visits from the police, trips to the hospital for gun shot wounds, stabbings and various traumas all perpetrated on each other. All of this, coupled with my torture in school and my own internal torment over my sexuality and the violence of my own daily beating from my father led me to my first suicide attempt in the seventh grade.
It had been a particularly bad weekend at our home, and my parents had fought viciously with one another, with my little sister and me trying to keep them from killing each other. By Monday morning, I was tired and very depressed and as I lay in bed, I decided that I was not going to school anymore. I went downstairs in my underwear (because my father didn’t whip clothes he bought) and I walked up to my father and said, “I’m not going to school anymore, so you might as well whip me now.” I was prepared to duck as I thought he might take a swing at me, but to my surprise, in a very calm voice, he simply said, “Okay.” With that, my father put his hand on my shoulder and walked me to the living room, which is where he gave me most of those whippings. When we got there, I got the worse whipping of my life; it was more of a beating than any of the others before or since. He whipped me until I couldn’t cry anymore. He whipped me until his right arm got tired, then he switched to his left arm and beat me some more.
When my father was finally exhausted from beating me, he asked me if I was ready to go to school. My whole body was trembling with pain and I could barely get out the words, “Yes Sir.” It was the worse whipping I’d ever endured. Welts and bruises were nothing new to me, but this day they were bloody. I had broken skin all over my legs, thighs and back, and as my tears ran down my body they stung as they mingled with the blood that trickled from my wounds. As I climbed the stairs and thought about what awaited me at school, it was in that moment that I thought I’d much rather be dead. My mother never interfered with my father’s discipline, but always offered comfort and encouragement afterwards. This morning was no different, as I was getting dressed for school, she came into my room and when she saw what had happened to me, she ran downstairs and attacked my father.
On hearing the scuffle and the shouting, I threw my bruised body between them yet again in the hope of preventing them from killing each other while my little sister pled with them not to fight and not to hurt each other. My sister and I caught a few stray “licks” intended one for the other by my parents, but as I insisted to my mother that I was okay, she finally relented as we were on the verge of being late for school. During all this, I went over in my mind the ways I could take my own life; I settled on pills. As my sister and I ran for our books with my father calling for us from the door, I stopped at the medicine chest. For some reason, we had lots of “Contact” cold capsules, so I grabbed two packages, I think about 20 doses and I quickly poured the contents of the capsules into the applesauce packed in my lunch.
On the drive to school, clutching my lunch containing my poison of choice, a glimmer of hope entered my mind. I began to think to myself, “Maybe it won’t be a bad day at school…” I decided I wouldn’t do it unless things at school got bad. Surprisingly, the first couple of hours weren’t bad at all; I think it was because after the events of the morning, I was just too numb to care. But then it was time for gym class and as I stood in the locker room surrounded by my usual tormenters, I thought of what they’d say and do when they saw the bloody evidence of my beating from that morning. So I didn’t change and when I appeared on the gym floor in my street clothes, the gym teacher lost all patience with me and expelled me from his class sending me to my counselor’s office.
I had a wonderfully caring and concerned counselor who somehow, although I never told her anything of my life, seemed to understand me. She didn’t scold or question me that day. She told me I could finish the school day in her outer office and that she’d send for my work from my remaining classes. She asked me if I wanted to go to the cafeteria to eat lunch with her, but I told her I’d brought lunch from home. She let me go to my locker to get it and as I sat in her outer office, I wrote out my final farewell. It wasn’t a long letter, I don’t really remember what I said, except that I do recall saying I loved my parents and my family and that I would miss them. I folded my note in half and laid it in front of me. Then, with very little hesitation, I ate my poisoned applesauce, laid my head across my folded arms and over my letter and within a few minutes I was drifting off to sleep for the last time I hoped.
What happened after that, I only know a little about based on what others have told me. Apparently, I fell out of the chair and was discovered unconscious and barely breathing on the floor of the counselor’s office. I was taken by ambulance to Mount Carmel General Hospital here in Detroit, where I woke up two days later strapped to a bed in the psychiatric ward having had my stomach pumped and having been on a ventilator the first night. Later that day, a doctor came in to talk to me and though I could hardly speak as my throat was sore from the tubes that had been forced into my stomach and airway, I answered his few simple questions. He asked me, if I knew where I was, why I was there, and if I still wanted to kill myself. Apparently, I gave the right answers as he took the straps off and let me sit up in bed. After a few more minutes, an orderly came with a wheel chair and took me to the children’s ward where I stayed for four more days. During my parents’ visits, we never talked about what I’d done. It really was as if there was this huge elephant in the room that nobody wanted to recognize; nevertheless, there was something very different in the air. My parents came to see me together and they were kind to me and to each other the whole time.
When I went home from the hospital, my parents were nothing but kind and loving towards each other and I was amazed. I knew it was down to what I’d done and I was happy about it. I was kept out of school for the rest of the year and for a month or two things at home were copasetic. Though we never talked to each other about why I tried to commit suicide, my parents took turns taking me to regular appointments with a therapist who I shared some things with, but not the whole story, and certainly nothing about my struggles with same sex attraction. Eventually, as with all good things, the situation at home slowly came to an end and by the fall when I had to return to school, things between my parents were much as they were before.
Although I had many more whipping over the next two years that my father was at home with the family, they were never quite the same, never quite as fierce; I remember that I never cried again during one of those whippings. On those days when I did go to school, I didn’t know if it was me or my tormenters that had changed, perhaps it was both. Although they had more to torture me about, after all it wasn’t everyday that a kid tried to kill himself in school, none of it seemed to hurt as much as it had. Maybe it was because I was older, or maybe because I realized that there was nothing more they could do to me that they hadn’t done already… they had helped drive me to the brink of self-destruction.
As I talked of this with my father, I asked what he remembered about the time I tried to kill myself at thirteen. He recalled quite vividly what he knew of what I’d done and then he told me that he thought the reason was our home situation. He was genuinely surprised again when I told him that home was only a small part of the real reason. He asked if that terrible beating that day was the thing that pushed me over the edge. I could see the anguish in his face and I was glad that I could honestly tell him that, no, it wasn’t the reason. If anything, it was merely a small contributing factor to my overall unhappiness in my young life. Surprisingly, I was able to tell him, that I understood why he used to beat me that way and that I knew he was only trying to do what he thought was best for me. With that said, a great sigh of relief escaped his now wrinkled lips and some of the furrows in his brow dropped away. My dad gave me a big hug as I told him, “It was okay, I always loved you.”
Although my father’s punishments were far too severe and crossed the line of true child abuse many times, I understood then, and now, that he was merely doing the only thing he knew to do. He was motivated by his desire to see me raised up in obedience, and to see me get an education, something that had been hard fought for in his own life. When I was in middle school, the police were called to the school after the gym teacher saw some bad bruises and welts on my body when I was changing my clothes. I refused to explain it to the principal or the police, and when my father arrived, I guess he successfully explained it away, as no one ever intervened afterwards. Nevertheless, it is true that I love my father. He is and was as human as all of us, he made mistakes, and so did I. I’m glad that we were finally able to talk about them.
Although I’ve had lots of schooling since, my formal education as a child ended at age sixteen, when I was able to legally drop out of school. In fact the last day I attended high school was the day my Mother nearly killed my father when she stabbed him in the chest with a razor sharp boning knife nicking his aorta. He nearly bled to death. When I saw the bloody scene at home, not knowing if my father had lived or died, I decided I wouldn’t give them the opportunity to be alone with each other again when one of them might kill the other. This happened in early June, and by the time my father was home from the hospital, it was summer vacation. I never returned to school that fall. On Christmas day that same year, my father left our home for the last time. By the following summer, in the midst of a bitterly contested divorce, my family was divided and we children who had to choose sides were for a time, just as bitter as my parents.
As I talked, my father was surprisingly attentive and sympathetic; his reaction was one of the greatest surprises of my life. I spent a good long while talking with him about my school days. For me, the incident in kindergarten eventually led to a long standing hatred of school. As a result, although in almost every other way, I was a good and obedient child, when it came to school, I was very hard-headed and I suffered some pretty extreme punishments at the hands of my father because of it.
After that terrible day in kindergarten, my mother walked me to school the next day and after having some brief conversation with the teacher, things seemed to pretty much go back to normal, except that the teacher kept my little friend and I separated for the remainder of the year. Although some of the children would bring up what happened that day from time to time, it didn’t really bother me, and they weren’t vicious or cruel when they talked about it. Then, thankfully, in first and second grades things were pretty uneventful. I had a few friends and I even excelled in class so that by third grade I was placed in a program for gifted children. It was in the fourth grade when things took a turn for the worse.
Although there had always been one or two children in my classes who had also been in my kindergarten class and had witnessed what happened to me that day, by the time we were nine and ten years old, there were one or two who thought they understood the implications of what had happened. And so it was in the fourth grade that I was first taunted about what had happened years before in kindergarten. And it was then that my sexuality was first called into question by other children. I still remember the little girl who’d been in my kindergarten class, who then in the fourth grade began to call me names like “sissy” and “fag.” The strange thing was that at first I didn’t really understand it. I sort of knew what it meant, but why was she “accusing me” and making others treat me poorly too…?
I’ve often thought about that little girl and since I was about age sixteen, not with any hatred or malice in my heart. I remember that like me, she was not well liked by the other children and had only a few friends. I remember that she was the subject of ridicule herself. When I grew older and thought about it, I realized that she was taunting me in an attempt to deflect the cruelty that others were directing at her. It didn’t take too long for the other children to succumb to her enticements, and I suffered because of it.
By the end of the fourth grade, I was terribly miserable and unhappy at school. The few friends I had joined the ranks of my tormenters and although I was not an effeminate boy in any way, I had been labeled a “sissy” and was the subject of much cruelty at the hands of the other children who were awakening to their own sexual curiosities and were somehow able to recognize that indeed, there was something different about me. My solution was to stay away from school as much as I could. I was often sick as a child due to what I would later learn was G6PD deficiency. I would feign even greater illness to ensure I got to stay home from school as often as possible… Although my grades suffered, I got through the fourth grade more or less intact.
It was during the summer between fourth and fifth grades when I turned ten years old that many things began to change in my young life. My younger sister and I had sort of become “latchkey kids” as my mother’s business, started several years before, began to demand more of her time. It was also at this time that my parents’ marriage began to show the first signs of things to come including the physical violence that in a short few years would become commonplace in our home. That fall, when it was time to return to school, I decided for myself that I wouldn’t go to school anymore, a pretty bold move for a ten year old. And although I can’t recall ever being asked why I didn’t want to go, my father felt he had the answer to my belligerence; he’d beat it out of me.
My father would typically drive my sister and me to school each morning, and although we’d go in together, I’d often walk right through and out another door many mornings. I’d walk back home and watch our house from the corner waiting for my parents to leave for work then I’d spend the day at home. Usually just sitting in my room reading or tinkering with watches or electric motors and such. Then, just before school was out, I’d walk back to school and walk home with my sister, who never questioned why she hadn’t seen me in school all day. Eventually, report cards came out and the “jig was up.” When my father questioned me about all the absences revealed there, I didn’t offer him any explanation and I just kept silent… After an “old fashioned whipping” with his 40 inch belt, I confessed what I’d been doing. The next morning before school, when my father reminded me of his expectations and I refused to acknowledge him, he whipped me again, and this time mercilessly until I promised to go to school. I went, and of course the bruises and welts all over my legs and thighs only exacerbated my treatment at the hands of my classmates.
It seemed to me that I couldn’t do anything right in the eyes of the other children in school… I was picked on for so many things. As I’ve said, my father was very concerned about keeping up appearances, and he was a subscriber to the “Assimilationist” movement amongst blacks of the day. He didn’t allow us to use any slang language, and I’ve never forgotten his diatribe on the “jive handshake” which he absolutely forbade my brothers and I to use. And as bad as it was not being able to join in on the social rituals of the time (including that silly handshake) it was made worse by the fact that we were made to stand out even more so by our dress, appearance, and demeanor.
In my youthful days, the “afro” hairstyle was the norm, but my father would have no part of it for us as the afro was associated with the “black power” movement, so my brothers and I had to wear a clean shaven “Quo Vadis” haircut, even in the winter. And my father would cut our hair himself every Saturday morning, so there was no getting around it. We stood out like sore thumbs, and even though he began to relent in the case of my older brothers who were in high school and college respectively, for me, throughout grade school and middle school, he would have none of that, I had a clean head the whole time. Coupled with the taunting over my questioned sexuality, the explicit prohibition over being “too black” and having to come to school marked and bruised from a daily whipping most day, I learned to silently hate, both myself and my tormenters, and to a much lesser, but still significant degree, my father.
By the time I got to middle school, although I loved to learn, I hated school with a passion. I was an incredible loner during those years. My classmates found so many reasons to torment me that I pretty much just shut everyone out. I can remember going more than a month without actually speaking to anyone at school. I had only one school friend my entire time in middle school. I’d grown accustomed to and frankly unafraid of my father’s fierce whippings; and the fact was that although they were painful and left my body bruised and sore, they did not hurt as much as the cruel things that would be said and done to me at school day in and day out. I actually much preferred to endure the whippings if it meant I didn’t have to go to school.
On those days when I’d flatly refuse to go to school, my father would whip me until I would either relent or he ran out of time and had to leave me home so he could go to work. This became such an entrenched pattern, that eventually it became more or less the daily ritual… Whip me until I give in, and then take me to school. It’s a strange thing for me to think about now, but at the time, to my recollection, my father never asked me why I didn’t want to go to school. At the time, I was glad that he didn’t ask why, for I would have lied about the true reasons. But, when I was talking to Father about all of this a few weeks ago, I asked him if he knew why I hated school so and had endured all those terrible whippings…
By the time we got to talking about my school days, I’d already told him the facts about me, but he still didn’t seem to put two and two together and he said he didn’t know why at the time, I hated school… He said he thought I was just being “hardheaded.” When I told him about the tormenting that I’d gone through, and of how somehow, the other children could just seem to tell that I was different in the way that I am, he expressed some remorse about it all. In a way, it was a great relief to be able to finally tell him about it and to hear him express his own sorrow over it. I’d carried with me a smoldering resentment of those terrible whippings and all that went with them ever since those early days in my life. I think I’ve always felt that somehow my father should have known what was happening to me, despite all my efforts to hide it from him. But now, and since, I’ve recognized that he was distracted by other extreme issues in our lives at that time.
To know me, or even to look at me, I don’t think most people would ever suspect the truth of what lives in my heart, or that I’ve witnessed terrible violence between people I loved and who were supposed to love each other. By the time I was thirteen, my parents’ marriage had devolved into a “battle royal” punctuated by regular visits from the police, trips to the hospital for gun shot wounds, stabbings and various traumas all perpetrated on each other. All of this, coupled with my torture in school and my own internal torment over my sexuality and the violence of my own daily beating from my father led me to my first suicide attempt in the seventh grade.
It had been a particularly bad weekend at our home, and my parents had fought viciously with one another, with my little sister and me trying to keep them from killing each other. By Monday morning, I was tired and very depressed and as I lay in bed, I decided that I was not going to school anymore. I went downstairs in my underwear (because my father didn’t whip clothes he bought) and I walked up to my father and said, “I’m not going to school anymore, so you might as well whip me now.” I was prepared to duck as I thought he might take a swing at me, but to my surprise, in a very calm voice, he simply said, “Okay.” With that, my father put his hand on my shoulder and walked me to the living room, which is where he gave me most of those whippings. When we got there, I got the worse whipping of my life; it was more of a beating than any of the others before or since. He whipped me until I couldn’t cry anymore. He whipped me until his right arm got tired, then he switched to his left arm and beat me some more.
When my father was finally exhausted from beating me, he asked me if I was ready to go to school. My whole body was trembling with pain and I could barely get out the words, “Yes Sir.” It was the worse whipping I’d ever endured. Welts and bruises were nothing new to me, but this day they were bloody. I had broken skin all over my legs, thighs and back, and as my tears ran down my body they stung as they mingled with the blood that trickled from my wounds. As I climbed the stairs and thought about what awaited me at school, it was in that moment that I thought I’d much rather be dead. My mother never interfered with my father’s discipline, but always offered comfort and encouragement afterwards. This morning was no different, as I was getting dressed for school, she came into my room and when she saw what had happened to me, she ran downstairs and attacked my father.
On hearing the scuffle and the shouting, I threw my bruised body between them yet again in the hope of preventing them from killing each other while my little sister pled with them not to fight and not to hurt each other. My sister and I caught a few stray “licks” intended one for the other by my parents, but as I insisted to my mother that I was okay, she finally relented as we were on the verge of being late for school. During all this, I went over in my mind the ways I could take my own life; I settled on pills. As my sister and I ran for our books with my father calling for us from the door, I stopped at the medicine chest. For some reason, we had lots of “Contact” cold capsules, so I grabbed two packages, I think about 20 doses and I quickly poured the contents of the capsules into the applesauce packed in my lunch.
On the drive to school, clutching my lunch containing my poison of choice, a glimmer of hope entered my mind. I began to think to myself, “Maybe it won’t be a bad day at school…” I decided I wouldn’t do it unless things at school got bad. Surprisingly, the first couple of hours weren’t bad at all; I think it was because after the events of the morning, I was just too numb to care. But then it was time for gym class and as I stood in the locker room surrounded by my usual tormenters, I thought of what they’d say and do when they saw the bloody evidence of my beating from that morning. So I didn’t change and when I appeared on the gym floor in my street clothes, the gym teacher lost all patience with me and expelled me from his class sending me to my counselor’s office.
I had a wonderfully caring and concerned counselor who somehow, although I never told her anything of my life, seemed to understand me. She didn’t scold or question me that day. She told me I could finish the school day in her outer office and that she’d send for my work from my remaining classes. She asked me if I wanted to go to the cafeteria to eat lunch with her, but I told her I’d brought lunch from home. She let me go to my locker to get it and as I sat in her outer office, I wrote out my final farewell. It wasn’t a long letter, I don’t really remember what I said, except that I do recall saying I loved my parents and my family and that I would miss them. I folded my note in half and laid it in front of me. Then, with very little hesitation, I ate my poisoned applesauce, laid my head across my folded arms and over my letter and within a few minutes I was drifting off to sleep for the last time I hoped.
What happened after that, I only know a little about based on what others have told me. Apparently, I fell out of the chair and was discovered unconscious and barely breathing on the floor of the counselor’s office. I was taken by ambulance to Mount Carmel General Hospital here in Detroit, where I woke up two days later strapped to a bed in the psychiatric ward having had my stomach pumped and having been on a ventilator the first night. Later that day, a doctor came in to talk to me and though I could hardly speak as my throat was sore from the tubes that had been forced into my stomach and airway, I answered his few simple questions. He asked me, if I knew where I was, why I was there, and if I still wanted to kill myself. Apparently, I gave the right answers as he took the straps off and let me sit up in bed. After a few more minutes, an orderly came with a wheel chair and took me to the children’s ward where I stayed for four more days. During my parents’ visits, we never talked about what I’d done. It really was as if there was this huge elephant in the room that nobody wanted to recognize; nevertheless, there was something very different in the air. My parents came to see me together and they were kind to me and to each other the whole time.
When I went home from the hospital, my parents were nothing but kind and loving towards each other and I was amazed. I knew it was down to what I’d done and I was happy about it. I was kept out of school for the rest of the year and for a month or two things at home were copasetic. Though we never talked to each other about why I tried to commit suicide, my parents took turns taking me to regular appointments with a therapist who I shared some things with, but not the whole story, and certainly nothing about my struggles with same sex attraction. Eventually, as with all good things, the situation at home slowly came to an end and by the fall when I had to return to school, things between my parents were much as they were before.
Although I had many more whipping over the next two years that my father was at home with the family, they were never quite the same, never quite as fierce; I remember that I never cried again during one of those whippings. On those days when I did go to school, I didn’t know if it was me or my tormenters that had changed, perhaps it was both. Although they had more to torture me about, after all it wasn’t everyday that a kid tried to kill himself in school, none of it seemed to hurt as much as it had. Maybe it was because I was older, or maybe because I realized that there was nothing more they could do to me that they hadn’t done already… they had helped drive me to the brink of self-destruction.
As I talked of this with my father, I asked what he remembered about the time I tried to kill myself at thirteen. He recalled quite vividly what he knew of what I’d done and then he told me that he thought the reason was our home situation. He was genuinely surprised again when I told him that home was only a small part of the real reason. He asked if that terrible beating that day was the thing that pushed me over the edge. I could see the anguish in his face and I was glad that I could honestly tell him that, no, it wasn’t the reason. If anything, it was merely a small contributing factor to my overall unhappiness in my young life. Surprisingly, I was able to tell him, that I understood why he used to beat me that way and that I knew he was only trying to do what he thought was best for me. With that said, a great sigh of relief escaped his now wrinkled lips and some of the furrows in his brow dropped away. My dad gave me a big hug as I told him, “It was okay, I always loved you.”
Although my father’s punishments were far too severe and crossed the line of true child abuse many times, I understood then, and now, that he was merely doing the only thing he knew to do. He was motivated by his desire to see me raised up in obedience, and to see me get an education, something that had been hard fought for in his own life. When I was in middle school, the police were called to the school after the gym teacher saw some bad bruises and welts on my body when I was changing my clothes. I refused to explain it to the principal or the police, and when my father arrived, I guess he successfully explained it away, as no one ever intervened afterwards. Nevertheless, it is true that I love my father. He is and was as human as all of us, he made mistakes, and so did I. I’m glad that we were finally able to talk about them.
Although I’ve had lots of schooling since, my formal education as a child ended at age sixteen, when I was able to legally drop out of school. In fact the last day I attended high school was the day my Mother nearly killed my father when she stabbed him in the chest with a razor sharp boning knife nicking his aorta. He nearly bled to death. When I saw the bloody scene at home, not knowing if my father had lived or died, I decided I wouldn’t give them the opportunity to be alone with each other again when one of them might kill the other. This happened in early June, and by the time my father was home from the hospital, it was summer vacation. I never returned to school that fall. On Christmas day that same year, my father left our home for the last time. By the following summer, in the midst of a bitterly contested divorce, my family was divided and we children who had to choose sides were for a time, just as bitter as my parents.
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