Posted on September 18, 2005 at 00:30:23.
Not-me: Autobiography of an absence 2
By M Satai
2.
As for my parents, who must figure in this period somehow, if for nothing else than for their slow and steady psychological and physical poisoning of me…well, how could I ever stop vomiting out their memory if I even let myself begin?
And where to begin?
My father was a ridiculous, hysterical, hypochondriacal bastard who was eternally nervous and frustrated and angry. Let’s leave aside the anxiety and anger for the time being. What he was frustrated about…that seems impossible to determine inasmuch as he never seemed to have any real ambition to do anything other than what he was actually doing during this time and all times, which was nothing but living like a complete unthinking moron: working, eating, buying, working, eating, buying etc.
Perhaps he was frustrated only inasmuch as he wanted to live like this with a woman who was not my mother…and who could blame him for that?
He needed sex, that’s what he told me years later in a confidential “confession” by the ocean, and my mother wasn’t giving him any carnal satisfaction. My mother, for her part upon hearing this apparently unwelcome old complaint, claimed that my father simply couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and that his many infidelities had nothing whatsoever to do with any imagined intimate shortcomings on her part.
These lying, manipulative psychopaths would say anything to justify their respective behaviors (just like everyone else) and I couldn’t care less about trying to find the “truth” of the matter. Suffice it to say, I can no more bear to imagine my father’s oozing, creepy sexual advances than I can my mother’s impenetrably stinking crotch of black thorns.
Between these two impossibilities, it stretches credulity to even imagine such an absurdity as my birth…how could such an unthinkable thing as my birth happen when each dependent element of its happening has such an absolute antipathy to every other element, such an insurmountable charge of total repulsion?
My birth seems an anti-miracle…a curse…from which seems to follow, quite logically for once, my anti-messianic standpoint and suicidal message: an apocalyptic disgust with all human life and a desire to see the entire “mis-taken” species annhilated.
My father (does the word “father” have any meaning distinguishable from “the act of being force-fucked in the asshole”?) suffered from nervous stomach disorders of one kind or another almost constantly. I remember, vividly for instance, his complaints of severe constipation. His most unforgettable self-pitying report included a description of how, while seated on the toilet for a half-hour or so, he was finally forced to resort to reaching up inside his own asshole with his finger to pull the turd out.
In addition to these constant stomach complaints, my father suffered from various skin ailments, including what he called hives: a rash of irregularly-shaped pink welts that would almost nightly appear all over his back and arms and who knows where else. These welts, which resembled giant pink mosquito bites, were apparently extremely itchy and their regular outbreak formed a locus around which the family-reality revolved.
Bald as he was rapidly growing at the time, my father nonetheless had a terrible and chronic case of dandruff. I remember him seated at the kitchen table combing what was left of his dried-out hair over a sheet of newspaper. The paper would soon be covered with a pile of dead white skin-flakes. Even now the sheer quantity of my father’s dandruff-pile seems almost mythic to me.
And, yet in spite of all this, of all his physical shortcomings and deteriorizations, my father was an excessively, even intolerably, vain man. I remember standing behind him as he sat, helping him comb the flap of dead hair across his bare scalp…and finding that there wasn’t enough hair to carry-out his instructions to “cover up the bald spot.”
Hook-nosed, crooked teeth, bald, bad skin, he maintained his vanity nonetheless, enjoying fine clothes and jewelry, growing fatter as the years passed but only in the way that those habitually thin from their youth grow fatter as they age, pot-bellied, flabby, somehow disproportionate.
I had, understandably, a horror of growing up to look like him.
He did, however, make a general appearance, difficult as it may be to picture from the foregoing, of being younger than his age—even in his later years.
My mother…there isn’t nearly as much to say about her physically as there is to say about my father. What problems or preoccupations she might have had about her appearance or health weren’t nearly as predominant or spectacular as my father’s (they could hardly be so with such a hysterical lunatic as him around for comparison)—and, if anything, could probably be summed up by simply stating my sense that my mother didn’t believe herself to be a very attractive woman and I wouldn’t be inclined to disagree.
I prefer to pass over without much comment her habit, after the divorce from my father, of crying out in the night with leg cramps upon which moaning and groaning, either my brother or myself were being passively implored to come into her bedroom to massage her bunched-up muscles. I pass over these episodes without further comment primarily because I never answered these calls for “help.” My brother always rose from bed to go to her aid…and I simply lay there listening to her carryings-on with profound disgust until he did so even then understanding all-too-clearly their psychosexual nature.
My mother, like all mothers apparently, believed herself owed some form of eternal gratitude for having evacuated me out of nowhere into this life-sentence of unending tortures I’m currently serving. Somehow I escaped the universal burden of mother-love and, if anything, felt nothing but antipathy towards the maternal hell-hole. I regarded my mother as little more than a slave, or, better yet, a walking-talking placenta from which to continue to draw nourishment until she was entirely used up. I felt she was responsible for my miserable, unwanted existence and that the least she could do was anything I thought might make it even marginally endurable. Rightly or wrongly, my mother always felt slighted at not having received the unthinking adoration with which most human offspring commonly regard their mothers.
No…just the opposite: I considered my mother, if then only dimly, as a kind of monster, a momster, and she was never far in my mind when I follow up the ultimate cause of every pain and fear I ever felt.
As for her personality…its easy enough to see in retrospect how my mother’s lying, manipulative, passive aggression could have driven my already lunatic father into his frequent and seemingly unprovoked fits of monumental blind rage…but at the time, the origin of his sudden explosions of anger were a complete mystery. This woman, my mother, seemed utterly incapable of telling the truth about virtually anything and prefered to obscure everything, especially her own true desires, behind such a fog of confusing half-truths, contradictions, and “misunderstandings” that the events of the past were always up for re-interpretation, if not re-invention.
If I were to pity my father at all (and one would practically have to be christ himself to do so), it would be to pity the idea of him trying to coax an honest answer from this automatic lying-machine designed out of meat and hair to look like a woman. Any straight thing that went into her invariably came out crooked and, perhaps, I’m nothing if not the best example of that.
Barring being outright murderers (and perhaps even these would have been preferable), it’s hard to imagine a pair of monsters more unfit to produce and rear children than my mother and father if only because on the surface of things they seemed so relatively innocuous. There is nothing they can be outright convicted of having done to me (aside from, possibly, some threats with knives and strangling hands)…and that in itself is a kind of serpentine evil all the more effective in that it eludes any positive identification. There is no way to protect oneself from such an all-pervasive atmosphere of plague…a dis-ease that becomes synonymous with life itself.
It’s a frightening testament, then, to the sheer force of my personal will that it took so long for them to kill me, but they managed it in the end, by the time I was 12, in any event. Up to that point, I was a thoughtful, always worried, but loud-mouthed and dominating little boy who would, nonetheless, shrink back cowardly at the slightest outright threat, or hostile opposition. I feared, it seems to me, not so much physical pain, but shame and the threat of instant annhilation, both of which my father wielded with very little tact or self-restraint.
I recall a schoolyard fight in which some little jackass caught me in a headlock that had neither incapacitated nor hurt me at all…and yet I still gave up, cried “uncle,” because I was embarrassed to be at the center of a ring of schoolmates who’d circled around us to watch. I simply wanted to be leave the scene—and to “surrender” seemed the quickest way to vanish.
Other fights occurred during these early years and I’d sometimes “disappear” in another way altogether: by exploding into such a blackout rage that I didn’t realize what I was doing until I found my hands around someone’s throat.
What is constant, of course, is the twin desire to annhilate “my-self,” either by implosion or explosion, as if in the annihilated place, the no-man’s land at the epicenter, within the sphere of the very nothing itself , I might experience whatever existence I could rightly be said to temporarily possess.
And thus, in both suicide and murder, I began to seek the key to identity which struck me, always and necessarily, in the absence at the center of my-self.