Chapter 5: Madder Max
I can't entirely blame my father for calling an end to his marriage. He didn't want the life he'd constructed for himself. As an adult, he had every right to set out on a new path and reconstruct a different path. For him, being married and having children proved to be a mistake, and he no longer wanted his wife, his kids, or his proverbial picket fence. Perhaps he recognized the absurdity of it all, or maybe he genuinely didn't like us. In any event, once he realized that we weren't enough, he left us behind and went out in search of a different kind of life.
My father came of age in the 1950s. As a young man, he unquestioningly accepted the strict set of social rules placed on him. In those days, most American men adhered to the rigid social expectations placed on them: men were expected to go to work, support their children, and maintain the household, but they were not allowed to openly express emotions. Men of that era remained detached, and my father was no different. He dutifully did everything expected of him: he served in the military, he married young, and he secured himself a job that allowed him the opportunity to climb the corporate ladder. My mother fulfilled her own societal obligations: she stayed at home with the kids, and she fed us, clothed us, and cared for us just as she was expected to do. Everything should have been perfect: Dad dutifully brought home the money while Mom took care of the domestic sphere. They lived out the American Dream, and everything should have been perfect with their two cars, their house, and their three healthy young children, but even so, this wasn't enough for my father.
From my earliest memories, I could feel the intense dissatisfaction with his life. Children are like sponges: they unconsciously absorb their environment. They decode the tones of every conversation, spoken or unspoken, and they analyze the smothering silence for meaning. Even as a child, I felt the complexity of my father’s plight. I sensed the weight of his unhappiness. When he came home from work, his anger and frustration settled over the house like a heavy blanket, and it covered all of the occupants inside. The feeling was so overwhelming that I preferred the times when he was away. In my parents, from such a young age, I recognized two sad people who’d joined together in a failed union. I never saw them smile or kiss or hug or fight. I rarely saw them interact with one another. They ignored each other and lived like two anonymous strangers who simply shared a house and children. I felt the uncomfortable rift between my parents, though they never bickered or argued in front of us. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. They’d both given up with even trying. Soon, they would divorce.
While I knew my parents felt unhappy, I didn’t understand that my father wanted a different life. In fact, I didn’t know that it was possible for him to have a different life. In the 1950s, he’d made a pact to marry my mother, but now that we’d moved into the early 1980s, his promise seemed less important. The 80s was a time of materialism. People were encouraged to take what they wanted and to leave the rest behind. My father’s desires seemed to match the era in which he lived. He wanted to exchange his suburban house for an apartment in LA, and rather than being married to a middle-aged woman, he decided to trade her in for his young secretary and a sports car. In his new life, there would be no children.
I don't know if he started fucking his secretary at around the same time that I broke my arm, but by the end of that same year, he'd officially left us. After the initial separation, the divorce finalized shortly thereafter, and he was gone. Like a magic trick, he disappeared. For us children, the divorce seemed quietly unemotional, just like everything that my parents did in front of us. Lynn, the secretary, offered my father an entirely different life. I remember the first time that I met her. She seemed to exaggerate her expressions, and she came off as ostentatious and vaguely out of place. Come to think of it, she reminded me of the Baroness from The Sound of Music. She was plastic and pretentious, and she seemed put out to have my father’s children visit even for a weekend. There was nothing warm about her, and her affected voice grated on my nerves. Still, at ten years old, I came to terms with his decision, though I felt somewhat conflicted. In part, I did feel sad, but I also felt a sense of great relief because I no longer had him calling me a pansy, and I didn’t have to play soccer or baseball. In contrast, my brother Max felt devastated by the divorce. Max, then sixteen years old, had lost his father and his best friend, and this did not sit well with him.
When my parents first announced the finalization of their divorce, Max tearfully locked himself in his bedroom slamming the door and not coming out for several days, not to eat or shower or even to go to school.
"You're a fucking bitch!" he shouted at my mother when she tried to get him to come out.
My brother was sixteen and I was ten. My mother said that Max just needed some space to process everything that was happening, so she advised my sister and me to leave him alone, but space didn’t seem to agree with him. He became even more moody and temperamental, first lashing out at my mother and then lashing out at me. My brother carried a lot of rage, and he had enough blame for everyone in the house. My mother should have sent him to counseling, but counseling wasn’t popular in those days. On several occasions, he pointedly told me that I was the direct cause of my parents’ divorce.
"He never liked you. Nobody likes you. Just mom, and she's a fucking cunt!"
He said that when I broke my arm, it was a major reason for their separation, and perhaps he was partially right in that; however, the broken arm proved only a small part of that decision, and the divorce was a long time coming.
Max could never face the truth of our parents' divorce because the implications were far too devastating: our father didn’t want to be married to our mother, and he no longer wanted children in his daily life. He’d grown tired of the pact he’d made in the 1950s, and when he saw what the world offered in the early 1980s, when he saw that he could leave his unhappy marriage and take comfort in a young, attractive woman, he cashed in his chips and made the exchange. Yes, I’m oversimplifying what I imagine must have been a complex decision, but I’m trying in earnest to make meaning of something I still don’t quite understand. That’s why I choose to break this down to its simplest terms: my father didn't want to be a father anymore. If he wanted to be a father, he would have at least visited us after the divorce, or perhaps simply picked up the phone to call from time to time, but he didn’t. At my mother's insistence, we saw him once a year when we'd spend a weekend at his apartment, and that was more than enough for me.
But for Max? It was a complete and total devastation. As a result, Max felt the need to lash out and blame others. At its root, their divorce had nothing to do with my stupid broken arm or my being a pansy. Their divorce stemmed from my father deliberately making a choice to start over, to press the reset button, and to go and live another life far away from the one he’d started and then abandoned. It was a life far away from us. While this hurt all of us, each in our own way, it affected Max the most, even more than mother.
Divorce affects some children much more than it affects others, and without a father, Max became the anchorless ship. He spun wildly out of control, and my mother’s discipline, unlike my father’s, proved entirely ineffective. The divorce transformed Max into one of those angry, troubled teens that you read about. Once he overcame the initial sadness of the divorce, he settled into a state of constant anger, and he remained in that state for quite some time. I don’t know if Max truly blamed me for my parents’ divorce or if I simply served as the whipping boy because he felt so much anger at the loss. In any event, I was an easy target because I was weak and scrawny, and I didn’t know how to fight back and defend myself.
As the first born, Max could remember my parents' marriage before they became unhappy, and he no doubt missed those times when my parents behaved lovingly toward each other. It must have been a sad thing to watch my parents go from being a lively, happy couple--a couple who fished and bowled and enjoyed camping--into two invisible ghosts hardly ever speaking to one another.
Throughout the whole of their marriage, my brother remained a loyal friend to my father. Max copied our father's mannerisms and took up all of his interests to please the man. They spent weekends watching sports, playing catch, going to games, washing the car, and all the other things that a father and son should do. Now, with my father gone, Max sat alone in front of the TV set with no one at his side. Dad wasn’t coming home. Ever.
Max asked my dad if he could move in with him, but my father put an end to that idea immediately.
"I need you there with your mother. You need to be there for Billy. He needs you, Max."
There would be no visits, no phone calls except on birthdays.
This wasn’t like one of the many business trips that he took, and it wasn’t like all of the nights when he had to stay late at work. No. He wasn’t coming back, and he wouldn’t be there to watch the game or throw a football. Worse, my father’s new life did not afford a place for even his favorite son. Before the divorce, every Sunday when he was at home, my father and Max would sit together watching sports—both of them howling at the screen in unison—but now that my father found a new life with his young wife, my brother sat alone with a hole in his heart. While I celebrated the new freedom in my father's absence, my brother raged and struggled with both anger and depression, and he made it a point to lash out at the world, and at me in particular. To a large degree, I still resent Max for how he treated me in those years that followed the divorce.
With the divorce, my mother now worked a full-time job to support the family, and that left me alone with my brother on most afternoons. Max took advantage of this opportunity, and he beat the shit out of me on a regular basis. I need to be clear on this point: when I say he beat the shit out of me, I am not talking about the normal rough housing or teasing that you would expect between brothers. There was nothing normal about the way Max treated me, and our six-year age difference made it so that he had every advantage. Society has a way of ignoring sibling abuse, but there was nothing normal about my experience.
Siblings are supposed to fight, but what happens when the fighting escalates? What happens when a line is crossed into dangerous abuse? At 16, he was very much a young man, and at 10, I was still essentially a child. This abuse happens more often than people think. I once read something that stuck with me, and I still think it's true: “If one child is always the victim and the other child is always the aggressor, it is an abusive situation.” Of course, at 16, my brother wasn't a child. He towered over me, and I had no way of fighting back.
I can't count the number of times that Max whipped me, slapped me, punched me, or pushed me down. Twice, he choked me so hard that I passed out and awoke to him saying, "You little fucking faggot!" When he smashed the lamp over my head, I toppled to the ground and bled all over the linoleum floor, and he insisted that I clean up the mess while threatening to kill me if I told my mother. Once, he did something to me that I don’t want to discuss; it was much more inappropriate than being strangled or hit with a lamp, but I don’t ever want to talk about that.
To support the family, my mother worked long hours, so my brother had full reign of the house and he could do whatever he pleased. Even when my mother got home—when she scolded him for the way he treated me—he didn’t care. What could she do to him? Nothing. He was the oldest male, and without a father in the house, he felt he could do as he pleased, which is exactly what he did.
Max was in high school, and I got out an hour earlier than he did, so every day, I scampered home and tried to think up ways to avoid him. In the hour that passed, I remember feeling sick with fear because I knew what Max would do to me when he arrived. Abuse occurred daily, and I’d come to expect it. Whether he beat the shit out of me or called me a “pansy homo” I could expect some kind of punishment.
Initially, he always started with his familiar insults, but these taunts quickly escalated into assault. When it started, I would mostly try to hide and get away, but that was useless. My mother’s bedroom had a lock on it, so I used to hide there, but Max would get so angry that he’d kick holes clear through the door. Imagine that! Somebody kicking holes in the door screaming, "I'll fucking kill you!" He did this with my mother’s bedroom and also both bathrooms. Locks were useless. Some days, I would hide by going into the backyard. There, I would slip over to the neighbor’s fence and hide inside their hollow juniper tree while waiting for my mother to come home. Sometimes, it worked and he left me alone, but more often than not, he came to find me. He would drag me by the neck inside the house and then he would “punish me.” That’s what he called it: “Punishment.”
"ARE YOU READY FOR YOUR PUNISHMENT?" He'd say, "Mom's not home to save you, Pansy." Then he'd lock his arms around me and pull me in close. He'd grab my wrists and slap my own hands into my face. If I struggled, he'd hit me in the stomach and knock the breath out of me. He hold me tight and wait for me to cry. That was his thing. He wanted tears. Not fake tears, like "Let me go." He wanted me in pain, and he'd say twisted shit in my ears, sometimes slapping me around, he'd push his groin against me, into me.
“Dad’s not around, and you need to be punished,” he would say.
Fearing the beating, I always yelled my familiar reply, “I’ll tell Mom.”
“And what’s Mom going to do, pansy?”
Nothing.
My mom would yell at him, threaten to ground him, cry to him and beg him to stop, say that she would send him away to military school, but at the end of the day, Max was right. My mother would do nothing. Max and I both knew it.
I hated him. I hated him in a way that's hard to explain. It was real hate.
Sometimes, I didn’t even fight the beatings. It got to the point where I would lie still and let him do to me all the things he felt I deserved. I would bubble over with tears, and my brother wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. My torture became his perverse obsession. Max would twist my arm behind my back and pull it so hard I thought it would break again, and though I cried and begged him to stop, he enjoyed hurting me too much to quit.
“You're a fucking pansy!”
Max got off on the abuse. That’s the only way I can describe it: he got off on it. For two years, his mean streak never softened or faded. My mother should have called the police; she really should have sent him off to military school like she’d often threatened to do, but she didn’t. Instead, she seemed to take responsibility for his behavior, as if it were her fault for letting the divorce happen, which made him so angry. So she would cry and beg him to stop hurting me, but—as I said—he couldn’t stop himself. He continued to spit on me, pull my hair, smack me in the face, and worse. He tore into me to satiate his aggressions and to punish me. He fetishized my helplessness.
“Little mama’s boy wants his mommy! Ain’t that adorable!” he would say. Then he would focus in on our father: “You’re the one who made dad leave, didn’t you? Dad couldn’t stand living in the house with a homo for a son. You made him sick!”
Sometimes I wonder if my brother thought that by beating me it might actually bring my father back home. My father was not a nice man, but he did not tolerate misbehaving, and he would have set Max straight if he still lived in the house. . Or maybe that's not true. I don't know. But sometimes I think Max misbehaved because he thought it would bring my father back. Then again, maybe Max did it because he wanted to punish my mother. Max openly blamed my mother for the divorce. That's why he made her cry so often and called her a bitch and worse. Maybe Max liked to see her cry as much as he liked to see me do the same. Or maybe my brother did it just because he truly is an asshole. It’s a terrible thing to say about my own family, but some people are just plain evil. They’re born that way and they stay that way.
My brother continued the worst of the abuse for two years when he finally disappeared into the Marines, but until then, nothing would stop him. At school, his grades plummeted, and he started hanging out with the wrong crowd. His new friends introduced him to alcohol, marijuana, and crank, and by the time he turned 17, my mother could do absolutely nothing to control him.
I don’t understand why we don’t hear more about sibling abuse. It exists, and it’s terrifying for the younger siblings who have to live with an older troubled teen. I try to convince myself that my mother never understood the real extent of the abuse, just like I have to convince myself that she didn’t know about that silly Halloween mask that terrified me as a child. But I do remember my mother crying to Max and begging him to stop.
“Please,” she said. “This isn’t easy on me. The divorce is hard, Max. Your father isn’t contributing anything to help out, so I’m the one who supports us. I can’t be here like I was, and I’m sorry. I understand if you’re angry with me, but I’m doing my best. I wish things were better, and I want to make it better, but please, Max, please help me out. Your brother’s only eleven years old, and you’re a man. You’ve got to stop what you’re doing to him.”
None of her pleading worked.
If I had anything of value, Max would deliberately take it and sell it. If he couldn't sell it, he'd break it, and then he would present the broken pieces to me as a pile of rubbish and laugh until I cried. When his grades got bad and he wasn't going to graduate, she had no choice but to send him to a local private school known for handling troubled teens. Even so, he continued taunting me and beating the shit out of me on a regular basis. Shockingly—and to me, this is perhaps the worst part—he actually encouraged his friends and their little brothers to torment me as well. He instigated his friends’ younger brothers to approach me at school and to call me out as pansy. What could be more fucked up than that? No matter how bad things were at home, I always hoped that my brother would have my back in public. This was not the case. As if my life weren’t bad enough already, I now had peers at my school taunting me as the "pansy" because Max gave them permission. What older brother does that? What member of your own family encourages other kids to tease flesh and blood? I had no respite during those days. Now I faced teasing and bullying at school, and I faced it at home. I can't remember a single day when Max was nice to me, nor can I remember one single moment when I could turn to my brother for any type of help or advice. He openly hated me, and he did nothing but tease and torment me, and I could do nothing about it. Even now, as I write this, I feel my blood boiling.
Those were the fucked up years.
Not surprisingly, my first experience with illegal drugs happened around that time.
My mother wasn’t at home, and my brother had a girl over at the house. Her name was Lucy Brody. She wasn’t his girlfriend, but I knew Max had a crush on her. She lived down the street in a large blended family. The Brody’s had lived in the neighborhood for years, and when Mr. Brody’s wife died, he remarried Lucy’s mother. Lucy’s mother was a brash, loud woman while Mr. Brody was mostly quiet. Lucy took after her mother. At the time, she was 15, a skinny, scrappy, rebellious girl who also “ran with a bad crowd,” as they say. On the day I’m remembering, my brother and Lucy disappeared into a back bedroom leaving me planted in front of the television. Though my mother didn’t smoke, my brother and Lucy did, and I could smell their smoke coming from the back bedroom. After some time, Lucy reappeared, lit a cigarette on the stove, and then used the house phone to call three of her friends over to the house.
Like an overprotective child, I felt angry with my brother for allowing smoking in the house, and I hated Lucy for walking around and acting like she owned the place.
“We’ve got three hours,” she said into the phone. “I’m over at Max’s. His little brother is here, but nobody else. Nobody’s gonna be here for at least three hours.”
Two boys and one girl showed up in fifteen minutes’ time, each of them wearing cut-off shorts and half-tops. They raided the kitchen, took what they wanted, and then disappeared into the back bedroom. I sat in the front room watching cartoons, but I could hear their music underscored with constant laughter. I remember feeling curious, but more than that, I felt nervous: I also knew they were all up to no good.
I don’t know how much time passed, but Lucy eventually came out of the room, and she looked at me with glossy, bloodshot eyes. “Billy,” she said, smiling. “Me and my friends have something special to show you. You wanna come see?”
“I’m watching TV,” I said. I still felt angry that they were smoking in the house.
“You can watch it later. Come with me.”
I felt I had no option in the matter, so I reluctantly said, “Sure.” I followed her down the hallway and into Max’s room. The air smelled of sweet smoke, and a Fleetwood Mac record played in the background.
Lucy shut the door behind us and then she sat me on the edge of my brother’s bed. In that moment, Max looked especially strange to me. He was high, though I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know what everyone laughed at or why they laughed so easily, and I didn’t know why they called me into the room. I could tell their laughter was in some way connected to me, and it felt as if I’d walked into a trap. All attention settled on me.
Lucy asked, “Have you ever seen one of these?” She held out a red bong. I shook my head no as she passed the bong to Max. Max flicked the lighter and then took a big toke. He held the smoke in his lungs for several seconds and then exhaled a large plume into the room. He then passed the bong to the guy sitting on the floor near his girlfriend. The guy struck the lighter and held the flame to bowl as he inhaled deeply. As he exhaled, he burst into a coughing fit, and the others laughed at him. The yellow curtains were drawn shut, and the feint sun filtered through them and colored the room with a mustard glow.
Lucy said to me, “OK Billy, it’s your turn. Time to get you stoned.”
Upon hearing the word “stoned,” everyone laughed and howled and clapped, and I felt embarrassed and especially anxious.
Lucy said, “Now here’s the thing. You can’t tell your mother about this because you’ll get in big trouble.”
“I don’t care if he tells my mother,” Max said.
Lucy replied, “Yes you do, Max! You’ll get in trouble and so will we. If my mom finds out again, she’ll kill me.”
Max said, “Good luck keeping him quiet. He’s a little tattle tale. He lives for that shit.”
In that moment, I wanted to prove my brother wrong, so I said, “I won’t tell. I promise.”
“You swear?” she asked.
“Yes. I swear.”
Then she gave me a set of simple instructions: “Now what you’re going to do is this: I’m going to blow some smoke into your mouth, OK? When I blow out, when you feel it in your mouth, you suck in. You breathe in the smoke, ok? Suck the smoke all the way down, as hard as you can.”
“This is stupid,” Max said. “You’re wasting it on him.”
“It’ll be funny. Come on Max. Let me do it.”
“Fine.” She took a hit from the bong, pressed her lips to mine, and then blew the smoke into my mouth.
One of the guys howled with laughter and then cheered,
“Suck it in, Billy.”
I drew the smoke into my mouth and tried to swallow it like it was some kind of medicine. I gulped at it, lapping and gasping, and then I choked in a coughing fit just like the guy on the floor had done. Everyone laughed as if they’d seen something hysterically funny.
Lucy said, “Let’s try it again, Billy. Breathe it in.” Once again, she drew in a deep breath of smoke and then blew it into my mouth. Rather than swallowing it down, I drew it in, and this time I held it in my lungs long enough to make the teenagers cheer and applaud. But once again I broke into a cough.
Max said, “Lucy, practice with me. Show him how it’s done on me.” He flashed a cheesy grin, and she rolled her eyes, saying, “I don’t think so Max!”
Max scowled, and Lucy handed the bong back to the people on the floor. Now the girl took a hit from the bong, leaned over toward her boyfriend, and they exchanged a deep kiss and a bong hit.
Max looked over at me and with a curious and almost threatening tone, he said, “That’s how it’s done. You’ve got to breathe in like you’re sucking. You know, like you’re sucking.”
Lucy asked, “Do you want to do it again, Billy?”
“No,” I said. “Can I go now?”
“No. You can’t.” Max said. “Don’t be a pansy.” I sucked it in, pulling the smoke deep inside my lungs, and I held it just as long as I could, and then let it go without any cough at all. I think everyone seemed shocked at how quickly I’d caught on, and when they cheered and clapped, I must admit that I felt important in that moment.
So I did it again.
And again.
The laughing and cheering seemed all for me. I felt like I was floating, and the song on the record player seemed to play for me, too. I felt like the Gold Dust Woman, and I finally felt as if I had done something right.
Lucy said to me, “Do you feel it?” Her voice sounded far away.
I didn’t know exactly what she meant—“Do you feel it?”—but I didn’t want to disappoint anyone in the room, so I said, “Yes, I feel it,” and I leaned back onto the bed.
Everyone laughed, and Lucy said, “You’re stoned!” Then she grabbed a scarf tied onto the bedpost. She flirtatiously placed it on her shoulders and wore it like a feather boa. She closed her eyes and mouthed the words to Stevie Nicks’ song on the record player, and everything felt warm and yellow.
Then Max lit the bong and took another hit. He said, “When you smoke this, you’re invincible. You can do anything.”
The guy on the floor laughed and said, “No, that’s cocaine, not pot.”
“Here,” Max said holding up his cigarette toward me.
“Touch the end of this cigarette. It won’t burn.”
Everyone laughed and I quickly sat up from the bed.
“I’m serious,” Max said. “Touch it. It won’t hurt.”
“I don’t want to,” I said, feeling dizzy and confused.
“Do it, pansy.” He said, “Touch the cigarette. Feel the burn.”
Lucy said, “That’s fucked up. Don’t make him touch it.”
“Come on. Let’s see him do it,” Max said.
The room erupted into a chant: “Do it! Do it! Do it!”
“Goddamit Max,” Julie said, laughing. “You’re an asshole!”
She took me from the room and ran my hand under the cold water.
“If your mother asks,” she said, “tell her you burned it on the stove, OK?”
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