For reasons I will never truly understand, my first stepfather was an honest-to-god son of a bitch. To this day he will never admit that fact and my mother still is quick to defend him, but as I have learned in the years since, an unpleasant fact is no less a fact just because you don't agree with it.
He came into our lives at a time when we needed him, because my father had run off to Louisiana after realizing he was more in love with a bottle and the powder he could whale up his nose at that point than his family. So when the new guy came along, he helped keep my mother and her two kids from being in a considerable world of hurt.
By the time they married a few years later, though, things had definitely changed in my life. I learned for what may have been the first real time what hating someone and being hated by someone feels like.
Now before I continue, as a point of fact I want to make it clear that I was in no way an angelic kid who never did anything wrong and was beyond reproach of any sort. I would disobey my mother and not do chores or my homework, I would stay up late, I'd horseplay with my brother and so on. If I really look at it, though, I seriously doubt I was any different at that point in my life than 99 percent of children on this planet, because for all my faults, I was also a smart, curious, compassionate, and well-mannered kid too.
Then things started coming apart.
It started when my curiosity got the better of me and I discovered pornography WAY earlier than I should have. My stepfather kept it in a locked drawer in the roll-top desk in the house and at the same time, my brother learned how to pick locks using paper clips. And since I was of the impressionable age where I wanted to do everything he did, it doesn't take a math genius to see how this equation pans out.
A few months later, one of our neighbor friends, all of 13-14 himself, molested me at his house. It only happened the once and it wasn't such a traumatic thing that I had nightmares about it for years afterwards. But the fact remains it did happen, and not only did I not tell my parents about it, I didn't tell a soul about it for a good 25 years.
Why it took so long, I have no idea. I guess it was easier for me to just heal up and move on from it than it was from a lot of the things that would come later on.
Then there was my stepfather himself. When he was in a good mood, he could be as personable as anyone. When you pissed him off, however, he could make you feel very, very small, very very quickly. Apparently, I had the knack for pushing his buttons and setting him off better than anyone because I never seemed to do right by him.
At that time, I was playing Little League ball and had somehow gotten myself grounded (the reason is lost to me at this point in time), but I had a game scheduled and my brother convinced me to go, even though I told him I couldn't. So I did. The game got rained out and when I got back, my mother and stepfather were waiting for me, and when I told them why I went, they didn't believe me.
I kept being told over and over again, "Stop lying to us and blaming your brother, and tell us the truth!" Even though I was telling them the truth, unpleasant though it may be. So I told a lie that they accepted as the truth. I told them it was all my idea and I did it because I didn't think I needed to follow their rules.
I was eight-years-old and all I wanted to be was an eight-year-old kid. I wanted to go have fun with my friends, have cool toys to play with, watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat cereal with too much sugar and prizes at the bottom of the box.
When my stepfather started getting violent towards my mother, that was the end for me. I was sitting in my room one night and heard a crash downstairs. Thinking a lamp or something had broken, naturally, I went to check it out. I came down to find my mother washing her face off in the kitchen sink and having no idea what had happened.
Turned out my stepfather had tried to hit her in the face with a glass of whiskey and his pitch went high and outside, shattering against the living room wall. I followed her into the living room and he came back in, ordering me back up to my room and not to come back out. I did as I was told, but to this day I wish I'd stood my ground or called the cops or did something other than leave her alone with him. Even though he never laid a hand on her, it still bothers me.
My mother was married to my first stepfather for less than two years, and in that time, I went from being about as happy-go-lucky a child as you would meet to a moody, temperamental, argumentative, combative, untrusting, passive-aggressive one.
The last thing I ever said to him in person, after we had moved out and were back on our own, was when he came to the apartment to see my mother. I was in the driveway playing baseball and holding my aluminum Little League bat.
I looked him in the eye and told him, "If I hear a crash, or a scream, or anything like that, I will come up there I swear to God I will beat your fucking head in."
I don't care where in the world you live. No 10-year-old should have to say that to a grown man.
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