It’s been a month of off-screen busy-ness since I last wrote about my dead dad. Let’s see if I can finally get some of the other haunting memories down in print, and presumably out of my head.

My younger brother has recently compared our paternal grandmother to Judge Judy. He says he sees, in that show’s brutal judgmentalism, grandmother’s attitude toward life as she’d learned it back at the turn of the last century. This was the attitude my father adopted—an attitude of isolation, emotional repression, racism, curtness, sternness, and verbal abuse.

At this grandmother’s funeral, a distant cousin told me what I’d long known, that my younger brother had always been my father’s favorite. My father had supposedly talked to this cousin years ago about my older brother, who was and is mentally retarded, and then about me, whom he called “a genius,” and then my younger brother, the “one normal person,” whom he was so relieved to have finally sired.

My father’s personality evolved over the years, as did his attitude towards me. For the first few years, he tried to balance the harsh dinner-table lectures with playtime joking. But such efforts faded away by the time I was, say, eight or nine.

From that point, I remember three basic kinds of statements from him:

• The constant verbal abuse and putdowns against me, which would invariably climax with “And stop feeling so goddamn sorry for yourself!”
• Snarly rants against figures in the news or general outside-world targets: Blacks, Mexicans, Nixon, politicians in general, women’s libbers, women in general, etc. etc.
• Instructions for the household chores that would pretty much fill all my weekends and summers. Beyond the house and the huge lawn, there were the barn, the eight to ten head of cattle, the fences, the wild blackberry bushes needing chopping down, and, eventually, The New House to build. (His chief nickname for me and my brothers: “Free Help.”)

He wasn’t just a rage-aholic. He also had several of the more usual vices. He spent his afternoons and evenings maintenance-sipping straight Jim Beam or Old Crow, and his weekends guzzling Miller High Life or Oly. He had a pipe, which he filled with his own mix of three of the cheapest tobacco brands on the market. Once a month he “mixed the tobacco” on the living room floor, covered with old pages of the Everett Herald.

But my father’s chief withdrawal mechanisms were antique furnishings and antique cars. Especially the cars. There were so many of them. Even a boat or two.

A Rolls-Royce hearse. A 1939 Ford V-8. A 1956 powder blue Thunderbird convertible. One of the last prewar Lincolns, a specially doled out model limited to Ford execs and family members. The only car in his collection that had been built in my lifetime was a Continental Mark II.

Oh yeah, and the Malibu station wagon we had when I was a kid, with the back inside door handles removed so we couldn’t get out unless my father or mother let us out.

To one side in the back seat would be my younger brother, whom I blamed for everything and started meaningless fights with at every opportunity.

To the other side would be my older brother, who (as I was told) suffered from infant pneumonia before I was born. He lived, and continues to live, with moderate mental retardation, epilepsy, asthma, nasty skin rashes, assorted allergies, and a cocktail of other disorders. Please don’t think of him as a valiant, positive-minded survivor, or as a happy naif. He’s even more sullen and bitter than I am, and with good reasons.

In the middle was me, usually withdrawn into my thoughts.

I buried myself in my own head, and in my twin passions of books and TV. (To this day, I don’t get why so many people order me to renounce one of my childhood friends. You know which one I mean.)

By living in my own head, I don’t just mean in words and ideas. I also retreated from the noise in the house into a noise in my mind. An inaudible, undescribable “static” comparable to that produced by an old Soviet “jamming” radio station.

I grew up smart in a town where boys were supposed to be dumb. I became, and remained, jealous of girls’ freedom good at academics and bad at sports. I didn’t want to be a girl. I wanted to be among girls. And I wanted what I, in my amazingly limited perspective, thought were girls’ social privileges. (God, was I living in an insular world!)

I should have realized girls didn’t have everything easy from the example of the only female in our house, my mother.

(There will be at least one more installment of this. I won’t promise when.)