Confessions of a Sociopath (11 page)

That was the thing with me. I made people smile so much
that it was easy to laugh off anything I did as harmless and silly rather than dangerous or reckless. I was a natural clown, an entertainer. I danced with gusto. I yelled and told stories. If there had been YouTube back then, I would have gone viral. My family could often ignore my other quirks because I was so charming and kooky. They could imagine they were just living inside a Saturday-morning television show involving a high-spirited kid and her colorful high jinks. At the end of each episode, they would smile, shrug their shoulders, and shake their heads.

But my lack of inhibition also meant that it all came out unfiltered, the charm interspersed with the awkward and disturbing. When I was
on
, I could delight everyone. But sometimes I could be too much. I would demand too much attention, pushing past cuteness to an uncomfortable grotesque. Other times, I would turn
off
, withdrawing completely into myself as if no one else was around me. I felt like I could turn invisible.

I was a perceptive child, but I couldn’t relate to people beyond amusing them, which was just another way for me to make them do or behave how I wanted them to. I didn’t like to be touched and rejected affection. The only physical contact I wanted entailed violence, and
that
I craved. The father of one of my best friends in grade school had to pull me aside and sternly ask me to stop beating his daughter. She was this skinny, stringy thing, all bony and with no muscle, with this goofy laugh; it was like she was asking to be slapped. I didn’t know that what I was doing was bad. It didn’t even occur to me that it would hurt her or that she might not like it.

I was not a typical child. That was obvious to everyone. I knew I was different, but there were no real indications to me of how or why I was different. Children are all selfish things, but maybe I was a little more self-interested than most. Or maybe I was simply more adept at accomplishing
my self-serving ends than others, unfettered by conscience or guilt as I was. It was not clear. Young and powerless, I developed my own forms of power by convincing people that pleasing me was in their own best interest. Like many children, I objectified everyone around me. I envisioned the people in my life as two-dimensional robots that turned off when I wasn’t directly interacting with them. I loved getting high marks in my classes; it meant I could get away with things other students couldn’t because I was one of the smart kids. I made sure to stay within the realm of socially acceptable childish behavior—or at least to have a sympathetic narrative prepared in case I was caught. Other than being adept at childish manipulation, I never seemed different from my peers, at least not in a way that could not be explained by my exceptional intelligence.

Everything I learned about power—how great it feels to have it and how terrible it feels to be without it—I learned from my dad. Our relationship for the most part constituted a quiet wrestle for power—he demanded dominion over me as part of his home and family, while I enjoyed undermining what I believed to be his undeserved authority. When I misbehaved I would sometimes get beaten black and blue by my father, but I never reacted. If anything, what bothered me about the beatings was that he thought he was winning our power struggle, but I knew it wouldn’t last. If someone who loves you is hitting you that hard, you have more power than he does. You’ve provoked a reaction in him that he cannot control, and if you are like me, you will use this incident however it suits you for as long as you are associated with him. For my image-obsessed father, the threat of my disclosing these beatings was enough to torture him. Perhaps at a church social
gathering I might wince as I lowered myself gingerly into a chair, making meaningful eye contact with my father when well-meaning third parties asked if I was okay, a look of terror flashing over his features as he anticipated my response. Strategically speaking, the beatings were the best thing to happen to me. His guilt and self-hatred were more potent than any other weapon in my little child arsenal and more enduring than any bruises that I may have suffered.

My father often made ridiculous demands of his children. He would tape lists of demands like “build a fence” and “fix the sink” to the doors of our bedrooms so we would see them when we woke up. I had gotten used to attempting the impossible when my father requested it. The way he asked me always made it seem like a dare, questioning whether I had the smarts or the courage to make things happen. Because that’s what I prided myself on, getting stuff done. Unlike my father, whom I considered to be largely inefficient, I was great at taking care of business. That was my role in the family.

His narcissism made him love me for my accomplishments because they reflected well on him, but it also made him hate me because I never bought into his self-image, which was all he ever really cared about. His dossier of civic duty and success meant nothing to me, because I knew better, and mine was and would be far greater than his. I think I did a lot of the same things he did—played baseball, joined a band, attended law school—so that he would know that I was better. I lived my life so that I had no reason to respect him.

One night in my early teens, driving home from the movies with my parents, I got into an argument with my father about the movie’s ending, which he thought was about overcoming obstacles and, of course, I thought was about meaninglessness, as I did about most everything those days. I was full of a
teenager’s petulance and contrariness mixed with a little more intelligence and cruelty than the average kid.

I didn’t mind arguing with him. I in fact made it a point not to back down from any of our arguments, particularly if they presented an opportunity to challenge some part of his provincial worldview, which I had already concluded was distorted in self-serving ways. We were still arguing by the time we pulled into the driveway of our house, and I could tell that he wasn’t going to let it go. I told him, “You believe what you want,” and went into the house. My impassivity often provoked his worst behavior.

I should have known that he wasn’t going to let me get away that easily, or maybe I knew but didn’t care. He followed me up the stairs, because it bothered him that his daughter—who was just a child—refused to agree with him, didn’t care if he disagreed with her, and thought nothing of casually dismissing him.

At the time, my parents were going through one of their rough patches. My father would bully my mother and she would have momentary breakdowns in which she would lie on the bathroom floor and respond to us by rhyming whatever it was we said to her:

“Mom, are you okay?”

“What did you say?”

“Do you need help? Are you well?”

“No, I’m feeling swell.”

Sometimes when my parents fought, she would try to assert herself using whatever she had learned from the self-help books that lined the headboard of their bed. One of her favorite lines was “I’m rolling up my window on you.” It meant that she was refusing to let him affect how she felt, which drove him mad. In retrospect I wonder who it was that wrote
that self-help book and how many of its readers ended up with swollen lips and bruised eyes. The idea that my father couldn’t make an impact on a person was enraging to him. Had my mother actually rolled up a car window on him he would have smashed the glass.

That night as my father became increasingly hostile about our argument over the movie, I told him, “I’m rolling up my window on you,” and then I slipped into the bathroom at the top of the stairs, shutting and locking the door.

I knew there would be consequences. I knew he hated that phrase, and that my repetition of it presented the specter of another generation of women in his house who refused to respect or appreciate him, and instead despised him. I also knew that he hated locked doors. I knew these things would damage him, which is what I wanted. And in any case, I needed to pee.

It was only a moment before he was pounding on the door. I imagined his face on the other side, getting redder and redder, contorted in an ugly display of anger. I remember wondering detachedly how long I would have to wait for him to go away. He began to shout.

“Open up!”

“Open up!”

“Open up!”

Each time he said it was louder than the last, swelling with impending violence. There was a pregnant pause, then the first big punch into the door, and then a crack. I wondered, curiously, about the door’s sturdiness, about whether its designer contemplated this kind of domestic disturbance to its integrity. I thought about how many blows it would take for my father to get through the door, and I wondered, curiously, how much danger I was really in. What did he imagine he would do when he got through the door? Would he drag me out of the
bathroom by my hair, kicking me in the soft of my stomach, screaming at me to agree with him about the ending of the movie? It seemed absurd.

I sat down on the tub to wait it out. The loud noises triggered a rush of adrenaline in the form of increased heart rate, heightened sensitivity to sounds, decreased peripheral vision; I observed these facts to myself calmly. I passively ignored their invitation to feel a sense of urgency as being counterproductive. Despite my body’s involuntary physical reactions, there was no emotional panic. I don’t know what it feels like to panic in a situation like this. What would a panicked person even do? There are so few options in such tight quarters. If anything, I was intrigued, curious to see how events would unravel.

By now the punches had knocked a hole in the door, and I could see through the hole that his hand was bloody and swollen. I wasn’t concerned about his hand, although it occurs to me that another daughter might have been. I wasn’t glad that he was hurt either, because I knew that it gave him satisfaction to be stricken by such passion that he could disregard his own pain and suffering. The bathroom door was not the only door that would be damaged by my father’s fists. The bedroom door at the end of the hall accumulated several indentations throughout my childhood (it opened to my oldest brother’s bedroom), as did the door to the master bedroom (resulting from fights with Mom). Walls were occasionally dented from having been punched near the heads of his family members.

He kept working at the jagged, splintered hole until it was big enough for him to stick his face through it, which meant that it was of considerable size. I remember achieving confirmation of his ugliness, seeing his face glisten with sweat under the harsh bathroom light. But he wasn’t grimacing in
anger as I had imagined; instead, he was smiling widely so that his teeth showed. He asked me with a wild gleefulness, “
You
are going to roll up your window on
me
?”

By then I must have seemed startled enough to satisfy him.

He withdrew his face, and through the hole in the door, I could see that he had lost his propelling anger. Any power I had gained by walking away from him and locking that door was stolen back from me the moment he saw the distress in my eyes, even if it was only slight.

He walked over to the closet to take out some gauze and other medical supplies to tend to his hand. In his youth he had worked as an EMT and was very proud of his first aid skills, so I knew that he would be meticulous with his self-ministering, as a point of pride. When I was certain that he was fully engrossed in his task, I slipped out of the bathroom, down the stairs, and outside, where I hid in the dark.

I stayed out there for a while, breathing deeply and contemplating my next move. I was not scared per se, but more aware of the way my world had changed in the past fifteen minutes. I was suddenly less concerned about my math homework and more concerned about preparing for a physical assault. Before hiding in the trees, I grabbed a hammer from the shed and held it up with the claw end out. For a few seconds, I would have killed anyone who came near me.

A little while later I heard my oldest brother yelling my name. I didn’t answer, waiting. I heard him go back inside. A few more minutes, and then he came back out.

“It’s okay. People are here.”

“Good,” I thought. “Witnesses.” But I knew that my dad was over it already. He had gotten the satisfaction of inflicting injury on himself, fear on me, and physical destruction where
his loved ones could see it. He had everything he wanted, and was therefore done for the night.

My mother had called a church official to help calm my father, in front of whom we all knew he wouldn’t lay a hand on me. For the remainder of the night, he wouldn’t do anything but express contrition. Even this would be delicious for him, a crucial element of the dramatic narrative that he and I had set into motion. I dropped the hammer and snuck back inside.

That bathroom door didn’t get fixed for months. When he finally got around to replacing it, my dad threw the old one out around the side of the house, as the yard was our family’s repository for broken things. My brother Jim found it there and told me to come down to see it, but when I got out there he was gone.

I stood and stared at it a little before he showed up with a pickax and a sledgehammer in his hands. Jim let me take the first swing, and after that we took turns smashing it to splinters. I felt the breathless exhilaration of destruction, obliterating from existence this object that had contributed to invoking anxiety in me, that had dispelled any false sense of safety I may have felt within my own home. The impact of metal on wood, the aching in my arms—it all felt wonderful, powerful.

I don’t know where Jim was when my dad was punching through that door. If he was around, he certainly didn’t do anything to stop it. I couldn’t count on him to do things like that for me. He just wasn’t strong enough, and I could never really fault him for that. In truth I could take better care of myself that way than he ever could.

I could, however, count on Jim to maintain a deep and abiding hatred of my father on my behalf, which was actually the worst revenge I could get on my dad. Children can be so cruel that way—loving each other so much more than they could love a parent despite the affection that is heaped upon them.