Pain Don't Hurt (2 page)

chapter one

And we shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.

—
WINSTON CHURCHILL

A
t this moment, right now, all I knew was I was just trying to survive.
I had already bitten through my lip, and the salty iron taste of blood was coating my dry tongue, wreathing it in some sort of gore sweater. It was making me feel sick. It was 95 degrees outside, hot even for a Pennsylvania summer, and the air felt like the unclean and speckled inside of a skinned animal steaming across my shoulders. The crappy rotating fan was doing nothing but moving the heat around the room in sticky waves. The sweat collecting around my hairline was starting to run into my eyes. I was just a few minutes away from getting my first belt beating. I was six years old.

“Don't cry, oh for God's sake. You look like a stupid baby when you cry, and you aren't a baby, are you? You're a man.” The heavy New York accent came volleying out of my father, propelled on a cumulus puff of twenty-four-hour-a-day whiskey/beer breath. His black eyes burned with a sickening mix of compulsion and fury. I flinched against the inevitable. Time for the nightly rampage . . .

His gargantuan hands rose above my cringing head. Years later
Sporting News
would run a story on legendary wide receiver Jerry Rice. In the center of the paper they included a life-size outline of Jerry's famed enormous hands. As men at the local bar sat marveling, placing their own hands over the outline and laughing at how dwarfed theirs looked by comparison, my father leaned over their shoulders and slapped his hand down over the outline, utterly eclipsing it. I remember feeling a sick sort of pride, the old “My dad really could beat up your dad.” Those mitts were his moneymakers. Their massive size is what made it possible for him to grip a basketball in his palm with the effortlessness with which most children can palm a yo-yo and garnered him a spot as the poster boy for the first-ever NBA game. He only played pro for a few years, but his image is still used today. His hands earned him a level of uneasy respect from neighbors and the other men who would spend time frequenting the same local bars, tolerating his raucous and often caustic storytelling, watching him boss me around, forcing me to entertain the other drunks by recalling baseball or basketball player statistics, or to recite Lou Gehrig's retirement speech from memory with faultless accuracy. “You know, I was there when he gave that speech,” he would say, over and over again. No one ever dared to tell him that they'd heard it before. No one ever dared to tell him much. When “Moose” spoke, it was listening time. That's what they called him, “Moose,” because he was just so fucking imposing. . . . He wasn't much for conversation or dialogue; he liked to entertain, and often at the expense of others. If he was interrupted, the interrupter became his subject of choice; he would mock them until they either left whatever dingy Latrobe bar he was at that day or engaged his barbarism, which always ended badly for them. He used to take pride in the fact that he “rarely hit anyone with a closed fist.” Truthfully, it made little difference. Getting swatted by a leathery palm the size of a tennis racket launched by a man standing at six foot five and weighing over three hundred pounds, regardless of the age or size of the receiver, generally resulted in damage one was not likely to soon forget.

I could hear my mother, my small-featured, passive mother, puttering around in her room, trying to busy herself. Trying to pretend she had an excuse for “not hearing” and therefore not intervening in what was going on. My father was born Harry David Miller in the Bronx in 1923. He was born the son of Benjamin Miller, a bastard of whose heritage no one is really sure (we suspect Russian Jew) and who upon being adopted took on the surname “Miller.” Ben served as a superintendent in a big apartment building and was married to a six-ways-from-Sunday mentally fucked Czech woman, my dad's mom. My father learned to take and dish out the onslaught early on from her. My mother, on the other hand, grew up one of seven brothers and sisters in a family of Ukrainian and Mongolian descendants. Everyone on both sides of their families drank, and I mean drank in the way of the tragic Eastern Europeans. They made careers, hobbies, and commitments of their drinking. My father drank to become a storyteller. My mother drank to believe the stories. God only knows what about him captured her attention first. What about him caused her to think,
This is the one
? When she met him he was, after all, still married. Only on his third wife at the time, and consequently third family. When he met my mother, then Helen Rose Lechman, a secretary with tiny, slight features, born and raised in New Derry, Pennsylvania, he made the decision to move on once again, as he had twice before. He abandoned the previous family and moved in with her. Perhaps it was the fact that my father had played in the NBA, had been a big-time athlete, and had fought in the war and been wounded. He was more worldly and had, in her small-town eyes, prestige. She longed for a bigger life, a better, fancier life. She longed to be a part of the upper class instead of just watching them go by with their designer handbags and brunches. Maybe she saw him as a way out. He later appealed to the Catholic church to annul his first marriage (because as we all know, having children doesn't necessarily mean the marriage has been consummated in the eyes of the Catholics, and the church doesn't acknowledge or care about other marriages following the first, so only the first one needed to be dealt with) and proceeded to marry my mother in Virginia before I was born. I didn't find out until I was sixteen that I had potentially dozens of other brothers and sisters I had not known existed until that day. I still have never met any of them, other than my brother Colin, who was, in truth, my half brother and the product of the wife previous to my mother. Colin and I were never given the opportunity to be very close other than early on. Oh, but when we were young . . . I looked up to him when I was young, his wild taste in music, his charm, and what seemed like an ability to know and/or understand everything. He always had an answer, an explanation. He seemed so cool. Later, when that answer became drugs and that wily personality became a dishonest one, we drifted apart. Or rather, he drifted, leaving me to take the brunt of my father's brutality all on my own. It isn't surprising that he ended up in the world of drugs, as we all were looking for escape from the ghosts of where we came from. My mother and father chose alcohol. Colin just went with the pattern laid before him, though his selections of substances tended toward the . . . exotic. I don't know if he chose to live part-time with my dad as a child or if his mother sent him to be with him, but he was there, his childhood split between the two houses. I know that whoever made the decision for him to be raised in that house with my father, even part-time, did him a great disservice.

“All right, now you need to imagine your feet are nailed to the floor. Get in that fight stance and only turn from the waist, and don't look all scared. Wipe your stupid mouth and quit gawking. Pretend you're not a scared little idiot.”

Looking back on it now, it makes me laugh. I was so shit scared of him back then, I did whatever he told me to do without question. Now I know he was giving me terrible advice. You always step with your jab, remain loose in your stance, and whip punches starting from your feet all the way up. You don't “imagine your feet are nailed to the floor.” So stupid.

“Now throw that jab out there.
Throw like you actually want to hurt somebody,
not like you're just some pathetic princess. You want me to start calling you ‘princess'?”

I balled up my fists and threw them as hard as I could into the center of his giant palms, trying as hard as I could to focus on keeping my feet, floating in my big brother's shoes, from moving even a little bit. Sweat was rolling down my forehead, and my stomach was clenched into an angry tangle of nerves. I was in danger of throwing up, which seemed a better alternative than standing there in front of him right then, except that I knew if I did, he would kick my ass even harder. My punches weren't hitting hard enough. I knew they weren't because he was looking more and more irritated. I couldn't seem to generate enough power to have an effect. I imagined my hands punching clean through his palms to the other side and slamming him in the face. I imagined him, with a surprised look on his face, laid out on the floor. I imagined him scared of me.

My father's favorite quote was “It is better to be feared than respected, for fear lasts longer.” He loved to tell anyone and everyone this. When I was diagnosed as being a type 1 diabetic very early in life, followed shortly by being diagnosed as having a problem with my aortic valve, something in him seemed to decide that he needed to “toughen me up.” As though that disease was my choice. He hated that I had any natural frailty.

“You call that a punch? Come on!” he roared. Everything in me wanted him to disappear, to just explode into a puff of dust with my next punch. I begged, pleaded, made deals with God or whoever. I wished as hard as I could. Nothing will encourage religious tendencies more than the feeling of absolute helplessness. Maybe that is why my mother never missed a service. She attended morning mass every day, both in her church and in my father's. While my father professed to be a Catholic, my mother preferred the Russian Rite church, but she liked to attend both churches. I think she would have gone to a synagogue if she thought they would have her. She would drag me with her every Sunday to her church and then to the Catholic church. I still think the rituals affiliated with both churches are beautiful. I mean, you want to see Christ presented with a lot of pomp and circumstance, go to a Catholic or Russian Rite church. The costumes, the lengthy services, the constant stand, kneel, bow your head . . . There appears to be a level of dignity there, or at least effort. The production alone demands some appreciation. Not to say that other religions don't, and not to say that I really believe much of what any of any religion espouses. But it was pretty spectacular to watch as a kid. In the beginning I used to like going to church with her simply because for those few hours, I knew exactly what was going to happen to me, and I could blend in. After a while, that comfort faded, as I had gone through my confirmation in the Russian church very early, which put a spotlight on me in the Catholic church when all the other kids were going through their confirmations as young teenagers. If I wasn't the odd man out by way of physical difference, somehow my parents found a way to force me to be left of center and, once again, seen as a “weird kid.” Plus, my father started to enjoy arguing with the Russian priests. In fact, I think he attended that church specifically to drum up new ways to get into arguments with them.

My mother was always looking for peace. At her age, church was one of the only places she had been taught to seek refuge. Sometimes she would drive me around in her car and tell me, “I'm going to get us out of here, Mark, we're going to go looking for apartments today and then we'll be out of there.” By the end of each day, either her guilt over thinking of walking out on a marriage (us Catholics and Russian Rite have truly cornered the market on guilt; feeling guilty is practically a skill we have perfected) or sheer exhaustion from thinking about how much it would take to actually leave would pull all the steam from her engine. It always ended the same: with shame and booze. We would go back home, she would pour herself something, then she would go to her room and shut the door, and I would be left to face him, his questions, his beer breath, and all that pent-up anger. Colin had learned over time to stay scarce, so he was never there to save me, not that I can really blame him. When he was there, he got it so much worse. . . . Sometimes my parents would spend months not speaking to each other, existing on opposite ends of the house, using me as a carrier pigeon if they needed to deliver information to each other. They never slept in the same room, not for as long as I can remember. She claimed it was because he snored; he claimed it was because she was a bed hog. The truth is, they were totally codependent but they just couldn't fucking stand each other.

“
Come on!
” He grabbed my shoulders and yanked them up, nearly lifting me off the ground. “
Come on!
Let's
go
!” he bellowed. His anger had reached an all-time high now. This was the boiling point. If I didn't deliver now, I would get tossed, smacked, all the while being showered with soul-crushing belittlement, characteristic of his “boy named Sue/toughen up” regime. The more of a target he made me, the harder he figured I would become. His intentions were to build a callus around my soul that was so big I would never be fragile to anyone. The onslaught was fully intentional. He would either beat me into a greasy smear on the floor, or eventually, I would rise up and become this armored beast that couldn't feel pain. It was a bad plan from the very start. Later on in my life, when I would be standing over him, watching him take his last animalistic rattling breaths of life, instead of being able to generate love, remorse, empathy, or even hate, that callus would prevent me from achieving either catharsis or forgiveness for a long, long time. I would watch every muscle in his face relax as he growled out a final gasp, and I would, for two solid years, feel nothing.

I took a quick breath and threw my last punch so hard it nearly pitched me forward straight into his chest. My fist skimmed off his hand and glanced right into the center of his wide, leathery cheek. If my heart could have burst through my ribs and run out of the room to hide, it would have. I felt all of my organs just huddle into the center of my body, and all of my extremities went cold. I know now that what really enraged him was not that I had hit him in the face, but the fact that it had been accidental. If I had hauled back and just plowed my tiny fist straight into his eye, he probably would have respected it. I can't say he wouldn't have slapped the bejesus out of me, but I doubt my skin would have tasted leather that day. He browbeat everyone, but he had this odd admiration for hopeless acts of courage. Had I actually
intended
to throw that punch, I might have gotten off lighter. As it stood, though, I had clearly not. The punch landed on his face because I was “sloppy” and “out of control.” In short, my ass was grass, and he was about to become the lawn mower.