The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (7 page)

I sometimes wonder if, in our father’s situation, I would have had the courage to enlist. I suppose I would have; peer pressure alone would have made it tough to do otherwise. There was an anti-war movement during World War II, but it was small, and our parents surely had nothing to do with it. The prevailing view was that the war had to be fought, a view I share.

My generation was also deeply affected by war, but in very different ways. Our war, in Vietnam, was shot through with moral ambiguity, a war this country had no clear need or justification to fight. It seemed to be a grim game played with the lives of young Americans (not to mention untold numbers of Vietnamese) who were asked (and ordered, via the draft) to serve a cause whose rationale was murky indeed, lost in the obfuscations and double-talk of war-mongering generals, breast-beating super-patriots and mealy-mouthed politicians. With time, a moral imperative to the war did emerge, and the imperative was: Don’t go. Resist. Tell the government and the politicians to take their war and shove it. And that’s what a lot of us did.

Certainly that’s what Terence and I did. Like many of our peers, we’d had our minds blown with LSD and had bought into the hippy-dippy, peace-and-love, counterculture paradigm. Naturally, this trend shocked and appalled many in our parents’ generation, as did the disrespect for authority that resistance to the war necessitated. In my opinion, the Vietnam War and the widespread use of LSD were the two events that contributed most to the ideological and cultural divisions that ripped apart the country in the sixties. Those wounds remain open even today, a time when any form of healing, of tolerance for diverse moral and ethical perspectives, seems more remote than ever. Fortunately, Terence and I did not have to confront the full force of those conflicts at home. Yes, our parents looked harshly on hippies and the counterculture; they hated and feared LSD and other such drugs, along with the demagogues like Timothy Leary who promoted them. But they also knew the war was an unwarranted and unnecessary travesty. They didn’t encourage us to protest in the streets (we did anyway), but they did strive to keep us in school so we’d qualify for student deferments.

Like many others, my brother and I could avoid the war by graduating from high school and getting into college. That we succeeded can be traced back to the early emphasis our parents placed on books and reading. When they were kids, higher education was still hard to come by; it was seen as a privilege, the key to a better life and career that not everyone could hope to achieve. Though our father decided not to attend college, both our parents were determined that we would. I’m eternally grateful that they passed on a love of learning to us. We didn’t have the sense to realize it at the time, let alone to appreciate how hard they worked to keep us in school while our less fortunate peers were tapped for sacrifice to the god of war. Now, of course, I do appreciate it—now that it’s too late to thank them.

Chapter 4 - Terry and Denny

Terence Kemp McKenna and Dennis Jon McKenna.

Terence Kemp McKenna emerged from his mother’s womb on November 16, 1946. It was the end of a difficult pregnancy. My twin cousins assure me that my brother was a challenge from an early age and quickly earned the appellation “Terrible Terry.” Many infants and toddlers try the patience of their parents, but Terence, a “temperamental” child in modern parlance, apparently pushed ours to the limit. Fortunately, Mom had her sisters to help her through these trying episodes. Their support throughout our childhood was surely a major reason she remained as sane as she did. In fact, our mother was wise and compassionate, and if anything too tolerant. I know we hurt her, profoundly and deeply, many times; and many times in the four decades since her death I have wanted to apologize. I have to believe she knew we loved her despite it all. I suppose this lament is no different from that of any mother’s son. How many of us really honor and appreciate our mothers the way we should? Yet they always forgive us. In my heart, I believe our mother knew we loved her and has forgiven us.

Some time after Terry was born, the little family moved out of our mother’s childhood home to an upstairs apartment in a house near the Bross Hotel (then as now Paonia’s only hotel). They had just settled into their newly built home at Fourth and Orchard when I arrived, on a cold December day in 1950, a week before Christmas. I have no idea if I was “planned” or not, but whatever the case, when I joined the family my parents were delighted. Compared to Terry, I was a model of mellowness, or what some would call a “placid” baby. Though I’m still evenly tempered, certain critics, notably my wife, tell me I’m not as laid back as I like to pretend. Whatever. Compared to Terry, raising me was easy for my parents—at least early on.

Terence was a month past his fourth birthday when I showed up. Until then, he’d been the master of his universe, getting all the attention he craved. Like most any child, he perceived my arrival as a threat to his hegemony, which it was, and for years his primary agenda would be to neutralize this threat by any means. Had I been the elder sibling when he burst into
my
sweet scene in all his mewling, puking, disgusting glory, I’m sure I would have done the same. I dare say this was probably normal sibling behavior, at least in American society in the fifties. The difference was that Terry, being smart and creative, took brotherly terrorism to some rather interesting places. I see this as a very good reason not to have more than one child, or, if you do, to time them closer together or much farther apart. Four years strike me as exactly the wrong spacing.

There’s another factor that complicates my attempt at an early psychological portrait of Terence. At some point shortly before I was born, when Terence was three or four, there was an incident that drove a wedge between him and our father, changing their relationship forever. Indeed, the moment may have negatively affected Terence’s relationships until the end of his life. According to what Terence told me decades later, he and a friend were playing in a sandbox; being curious, and being boys, they began playing with each other’s genitals, and, somehow, handling each other’s shit. From a modern perspective, this behavior would be considered totally within the bounds of normality for kids that age, and most parents today would laugh it off. But when our dad encountered the scene he apparently freaked out. All his repressed fears about homosexuality, and sexuality in general, instilled in him as a Catholic child, bubbled up in a blind rage, and he spanked Terence rather badly for this transgression. In a way, he was exorcising his own demons from these forbidden realms; the outburst might have been directed at his son, but I am sure it rose out of his own fears.

Terence could not have understood that; all he knew was that his dad had suddenly turned on him in a vicious and painful way and beaten the living daylights out of him. His response, understandably, was one of rage and resentment. He couldn’t really show his extreme anger without risk of another beating; but the resentment soaked in, and lingered forever.

“That was it,” Terence said when he told me the story. “That was it between us.” He slammed an emotional door on our father that was never to be reopened, or so I believe; in that one instant, he resolved to protect himself at any cost, to never show vulnerability, and to put his own (perceived) self-interests front and center at all times. It would seem that, in his own mind, his mistreatment justified his extreme hostility over the years toward our parents, especially our father, and also toward me. As Terence matured he got better at relationships, but they were never easy for him. He told me this story with great vehemence and as if it had happened yesterday. I am left wondering if this experience had resulted in a loss of some essential willingness to trust in others. The story explained my experience of an emotional firewall that I often encountered at the core our relationship, and what I could perceive of his relationships with others. As for me, he eventually discovered that I wasn’t just a younger, weaker brother to torture. He did express his love for me, but only after years of abuse.

I don’t remember when Terry instituted his reign of terror against me, but it must have been when I was about four or five. Terry was a very creative tormentor, and employed both physical techniques and, even deadlier, a variety of psychological techniques to good effect. For physical torture, tickling was his method of choice. It was a good choice; I was very ticklish, probably in part because I became over-sensitized to it during our torture sessions. But it worked for Terry because it didn’t leave marks, and superficially it didn’t seem “that bad” because it made me laugh; but the laughter was not voluntary or enjoyable.

Terry was bigger than me, obviously. His favorite method was to hold me down on the floor, placing a knee on my chest and using both hands to pin my arms, then using his sharpened chin to poke and prod me. This became known as the “chin-ee” method. Other techniques were applied as well, but it was the chin-ee that I hated the most. It was all good-natured fun—for Terry. I don’t think he intended to hurt me, at least not with his tickling; but the impulse was hard to resist, because I so reliably reacted in a satisfying way. On other occasions the torture was more overt and I ended up bawling a lot. Perhaps nothing about this was abnormal; siblings compete, a primate pecking order must be established, this is just what humans do. Like most big brothers, I suspect, Terry both hated and loved the little squirmy worm that I was. It was fine for him to torture me, he considered it a perquisite of being the big brother; but if anyone else threatened me, he was there to protect me.

If the physical teasing I endured was mundane and run-of-the-mill, the psychological teasing reached another level. Terry consistently tried to create a climate of fear based on unpredictability. His mischief had to be done under the radar, of course, without drawing my parents’ attention. My reality was one of whispered innuendoes and muttered threats about what would happen the instant they turned their backs: dire consequences awaited me if I failed to toe the line. What was the line? Well, it was nothing less than total subjugation. Often, Terry would thrust his face into mine and rasp, in a low whisper, while staring at me with a hypnotic gaze: “Never oppose my will. Never,
ever
oppose my will!” I hated this and didn’t react submissively. On the occasions when I dared to express actual defiance, however, his responses got physical, and more often than not I’d end up crying.

I was not always the innocent victim, of course, though I got very skilled at playing one. Like many little brothers before me, I developed offensive countermeasures as well as defenses. My offensives had to be stealthy. I cultivated the art of timing. I became skilled at selecting, or creating, situations in which it appeared that Terry had done something to me, but hadn’t really (or in which I was complicit), and I’d make sure our parents noticed. While presenting a picture of angelic innocence to them, I’d telegraph Terry, via a smirk, that this was sweet revenge. Blame and sometimes punishment would then follow, all the more resented by him because it was unjustified. I knew that sooner or later there would be retribution, but I didn’t care. Knowing that I’d managed to stick it to him for a change was extremely satisfying.

What was driving Terry? By the time I showed up, his encounter with our father was in the past, but I’m sure it still stung. In what must have been a strategy for survival, he had hardened his emotional armor and adopted the “me-first” attitude that persisted well into his adult life. I don’t think he had ever harbored the hatred for our mother that he did for our father. Part of it was, he had learned to trust her as someone who would protect him from Dad—which she did many, many times. She was kind and nurturing and perhaps just a little afraid of her husband. Over the years, she often refrained from telling him about the horrible things “the boys” had been up to in his absence, perhaps fearing he’d overreact in some regrettable way that could not easily be undone. To be fair, our father physically punished us only on the rarest of occasions that even today some parents might view as deserving such a response. Those instances tended to occur on Friday nights after Dad returned from a hard week on the road, only to find we’d been busy in his absence driving our mother crazy. That’s when the belt would come off and we’d get a thrashing. I must also add that never once did I see our father lay a hand on our mother in anger. In our family, that was a line that was never crossed.