The World's Largest Man (13 page)

“I'm sorry I laughed at you and your friend,” he said.

“I'm sorry I said that about your girlfriend,” I said.

We shook hands. Nobody cheered. Nobody was even there.

W
hen you leave high school, you realize the world is not a Thunderdome, that you needn't whip a man to be a man. What you need is intelligence, and hard work, and a scholarship, and a career, so that you can have money, so that you can buy a handgun.

The river of my life changed at that school. I had learned so much about the democratic promises of universal education, for one, including the lesson that public schools are about the last places in our country, aside from the Doritos aisle at Walmart, where a perfectly reasonable and healthy human being can come into close contact with people who are actually insane. And that includes many of the teachers, and also my mother. There's just no other explanation for their sweaters.

I guess it's no surprise that I would go on to become a teacher myself, and that I, too, like my mother, have a love for sweaters and a gift for screaming at children and announcing that I would like to hurt them with a length of rubber hose, were that permissible.

But unlike my father or Tommy or Tom Bishop or all the other angry Toms of the world, I never really had an occasion to fight, at least not until I had a wife and children. I have three daughters, and I often find myself standing between them and some danger, some dog, some fire pit, a Great Wall of Father.

“Will you protect us?” my daughters often ask. “If someone comes into our house?”

“Of course,” I say, and I can feel the truth of it in my bones. I come from a long line of men who have whipped other men with riding crops, and I have whaled on many things, mostly drums. My daughters are sure I can hurt people, if the need arises. And I believe I could, if I had a folding chair.

I just hope it doesn't come to that, because I'm better at the turning of the cheeks. I've got an endless supply. Just try and hit me, and you'll see.

T
here's some dispute about what actually happened that Saturday night in the heady days of my seventeenth year, whether it was assault and battery, or just assault, or just battery, but two things were for certain: My father hit me, and I was in my underwear.

It would be the last time that he hit me.

What I needed that night were pants. I have always needed pants. People have done nothing but ask me to put on pants since I first had legs. I was in my bedroom, preparing to go on a date with a girl I'll call Lucy. Lucy had schooled me in the arts of love, had taught me so much about how to treat a woman, and one lesson she taught me was how important it was to wear pants. But that night all the good pants were in the laundry room, on the far end of the house, and so I sought them out with the use of my pantless legs.

It was just us three in the house, Mom and Pop and me, Bird having long flown the nest for places where there were fewer societal restrictions against smoking marijuana in churches. It was
quieter now, simpler. I had taken to bicycling country lanes in solitude, trying to breathe in the rich vapors of this place I knew I would soon be leaving. It was no longer necessary for Pop to coach me to do anything, and we saw much less of each other, even during deer season, my revulsion at the tedium of live-meat acquisition having driven me to seek refuge in SAT test preparations and the writing of poems that were so full of nonsense that many of my early readers would have happily rather watched me saw the heads off animals than be forced to read them.

Pop and I had grown distant. He did not like what I was becoming, had become. I hadn't fired my gun in two years, had barely fished, had forgotten how to tie a clinch knot, had quit the varsity baseball team in the year when I could have ruled the outfield, had I made the effort. There was a bitterness in his tight-lipped grin as I shared with him some dubious new enthusiasm: writing, cycling, the drums.

Every son, I guess, wants his father to know: I am not like you.

Some of our fathers are ministers, so we make sex with whores. Other fathers make sex with whores, so we become gynecologists. Or our fathers are witch doctors, so we become wizard doctors. This is the way of things. Fathers can accept it, or they can deny it, or they can do what mine did: get mad.

He was mad about much: his life, his work, his money, his problems, and now, his boy, who was behaving like a homosexual and threatening to go to college with a bunch of Presbyterians, a word that wasn't even in his Bible, and now his boy had taken to walking around the house in his underwear, and he could not abide it.

Something was going to happen. There was a reckoning due. A great battle.

“What'd I tell you about being in your underwear, son?” he said.

They were watching television, he in his recliner, Mom under the afghan. I strolled past them casually in my briefs, as casually as a young man with no pants and a Kodiak bear for a father can.

“Yessir, oops,” I said, still pantless, scampering now.

It is difficult to explain how deeply my father hated his wife having to see his sons naked, or almost naked, but one suspected it was rooted in some anxiety over biblical curses and that old Oedipal tug that moves the ancient places of the heart. I thought nothing of my mother seeing my penis, the selfsame penis she had formed in her uterus and powdered for years afterward like it was some sort of little fancy man, much less seeing the profile of the little fancy man inside my underwear, which she washed and folded with such care.

“I done told you one too many times,” Pop said, getting louder.

“Sorry,” I said from the laundry room, when I heard his recliner squealing shut.

As I dug around in baskets for the required garments, I heard Mom say, “No, don't.” And I turned, and there stood Pop. I was as tall as him now, if not as large. Our eyes met. Then I looked down, and saw that he was holding a belt.

The question every boy asks himself is this: Can I take my father? If push comes to shove, can I whip him? Huck asked it about Pap. Luke asked it about Darth. And now, as I stood there between a pile of whites and the dryer, what I asked was, Could I defend myself with an ironing board?

I
don't remember the first time he did it. There was never a time when he wasn't doing it. I suspect it started very young, when I was two or three.

It's called
whipping
, and it's as far away from what's called spanking
as Mars from Uranus. Spankings were for little girls and puppies, a tender, halfhearted swat by a parent who didn't really mean it. A man who merely spanked his children was probably a florist. No, Pop whipped us like a Mexican grandmother beats a rug, with stoic resolve, dispassionately, purposefully, constantly, and sometimes like a Mexican grandmother who smokes PCP and rules a cartel. It was his understanding that boys who were not beaten in a spirit of paternal affection ran the risk of growing up to become happy, overconfident handbag designers.

“He that spareth his rod hateth his son,” says the Book of Proverbs, “but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” We heard this verse a great deal in church, a holy sanction for the beating. I pictured the writer of Proverbs with a quill in one hand and a large rod in the other, perhaps of bamboo, beating back the sons he so deeply loved.

“Your daddies whip you to show you they love you,” said the preacher, and I thought, Maybe he could just say it with a card.

The way it would always start was, we'd do something we weren't supposed to. Say, throwing rocks, or throwing bottle rockets, or throwing our smaller friends.

“You boys better behave,” Mom would say.

And like all boys, we would not behave. We would throw the thing, and something bad would happen: a rock through a windshield, a bottle rocket through a crowd, a small friend through a window.

“Your father wants to see you,” Mom would yell out from the back door, as I crouched behind a large shrub and feigned the look of a boy with a great interest in ground mosses, while Bird descended from whatever tree he'd climbed, and soon we were inside, walking slowly toward Pop in his recliner.

“Come around here where I can see you boys,” he said, the unmoved mover.

“Sir?” we'd say, trying to look as darling and precious as two young boys can, doe-eyed and full of God's holy light.

“Get around here,” he said, directing us to stand immediately in his line of sight. This was his way of suggesting we were not the center of whatever galaxy this might be, that we were satellites at best, distant and pathetic moons that must be hit with things to get back into proper orbit. His gravity brought us to him, not the other way around.

“What'd you boys do?” he said, and we told him. We couldn't not.

“Come with me to my office,” he said, closing his recliner with the tortured squeal of its steely innards, a sound I have forever come to associate with anal discomfort.

W
e followed Pop down the hallway, and I did my best to leave a visible trail of tears and mucus so that the authorities could retrieve our bodies. Pop had no office, of course. What he had was a bedroom, where he selected his belt.

I bawled ferociously and very much wished to run, but he'd spiritually neutralized our ability to flee, the way a tiny bunny can see but somehow cannot run from the large snake. Several belts hung there on his rack, electric eels in slumber. He took one, folded it in half, and turned to us, while I began to affect the look of a child with polio.

“Who wants to go first?” he always asked.

I couldn't imagine watching Bird get it. Bird was a known wailer, with screams like a schoolgirl being slowly lowered into a kettle of hot oil.

“Me,” I said.

I stood up, and Pop took my small left arm in his bearish left paw. As soon as the belt made its initial contact—on the bottom, occasionally on the top of the legs, sometimes the
small of the back—I abandoned all reason and attempted to flee through the nearest architectural orifice: a door, a window, a wall mirror. But I only got as far as my arm could straighten, for Pop still held it tight, tight as a blood pressure cuff, while my legs continued to assert their right to flee, which led to my being occasionally horizontal, levitated. There was always a sort of call-and-response during this wicked dance, with Pop repeating a few questions that sounded strangely rhetorical, while in response I screamed like Robert Plant in Zeppelin's “Immigrant Song.”

“When are you going to behave?”

“Ahhhhhhhhh!”

“When are you going to do what I say?”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

“How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

From the street, it might have sounded like, like, well, exactly like what Robert Plant had been singing about: young children being slaughtered by a Viking.

T
hese were no tender touches of parental scolding, the way you imagine fathers with expensive sneakers would do it, like they were prying ketchup from a glass bottle and regretting every delicate tap, while the children sort of stood there and cried, because it hurt their daddy's feelings if they didn't cry at least a little. No, these were mighty strikes, searing, launching me high into the air, such that I might seek refuge in the ceiling fan, reaching for it, for anything to pull me out of this chamber, a child attempting to catch an escaping balloon while being attacked by rabid fruit bats.

When Pop finally stopped, the sheer momentum would send me from the room with great speed, and I would run around
the house seven or eight times, attempting to outrun my own buttocks and the liquid fire that spread over them and up my back, eventually collapsing into my bedroom, where I would use a telescopic arrangement of mirrors to inspect my hocks and wonder if such things happened to the hocks of other boys.

I never thought to ask myself if it was cruel. It was just one more condition of living with Pop, the way people in the Civil War didn't complain about having their legs sawed off. It's just what happened. You got shot, it got infected, they sawed a part of you off. I threw a rock, I got caught, and now, like so many Confederate veterans, I also couldn't walk.

Why did he do it?

The list of reasons is long and unsurprising, the rocks, the clods, the failed
yessirs
, the petulant
nosirs
, all the petty urges boys will have, such as my trying to put a cat in a toolbox, after being repeatedly told that cats do not belong in toolboxes.

“Why would you do such a thing, boy?” Pop would say.

There was no good answer. I just lowered my head, and waited for the executioner to rise and mete out his electric pain. He was right. You can't treat a cat like a set of metric socket extensions, even if cats are full of darkness and evil.

We got older, and the whippings got worse: harder, longer, louder. I have no illusions about any angelic goodness in children, knowing what I know of the heart of man, but this was starting to feel like child abuse.

“If he keeps that shit up,” Bird said, “I'll fucking kill him.”

And he kept that shit up, and nobody killed him.

M
om would intervene, I hoped, at some point. If it got bad.

I knew she must have secretly believed it was wrong, or a bit much.

“Some parents put their children in time-out,” she said to
Pop one day. “Like, when kids misbehave, you put them on their beds or the bottom stair.”

“Stair? We ain't got no stair,” Pop said. “TV's turning you crazy.”

“It's more humane,” she said.

“Humane?”

Pop searched his vocabulary for this term, and found only a picture of a florist.

“When do you whip them?” he said. “Before or after the stair part?”

Something was in the air, you could tell. Times were changing. We heard things on ABC's newsmagazine
20/20
, where Hugh Downs would detail the horrifying ubiquity of child abuse in America, calling it rampant, especially in more rural communities, suggesting that if you had at least one relative carrying a shotgun or food stamps, there was a high probability you were being abused at this very moment, but also that signs were looking up, that America was getting wise to its warlike ways and learning to embrace more humane childrearing habits that involved what seemed like excessive talking and hugging.

Around junior high, I read something in one of Mom's
Reader's Digest
s about child abuse, and they provided a toll-free number and a list of suggestions, including the procurement of a camera to document the abuse.

I happened to have such a camera, a Polaroid.

And I wondered.

And I wished.

I wished it were easier. I wished that Pop read things like
Reader's Digest
, so he might be moved by its persuasive arguments about the power of human love and how hitting your children with such violence could lead to all sorts of pathological behaviors, such as them hitting their children, which were your grandchildren, which you had caused to be hit, and who
would hit their children, your great-grandchildren, a whole lineage of big people hitting small people, and the small people attempting to flee, to fly, to run far away, so far, perhaps across oceans, even.

Was it really child abuse? How could we know it was wrong to hit things? We grew up hitting things: at school, on the field, in the woods. It was only normal that somebody would want to hit us, and why should we stop them?

All I knew was, I was ready to do something about it.

I
f Pop hated our walking around the house in our underwear, then he really hated our standing there, watching our mother urinate. I don't know why I enjoyed conversing with my mother while she sat on the toilet, but I suspect it had something to do with every child's fear that when a mother is out of sight, she might be enjoying herself.