The Broken Boy
It seemed simple enough at the time. Get a girlfriend, love her, never leave her. It's not like that at all, but they'll shove that spiel down your throat as long as they can. My life was nowhere near that, and most assuredly wasn't simple. I'm not sure where I should start, but I'll do my best.
I reckon everything started to go downhill when I was around twelve. I started seeing more and more of the reality of my situation, began to understand what was happening in my environment. I saw that I had an abusive stepfather, I saw that things weren't okay, and most of all, I saw things about myself I hadn't known previously. At the time I had still gone by the name Paul Utz, as was given to me by my mother and father, at birth. It wasn't to last, but I still think back on it at times, and have to wonder; did I bring all this down on myself, just being me?
It's only been in this last year that I've been able to write about anything that's ever happened to me, due to the help of a wonderful man named Patrick. Patrick is my therapist, and has helped me through more than I even think I'll ever manage to write. People come and go in my life, some forgotten, some remembered, some faded, tarnished, and degraded, but I have a feeling he'll stay important in this story for as long as I have the energy to write.
I suppose I should start off by explaining my childhood, and all the things that I'd learned across it, as well as the various father figures in my life. Across it all, there's maybe five men on the face of the planet I would ever consider anything close to a father figure to me. I'll leave it up to you to decide which were good, and which were bad, a decision I still haven't made myself. There was Ralph, my half brother and half sister's father, both of whom ended up in a mutual status of disowned hatred with their father. Neither of them liked him in the slightest after 2012, and although I only knew him for a short time, for what time I had interacted him, he had enough of an impact on me to make me realize that he wasn't the best of people, but he wasn't the worst I'd run across.
The man was many things. He was a drug addict, short as all hell, and an asshole. I never stopped to ask what he was addicted to, but I knew it had to be something serious. He was always paranoid, angry, and rather harsh. All he ever seemed to want to do was lay around and play on my older Sister's XboX all day. All I ever saw him do was specifically that, or sleep. He never cooked, cleaned, or left, unless he was heading out to get his next fix. I never saw much of him, except in one instance. My 'Grandmother', an elderly woman of maybe sixty, named Evelyn, whom had adopted myself and my small family as her own. She was Ralph's mother, but she seemed to prefer us to the youngest of her four sons. She had been taken to the hospital at one point as a result of having had something happen, an injury that is too fuzzy in my mind for me to even recall anymore. I was maybe six at the time, and it hadn't stuck in my mind. I had ended up at Ralph's house at the time, and had been sat in front of a VCR to sit there and wait until my mother came to get me. It was that, or he was yelling about things I couldn't understand. I was a little kid though, and a resilient one at that, so I brushed it off and went on with my life. I didn't understand at the time, but my life wasn't a normal one, in the slightest.
Ralph was the first person I'd ever really thought of as a father. My birth father had shown up whenever he felt like it, or needed me for sympathy points with a woman for the last few years, so I hadn't even realized he was my father.
Next in line was my birth father, a man by the name of Jerry. He was a large man, standing at about six feet tall, and somewhat reminiscent of a tub of lard. My father weighed in at about five hundred pounds when I was a little kid, and he wasn't afraid to show it. He was a loud, angry person, with enough Bi-Polar problems that he could probably hand one out to every person he'd ever known, and still have a surplus, the number of which probably topples the USA's current debt. He was a very specific person, and a stubborn one at that. He loved to pick one problem, then work at it for hours, days, weeks, months, and once, even years. He was a firm supporter of the "The horse is dead, but let's kick it for an hour just to make sure!" strategy in life. He was good at IT work from the first time I saw him, working between AT&T and Verizon. He worked on the larger servers, maintaining the early U-verse and FIOS systems. I had grown a natural respect for him, as I was told many, many stories about the kind things he'd done for people. I was told many things, good and bad. I didn't understand any of it at the time, but I wasn't shy of asking. He'd chased my Aunt with hammers, thrown televisions at people, and once even threatened to shoot my mother. On one hand we have stories of bad, but on the other we had stories about how he'd once driven roughly 250 miles in a night for a friend who's car had broken down. He was a very two-sided person, almost two-faced, who'd taught me many valuable lessons in life. I would never have learned how to do many of the things I've learned to do without him, yet by the same hand, I might actually have been a normal child. I suppose everything in my life I could look at from an angle similar to that one, but I'd rather not spend all day dwelling on my mistakes. Yet.
The next person to enter my life went by the name of Richard, or as I preferred to call him when I was a kid, "UmDad". It was a joking nick-name he'd demanded to be called when all four kids in the house kept saying "Um" before we actually said "Dad". Personally, I view him as a good man, as he was the first father figure I actually could list more than five things he'd done somewhat right in the last ten years. He instilled somewhat of a moral balance within me, taught me what right and wrong were, and reminded me of the reason why we did things the way we did them. It was his philosophy that taught me who I was, and why I acted the way I did. He was the first person I ever aspired to be just like, albeit he was bulky, in every sense but the muscular one, he was a kind and caring person, who actually managed to hold a job. He was reliable and kind in a way I'd never experienced in a positive way before. As a kid it'd made me trust him like I had trusted no other before, my mind building him into a hero, even though he wasn't even close to one. I thought of him as my father, someone I could trust to protect me from all the hate in the world. He was the strongest person in my life, but at one point, he changed, just like everyone does. He had been forced to go in for and operation, something in his abdomen, and somewhere along the way he stopped being him. From here out I considered him an entirely different person, and I wanted to figure out what had happened to the original man. Richard 2.0 was an ass, the exact opposite of the original man I had met years before. It's my firm belief that he died on that operating table, and that an entirely different person was the one who came back to the house. This new man taught me what it was to truly be afraid of life. He beat us, screamed at us, bruised us, sexually abused a handful of us, among many other things. I'd like to think I didn't get the worst of it, but there's a good chance I did. He loved to break my ribs, and crush my dreams, and once he even went so far as to break more than just one, and sent me to school like nothing was the matter. I'll never be the same person, but I suppose it gave me a slight sense of humility. I learned when to speak, and when to stay quiet. I learned what I had done was wrong, and what all of what I had ever done was wrong. The latter list was rather short, but the first was immense, and it just kept growing. Worse and worse things got for me, until I became reclusive. I sat inside my room or I hid upstairs all day. I stayed home all day, didn't go anywhere, didn't do anything. Coincidentally the beatings got worse and worse, and my soul chipped away more and more. I learned that I would never escape from him, no matter how hard I tried. He taught me to never think I was right, and to never want for things. He forced me to go to this tall white church every Sunday, and to follow devoutly the path of the bible. I read into it, memorized lines out of Genesis, learned things I had never wanted to. I changed as a whole, stopped trying to do things, stopped wanting to too. I became, in essence, broken. I was never the same after that. I became someone else entirely. I was broken, I was beaten, and I was raped, but none of it would ever compare to the pain and fear of just waiting. Of sitting in silence.