I'd been thinking of my father a little more. Not Joey, my step-father. My father, Albert. He was dead. I wondered if he committed suicide, driving the car too fast on purpose and crashing on purpose? He was a purposeful man, my father. We'd had that fight after he tried so hard to get me back. But I was still too upset, you know. All that stuff he did to me, I'd really suppressed it while I was still living with him, I'd had to. But once I moved in with Joey and things relaxed and I felt safe, I started to understand how damaging living with my father had been. When people aren't hitting you all the time anymore it makes a difference. So I guess I didn't really want to move back in with him and have that fear again, and try to be so good again. I wasn't perfect, and at Joey's I didn't have to be. But my father expected perfection. He demanded it.
What would it be like, I wondered, if he was still alive? Would I be living with him, and would he have been able to change? Would I be living with Joey and we'd have this terse relationship, clipped sentences and everything unspoken? It wasn't easy having two dead parents at my age. I was only 16. They'd both been dead since I was 14. Even though I had Joey and Ang, sometimes I still felt like I was on my own. I was just staying at some guy's house. I'd think that, I'd feel that, and then I'd feel guilty because Joey tried so hard. I mean, he did. He included me in everything and he treated me like I was his son and I know he loved me. I loved him, too. It was just…I don't know.
I wasn't the only one. Angie had a dead mother, our mother, but she'd never even known her. Was that better or worse? Maybe not either, it was just how it was for her. But she had Joey to make up for it. She had one amazing, loving, cool parent. I never had that. My mother was under my father's thumb when she was married to him, and then she abandoned me when she left. She had to have known he was hitting me. She had to have known. He hit her. And she wasn't that great. She was distant, she was guilty, she was involved in her new life with her new husband and new baby and where did that leave me? But still, I loved her, of course. She was my mother.
Every time I lose my temper I feel like my father, and it is happening more and more frequently. I pounded the shit out of Spinner at the movie theater/mall the other day. And it felt so good, while it was happening. That loss of control, that daze that I was in, it felt good. Was that how my dad felt when he pounded the shit out of me? Maybe. Of course he was sorry afterward, always. And I was sorry I'd pounded on Spinner, even though he deserved it.
It's like you have to incorporate your parents into yourself. You have to understand them to understand yourself, to know yourself better. So I'm not too well off in that department. My father was violent and brilliant, cold, unreasonable, but logical. He was a mass of contradictions. How can I take any of that and figure myself out? So will I be violent, too? I don't feel too logical most of the time, but I guess I understand his drive. I feel that. I felt it with my interests, photography and music. I guess I'll just have to watch my temper, but right now it doesn't really matter. How many of my friends am I going to beat up? It'll matter when I have a wife and kids, that's when it'll really matter. And my mother? I know her even less. I didn't live with her for as long. I don't think I really knew her at all and then she was gone.
I watched my father, after every beating, kind of resolve never to do it again. So I guess I know that won't work for me. Resolves all kind of melt away in the next instance of rage. So how to deal with it? Like Spinner that day, he kept at me, about Manny, about shit. He kept pushing me until I ended up going after him. I felt myself just sliding toward violence, this precarious slide that wasn't without pleasure. That's the devil of violence and destruction, it's kinda fun. I mean, not in the long run. I really didn't want to hurt Spinner or anybody else because I know what it's like to be hurt. I don't want to be like my father in that way. So what do I do? How do I control it? Because I know it's in me, like it was in my father. I know the potential is there. I just don't want to make the same mistakes he made, but sometimes I feel doomed to. There really is nothing I can do.
I've overheard Joey tell people, people like Mr. Simpson, that I'm nothing like my father, but I think Joey is wrong. I'm a lot like him. And so does Mr. Simpson think there's something to worry about? That worries me because he works with teenagers, and if he thinks I'm like my father then that's not good. But why would he think that? I go to class, I'm sociable, I'm not, not…I don't know. Not not normal, how's that? Why would he think there's anything to worry about?