How My Father Beat Me

Posted on March 13, 2004 in Childhood

Television and movies show violent people with wrinkled red faces, open mouths, writhing limbs, and sweat swamping from every pore of their filthy body. I never lived with such a man. When my father beat me, the muscles on his face smoothed over and the skin paled; his mouth stiffened and shut; the limbs jerked into acute angles and firm lines; and he drily, militarily slapped, punched, or kicked me. The grey, convoluted general which squatted in the calcium pillbox of his skull gave the commands. His muscles followed orders, stormed out of the trenches, and charged the soft epidemis of my upraised arm, my buttocks, my chest, or my face. He looked nothing like the filthy, bayou-soaked, floppy-armed degenerate of image-fiction. He scrubbed himself well, kept at all times a martial bearing.