High Crimes
It was 1972, and I was interacting with fellow students while working on an assignment. I kept getting the eye from my teacher, Mrs. Berkowitz, and I was pretty sure she didn’t like me much. I was also certain she was aware that my father was physically abusive, and sometimes I thought she was just itching for a reason to send a note home with me to my parents.
One particular day that year she confirmed my suspicions. She called me over to her desk, and as the room got silent it was no secret what was next. I remember Violet telling me she was sorry, but that was just her – she was a sweetheart and even though she was the teacher’s pet she was still friendly to us ‘troubled’ kids.
Mrs. B handed me a folded and stapled note, and gave me specific instructions to hand it to my father – not my mother. “Have your father sign this and bring it back to me on Monday,” she told me, and my heart sank. A million thoughts ran through my head, and once again I had to face my father and take my punishment for the high crimes I had committed on the field of duty: Mrs. B’s sixth grade classroom.
My father was a somewhat large man, standing about 6 feet tall and weighing in at about 250 pounds. He was a former Marine – and I mean ‘former’ because he didn’t deserve the “once a Marine, always a Marine” designation. He was abusive, often times violently, and had been for about eight of my young 12 years. The first time I could remember him absolutely pummeling me I was just four; and yes, I can remember what I did wrong, and how he reacted.
My mother was also a victim, and though she was a little more protective in my younger years, I knew that she had to save herself occasionally, because if she withheld anything and he later found out, I still got the beating he felt I deserved – and so did she. At first, I felt betrayed when she approached him as soon as he walked in the door and ratted me out, but I knew why and I can honestly say I never held it against her. Later that year, she was caught having an affair with her boss, and my father beat her up and kicked her out; I was simply glad she got away.
This particular afternoon, I told my mother I got a note and showed her. It was addressed to my father and when she saw it was stapled she knew better than to open it; she knew that if she did he would pin it on me, and she also knew I wouldn’t rat her out. So she looked at me and told me to give it to him after dinner, when he sits down for his nightly indulgence of alcohol and unfiltered Camels. I still wasn’t sure what my crime was, so I couldn’t tip her off to the severity of the punishment I was to receive.
After dinner that night, I wearily walked up to my father, voice trembling, as I told him, “My teacher said to give you this.” He would sit on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, choking down another nail to his coffin and washing it down with a bottle of National Premium beer. He didn’t get up often, unless he wanted to nail us, and at that point I knew it was going to be one of those nights. He told me to bring him the note, and then to go back to where I had been standing – so he could get a full view of my body language.
You see, we were told to stand there while he lectured us for hours on end; standing at ‘attention’ with our hands by our sides, staring directly at his angry face. The rules were simple, yet difficult to follow when you’re a young child standing like that for a minimum of two hours. We were not allowed to yawn, blink excessively, look away, list to one side or the other to shift our weight, and we were not allowed to scratch if we had an itch. First offense of the previous received a verbal warning, second offense and beyond resulted in a backhand or a punch to the face or stomach. Still, each of those limitations generated a lot of often-unsuccessful attempts to mask them.
When my father read the note, he started in on me almost immediately. He asked me why I did what I did, to which I responded with the traditional, “I don’t know.” We learned to never know why we did something that he felt was stupid; for starters, if our response made sense then he simply couldn’t accept it – there was no way in his mind that we were smart enough to make an intelligent or informed decision. If we told a lie and he caught us, the punishment would be greater. Sometimes we actually did lie, however, because we learned that if we made up an excuse that painted us as stupid, irresponsible brats, he could believe that – and the punishment was not excessive, at least by our standards.
He continued to berate me over my high crime, and every once in a while he caught me masking a yawn, or he called me over for a backhand for blinking too often. After continuous lecturing reached the two hour mark, he rose from his throne and approached me. The note was wadded up into a ball and he told me to open my mouth as he shoved the note deep into the back of my throat. I was crying, partially from the abuse, but with that note shoved into my throat I began choking on it, and gagging. He continually told me to swallow it, and of course there were two reasons that wasn’t possible: first, my throat was too small, and second, I had to hand it back to Mrs. B on Monday, signed by my father.
Still choking and gagging on the soggy note, he reared back and punched me in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of me. My 86 pound body folded like an accordion as I fell to the floor, crying and trying to catch my breath. He told me to get up, but my body wasn’t having any of that, and I laid there trying to regain my breathing and my senses. He helped me up by the throat with his over-sized mitt, and slammed me against the wall, hitting my head in the process as he continued to berate me. But this was only part of the punishment.
He uttered the words we all feared: “Go to my room!” That meant one thing and one thing only: the belt. I went to his bedroom and stood there waiting, I could hear him yelling and cussing as he grabbed another beer from the kitchen. When he walked in, he slammed the door shut and told me to face the wall. It was the same wall that had a fairly large hole in it, still unrepaired, from the time he picked up our dog and threw him into it. The hole was about two feet up.
“Drop your pants,” he yelled, as I could hear the whish of his thick leather belt as it snapped through the belt buckles one by one. My pants – and underwear – were at my ankles and I could hear him rear back. The first strike stung my lower buttocks like a scolding hot branding iron. It hurt and I began to weep a bit. He hollered out, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to really cry about.” Of course, he already had done that, but there was no reasoning with this monster – that ship sailed long before that night.
By the fifth or sixth strike, I could no longer feel anything new, just the burning pain that was searing across my thighs and buttocks. But I knew more strikes came, because I could hear the belt snap in the air – they say it’s the sound of the belt breaking the sound barrier – and I could hear the smack across my backside. By the tenth one, he finally stopped. My leg was bleeding, and my bottom was red and swollen. He had broken the skin early on, and each new strike just opened it up further. But wait, as they say, there’s more.
My father told me to pull my pants up, and then informed me that we would repeat this exercise in learning another six times until I learn not to get notes home from the teacher. My underpants quickly absorbed some of the blood and as it dried the two stuck together like hot glue. The next morning I was told that I had to stand up at the dining table to eat, to further my punishment. I didn’t dare thank him for that, as sitting down was rather excruciating at the time, especially on a vinyl seat cushion. I gladly stood up for every meal for a week, as each night he repeated the punishment. On Monday, I had to take a fresh note to Mrs. Berkowitz, and, as instructed, I explained to her why it was not possible to return the same note she had sent me home with, as if everything else wasn’t humiliating enough to begin with. Of course, my father stapled that note before he told me to hand it to her, so I couldn’t read what he wrote.
The beatings continued for a few days, and that week it was difficult to sit on the hard wooden chairs at school, so I did a lot of squirming around, which drew a lot of attention. Nobody knew why, except Mrs. B. By Tuesday, my father told me he would not continue the beating for the rest of the seven days, saying he felt I learned my lesson – something which he wanted me to confirm, as if he was asking me if I was in agreement with our vacation plans for the summer. Did I learn my lesson? Yes, and no. Yes, because I realized he would always see my high crime as deserving severe punishment; and no, because the punishment didn’t fit the crime, even in my young eyes.
I grew up thinking all kids were beaten like that, and even wrote a paper in the eleventh grade about an abused child, adding some creative license to my partial autobiography. I still have that paper, and the inscription next to my grade of A-/A, where the teacher stated, “this is quite good. You really got into the mind of an abused child.” He didn’t really have a clue, but they weren’t trained to detect things like that in the 1970s, especially since most of us were guilty of the same ‘high crime’ I had committed many years earlier – which was simply ‘talking in class.’
I guess I got even, though, because I became a writer, professionally, and even used to do stage shows talking about abused and mistreated animals. And as you might guess, I have the gift of gab, too, and most people inform me of it. Fortunately, I don’t have to stand at attention while they tell me that I talk too much.
Notice: The names in this story are fictitious to protect the request for anonymity.
