Freddy, Chp. 12 excerpt

CHAPTER 12
FREDDY: WHAT GOES ON IN THE WILD HEARTS OF TRAGIC MEN


...And so Vicki and I explored my thoughts and my feelings about my father. For the stirrings my father felt were deep, and in those stirrings I could imagine ancient things --as Vicki whispered. I fell into her trance.

Dad, perhaps because he was short, had taken up boxing as a boy. I had always been afraid of him. I remembered him “crimping” my fingers, at five ---and my sister’s, too, that day. He was just playing. Janine and I looked at each other, that day, and we knew that our father was not an ordinary man. His mouth frothed. He was a little involved. He was just a little carried away. That day.

“He had a violence about him,” I told Vicki. “And a sneer….”

She puffed on her smoke, aloofly. But I continued in my mind.

I thought about his seeming “hate” for anything that seemed happy. I saw, now, the sadness in my dad. There was a special resenting Freddy seemed to have about him. It drove him to the bars, after work, to see the whores. I imagined my dad, drinking and smoking in a bar. The whore would approach. They’d go to a room. Afterward, the night air would be so cold. Freddy had nowhere to go, there, on work, out of town. He might just as well not have a wife. Or kids. Or any goddamned thing at all. The beer and gin, that he would always drink together, would make him wobble. Perhaps, there in earliest morning, he laughed at the idea of love, and wondered like the rest of the world, as he went “home” to the motel, on some empty street --about life.

Sometimes I thought of him in a dream. He walked over some railroad track, over the hump in a little hill, in some goddamned unknown town. Of course, it was his death I dreamed of. But I just wondered where that man was going. For where did I come from, too? Was he an evil that would die? And my evil? Would it die, too? Or did his evil live? Would we meet again in some dangerous place, and would we, or could we, ever trust each other at all? I hoped we were not locked in some eternal struggle. But I trembled, because I thought it possible that we were. That one might have an eternal enemy: Perhaps that was the reason I was concerned with that cosmic illusion that was the cause of all human war.

“I’m quite bored with all of this,” Vicki simply said. “Go to sleep now, you stupid prick.” She cut the connection. And I was tired, anyway, I admit, and I did sleep. I knew my studying was slipping. Academically, I was losing ground.

At least I was bathing. Maybe I could do better at my shaving, I thought. And maybe I could change my pants more often. Even I could see the creases in them from where I was sleeping in them. My hair was combed, but I had to really wet it down to get the strange waves out of the hair from how I was sleeping in my bed. It had been months, I think, since I put new sheets on the bed. I guess you could say my personal appearance was slipping some. I was feverishly writing in my journal though. Give me credit for that. I was downloading this stuff on the “split brain” research. I was thinking about the “theories of the self.” I had read about the idea, once, in a philosophy book. Just what do we really mean by “the self?” I was wondering if I really existed. I think I let something about it slip at school, for people seemed like they were treating me a little differently.

My stomach was hurting. I knew I needed to see a doctor.

But I was thinking about Erich Fromm and all those nasty things he said about Adolph Hitler’s sex life. I was taking notes in a big spiral notebook. I knew I must slow down, because I couldn’t read my own writing. I was in a hurry, because I knew the world depended on me. Yeah, I knew it sounded crazy. But I still believed it, anyway…

There was a day, and then a night, and then an early morning --when our mom loaded us in the car and we three went to Iowa. For Freddy was just a little hard to deal with that day. A few weeks later it was all patched up, and we drove three days –back home. But, that day I began to think of suicide, and I began to think of murder. That day. That one day when I was twelve...

Vicki found this all so funny.

“Fool. Don’t you see it? Daddy had a mistress and little boy Tommy went to bed hungry because Daddy was a pussy slave.” Vicki smirked, but despite my love for her, the bitch... Well, my anger left and I found myself again in a mental space, a space that Vicki, herself, had created...