“Yes. Sometimes we carry strong emotions for abusers not just because they hurt us but because part of us believes we deserve it. Children oftentimes ascribe goodness or wisdom to their parents that they don’t deserve. That’s why children will feel guilty for things they’re not guilty of. I’m trying to ascertain how much guilt you’re accepting for your father’s actions.”
I nodded slowly.
“Where did you get the Playboy?”
“In a Dumpster.”
“What were you doing in a Dumpster?”
“Foraging.” A thin smile crossed my lips. “Now that’s a story in itself. I spent much of my childhood in Dumpsters.”
Dr. Fordham leaned forward. “Tell me about it.”
Chapter Twelve
Some people use the Bible as medicine. Others use it as poison.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS EARLIER
Ogden, Utah
“Charles, get up. Pronto.”
My eyes fluttered open to the murky, shadowed figure of my father bent over me. His coarse hand was on my shoulder, shaking me, shaking my entire rickety bed. “It’s late.”
Late. It was four thirty in the morning. But even as a seven-year-old I knew better than to talk back to my father. Ever. My ribs and face still ached from the beating he’d given me the afternoon before. He beat me enough without reason; giving him a reason was straight-up idiocy.
“I’ll hurry,” I said.
He clomped out of our room and down the hall in his heavy, weather-stained work boots—the kind with leather laces and a steel toe. I’d felt that toe against my butt more than once.
“God loves me. God loves me. God loves me,” I whispered to myself. I took a deep breath, then threw my quilt down and sat up, taking a moment to gather myself. My side ached from the motion, reminding me of the beating. I didn’t remember why he had beaten me. I touched the right side of my face. It was puffy. God loves me.
I hadn’t seen myself in the mirror since he came at me, but I didn’t plan to. After one beating I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize myself. I looked like a monster. That time my parents kept me home from school for two weeks, telling the school officials that I had pneumonia.
I picked up the Bible that I had fallen asleep with and set it under the bed. “God loves me,” I said one last time.
I slept with the book the way some children slept with a teddy bear. My mother had gotten the Bible for me at church. It was a dark-blue hardcover Gideon version, the kind someone put in hotels. In fact it said so inside the cover. I always considered the book my friend, even though my father sometimes used it against me, literally as well as figuratively, as I’d been hit by it many times. The spine was broken, and the cover had come off when he threw it at me from across the room.
My father was his own kind of religious, a law unto himself, claiming belief only as long as it served his needs or rationalized his behavior. Sometimes as he beat me he’d quote scripture. I hated those scriptures and even crossed them out of my Bible. Proverbs 13:24: “He that spareth his rod, hateth his son.” Proverbs 19:18: “Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.” Proverbs 22:15: “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.”
My father loved these scriptures, as they validated his cruelty. In fact, they practically made him sound righteous. What was bizarre was the way some part of me believed him. I came to a strange psychological place where I would actually thank my father for beating me and keeping me on the path to heaven, a path, I believed, that must pass through hell. I had to believe that, I think. The alternative was that my father hated me.
The mind does strange things to survive. I didn’t know it at the time, I didn’t even know what it was, but I had OCD. I couldn’t make sense of what my father was doing to me, so sometimes, as I lay bleeding and shaking in my room, I would mutter strange things to myself. “Oh, uh. Um. I guess I’ll hum.” I would repeat this over and over, once for more than an hour. Then I heard a sermon at church where our priest told us to remind ourselves of God’s love, even if we have to repeat it out loud. That’s when I changed my mantra to “God loves me.” It wasn’t really a conscious decision, it just kind of happened one night after my father had beaten me for making too much noise when I came in from playing.
There was one other very strange by-product of my father’s abuse. Sometimes when I heard my father coming down the hall with that certain step (I learned to tell by his walking patterns if I was going to be beaten), I would crawl under my bed. I found if I pressed myself all the way in the corner, he couldn’t reach me. There were spiderwebs under the bed. To this day I like spiderwebs. I like the way they smell and the feel of them on my face.
As I sat on my bed, I looked over at my brother, who was still asleep in his cot on the other side of our little room. We used to sleep in the same bed until he started wetting it, and then my mother found a smaller mattress at a yard sale, which she covered with plastic leaf bags and sheets.
My brother, Mike, was only five, so my father pretty much left him alone—at least as far as going out Dumpster harvesting. He still got his share of beatings. This didn’t surprise me. I’d been beaten since I was three.
That morning I wanted to sleep too, but it wasn’t going to happen. It’s just the way things were. I was always tired when we started our “route.”
I heard the front door of our duplex slam shut, my father’s truck door open, and then the truck’s ignition cough as my father attempted to start it up. He’d had the rusty Dodge since before I was born, and it was already a decade old when he bought it. It never started on the first try but it was especially obstinate in the winter.
I held my breath as the starter motor whined. With each failed attempt at turning over, my father’s curses and grumbling would grow louder. In the middle of last winter the battery gave out completely. My father stormed back into the house and started breaking and throwing things around, which included my mother, brother, and me.
After what was probably only a minute—but felt like an hour—the engine caught, and my father loudly revved it a few times as if to punish it for being stubborn or our neighbors for still being asleep.
I instinctively breathed out in relief as I pulled on the blue jeans that were crumpled on the floor next to my bed, the same pair I had worn the day before and the day before that. I only had two pair of jeans and the others were my nice pair to wear to church. Nice was relative. They were old and faded but didn’t have holes in the knees.
I heard the front door open as I hurriedly pulled on a sweatshirt, then my coat over it, rolling the sweatshirt sleeves back. The sweatshirt was large for me, but it was winter and my coat, which my mother had found at a thrift shop, had a tear in one side and had lost some of its batting.
As I walked out of my room, my father handed me a piece of bread with mayonnaise spread across it. “Let’s go. We’re late.”
“Sorry,” I said, taking the bread. My father had told me that it was an egg sandwich, which, technically, it was. I didn’t care. It was food and I never had the luxury of being picky. He’d just as soon not give me anything.
I walked out to the truck. It had snowed during the night and my father had already cleared the windshield. The truck door creaked as I opened it and climbed in onto the cold vinyl seat. The sound of the truck’s defroster blasted the small cab.
My father glanced over at me. “Where are your gloves?”
“I lost them.”
“Lost them,” he said angrily. “We don’t have money to buy more. Don’t let me hear you complaining about your cold hands.”
“No, sir.”
My excuse was only partially true. I’d lost my gloves when three bigger boys had jumped me behind the school and beaten me up. I remember one of the boys saying, “Look, the spic’s got a bloody nose. Better wash his face.”
It was the first time I h
ad heard the word, and I didn’t know what it meant. Later, when I asked my mother what it meant, she just frowned and told me to never say it again—especially around my father. When I was older I learned that spic was a derogatory term for Mexicans. It’s been traced by some journalists to Americans hearing Panamanians say, “No spic d’English.” No wonder my mother hated it.
The kids at school called me a spic not because I looked Mexican, which, outside of my dark hair and brown eyes, I didn’t, but because my last name was Gonzales—a name all the kids knew from the cartoon character Speedy Gonzales, a sombrero-wearing mouse. My life was doomed by a cartoon mouse.
My father’s father was an illegal Mexican immigrant from Monterrey, Mexico, making me one-quarter Mexican. But my last name was 100 percent Mexican.
The afternoon that I’d lost my gloves, the boys had surrounded me, pushing me back and forth and punching me until I fell to the ground. Then two of the boys held me down while the other washed my face with snow. Afterward they stuffed my clothes with snow. One of the boys groped me as he shoved snow down my pants. Then they stole my gloves as they left me facedown in the snow—wet, sputtering, and bleeding.
I never told anyone what they had done to me. I didn’t really have anyone to tell—at least anyone who would help. Saint Joseph Catholic School wasn’t exactly a sympathetic environment. Corporal punishment was the norm and the priests and nuns weren’t hesitant to beat their students, which begged the question: Why would you tell someone who had beaten you that someone else was beating you?
Home was the same thing. I couldn’t tell my father. I could, but I knew better. He would only be angry at me for being weak. In fact, showing weakness was as sure a reason as any for getting beat. Once, as we got in the truck after church, my brother accidentally slammed the truck’s door on my thumb. My thumb swelled up with blood and my parents had to take me to the hospital. I cried out in pain as the doctor poked a needle into the tip of my thumb to drain the blood.
When I got home from the hospital, with my thumb wrapped in bandages, my father beat me for “crying like a baby.”
The reality was, no one cared that I had been bullied except my mother, and telling her would do nothing but add to her pain and feelings of helplessness.
That’s how I lost my gloves.
My father grumbled something about my stupidity as he ground the truck into reverse and pulled out of our driveway onto the dark, snow-packed road. Our first stop was behind the Albertsons grocery store just two blocks away from my home. My father drove around to the back of the store and parked in front of the Dumpster. He didn’t kill the truck’s engine, just let it idle as he didn’t want to risk it not starting again.
We both opened our doors and climbed out at the same time. It was a routine I was used to, our weekly harvesting. The Dumpster had a plastic lid buried beneath a fresh layer of snow. My father pushed the cover up until the snow slid off, threw it back, then lifted me up so I was sitting on the edge of the Dumpster. I jumped in.
Peculiarly, Dumpster diving was the one time that my OCD need for cleanliness didn’t kick in. The smell was always foul, but I’d gotten used to it. This one certainly wasn’t as bad as some Dumpsters I’d been in, like when they threw out bad meat or a dead animal. My father turned on his flashlight and handed it to me while I dug through the refuse.
My father had given me two objectives for my hunt. The first, and usually the most fruitful, was to find glass bottles to redeem. There was a nickel bounty on glass bottles back then, and I could usually find a dozen or so in each Dumpster. I also kept my eyes open for another prize: dented cans of food. Sometimes there would be a big payoff when I’d find an entire case.
The process was like fishing. Some days there would be a big haul. Others not. I found all sorts of things. Once I found an old man whose body didn’t move at all even though his eyes were open. There were flies on him. It was the only time my father let me out of the Dumpster without finding something. He told me to hurry and get in the truck and he drove home without finishing our route. I wondered if he was afraid of being blamed for the man’s death.
Our first stop that morning was okay—not great, but okay. Eight glass bottles, three dented cans of Dinty Moore stew, six cans of sweetened condensed milk, and an open bag of jerky. This was just the first stop. There were six other Dumpsters on our route. By the fourth it would be light enough that I wouldn’t need the flashlight.
“Why do we go so early in the morning?” I asked my father as we drove home from the last stop.
My father just looked ahead like he was thinking, his gloved hands gripping the steering wheel firmly, and then he glanced over at me, his eyes dark. “You think we should go after everyone else has picked through ’em? You think we should let everyone else go first?”
“No, sir.”
“I’d say no,” he said. “I didn’t raise fools. The early bird gets the worm. We get there first. All those lazy good-for-nuthins, they get what we miss. We’re just smarter than them.”
His reasoning made sense to me. I just hadn’t realized that so many other people were doing the same thing we were. I knew there was a lot I didn’t know about the world. I just hadn’t ever heard anyone else talking about searching through Dumpsters. Still, peculiarly, his explanation made me feel good. It made me feel superior.
“We’re smarter than them,” I said. “We’re early birds.”
He nodded. “Damn right. Look at that haul.”
The truck’s bed had more than sixty bottles and forty cans of food. There was also a plastic cooler I’d found that was in good condition except for a scratch on one side, which rendered it unsellable.
As we drove back into our driveway my father said, “Put the food in the cooler and take it inside. Tell your mother she got plenty for dinner. And don’t forget to scrub your hands and arms good. I don’t wanna hear about you stinking from your mother.”
“Yes, sir.”
I piled the cans of food in the cooler and dragged it inside as my father drove off to work. He always worked Saturdays. He did gardening in the warm months and shoveled and salted walks in the winter.
It wasn’t until I was older that I realized why we got up at four thirty in the morning. My father was embarrassed that someone might see us. As I grew older I realized that he spent most of his life afraid that someone might discover who he really was.
Chapter Thirteen
We all swim deep in the river of our ancestry.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
My father, José “Joe” Gonzales, was born in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, California. His father, my grandfather, had illegally crossed the border from Monterrey, Mexico, at the age of seventeen. He worked fields in Texas for three years, then went west, first to New Mexico and then to California, where he operated a fruit cart and married a woman who was half-Guatemalan and half-Filipino. That is where my father was born.
Raised in poverty, my father joined the navy at the age of eighteen but was quickly discharged after being found physically unfit for duty. He had been assigned submarine duty, where he discovered that he suffered from claustrophobia. He met my mother one weekend at the Las Palomas bar, where she was waiting tables to earn money for nursing school.
My mother, Fiona, was the cultural and physical opposite of my father. She was five foot one, buxom, with bright-red hair accentuated by the bright-red lipstick that she always wore. In spite of her bartending, she was a devout Catholic, and since my father had no religion, her parents would not allow her to date him. It didn’t stop her from seeing him, though, usually late at night after her parents were asleep. Finally, in an attempt to win her family over, he agreed to be baptized Catholic.
A year after marrying my father, my mother graduated from school—she was the first in her family to earn a college degree—and became a nurse. Her salary wasn’t much, but good enough that she sometimes earned more than my father, which embarrassed him. It was the same year that I was born. r />
My mother worked as a nurse until a year after we moved to Utah, when she hurt her back trying to help someone get down the stairs in a wheelchair and was fired from her job. No compensation. No severance. That’s how things were back then.
While she was looking for work, a friend told her about selling Avon cosmetics. She joined the company. My mother was a hard worker and tended to do well at whatever she set her mind to. Walking door-to-door, she built up a sizable number of clients for her Avon business, and a year after hurting her back, she was making almost as much as she had as a nurse.
Once a month a big box would arrive at the house with her shipment of cosmetics, and when I was old enough I would help her put together the orders along with cellophane sample bags we’d fill with small tubes of lipstick and blush.
The December I turned fourteen my mother came down with pneumonia and was too sick to go out and deliver her products. She was scared. Since my father was unable to do gardening work in cold weather, things were already tight in winter.
She laughed at first when I told her that I could do Avon, but she didn’t really have another option. Some boys might have thought it humiliating, but I didn’t. I was spending my Saturday mornings in Dumpsters. This was practically high-class.
One afternoon after school, my mother and I put together plastic sample bags and I went out with a wagon, going door-to-door to deliver the makeup. I wasn’t just making deliveries, I was on a mission to make money.
The women I visited were amused to find me on their doorstep. They smiled and thanked me, told me to wish my mother well and promised that they’d get back to her when she was better. But I wasn’t quitting that easily. I told them that they would miss Christmas if they waited to order, and that I would wait for them to fill out their order forms. The women filled out the forms.
I wasn’t looking for sympathy. I was there to sell. That’s when I learned my first sales trick: power-of-suggestion selling. “Would you like some lip liner to go with your lipstick?” I’d ask. They almost always said yes.