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Snakes~
There was a young girl whose heart was a frown
‘Cause she was crippled for life and couldn’t speak a sound,
And she wished and prayed she could stop living,
So she decided to die ...
‘Cause she was crippled for life and couldn’t speak a sound,
And she wished and prayed she could stop living,
So she decided to die ...
When I was in first grade, just
three years earlier, Mom, climbing stairs, suddenly stooped over and vomited. But what came out wasn’t food, but blood. Lots
of blood. She swooned and collapsed, falling backward down the stairs and breaking
her back. She made it to the emergency room just in time: her stomach was
moments from bursting, so full of blood was it.
She
died on the operating table. Four times.
The
local hospital had no idea what was going on with her, so she was transported to
Denver General Hospital
Mom
had to learn how to walk again. Eat again. Breathe again.
She
had to take some 70 medications every day, and would until her death fifteen
years later in 1984.
She
had to live with the fact that a horrible terminal disease was eventually going
to take her prematurely from her children.
And
she had to deal with my father,[26]
a drunken, philandering, bigoted, avaricious and bloated tyrant who forever
refused to acknowledge her sickness, claiming she was “faking it,” and who
humiliated and raged at her and us, his five kids, every chance he got.
No matter how you look at it, Louis Helbert, Jr. was a genuine monster. Mom had
no one to protect her from him: my two older sisters were drug users and, for
not so mysterious reasons,[27]
sympathetic to him. My younger brother and sister and I were far too young to
do anything about what we saw happening around us.[28]
In
retrospect, we were the most dysfunctional family in the entire Country Club
Estates neighborhood. Perhaps in all of northern Colorado . In my childhood, my siblings and I
were witness to and recipients of regular physical and verbal abuse from dear
ol’ Dad; two of my siblings engaged in incest; one had had multiple abortions
by the time she was eighteen; another was discovered sleeping with her high
school math teacher; one participated in a robbery and was, for a short time, a
suspected accomplice in the grisly murder of a young woman whose body was found
in an irrigation ditch just a couple of miles from our house. It was no secret
that the Helbert family home was an easy place to score dope, and at
bargain-basement prices: after all, my sisters and brother often competed with
each other for sales!
In
1972, at ten years of age and living in this hell, I knew only two things: that
I loved Mom, and that I loved Connie. Beyond that, it was deuces wild.
My
bedroom was at that time next to Shelly’s, my older sister. She was playing
Jimi Hendrix on her new record player a few days after Christmas when I heard
familiar, heavy footfalls coming down the stairs. It was Dad. He marched by my
bedroom where I lay on my bed reading a book on astronomy. At the entrance to
Shelly’s room he roared, “Turn that shit off right now!”
I
heard her say something—something I couldn’t make out except for its tone,
which was snotty and petulant—and then I heard a great screech and then a
jarring, punctuated crash. And then Shelly was shrieking, the shrieking getting
abruptly louder, as though she were on fire and racing to get into my room.
She
wasn’t on fire. Dad had her by her long dark hair and was dragging her
caveman-style down the hallway towards the stairs. In his other hand was a
baseball bat. He’d used that, as it turned out, to smash her new record player
to pieces.[29]
He dragged my sister up the stairs where, with more shrieking, he presumably
punished her further. I didn’t really know; by that point I had closed my
bedroom door and sat shaking on my bed, the astronomy text completely
forgotten.
It
was like that in the Helbert household. Violence, abuse of every kind,
self-medicating, more violence, more abuse, more doping.... I remember reading
the Bible that year, cover to cover. I remember the guilt I felt. Guilt—because
every night when I went to bed, I prayed that Lou would divorce Mom and abandon
us, his family. I blamed him for everything I saw happening around me day after
day; I blamed him for the sense that at any moment it could be my turn next,
which it was on occasion, and to watch myself very, very carefully. By the time I was ten years old I could melt into
the woodwork, even while sitting at the dinner table. When my father noticed
me, he, incredibly, took me to task for not being more like my siblings.
“You
spend all your time in your goddamn bedroom,” he growled menacingly one day.
“What the fuck are you doing down there, Shawn? You could make some friends, be
more like your older sisters.”
When
I told him that my older sisters were drug users and were in constant trouble
at school, he backhanded me and bellowed, “Well, at least they aren’t turning
into a fag like you! You could learn something from them! It’d do you some good
to light one up or sneak out of class! Make a man out of you! At the rate
you’re going now, you’ll never get there! All you do is sit in your bedroom and
read those goddamn books! That’s all you do!”
“Those
goddamn books” were given to me by Mom, who had long since noted my desire to
learn more about astronomy and about snakes and amphibians, and so fed my
curiosity by surreptitiously buying me books on them. My father never bought me
a single book—but had no trouble threatening to take them away from me.
“I
oughta burn every last goddamn one of ‘em,” he snarled one evening after
dinner. “You’re turning Shawn into a fag, Virginia.”
Mom’s
name was Kathleen. Lou had renamed her “Virginia ”
after the doctors told him she could no longer have sex, not without
endangering her life. “Virginia ”
came from “virgin.” From the time she left the hospital after her initial
ten-month stay until he deserted the family in 1974, he never called her
anything else. For a long time I thought it was her real name and that
Kathleen—Kay—was a nickname.
I
ended up hiding my most cherished books, including the one on American Indians
that Connie gave me. I worried about them constantly; I worried Lou would
discover them.[30]
He
didn’t.
He
found other things of mine to destroy instead.
As
I alluded to earlier, I was fascinated by reptiles, snakes in particular. I
could recite facts and figures about snakes to you, everything from various
species to weights and lengths and habitats and poisons and what they preyed
on. I loved looking at pictures of the big pythons and anacondas; there was
(there is) an intense dignity about them.
Since
I lived in the country, I had all sorts of fields in which to explore for the
snakes indigenous to northern Colorado .
They were, by and large, hard to find. But garter snakes are common there, and
when I caught one, I’d keep it in a ten-gallon aquarium on my desk in my bedroom
and study it. Sometimes I’d get lucky and find two. In the winter of 1972,
during Christmas break, I had four such snakes, all collected the previous
summer. All lived in the same tank. I’d given them names.[31]
One
early January day, as the recent snowstorm melted under the warm caress of
chinook winds, I came back from another of my explorations to find my father
looming in the driveway, glowering at me, a shovel in his hand, the tank my
snakes lived in at his feet.
Without
a word he kicked the tank over. The snakes, freed, tried to find shelter away
from the exposed, barren, cold cement. He raised the shovel.
I
screamed, “NO!”
He
brought the blade down on the first snake with a sharp clang, cutting it
cleanly in two. As I stood there, horrified, watching its two halves flop and
bleed, he did it again and again ... and again, and again, hacking with a rapid
mindful military order at all of them. I could do nothing but shriek and jump
impulsively with each sharp clang. Each strike of metal on concrete echoed like
a rifle report off our barn across the driveway, lost itself in the fallow,
silent, snow-lined fields across the county road, in the wind blowing
indifferently through the trees. The snakes flopped as they died; they twisted
and writhed, curling protectively about themselves and bleeding. Lou kept
hacking at them, hacking and hacking. He finally brought the shovel down on the
aquarium, smashing it, the glass scattering over the driveway and the dying and
dead snakes.
Mom
had heard my shrieks and was now standing at the front door. She screamed,
“Louis, what are you doing?”
“I’m
teaching this little shit a lesson!” he yelled, not looking back at her.
“Stop
it! Stop!” she ordered, tears in her eyes.
“Get
back inside, Virginia .
This doesn’t concern you. I’m going to make a man out of this little fuck if it
kills him. And frankly I don’t care if it does.”
“Louis!”
But
his attention was firmly on me. “Come here!”
My
dad was a huge man—over 6’2” in height and nearly 300 pounds. I was utterly
terrified of him. I did as he asked. I approached him, blubbering, sickened, so
aghast at what I’d just witnessed that I knew it would stay with me the rest of
my life. Whatever punishment he was about to dole out could not possibly
compare.
As
I came within reach, he grabbed me by my shirt collar and slapped me, hard. The
slap sent stars of shooting pain through my vision. I was choking from his
grip, but somehow still managed to scream.
“Stop
bawling, you little baby!” he bellowed over Mom’s helpless cries. The smell of
stale bourbon washed over my face. He slapped me again, then again. Mom
screamed at him to stop, still too weak to attempt to come unaided down the
ice-covered stairs to my rescue.
“I
said stop bawling!” And he backhanded
me, this time so brutally the force of the strike loosed me from his grip. I
struck the ground partly on my butt and partly on my back. My upper lip was
bleeding; my front teeth felt loose. My wrists throbbed with the impact on the
cement.
He
picked up the shovel and threw it at me. The handle cracked hard against my
skull, sent more stars arcing through my vision. It spun away into the yard,
where it lay still, the silver blade covered in snake guts.
“Clean
this fucking mess up; and if I ever catch you with snakes in the house again,
Shawn, I’ll use that shovel on you!”
He
went inside, dragging Mom behind him.
Some
of the snakes were still moving. They were still alive. Barely, but, yes, alive.
They twisted and writhed, slower and slower, on the cement. I remember one, its
eyes. They were looking right at me, as if to say, “What did I do, Shawn?” And then the little guy—he was barely five
inches long—went still. Shaking and nauseated and wounded so deeply that it
felt exactly as though I’d been the one hacked into pieces, I crawled around on
my hands and knees, weeping uncontrollably, collecting pieces of dead snakes.
Garter snakes release a powerful scent when threatened: a rich musky odor meant
to dissuade potential predators from pursuing them. The entire driveway was
thick with it. My hands, too. Two of my fingers were bleeding from cuts—the
shattered glass of the aquarium was everywhere.
Sobbing,
I took the snakes and buried them next to the large cottonwood tree just
outside the front yard fence. I sat next to them for a long time before going
inside.
The
house was quiet as a tomb.
I
went downstairs to my bedroom, where I stayed until dinnertime. I couldn’t stop
crying, even though I knew crying would earn me more punishment.
It
didn’t matter anyway.
At
dinner Lou slapped me again.
“What
the fuck did you do with those snakes?” he demanded. “I told you to throw them
away!”
I
lied. “I did throw them away!” My
upper lip was bleeding again.
Lou
grabbed me bodily and, dragging me out of the dining room, hauled me into the
master bedroom. He sat on the bed, turned me over his knee. With one hand he
tore my pants off, his black belt already unlooped from his pants and at the
ready. He brought it down on the bare flesh of my bottom. I wailed. He whipped
me without a word, with a silent rage that tore at my spirit. I don’t remember
how long he went on, but when he finished he threw me off his lap, then kicked
me in the ribs. He must have searched the big trash bin out front and found no
mutilated snakes inside. But instead of saying that, he stepped over me and
stalked off while my older sisters rode Mom for indulging my desire to learn
about anything by means of books. He left the house soon after and didn’t
return before I’d gone to bed.
I
hobbled downstairs, my body aching. I stayed there until morning.
Mom
never said anything to me about what had happened that day—but I could tell it
really killed her inside that she was helpless to do anything about it. I
remember being terrified about having pets of any kind from that day forward;
but after that day Lou lost interest in me altogether, as though by beating me
he had judged me unworthy of any attention whatsoever, positive or negative. He
never learned of my relationship with Connie;[32]
in fact, he never bothered to learn anything of his son after that beating. In
fact, he would admit many years later that he didn’t remember hacking up the
snakes, or, for that matter, much of anything of my childhood. I had been
forever relegated to second place behind his real son, Ezra Brooks.
In
the eight years following I would become one of Colorado ’s greatest all-time age-group
swimmers. Lou never once attended a single swimming meet to watch me earn all
the glory coming my way. That following summer, after I had seen Connie for the
very last time, Mom took me to Brush’s Pet Shop, which was next to Woolworth’s,
where I would meet Iggy, the baby iguana she would buy me, and who would be my
companion for the next twenty-one years of my life.
I
think it was Mom’s way of saying she was sorry for not being able to help me
that day. She ended up loving Iggy as much as I did, especially in early 1974
when, while sitting atop her head while she stood at the stove,[33]
he struck out at Lou as he approached her from behind. Iggy’s tail cracked
across the bridge of his nose, breaking it instantly. I witnessed the entire
thing, and managed to get my beloved green friend back downstairs to my bedroom
before he could get to him and take a shovel to him, which he threatened to do
both before and after getting out of the emergency room. Both his eyes were
black and blue and filled with lightless rage, but his apathy toward me
ultimately won the day.[34]
He skulked off to work; and then, just a month later, he left Mom for a much
younger woman,[35]
filing divorce papers immediately after.
My
prayers had finally been answered.
~~*~~
It
took me a long time before I finally decided to include swear words in this
essay. They felt so out of place, so removed from my reality with Connie, with
Mom, that I feared the essential points of this telling—young love, spiritual
awakening, the childlike sense of wonder at all that is, the angelic purity of
youth and the unvoiced aspirations to maintain that purity forever—would be
crushed under their bluntness. But to exclude them would have watered down my
day-to-day reality with Louis J. Helbert, Jr., and thus would have painted a
dishonest picture of him for you.
As
I said, Louis Helbert was a true monster.[36]
He was vile. And despite his intimidating size, importance to the community of Fort Collins (more than
half of which was self-inflated and imaginary, I’d warrant), he was in the end
a very small, pointless, helpless, hopeless, useless sot who thought himself
worthy of the title man.
But
he was never a man. A man has integrity. A man is honest. A man is decent. A
true man is not a bigot or a homophobe or a womanizer or a child beater. When
it comes to dear ol’ Dad, the use of the word man is mistaken.[37]
Louis Helbert never had the courage to know and grow in love. And it is my
thesis, and forever shall be, that he who does not possess that courage cannot
be a man, no matter how much testosterone courses through his veins. In like
manner, the same holds true for women. A woman can claim the title of such when
she attains the courage to honor her sex, and not before. True love, as I have
stated already, is rare in this world; thus are the number of people able to
claim manhood or womanhood in any real or authentic way.
J. Krishnamurti: So can the mind—again we must come back to this
point—can the mind understand the nature of pleasure and its relationship to
love? Can the mind that is pursuing pleasure, an ambitious mind, a competitive
mind, a mind that says, I must get something out of life, I must reward myself
and others, I must compete: can such a mind love? It can love sexually. But is
love of sex the only thing? Why have we made sex such an enormous affair?
Volumes are written on it. Unless one really goes into this very, very deeply,
the other thing is not possible even to understand. We can talk endlessly about
what love is and what love is not theoretically. But if we use the word love as
a mirror to see what is happening inwardly, then I must inevitably ask whether
it is pleasure in its multiple forms? Can a man who has got into a top position
through drive, through aggression, through deception, through ruthlessness—can
he know what love is? Can the priest who talks everlastingly of God, who is
ambitious to become a bishop, archbishop or whatever it is—to sit next to Jesus
...
Allan Anderson: To sit on the right hand of God.
J. Krishnamurti: So can such a priest who talks about it know what
love means?
Allan Anderson: No, he thinks he can with reference to something
called a higher love which is based on denial of a lower one.
J. Krishnamurti: That’s just words.
Allan Anderson: In that conflict there can be no love.
J. Krishnamurti: So our whole social, moral structure is immoral.
Allan Anderson: Yes.[38]
Language
is the most powerful instrument available to humanity. My “father,” Louis J.
Helbert, Jr., used language as a weapon, to destroy, to tear down, to humiliate
and degrade and minimize and shame. And when his damning use of language
failed, he’d raise his fists or use his belt or a plank of wood or his slipper
or a pipe wrench or fishing line or a switch torn from nearby brush. For me to
exclude his swear words would be to honor his use of the English language by my
considered omission of them. And I cannot and will not do that.
~~*~~
Whenever
I need to leave it all behind
Or feel the need to get away
I find a quiet place, far from the human race,
Out in the country
~~*~~
The
fields surrounding our home were my dear friends. I spent whole days in them,
milling about, exploring, or simply doing nothing. There were hiding places:
irrigation ditches and wide patches of high, dry weeds, or the sheltering shade
under a distant cottonwood tree. I’d find a spot and sit and hide.
After
my pet snakes were killed, I spent many hours next to where I'd buried them,
apologizing to them over and over again. The cottonwood tree just outside the
property of our house was the oldest in all of Larimer County
But
I couldn’t. Not for a long time. Not for years. As Christmas vacation, 1972,
came to a close, my mind kept turning to Connie. I couldn’t wait to see her
again. I missed her so deeply it hurt in my ankles. I longed to be next to her,
to see her smile again, to feel her shoulder touch mine as we sat on the
sandbox wall.
I
thought about what it would be like to have her here, sitting with me. What she
would say to comfort me. Or, perhaps, like so many recesses, she’d say nothing
at all, and I nothing in return.
Nothing
... and everything.
~~*~~
“I
had no idea. I'm so sorry.”
I
had spoken without really hearing myself say the words, almost as if I’d merely
thought them. I was dumbfounded and felt woozy with staggering loss and
disbelief and a spiking outrage that threatened my very ability to reason. I
had choked the words out, my eyes clenched shut.
“It’s
okay,” she answered. “You couldn’t have known. It’s over now. He’s gone.”
She
had spoken quietly, almost whispering, as though to speak louder would alert
him—I could clearly see him in my mind’s eye—to her presence and bring him
back.
“Are
you okay, Shawn?”
Was
I okay? Good grief! I could feel the
wet tracks of fresh tears down my cheeks, and struggled to compose myself. My
ear ached. I discovered I was pressing the phone to it with almost manic strength.
My abdomen trembled as though I’d done an hours’ worth of sit-ups.
“No,”
I said. And then I added bitterly, “Another one lost.”
“I’m
sorry, what?” said Connie, her voice like a dying chime. I was pressing the
phone into my skull because I wanted to be closer to that voice. I wanted to be
just a foot away from it. Just like it was when we wandered aimlessly about
Tavelli Elementary’s playground three and a third decades ago.
“Nothing,”
I said after she asked after me a couple of times. “Nothing. Tell me more. Tell
me everything.”
I gritted my teeth and sniffled and bowed my head and waited. My ear throbbed even harder.
