Authority.

Around the time I was 10 or 12, I started to do poorly in school. My father, being my father, decided that the reason behind my poor performance in school was a general lack of discipline, respect for authority and self-control.

To counteract this, my father decided that he was enrolling me in a home-school boot camp. Basically, the idea was that for everything I did wrong, my father would effect some sort of punishment. Miss a question on a test? Do twenty push-ups. Talk back? Five lashes with a belt. Fail to turn in a homework assignment? 10 laps up and down the stairs of our house. I think you get the general idea.

This went on for about a month or so, when one day during my room inspection (bed made, floor vacuumed, no dust on shelves, etc.) my father pointed to a ruler that was sitting on my bookshelf. As the edge of the ruler was not perfectly parallel to the edge of the bookshelf, my father told me that I was to give him twenty push-ups. I thought that this was rather absurd. It had never been explained to me that the ruler was supposed to be parallel to the book case. He could offer me no clear reason as to how I should have known this, or why it should be the way it was. And I told him that. I told him it was absurd.

The purpose of this, my father explained, was so that I would learn that authority is absolute. Authority need not explain itself. Need not have a reason for doing what it was doing. My job was to submit to authority. Not to question authority, not to offer my take on what was going on. He then told me that I owed him forty, rather than twenty push-ups.

I believe that this is when I told him to go fuck himself. If I recall correctly, this is the point at which he removed his belt. (I'm not going to lie to you, my father used to say, this is going to hurt you more than it will hurt me.)

Our house at the time was a basic four-square set up. Four on the bottom floor, four on the second. The rooms on the ground floor each had a door leading in to either of the adjoining rooms. The second floor simply had a small hallway, mayhap six feet long, from which one could access any of the four rooms on the second floor.

My father's belt came off. I bolted.

There was a pretty good twenty to thirty minute period where my father chased me around the house (I mean this literally, we made quite a few laps around the ground floor.) You've got to bear in mind while reading this that my father was about thirty-six at the time. About sixty pounds overweight. Drank until he passed out whereever he happened to be four to five nights a week (and was probably pretty well inebriated as this was happening). Smoked a pack or two a day.

I'd been doing wind sprints on our stairs daily for the previous month.

Eventually, after a good half hour or so, I'd ended up in my parent's room. Entering their room, one directly faced the side of their bed. There was a small opening on the far side of the bed where the bed was separated from the wall by a night stand. Unlike the dining room, where I could simply run clockwise or counterclockwise around the table depending on which way my father came at me (You're going that way, I guess I'm obviously going the other way.  There was a nice Keystone Cops atmostphere to the dining room), once I was on the far side of my father's bed, I was pretty much hemmed in. We stood and faced off for a couple of minutes. Every time that he'd make a move to come around the bed I'd feint as if I were going to go over it. If he made to go over it, I'd start back around.

He finally commited to going around the bed. I scrambled over my mother who was in bed, reading. At this point, my mother finally opened her mouth and told my father to cut it out. Which pretty much ended boot camp.

My father and I had many disagreements while I was growing up. Most of them did not end nearly so luckily for me. It's kind of funny, though. We'd argue a lot. He'd beat the shit out of me. But for all of the arguments, and for all of the times I'd bleed myself to sleep at night, I never became any more convinced that my father was right, nor any less convinced that he was merely an asshole.

In the years since, I've told this story to a few people.  People have often asked me why I didn't just leave the house.  I'm not sure where an 11 year old would have gone.  Walk out the door and get picked up by the cops five hours or five days later?  I pretty much just bode my time and made a move.  I figured when the time was right, I'd get out of the house and into the real world.

As I see more of the real world, I tend to believe that my father was right, in some respects.  Most people view power as a form of authority.  They deserve respect for their ability to harm.  Regardless of how correct what they are saying is.  I still don't really think that's any more right or those people are any less of assholes.