Living With Abuse 10: Race (and Trust)
Russell Zimmerman
Mar 5, 2020·28 min read
[Hey, this one gets maybe the darkest so far. Okay? Racist stuff, child abuse stuff, and, um molestation stuff. So if you can’t read it, I don’t blame you. Please believe me, no hard feelings. Hit eject right now if you’ve got to, and I’m sorry.]
“It’s nice of you to play with them,” mom would tell me, when I was out on my dope-ass BMX or my ugly little skateboard, playing with the other kids in our trailer park.
“But stay where I can see you.”
She never told me to stay where I could see her when my best friend, Todd was over. Never told me and my cousins to stay where she could see us, either, if they were visiting from Oregon. Every summer I’d spend a few weeks up in Oregon, and one (or more) of my cousins would spend a few weeks with us.
I never stayed with Uncle Bryce and his wife. They were drunks, and mean ones, and he abused her (and their son). That son, my cousin Bryan, was a real piece of work. I honestly don’t know just what sort of diagnosis he should have gotten several decades ago, or just what meds he should have been on, but — thanks to them — he had (has?) some real problems. He used to hoard things in preparation of running away (like a tuna salad sandwich he showed me, stashed in the bottom of his closet, that he’d had for a few months). He used to steal things from them, because they didn’t give him much by way of an allowance (and then they’d beat him for stealing from them, and make sure not to give him an allowance for another year or whatever). Sometimes he’d steal things for us — his cousins — because he thought that was the way to make us like him; when we were both solidly in our mid-teens, and I was deep in the throes of my X-Men love, he shoplifted some comics to surprise me with because everyone in his family in Oregon was sick of him, and maybe this half-remembered kid who lived in Kentucky might think he was cool.
But even me and Bryan, even at our sub-10 ages, we got to play basically where ever we wanted, there in the mobile home park, in the worst neighborhoods in San Jose, CA. The two of us, as dumb as a pair of young boys can be, we had our run of the place. No worries. We’d be fine. I’d be fine.
There was a jungle gym — a rusted, breaking, thing, none of his fancy ‘plastic’ — waaaaay back in the back of the mobile home park, past the rows and rows of trailers, in the big, otherwise-vacant, lot that abutted a junkyard on its longest edge. We had, yes, the stereotypical junkyard dogs always barking and howling and snarling and ramming against the rusted sheet-metal fence. It was basically a pit. The back-end of the place was just unmowed grass filled with dangerous trash. You couldn’t really
play there, except for the little playground itself.
The playground area had a four-swing swingset (with two swings on it), a washed-out beach volleyball court (that I never saw a net on), and a little tower-thingie just to climb on and do kid-stuff. There wasn’t a slide or anything, it was just this tower. Other, older, kids used to go there and smoke (and, in retrospect, do quite a bit more than that, based on some of the fairly distinctive garbage we found littering the place). Me and Bryan (or Matthias, or Noel, or Brianne, whoever was visiting with us) we’d just go back there and hang out, swing on the swings, fuck around and throw pieces of tanbark at each other trash bottles or cans, or –
(SIDE NOTE: okay, hold on, I just remembered something, alright? ‘Tanbark.’ Does anyone else remember tanbark? I’m beginning to think it was a distinctly Californian, or maybe even Bay Area, name for it, but it was, like, the wood chips that used to pad playgrounds. I’ve got a buddy here in Texas (completely unrelated to all of this, we weren’t friends until decades after either of us lived in California) who
literally went to elementary school like three miles from me (small world!), and
he remembered calling it ‘tanbark,’ but nobody else ever does, it feels like.
The wood chips? Mulch? Whatever? Those big fucking chunks of wood that somebody thought made for great ‘padding’ or ‘filler’ or ‘guaranteed splinters’ in playgrounds, right? Maybe the naming convention for it wasn’t all that’s distinctly Californian, but
for us, that shit was, like, really thick bark from trees (and sometimes a little layer of regular wood just beneath it), that was, like, a by-product of various logging or whatever. And that’s what would be scattered all over our playgrounds, in the places that couldn’t afford to properly do a sandpit.
So, yeah. Tanbark. Just thinking about the stuff gives me the “who thought this was a great idea?” heeby-jeebies)
Anyways, segue over, sorry. Where I’m going with this is that we didn’t have much to do at the mobile home park, and what we
did have to do, we had to do waaaaaaaaaaaay the fuck back literally as far from my mom’s trailer (a double wide, don’t you forget!) while still not leaving the place. Literally over a dozen rows of trailers away, we’d play.
Me and Todd (remember Todd? He’s the one who I tried to save from a mean old lady when a skateboard crash sent him running), we’d play back there. Me and Matthias, me and Noel, me and Brianne, me and Bryan. Whoever. We could fuck off where ever we wanted to, do whatever. Throw glass bottles we found, stomp real good on empty beer cans until they were little hockey pucks we could sling at one another, swing real high and jump off like a lunatic, whatever we wanted to do. It was all fine.
But.
But, when it was just me and the neighbor kids, it was “it’s nice that you play with them, but stay where I can see you.”
The neighbor kids, you see, were Mexicans, African-Americans, or — worst of all — Vietnamese.
If I left with them, I might
get up to no good. If I left with them, I might
go missing. If I left with them,
something might happen.
Now, if you ask my mom — and Felicia and I did, just a few years ago, during The Great Cohabitation Disaster — she isn’t racist. It’s important to remember that as you keep on reading all of this. Like a great many people near her in age, she is
certain that she isn’t racist.
We’re all just too sensitive these days. She and my aunt and uncle were just joking. They didn’t mean it like that. It was just an observation. Why are you mad at them for their opinion? That cartoon is how they look! And, anyways, there are good ones and bad ones, don’t you know.
It was that flavor of racism. That type of scorn. That subtle, but poisonous over time, level of everyone being white, everyone having only white friends, everyone only trust and working with or for white people. Most of my family, I’ve mentioned, lives in rural Oregon. Remember, please, that rural Oregon spawned the far-right militia groups that took over a national wildlife refuge and pointed guns at cops and soldiers for a couple weeks at a time.
So yeah. Not the most ethnically diverse place, y’know?
But me and my white friends and family, including the guy who’d later scam multiple friends and family members for money to soup up his truck and then
lose on Judge Judy over it, the serial shoplifter, the weird little hoarder kid? Or the one who grew up to be a corrections officer after drinking his way out of the Army? Those paragons of virtue, we could do whatever we wanted, because we were white kids, going out and doing white kid stuff.
At the same time, though, if I was around
those other kids, by God, I had to stay where she could keep an eye on me.
My own neighbors were less trustworthy to be safe with me
in our own neighborhood than my idiot cousins from 600 miles away. The families that lived all around us were less trustworthy than the families that
she knew were abusive, but happened to be her white siblings.
I mean, she knew Grandpa raised her brother and sister. She knew how. She knew how Bryce treated his wife and son. But still, my cousins and I were fine.
It was
those people I couldn’t be left alone with.
It was
those people who had gotten rid of the local grocery store, and replaced it first with a Vietnamese market, and later (according to Google Maps) with places like Bun Bo Hue, Banh Cuon Tay Ho, Da Nang, Danh’s Garden, Than Son Tofu. It was
those people that had made our grocery store into a smelly, disgusting, mess.
When we moved to Southern California, it was those very same
those people — the Vietnamese — that she blamed for every missing pet in the condominium complex. They had, after all, probably been the ones who took GG from me, right?!
“’Nuh-goo-yen,’ what kind of name is that?” I heard that from the time I was five or six, to the time I was almost forty, from her. She just never learned how to say it right. Never learned how to stop complaining about how they spelled it “wrong.” Never learned not to Other and vilify and look down her nose at Vietnamese people.
Imagine denying yourself, for your whole-ass life, the pleasure of a good banh mi or a fantastic bowl of pho, just because you’re so damned racist that you’re scared to ever try them. How pathetic is that? What kind of wasted life is that?!
Imagine seeing ancient, hunched-over, women looking through the trash cans every Thursday morning, early, before the garbage truck came, trying to find food. Wisened, wrinkled, old Vietnamese ladies, rummaging all through the condominium complex, before dawn, looking for anything edible that their white neighbors had carelessly tossed, to take back to their families. Imagine calling yourself a Christian, and seeing little old ladies digging for food in the trash every garbage day, and
sneering at them, making a big show of shuddering, and of telling your child how disgusting “those people” are.
But ohhh, let’s not forget, it’s not just them, oh no.
“Why do I have to press 1 for English?” I remember her saying, again for literally decades. “This is America! We shouldn’t speak Spanish!”
Ho, ho, ho. Yes. She’s one of
those, too.
“Ugh, they’re just taking over,” she said when the trailer park hit some threshold of
too many Mexicans for her. Prior to that threshold, she had loved the wrinkly-faced little
abuela that lived next door to us, and would trade her sweet baked goods for trays of tamales and enchiladas. Prior to that threshold, she had played on the generosity of a neighborhood handyman, Luis, playing up how helpless she was and how hard it was to be a single mother, to get things fixed without ever paying him. But once that threshold got hit? Nope.
Suddenly the neighborhood smelled bad, suddenly the summer tan I got was ‘so dark you look like a little Mexican boy,’ suddenly all the restaurants around here are too spicy.
And these feelings, they don’t go away when you leave them to fester. That racism doesn’t, like, get
better when you move from California, to Kentucky, to Oregon.
Thirty-plus years later, living with us in Garland — a suburban Texas town so white it’s literally the inspiration for
King of the Hill — we had a few too many Mexican neighbors for her liking, too. One of them was okay, because she put him to work doing our lawn care (“ho ho ho, I knew he’d say yes!”), but there were still just
entirely too many of them for her liking.
The local Wal-Mart was “too ethnic.” She didn’t feel safe there. When she’d go sit in her car and smoke her secret cigarettes and listen to the oldies station for a few hours (like you do), it was always at the ALDI a few miles away, it was “cleaner.”
Imagine how racist you have to be to think that
Wal-Mart isn’t white-bread and routine enough for you.
One time, while she was living with us, I went to visit her in the hospital (funny story!) (we’ll talk about it later). In
the hospital. And there, in the hospital, she complained about how many Mexicans there were “hanging around.” Her next door neighbor had some children and grandchildren visiting her to see how she was doing after the ER, and mom complained about “the damned family reunion going on” when she was trying to sleep, and wished — aloud, mind you,
out loud — that “they’d all just go on back where they came from.”
With all the other things we could have been talking about given all the drama going on (like I said, we’ll circle back to this particular day), with, oh yeah,
being in the hospital, of every conversation she could have had, she had to complain about her Mexican neighbors.
Hey, that reminds me. On May 26, 2017, the Texas Rangers played the Toronto Blue Jays, at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, Ontario. Bear with me, this has to do with racism and my upbringing, okay? Just trust me on this one.
So, right, May 26, 2017, first game between the Rangers and the Blue Jays since they’d played on May 14,
2016, right? It’d been a year since that game (which the Rangers won), and here it was, their first contest in a year, and they were
in Toronto for it.
Why does this matter?
Because mom was living with us when my wife tried to watch her beloved Rangers play, on May 26, 2017. And because Toronto booed the
shit out of one Ranger in particular, Rougned Odor, as he stepped up to bat.
Felicia chuckled. I grinned a little. The sportscasters mentioned that he’s not exactly Mr. Popular in Toronto “after last year.”
“WHAT DID HE DO?” my mom squawked, wide-eyed, eying him warily, “ROB SOMEONE?!”
“IS THAT HOW HE PAID FOR THAT GOLD CHAIN?,” she curled her lip in disgust, “JUST LOOK AT THAT THING, IT’S SO TACKY,” she said, while wearing a gold chain with a cross on it, just like he was wearing a gold chain with a cross on it.
Rougned Odor, you may have guessed, is not of the Caucasian Persuasion (tm). He’s Venezuelan, not Mexican, but, hey, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ , close enough for her, y’know?
Now, no, he didn’t rob someone. He’s, y’know, he’s a multimillion dollar contract professional baseball player, he didn’t have to, like, knock over a pawn shop for his fucking chain.
But
think about that, that that’s where your mind goes when you hear an athlete isn’t popular with another team’s home crowd.
Think about it, how
no other explanation makes sense to you — nothing that has anything to do with, I don’t know,
sports — except to assume that the brown guy had robbed someone to buy his tacky gold chain, and that’s why Canada doesn’t like him.
(SIDE NOTE: The actual reason is because in that game on May 14, 2016, Rougned Odor very (in)famous punched Jose Bautista square in the face. I don’t know how you feel about grown men punching one another square in the face, but let me tell you, if you’re a fan of grown men punching one another square in the face, you could do a lot worse than to Google Image search “Rougned Odor Jo” and then just let autofill take over, friend, because believe you me, (a) autofill will know just what you’re looking for, and (b) you will see a moment frozen in time that could be in a fucking
textbook about how comic book artists should draw someone getting punched in the face. Shoulders, hips, follow-throw, from the puncher, helmet and sunglasses falling off from the punchee, you name it. Kids have dressed up like Rougned and Jose, in costume together, at Halloween. People have gotten tattoos of this punch. I see a watercolor of it in someone’s Etsy shop. Heim Barbecue, in Fort Worth, has given Rougned free barbecue
for life over how classically perfect the punch was).
But naw. Her knee-jerk assumption for why one professional athlete might be unpopular in another professional athlete’s home town, during an actual game, commented on by professionals live on tv, during an ongoing feud between the two teams…was that the brown guy must have jacked someone’s car or something and been busted by the Toronto PD.
“Those people.” I can’t tell you how many times I heard that particular expression from her, to refer to anyone not white. Anyone. People opening restaurants, people who shop at a certain aisle of the grocery store, people who turn their hats the wrong way. People who wear too much jewelry. People who like music she doesn’t. People who live down the street from us.
We had a
Kentucky State Trooper that lived about three houses down from our house, when we lived in Florence. A remarkably fit black man (that she openly ogled, and chuckled about with neighbor ladies openly enough her 12 year old son noticed it), his awesome wife, and their son.
The dad was fine, of course. He had his hair trimmed nice and short. He wore suburban white people clothes, off-duty, like lots of cops do, khakis and polo shirts and stuff. The mom was fine, too. She had a good job, wore professional office attire, no complaints there.
But their son? Oh, no. He was my age. He wore baggy shirts and blue jeans “that need to be pulled up!” He had “weird stuff” shaved into the side of his head. He wore “all those chains, wonder how he paid for those.”
In my own neighborhood, just a few houses down, lived
honestly almost the only black family in my school. The patriarch of that family was
literally a decades-serving
cop. And I shouldn’t hang out with “that boy,” because “who knows what he’s up to?” Y’all, this area was so suburban-Kentucky-white that not long before we moved there, the school was vandalized with racial slurs and swastikas. The area is something like 2% African American despite being literally minutes away from Cincy, I see now, as I do my little internet research binge, and
oh yes, I almost forgot, right there in Boone County, in 2004, a black family that moved into the neighborhood a few months earlier had a cross burned in their front yard.
Like, this was a white-ass neighborhood, and our particular block didn’t have a whole lot of kids on it, and I wasn’t allowed to associate with this kid. Because. I was one less friend he was allowed to try and have. Because.
A couple years later, she got in a fender bender. Icy road, she was at a red light, the car behind her slid up a bit and gave her a little
boop. No damage, no nothing. But she was all in a panic about it, because
black men got out of the car, in
Downtown Cincinnati, so as she told this story she loved to chuckle, and make an “oh boy” face, and tell people about how she prayed “oh lord, this is it, I’m gonna die.”
On Fridays, at Scout camp, families were allowed to come visit, hang out, see the camp, talk to their kiddos, see what badges they were working on, and come to a campfire full of skits and awards and stuff. For a few summers, the camp itself gave away big, fat, amazing, watermelons (that were just fantastic in that Kentucky heat, they tasted amazing any time there were extra for the staff and we got a bite). Campsite inspection awards, junk like that, right? We’d make a big show of a troop getting a new ribbon or whatever, call them up, give ’em the watermelon; everyone would laugh at some scrawny kid trying to carry it back and looking hugely pregnant.
One week when she visited (unannounced, and largely unwanted) and sat next to me at that campfire (which was
my work, keep in mind, I was camp staff, this was
my job), as one young Scout went waddling off, struggling to carry the watermelon, she pointed to another troop, seated nearby.
“They should give it to them,” she said, pointing at one of the Louisville urban troops, inner city, poorer side of town. All black. All struggling. Some of them were kids who’d never left their city before. Kids who’d never been camping. And there they were, at my camp, and my mom joked about giving them watermelon. When I looked t her, aghast, she said “I just mean because it would be nice! To welcome them to Scouts!”
But she’s not racist. Just ask her.
There’s nothing racist about how she shared Uncle Bryce’s memes, five or so years ago, political cartoons talking about Michele Obama and how masculine she is, comparing her to Melania Trump who’s just so gorgeous and sophisticated. Right? Nothing racist about
any of the anti-Obama pictures, of course. Nothing wrong with rolling your eyes at MLK Day, nothing wrong with rolling your eyes every time you see an MLK boulevard somewhere, nothing wrong with rolling your eyes at commercials for every black-led tv show you can think of, including such
urban staples as The Cosby Show and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, saying “ugh” at the mention of BET or basketball, nothing wrong with complaining about Ebonics and “the table manners of those people” after church dinners.
There’s nothing racist about the way
the whole-ass family talks about my second cousin, who married a black guy, who had kids with him. That makes them a real family, right? Married, kids? Not like me and my wife? Not quote. Because — curiously — every time she, or my aunt, or my cousin Brianne ever talked about that second cousin, they mentioned how cute the babies were ‘anyways.’ How cute the babies were, while reminding you they were half-black. Always a little eye roll and “what’cha gonna do?” look when mentioning the husband.
But that’s not racist.
You see, to her, to them racist had to mean
all in.
It meant KKK regalia. It meant marching in the streets. It meant lynching, burning crosses, shouting open racial slurs, spitting right in someone’s face. Anything less than that —
anything — and you weren’t really racist. Didn’t matter how you voted, how you talked about people, how you locked your doors or clutched your purse. You weren’t racist, you were just “calling it like it is” or “having an opinion.”
The same way that child abuse
had to be my grandfather’s open, brazen, cruelty, racism
had to be the very, very, worst things you can imagine.
If you weren’t the worst thing possible, you weren’t doing anything wrong.
“There’s nothing wrong with being proud of who you are,” she would tell me, going to Oktoberfest in Cincinnati, halfway around the calendar from complaining about Black History Month.
We are, you see, German. She had first cousins living in Germany, still, in fact, on an old dairy farm that had been in the family for generations. She went to Germany, even, just after high school. Her first taste of adulthood and independence had been taking a graduating-seniors-summer-trip-German-Club-thing, but then ditching the teacher at the end, not going home, and living in Berlin for a year or two.
ANOTHER FUCKING SIDE NOTE: she got the only job she ever had that summer, in, like, 1965. She got hired on with a marketing company (the one that does the most famous tv ratings) (you guys remember tv ratings, right?). Fresh out of high school, she got hired by that company, and she worked there, and when she moved back to California she got a transfer and worked for their office in Menlo Park, and she worked with that same company when we moved to Tustin, and that same company when we moved to Kentucky. She was with that same company right up until they fired her about a year before she could retire with full benefits. She never got a job after that, even a part-time one, no matter how many doctors and friends and family members begged her to get out of the house and stay active, no matter that she went to strip-mall technical school to become a medical assistant. Never, ever, ever. She never once applied for a single job in her whole-ass life, after getting hired on in that marketing company. But if you ask her, she’s (a) still an expert on how to get a job, it’s all “beat feet and leave resumes, mister, and give a good interview,” and also (b) she is
absolutely convinced that corporate loyalty is still a thing, that companies reward their workers for years (decades) of service, that everything is fine with capitalism, that if you get let go (
you get let go, not
her get let go) it’s your fault, etc, etc.
But anyways. We’re German. German’s German. German as sauerkraut and schnitzels. German enough to go to Oktoberfest every year — “we’re allowed to be proud of our heritage for once” — and all kinds of stuff like that, right? German enough to insist that stubbornness was a racial trait to be proud of.
German enough that one of the times she gave me
that lecture (the one about being a wasted miracle), it was because I failed German (1) in high school. It didn’t matter that the tiny little class of literally five students was me, one absolutely knockout gorgeous brunette Senior who didn’t want to talk to a Freshman like me, and three edgelord little Neo-Nazi wannabe punk kids (who were into drawing swastikas on everything all class, and who rather understandably had the teacher’s attention most of the time). No, no, no, I should have been getting straight A’s in that class,
it’s in my blood.
BOOM ANOTHER SEGUE: The family story about our German-oh-German family in World War Two? And that dairy farm? Some of the brothers fought for Germany, but they were “the good ones,” they were just regular Wehrmacht, which is how we like to pretend that
only some Nazis were bad, right? If you weren’t Waffen SS, you were just some poor dupe who didn’t know anything bad was going on, after all, that’s the historical myth, there. And they clung to it.
Except, see, one of my great-uncles
was Waffen SS.
Whoopsie!
So the family story there, is that he — the youngest brother out of all of them — didn’t enlist, he stayed behind to take care of the farm. And when the army came rolling through and looked at the town rolls and all, they said “Hey, we hear there’s a strapping young German lad out on this farm, who’s of proper age! You should come with us! Why haven’t you enlisted?”
“I can’t enlist,” my absolutely innocent great-uncle said. “I have to take care of the cows, and my sisters!”
So the mean Nazis — who weren’t the
good Nazis, you understand — they went out into the barn and they gunned down the dairy cows.
“We took care of the cows,” they said, “Do we need to talk to your sisters, too?”
And
that’s how we tell ourselves that our Waffen SS-enlisted great-uncle, who fought in the living hell that was the Eastern Front, was a good guy.
That’s the trick. You can be proud of your German heritage, and then when anyone brings up anything
bad about German heritage, you point out that we only very reluctantly took part, ever so unfortunate about the Allies we killed, I heard
some Nazis were really mean out there in the Eastern front, but I’m sure
our Nazis would never, ever, do anything like that.
Or, as we here in the American South like to put it,
*ahem*, “heritage, not hate.”
Ah, family.
But, hey! German, right? We were pretty German, is where I’m going with this. German enough for anything. German enough.
German enough to have a friend, back there in our trailer park in San Jose, when I was a little boy.
Hans. I’m going to tell you about Hans for a bit, and part of the levity I’ve tried to inject into this essay about toxic, casual, half-hearted, racism is because this is where — unlike all the racism — things take a darker turn. I’ve wanted to keep this piece of the story light by joking and going on segues and shit, and I honestly don’t know how much of it is trying to keep things readable for whatever hypothetical audience this book will ever have, versus trying to put something off.
Hans. I have told four people in the world everything I remember about Hans, before writing this. Four people. Which is, as I sit here and count them, an interesting coincidence, because as it turns out I remember exactly four things about Hans.
Four things:
1, Hans was German. This is the key thing, really. He was even more German than mom! He was actually
German-German, born in Germany, raised in Germany, lived in Germany until he moved to the states “a few years ago” (in the early 1980s). Fatherland, born and raised. German enough mom loved him just for his German-ness, for being someone she could
spreche auf deutsch with, someone she could talk to more than “those people” (literally all of our other neighbors), and someone she could invite over for “real food” like sauerkraut and pork schnitzel, or could leave her son with (instead of the
abuela next door) if she got called into work or something.
In retrospect, the historian in me can’t help but squint just a
little suspiciously at a guy who was
about 60 in
about 1980, which means he was a strapping young man of
about 20 when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, and we never once got any war stories about how he helped the Americans or anything, y’know? But that’s neither here nor there, I guess.
So anyways, Hans was German.
2, Hans had a little kid, just about the only other white kid in the trailer park, who hung out at Hans’ trailer a lot. He was some neighbor kid. He was a few years younger than me, and smaller than me even accounting for that. Skinny little guy. That’s all I remember about that kid. Just that he was smaller than me, and was at Hans’ sometimes.
3, When I was about eight, Hans went away. Around that time, mom suddenly asked me all sorts of stuff about my peepee and my swimsuit and if anyone had ever done anything bad to me. Hans went away, you see, because Hans was found to have been sexually assaulting neighborhood boys. I like to think he died in prison.
4, Hans had a pinball machine in his trailer. This sixty year old guy, who lived by himself, with no kids or grandkids except some in Germany, had a pinball machine. And a neighbor kid who hung out there a lot. And all I remember —
all — about Hans’ trailer, at all, is that pinball machine.
I remember being very, very, focused on that pinball machine, every time I was over there. That shiny metal ball, the flashing lights, and the big lit-up part on top with a man and a woman in these space-suit jumpsuit things so it looked all sci-fi like Cloud City on Bespin but with outfits from Buck Rogers (with the deep v-cut), but the men and the women down on the face of it, in the play area, were all in bikinis and speedos.
And because I’m a fucking idiot, while I sat here to get this ready for publication, I decided to go fucking search on Google Image. I like to sleuth it up and find little details, and I did some searches of pinball machines by year and the big cursive
Bally logo that I remember, and I just found a bunch of pictures of the exact model, called “Future Spa.”
Future Spa, 1974. That’s…that’s it.
I just sat here and didn’t type for a few minutes, in the middle of finishing this up. I saw those pictures and I said something and Felicia heard my weird little voice and came to check on. Because I like trying to find things on the internet, I found a thing on the internet. And when I did, I felt like I got punched in the gut. And, um, yeah. That’s it, all right. Those are the pictures. That’s the mostly-naked people on the play area of the pinball machine that Hans had in his trailer. Future Spa.
So. So yeah.
I need to be really honest about something, here. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to say that I remember Hans assaulting me. I’m not going to say I remember him laying a hand on me, or the other kid, or anything. I’m not going to say that I know for sure what happened to me, or what happened around me that I was desperately tuning out. I won’t pretend that I remember exactly what went on there.
But I know that
all I remember about the inside of Hans’ trailer is this fucking pinball machine, and this awful pastel blue-green and these big-titted women and these flexing, almost-naked men, and all the lights. And I remember the sounds the flippers made, and that shiny metal ball that I got so, so, intensely focused on, instead of remembering anything about snacks or sodas or his tv or him having a dog or a cat or a couch or
anything at all but that pinball machine.
And,
now, I also know that I deeply regret looking up these pictures, on Google Image.
So, yeah, back to the point? That’s Hans. That’s what I know about him. He was a convinced child molester, he often had a skinny little white boy that hung out in his trailer a lot, he owned a cheesecake-and-beefcake-covered sci-fi-themed pinball machine, and he was German.
And
because he was German, I know the other things I know about him.
That’s all it took. That’s all of why he is even this footnote in my life.
Just because he was German. That, alone, was reason enough for her to trust some weird old bastard who lived alone but had a pinball machine (and one she must have never seen, herself, because there’s no way she wouldn’t have noticed the titties and asses and stuff).
When I told the fourth person in the whole world that knew this story — the fourth, before I started hitting this keyboard and pouring this out — when I told that fourth person, we were in a rental minivan, that year’s “Swagger Wagon,” on our Origins road trip (gaming convention in Columbus). Middle of the night. Five people in the minivan, two of us actually awake. I was driving (because I try to drive as much as I can, see an earlier essay), and sitting next to me, taking her turn in the passenger seat up front, was a friend who is the wife of an even better friend.
We get tired and a little weirdly lonely and a little weirdly introspective, open, and talkative, on these trips. Especially the overnight parts. Me and my friends, who lock ourselves into a rental for a 12 or 14 or 16 hour drive, we talk about some stuff with each other that we tend not to talk to other people about.
And I told her about Hans while I was sitting there, driving overnight, all the way through, Dallas to Columbus in one long go. Halfway hypnotized by the taillights and the broken yellow lines being eaten up underneath our van, I told her about Hans. I have no idea how our conversation got there, but it did, so that was it, person number four. She shared some stories, too.
But also, she said to me that when she first got pregnant, when she and my buddy were first expecting, the
number one thing she promised herself, and her kiddo, and God, was “I’m not going to hand my kids over to a predator on a silver platter.”
Well, my mom
did.
Whether I remember him assaulting me or not, whether he
did or not, he
was a serial child molester, and she
did hand me to him on a silver platter. Hell, actually pretty literally, because I probably went over to his place carrying a foil-covered plate of leftovers from mom, paying him for babysitting me that evening.
She trusted him with her kid, alone, because he was German. That was it. That was all it took.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t play in the street, outside of eyeshot of the house, with other kids my age that weren’t white.
But if you ask her — and a great many people her age — that’s not racist.
RUSTY’S RAMBLING: I feel like telling parents “hey, don’t be a racist piece of crap” and “also, don’t cheerfully hand your children over to child molesters” is setting a low bar for what’s supposed to be some wisdom and introspection at the end of one of these things, but, fuck, here we are.
Alright, I’m a fancy-wordy-man, so I need to cook up some fancy words no matter how tired I feel right now, as I reread this and prep it for publication, so here goes.
“Think,” I guess?
That’s my parental advice, here.
Think. Think before you talk. Think about what you’re saying. Think about who you’re saying it about, and
think about who is listening.
Think about the long-term, low-key, lingering, impact of your words, your expressions, your “concerns” about certain neighbors. Think about the assumptions you make. Think about your knee-jerk reactions to people based on the color of their skin.
Or, rather, not just on the color of their skin, but everything that goes with it.
Think about the knee-jerk reactions based on the music they’re listening to, the car they’re driving, the way they wear their clothes. Think about the knee-jerk reactions based on news reports, based on crime dramas, based on cop tv shows. Think about the knee-jerk reactions based on how someone’s yard looks, or their house, or their hair.
Or their gold chains.
Think about all the million little ways you can be
racist as fuck, without ever having to
acknowledge you’re racism.
Right? Let me repeat that, because I think it’s important, as an overall theme of these essays.
Think about the million little ways you can be _____________, without ever having to acknowledge you’re ________________.
In a way, that’s this whole-ass series, right? It’s about being abusive without understanding, admitting, or acknowledging that abuse. It’s about being mentally unhealthy without ever acknowledging your mental health. It’s about being toxic, venomous, cancerous, awful to be around, while always thinking it’s literally everyone else in your life that’s wrong, never you.
It’s about looking at ourselves, and trying, trying really hard, to think about what we could be doing better, even if we think we’re doing okay. Whether it’s as a parent or just as a person.
You don’t have to be
the villain to still be
a villain. In someone else’s story
or your own.
So parents, think about your attitudes about race and class (and how those two go together), and the example you’re accidentally setting for your kids.
Now, for the folks raised by problematic parents? For the folks reading this not because they’re a parent, themselves, but rather because they’re here for tips and tricks and advice for how to recognize and cope with this sort of thing?
My advice to you is to just, well, keep your eyes wide open. Look at the things your family says. Listen to them. Listen to them when there aren’t any people of color around. Look at the memes they share and the articles they repost on social media. Look at who else ‘likes’ those social media posts. Look for Confederate regalia. Look for the “jokes,” especially.
Look for the things that racists say, instead of looking only at who’s saying it, and telling yourself they’re not a racist ahead of time.
If people in your family say the things racists say, to defend the things racists defend, guess what?
They’re a racist. Family or not. Parent or not. “Different era” or not. Don’t make excuses for them. Ask them about it. Ask them to explain the joke. Ask them what they meant by that. Ask them why the joke is funny. Ask them if the targets of the joke would also laugh. Ask them if they’ve told that joke to any people of color.
Just ask ’em. Put in a good faith effort at clear, open, communication. See what happens. Go from there.
So, uh, that’s the racism part. I..huh. I gotta tackle the other thing I brought up, huh? Even now, several hours after almost-finishing this and getting ready to post it, I’ve gotta just stare at my blinking Word cursor for a bit and try to figure it out.
Thing is? I don’t…I don’t know what to say about the other part, really. The other, uh, thing. The German, pinball-playing, elephant in the room. I haven’t ever opened up about that enough to really
try and tackle it, and I don’t know that I particularly want to.
More to the point, I know that I’m not equipped to give anyone advice about it, really, whether parents or abusive survivors. So I’m just not going to.
Instead, I’m just going to ask that you swear what my friend swore, when she had her first child. Promise it to yourself, your partner, your kid, your family, your therapist, your priest, your god, your God, whatever conscience you believe in.
Promise it to whoever’ll make it stick.
“I’m not going to hand my kids over to a predator on a silver platter.”
