Read Online The Birth of Bane by Richard Heredia - Free Book Online Page B

for years.
    So, you see, to
me, he wasn’t overly attractive, and yet he seemed to get more
pussy than your average guy.
    Now, I called
his women “fucks”, because I could never imagine my dad making love
to a woman. He was just too taut, pulled too tight to express any
emotion in the proper fashion. His filtering mechanisms were
twisted beyond repair. I couldn’t see him “wooing” or “sweeping”
any woman into bed on a wave of sensual romance. No, he’d just want
to fuck, plain and simple, and somehow he managed to find females
who were ok with that. And, this wasn’t the sixties or early
seventies when “free love” was the motto and sexual partners were
passed about like hard candy. No, that age had passed. AIDS was the
name of the game now. Fear of the unknown and the concept of a
modern plague ruled supreme. Still, my father managed to get women
to go to bed with him. I know, weird…
    (Little did I
know it would be Roxanna who’d play a critical role in what was in
store for my family in the months to come.)
    At the time,
though, she was of little consequence. Thus, I banished her from
conscious thought forthwith.
    Instead, I sat
on my bed, thinking of Myra, knowing somewhere in the middle of
myself what I felt for her was already more mature, more real , than anything my father would have the capacity to
experience. Here we were, mere teenagers, in the wash of hormones,
where life could be glorious and then turn tragic at the drop of a
dime, and still… we were better equipped.
    Over the years,
I’ve come to realize my father never truly got over the death of
his mother. When she died, something in him had stalled, as though
he was stuck on a sandbar in the ocean of life. Nothing died per se, as with many other people. No, his yearning, his
willingness to learn, to improve himself, merely quit on him. One
can mourn something that has died, and then accept it and move on.
Being stuck is not the same. His whole life, my dad was stuck in
the past, stuck over the fact he’d grown-up poor, stuck with
childhood notions of what it was to be a man. He couldn’t reconcile
the fact his parents had divorced, and was further confused by the
eventual promiscuity of his mother. Her “sanctity”, in his mind,
was marred each time she took a new lover to her bed.
Inadvertently, and unbeknownst to him, his anger grew, festered,
turning into something smacking of rot and decay. Because parents
weren’t as open with their children back then as they are now, or
when I was younger, his world continued to backslide even further
into the dregs of his ever hardening heart. He had only the
leave-takings of a world he couldn’t hope to comprehend without
help.
    Then, his mother
passed away, and that’s when the guilt set in. He felt guilty
thinking she was a whore. He felt guilty over the times he’d
spurned her affection, because of the men she had around. Maybe,
somewhere deep, he felt responsible for her death. Forget the
cancer, forget her fast life-style. Something inside turned black
with her dying. It was something crucial.
    Yeah, he
might’ve died an adult, but he was never more than an
eight-year-old child in his head.
    A vindictive,
self-centered, eight-year-old child , I thought. Don’t get it
twisted.
    As if to stress
the point I was trying to make in my head. I heard something
fragile break, could imagine hundreds of shards scattering across
one of the rooms downstairs. The asshole was throwing things
again.
    I shook my head
ruefully, running a hand through my short hair. This fucking guy…
    I would’ve
continued with the thought, but the sound of my door opening and
closing roused me from my musings. I glanced up and saw Valerie
stride in, tears on her cheeks, apprehension and dismay written
within.
    I
stood.
    She came to me
faster than I could react and did something she hadn’t done in
years, not since we were little kids, helpless against the nasty
barrage coming from my father’s mouth. Her arms