My Uncle is Dying

My Uncle is Dying(Perkins) I haven't spoken to my uncle J for more than 30 years. He didn't seem to mind.

My aunt wants me to talk him because he's dying. I don't want to hurt her by telling her why I won't.

J would say he was more than an uncle. That he took me and raised me like his own. It's partly true; I lived with J for ten years. My mother and I moved in when my dad went to jail after a bar-fight got out of control and a man was killed. I was seven at the time. My mom had migraines, which led her to quit jobs. We needed someplace to stay.

When my mom had headaches, I had to be very quiet. And when J was at home, I had to be even quieter. He didn't like noise even without a headache.

It is hard to stay quiet at that age. I knew the consequences if I made noise in the house. J was what people used to call strict. Nobody thought there was anything wrong with that. It was his house, his rules.

I was not very good at taking a beating. I hid and I cried. I struggled. It took a long time before I learned that nothing but boredom was going to stop him. I experimented with ways to make him calmer, to placate him, careful not to reveal that I was trying to manipulate. I tried playing dead a few times, but the trick could backfire if he decided to bring the belt down harder to get a good scream.

Sometimes weeks, even months, passed without my getting in trouble. He could come back from the bar, have a beer and watch TV, and go to bed without even noticing that I was there in his house, eating his food and making him miserable. But it never lasted. There was always something that set off his rage. Sometimes I'd hear him hit my aunt, and that would bring calm. Sometimes that was just his warm-up.

The older I got, the more I experimented with how J could be placated. With age I gained insights into his thinking. By 12 or 13 I knew that J needed to show his power, his ability to dominate. The smell of alcohol on his body -- the smell that used to terrify me -- now meant I could push further into manipulating him away from his need to beat me in order to feel powerful.

He didn't really want to beat me; he wanted to humiliate me. And I learned how to draw him into that humiliation so completely that it was better than giving a beating to him.

By the time I was a teenager, I had mastered the actions and vocabulary of humiliating myself. The verbal self-abuse was the hard part. The physical act was even easier. Every teenage boy figures out how to do in secret. The leap to making it a performance was pretty easy.

He bought a Polaroid camera to create a permanent record of my descent. The pictures were a source of power to him: he wasn't in the shots, and we both knew that if they fell into anybody else's hands that I would be the pervert, not him.

Self-humiliation takes a toll on the mind. You can forgets why the game started in the first place. Drugs dull pain, even as they cause dependence. The things I performed in front of J dulled the immediate pain -- he lost interest in whipping me -- but made me question whether I would ever grow up to be a normal man. I was glad to have out-smarted him, to have read his mind and discovered how to subdue it. But that came with a growing dread that I would be found out some day, and that suicide would be only escape from the humiliation if anybody else knew what I was willing to do get out of being punished.

When I was 15 my mother's boyfriend found a job far away. They didn't marry, but we all moved in together. In 1970 this was vaguely scandalous, but it kept me away from J. I worried, of course, about the photos. J was far away, but the photos could move by mail and find me anywhere.

Over decades, I thought less about the photos. They have lost their power over me. My mom died five years ago, my dad a year later. Nobody is alive that would recognize me.

So now my aunt wants me to go and say goodbye. Perhaps he wants to tell me he's sorry.

I'm not going back. I was taught as a child to be unforgiving; than man who taught me will see how well he's done.