Burn Down the Ground (29 page)

EXCESSIVE NOISE DISTURBANCE

S
ince my parents never noticed the everyday noises around us—pots and pans banging, dishes being unloaded, the telephone ringing—I became successful at tuning things out. I made myself effectively deaf to sounds that did not matter.

I was such a sound sleeper that I was forced to use the three-foot
speaker from my Fingerhut stereo as an alarm clock. Each night I put one of the two speakers in my bed next to my ear with the volume cranked to 10 and set the timer. On occasion, this still failed to wake me. When Rob, Alexis, and Jeff slept over, they thought it was strange that I’d climb into bed with a giant wooden speaker. In the morning, when they had to shake me out of my coma so I could shut off the earsplitting wails of Ozzy Osborne, they thought I must be deaf, too.

But in the early morning hours of August 15, 1988, something else woke me.

It was 3:30
A.M
. and bumps in the night were never the bogeyman. They were always Dad, drunk and disorderly. Just the night before, hours after Mom and I had returned from our Six Flags adventure, I wrote to Rob in my diary:

Wearing only my underwear and my AC/DC Fly on the Wall concert T-shirt, I slowly opened my bedroom door. Mom’s door was open and the soft glow from her table lamp spilled out into the hallway. I edged down the hall and peered into her room. She was lying on the floor, with Dad straddling her, gripping the back of her head with his left hand. His right arm was cocked back, his fist in a ball. Mom heard me and shot me a terrified look. Dad threw a punch and missed. Dad’s fist had already been in motion, but that split second of distraction was long enough for Mom to wriggle out of the way. The loud crack of his knuckles on
the thin carpeting confirmed I was not dreaming and they were not playing around.

Mom ran toward me, dressed in her favorite floor-length polyester nightgown and her hair curled in black brush rollers. Dad was wearing jeans and reeked of Jovan Musk and alcohol. Clearly he had been at a bar and was out-of-control drunk.

He followed us into the dining area, where I saw that the plasterboard walls were riddled with fist-sized holes. I had slept through his angry punches.

Dad corralled us into the dining room. I shouted to Mom without moving my lips. David and I used to do that as kids to keep Mom and Dad from knowing what we were saying. Then this secret communication never failed to annoy her. But now my ventriloquism might help save our lives.

“SHOULD I CALL 911?” I shouted, hoping she would understand me.

I had never seen Dad raise a hand to her before. He had only spanked me twice in my whole life. I wanted Mom to tell me what to do, to tell me it was okay if Dad got in trouble, to admit that this couldn’t be fixed.

Instead she screamed, “I DON’T KNOW!” making her own poor attempt at talking without moving her mouth. She was so bad at it that I worried that Dad would catch on.

My father paced the room shrieking “MUDDAH FUH!” while flailing his arms and pounding his fists on the tables and walls. At one point he grabbed my mother by the arm and pushed her toward one of the four dining chairs. She resisted, but he shoved her into a seated position. Dad’s six-foot-two frame of pure muscle, deeply toned from years of construction work, was too much for the two of us combined. We had to call the police. But how?

Dad was screeching in Mom’s face. I couldn’t get to the kitchen phone with them in my way, and there was no way I was going to leave my mother to fend for herself. I screamed through my clenched teeth to anyone who could hear me, “SOMEBODY HELP! CALL THE POLICE!”

I was certain our neighbors Tony and Sammy would hear me and call for help, even though they weren’t talking to me anymore. The cops would be at our door any minute, I told myself. I would still be able to get in a few hours’ sleep before my 10
A.M
. shift at Malibu Grand Prix. Minutes ticked by like hours and Dad’s temper reached a boiling point. He yanked Mom’s hair, then twisted her arm behind her back and began squeezing her face with his free hand. Mom was crying hysterically. She screamed at me to call the police. I ran to my room and dialed 911.

“This is the 911 operator, do you have an emergency?”

“Yes, help!” I screamed. “My dad is hurting my mom!”

“Are you at 1608 Weyland Drive?”

“Yes! Number 1004! Send police fast, please hurry!” I recalled Dad’s complaints of discrimination by police and frequent stories of deaf people being injured or shot dead by officers due to miscommunication. Worried that the officers might hurt Dad if he didn’t immediately obey their commands, I added, “He’s deaf so he might not hear what they say.”

When I returned to the dining room, I saw that Dad had let go of Mom’s hair and now pounded around the room swinging punches, screeching and signing that he would kill her, and then himself.

I tried to defuse the situation, telling him and Mom that the police were on their way. He began to calm down while Mom sat
solemnly at the dining room table. I was sitting in a sea of terror worrying that I had a head full of pink sponge rollers and was only wearing underwear. We already looked like an episode from
Cops
. There was no way I would be caught dead looking this way in front of officers. I turned toward my bedroom to find clothes, but Dad commanded me to stay where he could see me.

When the rap at the door came, Dad didn’t try to stop me from answering. Two policemen stood in the entryway, their hands resting on their holstered guns. I noticed the front porch light was shattered. Dad must have also done that while I was sleeping. I repeated to the police what I had told the 911 operator, that my father was deaf and might not obey them.

Dad looked unfazed at seeing the officers and threw in a bit of feigned innocence. His face said, “What’s the problem, officers?” That might have worked, if there hadn’t been a dozen fist holes in the walls behind him.

I told the officers the basics but they only wanted to know about the status of Mom and Dad’s relationship.

“Are they married?” one of them asked.

Domestic violence was treated differently back then. Laws would eventually change, but on this night, what happened behind a family’s closed doors was mostly off-limits to the infamous strong arm of Texas justice.

“Yeah, they’re still married but he doesn’t live here anymore.”

Somehow it came up that Dad still had some personal belongings in our apartment, namely some clothes of his in a closet. They hung next to Mom’s clothes, all of which now had slashes after Dad had angrily taken a knife to them during a rampage two nights earlier.

“His clothes are in the closet, he has a right to be here,” the officer said.

“But his name isn’t on the lease,” I argued.

“It doesn’t matter. All we can do is ask him to leave.”

Ask
him? How about
tell
him
.

The officers negotiated with Dad by interpreting through Mom. She relayed their messages of “Come on, just go home and sleep it off,” and “You don’t want to have your daughter see her parents fight like this, do you?” Lines like those must have worked when delivered by men in uniform carrying guns, but they didn’t have quite the same effect when signed by Mom, the very woman Dad was threatening to kill just moments earlier.

This went on for twenty minutes before the officers were able to lead Dad through the front door. They pledged to follow him home to make sure he stayed out of harm’s way.
Our
way. It all seemed so informal. Nothing signed, no photos taken, no report completed. Just a “he said, she said” and a quick dusting off of the hands. They even helped Dad get in his car, even though he was clearly in no condition to drive. His eyes were glassy and he reeked of alcohol.

Mom and I retired to our bedrooms without as much as a hug. We were in shock, and I had to be at work in a few hours. If I went back to sleep, I figured, maybe I would wake up to find that it had all been a bad dream.

I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard a tremendous crash. I leapt out of bed and grabbed the rotary phone that was on the floor by my stereo. Dad came charging down the hallway and into my bedroom. I was in the middle of dialing 911. The 9 hadn’t even finished spinning back into its starting position
when my father yanked the receiver out of my hand. As if cracking a bullwhip, he ripped the cord out of the wall.

In the age of rotary phones, 9 was a stupid number to have to dial in an emergency.

Throwing down the phone, Dad whipped out a folding knife from his back pocket and charged after Mom, who was standing in the hallway. I trailed behind and saw that our front door was knocked off its hinges and the wood splintered where the bolt should have been.

Dad grabbed Mom by the arm and forced her back to the dining room and into a chair. I stood paralyzed with fear as he planted himself at the head of the table. He pointed me to the empty chair across from Mom. “SIT!” His high pitch and ferocity was startling. I took a seat as ordered.

For hours, he interrogated my mother about her dating and sex life as I sat with my head down on the table. Occasionally he punctuated his sentence with a slam of his fist on the table or a quick jab to the wall. His balled-up hand crashed through the drywall with ease.

Each time I tried to get up, he bared his teeth and screamed, “SIT!” I tried to shrug him off with my best teenage hostility act, signing, “Going to bed.” He quickly jumped up, standing tall and puffing out his chest like a king cobra as he shrieked, “SIT! NOW!” I sat at the dining room table with my parents, something we had not done since Thanksgiving when I was nine.

Mom sat in silence as though she was in a trance. Frustrated by her lack of emotion, Dad turned his attention to me. He pointed at a photo of my mother with her co-workers proudly lined up in front of a helicopter they had just built. He grabbed it off the wall—the same wall that sported fresh holes the size of
Dad’s fist—and ferociously signed, “Did you know your mother fucked him and him and him and HIM?!” He pointed so hard that his index finger cracked the glass. It didn’t cut him through his thick calluses, but it gave him an excuse to get even angrier. He broke the frame in two and hurled the shards and splintered mess against what was left of the wall.

Our eyes locked. He signed to me with forced emphasis on each sign, “Your mother S-L-U-T!”

I searched his livid face.
Are you in there, Daddy?

“Did you know your mother gives good head?”

He searched my dazed face, as if he were asking if I was on his side.

I wasn’t.

He had just told me that my mother was a slut, that my mother gave blow jobs.
Told me, the daughter he was trying to protect from the evils of men
.

He snapped.

In one swift move Dad lifted Mom by her neck and slammed her back against the foyer wall. I looked down and saw that her feet were writhing desperately as she tried to dig her heels into the wall. Her polyester nightgown was bunched up around her waist as she held on to his wrists and strained to make her neck muscles tight. Her eyes bulged and the vein in her forehead grew fat.

I pried at one of Dad’s hands but it was firmly in place. So I concentrated on one finger; if I could bend one backward he’d have to let go from the pain.

Please, just one digit, Kambri. You can do it. Just get his index finger. Just
one
finger
.

He was too strong.

I switched tactics. “Daddy, Daddy! Look at me, Daddy!” I signed in his face, breaking his focus. He turned his eyes my way but never lost his grip. “Daddy,” I continued. “Please, don’t do this. Why are you doing this? Why? Why? Why?”

He was cracking; I could see it. “Daddy, look at me. It’s me, Kambri, your baby girl, remember?”

His glassy eyes welled up with tears. I repeated it over and over again. “It’s me, Kambri. Daddy, it’s me. Remember? Your baby girl, Kambri.” Finally he let go. Mom choked and gasped for air. I raced to the kitchen phone, still connected to the outlet, and dialed 911. Dad caught me and yanked the receiver out of my hand just as I heard the operator answer, “911, what’s your emergency?” He slammed the phone back into its cradle, disconnecting the call.

I was now the enemy, too.

He whipped out a hunting knife from his pocket and held it to Mom’s throat. His top lip was tight and pinched and his bottom lip jutted out, exposing his bottom teeth; he looked like a salivating, growling bear on a rampage. He pulled Mom’s head back by her hair and made her throat long and tight, just begging to be slit open. She held on to his wrist with both hands as they stared into each other’s eyes.

The phone rang.

I had a choice: I could try the baby daughter route again, or make a break for the phone and hope that he was too caught up in his hypnotic rage to notice me. I ran to the kitchen phone.