Waiting for the Punch Page 4

  Marc

  Canneries?

  Ron

  Where you can beans and broccoli and stuff at a factory. Any type of frozen peas. I would just have to pick out stalks of broccoli, and put them in a chute, and avoid putting my fingers close to blades. Then one day my job was to pick out rats and snakes out of the stuff. That was the last day I went.

  They would just kind of get rooted up. They’re not plucked out by individual farmers. They’re just put all together, and when they’re originally dumped they’re just dirt and rocks and vegetables and dead rodents.

  I let a lot of rats go through.

  Marc

  You did not!

  Ron

  Oh, yeah. Do I look like a person that touched a lot of rats?

  WYATT CENAC—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  My mother and father lived in New York City, and then they split up when I was about a year old. My mother remarried, and then maybe when I was about three, my mother, stepfather, and I moved to Texas.

  My father was murdered when I was four. My grandmother, my maternal grandmother, lived in New York, so I would spend time with her, and then I would spend time with my father as well. My grandmother, even after he got killed, she did a good job of trying to keep talking about him.

  He was a New York City cabdriver, and he took a fare up to Harlem, and then they robbed him and shot him.

  Just recently, maybe two years ago, a friend of mine connected me to an NYPD detective who pulled up the file, and I got to see everything. I always knew where it happened, but this sort of laid it out. Once he was shot, he died instantly, and then his foot was on the gas, and the car went across the median, and crashed into some cars. Then there were some witness accounts and stuff like that. It was really amazing. Then, at the end of it all, there is the guy. They caught the guy and I had his whole rap sheet. It was weird to just see that, and to just get a fuller picture of that guy. He lives in Brooklyn. There’s a whole kind of weirdness of oh, wow, this person, I’ve seen his whole life. I see his rap sheet.

  He got a really short sentence for it. I think he was sixteen when he did it. I just think about, he was sixteen, and this thing, it just set him on a path. Weirdly enough, he was doing time in North Carolina at the same time I was in college in North Carolina. It’s just strange, these little sort of intersections of life where it’s like oh, we were both in North Carolina at the same time.

  Marc

  Different institution.

  Wyatt

  Exactly. Yeah, different state-run institution. Both not the best football teams. Really underperforming football teams in both situations.

  Marc

  Wait, so now, the dude who murdered your biological father lives in the same city as you as a free man.

  Wyatt

  Yeah.

  Marc

  Do you have any compulsion to meet him?

  Wyatt

  Not really, no. People have asked me that. I don’t really have anything to say to the dude. If anything, there’s a part of me that I look at him and what he did, and there’s a sense of he is partially responsible for me being who I am. I’m not going to send him a Father’s Day card, but this was a traumatic event that changed me in the way I saw the world. He’s the person that did that. Who knows how different my life would be? I assume I’d probably still be in the same place, but maybe my father would have been the deadbeat that he was to my sister to me, and maybe I would have dealt with that. Or maybe I would have gone to New York and lived with him, and it would have changed my impression of him in that way.

  In that way, it is, like, yeah, this one thing, that idea of the butterfly effect or something like that, here it is.

  AIMEE MANN—MUSICIAN, ACTOR

  My childhood was pretty fragmented. My mother left when I was three years old. There was a lot of drama around that, because she ran off with a guy and he was married, and they took me, and my father didn’t know where I was. This was just a lot of drama. I was eventually found and brought back, but this was probably nine months later.

  Marc

  Your mom kidnapped you with this dude that she ran off with, who was also married, and took you to another state?

  Aimee

  Out of the country. We wound up in England, but I think we spent some time in Germany. I remember being in Amsterdam. I don’t know what the plan was. I think he was going to get a job. He took his kids, because he had kids.

  Marc

  “Here’s your new family.”

  Aimee

  Yeah.

  Marc

  Was this a guy from the neighborhood, somebody that your father knew?

  Aimee

  Somebody who worked for my father. There’s a lot of drama in it. My father had hired a private detective, but I think he found out where I was by accident, because he was in advertising. He was in the same business. In the course of doing business, my dad ran into a guy who said, “I saw the guy that used to work for you,” and it was him.

  I think she flew back with me, and then I was taken to my grandparents for a month, which is crazy. It’s all fucking crazy. My dad told me most of this. I know her now, but I sort of didn’t really see her until I got back in touch with her in my midtwenties. She obviously doesn’t really want to talk about it.

  Here’s another detail: I think we were all staying at a hotel or something, and I was three years old, playing by myself in the parking lot, and this boyfriend hit me with a car and knocked me unconscious. Probably not on purpose, but he did yell at me for causing an accident.

  Marc

  I’ve never heard of child abuse where the child was hit by an automobile.

  Aimee

  Yeah. Well, look, it was only a VW bug.

  Marc

  Oh, you could have won.

  Aimee

  I could have.

  TOM ARNOLD—COMEDIAN, ACTOR

  When I was ten, my dad married the next-door neighbor. She had a couple kids and that was terrible. It was terrible because she’d come from a very corporal punishment background and I was the oldest and she was going to tame me. It was not a pleasant experience. I get along with her now, of course. I know it was hard for her because I was like, “Oh my God, you’re taking my dad.” He did ask me if he could marry her. I remember saying, “Well, yeah. Of course.”

  She had a chart on the fridge with check marks during the day for when my dad got home and this is how many whips you’d get. The saddest thing, and I thought of this recently because my son was born, was when I was in bed. Man, I was loaded up with the extra underwear, the padding, because I knew it was coming because there had been a lot of check marks next to my name. I could hear him saying, “Oh, come on, Ruth. I don’t want to.” She’d say, “Goddamn it, it’s him or me.” You’re ten and you’re hearing that. You’re like, “Oh my God, I don’t want my dad to get divorced.” You march on down there and say, “Let’s do it.”

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN–MUSICIAN, SONGWRITER, AUTHOR

  How could you live in a house where there was so much kindness and great cruelty? It was very, very difficult to understand those things, and it set me very on edge. I had my own little local minefield that I had to walk every single day, which caused a great deal of anxiety and neuroticism in me. You know, I had this one great thing, but then I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. It made me a very nervous kid.

  PAUL SCHEER

  My mom got divorced three times when I was a kid growing up. That was a little rough. We lived a lot in small apartments and moved around Long Island. Weird guys. Weird stepdads. I remember I had one stepdad who refused to let me call him by his name. His name was Cordell. I could not call him Cordell. He made me call him Daddy, which is, in retrospect, weird.

  My dad got into a fistfight with Cordell right in front of me. That was crazy. As a kid to see your real dad and your stepdad fight, like fucking go for it. I was young. I was, like, nine or ten. I remember seeing it.

  My dad and I
come back from apple picking, coming in, seeing my stepdad, who was in a bathrobe. He was a truck driver for a supermarket. My dad came in, and Cordell says, “You don’t say fucking hello to me, Bill?” My dad’s like “I said hello to you. It’s your fucking fault if you didn’t hear it.” All of a sudden my stepdad picked up a coffee mug, fucking whaled it at my dad’s head. My dad ducked and it exploded on the wall. They just went at it, like, grappling around my kitchen table. My dad’s the nicest, most well-adjusted guy, and then suddenly apples are flying. I’m throwing apples. My dad is throwing apples. They fight until they literally leave the house, like outside the front door. My dad’s a pharmacist. A pharmacist fighting a truck driver. It was something like out of a Clint Eastwood movie. It was insane, insane stuff.

  Hours later, I got on the phone and Cordell was on the phone in my house. My dad was on a pay phone, and they apologized to each other while I was in the middle. For my benefit, to hear them apologize to each other. They had to get together and apologize over me. Looking back on that, that was terrible.

  Cordell was an abusive fuck of a dude. A terrible dick. He’d come home, literally an arm in a cast because he got into a fight at work.

  I would talk back a lot. That was my thing. I got into a ton of fights all until eighth grade, and then I was like, “Oh, I got to stop this.” But I was getting good at it because I was fighting a forty-year-old guy at home. When you fight this big fucking forty-year-old dude, this fat dude who is strong, literally throwing a pitchfork at me and I’m dodging a pitchfork, getting locked up in the barn.

  I just learned to be more of a grappler. It was like a lot of slaps and runs or punches in the stomachs and runs. But when I was in sixth grade I got into this fight with this kid and he gave me a sixth-grade punch. Like boom, punch in the face. I remember I grabbed him by the neck and we were by a car. There was a car fender there. I was like “Whap, whap.” Like, his face into a car fender. We were both suspended from school, because he started it. But I stopped that. I remember being like “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t like this.”

  JOHN DARNIELLE

  I had fresh earrings when I was fourteen or fifteen, and that pissed my stepdad off to no end. I think I got Mom to sign off on it. He hated that. He was a left-wing political activist who beat his wife and child and was homophobic. I was getting girlie at fourteen and fifteen. I was growing my hair long, I was trying on eye shadow and rouge and stuff like that.

  The day that he knocked me hard enough to actually knock out an earring, and the post dug into my neck, that was the day that I wound up getting thrown out of the house. I had to go live with my real dad.

  It was a mess. The thing about that period of time was that I had at that point a strong network of friends. For the first time I was close enough to grown up that my friends weren’t just my friends. They were meaningful people in my life who I talked to about my life and who I was constructing that amazing teenage life with. They know your struggle. Suddenly, there was this big blow-up day about which I remember only that he did that. He was slapping me around the face hard enough to make the earring dig into my neck and make me bleed. I went back to my room and sat there, listening to music, and my mom came down the hall to say it was time for dinner. I’d been sitting there for half an hour contemplating what I was going to do to express that I didn’t deserve this and the extent of the rage, so I punched my window. I put my fist through the window. It felt like a million bucks.

  I never felt so good in my whole life. It was like, holy shit, and the house melted down. My stepfather screamed that he was going to beat everybody’s ass even worse. My mother is crying, my sister is crying. It was a whole terrible scene.

  I’m bleeding all up the arm but I felt like a million bucks. It felt so good to show them what it felt like inside. There was no way of getting it through their heads.

  That was my victory.

  PAUL SCHEER

  I remember Cordell having my mom held like a hostage with a handgun and seeing that as a kid. During a fight.

  I say it now and I think, “Wow. That was crazy dark. That’s insane.” But as a kid it doesn’t register like that.

  I remember saying to my mom “We got to get out of here.” My mom’s like “No, no, no. It’s okay.” I was like “We got to go. We got to go.”

  Marc

  Did he hit her too?

  Paul

  Yeah. He hit me, he hit her. But you know what? Never to the point where we were really hurt. I think that was always my line. “Oh well, we don’t have broken arms. Or we don’t have this. Or we don’t have that.”

  He would apologize, but he was like an older brother instead of a dad. It was that kind of relationship. I think he was competitive for my mom’s affection toward me, which is insane. It’s, like, that’s a mother and a son. You’re a husband. It would come out a lot in Indian burns. You know that kind of stuff, which really hurt.

  I called child protective services at one point. They came to the house and they interviewed the parents side by side. They were like, “Does this happen?” My mom’s like, “No.” They talked to me and I was like, “Yes.” But they think, oh, the kid’s lying. The parents are telling the truth. They left.

  Marc

  Did you get beaten for that?

  Paul

  Yeah. Oh yeah. Of course.

  My mom rebelled in the craziest ways. My dad’s so nice and great. The man she’s married to right now, also wonderful and great, but with Cordell, she was like, “I want something different.” She got something insanely different.

  Then my mom kind of wised up at a certain point and she was like, “Oh, we’re out of here.” This guy has more guns than he has shirts.

  This is a crazy thing. My mom pretended that he won a trip, a hunting trip. She created these envelopes. It was like, “Cordell, you won this trip.” She got him plane tickets. Got him a hotel. Created this whole fantasy, seven days away for him. The minute he left the house, a moving truck pulled in and we got all of our shit out of the house and we took off. We left Cordell’s farm, and we moved into a small apartment, and that was it.

  JOHN DARNIELLE

  My stepfather died. He died, and my sister called in the middle of the night to say, “Mike is dead.” Then I went on tour a month or two later, and stuff started to crack open. It was really amazing. I started to feel free with my feelings. I tell people, I tell survivors when they come up to me in the merch line and say, “I survived abuse.” I ask, “Has your abuser died yet?” and they will say, “No.”

  I say, “I want you to be ready because I hate to say this because you don’t wish death on anybody: It’s wonderful when your abuser dies, it’s wonderful. It’s like nothing in the world. It’s like you are free.” There’s a feeling that you will never be free of what you were, but then there’s this. Even though my stepfather was helpless at the end of his life, to know that the person who used to hurt you no longer can is very, very, very deep. It’s unbelievable.

  Marc

  You forgive him?

  John

  No. Which I hate about myself, but I don’t.

  WYATT CENAC

  My biggest fear, and it was a fear that I had as a kid, because there would be times my mother might show up somewhere or she would have somebody spy on me and do shit like that. It was a really paranoid house growing up.

  I remember, one time I was supposed to leave my car at a certain place. I was picking up this girl that I was seeing at the time; we were going to go to Six Flags Amusement Park. I was supposed to leave my car on one side of town; Six Flags was on another side of town, both far from where my folks live. I go pick up the girl. She’s like, “We should drive to Six Flags together. It’d be romantic,” because we were supposed to ride with her sister. I was like, “Well, I don’t know. My mom says—” Then she touched my leg, and it was like, “Okay, let’s do it.”

  We drive, and I had to take the highway and my folks didn’t want me on the highway
. My mother used to make me carry around this cell phone, one of those big-ass car phones. Phone’s ringing nonstop, the girl answers it, and I immediately hang it up, and I’m like, “What the fuck are you doing?” Then I eventually answer it, and my mother’s like, “Why didn’t you pick up the phone?” I was like, “I don’t know if you called the right number. This is the first time it rang.” I dropped the girl off, and I get home, and as I’m pulling into the driveway I see my stepfather has been tailing me at some point, and his car’s coming behind mine. He picked me up somewhere on the road, followed me back to our house.

  What I learned is that my mother sent somebody to go see if my car was where it was supposed to be. When it’s not, she calls the police. Knowing I took it, she calls the police, thinking that the police’ll pick me up, and I’ll learn a lesson.

  When I get home, she has opened up all my papers, anything that I had locked up. I used to keep a briefcase where I could lock things up. All that stuff is spread out on her bed and on the kitchen table. It’s almost like the police have come in and raided the place, and they’re just going through everything. Violating in a way that was like, this doesn’t even have anything to do with the crime at hand. The crime was that I took a car on the highway; you’re now looking at this as like, “Let’s basically just go through all this shit.” There was always that sense of violation. I never knew who was my real friend. There was a girl I grew up with. She, at one point, told me that my mother had asked her to befriend me just to report information.

  Halfway through my first semester of college, I was failing out and they would send a midterm report to your house. I’m in the shower, and my roommate comes knocking on the door of the bathroom, and he’s like, “Hey, your folks are on the phone.” I was like, “I’m in the shower. I’ll call them back.” He goes back, and a minute later he’s like, “They’re not getting off the phone. They’re saying, ‘Get out of the shower.’” I’m just like, “Oh, shit.” I’m thinking, “Did somebody die? What the fuck is going on?”