Excerpt #3: Child Abuse, Alcohol and Violence

     Once he'd gotten a hold of me, I was dragged and beaten along the floor to where he proceeded to put a few welts on me too...on my hind end, to be exact. He dragged me by the shirt collar, my feet banging and bouncing all the way down the stairs, until we got out into the living room. It was then that he went into a psychotic kicking and punching frenzy. All I could see was the blur of his reddened face and the saliva spraying out from it. Then, when he had me just where he wanted me on the floor before him, the drunken bum went for the big one. He kicked me so hard in my right side that I crawled up into the fetal position from the excruciating pain and begged and begged for him to stop. I knew that he was going to kill me: he was in a drunken, frenzied state of madness and couldn't stop. Just when he was about to deliver the coup de grace, my mother grabbed him by the arm and yelled, "Stop Jack, you're going to kill him! You'll go to jail!." Typical. She worried about him. How about me?  She gave that murdering drunk a couple of beers to calm him down, and he went out the front door and back to work.

The next day, however, it was back to school. I arrived after the agonizing two-mile walk and got sick, sick enough to throw up all over the classroom floor. The class didn't laugh at all; they screamed. Each round of screaming from my audience seemed to synchronize itself with the heaves inside my body. The next thing I noticed was the janitor cleaning up the mess. I tried to sit upright at my desk, but folded over from the grueling grind that screamed from the right side of my torso that I was in serious trouble. A blind man could have seen the trouble I was in, but my mother had somehow failed to notice when she'd sent me out the door that morning. I was being murdered! The teacher called me to her desk, saw the shape I was in, and left the room. Before I had a chance to say anything, I found myself lying down in the rear seat of the school nurse's car on my way home. I was dying.