Fuck You, Dad

It was around Christmas time, mid-December. The college semester was finished, and I was on Christmas break.

Dad came home. He’d already had a few.

He used to say at times like this that he was in “No Mood.”
He’d usually follow that up with a curt,

“Unless you’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’,”
to finish out whatever it was one of us kids was about to say.
Usually, it was directed at me.

This day, though, was an odd one.

My sister and I had been bickering all afternoon.

I needed the phone line so I could be on the BBS, talking with my friends.
She wanted the phone line so she could call one of hers.

I was talking to more friends—so clearly, I won.

When Dad came home, she told him I wouldn’t let her use the phone line at all.
She said every time she picked it up, I would come and yank it away from her and hang it up, telling her not to do that again because it disrupted the modem and I’d have to redial.

Mom and Dad were already upset with me about the phone bill.
I kept calling long-distance BBSes.

I didn’t care—that’s where my friends were.

He stomped down the stairs into the little office room I had carved out for myself in that house.
Most of the basement was mine at this point.

He started yelling at me about it.
I don’t remember the words—he was very, very drunk. I could smell it on him.

Suddenly, he grabbed the phone that was connected to my modem.
It was one of those old yellow ones with push buttons and a steel frame.

“You wanna hit little girls?” he said to me.
“I’ll hit you like a little girl, then.”

The phone base smashed across my face and temple.

It hurt.

That might be the understatement of my life.

Something in me changed in that moment.
I was just about Dad’s height at the time, and as Mom liked to point out, I was “husky.”

I don’t remember much of what happened next.

I completely dissociated.

I remember the aftermath.
I remember Mom being upset at me—that I gave Dad a black eye before Christmas photos.

I didn’t fucking care about our Christmas photos.

That’s all she cared about—how we, as a family, looked compared to other families at church.

I charged forward at him with all of my body weight.
It caught him by surprise, I think.
I had never fought back before.

We went from inside the little office nook into the bathroom across the hall.
The doors of the two rooms weren’t aligned.

We didn’t go through the bathroom door.

I drove him through the wall.

He was still holding onto the phone.
The cord snapped somewhere along the way.

In his drunken state, with me on top of him, I picked up that phone and smashed it into his face.
I kept smashing it into his face.
And punching with the other hand.

I changed in that moment.

I was no longer the nerdy kid my dad could fuck with.

I left the house that day, blood still running down my face, and drove to a friend’s house.

I wouldn’t return until my 20th birthday.

Fuck you, Dad.