Dancing At The Monster's Ball

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Mid-October 2006


It was 3 o'clock on a Monday morning when the phone rang. The man thought it was someone from work until he recognized the voice of his estranged son.

The boy was calling his father because he was an adult now and wanted answers about his life. The father had provided those answers years ago, as did the boy's psychiatrist; however, then, as now, the boy was not ready for the truth. Sadly, he never would be. Within ten minutes, the son ended the conversation just as the father started to explain what really happened in the old house.

The man sat on the edge of the bed and shook his head. So much lost at such an early age. The person on the phone was no longer his son, just someone trying to find his way in the world. Someone dangerous, but lost nonetheless. The bond that was once between them had ended four years ago when his son endangered him.

The boy had stopped taking his meds months before the incident and had slowly gone out-of-control. He was living with his mother full-time and she had convinced him and herself that they no longer needed their medication or psychiatric help.

They needed the remedies. It was the only way to quiet their personality disorder and the accompanying violence; yet, they didn’t see it that way. They were perfect. The world was wrong.

The man got dressed and made his way into the kitchen for an early morning cup of coffee. He took a sip and wondered why, after all these years, his son would call him. It didn't make a damn bit of sense, but, then, mental illness never does.

Looking for solace, he walked into his backyard. There he welcomed the warm embrace of the darkness and the quiet solitude of an early morning night sky. Looking to the south, he found Canis Major, Orion, Perseus and, finally, his answer.

The boy was in a dorm room, living away from his mother and feeling free for the first time in his life. His mother's tendrils were slowly unraveling from his psyche and he wanted answers and reasons as to what happened to his life. Unfortunately, he would never find them.

They're locked away in the unholy union between his mother and him - between the abuser and the abused. In the perversely balanced world of the mentally ill, those roles changed according to who needed to be hurt in their sick game of subjugation and violence. And woe be on to the Good Samaritan who comes to the rescue - for the jackals hunt as a pair.

The man took another sip of coffee and watched the night sky hoping to see a shooting star. He didn't have to wait too long.

The boy's phone call brought back memories of a turbulent time when chaos reigned in the Tempe household. It culminated on a horrible afternoon in an insane explosion of violence between two mentally ill people.

The man sat back in the Adirondack chair and traced all of the stars in Orion. Then, he closed his eyes and remembered the day when the world stopped.

It was a summer afternoon, a year before the divorce. The father had come home from food shopping and interrupted the mother and son in an intimate, psycho-sexual pas de deux of trying to strangle each other to death. They had, with all their god-given, down to the last ounce of strength, tried to kill each other and end their suffering.

But they had been interrupted and the real world returned to remind them of what they had done, but more importantly, failed to do. They were survivors from a head-on car collision that had planned to die in the crash and now stood ashamed having missed their chance at death.

The boy had scratches on his face and arms where his mother had clawed at him. She had bruises on her arms and across her body. Their face, chest, arms and legs were blotchy from the intense adrenaline rush that was now leaving their body. In its wake, it caused small muscular tremors to randomly shake their large muscle groups and extremities. Their necks, reddened from the strangulation, had handprints with perfectly outlined fingers still grasping at their throats. Their eyes were an odd mixture of pure white and small ruptured pools of blood from the petechial hemorrhaging. They both had each other's skin under their fingernails.

The father first administered to his son, making sure he didn't go into shock. The boy was fine, but his wife was not. She had flown too far into the abyss and wasn't coming back. She stared at him with wide eyes and babbled endlessly about having wanted to kill her son. The father made her focus on the here and now and slowly brought her back to reality, but those eyes remained of someone still floating in the abyss.

That afternoon changed everything in the Tempe household. The mother should have gone to prison and the boy to a psychiatric hospital, but that didn't happen. The father made a decision similar to one he made as a young man. He separated the living from the dead. He decided who would live and who would die. He triaged his family.

His daughter would be one of the living. She would go away to school. Three thousand miles would separate her from her mother's and brother's unstable mental condition and violent ways.

The boy and his mother would be amongst the dead. The boy needed his mother and her version of reality more than he needed the real world. And she needed someone to love her and to think that she was perfect, because she couldn't love herself.

The day after that horrible afternoon was the most telling as to his wife's mental state and her need to be perfect. She tried to convince him that the previous day's "incident" never occurred. He looked her in the eyes and coldly told her that she had tried to kill her son and she would have to live with that guilt. She never sought psychiatric help nor did she continue with her meds. After that, to him, she ceased to exist.

In the following year, the father worked closely with the boy's psychiatrist, creating behavior-modification tools and a strict regimen of daily medication. His wife didn't know that the psychiatrist and he were working together (and had been for many years - ever since the beginning). It was the only way for the boy to have kept one foot in the real world. His father hoped it would work one more time.

The mother fought the father's parenting methods, blaming him for everything. The father ignored her. He knew she spoke from guilt. It was her dirt and her hurt that churned her stomach. He focused on making his son better. At the end of the year, his son had changed. He was one of the living, at least for now.

Also during that year, the father worked on ending his marriage. He did so by leveraging the mother's personality disorder against herself. Within nine months, she came to him and asked for a divorce.

It was a year and a month after that horrible afternoon when the divorce was final. And a year after that, he said goodbye to his son on a fall afternoon in a greenbelt area near the mother's house.

He remembers that day quite well too. The three of them were standing together for the last time. The mother and son were hugging each other, happy that the father would no longer be a part of the boy's life. The mother said thank-you to the father. The boy was all hers now.

It was a scene she needed the neighbors to see, proof that she was a better parent, because she was a loving parent. These same neighbors, well-intentioned, but bloodied Good Samaritans, had quietly pulled the father aside on previous times to tell him about the violence that was occurring in the mother's house.

The man ended their conversation with a palliative lie. One that was understood by all and believed by no one.

"Maybe, in the coming years, we would see each other in a different light and, possibly, have a better relationship."

It filled the awkward space between people who no longer wanted to be together. The mother needed to hear it. No one else did.

She offered him dinner, but he declined. His belly was full and his heart was content. He hugged the teenage boy, who was once his son, and left without regrets.

As he drove away, he watched the mother and son walk back to their house. A house built on guilt and shame and a broken reality. Within a few months of living with his mother, she had convinced him the horrible afternoon had never happened. To enforce that lie, she provided him with a European vacation and flights of fancy. Such is the cost of lying and living in a tangled web of self-deceit.

They have each other. That's all that matters.

Together. Forever. They will dance at the Monster's Ball.

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