Memories of a Violent Man
Now, I Spend A Small Fortune on Therapy...
My father loved to fold his lower lip over his black mustache.
I’m not sure why he did that. Maybe it was about the sensory stimulation of having his hairy mustache in his mouth.
I don’t know if it was a sensory stimulation thing…
A machismo thing…
Or some genetic glitch.
I think it may have helped him to concentrate.
Often, his face would look grave. His brow would furrow, and you could hear his heavy breaths as he exhaled.
He’d hold his lip in this unusual position for extended periods.
Sometimes hours.
Fixing a toilet with the folded lip and fixing his bike with the folded lip. It was quintessentially him.
I’d follow my father on Saturdays for years as he did errands. He always had to go to the bank to drop off rent checks or something like that.
One such Saturday, I waited for him in his white “Super Carry” minivan as he did his business at the ATM.
I remember a six-year-old me sitting in the passenger seat… wearing his cyclist’s sunglasses. I’m looking at myself in the rearview mirror, trying to curl my lip like he did.
My father frequented many of the same stores on Saturdays.
One common stop was the hardware store. He always needed to buy supplies or tools for whatever work was required in his apartments.
I became very well acquainted with dangerous tools that little children probably shouldn’t have been playing with: hammers, saws, hacksaws, jigsaws, crowbars, chisels, lawnmowers, weed whackers, cutlasses, and an assortment of hazardous chemicals.
Here’s how the day usually went:
Before 9 a.m., my father would give marching orders to his workers. Romanus was his main guy, and he tackled whatever needed to be done most days. He had a white patch of hair about the size of a tennis ball on the back of his crown—a birthmark.
He couldn’t read or write until he was an adult. So, at age 18, Romanus started doing odd jobs for my father.
Whatever he needed, Romanus did. Cut grass, landscaping, masonry, being his chauffeur, you name it. When my father learned that Romanus couldn’t read, he made him go to night school until he knew.
Romanus and I were great friends. I’d always find all the tools and supplies enticing, and that’s where Romanus would be. We had many good times. There were many good laughs.
After Romanus got his marching orders, we’d go into town to find whatever else my father would need. We’d pick up my grandmother -- universally known as Aunty Madge.
He’d drop her off so she could get groceries while we cared for his business. I just tagged along. Maybe I might get some sugary treats, crayons, pens, or something else for my trouble.
When we drove around Castries, doing our various errands, my father would run into one person after another who would stop with him to chat. He seemed so popular, almost like a celebrity or a politician.
People always wanted to stop and chat. Usually, I’d tune in just when it was time to hear something inappropriate. “And I’m like, who’s breast line I see over there? That’s not Andy’s breast line.” Everyone erupts with laughter.
We’d pick up Aunty Madge and drop her off when we finished our business in town. And we would go to our house just downstairs from hers.
On Saturday afternoons, my father would sleep on the couch in the living room. I became very good at walking silently because I never wanted to wake my father.
That would be a great way to get whipped by his belt.
By the evening, we’d go to church. We liked going to church on Saturday night. Smaller crowd. It’s not as hot. More parking. Shorter service. My father always slept through church; it was so embarrassing. He had no shame.
We had a candlelight vigil once, and he fell asleep with the candle in his hand… I’m told that the cup holding the candle started to catch fire, and he was none the wiser.
Like me, my father has been a lifelong endurance athlete.
I was just a little too young to have seen him in action when he was in his prime, but my father was known across the island as a phenomenal cyclist.
There are pictures of him at various cycling events, wearing his spandex shorts, colorful jersey, helmet, and clip-on shoes. A cycling trophy sat in a cabinet in our living room.
The house was constantly overrun with bikes, bike parts, and gear. I think everyone except my mother had a bike. Some of us had two bikes. So that’s like seven bikes or more crowding the verandah.
Sundays were always about cycling. Before I was old enough to go with him, he’d take my brother, and I’d stay home feeling left out. They would always come back with tales of their adventure. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to go myself. I would wear his gloves, sunglasses, and helmet and ride around the house on my tricycle.
Hands down, most of my best memories with my father happened while we were on bikes.
Only he could have delivered so many spectacular adventures. Here are a few examples. For one time, we tried to ride from the southernmost tip of the island to the northernmost. There was a big event with more than 100 cyclists in attendance. A double amputee cyclist from Barbados had come to St. Lucia to train, and the whole event was in his honor.
He would do this 60-mile trek, and we would all follow. I was 12. I don’t know how far my father got. I probably only made it less than a quarter of the way. You would have had to climb dozens of mountains to make this journey. And, to be fair, St. Lucia has some hills that feel like Medieval torture climbing them.
It isn’t beyond the pale to describe them as a cyclist’s worst nightmare. There are very few places in America that possess such a grueling landscape. If any.
You could get some excellent training on the hills in St. Lucia. There are so many hills that make you suffer. But I’ll mention the scariest one of them all for now. Called the Bar d’Lisle.
This monstrosity is the type of hill that, once traversed, changed you as a person. It seemingly went on and on forever. Few people could climb that thing without stopping to push. Add the roasting hot sun on your back for the entire journey, not to mention the drivers swinging around blind corner after blind corner at breakneck speed.
You’re on your bike, on asphalt hot enough to fry an egg. Struggling for your life. One climbs up and down the Bar d’Lisle, and you would be sore for a week. To attempt it, you had to be in a completely different frame of mind.
Just the mention of the Bar d’Lisle struck fear into my heart.
So, when my father took us through that route, you could be as lazy as you wanted and eat as much afterward.
I saw sides of St. Lucia that I never would have if it were not for cycling. I saw how the rural folks lived. In some tiny villages in St. Lucia, people would bathe together in rivers or these public baths. It sounds wild saying this out loud. Who the fuck would do something like that?
Well… I can distinctly remember stopping for a water break at one such village and seeing a woman’s bare breasts as she bathed with some children.
We made eye contact as she mouthed, “Come and bathe with me.”
One time, we went for a Sunday ride, and my father brought along a bunch of his friends and their kids, and it was a whole gang of us riding off-road on our mountain bikes. We had lots of fun.
There was one driver who wasn’t on a bike, but she instead tried to follow us in her Chevy blazer. Big mistake.
Her car got stuck in the mud. That ended our bike ride because we had to get the car out of the mud. My father, the famous man he was, found a guy he knew not far away who brought his truck to get the Chevy out of the mud.
After it was all done, we were ready to pack up and call it a day. We threw our bikes into the back of my dad’s friend’s truck. I hopped in the back of the car with another kid, and the adults drove ahead in the Chevy.
Out of the blue, a random man I’ve never seen jumps into the back of the truck with me and my buddy, feeling very confused. He’s a Rastafarian. Very dark-skinned. Gaunt. Perhaps not even 18.
He starts bragging to us boys that he’d just robbed somebody. But the police would NEVER catch him.
We drove down this rough dirt road for less than a minute. Before we started, we passed a little convenience store on the side of the road. The owner was standing outside, looking angry as hell. He had a large two-by-four in his hands.
As he looks past me, my friend’s face changes from confusion to terror. He jumps out of the moving vehicle and tumbles onto the dirt road. I look behind me and see the store owner charging towards the truck. He has a murderous look, and he seems to be preparing to swing that giant two-by-four at me.
I look back at the rasta. He reaches for his pocket to brandish a weapon. I don’t know why I knew, but I did. It was the type of thing you’d see in an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. That’s when I got terrified. I was caught between these two who were about to go to war with each other.
Apparently, this rasta stowed away on a truck that brought him back to the scene of his crime.
Thankfully, my guy didn’t pull out a gun or a knife. No.
He pulls out a slingshot and starts pelting stones after the shop owner. He jumps out of the truck and starts running down the hill. The store owner chases after him.
Perhaps, if we were lucky, my father would take me and my siblings to the beach in the later afternoon when the sun wasn’t so high in the sky. And this was where my father would shine.
He was the comptroller of 3 hotels.
So, that means we had access to these luxurious places that would otherwise be closed to the public.
These tourist resorts were by far and away the most elegant places to be in St. Lucia—lots of delicious food, a volleyball net, a giant chess board, and water sports. Everyone smelled like sunscreen. But back then, I thought that’s what white people smelled like.
Come at night, you might catch some classy jazz pianist. There would be a bonfire on the beach.
If we didn’t lounge on beach chairs with smoothies at one of those places, we might do some water sports. I loved the banana boat. It was a giant inflatable banana that about five people could sit on and be dragged through the water.
Usually, a bar would be built into the swimming pool, so the tourists would smoke their cigarettes in the pool as they grew increasingly drunk from their constant stream of cocktails.
But we didn’t always go to the hotels; the typical beaches were also excellent places to spend a Saturday afternoon.
We would either go to the beach or a swimming pool. If lucky, I might get some ice cream or a smoothie. Have some pizza before going home.
My father, still in denial about it, is a messy guy. I think he’s a hoarder by today’s standards.
Some people thrive in an environment of complete order. Not my father. There were always piles and piles of junk from yesteryear strewn across most house rooms. I was so embarrassed about all of the junk lying about the house.
In this regard, he was just like his father. But my father could never accept that he was messy. It was hard to take him seriously about us being messy when he was just as messy. We took after him.
My father was notoriously cheap. It’s one of the many ways he’s sabotaged his own life. Because I’ve never seen a man waste money and create misery to save a dollar. He always wanted to do the bare minimum to save a dollar.
My aunt told me a few years ago that when my father was 6, his father tied him to a tree for an entire day. I didn’t ask for details.
Was this a day, as in 24 hours? Or a day in the sun up until sundown? And what crime did he commit that his father felt justified in treating him like that? I’m not sure.
But here’s the conclusion I made:
Only someone who had been treated with such inhumane cruelty could turn around and think the savage way he treats people is acceptable.
So, when my father would make me shine all of his shoes…
With the old-school shoe brush and the black polish that makes a tar-like mess all over, everything smells like a leather tanning shop.
He thought this was fine because his father made him do that. My father has many good qualities. But he’s also a VERY broken man.
What makes his situation so much worse is that he has no idea of the full ramifications of how he’s treated people.
He’s destroyed everyone in the family, yet he will go to his grave denying any wrongdoing.
Until next time,
Anton
Dancer, Writer, Buddhist