Chapter 2: Stepdad #1, Chuck Prue

(In case you are new to my blog, I'm writing my history in a series of chapters. I wrote Chapter 1 in January 2008. This entry is kind of depressing, but its a true reflection of my younger life. I promise the chapters will get cheerier when I'm an adult.)

Mom met Chuck Prue in June 1984 at a bar in Alameda, just outside San Francisco. He was a sailor working at the Navy base in Alameda for the summer, while permanently stationed in San Diego. By that point Mom had been a single mother for five years, and was beginning to worry about the effects of raising my sister and I without a father figure.

We didn't have a lot of money. My mom slept in the living room back then so that my sister and could share the bedroom in our apartment. My first memory of Chuck is when I got up in the middle of the night because I thought I heard my mom crying. I went out to her bed in the living room and he was on top of her. I thought he was hurting her, and I started screaming. Mom jumped up and said everything was ok. She told me to go to my room. Within seconds she was dressed and at my side, and explained to me that everything was ok. It was my last month as an 8 year old. My sister Jennifer was 5.

Mom allowed herself to fall in love quickly with Chuck, and made an impulsive decision that she hoped would make life better for us all. She married him on August 4, 1984, and on August 8 we packed our remaining things into his truck and drove down to our new home in San Diego.

In order to afford a three-bedroom apartment we moved to a cheaper eastern suburb called El Cajon. It was a pretty decent low-income suburb, with most families living in stucco apartment buildings with pools at the center, and strip malls providing all services from grocery stores to doctors. We lived in the first apartment for a year. The things I remember about that year include:

• The beautiful bushes that lined the walkways of our building, and the hummingbirds that drank from their flowers
• Playing tag with my sister around the building
• My sister’s cat Sissy jumping out of her second story bedroom window and living in the bushes for two days until we found her
• Chuck kicking a paper bag that he thought was empty, but was actually full of my painted rock collection, and when I laughed, him pushing me across the room so that my head slammed into the wall and I fell to the ground
• Mom yelling at him for pushing me
• The first feeling I had had of being unsafe in my own home
• Eating liver for the first and only time
• A beehive in the tree outside our living room window
• Cleaning the apartment naked so that I didn’t get my clothes dirty, while mom played an 8-track of Barry Manilow’s greatest hits
• Chuck yelling at me about not cleaning the cat-box in my room, grabbing me from the back of my t-shirt, dragging me face-down through the hallway and into my room, and shoving my face in the cat shit
• Feeling so confused, and humiliated, and scared
• Mom taking Chuck into their bedroom and screaming loud enough for me and Jennifer to hear that she would leave if he ever touched either of us again
• A truer understanding of how deeply my mother loved me

Despite my growing fear of Chuck in that first year, when I think of the apartment I remember that it was bright, and the excitement of a new beginning. After one year though, we moved to a new apartment in a different part of El Cajon. When I think of that apartment I think of darkness, and the beginning of the anxiety that I have carried with me since. We lived in that apartment for one year as well, and here are the things I remember about that year:

• Our first VCR, and the fun I had recording and watching movies
• A rabbit we had that would chase our cats around and try to have sex with them
• Losing my cat Missy one day, and searching the apartment complex until I was crying so hard I could barely say her name anymore, and going back to the apartment feeling drained and horrible to find her there waiting for me
• Chuck asking me to help him build a wooden storage system for the bed of his truck, and constantly yelling at me for doing everything wrong, but making me stay to help him
• Teaching myself to do front handsprings in the lawn
• Black widow spiders on the back porch
• Seeing Chuck naked when he came to my door one night just after I had gone to bed; not hearing anything he said, but staring at his penis, which looked long and thick, though it was the first grown man’s penis I had seen
• Feeling aroused by Chuck, even while hating and fearing him
• Asking my mom what a blowjob was, and her telling me
• Telling mom that I thought I was gay (at 11), and her telling me that it was probably just a phase

By that point I was in sixth grade and was in a school for smart kids. I say this here because I think it made the dynamic between Chuck and I worse. I have talked about this with Mom before and I think that Chuck was very self-conscious about his own intelligence. During that second year of their marriage he took a test to advance to the next level in the Navy and failed three times. So the way that manifested with me was for him to constantly show me his superiority, demand things from me, and make me feel stupid, or subservient, or just scared.

At the time I only knew that Chuck was abusive with me, but I later found out that he was quite abusive with Mom in that year as well. In 1986 Mom left him and we moved in with Mom’s parents, who luckily had moved to San Diego as well. Chuck’s mental health deteriorated, and soon after they separated he was ordered by the Navy to spend six months in an intensive psychiatric facility.

The last time I ever saw Chuck was maybe seven or eight months later when I looked out the window one morning and saw him in my grandparent’s driveway. I was terrified, and ran to my mom, but by the time she got to the window he was gone. I thought that maybe I had been mistaken. So we finished getting ready for school, and when we went to the car, we found a large basket of black flowers on the hood of the car. There was no note. At the time I thought it was a warning, but I guess it was just a goodbye.