A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [12]
Once he pulled a bong out of a closet and showed me how to smoke pot with it. It didn’t seem like he had this bong hidden very well in the closet, so I assumed his parents used it too. They were a whole family of stoners. Besides my stoner brother, I didn’t know much about drugs then, just that they were bad and made you want to fly through the air like Superman.
I tried to hold the smoke in like Chad showed me but it still didn’t seem to have an effect on me. Chad leaned back with half-closed eyes and said something about how high he was. He looked like a sleepy cat. I thought he was faking it.
I kept waiting for something to happen to my brain, or for my head to feel like a lost balloon, but it never happened. So I faked it a little too, just to keep him as a friend. I laughed like he laughed, at the stupidest things, so I wouldn’t be a total drag.
Space Shuttle
We went to California once in a motor home to see a space shuttle land. One of my half brothers, Russell, was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base and that’s where it was supposed to land. We went to some kind of NASA museum that morning before this “historic event” was to occur. Dad bought a black baseball-style cap with NASA in yellow letters on it. It was really hot out there by the landing strip and there were hundreds of people around with cameras and umbrellas. People were taking scissors and cutting the sleeves off their T-shirts. Dad got carried away and cut the whole top of his new cap off.
“My head’s gotta breathe,” he said. Everyone thought it was foolish, even Mom, who kind of snorted at him and said it looked silly.
We felt sorry for Dad and I think he felt sorry for himself too, because after a couple of hours he took it off and put it in the motor home.
The space shuttle landed without a hitch, but we couldn’t see anything with all the people there. Later that day, I saw the cap in the motor home’s trash bag.
Russell
I always thought that my oldest half brothers, Russell and Gary, were the favored children in the family. They were both in the military, Russell in the Air Force and Gary in the Coast Guard. I figured Dad was proud of them because they had real careers that were serious and respectable. I was never interested in joining the military, mostly because I was afraid of going to war and I hated those commercials where they said they did more before 8 a.m. than most people did in a whole day or whatever they said. Waking up so early seemed like torture to me. Plus, I didn’t like being yelled at and I knew there was a lot of yelling involved.
Russell told me later that the real reason they signed up for the military after turning eighteen was to simply get away from Dad, not to earn his respect. The way he described Dad’s treatment of them as his stepsons was like psychological torment. At Christmastime, Russell said my father would get him and Gary the most minimal gift possible, sometimes used toys. But for Mark, he would bring out something new and big, like a bike or guitar. He would make a big presentation of telling Mark that Gary and Russell weren’t allowed to play with his gift. It turns out that, back then, Mark was like the Golden Child in the family. Russell and Gary, the older boys, were the targets of Dad’s anger and resentment. Russell said that after he earned his license and bought a car, he would often drive to his girlfriend’s house and sleep in the backseat until morning, and then give her a ride to school. His car was a place to escape.
Gary
Once, when I was twelve, Gary was visiting us when a huge family fight erupted. It started with Dad and Mark at the dinner table. Mom tried to stop it and then Matt got involved too. Dad didn’t like it when Matt voiced his opinion about family matters. He would sometimes try to mute Matt’s presence by saying, “He’s not even my kid.”
Then Mark and Matt began arguing and eventually ended up outside, ready to fight.