Work Text:
We harm those whom we adore.
- Dead Can Dance
Colorado, summer 1974
***
The guys and me always know when Pete’s had his ass whipped. You see, we’re a predictable group of kids in a predictable town – same shit, different day. When you’ve known a kid since Scooby Doo made his debut on the small screen, you get to notice his patterns. Which, as I said, is how we know Pete got his ass whipped last night.
We know for sure when Pete surpasses his usual lunch spot next to Jonah on the bleachers and instead leans back against the chain-link fence with his arms crossed. He also foregoes his “faux fag”, as Hale and I secretly call it. You know, the only thing more embarrassing than not smoking by the 9th grade is pretending to smoke. But since Pete is a year younger than the rest of us, his badly concealed fiction that he is a seasoned smoker almost passes for cute. That doesn’t mean we don’t chuckle over it on occasion.
Jonah casts me a meaningful look through his magnifying glass lenses, pushing the hornrim frame up his sweaty nose in a gesture that would be revealing to Pete if he weren’t so distracted.
Pete’s been surly for, oh, about a week. He often is. And he’s not one of those kids who can be in a bad mood one day and get it out of his system before another; Pete is like a July tornado; he takes his sweet time picking up debris and marinating his irritation until he can suck someone in with him and blow himself hoarse. My sympathies to his father for being that unfortunate motherfucker.
If such knowledge holds true, then this cycle of Pete is roping out within the next hour, I’d say. Or, I stand corrected, right now.
Pete’s drooping head whips up instantly at the sound of rubber crushing the loose dirt of the parking lot. He has to squint through the sun to verify that this is his ride. You never know what Pete’s dad’s going to be driving one day to the next; depends which vehicle is included in whatever contract he’s working on. Today it’s the tired looking news van. When someone’s ride arrives, you’d expect them to begin getting their things together and head on down. These things, Pete never does when his dad picks him up at lunch hour on days like these. He merely purses his lips and turns back to face us, looking truly engaged in our unengaging conversation for the first time all day.
He pretends not to hear the approach of footsteps on the sparse outfield below us until we all hear a voice call up to our perch.
“Pete!”
Pete turns around again at this intrusion as if seeing the man’s approach for the first time. For a second father and son just look at each other; Pete’s dad with his hands resting on his hips and a shiny Gazette-issue camera slung around his neck; Pete biting back a smile. Then Pete bends to grab his untouched bagged lunch and is tripping down the steps with a muttered “Flip-side, fellas.”.
“Called it.”, Jonah quips. Hale and I keep our mouths shut and let Jonah have his moment.
I move up and take Pete’s spot by the fence to watch the little ritual play out between one of our best friends and his father.
Pete lopes up toward his dad but swerves to move past him at the last second, giving the man a meaningfully wide berth. The older man sighs and turns to follow his teen. As they reach the van, Pete’s dad darts to open the passenger side door before Pete can do it for himself. As Pete climbs on in, his dad brushes the back of Pete’s baseball shirt as if for lint, although everyone involved can read in the gesture the desire to soothe his upset kid. Seems that Pete’s delusive efforts are hereditary.
I look away and only hear that the duo have left school grounds.
“I saw it once.”, I say conversationally.
“Saw what?”, asks Jonah. But I have a feeling that Hale already knows.
“Pete getting his ass beat, what else?”. I look up with a smirk.
“The fuck you did! Really?”, Jonah asks incredulously, and before I can answer he pitches another question into the mix. “By Mr. Madder?”.
I roll my eyes at this – “Of course Mr. Madder, dumbass.”.
Jonah blinks in surprise. “But Mr. Madder is so… such a, well.” Jonah takes his glasses off and wipes a lens. “To put it bluntly, he’s a hippie.”.
Jonah’s not wrong there. Mr. Madder was one of those kids who wore a kaftan on his college campus. Probably sat in on a great many protests there too. He won’t even buy gas from ExxonMobil in this year of our capitalist lord 1974.
Pete’s own political compass has no such true north. His needle swings on an axis from flower-child to Reaganite depending on his current standing with his dad. Guarantee, come lunch tomorrow, Pete will be condemning Watergate, purely on account of this make-up lunch date with daddy. Pete’s an acquired taste.
Hale, quite the hippie himself, reties his hair in his customary ponytail, and responds; “Just ‘cos a man protests Nam means he can’t give his kid a hiding? Even if his kid’s Pete?”.
Loyal as we are to our younger friend, we all can acknowledge that Pete is a piece of work. A satirist, a whizz on the racetrack, sure. But a guy whose ass it would be satisfying to lay into on occasion? Also yes. But us young guys don’t so much like to side with the Man on issues concerning us.
Jonah sits back as if devastated; “I thought we just thought that Pete’s dad gave him a piece of his mind.”.
Hale opens his mouth to reply but I beat him to it; “In what world does a father giving his fourteen-year-old son a “piece of his mind” not end in an ass-beating?”. I feel like I’m seeing Mr. Madder clearly for the first time, a lot of the grown-ups I know, actually. “Hey, I know we’re living in the age of space travel, free love, textbook psychology, yada yada. But if there’s one thing people get real old-fashioned about, it’s their kids.”. I feel incredibly grown-up myself as I say this. Well, as grown up as a sophomore can feel I guess.
Hale interjects around a half-demolished bite of sandwich; “Yeah, bet it was fuckin’ stone age.”.
That reminds us all that I was in the middle of telling what has the potential to become an integral part of our group’s mythology. But despite the urge to share with them the after school special that had reframed everything I knew about Pete, I knew that if I was any type of friend to Pete then I’d have to give them the Digest version.
Jonah and Hale wait with bated breath for me to begin the gory tale of how our good pal Pete got his tail busted. There’s something to the notion that even in our relatively civilized society there is left over from some earlier stage of evolution a bloodlust. It just changes its form. Two thousand years ago it was watching some poor sap getting mauled in the Colosseum. Now it’s spectating combat sports. And for kids I guess the best we can do is rehash how one of our own got his butt tore up.
“Fuck me, get on with it!”, Hale prompted.
“Uh, okay.”, I started. “I guess it started when Mom sent me round to Pete’s to give him his mitt back.”.
I didn’t think I needed to explain this next bit, but I did regardless for… context, or “scene-setting”; that’s what the old biddy who teaches my English class would call it.
“Wait.”, Jonah holds up a hand, “When was this?”.
“Maybe a month back? I’m not sure though. It was the same week that Pete decked Bill Anderson so hard his-”
“Don’t care.”, Hale interrupted. I put my hands out in surrender.
“Yeah, so Pete’d came to my place right after school, and while we were playing his dad pulls up on the curb and like… gestures Pete over.”. I survey my audience to see if they care about my prelude. “And, uh, Pete was pretending not to see him, like even after I pointed him out. He waited till his dad got all the way to us. And he was real mad.”.
Most of us have folks who are hopping mad every other day. I wouldn’t usually have mentioned it, but, thing is, we all know Pete’s old man. And Mr. Madder’s a very cool-headed guy, contrary to his name. Seems like the only person who can get him riled up is Pete. And Republicans.
“Mr. Madder riled up?”, Jonah interjects. “woulda loved to see that.”.
“Anyway, so he took Pete home.”.
I swallow lamely, divulging how Pete had thrown his heavy catcher’s mitt square in the man’s chest before storming to the car. For the sake of our friend’s reputation, I also keep under wraps the way Mr. Madder’s hand had whipped back as if to whack Pete’s ass as he stomped past, right there on my front lawn. Feasting though we are on our fellow man’s thrashing à la leather, I draw a subliminal line when it comes to sharing how our hotshot comrade almost got his heinie publicly popped like a tantruming toddler. Or how that same hand had given Pete’s tightly-knotted bicep a reassuring squeeze when the pair reached the Pinto. And that even though Pete wrenched his whole upper body out of his dad’s hold, he had been blinking back tears as the car backed onto the road.
Pete is, in my estimation, a real stubborn, real scornful, real sensitive kid. I think it may just be his old man and me that know that last part.
“Pretty sure my dad woulda caved my skull if I threw something at him.”, Hale mused.
Jonah’s lips thinned at Hale’s vulgarity. His parents are two of those angels sent from Dr Spock above, the savior of kids’ backsides. He’s never had a hand laid on him in his life. Whenever the topic of corporal punishment is brought up in a group setting he always gets real quiet. I reckon he either has nothing to add or more likely he’s attempting to suppress his disapproval. I get the impression that Jonah thinks his family too erudite for practices as backward as corporal punishment. And since his dad and his mom have college degrees, he might be onto something. It helps that Jonah’s the type of kid who could be reasoned with as soon as he learned to talk. And it’s difficult to talk him into doing any crazy shit because he prefers not to break rules unless he feels like he has a good reason to do so. Social harmony and all that. But yeah, sure, any of us but Jonah could expect some painful retribution if we dared to throw something at a parent. But only Pete’s hot-headed enough to do such a dumb fucking thing.
Before Jonah can verbally express his disapproval or Hale can find another creative way to tell me to get on with it, I begin where I left off.
“Mr. Madder must’ve been so focused on Pete that he forgot the mitt, so my mom sent me round with it. And obviously, Pete and his dad had the jump on me, so they were already inside when I got there.”.
By looking at my friends I can tell they know I’m getting to the meat of the story. Even Jonah’s stowed his disapproval and is hanging onto my every word.
I really had intended to drop the mitt on the welcome mat and run, knowing Pete was in some sort of hot water, but then I’d heard it. An all-out screaming match. With Pete being the sole participant. I fill the guys in;
“When I got there Pete was yelling.”.
“What was he yelling?”, asks Jonah.
“Oh, just cussing Mr. Madder out. Stuff like “cuck”, “libtard”…”.
Jonah bites back a gasp and Hale gapes, probably imagining his own father being confronted with those words.
“Fuck.”, Hale adds eloquently.
“Yeah, he was buggin’ out.”, I agree. I shudder in the midday heat at the memory.
All of a sudden, I feel like I’m back there, standing frozen outside the front door, leather catcher’s mitt in my hand, seeing and hearing Pete’s tantrum through the living room window. I couldn’t have stepped away for the life of me. I was seeing more of Pete than I had in all the years I’d known him.
Mr. Madder had taken a deep breath and set his camera on a bookshelf. He turned back to Pete, who had finally ran out of steam, and set his hand cautiously on Pete’s shoulder, presumably saying something calming. It had the opposite effect since at that small act of physical connection, Pete was set off like a hare-trigger.
He wheeled around, and this time I heard all the words that spewed from his mouth;
“Don’t you fucking dare touch me! You have no right! Just go fuck yourself like you do every night since Mom’s not here to do it!”.
Jesus. My jaw hit the floor and I felt a jagged sense of hurt for Pete in that moment. His mom had hit the road to join some commune that I suspect is really a cult a few years back, and stupidly, since she hadn’t died, we’d all assumed that the loss hadn’t hurt bounce-back Pete. But now it looked like all that hurt had been brewing inside him and was being hurled at Mr. Madder’s gentle face.
“Cock-sucking pussy.”, Pete growled savagely to finish up his tirade.
“Hey!”, Mr. Madder barked, hands on his narrow hips that Pete had inherited.
Pete jumped at his dad’s seldom-used authoritative tone before regaining his ire. In one quick move he reached out and swiped that beautiful, hi-speck camera from the bookshelf and onto the hardwood floor. Like a cat swiping an egg from a countertop to see if it’d break. Turns out it does. The glass lens crackled over the floor like the windows of a tiny room that had just been blown up.
Both Madders eyed the broken tool of Mr. Madder’s profession. In my retelling I shorten this to “Pete broke Mr. Madder’s camera.”, to which Jonah and Hale react pantomimically with “Oh my God!” and “Christ on a bike!”.
I had at this point intended to drop the mitt on the doorstep and leave my friend to his domestic, but then it got too quiet. Until then the affair had been narrated in slamming doors, stomping and swearing, but now it was eerily silent. Plus, if I’d missed what happened next, I’d have only half a story. I also felt pretty safe from discovery since to my eye it appeared that Pete and Mr. Madder’s world had been reduced to the two of them and that shattered Nikon between them.
Mr. Madder looked up at his son’s heaving chest, still somehow with his come-what-may zen, but accented with a look of absolute intent. He looked calm but unnervingly strong.
He swept the remains of the Nikon safely out of the way and stepped over the wreckage toward his son.
Pete was looking visibly upset, like some of the wind had been taken out of his sails. He hardly noticed when his dad took his arm in his hand until the man propositioned in a baritone that sent a shiver down my spine outside;
“You need seeing to, young man?”.
He posed it like a question and Pete gave his answer;
“I don’t need anything from you, queer.”, and tried to yank his arm away, but this time, found he couldn’t.
You know, I think if you asked Pete his opinion on the cocksuckers and queers that he so often brings up in heated moments, he wouldn’t have much to say either way. Right now, they just sound like good, dirty words to hurl at his old man.
Apparently Mr. Madder had decided to the contrary that Pete did need some “seeing to”. I was inclined to agree. Who knew our sharp little friend Pete had so much melodrama raging around inside him. You think you know a guy.
“And then Mr. Madder murdered Pete and donated his body to The Grateful Dead, the end?”, Hale jokes. Even Jonah smiles wanly at that, wondering himself how Pete had made it to homeroom in one piece the next day. I tilt my hand in a see-saw gesture.
“I wouldn’t say murdered.”, is my cautious reply.
What had really happened was that Mr. Madder dragged his son, whose coltish legs were beating alternatively at the floorboards and Mr. Madder’s calves, over to the wooden writing desk against the edge of the room. He wrestled Pete down over it despite his wildcat thrashing, swearing and even biting at one point, and managed to undo his belt and whip it out of the loops with his elbow on Pete’s back.
I expected him to double it over and start whaling on Pete, but he didn’t. Instead, Mr. Madder tucked the buckle safe in his palm and wrapped the strap around his hand one, two, three, four times, so he was left with only seven inches or so of the tail of the belt.
He stood up a little, looking steadier, with his hand pressing on Pete’s back and his own two feet on the inside of Pete’s ankles, pushing Pete’s long legs wide apart under the table to minimize his capacity to kick like a donkey.
Pete was quite a picture; blond hair flopping everywhere from the tussle, face flaming, hips bucking as much as they were able and still remarkably cussing up a storm.
“So then did Mr. Madder just go ballistic?”, Hale asks.
“He whipped Pete’s butt, yeah.”, I offer.
“He cry?”, Jonah asks confidentially. It is after all the question of all questions when a teenage boy gets a spanking.
“Not at first, but by the end, yeah.”.
This is true, but it feels reductive compared to the spectacle I’d witnessed. Jonah nods soberly.
With Pete sufficiently pinned down, Mr. Madder began flicking that length of belt all over the seat of Pete’s jeans. “Flicking” sounds like too light of a word, but that’s all he had to do with that sharp tongue of leather to make it sting.
Unfortunately Pete is a victim of conformity when it comes to denims – all the kids, including Pete, wear jeans that flare at the calf but from waist to knee are skin tight. Pete’s a slender guy, you pretty much have to be to get on the track team, but the jeans he wears fit him like a second skin, which outline his little ass and thighs in detail by proxy. Mr. Madder could for sure have seen every square inch Pete’s ass had to offer, and the tight denim probably meant Pete felt every single stroke as if his pants were down around his ankles.
Pete was yelling and cursing in a constant stream;
“You cock-sucking bastard, let me the fuck go! I hate you, I hate you!”.
All the while Mr. Madder was whipping that little strap all over his butt as if he had all the time and all the patience in the world. I winced and shifted in my spot on the doorstep; Pete may have been too angry to feel it, but he must have had one smarting backside under all that bravado. My own dad only gives me my age in licks when I do something supremely stupid, which seems fair. I’ve never had a punishment like this, where Pete was getting constant thwips with just the end of that belt, wielded with more precision than force. Faced with this, Pete hollered;
“Aowww, godDAMNIT!” and kicked a leg up, partially as a reflex to what had been a particularly biting stroke, but mostly in hopes of kicking Mr. Madder.
“Ay!”, Mr. Madder barked, in a tone I never could have imagined he possessed, “No!”, he warned as if scolding a dog. He pushed that guilty foot down where it belonged and bent to give each of Pete’s taut calves a few biting licks of their own.
Pete’s hand slapped twice on the desk surface as if tapping out and he tucked his stinging calves back under the table.
Mr. Madder resumed whipping Pete’s butt with more confidence now that Pete was more subdued. Only now he focused lower down, where Pete’s jeans would usually crease under his butt when he stood up straight. Unfortunately for Pete, that soft, sensitive band of flesh was on full display for his dad to punish along with the rest of his bottom.
And Pete didn’t like that one bit. He threw his head back and let out what was either a groan or a wail;
“Stawwp!”.
I blushed for him then, since I knew Pete would never talk to me again if he knew I’d witnessed him in such an unguarded state. He held out for a few more licks before appealing to higher powers;
“Come on, stop it!”.
There was an implied “please” tacked onto the end of that, I think.
Mr. Madder didn’t even break his stride, just rewarded the first clean language out of his son’s mouth since picking him up by returning his attention to the rest of Pete’s bottom; tanning one side up and down before warming the other side in an identical fashion.
“No, I’m not gonna stop right now, Pete. You have been pushing and pushing me and I’ve been real patient with you.”.
He sounded hurt himself that all his efforts at humanely weathering the storm that is his son had come to this.
The belt in his hand had been scorching the scant meat of Pete’s backside this whole time and I can only imagine how much it hurt. It may only be surface damage, but I’d take my dad’s “grin-and-bear-it” whippings over this sanding down of Pete’s edges any day.
Pete had stopped jolting around so much and had gone all tight and still, barely breathing and just maybe trying to listen. One hand gripped the far edge of the desk while the other made a little shield around his eyes.
“I remember what it’s like to be fourteen,”, his dad said, a little softer, and the hand no longer necessary to hold Pete down stroked his damp hair briefly before returning to the back of Pete’s baseball shirt. “But I cannot, will not, play nice with you when you treat me like you have been.”, sterner now. “No son of mine is gonna get away with treating people badly.”.
He shocked us both by accenting this pronouncement with a particularly cruel lick to Pete’s thigh, the end of the belt wrapping around the inside and biting like a snake at a sensitive spot dangerously near his equipment. Pete responded by immediately bursting into loud, messy tears and tried desperately to close his legs to protect his sensitive inner thighs which were now liable to be whipped alongside his buttocks and calves. It was fruitless since his dad was using his own feet to spread Pete’s legs and his belt to toast this newly conquered ground.
It seemed like Pete’s energy was all burned up because instead of renewing his struggle he merely sobbed on the table, feeling in full force every burning inch on his lower body. Perhaps realizing how much of a cruel master his mild-mannered dad could be but ordinarily chose not to be.
“I don’t want to be doing this, Pete.”. The slaps of leather were slower and lighter now, their sounds drowned out by Pete’s crying. “I’m a nice guy – I know you don’t think so right now.”. He looked in vague disgust at the belt coiled in his hand. “But I can’t keep being nice to you when you’re not nice to me.”.
The man’s voice broke a little at the end. His language could be used to explain this concept to a toddler. Appropriately, Pete seemed to be getting it.
“I’ll be nice, I promise.”. Pete choked on his tears before continuing, “Please be nice to me again.”. He was sobbing as if his heart was broken, his last syllable was barely audible. “Dad?”.
Mr. Madder’s arm faltered at the return to his title and he sighed in relief. Not all was lost. He tossed the belt onto the couch and deliberated before slapping Pete’s ass with his own open hand.
“That’s my name, kid.”, he affirmed warmly before transitioning to a resentful tone;
“It’s not “bastard”.”, a swat on Pete’s left back pocket. “It’s not “libtard”.”, a matching swat on his right pocket. “It’s not “queer”.”, another swat. “And it’s certainly not “cocksucker”.”, with a harder swat. “My name is “Dad” to you, every time, unless you want to do this again on your briefs.”. He landed one final devastating swat dead centre.
Pete did him one better;
“Daddy?”, he sobbed out.
Mr. Madder didn’t let him get any further before hauling him up like he was only a little kid, taking a seat on the desk and crushing his too-tall teenager to his chest, who was sobbing fit to throw up.
“There we go.”, he murmured. “Daddy’s got you.”.
Pete coughed and hooked one arm around his dad’s neck, right where his camera strap should go, which probably reminded him of the camera he’d broken. His jagged sobbing took a softer, sadder tone.
“I’m so sorry.”, he got out. For more than the camera, I imagine.
“Shhh.”, Mr. Madder soothed. “You’re all forgiven, Petey.”.
He pushed Pete’s hand out of the way of his bottom and gave it a few pats as if to remind him of all the debts he’d paid off in the last fifteen minutes. Pete squirmed in place at the additional attention to his sore backside and burrowed deeper into his dad’s shoulder. Mr. Madder sighed,
“I booked us a slot at Mesa Verde for the weekend. Thought we could visit Mom while we’re down there.”.
Pete stiffened and Mr. Madder appeared to hold his breath. Then Pete nodded silently against his chest. Mr. Madder kissed Pete’s hair.
Neither said anything for a few minutes. Then Pete wiped his face on his dad’s shirt and pulled back, green eyes swollen and still leaking tears. His lip trembled as he asked in a sad little voice so unlike the Pete I knew;
“Are you-, can you ever be nice to me again?”.
I could see Pete’s throat working to dam yet more tears.
Mr. Madder set his hands on Pete’s waist and swallowed, his own blue eyes welling up behind steel rims.
“Pete, baby, this”, he gestured between them, “goes way past being nice to each other. I love you. No amount of name-calling can change that.”.
Pete dropped his head and cried. Mr. Madder continued softly;
“And I’d be a whole lot nicer to you if you’d let me.”.
I’m guessing he meant more affectionate, since he brushed Pete’s light waves back from his face as he said it, wiped a few tears with his cuff and ran his thumb over Pete’s flushed brow.
Pete leaned into the touch with his eyes closed as the last of his sniffles died away. Usually, Pete’s like a standoffish cat. Few teenagers will admit to enjoying parental coddling, but Pete is abnormally averse to physical intimacy; he’s forever ducking, wrenching away from or otherwise dodging out of comforting hands’ reach.
“I’m letting you now.”, Pete whispered as his dad continued to enfold him in all of his rejected affection.
A few minutes later, Pete had reached capacity. He pulled back, looking a good bit more settled but groaned; his thoroughly whipped ass catching up with him.
“I’m gonna go to bed.”, he said, which translated to “I need to get my jeans off.”.
Mr. Madder nodded in understanding. As Pete reached the door, Mr. Madder called after him in a moment of impulse;
“I love you, Pete.”.
And Pete, while he didn’t return the favour, flashed a thumbs up over his shoulder as he left the room, which in Pete-enese means roughly, “Message received. Back attya.”.
At this point I really did drop that damn catcher’s mitt on the welcome mat and legged it home, my mind whirling to reconcile this new side of Pete with the Pete we know. I guess even standoffish cats purr sometimes. And that Pete is one of them I’ll take to my grave.
As far as our friends are concerned, Pete got a conservative whipping of his age in licks, took them like a champ and shed approximately two tears. All we would know of the afterburn was that Pete slipped away to school the next morning before his old man could see him off and that Pete, who’d not sat through an entire class in a week stayed put but squirmed in his chair. And come lunch hour Pete had pretended not to see Mr. Madder pull up next to the bleachers, new camera slung round his neck. Just like he’d done again today.
I reckon Pete will take up his faux fag again tomorrow. Same shit, different day.
***
The End