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The Man Who Killed Me
If childhood trauma changes us forever, then is the person we could’ve been now dead?
As far as I can remember, I’ve contended with intense anxiety my whole life. However, my dad says I wasn’t always this way. He says what I saw changed me.
My parents got divorced when I was two years old. A few years later, my mom got married again, to her third husband, Vince. Vince was a white man with a Southern accent, tan leathery skin, and thick brown hair. He had squinty eyes like you might see on a tough sheriff in an old Western, eyebrows that slant inward, and thin lips with a wicked curl to them. I have only scattered memories of him, but all of them are bad.
He used to drink a lot of beer and was always playing a football game on the PlayStation, which seemed to me an injustice since I wasn’t able to play even though I was the only kid in the house. One day, when I was about 6 years old, he offered me some of this black stuff he’d always carry around in a little can. I refused Vince’s offer, but he forced some into my mouth anyway and laughed. I haven’t tasted anything worse to this day. I later learned it was chewing tobacco.
One Christmas my cousin Carlos came over. Carlos was, by my recollection, still a teenager at the time, but Vince was drunk, and he made Carlos the…
