I Can Only Imagine Read online

  With Dad’s modest income from the highway department, we lived in a typical middle-class neighborhood in a small, unassuming house. Built in the early sixties and featuring the classic avocado-green appliances and wood-grain paneling, it was the only home I ever knew, located right off a major highway on the frontage road. At the time, I never considered us to be poor, but we were certainly way closer to that end of the economic spectrum compared to most other people I knew.

  I grew up in the pre-video-game generation, and TV wasn’t really on my radar. With just three or four stations to choose from, picked up by the rabbit-ears antenna, television offered nothing for kids except maybe an hour after school and three hours of Saturday morning cartoons. My imagination wrote way better scripts anyway, sometimes playing out several complete episodes of adventure in a single afternoon after I got home from school.

  The hit TV series The Wonder Years, which was about suburban life in the late 1960s and early 1970s, featured a dad; the older brother, Wayne; and the younger brother, Kevin. These characters were a fairly accurate picture of Dad, Stephen, and me when I was growing up. The age differences, personalities, attitudes, and issues on that show mirrored those of the three Millard males living under the same roof—although I don’t think I would call my childhood years a “wonder.”

  Stephen and I had the classic older-brother, kid-brother relationship, in that he could pester and punch me all he wanted to make my life miserable—but if anyone else said anything bad about me or did anything to me, he would quickly jump to my defense. One time, for example, after I had come back from Mom’s in San Antonio, one of his buddies popped off and said something about her not wanting me. I thought Stephen was going to kill the guy. He knew my weak spots and wouldn’t let anyone hurt me—and he would make them pay if they tried. No one knew what we had had to endure better than we did.

  After Mom left for San Antonio and it was clear that life was now just the three of us, Dad’s anger focused completely on me. I started receiving the brunt of his rage, and spankings turned into whippings. He grew more comfortable and more frequent with his violence toward me. Even Mammaw Millard, the family member closest to us, who knew Dad had a temper and was a tough disciplinarian, never suspected the levels to which he was going with me. And Stephen and I certainly weren’t going to tell anyone because of what Dad might do. Without Mom around as the other parent, there was no longer any accountability and no one to tell him he was taking things too far or it was time to stop. No one except me, of course, but he didn’t hear me any longer.

  The family secret of abuse not only continued but was now being driven deeper.

  The Original Escape Game

  The world inside a kid’s imagination is often the only means of relief from a hostile environment. With an absentee mom, a brother who was now a busy teenager, and an emotionally disengaged dad, I was Andy in the movie Toy Story—the kid playing alone in his room for hours upon hours, acting out all manner of tales and adventures. I would set up elaborate sets in my room and play out every scenario my creativity could conjure. With simple, inexpensive, often homemade and handmade toys, I built all kinds of strange contraptions in an attempt to break away from the reality of my home life.

  The vast landscape within my mind was my constant and immediate escape. In the blink of an eye, I could blast off to another planet or sail away to an uncharted island sanctuary. I also began drawing and became consumed with my sketchbook. Honestly, I would exercise any creativity I could to try to express what was built up in my heart that could never seem to find its way out.

  I was also Max in the classic book Where the Wild Things Are. While I didn’t own a wolf suit like the kid in the story, I saw Dad as the worst sort of monster living in my world. In my sketchpad, I often drew myself in different scenes with a large, two-horned, hairy ogre.

  During this season of my life, music also started to take hold of me and offer temporary but welcomed respites from reality. I remember we had an 8-track tape player (a pre-cassette format) that had a radio in the same unit. You could tune in to a station, hit Record on the 8-track, and “tape” the radio show you were listening to. I loved the band Electric Light Orchestra, who had hit after hit back in those days. My favorite vocalist was Leo Sayer (and he’s still high on my list today). His Endless Flight album from 1976 is still amazing! One night I recorded Casey Kasem’s radio show American Top 40, and then I wore out the 8-track by playing the recording constantly, getting lost in the words of the pop songs of the early 1980s. I can still hear Casey’s program ending with his famous catchphrase: “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.”

  Music became my ultimate escape, one I have never outgrown.

  Running the Gauntlet

  Dad had both a leather strap and a wooden paddle with holes in it that cut down on resistance to airflow. At least, I think that’s what the holes were for. Supposedly, those made the spanking hurt worse. If you’re anywhere in the neighborhood of, say, forty years old, you probably heard the rumor that your principal had one of these torture devices hidden away in his office for the really bad kids. Well, while I’m not sure about our principal, Dad for sure had one.

  I could do something as innocent as leave the bread out on the table after a meal or put it back in the wrong place, and he would knock me across the room. I was rarely ever given any real explanation for the punishment, so I often didn’t know exactly what set him off. Soon, everything seemed to have the potential to get me in trouble, even good things, because I couldn’t be sure how Dad would react to anything related to me.

  One particular time, when I was in Mrs. Burns’s fifth-grade class, the school gave me a letter to take home that said I was an honor student. They asked me to get Dad to sign it and bring it back to the office. Because I felt I couldn’t take the chance of the letter being a match to light his fuse, I forged his signature and returned it. Let’s just say that my rendition of his name looked nothing like it was supposed to.

  The school secretary easily detected the forgery, called my dad, and laughingly told him the office staff thought it was cute that I had tried to fake his signature on something as harmless as an honor roll letter. She thought it was obviously just a silly misunderstanding. Well, Dad didn’t think it was very funny. Not only was there no praise for my being on the honor roll, but the forgery punishment was severe. One of his specific triggers was anything that made him appear foolish or feel embarrassed in front of the folks in town.

  If Stephen brought home a borderline report card, Dad would tell him he would need to work harder and get better grades. If I brought home the same or better, he would wait until we were alone and then get out the strap. At the time I assumed Dad dealt with Stephen the same way he dealt with me and that our punishments were kept separate and private. But many years later as adults, when my brother and I started opening up about our childhoods, I realized I had borne the brunt of Dad’s abuse.

  Still, I always maintained an “I’d rather be safe than sorry” strategy. I scrutinized my every action to avoid getting hit.

  The Vicious Cycle

  Dad worked hard to make sure Stephen and I grew up in his reality, where dreams die and you work every day to just get by. As a result, my creative imagination often conflicted with Dad’s commitment to “realism.” Many times, in response to some creation I had made or goal I had shared, he would give me a speech that went something like this: “I’m going to teach you something, Bart. Dreams don’t pay the bills. Nothing good comes from it. All it does is keep you from all this.” His eyes scanned around the house as he spoke with a biting and bitter tone. “Dreams just keep you from knowing what’s real . . . You understand that? . . . Huh?”

  Full of fear, I would glance up, brace myself for the possibility of things escalating, nod my head, and manage to mutter, “Yes, Daddy.”

  The only time Dad expressed any sort of love or affection to me was after he had whipped me. Nearly every time, when he ha
d calmed down, he would let me sit on his lap, and we would watch TV together—I guess because he felt bad or guilty. Sometimes he would attempt to explain why he disciplined me and why I needed to obey. While I didn’t always understand the severity of the punishment versus the actual crime, I still always savored those moments of normal father-and-son intimacy.

  This was a consistent pattern throughout my childhood—a whipping followed by affection. So I associated that a father’s closeness only followed severe discipline.

  There were times when I hid the strap and the paddle because I was scared and didn’t want him to whip me. He would think he forgot where he put them, while I hoped he might cool off by the time he found them. But then there were plenty more times when I so wanted his attention that I intentionally crossed the line just so he would get out the paddle—because I knew that afterward we could then cuddle up and watch TV together.

  Sad? Yes. But true.

  Suburban Survival

  Stephen and I would do pretty much anything to avoid Dad’s wrath. When Stephen was a junior in high school, he got a job at a pharmacy in town. He had been late to work several times, and the manager had threatened to fire him if he was late again. One morning, Stephen overslept and woke up an hour late. He knew he was going to get canned, and he knew how mad that would make Dad, so Stephen came up with this crazy scheme that he would tell his boss that he was late because he had been jumped and beaten up. He told me to punch him in the face until the black-and-blue bruises were convincing.

  Standing in the middle of our living room, Stephen said, “Okay, hit me, Bart. Hard. Up by my eyes.”

  I did not want to punch my brother, so I was almost crying, telling him, “No, I can’t hit you like that!”

  Stephen started shoving me, calling me names, and trying to provoke me to hit him. Finally, I got mad enough, hauled off, and nailed him with my fist. He looked in the mirror and said, “No, that’s not enough, Bart. You’re going to have to hit me more, and harder!”

  Starting to get the hang of my left hook and right jab, I punched Stephen several times around his face until he felt there was enough physical evidence to back up the story to his boss. But then, just to make absolutely certain his face was convincing enough, he decided to get a razor blade and carefully cut a slit near his eye. Yes, he cut himself open and intentionally bled to finish off his I-got-beaten-up story.

  Man, what we would go through to keep peace with Dad was crazy.

  But there were other side effects of the lack of parental attention. For example, I was never taken to a dentist growing up, and no one ever taught me how to or made me brush my teeth, so by the time I was in high school, they were yellow. Literally, each of my parents assumed the other had taken care of that detail, when in reality, neither had. Because dental hygiene was never put on my radar, the first time I went to a dentist was in the first year of my marriage, when my wife strongly suggested it was time for me to go.

  My Mammaw Millard worked at JCPenney, so I would go there to get shoes and clothes that were damaged or returned, ones they couldn’t sell or send back to the manufacturer. Because of factors like these, I was an easy target for being made fun of at school. Even though I was named after Bart Starr, the legendary quarterback, kids in a pack can destroy anything. My name rhymes perfectly with a slang word for flatulence, so I was always called Bart the Fart. My saving grace, if you want to call it that, was that I was bigger than most of the other kids in my grade.

  But rather than rely on size, I used comedy as my first line of defense. I always worked hard to be funny. Humor got me attention in a wide variety of circles, and I used it to my full advantage. My brother made fun of me all the time, too, so I got really good at turning on anyone who ridiculed me. I was the king of the cut-down and could go toe-to-toe with anybody.

  Affection Deficit Disorder

  Because I was constantly starved for affection and did almost anything to get it, I preferred my dad beat me rather than ignore me. At least when he was knocking me around, I was the center of attention in his world. Of course, this isn’t logical, but this is the way a needy and desperate child thinks.

  The worst whipping Dad gave me was also one of the last. It happened right before the end of fifth grade. I don’t remember what he thought I had done, but he must have had extra time to grow angry about it as he waited, belt in hand, for me to come home. When I walked through the back door, he came out of nowhere and blindsided me. He whipped me from the middle of my back down to my calves, so by the time he stopped, I had turned several different shades of purple from one side of my body to the other. The stinging on my skin was excruciating. The really bad part of a beating like that is, as the hours go by, the pain just gets worse.

  Even the pressure of the elastic band on my underwear hurt, so I lay in bed all night on my stomach, completely naked, with nothing touching my backside. My dad confessed to me many years later that the realization of what he had done to me in his rage hurt him deeply, and he had cried a lot that night. Well, I cried a lot that night, too—from the physical pain. As I so often did, I stuffed down the emotional hurt, adding yet another layer to deal with someday down the road.

  Dad called Mom and told her he wanted to send me to San Antonio over the summer and then have me start sixth grade there. Just me—Stephen wouldn’t be going because he was about to start his senior year. My guess is Dad was concerned that the next thing I did might finally push him over the edge, so he decided to ship me off to Mom. She agreed to the arrangement.

  Once again, having no choice in the decision, I had to go. But I went kicking and screaming. I hadn’t lived with Mom since I was in third grade, and I had only seen her on occasional holiday visits. I went from living with my brother to being an only child. I also quickly decided that I hated my stepdad, Lawrence, Mom’s third husband. He wasn’t mean to me and actually treated me way better than Dad did. I just didn’t like the fact that Mom was married to someone else. I wanted no part of this stepdad business.

  Lawrence constantly tried to take me fishing or get me to help him build something because he knew I liked to create. But I would not cooperate. Fishing meant being outdoors in the steaming central Texas summer heat, and I was accustomed to creating things by myself. I also had trouble navigating the concept that a father figure would want to be involved in my life for any good reason. I just couldn’t escape the parental paradigm I had always had.

  For example, one day Mom and Lawrence started arguing. In my experience, any conflict always escalated into some sort of physical violence. As their voices began to rise in anger, Lawrence took Mom by the arm and told her they needed to go into another room and not fight in front of me. All I could think was that he was going to take her in there to beat her. So I stormed out on the porch and grabbed the first thing I could find that looked like a weapon a sixth grader could use. In the corner stood a wooden boat oar. I grabbed it by the handle and walked back in the house, straight over to Lawrence, who was turned away from me. I hit him as hard as I could across the back of the head. The boat paddle snapped in half, and Lawrence collapsed to the floor.

  Mission accomplished. Stepdad neutralized. Mom saved. Bart wins. The crowd roars! (Remember my vivid imagination?)

  But Mom did not act like a damsel rescued. She screamed at me, “Bart, what have you done? What were you thinking? You could have killed him!”

  I freaked out, realizing I could have actually murdered him.

  A few very long minutes later, Lawrence, though still a bit dazed, was on his feet. I cried and told him how sorry I was. After all, he really was a nice guy, and I didn’t actually want him to die. I just didn’t want to have to live with him.

  To his credit, Lawrence told me he understood how it could have looked to me as though he wanted to harm Mom. He knew I was just being protective. To my surprise, he forgave me and let it go. (Whew!)

  In Greenville, I had been accustomed to walking or riding my bike all over town. It didn’t ta
ke me long to get anywhere I wanted to go. But in San Antonio, Mom wouldn’t allow me to go more than about a block without telling me she didn’t want anyone to hurt or kidnap me. I felt as if I were constantly under house arrest. Unhappiness and loneliness overwhelmed me, and I became depressed. Even though Dad was abusive, he and Stephen were the only family I felt I really knew. I wanted to go back to my old, abnormally normal life. While I was fine living with Mom, I just wanted to be back in my small hometown.

  Finally, toward the end of sixth grade, Mom and Dad talked over what was going on with me. In one particular phone call, Dad even voiced that he missed me, and Stephen told me Dad had expressed that to him too.

  Maybe Dad had decided things were going to be different between us, but I had already concluded I would risk returning to the abuse rather than live in San Antonio as an only child with an annoying stepdad. So my parents decided I would go back to Greenville as soon as school was out.

  That was the last time I lived with Mom.

  From Anger to Apathy

  Things took an odd turn with Dad not long after I came back from San Antonio. I believe he was hoping that the time away from him and Stephen, and now the chance to have a fresh start, would have helped me grow up some. But soon after I returned, I followed my brother to a party at his friend’s house. Everyone there was older than me. A guy had what looked to me like a regular bottle of mouthwash and was challenging people to drink it.

  Remember, I was starved for attention. I stepped forward and told everyone that I would take the dare. I was thinking, Drinking mouthwash can’t kill you! What could possibly go wrong? I’d seize the moment and coolness would follow. (You’re shaking your head right now, aren’t you?)

  Well, the mouthwash bottle was filled with a mixture of peppermint schnapps and Everclear. (A necessary detail here: while both are liquor, Everclear comes in two alcohol volumes: 75.5 percent and 95 percent.) Like some sort of bad excuse for a frat boy, I downed the whole bottle.