Life After Life After Death by Robert Lashley
“I will not completely conquer this pain in my lifetime, but I will fight”
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The first day that he wanted to have sex with me was a hazy Saturday in June. It was in his top floor condominium overlooking Wright's Park. It was in the middle of his living room, right in front of a spacy window that blocked two gray willow trees. That night he had relapsed: I knew it by the way his big feet had stomped so awkwardly up the steps of the condo, and by the way he came in the door muttering in a language only he understood. I instinctively knew to be leery of it. To pry -- to be too energetic and demanding around it -- was to risk being hit by his closed fist.
He slammed the front door and paced back and forth in the kitchen, going in and out of lucidity; from the fragments that I understood, I could tell it was something about his job. He sat down and ate, for the time oblivious to me as I sat in my bean bag chair and thumbed through baseball cards. Around 8:30 he took his pants off, white with gray polka dots, and laid his head on the top couch, looking up at something on the ceiling that I never understood. He was in a stupor, but his face had something that resembled a smile.
Around 9 o'clock, a replay of a fight came on. It was Michael Spinks versus Gerry Cooney, and he summoned me to the chair beside him. The pain and the fear of him hitting me was so pure, so painful, that my brain was on a form of full prevention mode. I put on the biggest smile I could. I knew that if I put on a show, watched what I said, and didn't talk over the sporting event like I did over the World Series the year before, that I could get through it. I went back and forth between the fight and him: Spinks starting reasonably well in the early rounds, he patting me on the head and yelling at the TV, Spinks starting to falter in the third and the 4th, him screaming, "Get him, Michael, get him."
By the end of the 4th round, the man had lost his interest in the televised back and forth, and fell into a stupor. in the commercials between rounds, I could only make out the word Saundra, the name of his first childhood love in the 50's. Round 5 came on. Spinks peppered Cooney with right after right after right. The man, not looking at the fight, stroked my head. The fight stopped, but he kept going, stroking my head with his left hand and taking out his penis with his right.
The next memories I have are a mélange of concrete pictures and sensations. I remember how huge his penis was, how it tasted like a combination of salt and sweat, that shuddering inner feeling in my nose that I still get when I smell rancid vodka. I remember his hand moving me back and forth, and trying not to gag up the top ramen I had eaten before the fight started. I remember his shudder, then his scream, then him running into his bed and crying for hours, while I stumbled back into my chair, dazed, trying to go back to looking at my baseball cards.
About 2 o'clock he wakes me up, and takes me to his bed. He went into a soft version of the rhetoric which I would become familiar with: that he was sorry, he had a horrible day at work, and that I had to understand that he had gone through a tremendous pain through losing his business, and that I could not say anything because he was a great and beloved man, and he was getting his life back together. He'd be a millionaire again soon, and if I didn't say anything, then he'd take me to Disneyland.
As he went to sleep, he cradled me, his penis outside of his pants and caressing the crack of my backside. I didn't have any barometer for this. I wanted him to take me to Disneyland. He was my father. In a month, I would turn 9.
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To many people, my father was a great and beloved man. Born in severe and abject poverty in Birmingham, Alabama, he raised himself up to be the owner of one of the most profitable black-owned businesses in the state of Washington. From a share cropping land that was once a plantation designated to break unruly slaves, my father made himself a millionaire, a master at running an efficient landscaping company in the 70's. The combination of affirmative action, his visibility, and his ability to do his job, made him the owner of one of the biggest landscaping businesses in the west coast, and by far the biggest name in landscaping in the Pacific Northwest. To this day, people who loved Bob Lashley still love him, and I don’t doubt their reasons.
What also mattered to people in black Tacoma was how he did it. He hired people in the neighborhood, put men through college, had an office on the hill, and was visible in community politics. More than that, he did it without compromising himself. So when he fell, people romanticized his decayed state and took pity on him. In 1980, he won the El Toro marine base contract, but took a tremendous amount of abuse in doing so. He would eventually win a settlement, but in the duration became severely dependent on drugs and alcohol, and severely abusive toward my mother, myself, and any loved one in his vicinity. By 1985, he was divorced, homeless, and, in paperwork, had transferred 750,000 dollars in debt to my mother's name.
So when he told me that he was a great and beloved man and that I shouldn’t cross him, I took him at his word. Even when my mother was deathly afraid of him, going from apartment to apartment, the Lashley name still had enough juice to get him joint custody of me. Between 1984 to 1988, when my mom was on Section 8 and working breakneck hours at her retail job, he had a system of men who refused to give up on him. They loaned him money, stuck through his raging fits, propped him up to be sober enough to bid and win the University of Puget Sound contract, all because of what he had meant to them.
And so, outside of his relationship with prostitutes, I was the last person he “was with.” Between June 1987 and November 1992, he raped me more times than I could count or remember. When he lost his job and went back to the projects, the contact escalated. I was penetrated by him 4 times, twice violently, of which I still have sizable damage. After November when I tried to fight back and was beaten, I stopped being sexually desirable to him, something at the time I was sick enough to feel bad about. By 1994, he had focused his furies on my grandmother, and on July 19, 1994, he lost his temper toward her, and pushed her in her wheelchair. Against the motion of where she was pushing her wheels, the control of the wheelchair broke, which caused her to go backwards, and fall down a flight of steps. Six days later she was dead.
During all this, however, were wonderful, remarkable memories. My mother, grandmother, and my aunts' fierce love and presence, houses that believed in feminism and African American literature more than they believed in anything else. My grandfather and uncles who made being a man and being a gentleman something both down home, and of high ceremony. A cultural and intellectual education that I wouldn’t have traded for anything, and a thing that still guides me to this very day. In the end, however, hell took over, and when I began to see different barometers of fatherhood, a sizable part of my brain that was seemingly impossible to penetrate wanted to get high and die.
Did people know? Almost everyone suspected it. My mother did, as well as a psychiatrist that saw us for almost nothing. My uncles didn't want to come to the house because of the feelings of their own helplessness and the fear they might kill him. The vacant spaces that time and distance can create in friendships drove my aunts away. Being in the proximity, my grandmother and my Uncle Moe intensified their dependency on alcohol.
And who kept it going? Me. Oh God, me. I remember a prostitute who, when she got wise of what he was doing to me, threatened to have her pimp come shoot him. End it right then and there. I told her that nothing happened, that I had sagged my pants and was joining a gang and that he kicked me in the ass real badly and that's why I was bleeding. He was my dad. I had been with him for years. I loved him, wanted him to love me, and I didn't want him to die. Haunting and horrible as it was, he was the intimacy that I knew.
In the end, however, a great part of me did want him to die. After what he did to my grandmother, I had no more feelings of love for the man, but the damage to me had already been done. My life between the ages of 16 and 28 was a series of hospitals and mental hospitals, numerous suicide attempts, a couple of stomach-pumping close calls, and a pending disability case by the time my father died in November 2000.
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I saw him twice after he died. Both times it was in the mirror. The first time it was almost a year after he died. I was 23 years old and had broken off two relationships with wonderful women who were thoughtful and patient with me, who believed in me more than I believed in myself, and whom I treated like garbage. I spent my teens and early 20s veering between two dissociative personas: a frightfully angry, self-pitying nationalist; and a charming suburbanite conservative gladhander, and alienated every single solitary person who cared about me.
Worried that I would be (justly) kicked out of Curtis High School with my record of violence towards men, I decided to play conservative, make University Place my trick instead of my father, and got good enough grades to get into Western Washington University in the fall of 1997. The hustle and bullshit of a troubled 19 year-old kid was no match for an elite university, and lost in my stupidity was a bright, beautiful young woman who tried to love me and who I treated like dirt and emotionally pushed out of my life.
The second woman was a bright, beautiful woman who I met as a freelance writer in a Tacoma coffee house. I was a good music critic: I had my first brilliant literary teacher in Virginia Taylor, who a year before she died, whipped me into shape, demanding nothing but the best from my work, and demanding I read the greatest critics who ever did this. If I was going to write, I wasn't going to "waste anyone's goddamn time."
Off the page, however, I wasted the time of this woman. We met at a coffee house, and had an argument about gender, and she thought I was engaging, charming, handsome, smart enough to evolve from some of the beliefs I had. During the four months we were together, she would tell me how smart I was, encourage me to get help, tell me what I could be if I dealt with my issues. And I cheated on her three times.
Finally she had enough. She had found out I had cheated on her and met me outside of my apartment in the Winthrop in Tacoma. Where in other times she would yell at me, this time she stood outside the hallway window next to my door. She wore an elegant gray jacket that contrasted with the whitish fog that settled on the rooftop of the next building. Her hair was parted back. In a deadpan voice she told me,
"I hope you never regret being with someone as much as I regret being with you."
And walked off.
Dazed, I muttered my usual line, "You never understood me, bitch." But in the distance, I heard her give a dark, bitter extended laugh, as the ding of the third floor elevator went off. I opened the door, put my bag of CDs on the tile floor, looked in the mirror, and there he was. I had spent so much of my time thinking I was a victim, thinking that the pain I had inside freed me from the responsibility of being a human being, thinking that this deep, frightening agony inside me allowed me to do anything I wanted, and I looked in the mirror and saw this deeply disgusting man. I cried for five minutes, then remembered my father. I called my grandfather, and I told him that I was a miserable man, wanted to be a better one, and I didn't know how.
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The next 10 years were a rough evolution, but I grew. I'm happy to say that I grew a lot. And I did it when I stopped trying to fit into any box and embraced all that was wonderful in my life. The people who I was told to hate the most as a man (feminists) were virtually the only people in my life who gave me any love, and I decided to “rep that,” to actually be myself. When I was 24, I asked my mother what could I do to "be a better friend to women. A feminist and stuff." She said: "Show, don't tell. And don't expect a cookie." I've done my best to abide by that, and though I haven't been perfect, I'm proud to say that I've become a good person because of it.
I studied my grandfather like a madman. In many ways, I am his clone: I take in little things like how he walked (I walk like a duck because of him), his vocal mannerisms (my southern accent comes from him), and the way I overdress in the summer (goes without saying). Most of all, however, was the way he conducted himself and the way he treated women. My grandfather is the greatest southern gentlemen I have ever known, and the most noble person I have ever come in contact with. He survived the pain of Jim Crow, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, and what his stepson did to him and his wife, and did it with a quiet, disciplined dignity. And if he could go through all that, then maybe I could get through my shit -- if I studied him. And I got through a lot by doing so. I'm a hardass on myself, but know what I've written, and I know what I've done that's good. Where some people are out in left field, I know I'm in the stadium parking lot up the hill, but I like the view.
What I couldn't get through is that until I had surgery at 30, my ass interminably bled. And that if somebody hugged me for more than 10 seconds, I started to have a panic attack. Or, if not on my back and stoned, I couldn't be intimate with a woman without having a severe mental breakdown. I existed in masks, I desperately didn't (and still don't) want to wear Bob Lashley like he was Gogol's overcoat. I wanted to have as normal, quiet, and communicative a life as possible, so I kept to myself all the pot brownies and whiskey sours that got me to sleep.
To paraphrase Updike, however, that mask ended up eating my face just as much as the others did, even if it did it nicely. Using sweets as an outlet caused me to gain over 90 pounds. I had a lot of wonderful qualities as a friend and a temporary companion, but when a couple of wonderful women wanted more, I upped my drug and sugar intake, and became severely self destructive. Instead of emotional abuse and cruelty towards them, I turned it on myself.
And when my family situation turned into several years of sheer trauma, I lost a great deal of my ability to function. My grandfather had problems because family members stole money from him, and that November, his son almost murdered him. I lost an aunt to colon cancer. I lost another aunt, and saw her buried and eulogized in a way that was hateful enough to stun Creon. In February, another aunt shot herself, and in June, my 19 year-old adopted cousin, after spending years being neglected by his family because of his sexual orientation, died of a drug overdose.
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It got so bad that by September 2011, I didn't want to be here anymore. That fall, I was rescued from going into Lake Padden, and four days later stabbed myself in the chest with scissors four times. That December I overdosed on pills twice. In January, I was found in the snowstorm after wanting to go to Lake Whatcom and freeze to death. In April, I was taken to a home after I had passed out from a panic attack, with razors next to me that I don't completely remember buying.
When I got back from the home, I went back to my apartment, thinking of a way I could go quietly. I thought I was noble. I wasn't like the other suicide cases, I thought, because I was in a tremendous amount of pain and I wasn't advertising it! I'd had 25 years of trauma after trauma after trauma. Didn't I deserve to rest? Didn't I deserve some peace? I thought people would someday come to understand.
I went into my bathroom, thinking that there might be a leftover razor. I imagined myself in the bathtub, slitting my wrist, but leaving quietly. I opened the bathroom door and looked out the window, and I saw him one more time, speaking in my voice.
ME: What are you doing here?
MIRROR: What are YOU doing here?
ME: I'm not my father. I'm not my father.
MIRROR: Is that right?
ME: I am a good man.
MIRROR: Is that right?
ME: I have a good life, I have friends, I have written good work. I have people who care about me.
MIRROR: And what are you going to do to them with this?
Pause
Cat got your tongue, nigga?
Pause
Bob Lashley, Jr, gonna' run away just like his daddy.
ME: DON’T FUCKING SAY THAT.
MIRROR: Really? Really? Killing yourself isn’t running away from a problem. Nigga, that’s some Bob Lashley logic if I heard it. You on that stuff.
ME: I’M NOT ON THAT STUFF.
MIRROR: Is that right?
ME: I PROMISED MY MOTHER I WOULDN’T BE ON THAT STUFF!
MIRROR: But you’re going to do this to her?
ME: I'm tired.
MIRROR: You your daddy.
ME: I'm not my daddy.
MIRROR: You your motherfucking daddy.
ME: I'm not my daddy.
MIRROR: You’re dealt a series of bad hands and you are going to go out just like your daddy.
ME: My daddy should have killed himself if he was going to do what he did.
MIRROR: After traumatizing the people who cared about him....
ME: I'm not...
MIRROR: Traumatizing the people who care about you, Bob?
That night I texted a friend. That next morning, before she had to go to work, she took me to DVSAS where, for the first time in my life, I sought counseling for survivors of sexual abuse.
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In the middle of November 2000, my father had his funeral service in Bethlehem Baptist church. Thirteen people showed up. Though not knowing what he had done to me, the pastor knew enough of what he had done to my mother and grandmother, and struggled to hide his contempt for the man he was eulogizing. The few people there outside of family were members of his football team, a couple of businessmen, and a couple of janitors who used to work landscaping for him in the 70’s. The system of men who had coddled him and propped him up were nowhere to be found. The scene at the after-church dinner was grim and stern, as if everybody knew they were burying a “great” man, but not a good one.
Could I make the contextual argument of what made Bob Lashley such a monster of a man? I knew his biological father was a cake maker, a preacher, and a predator who had sex with my grandmother when she was 13. I knew he was molested at the age of 9 by an aunt, and harbored anger because of it. I knew he had brutal scars growing up in Jim Crow Alabama, and faced racial obstacles moving up the business ladder in the 70’s. I knew all this, however, because I laid with the man for five years; and no background, no background is a reason for you to repeatedly rape your son.
Bob Lashley used his background as a card to get out of the responsibilities of being a human being. He was a violent, hyper-macho misogynist (all you cats who believe only gays are pedophiles needed to get hold of his wannabe Jim Brown ass) who brutally beat every woman he was with. He tried to reform in the 70’s, but when adversity came, he got involved with drugs and alcohol and transformed into the living embodiment of a demon. Even though his problems with El Toro were painful, he couldn't deal with the fact that, instead of making 750,000 dollars a year, he'd have to settle for making 120,000 and being with a family who loved him.
How I deal with him is in how I live, what I can contribute to the world, how good of a friend I am, and what I put on the page. I do not act the way I act, write the way I write, and believe what I believe because of chance. I am not perfect, and do not claim or try to be. What I try to do, however, is hold myself to a high standard of conduct, friendship, and art because I am not what my father was, AND IF I MAKE MISTAKES, IT IS MY RESPONSIBILITY AND MY JOB TO RECTIFY THEM. I will not completely conquer this pain in my lifetime, but I will fight everyday to bring more to this world than I take from it. I have seen the ninth level of hell, and I will transform it into something meaningful, if I have to die trying (and not by my own hand).
And so here I am, without masks, guards, or conventional reserve, but with a pen. I have had brutal hands dealt to me, but there is no good that can come from me being an angry cancer about them, nor any good in me trying to stubbornly wish them away. In treatment, there have been days where I have struggled, but I struggle now and I do not hide in a mental sub-world of either squalor or sweetness. My story is not over, and I eagerly await every day to see how I can improve, what I can contribute, and how good I can become as a writer and a person. I deal with mental illness everyday, but I am a survivor. This is my story.
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Robert Lashley is the author of The Homeboy Songs (Small Doggies Press, 2014). A semi finalist for the PEN/Rosenthal fellowship, Lashley has had poems published in such Journals as Feminete, No Regrets, NAILED, and Your Hands, Your Mouth. His work was also featured in Many Trails To The Summit, an anthology of Northwest form and Lyric poetry. To quote James Baldwin, he wants to be an honest man and a good writer.
