Chapter Two

The Stepfather

I couldn’t decide if I wanted to spend the rest of the morning questioning my own sanity or finding a meaning to the things the young girl said. I chose the latter.

I googled “Fire Walker” but found only references to a B-movie starring Chuck Norris. I next googled “Pillar” and discovered nothing revelatory.

“Pillar of Tyranny,” I repeated to myself. What the hell did that mean?

I was reminded of the phrase “path of tyranny.” My stepfather used it several years after I tried to kill him. I guess you could say I had a troubled childhood.

My biological father left my mother when she was six months pregnant with me. No one ever heard from him again. My mother introduced me to a string of abusive boyfriends, the seventh of whom she married when I was ten. His name was Jack, and he was the worst of the lot.

We lived in a piece of shit Cape Cod in Oak Lawn, several miles south of Chicago. My mother died of a heroin overdose when I turned twelve but for those two fateful years the three of us lived in turbulence and squalor.

Jack had three hobbies: home brewing, drinking said brew, and beating the shit out of me. He was a welder for Local Union 597 when he wasn’t home with a hangover. He hosted a weekly poker game at the house every Friday night. Those were the nights where Jack and three of his welder buddies would drink themselves silly from one of Jack’s five-gallon Corny kegs, which he refilled every weekend with a pale ale or hard cider.

The four of them would take turns whipping me across my back and butt with their leather belts. During the first dozen or so beatings I would scream for help, but my mother never stirred from her heroin dreams. I eventually learned no superheroes or gods or even sympathetic neighbors were willing to help an impoverished child. After a time I resorted to muted sobs.

I won’t tell you about the humiliations visited upon me by Jack and his buddies. Those are memories I have locked away forever. I will simply say Jack made the mistake of teaching me how to home brew. During a rare moment of fatherly affection he showed me step by step how to ferment beer or cider. I was particularly interested in the transfer of beer to the five-gallon Corny.

A tragic story made the nightly news one particular week. A toddler from the neighborhood had gotten into some antifreeze left unattended in a drainage pan. Apparently ethylene glycol has a sweet taste children find appealing. The little boy died after suffering in the hospital for the better part of a week.

Jack had several gallons of antifreeze sitting on a shelf in his garage. I chose the Corny filled with hard cider, knowing its inherent sweetness would mask the taste of the poison. I depressed the keg’s pressure valve long enough to not spray the entire laundry room when I released the hinge lid. I poured out a couple of gallons of cider and replaced it with an equal volume of ethylene glycol. I set the carbon dioxide regulator to ten PSI and refilled the keg with adequate pressure. Jack and his buddies tapped the keg several weeks later.

They were all hospitalized in the wee small hours the following morning. My mom and I sat in the lounge outside the intensive care unit while three of the four victims were resuscitated. Barney, or “Uncle Barney” as he liked me to call him during the beatings, had a seizure prior to the arrival of the paramedics. He stopped breathing and was pronounced dead upon arrival to the emergency room. He had two children whose names I never knew. Brad and Steve, both single and childless, died within twenty-four hours from failure of most of their organs. Jack lived.

I now understand that ethanol, the alcohol found in beer and wine, is actually an antidote for antifreeze poisoning. Jack began the night with his own little preparty, which consisted of a half-gallon of pale ale. His overindulgence, it turns out, gave him partial protection from the toxins. He was kind enough to develop full-blown renal failure and, except for trips to the dialysis center, lived out the rest of his days in prison.