Rick was a well-known and revered activist, lauded for his peaceful but persistent approach to environmental and antinuclear issues. He was mildly famous within progressive circles, in large part because of an incident involving a crystal eagle and Ronald Reagan that landed him in prison. In the early 1990s Rick founded the Hundredth Monkey Project, a series of concerts and demonstrations to bring together antinuclear activists. In 1992 a few thousand people gathered in Nevada near the nuclear test site for a weekend of activism. On the final day of the event, many of those involved traveled to Las Vegas to hold a demonstration outside the Department of Energy’s office.
That same day, Rick, using a borrowed press pass, was allowed into a luncheon honoring Ronald Reagan. The former president had been presented with a large crystal eagle and was speaking to a room full of his devotees, the National Association of Broadcasters, who had awarded him with the statue. Rick snuck onto the stage, smashed the thirty-pound eagle, and stepped forward to the microphone, saying, “Excuse me, President Reagan.” He had planned to give an impassioned speech against nuclear testing, but instead half a dozen Secret Service men tackled him, while more whisked Reagan away to safety. In the video of the event, still available to watch on YouTube, the shards of crystal look like shrapnel as they fly over the former president’s head. Reagan was not harmed, but Rick, after various legal battles, was sentenced to around a year in prison and ordered to pay a $2,000 fine, cementing his status as a hero to the cause.
One morning, when I was fifteen years old, Rick threw a heavy wooden chair at my head because I had failed to clean up the cream cheese from my breakfast. The chair missed, crashing into the wall beside me and cracking into two pieces. He berated me as I shut my eyes and hoped my car pool to school, which was honking a friendly hello from our driveway, couldn’t hear his threats.
Rick was, privately, a terrible alcoholic who was emotionally abusive to me, my sister, and my mom. My mother did not know this when they first got together. He didn’t drink in front of us initially, though it’s hard to remember when that changed. I do remember when my mother found hundreds and hundreds of bottles and cans hidden inside the walls of our garage, and when Sarah, six years old, dumped out a backpack full of beer bottle caps onto Sharon’s table and said, “See, I told you he drinks a lot.” Eventually his alcoholism and anger lived openly with us all the time.
There was often the threat of violence, the hint that his rage could turn into something more. When Rick was angry with my sister, he would grab her arms or neck but let go just before bruises formed. He left marks on the walls from throwing plates laden with food when he was upset. It filled our house, this hurricane of anger, but he was careful not to let it touch us hard enough to leave physical marks. Still, he would destroy a shelf in a frenzy if he bumped against it one too many times, take a hammer to it, screaming, and reduce it to splinters while we hid in our rooms until his mood had passed.
I vacillated between blaming my mom for allowing this man into our home and feeling sorry for her. She tried to integrate him into our family, even had us go to family therapy, which promptly went awry when the therapist asked me how I felt about my stepdad, and I said, in front of Rick, “I hate him.”
“Any other feelings?” she asked.
“Nope, I really just hate him,” I replied.
My hatred spilled over to my mother too. I once threw an entire drawer of silverware at her in a rage over Rick’s presence. Her most common response to Sarah or me when we asked her why she stayed with him was “I love him.” But why did she love him? I didn’t understand the trauma that had led her heart to him, how she had found a man like her own father: cold, critical, and withholding of praise. I didn’t understand until I made similar choices.
Rick suffered from depression and spoke often of suicide. He made attempts at emotional growth. He joined a men’s group where guys beat drums around a firepit and talked about masculinity, and he tried family counseling on occasion. He attended AA on and off for years. His coping skills, however, seemed fairly limited to drinking and passing on the abuse he himself had faced. I believe that he thought love and respect were the offspring of fear. He used to say he wished he could take a pill and, poof, disappear from everyone’s memory.
Where the physical violence managed to just miss us, the emotional abuse hit its targets squarely. When my sister and I began to develop breasts and butts, Rick routinely called us fat and lazy, looking away from our curves, as though uncomfortable with pubescent bodies. His nickname for my sister was Piggy. When he and my mom fought, he attacked her weight and accused her of setting a poor example for us because she wasn’t thin enough. He disliked when one of us talked about something he didn’t understand. He had not gone to college and got upset when he felt his intelligence was challenged. He routinely called us “spoiled American brats” despite the fact that we lived off my mother’s artist-in-residency stipend and a little help from my grandmother. He said to my mom, “Everything would be great if you just did exactly as I said all the time.”
He had strange restrictions around food. When I was a teenager, he started buying hundred-pound bags of oatmeal and insisted we eat it for breakfast every day until the bag was empty. He once made my sister eat cereal with orange juice because we were out of soy milk. He discouraged us from consuming dairy but ate pints of Ben & Jerry’s himself. Regularly, he took everything that was nearing expiration or growing mold and chopped it all up to scramble with eggs, calling it “Rick’s Special.” He viewed food waste as the pinnacle of what was wrong with Americans.
The rule was that if Sarah and I didn’t clean up our things, he might throw them away to “teach us a lesson.” In some of Rick’s rarer moods, he dictated how often we could shower and for how long. Hygiene, clothing, weight, all these were things he felt it was his job to have a say in. There was no such thing as privacy in our house.
Sarah and I became allies. We traded food that we weren’t supposed to eat: candy, salty snacks, sugary drinks. If I wanted privacy while talking on the phone, Sarah would ask Rick to show her something in the garden or his garage workshop. If Sarah broke something, we would try to fix it or smuggle it out of the house before he saw. Rick didn’t like it when I read too much; I think my intellect bothered him. So Sarah would play quietly in my room while I read, letting me know when Rick was on his way to my door so I could slip my book under the covers and pretend to be playing with her. We learned to hide things, to speak in code with friends on the phone, to read the room for his moods. I snuck in showers at other people’s houses. I felt like I didn’t have ownership over my things or my body; everything could be taken away or denied if Rick was angry.
My mother once lit Rick’s bike on fire. When she couldn’t get the fire to start, I was the one who handed her a container of lighter fluid from the garage. She had found out he was cheating. Her first response was to throw rocks at the woman’s house, aiming for the windows, while Rick sat inside. When that proved unsatisfactory, she drove furiously home and set aflame the bike and cart he had used to travel across the country multiple times, one of his favorite things. My mom, Sarah, and I stood in the driveway while it burned, watching the dark smoke drift toward the bay. I can still remember her face, angry but satisfied, her blue eyes turning a steely gray.
My mother left Rick permanently in 2006. The last thing he ever said to me, at the end of a screaming fight when I was close to twenty years old (still a few years before he and my mother split for good), was that one day I would come find him and thank him for how he parented me. In 2010 Rick married a woman in front of a small group of family and friends. Two weeks later, he woke up and shot himself in the head.