"Daddy Issues" Episode #5 - The Hat Pin, Part I (memoir)

Growing up as a child there were some strict arbitrary rules I was obligated to abide by - no makeup, no pierced ears, only white underwear.  We had a secret knock when I was left home alone and was too short yet to peek through the spy-hole, various code words exchanged to be used in a variety of circumstances (specifically, on the phone, this will become important again later), and there was an antique ladies hat pin, an extremely deadly type of hat pin, a literal hairpin dagger about 11 inches long my father instructed me how to use in the living-room of Mentor Square Apartments, when he was still employed at Ohio Rubber, he showed me how to use it as a skillful weapon.

All afternoon in the living room.  Teaching me to stab testicles, eyeballs, and windpipes.  With an antique hatpin. 

I was maybe 6 years old?  7?   

As soon as my dad got custody of me, he put what was basically an extension of himself, because he's a Malignant Narcissistic, on lock-down.  But in retrospect, he did it in a very possessive dark extreme manner.  He was protecting me from the kind of men back in the mid-'80s that I don't think most of American society were really completely aware of existing yet.  His guard was too up.  He was too prepared.  He instructed me at a very young age to mistrust men.  To know that most men were perverted.  Dangerous.  To know that men basically did objectify women.  While he covertly and overtly did the same.  When I was a child before I hit puberty.  I was more precious to him.  I was more like a boy.  And I tried to be a boy.  I was indeed a tomboy and liked everything my father liked.  I read all of his books.  Listened to all of his stories.  Loved nature.  Loved art.  His favorite authors were my favorite authors.  His favorite topics were my favorite topics.  His favorite movies were my favorite movies.  All of this as a child, because I actually was a brilliant child. 

So when Daddy taught me how to puncture the eyes of the bad men with the hatpin who would steal me from him, I paid attention.  I also learned about how the throat and balls of grown men could be stabbed or kicked or punched, so I could run away and get help.  Get Daddy.  I didn't want to actually ever have to do these things, but I didn't want bad men to kidnap me either.  Pick up on how my little girl mind is actually getting conditioned here, I didn't want to ever actually be: taken away from Daddy.  Also, realize that my mind is being lead to knowing I can successfully protect myself from other men, but not my father - the implication being: Daddy would never hurt you or let you get hurt.            

So he teaches me all of this shit, we act it all out, the knocking on the door, the phone calls...then he takes me to some store in chronic suburbia, it's summer, he leaves me in a parked car in a parking lot, with all of the windows down.  Leans over the window into my side and goes, "Spank, remember what we talked about?  I'm going to leave you out here for a little while, okay?  The hat pin is here," Dad reaches above me and pulls out the hatpin a little bit which he's shoved into the sun-visor above me, it's sharp enough, he's just pierced the fabric of the car with it.  The little nubbin tip is like a smooth metal pine-cone, he grabs at it and pulls it out just a bit to show me it's there.  "Any weirdo-creep comes up to you in this parking-lot kiddo, you stab them in the fucking eyeball. Just like I showed you!"  I nod my head very somberly.  "That's my good girl!  Daddy loves you!  Be out soon!"  He probably then gave me a noogie and kissed my head.

It was most certainly not soon and so began my terror of sitting in parking lots alone, with a hatpin above my head to protect myself.  A hatpin that made the transitions of many cars my father owned.  A hatpin that somehow never made its way into his eye in my self-defense.  

I'm really only mentioning this because personally, I think it's weird my dad went to the lengths he did to "protect/abandon" his daughter from imagined rouge roaming pedophiles that never came in retrospect.  Save once, it was my creepy neighbor that did try to get me and my friend, Natasha, to come inside his apartment but I refused to let either of us enter, told my dad who did actually confront this man and I got permission to flick this particular creep off if he was ever caught staring at me or my friends.  This technique proved very effective at getting him to stop staring at us.    

My mother who was married to my father only very, very briefly has this terrible story about two missing little girl sisters in Collingwood, or around Collingwood, circa 1979-1982ish that she always tells me periodically about but it's really difficult to process things like that?  Sometimes my mom flatly gets things wrong.  Recently at the prompting of a friend, I confided in finally about this particular story, encouraged me to research it.  Look into it.  See if Mom was recalling correctly.  I rediscovered an entirely different NEO unsolved cold case.  One in whose M.O. was never used before nor since. 

Which is why I was trying to find the year that Ohio Rubber closed down and instead found the year it burned down: 1994.  Now I know it closed down years before that.  I can't remember my life from 1989 to 1994.  1990, 1991, 1992, 1993...9, 10, 11, 12.  Extremely hazy years.  When my life was the most abnormal but...I have to think about when Janette left...and I don't feel like calling him tonight to ask for the exact years.  Because he would've got custody of me around 1987 when I was 6.     

It's all pure speculation and conjecture.  I don't have any proof.  Just the pain I lived.  First-hand experience. He hit and beat my mom.  He hit and beat Janette.  Dad would black out.  Or conveniently act like he'd black out.  He wouldn't always black out though.  All the time I thought for sure, for sure this time he'd kill me, he's going to snap my neck this time.  He'll throw me like a rag-doll this time.  He'll break me like glass.  Chop me like wood.  Daddy wasn't a man, you see.  Daddy was Daddy.  So much more.  When I was a child he stood a formidable 6'2", after playing football at Willoughby South High, in adulthood he managed to still stay physically active hiking and playing on an informal volleyball team.  Janette had likened him to "Greek god" body type wise.  This is before he fell hopelessly ill.  Never to regain good health.  Which I'm sure working at a factory that had hidden troves of lewisite and other types of industrial chemicals he was constantly exposed to shy of two decades had an adverse effect on.

His side of the family always made him out to be weak or lazy, blaming his sickness on his mind or behavior.  A side effect of his inability to control his anger and stress.  He was a hypochondriac.  This is ironic as so many of his brothers turned into firemen and in April 2017 Ohio passed a firefighter-cancer presumption law due to all the various chemicals firemen get exposed to, this topic is also visited in the documentary Toxic Hot Seat.  The double standard, the double treatment within my father's family was real and something I too experienced merely for being his offspring. 

He was shortly disowned by his parents after he got laid off from Ohio Rubber.  Despite the entire factory getting shut-down.  Outsourced all the jobs to Mexico.  They hung up on him while he was explaining to them, very calmly, that he had lost his job and that he needed them to babysit me so he could go look for a new one.  They hung up on him, they hung up on me, they hung up on us.  He at first was dumbly confused and looked over at me, over his shoulder.  It was a beige corded phone.  He called them back.  Calmly left them a message on their answering machine about how they'd been disconnected and he didn't know what had happened, hoped everything was alright, went to restate his original plea for help and "...click..."  then it became obvious that neither disconnect was accidental.  

This.  Did.  Not.  Go.  Over.  Well.    

Rages like this were normalized, I keep feeling like I was 8 when he lost his job.  So it was 1989.  He'd turn into what I always thought of as "Pig-Man".  There were legit reasons for this.  Mainly because he had hazel eyes and every time he hit nuclear levels of rage--Narcissistic Rages--they turned into silver pools of mercury.  Silver eyes on Dad were kinda an uh-oh moment.  Then his face would contort, with all the fucking yelling, the nostrils would rise up into his face so it would look more like a snout, and the spittle would fly out of his mouth from the yelling.  He'd be like a creature from the Island of Dr. Moreau.                     
He hit Pig-Man levels.  Broke the phone, tore the phone jack out of the wall. 

I know I didn't know him long, but he was never the same after that.