SoMa Literary Review - Killing the Cubs

Killing the Cubs

By Dustin Wells

My father wrote me two letters in my life. The first one came right after I graduated college with honors. It read, "The Marine Corps will make a man out of you." The second letter came right after I completed grad school. That one read, "I really think you should join the Marine Corps." These one page statements were stuffed into the usual letters my mother sent which criticized me for dressing poorly and being a boozer and a womanizer like my father.

The implications of these letters might easily be construed if my father were patriotic, or if I came from a military family. While my father briefly served in the Marine Corps as a shipping clerk, he always considered himself more of a counter-culture guy, more of a hippy than a soldier. His hair was always long. He considered smoking weed the greatest hangover cure. His route answer for anything was, "Cool, man." While a self-professed staunch liberal, voting in national elections was the extent of his activism. So why did my father insist that I enlist in the military?

He drove me to the Marine recruiters after my high school graduation and waited in the car while the sergeants explained that I was ineligible for service because of my severe speech impediment. My father and I both knew the outcome because I stuttered so severely that I nearly hyperventilated when I tried to speak. When Dad learned of my official ineligibility, he drove home in silence, and then didn't talk to me for weeks.

So, when my father wrote me those letters asking me to enlist, he already knew I was ineligible, so why would he write them? My father wrote those letters to let me know that no matter how much I achieved, I could never be as good as he is. Billy Lee was a man's man. His son stuttered.

I think about all this as my daughter Nora toddles along the bay scouting for herons. I give her imaginary lectures in my head as she's far too young to understand. As she's yelling, "Bird! Bird!" I tell her never to allow anyone to tell her that she isn't good enough. Sometimes the people who are supposed to help you –teachers, relatives, and friends—want to humiliate you the most. I tell her that when she discovers these people that it's best to stay away from them: you can't please them and you can't change them. "Bird," she says and looks at me. I tell her that I'm proud of her. I tell her that lions sometimes kill their cubs because they feel threatened by them. I tell her we are not in competition. She hands me a rock and smiles.

It took me thirty-some years and three thousand miles until I realized that my father was trying to denigrate me to make himself feel better for having wasted his life. The signs were always there. Billy Lee Wells forbade his children to have jobs. He forbade them to have driver's licenses. We were forbidden to have money. Telephone access was strictly limited. Anything that would have given his children the slightest feeling of control, he denied. When he played board games, he flew into rages when the dice didn't go his way. When he won, he gloated for weeks. Why this man sired six children mystifies me. When I brought my college girlfriend home, I caught him touching her knee under the table.

For my own sense of well-being I stopped visiting home three years ago. My parents cannot understand why I deny them access to my daughter. Because, I would explain to them if I could, she's precious to me. Because I warn her about people like them, people imbibed with such self-hatred that it leaks into everything around them. "Nora," I say, "life is too precious to waste on such people."

"Bird," she says and points.

"Bird," I agree.

Also by Dustin Wells on SoMa Literary Review :

The Appalling Subjugation of Emily Dickinson by the Hegemonic Oppression of the Lesbian-Feminist Post-Modern Dyad, The Cycle of Hegemonic Oppression Or Why I Hate Stupid Mexicans, Union Meeting, Re: Enlightening Good News, The Resident Redneck, Writers Anonymous, Book Camp, Why Donna the Buffalo Sucks, Hustling, Oranges in Niggertown & Loser School

Dustin Wells lives in San Francisco and is the author of the novel Cappuccino Cowboy.