On the other hand, twice in my childhood my parents mistakenly acted in a way that terrified me, and, although I’ve intellectually excused and forgiven them since, I still get a twinge of the emotional horror and hurt that originally derived therefrom. In both instances, my parents were acting from their own internal strife although it was couched as a reaction to something I’d done, with the result that I felt rejected, abandoned, and confused.
The first incident for me was when I was maybe five or six years old. The whole family was in our car—my brother and I in the back, father driving, mother next to him. I said something to my mom—something innocuous, but, surprise! my father reflexively reached around and gave me a swat across the cheek. It was the one and only time he ever did that. I was shocked and terrified and in emotional agony—the open-handed swat itself didn’t actually hurt at all. My mother was even more shocked, and she began to yell at my father, which only scared me even more. As it turned out, he had whacked me because he thought I had said something terrible to my mother. In fact, he was deaf in his right ear due to war injuries, and he’d misheard what I’d said. Had he stopped to think, he also would have realized that what he thought he heard was impossibly out of character for me anyway. But he was feeling pressured that day about business concerns, and so he was on the ragged jagged edge to begin with. As I say, I understand all this now, but it doesn’t take away the recollection of how, for one instant, the rug was yanked out from under my emotional world.
The second incident was years later, when I was a teenager. My mother was under incredible pressure that I had not recognized. She was having health problems, and she was desperate to get out of her marriage to my father but felt that she couldn’t without jeopardizing his financial underwriting of my brother’s and my educations. My mother, my brother, and I were all driving in my mother’s car. I said something, and boom! my mother jerked the car over to the curb and told me to get out. She told me that she just couldn’t take it anymore, that I was utterly selfish and ungrateful. At least, that’s what I think she said—it’s certainly what she ought to have said. All I really remember is her ordering me out of the car as she started to cry. In my heart of hearts, I knew she wasn’t about to leave me there, but I was absolutely paralyzed with fear and refused to get out of the car. My brother burst into tears. Our saintly mother had suddenly become a monster or a Martian or worse, and I was to blame. Quickly, she caught herself and relented, pulling the car back out into traffic. I vividly remember the exact corner where this occurred in Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley, and I still get a twinge anytime I drive near there. I also know that it was on a Wednesday in mid-April, and I always remember it when April rolls around. I know that afterwards my mother felt as bad about the incident as I did, but that doesn’t mitigate the emotional reality that her momentary rejection and threat of abandonment was totally crushing.
Interestingly, my therapist recently pointed out that most if not all of the emotionally charged incidents in my life revolved around cars. I suggested that you spend a lot of time in cars in Southern California and they create an artificially confined venue from which there is no escape as interpersonal issues come to the fore. Cars heighten reality. They are also incredibly conducive to fantasy. They are worlds unto themselves, both a part of and apart from the rest of the world. The FBI profilers have postulated that serial killers can function more easily in modern times because the mobility afforded by cars gives them a wider killing field which makes them more difficult to catch. I think the truth is the converse: Serial murder is not at an all-time high because it’s easier for serial killers to commit their crimes and get away with it, it’s because the cocoon of the car actually fuels the crime. If you move too much you never root, you never connect, and it’s insulation and fantasy which create the mens rea for serial murder.
Yet, once again my childhood traumas—car-related or not— may have held back my maturation and even glitched my chances for happiness, but they did not propel me to serial murder. So I get the chills when I imagine a child like Bill Suff whose entire emotional youth was manipulated and toyed with by his parents, taken to inexplicable extremes. We cannot ever justify the crimes that he committed as an adult, but you just have to accept as gospel that Bill Suff never ever had a fair chance, and, because of that, neither did his victims. Particularly once he bought his van.
Catherine McDonald had worked hard to get her life together, A pretty, thirty-year-old African-American from Los Angeles, she’d completely kicked a sometime drug habit and was employed as a domestic in order to provide for her two toddlers. She lived in an apartment not too far from the meticulously manicured middle-class house where she’d grown up and where her kids stayed during her workdays, taken care of by her proud mom and stylish sister. God was an important part of Catherine McDonald’s life.
The problem was, God seemed to like to see Cathy pregnant, and, in mid-September 1991, she was in the last days of her first trimester for “child number three”. Of course, Cathy had yet to nail down even a “husband number one”.
With her pregnancy starting to show, Cathy had to explain the situation to her employers, and they made it clear that, once she got “too far along”, they’d have to find someone to replace her. Permanently.
Panicked but practical, Cathy steeled herself and made a plan: she’d spend the next few weekends “moonlighting”, making some extra cash that she could stash away, so that she wouldn’t be a burden on her family when she was out of work.
The “moonlighting” would be a trade she thought she’d left behind but always knew she could and would resort to in a pinch: the world’s oldest profession—work that’s always there, skills that never get rusty. But no way would she let her family know.