Members Only

By Patrick Best

T.J.'s father, Tom, was an odd, hunched-over man who’d retired from the Army and spent more time at the VFW drinking beer and throwing darts than he did at home. He was somewhere between 45 and 65 years old when I knew him. I’m usually pretty good at guessing a person’s age, but Tom was a tough one. He didn’t have the wrinkles or grey hair of someone who’d walked away from the nursing home in the middle of the night, but his demeanor and movements were those of a shuffleboard-playing fellow whose steak-eating and dancing days were behind him. T.J. said his dad was a war hero who'd "been in Special Forces and killed hundreds of gooks" during the Vietnam War. He said he'd snuffed out North Vietnamese soldiers in their tunnels with his bare hands, and that he'd eaten worms and roaches to survive when he spent months alone in the jungle. I was never able to imagine Tom crawling around with a knife in his mouth and a machine gun strapped to his back - he looked like a pencil-pusher to me - but I always enjoyed hearing T.J.'s stories.

Tom never seemed drunk when he was at home, but he always smelled like liquor and looked tired when he shuffled down the hall with a five o’clock shadow, wearing black socks and white tennis shoes. In the entire seven years of my friendship with T.J., I don’t recall him saying more than two words to his father in my presence. On the rare occasion that they were home at the same time and crossed paths, it was as if they were invisible to each other. There were never happy greetings or hugs or I love yous. Just the facts:

Tom: “Where’s your mother?”
T.J.: “Patio.”

or

Tom: “Where are my keys?”
T.J.: “Kitchen counter.”

or

Tom: “Has the dog been out this morning?”
T.J.: “Yes.”

Ursula Andress

His relationship with his mother was even more complicated. Kitten (that's what everyone called her, including T.J.) was a beautiful blonde in her mid-30s who was equal parts Reese Witherspoon and Ursula Andress. She'd met and married T.J.'s dad while he was stationed in Germany. She had a very strong accent, and she spoke at a volume that was barely loud enough to hear if you were standing right in front of her. It was almost impossible to believe that she was married to Tom. It was a match made in Bizarro World. She was beautiful and exotic enough to be on the big screen. He looked like a former history professor who now spent time sifting through items in a shopping cart under the overpass. The little soft-spoken Kitten would disappear when she something made her angry. Lightning bolts and nuclear bombs had nothing on her when she lost her temper. At age 13, I was at least eight inches taller than her, but she scared the living hell out of me. She was usually able to keep her composure when T.J. had friends over, but I could see it in her eyes when something upset her. A fork in the sink, a trash can that hadn’t been emptied, a wet towel on the floor. It didn’t take much. T.J. seemed more afraid of her when she didn’t release the hot lava that bubbled behind her eyes, and he did everything possible to stay away from her. He knew Mt. Kitten would erupt sooner or later and spill its fiery contents all over him.

I only saw her hit him one time. I was spending the night at his house and we were hanging out in a room that was behind their garage. Tom had been "renovating" the room for years, but we cleared an area amongst the power tools and the fold-up sawhorse for our sleeping bags and boom box. We went to the kitchen and ate a sandwich and some chips, careful to clean off the counter and put away the items we’d used to make our late-night snack. We listened to a Phil Collins tape while we played the board game, Risk, and T.J. told me about how much he loved a girl in our grade named Holly.

Someone knocked on the door.  The knocks were spaced apart in a dramatic, deliberate fashion. Knock. One second pause. Knock. One second pause. Knock. T.J.s face told me something was wrong. He didn’t look at me.

“Yes, Kitten?” he said.

“I need to speak with you for a moment, T.J.” Kitten said through the door in a cold, formal tone.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said as he stood and headed toward the door.

“We put up all the food, right?” he asked as he placed his hand on doorknob. He didn’t wait for me to reply. He opened the door and closed it behind him.

The living room was adjacent to their kitchen, and I could see them through the large sliding glass door that led to their back patio. The room where T.J. and I were spending the night was also accessible from the patio and there was a window that gave me a good view of them. The room was decorated with mahogany-colored antiques and a red and black tapestry hung on the wall above a Victorian Sofa. A single lamp was on in the room and it's warm light on the dark decor made my view look like a dark and brooding painting from the Romantic Period. Kitten was holding a paper towel in one hand and a thin belt in the other. T.J. was nodding his head as her face contorted as she yelled at him and shook the paper towel inches away from his nose. When she started hitting him there seemed to be no warning. He turned his back to her after the first two or three whips hit him on the upper arm and across his chest. The rest were focused on his legs, buttocks and back.

I couldn't hear anything she was saying to him. I couldn't hear the slap of the belt against his body. The music of Sir Phil Collins was still playing and served as the soundtrack for the horrible silent movie that was playing on the glass screen in front of me. T.J. didn’t fight her or run away or even plead with her to stop. He gritted his teeth and let his mother do what she needed to do. I wanted to help him. I wanted to run out of the house and never go back again. I just stood there, slack-jawed, and watched as my friend got the worst beating I’d ever seen. When he came back to the room 15 minutes later, I was zipped up in my sleeping bag and pretended to be asleep. He didn't try to wake me, and neither of us mentioned a word about it the next day.

All our friends constantly asked T.J. why he always wore blue jeans, t-shirts and a Members Only jacket, even in the summertime when the temperature in south Alabama sometimes topped 100 degrees. Kids at school occasionally picked on him about it, but it didn't seem to bother him. He could have told one of his gollywhopper lies to make the questions go away. He could have told them he had a skin condition that made him get hives if he received too much direct contact from the sun. He could have said he was training his body to deal with extreme heat because he was going on a secret mission with his dad in the Sahara Desert. Most of the kids would have accepted any explanation, even if they didn't completely believe him. "I like the way it looks on me," he would flatly reply. Nothing more. I never asked him... because I knew the truth.

Some names have been changed to protect the innocent.