The Hidden Man Read Online Free PDF

but in the end usually exhausting him, until he finally turned his ire on an inanimate object like my bedroom door, sometimes a chair. The wall of my bedroom looked like a Beirut stronghold.
    Looking back, it was probably comical, my father swatting at air, cursing me out, while I danced around him or crawled beneath him. I probably should have hung one of those punching bags in my room. My dad could have gotten in a pretty good workout, maybe even turned pro on the welterweight circuit. But he wouldn’t have enjoyed people hitting back.
    Once I sprouted up in height, and especially once I started making a name for myself on the gridiron, my dad basically left me alone. Something in the acclaim I received on the football field, and throughout the community, gave me immunity within the confines of our house. I figure, my father couldn’t put me down when everybody else was propping me up, so he gave it a rest.
    Either that or he paid attention that one night when I actually swung back. I always wondered if he had even remembered the punch the next day, waking up with a hangover and a shiner under his left eye, which he rightly could have chalked up to another night at the office in his line of work. That was right around the time the abuse stopped, as it happened, but I never really knew if he remembered his kid popping him, and it didn’t seem like polite dinner conversation. One of the many unspoken things that festered among our family.
    There was something ironic in the ability I had to make defensive backs miss in the open field, each of them my drunken father lunging at me and finding air. I have a distinct memory, my junior year of high school, taking a screen pass sixty yards or so for a touchdown, dodging two or three defenders in the process, then standing in the end zone and looking up in the stands at my family. My mother and Pete were there, as always, but that particular time so was my father, though I don’t remember him clapping. What I do remember is wondering, at that moment, looking up into the stadium lights on a cool Friday night, several hundred fans screaming with enthusiasm, what my father was thinking and having no idea. My best guess was that my father resented me at that moment.
    In any event, when I was no longer a convenient target, Pete bore the brunt of our father’s abuse. He was younger but also smaller and more docile. He wasn’t a fighter, and he wouldn’t avoid my father. He took it, every time. I would listen to it, lying awake, my head inches off the pillow, the sickening sound of open-handed slaps and closed-fist punches, Pete’s muted groans. I did nothing to stop it. To this day, I can’t put my finger on why. No matter how much I hated him, no matter how much I disre spected him, and even when I stopped fearing him, he was still my father.
    Pete and I never really discussed it. I broached the topic a time or two, but he always deflected it. As a child myself, I took it as survival instinct, a coping mechanism, but as an adult I can’t imagine what it did to him. I do know he’s had trouble committing to an occupation (three jobs in four years, currently in pharmaceutical sales) and to a woman (three in four months), and he gambles and parties way too much. It doesn’t take Freud to see a connection.
    It pained me to watch him at work here, reminding me as he did of our father. A part of me wanted to shake him, because he had all the charm of our dear daddy but none of the underlying malice. He could put up an impressive front, no question, especially in a setting like this, entertaining a flock of women. And it wasn’t insincere. There was a big heart in there. This guy basically rescued me after everything happened with Talia and Emily. Maybe it helped him, in a way, looking out for me instead of the other way around, over these last few months.
    Now, here he was, back to sneaking cocaine in the bathroom of a nightclub. He’d never been an addict, per se, at least as far