Do You Believe In Monsters?

Do you believe in monsters? I do. I was having one of those truly deep and comfortable childhood sleeps, that as an adult you were never quite able to return to.

“I told you to be quiet!” he screamed as he spanked my behind quite hard. I had been torn from my deep slumber into a confusing and painful reality.

“Now go to sleep,” he growled. He had blown through like a tornado, the whole thing ending as quickly as it had started. One of my siblings must have been talking and he had mistakenly thought that it was I.

That was one of my earliest memories of Dean Paul, occurring somewhere around the age of six or seven. Dean Paul was my stepfather. My real father had run off with his secretary a year before, and had “conveniently” forgotten that he had kids.

Soon after, Dean Paul had come into our lives. When he married my mother, our church had hailed him as a hero for marrying a woman with four small children, when he was already raising two daughters of his own.

Dean Paul was a short stocky man, with short black curly hair. He bore strong facial features and he had a habit of licking his lips in a lizard like fashion. When he concentrated hard, his mouth would involuntarily form the shape of an “O”. He would answer us children with grunts, as if his words were too precious to waste on the likes of us.

He had worked at the local rail yard for several years, unloading boxcars. This had given him a tough muscular body. He was a very strong man with very strong hands. Those hands were large hairy monstrosities with big knuckles. Those hands were just barely too large for his arms, and at first glance, something seemed to be off.

Have you ever entered a room where a picture was crooked? You know that something is askew, but you just can’t quite put your finger on it. That was Dean Paul, something askew.

I can remember the way that he would double up his leather belt and wrap those big hands around each end. Next, he would “flex” the belt creating a snapping sound. He would do this every single time before he would spank us. A hint of sadistic pleasure would dance across his face when he snapped that belt. I grew to hate that sound.

Dean Paul was a very religious man, yet there was something lurking within him, just below the surface. Something angry that was always straining to burst free. Something that he could barely control and when he lost it and it was free, then you had better not be the closest one to him.

That something was a monster. Adults could rarely see it, but all six of us kids knew. All of the neighborhood kids knew. They would stay away from our house. Even animals knew.

Our cats would run away when they saw him coming. Probably had a lot to do with the fact that he threw them in the pool quite often. My brother and I would get very scratched up rescuing them. He tripped over our favorite cat, Snowball, once. He put that cat in a plastic trash bag and smashed it against the wall in front of us. I also had the horror of watching him stomp baby rabbits to death that had set up a burrow in our garden. 

Dean Paul was a devout enigma. Always two doses of church on Sunday and a healthy dose of wife beating on Monday, followed up by verbal abuse for us children the rest of the week. Dean Paul never directly punched us kids when we were young, but any minor offense and he would unleash the monster on the end of that belt directly to our bottoms. My brother and I also became real friendly with a few walls that Dean Paul enjoyed bouncing us off when his belt wasn’t nearby.

Dean Paul got home from work at five and dinner had to be on the table at 5:30 or mom was in for it. Tuesday was liver and spinach night. We kids hated it If you didn't finish every bite you sat at the table until 9 o'clock bedtime. For years my Tuesday ritual was spending three and a half hours sitting at the dinner table. I still can't touch liver or spinach to this day.

Dean Paul would have made Hasbro proud because he was good at games. Mind games. One time my mother let us watch a variety musical show called The Captain and Tennille. Dean Paul believed that the Captain was a minion of the devil, and to prove his point, he shoved my mother hard. She flew across the room, landing on top of my younger brother, nearly fracturing his leg and causing a severe ankle sprain.

Ten minutes later, after the monster had returned to its cage, Dean Paul came back into the living room with a white sheet over his head and said, “Boo, I am a ghost.”

I guess that was his way of making up with humor. We didn’t think that he was funny, but he sure did. He never laughed though. It was more like a half-snarl, half-snort sound that I couldn’t mimic, even if I tried. That was Dean Paul. Abusing one minute and joking the next.

On one occasion, when I was nine, my mom sent me out to work on the car with Dean Paul so that we could "bond". He looked me right in the eye and said, "Ya know, I always wanted a son."

I couldn't believe my ears. He was going to finally acknowledge me and say something nice it was a break thru! He finished his statement with, "Too bad I got a sniveling snot-nosed pansy like you." I just walked away. Words scar at that age. 

Dean Paul was also a sneak. He would attempt to creep up the stairs to our rooms when we were supposed to be sleeping, anxious to punish for any real or imagined offense that he could find. His knee would make a popping sound as he climbed those stairs, alerting us to his presence. The six of us kids would lie there, as quiet as church mice, listening for the popping of that knee and all that it brought with it.

Dean Paul’s talents didn’t end there. He was also a world class spy that would have made James Bond proud. He was paranoid that we were always doing something to spite him. When one of us children stepped out of line and Dean Paul didn’t know who the culprit was, he would put us all together in my oldest sister’s room. He would meticulously monitor his watch and enter the room every ten minutes and spank us all until somebody would confess. He called it the Round Robin.

I can remember one particular session of Round Robin that lasted two hours when my younger sister had dropped a roll of toilet paper into the toilet and had tried to hide it in a trashcan. More than ten spankings each. What a price we paid for that 30-cent roll of toilet paper!

Years later, my mother told me that Dean Paul had picked my oldest sister’s room so that he could listen to us through a vent in an adjoining room. He must have really enjoyed those terrifying conversations between the six of us trying to get the guilty party to confess. The fact that he still spanked all six of us, even when he knew who the guilty party was, really showed his true nature. He relished in misery and fear.

Dean Paul would act very abruptly and irrationally at times. He had a rule that we could not leave our bikes in the driveway, so as you can guess, we would rather cut our finger off than leave a bike in that driveway. Unfortunately, my new best friend Duane did not know about the bike rule, nor did he know about the monster that resided at our house.

One day, Duane left his new BMX bike in the driveway. Dean Paul ran that thing over three times with his old Dodge van, snorting at a crying Duane, “I’m guessing that you don’t leave your bike in my driveway again!” Needless to say, Duane didn’t want to be best friends anymore.

The one encounter with the monster that really haunts me is the Great Basketball Incident that occurred when I was twelve. I was actually fairly good at basketball and liked to play with my brother.

Occasionally, Dean Paul would make us play a game of 21 with him. He would run around, knocking us down, calling every basket that he hit his Bread and Butter shot. It was his scheme to shoot long shots, keeping the game close, and then he would run in for an easy basket to steal our victory at the last moment.

I was unaware of how angry the monster was that day. Dean Paul bowled my little brother over and ran in to finish the game with an easy lay-up . . . and missed! Call it fate, or misfortune, but the rebound landed right in my arms and I could see Dean Paul bearing down on me like a raging locomotive.

I just tossed the ball, more out of fear than anything, towards the basket. 'Swooosh!' It was hardly even an attempt and should never have gone in, but it did. How I wish it hadn’t.

At the moment, I was happy to have won. The joy was short lived as a flash of orange whizzed towards my head. Instinctively, I ducked and the basketball narrowly missed me, slamming into the garage door.

He had thrown the ball so hard that the force of the impact shattered three of the four windows on the garage door. Before I could react, Dean Paul grabbed a fistful of my shirt and screamed in my face, “I let you win! Say it! Say it! I let you win!”

After I said it, he stormed off screaming back at me that he had let me win and no twelve-year-old could beat him at anything. He never played basketball with me again.

One time Dean Paul beat my mom so bad that he injured her back and she ended up in the hospital. That was the straw that broke the . . . well, you get it. We packed up and left a short time later. He stalked us through our teenage years, but eventually found a new wife.

I no longer associate with Dean Paul. I had heard that he remained a board member at our old church until he punched one of his teen-aged daughters in the face and broke her nose during service. They asked him to leave the church after that. I heard it from a reliable source, the daughter who got punched.

He also used to steal off the train cars a lot, and I was told that he got caught stealing some fur coats from a boxcar and he busted up the guy that reported him pretty good. The last sad thing that I had heard was that his new wife had tried to kill herself a few times.

So, I spent seven key years, six to twelve-years-old, living in pure terror. My days of being raised by a wife-beater, thief, sneak, spy, abuser damaged me. I am an introvert.

In high school I was anti-social and had not one friend. Not one. I didn’t interact well with males, especially in positions of power. I suffered from a medium level of repetitive OCD. I have also been prone to bursts of anger and severe impatience, which have caused me some problems in life. I have conquered many of these issues with age, experience, and faith.

Now back to my original question. They don’t have googly eyes or antennas on their heads. They aren’t covered in fur and don't have hideous faces. They don’t hide under our beds or live in our closets. They walk amongst us. So, do you believe in monsters. I do.



(Dean Paul is his first and middle name. Last name not presented for obvious reasons)