Pain Don't Hurt Read Free

“You know, I was there when he gave that speech,” he would say, over and over again. No one ever dared to tell him that they’d heard it before. No one ever dared to tell him much. When “Moose” spoke, it was listening time. That’s what they called him, “Moose,” because he was just so fucking imposing. . . . He wasn’t much for conversation or dialogue; he liked to entertain, and often at the expense of others. If he was interrupted, the interrupter became his subject of choice; he would mock them until they either left whatever dingy Latrobe bar he was at that day or engaged his barbarism, which always ended badly for them. He used to take pride in the fact that he “rarely hit anyone with a closed fist.” Truthfully, it made little difference. Getting swatted by a leathery palm the size of a tennis racket launched by a man standing at six foot five and weighing over three hundred pounds, regardless of the age or size of the receiver, generally resulted in damage one was not likely to soon forget.
    I could hear my mother, my small-featured, passive mother, puttering around in her room, trying to busy herself. Trying to pretend she had an excuse for “not hearing” and therefore not intervening in what was going on. My father was born Harry David Miller in the Bronx in 1923. He was born the son of Benjamin Miller, a bastard of whose heritage no one is really sure (we suspect Russian Jew) and who upon being adopted took on the surname “Miller.” Ben served as a superintendent in a big apartment building and was married to a six-ways-from-Sunday mentally fucked Czech woman, my dad’s mom. My father learned to take and dish out the onslaught early on from her. My mother, on the other hand, grew up one of seven brothers and sisters in a family of Ukrainian and Mongolian descendants. Everyone on both sides of their families drank, and I mean drank in the way of the tragic Eastern Europeans. They made careers, hobbies, and commitments of their drinking. My father drank to become a storyteller. My mother drank to believe the stories. God only knows what about him captured her attention first. What about him caused her to think, This is the one ? When she met him he was, after all, still married. Only on his third wife at the time, and consequently third family. When he met my mother, then Helen Rose Lechman, a secretary with tiny, slight features, born and raised in New Derry, Pennsylvania, he made the decision to move on once again, as he had twice before. He abandoned the previous family and moved in with her. Perhaps it was the fact that my father had played in the NBA, had been a big-time athlete, and had fought in the war and been wounded. He was more worldly and had, in her small-town eyes, prestige. She longed for a bigger life, a better, fancier life. She longed to be a part of the upper class instead of just watching them go by with their designer handbags and brunches. Maybe she saw him as a way out. He later appealed to the Catholic church to annul his first marriage (because as we all know, having children doesn’t necessarily mean the marriage has been consummated in the eyes of the Catholics, and the church doesn’t acknowledge or care about other marriages following the first, so only the first one needed to be dealt with) and proceeded to marry my mother in Virginia before I was born. I didn’t find out until I was sixteen that I had potentially dozens of other brothers and sisters I had not known existed until that day. I still have never met any of them, other than my brother Colin, who was, in truth, my half brother and the product of the wife previous to my mother. Colin and I were never given the opportunity to be very close other than early on. Oh, but when we were young . . . I looked up to him when I was young, his wild taste in music, his charm, and what seemed like an ability to know and/or understand everything.