Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves (True Stories) (6 page)

Some things don’t add up. For one thing, your dad doesn’t have a tattoo. You’ve looked. For another, your dad loves German shepherds and Mercedes-Benzes, and what gives with
that
?

Only…your dad also guards his food. He really does. And talk about a
temper
. A couple times, your mom’s had to pull him off you. Once, you even thought he was going to hammer
her
. Step out of line and everyone pays.

So there’s this dangerous guy with no past…And now, as a result, you’ve made up stories to fill the gaps. He and his father were resistance fighters; no, they broke out of camp; no, his father
smuggled
your dad out so that he could continue the fight on his own. It’s all a little fuzzy, but you’ve turned your father into Batman, Superman, and the Lone Ranger.

And now, right there, is the knife that proves it.

***

Here’s what you do.

You leave the knife and, flushed with excitement, run inside:
Dad, Dad, I found this knife, this Nazi knife!

***

This is what
they
do.

Your mother freezes. Your father stares at you from the couch. Neither says a word. There’s a very long moment, a very pregnant moment, when you wonder if you should repeat what you’ve just said. Maybe your dad didn’t understand? Maybe heat stroke cooked his brain?

Then your father sits up, very slowly, and swings his legs down. “Let me check this out,” he says. “You stay here.”

He heads for the garage; your mom stays mum; and you do what you’re told. But you’re beside yourself. You’ve been vindicated:
Yeah, s’plain
that,
Lucy!
Finally, the family room door opens again and you look up, thrilled, because now he will
have
to tell…

But his hands are empty.

“Where is it?” You’re almost tempted to look behind his back, like you did when you were little and he made things
poof
for peek-a-boo. Later, you duck out to the garage yourself, and when you don’t find anything you start to wonder if maybe you really are the idiot that he says you are. “Dad, where’s the knife?”

“There is no knife,” he says. His face shuts down. “You made a mistake. There’s nothing out there at all.”

***

That is where this memory ends, like a film that’s been snipped before the third reel. You never forget the knife, though, despite the fact that for the next forty years they’ll continue to deny it ever existed in the first place. When they finally
do
fess up—many years later—they say:
Oh, we didn’t think you needed to know about that.

Some stories don’t end as conclusively as we’d like them to, I guess. But now you’re a shrink. You understand how much your dad’s survival has cost him, and you understand the necessity of the fictions that both of your parents still have to tell themselves in order to keep on living.

Today, what you wish you could tell that poor twelve-year-old kid—the one who spent so many years hurting, and doubting herself, and feeling so damned stupid it took a superhuman effort some days just to breathe—is this: all the people who come after your dad now to get his story—the historians, the scholars, the merely curious—they just don’t get it.

What the Nazis did to your father lives in him, and always will. That kind of damage is permanent.

But this is important. Pay attention now. What your parents did
then
was not about protecting
you
. It was about protecting
him.
And that makes you stronger than him. It makes you better. It means…the truth about that knife is yours, too. Never swallow a lie and ask for seconds. Don’t believe a story that isn’t yours. Your words are the knife, real and tangible, and they carry a terrible weight. You are the author of your life, and the knife is yours.

It is yours.

Marke Bieschke

Dear Teen Me,

You’ve just turned sixteen, and pretty soon, on a random Saturday night, you’re going to roll your mom’s car out of the garage, start it up down the street, and sneak off to a tiny downtown Detroit nightclub. That night is going to change your life. And no, it’s not because on your way back you make an illegal left-hand turn into the police chief’s personal car and get totally busted for taking the car without permission—although that certainly throws a monkey wrench into your summer plans.

But that night, with two misfit friends at your side, you discover an underground world where you’re accepted for the fantastic little freak that you are—a world that expresses itself though music, fashion, and dance like you’ve never heard or seen before. It’s full of outrageous and outspoken weirdos who love art and books as much as you do, and who want to hear what you actually think about things. This world is completely opposed to your everyday high school reality, where people beat you up because you dye your hair and listen to bands from England.

You’ll end up sneaking out again and again, of course. You’ll spend your days fantasizing about the next club night, figuring out what you’re going to wear, what you’re going to say, and how you’re going to dance—not to mention how you’re going to get there. You’ve finally found a place where you belong! (And where you’re not the only one who’s gay.) You treasure every second in this world, and eventually it won’t just be your passion; it will be your career.

Looking back, however, you realize something else: Taking the car and getting caught were part of a pattern of behavior that was more or less directly tied to your father’s alcoholism. You had no clue what was going on at the time—your mother’s largely successful attempts to hide his disease will implode a year later, when your dad shocks you and your sister by bravely and successfully checking into rehab. He didn’t beat you or anything, and you were always provided for. But he did shut you out in weird ways—ways that made you feel you had to struggle to be heard, and that amplified both your loneliness and your independence.

You knew
something
was going on, but what? By taking the car you were crying out for attention in a perfectly teenage way, but you were also escaping an incomprehensible situation, trying to break the silence about something you felt sure was there, but which was never discussed. You were looking for a family that could openly express itself.

In a way, the whole experience was a good thing. It all turned out okay—great, even. Your father has been alcohol-free for almost twenty-five years now, and the two of you have grown close. When you were struggling with your own chemical dependency issues, his recovery served as a model for your own. When some of the dear friends you met at the club that fateful night started getting sick with AIDS, you recognized the harmful effects of silence and started speaking out. You’ve learned to trust your instincts, and you know that friendship and success are there for you, as long as you have the courage to reach out for them.