Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (14 page)

I
lay on an air mattress in the back of my truck, looking up at the night sky.

Most people think the brightest star in the sky is Polaris, or the North Star. It’s not. It’s Sirius, or the Dog Star, for its place in the constellation Canis Major, the Greater Dog. It’s the brightest because it’s also (after the sun) the closest, and getting closer. To my mind, it’s a stretch of the imagination to see a dog in Canis Major, which is basically a Y with a leg at one of the ends of the Y and another leg at the solo end. Both legs are about the same length and pointing in the same direction, but it could be any animal with four legs and a long neck. People see what they want to see.

That night, waiting to find out if the dog was going to make it, I was finally able to see the four-legged animal in the constellation. I thought of all the other ways the word “dog” was used in the English language, and it struck me that most of them applied to or resonated with me. “Die like a dog,” as in what I wanted the kids who tormented me to do. “Sick as a dog,” as in how I felt so many times as a kid when I was afraid to go to school. “Dog eat dog,” as in how the world seemed to me, and I was definitely the underdog in that regard. “Every dog has its day,” as in what I was still waiting for. “Dog tired,” as in what I felt physically. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” as in what some people thought I should do. If that phrase meant letting go of the things that hurt me, I couldn’t live up to it, because I wasn’t holding onto them; they were holding on to me. One last one: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight—it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” an adage I’d learned to apply, and adopt, almost as a slogan, but at great cost.

My favorite word, though, was “dogged,” meaning tenacious, stalwart, and untiring. I’d read about researchers who put heart monitors on sled dogs to see what sort of heart rates they were able to sustain over long distances. The researchers were shocked to learn dogs could sustain heart rates of three hundred beats per minute for hours, which was astonishing because scientists had previously thought the only mammals capable of sustaining three hundred beats per minute were tiny ones like mice or shrews. It explains how a pack of wolves can run down an elk, even though elk are faster than wolves. Wolves can outlast anything. I told myself the dog in the hospital had heart, in both senses of the word. I hoped it was enough.

Then I told myself I did, too. Surviving my childhood wouldn’t have been possible without it.

I grew up in Cudahy, Wisconsin, which is on the western shore of Lake Michigan, on Milwaukee’s “sout’ side.” You don’t pronounce the “th.” It’s about five square miles, with a population of about twenty-four thousand people, mostly white. The beaches are rocky and the water is freezing cold, with weather-beaten concrete breakers every couple hundred yards that constantly fight a losing battle against the waves and the winter ice off the lake, and woods laced with bike paths on the bluffs above the beaches. General Mitchell International Airport abuts the town to the west, putting the town, every few minutes, directly in the flight paths of low-flying airplanes taking off or landing, depending on the wind direction, but when you live there, you get so used to it you hardly notice.

The town was founded by a guy named Patrick Cudahy, who built a meatpacking plant/slaughterhouse that suffered a large fire in 2009, on the Fourth of July, as irony would have it. The fire put about a tenth of the town out of work. Apparently a couple of local kids were shooting off illegal fireworks and one landed on the building and burned a hole through the roof, which sounds exactly like something that would happen in Cudahy. There’s a massive foundry for Ladish Forging that runs half the length of town, on Packard Avenue, that makes castings and machined titanium parts for the aerospace industry. The other big employer is Bucyrus-Erie in South Milwaukee, the neighboring town to the south, where they make the giant strip-mining shovels, the ones that chop the tops off mountains. It seems like there’s a bar on virtually every corner, places called Rollie’s Tap or Vnuk’s Lounge or Sparky’s, filled with Polish guys with hardworking hands and maybe axle grease under their fingernails and burn holes in their Carhartt overalls. My first “real” job was working for such a man, a concrete mason named Bob who was truly a hardass. Not having a father in my life, I found his temper and directness pretty intimidating.

People didn’t drive fancy luxury cars in Cudahy, at least not when I grew up. They drove station wagons, minivans, and cars that were quickly and badly rusted from the winter road salt. I was thirteen when I saw my first BMW, and I assumed the driver must be rich. If you ride a motorcycle in Cudahy, and you probably do, it had better be a Harley, because they’re made in Milwaukee. The people who live there think of themselves, accurately, as hardworking and straightforward, connoisseurs of life’s simple pleasures, with traditional family values. To be fair, I can’t criticize an entire town just because I have some horrible memories there. I also have some truly incredible memories, like falling in love for the first time, exploring the steep lakeside cliffs as a kid, or qualifying for the state swim meet my senior year. But the difficult years at home and at school tend to discolor the rosy memories I do have. The most traumatic and difficult times of my life happened in Cudahy. Sometimes it’s hard to think fondly of my time there.

My house was an ugly five-unit apartment building on East Barnard, set close to the sidewalk. The front of the building was brown brick and featured lots of windows. The paint peeled from the window trim. There was a weird gap between the two front apartments, as if they’d originally built two houses close together, then added the rear apartments. The neighborhood was squarely middle-class, though it looks worse today than it did then. We were not wealthy, and it showed. I had my own room, with a mattress on the floor instead of a bed, and a poster of a white Lamborghini on the wall. I was probably the only kid in town who had his own filing cabinet. I didn’t keep files in it, but rather special books, souvenirs, and various artifacts. My musical tastes were eclectic and changed over time. In seventh grade, I went through a phase where I listened to Mozart on my boom box, but later my tastes transitioned to music a bit more lively, Metallica and Slayer. I had a fascination with some rather colorful reading material, which I kept in my filing cabinet, titles like
Poor Man’s James Bond,
written by a man named Kurt Saxon who is credited with coining the term “survivalist,” and
The Anarchist’s Cookbook
, written by a man named William Powell who has, since its publication, become a devout Christian who’s tried to have the book removed from publication. I can’t say precisely what drew me to these types of books. In spite of everything I went through, I did not have revenge fantasies. I found in them a way to escape reality, but also, ways to fantasize about having and exercising power. I believed that one day I would be in the military, shooting firearms and possibly working with explosives. Those books reassured me that such a future was possible.

My father, Mark Anderegg, was competent and respected at work, but at home, he could be cold, arrogant, narcissistic, crude, and downright mean—in short, a bully. As he aged, his hair changed from dark to salt and pepper, and he had a close-cropped beard his entire adult life. He was probably just shy of morbidly obese, with a massive beer belly, and he wore wire-rimmed gradient eyeglasses that turned dark in the sunlight but never seemed to turn entirely clear indoors. He also, frequently, wore bandanas as head bands, though his hair was never long enough that he needed to hold it back from his face, and he seldom did anything strenuous enough to work up a sweat. While married to my mother, albeit briefly, he told his coworkers she’d tricked him into getting her pregnant. “I hate kids,” he would later tell Michelle. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with Zak until he was sixteen.” He was cheating on my mother, Sandra, with Robin before they divorced, and he later cheated on Robin, or so I was told. Any semblance of cordiality between my mother and father ended when she was forced to sue him for falling behind on his child support payments.

Robin was also overweight, with large thighs and fleshy upper arms. She had a pale pinkish complexion, an up-turned nose, eyes that narrowed as though she were frequently squinting, and a small mouth set in a face that was broad and round.

Robin resented me because I was the baggage that came attached to Mark. After my mother sued Mark for child support, the contempt he and Robin had towards Sandra increased, a hatred that Robin took out on me.

Sandra was my primary caregiver, though she was, by any measure, a mess. She was also overweight, with a weak chin and a prominent overbite, blue eyes that drooped and made her look sleepy, eyebrows that were so light as to be barely noticeable above her narrow wire-rimmed glasses, thin light brown hair that hung straight down to her jawline like a helmet, and bangs. She came from Polish and German extraction, raised in a strict Catholic household and educated at a Catholic school by nuns who were, as she described them, harsh on a good day and sadistic on a bad one.

A child, of course, sees his parents through a child’s eyes and interprets parental behaviors in a child’s terms; yet even then, it seemed to me, though I couldn’t explain it or understand it, that she did not know how to love. It was just like the way some people can’t carry a tune or tell a joke or cook a meal. She wasn’t like other moms I knew, and our relationship was not like the relationships other boys had with their moms. We were more like squabbling siblings than parent and child. If there was supposed to be some sort of parental authority she had over me, she never established it, or she was too timid to assert it. I did not try to please her or win her love because she couldn’t express love in a way that made me want it.

Instead of hugging me or holding my hand as I crossed the street, she would sit on me and pin me to the floor by the wrists and say, “Tell me you love me.” If I said it, it was only to get her off me. In truth, I felt scared and trapped when I was around her.

Her inability to understand what I was experiencing at school, as the victim of a prolonged bullying campaign, was entirely consistent with the way she dealt with the feelings of others. She was cognizant of the way they felt, but she was incapable of honoring these feelings when it conflicted with her condition, her OCD. She was, for example, utterly incapable of ever being on time, for anything, anywhere, ever, despite any and all efforts she made to be punctual. She worked for a doctor for almost thirteen years and she was late for work over half the time, until, when I was in seventh grade, the doctor finally had to warn her that if she was late again, he’d have no choice but to fire her. Most people would find a way to be on time, but my mother could not. After she was fired, she spent nine months on the couch, depressed. She lost job after job for the same reason, sabotaging herself over and over again, but each time she would say only, “I don’t know what my deal is—I meant to be on time—I failed again,” incurring punishment and punishing herself without apparently realizing that being chronically late wasn’t just about her—it was, quite simply, rude to the people who expected her to be on time. This wasn’t enough to get her to change her behavior, though.