My dad got into a fistfight with Cordell right in front of me. That was crazy. As a kid to see your real dad and your stepdad fight, like fucking go for it. I was young. I was, like, nine or ten. I remember seeing it.
My dad and I come back from apple picking, coming in, seeing my stepdad, who was in a bathrobe. He was a truck driver for a supermarket. My dad came in, and Cordell says, “You don’t say fucking hello to me, Bill?” My dad’s like “I said hello to you. It’s your fucking fault if you didn’t hear it.” All of a sudden my stepdad picked up a coffee mug, fucking whaled it at my dad’s head. My dad ducked and it exploded on the wall. They just went at it, like, grappling around my kitchen table. My dad’s the nicest, most well-adjusted guy, and then suddenly apples are flying. I’m throwing apples. My dad is throwing apples. They fight until they literally leave the house, like outside the front door. My dad’s a pharmacist. A pharmacist fighting a truck driver. It was something like out of a Clint Eastwood movie. It was insane, insane stuff.
Hours later, I got on the phone and Cordell was on the phone in my house. My dad was on a pay phone, and they apologized to each other while I was in the middle. For my benefit, to hear them apologize to each other. They had to get together and apologize over me. Looking back on that, that was terrible.
Cordell was an abusive fuck of a dude. A terrible dick. He’d come home, literally an arm in a cast because he got into a fight at work.
I would talk back a lot. That was my thing. I got into a ton of fights all until eighth grade, and then I was like, “Oh, I got to stop this.” But I was getting good at it because I was fighting a forty-year-old guy at home. When you fight this big fucking forty-year-old dude, this fat dude who is strong, literally throwing a pitchfork at me and I’m dodging a pitchfork, getting locked up in the barn.
I just learned to be more of a grappler. It was like a lot of slaps and runs or punches in the stomachs and runs. But when I was in sixth grade I got into this fight with this kid and he gave me a sixth-grade punch. Like boom, punch in the face. I remember I grabbed him by the neck and we were by a car. There was a car fender there. I was like “Whap, whap.” Like, his face into a car fender. We were both suspended from school, because he started it. But I stopped that. I remember being like “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t like this.”
JOHN DARNIELLE
I had fresh earrings when I was fourteen or fifteen, and that pissed my stepdad off to no end. I think I got Mom to sign off on it. He hated that. He was a left-wing political activist who beat his wife and child and was homophobic. I was getting girlie at fourteen and fifteen. I was growing my hair long, I was trying on eye shadow and rouge and stuff like that.
The day that he knocked me hard enough to actually knock out an earring, and the post dug into my neck, that was the day that I wound up getting thrown out of the house. I had to go live with my real dad.
It was a mess. The thing about that period of time was that I had at that point a strong network of friends. For the first time I was close enough to grown up that my friends weren’t just my friends. They were meaningful people in my life who I talked to about my life and who I was constructing that amazing teenage life with. They know your struggle. Suddenly, there was this big blow-up day about which I remember only that he did that. He was slapping me around the face hard enough to make the earring dig into my neck and make me bleed. I went back to my room and sat there, listening to music, and my mom came down the hall to say it was time for dinner. I’d been sitting there for half an hour contemplating what I was going to do to express that I didn’t deserve this and the extent of the rage, so I punched my window. I put my fist through the window. It felt like a million bucks.
I never felt so good in my whole life. It was like, holy shit, and the house melted down. My stepfather screamed that he was going to beat everybody’s ass even worse. My mother is crying, my sister is crying. It was a whole terrible scene.
I’m bleeding all up the arm but I felt like a million bucks. It felt so good to show them what it felt like inside. There was no way of getting it through their heads.
That was my victory.
PAUL SCHEER
I remember Cordell having my mom held like a hostage with a handgun and seeing that as a kid. During a fight.
I say it now and I think, “Wow. That was crazy dark. That’s insane.” But as a kid it doesn’t register like that.
I remember saying to my mom “We got to get out of here.” My mom’s like “No, no, no. It’s okay.” I was like “We got to go. We got to go.”
Marc
Did he hit her too?
Paul
Yeah. He hit me, he hit her. But you know what? Never to the point where we were really hurt. I think that was always my line. “Oh well, we don’t have broken arms. Or we don’t have this. Or we don’t have that.”
He would apologize, but he was like an older brother instead of a dad. It was that kind of relationship. I think he was competitive for my mom’s affection toward me, which is insane. It’s, like, that’s a mother and a son. You’re a husband. It would come out a lot in Indian burns. You know that kind of stuff, which really hurt.
I called child protective services at one point. They came to the house and they interviewed the parents side by side. They were like, “Does this happen?” My mom’s like, “No.” They talked to me and I was like, “Yes.” But they think, oh, the kid’s lying. The parents are telling the truth. They left.
Marc
Did you get beaten for that?
Paul
Yeah. Oh yeah. Of course.
My mom rebelled in the craziest ways. My dad’s so nice and great. The man she’s married to right now, also wonderful and great, but with Cordell, she was like, “I want something different.” She got something insanely different.
Then my mom kind of wised up at a certain point and she was like, “Oh, we’re out of here.” This guy has more guns than he has shirts.
This is a crazy thing. My mom pretended that he won a trip, a hunting trip. She created these envelopes. It was like, “Cordell, you won this trip.” She got him plane tickets. Got him a hotel. Created this whole fantasy, seven days away for him. The minute he left the house, a moving truck pulled in and we got all of our shit out of the house and we took off. We left Cordell’s farm, and we moved into a small apartment, and that was it.
JOHN DARNIELLE