The Monster Got Game

(Dean Paul: The Competitor. Biographical series about my childhood. This story deals with domestic violence.)

My brother Ken and I had an electronic football game that you could play head-to-head. It was advanced for the late seventies. Dean would often insist that we played it with him. 

When it was his turn his mouth would form into a rigid “O” and his tongue would slightly protrude as he concentrated. On the few occasions that he would lose, he would throw the game across the room and scowl. “This thing is broken! Besides, it’s not real!”

No, it wasn’t real. Real was worse. 

The one encounter with the monster that really haunts me happened while playing basketball. It occurred when I was twelve. Indiana is basketball land, and all children that I knew played. 

I was actually fairly good and liked to play with my brother. Occasionally, Dean Paul would make us play with him. His favorite was a game called 21. 

21 is basically an all-against-all game. If you make a basket during a scrimmage, then you get two points and receive a free throw opportunity for one point per basket. First player to 21 wins the game. 

My stepfather 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, his mouth ‘o-ringed’ with his tongue sticking out, 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 game for the first time ever. 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.

Dean Paul 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!”

Have you ever been so scared that you couldn’t move? I was frozen like a fear popsicle as I dangled there. His spittle landing on my face while a trickle of my piss released involuntarily.  

After I stuttered it out that he let me win, he stormed off screaming back at me that he certainly had let me win and no twelve-year-old could beat him at anything. Dean Paul never played basketball with me again. Thank God.