My Story: Michael Totten

TITLE: My Story: Michael Totten

AUTHOR: Michael Totten

PERMISSION TO PUBLISH granted by the author.  All rights reserved.

Michael Totten has been professionally immersed for the past 50 years in working against humanity's rape and brutalization of Mother Earth/Gaia. In 1988-9, he drafted the first comprehensive climate action bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. A decade later, he received the Lewis Mumford Prize from the Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. In 2005 Totten co-led the development, testing and promoting of the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Standards - considered the gold standard for land-based carbon offsets.

______________________________________________________________________________

‍

A shaft of light pierced the windshield, cutting my brother Sam's face into two moods. The light side was full of confidence and casualness. It matched the easy banter he was making to deflect my worried questions. But the darkness shading his other side couldn't hide the deeper mood that threatened any moment to invade his light-hearted nature. It foreshadowed something terrible coming down the pike.

"Sounds pretty crazy to me, Sam," I said.

"I know, Mike, but if we don't do it then he'll really go berserk."

"I'd tell him to go to hell," piped up Brian, Sam's best friend.

"Yeah, and you and what army is going to save us from his wrath?" Sam said, his brow furrowing deeper as the car climbed the hill towards the house.

****

It had been a harrowing two days leading up to our dad's off-the-wall demand that Sam and I give him our driver's licenses. It was the day before Christmas. I was home for the holiday, having just finished my first semester at Yale.  School had been a grueling, draining experience, but nothing compared to what was now unfolding. I had stepped off the plane and into a bizarre play. Theater of the Abjured, as my classmate Jack called it.

Only heaven knows what triggered this course of events. All I know is that things changed that moment I stepped through the ivy-covered gates and into those hallowed halls of Yale. I was instantly heady, overwhelmed with a sense of freedom. I was at liberty to explore any and every worthy subject. I was the kid let loose in the candy store, the drunk told to close up the bar. And now I was finding the price to be paid for this seemingly innocent forage intothe garden of intellectual delights.

Two days before an innocuous incident had set off a tremor that shook our family's foundation and blew away the fragile semblance of peace that uneasily extended over the house. I had walked in to find my dad screaming at Sam for failing to find out the right information during a phone call to an investment broker. The situation was set up for failure from the first spoken word. In typical fashion, dad gave a hasty order to be carried out, and it was characteristically confusing and incomplete. But even if the order wasn't totally understood, to question him carried with it the threat of verbal and physical abuse. You just did the best you could, and prayed it wasn't wrong.

Inevitably, Sam botched the order. My father flew into a rage, throwing aside the plate of food on his lap. The rage followed the same pattern we had witnessed too many times before in our lives. His mouth contorted and twisted into a contemptuous sneer. His eyes narrowed into thin slits that seemed to barely constrain the molten hatred that threatened to engulf and lay waste to anything in its way. His mountainous mass of muscle and fat, 300 pounds of meanness, twitched in excitement like a hunter suddenly catching whiff of cornered prey. The giant mass came alive, agilely leaping from the chair, the pace quickened by some unfathomable, unconscious impulse that seemed to surge upward in him. He pressed his grisly, screwed-up face against Sam's. Greasy, bloody juices from the meat he'd been eating dripped off his chin, giving him that horror-filled look of Goya's blood-lusting Jupiter about to engorge another of his offspring.

"What's wrong with you, you fuckin' dummy," he screamed, jabbing Sam hard in the chest. The blow caught Sam square in the diaphragm, knocking the wind out of him. He couldn't catch his breath to answer, driving my father further into a frenzy. His enormous arms whipsawed faster and faster, glancing blow after blow off Sam, tripping him backwards into the furniture.

"Why you clumsy son of a bitch," he bellowed, smacking Sam in the ear. It hurt plenty. Sam went dizzy for a second, his equilibrium thrown off by the blow.

Having been away for four months from this madness, I suddenly saw with crystal clarity the dynamics of what was going on. It was one of those many seizures that my father experienced - not an epileptic seizure, but something much deeper and more ominous: a terrifying sickness of the heart and soul. It was as if his brain split open and some hideous outpouring gushed forth from a subterranean cavern of putrefying hatred. Something was gnawing at him, and he created a scene with us, in this case Sam, to unleash the viciousness. It would go on mercilessly until he fell, spent and exhausted, with one of us left bloodied and bruised.

Sam was almost always the target of these senseless beatings.  He was older than I by a year. Bigger than I was. He'd always been big for his age. In fact, he was a mirror of my father. Very, very big. And strong. The body and strength of a bear. But he was also slow and gawky. Not by nature, I now realized in watching him absorb blow afterblow by my maddened father. No, the awkwardness had been corruptly nurtured by years of floggings and flailings. It suddenly became all so clear. Sam played out my father's commands in strict obedience. He refused to resist, to fend for himself, or shield himself from the barrage of blows.

Now, however, I saw that there was so much more going on. Sam perversely exploited my dad's wrath. Forced to play the oafish clout, Sam did it with a vengeance. In a willful tum of events, he silently taunted my father's rage as if to say to him: "Bludgeon me till I'm dead, you bastard, but you'll never break my spirit."

I stood there, like so many times before, and watched Sam totally submit to the brutal flurry of blows. He never flinched or cried out like I always did, but stood there defiantly, taking it all like a human punching bag.

Sam reeled from a hard hit that nearly ripped off his nose, sending a gush of blood splattering against the wall. My dad went berserk at the sight of the blood, lunging at Sam and sending them both crashing to the floor. I snapped.

"Dad, dad, stop it! stop it!" I yelled, pulling at him. "It wasn't Sam's fault; he didn't know what you wanted." I couldn't believe myself. Never had I dared raise my voice at my dad. It stopped him short. Breathing heavily, he labored to make sense of what I had done.

"Get outta here," he roared, "both of you." That meant for us to go to our rooms and wait for his next command. However, my several months of freewheeling thoughts took it quite differently.

"Come on Sam, let's go."  I turned and walked out the front door. Sam followed without a word, and we drove away, silently wondering what the hel lwas going to happen next.

It wasn't long before we found out. We were staying with Brian when we got a call from my mom. She was crying.

"Your dad wants you to collect all yout hings and move out," she sobbed.

Apart from the sadness of knowing our mother was trapped in that house with an ogre, Sam and I were jubilant about the news. Sam was being told to move out on his own, which he had not done to date, only because of my dad's vehement protestations that he continue to live at home to save money while attending the local college. I was already moved out, although in the back of my mind I knew I would have to figure out how to finance the rest of my Yale education.

Sam borrowed a pick-up truck to move his few possessions: a desk and stereo with hundreds of records. Mom answered the door. The haggard face and limp body told us she'd been crying for hours. My dad, as always, was sitting in “his” chair, eerily silent. He didn't say a word to us, didn't even acknowledge our presence, but fixed his stony stare on the television set. Sam and I worked like clockwork and had everything moved out in no time. Mom sat at the kitchen table, quietly weeping. As we started to leave my father snarled at us.

"Look at your mother, you fuckin' queers. You're killin' her heart." Sam and I looked over at her, torn by her sadness and his meanness.

"Come here," he ordered. As Sam walked towards him, with me right behind, my dad picked up a gun, aimed it directly at Sam and pulled the trigger.

I leaped back, recoiling in the expected horror of a shooting. But the chamber was empty. My heart was pounding furiously, my senses alert and warning me to run for my life. I looked to Sam who had not even flinched. He stood there,almost defiantly staring down my father, yet not registering any emotion. My father couldn't get a reaction out of him.

"Go on, get out of here," he hissed.

"He's a goddamn lunatic,” I said, as we drove away. My skin was still a ripple of chills. Sam was steely calm.

"Yeah, poor mom. We're free and she's locked in with a loony."

As we drove down the hill a wave of sadness came over us. It was Christmas eve,and while other families were coming together to share in celebration, we were only too aware that this was the darkest time of year. Sam bought a six-pack of beer, as much to drown our sorrow as to spend the evening cursing the ogre. With mixed emotions because of the plight of our mom, we reveled and rejoiced in our release from years of slavish servility.

Christmas day brought the biggest surprise of our lives - a surprise that to this day remains a more powerful influence in my thought and actions than the birth of Christ which that day enshrines. Sam took the call. It was mom, barely audible or coherent through her muffled cries, informing us that my father wanted our driver's licenses. By some bizarre twist of logic, he believed that he would be liable if we were to get in an accident, since we were under 21. Sam agreed that we would bring them up, and Brian would drive us back. I vehemently argued with Sam that it was crazy and we shouldn't go up.

Sam was unmoved, coming back to the main point that not to do so would only make mom's life more painful.

‍