Tetched: A Novel by Thaddeus Rutkowski
A non-review by J. Stefan-Cole
At the top of Thaddeus Rutkowski's novel is the definition of Tetched: adj (1921) somewhat unbalanced mentally; touched [Alteration (influenced by obsolete tached, of a given disposition) of touched]. You know, those kids in school you'd make a rotating sign around your temple at, behind their back, to your laughing friends; touched, whacked, weird, odd, different. Those kids who wore punk or goth before punk and goth hit the mainstream, and before the Columbine High School massacres made headlines out of outsider kids who took their pain to deadly extremes.
Told in the first person, the book spans from a boy's rural childhood in a dysfunctional, biracial family (he's a "Twinkie," yellow and white, Chinese American) to a more functional if not entirely convincingly resolved adulthood in the big city. Everything in between borders on the insane. My take on the kid is that he's the sane one, reacting to the world he found himself born to, bending out of shape in the home soil. Underneath, he's perfectly tuned, it's the others that strike the sick notes, and the craziness of it leads to experiments in self-mutilation, like tying a string tourniquet-style over his penis, toying along the edge, "I found if I stood on a chair I could hang myself. I didn't want to hang myself by my neck, because that would have been too dangerous. So I hung myself by my wrists." It's a tortured form of taking control.
Self-immolation evolves into a desire to hurt others (though this is largely kinky S&M rather than outright, hardcore violence against women) and he confesses later, when he is older and has escaped the home hearth, the need to hurt results from having had no control as a child. This is breakthrough awareness and a turning point in what looked predestined to be a disastrous life. He had no control because his parents had none and they, mostly his artist father, kept changing the rules. Arbitrary is about as good as his father's behavior gets, and its all down hill from there until we start to share the kid's dread. His Asian mother is better adjusted but not by much as she hangs on to her own composure in the face of a husband who insults her pretty much non-stop. She works as a lab technician in a hospital, supporting the family, and is therefore not at home much, and when she is, her Chinese aphorisms and strange wisdom don't do much to clarify the world for her three bewildered children.
Dad had been in the army and he has a thing for guns and discipline, though his own discipline has been compromised by booze, disappointment and radical lefty thinking gone awry. He wants to be sure to have enough ammo on hand for when the revolution finally comes. He can rant about Che, but he's pretty much a bitter drunk who blames his three kids for his failed artistic ambitions. It's not even clear from the boy's perspective that the father has talent. It's mostly mental cruelty of the sort that comes from a battered ego, oblivious to the harm it perpetrates, though there are hints the father may be sexually abusing the boy's sister. Pretty much, Dad is a big child and a sad bully who robs his son of his childhood. He takes him to bars, gets drunk, shouts crazy stuff, "He waved the broom in the air. 'I've got a Mauser,' he shouted, 'and three hollow-point rounds: one for the president, one for the vice president, and one for myself.'" The boy makes a New Year's resolution that if he can't keep Dad from assassinating, he'll turn him in to the FBI.
Under this familial regime the boy could easily have turned into a Jim Shepard charcter, a Project X nightmare kid gone murderously wrong. That is not the book's intent and there is something, thankfully, more acute and less doomed about the tetched kid in Rutkowski's tale. His startled inner voice comes through with a kind of light in spite of the dark all around. This is especially vivid in the scenes where he walks the woods with his hunting rifle, never very serious about killing anything. He is so alone, and in the solitary woods his glimmering awareness of things being off, coupled with an awkward sense of himself, work to salvage something from the wreck of his home life. His father tells him to get a van, go out on the road, become a hippie. He doesn't want to support a college kid, and advises automotive school so he can fix the van when it breaks down. His mother, though, made sure her kids studied and the boy decides on college. If he can make it there with wits intact. Mom tests her husband's blood and tells her son his dad has syphilis. The boy reacts by wanting to hit himself and he borrows his sister's riding crop: "Guessing I was kinky, knowing I was different, and resolving to keep my deviance very quiet, I kept going with the riding crop until I got bored." Whatever gets you through the night?
The writing is raw with an honesty that cuts and is at the same time funny in an absurdist's take on the world. College is the time for smoking pot and dropping acid, to try to find girls to tie up, to hitchhike and go to concerts and see the world. There are plenty of types in college and the kid is instantly less of an isolated oddity. Socially, he's in a bigger pond. Away from home, a sweetness slips into the narrative voice, a vulnerability. Girls don't let him tie them up as he'd hoped, and he is otherwise sexually not up to the game, it's the torture, the desire to humiliate that arouses him. He can't communicate in any other way, could he possibly know how to? This is sincere; it's the only way he can connect, and Rutkowski brings that out with comedic pathos. One or two girls go along, up to a point, and are surprised when he's not that interested in penetration. He steals socks from the public laundry to rub when semen builds to a pitch that demands release. He walks around abashed, yet not dully unaware of what he is, and for all his angst and weirdness is never a victim of himself. That's the ironic sweetness that comes into the voice. He is not his father. He's a mess for sure, but is, mercifully, not his father.
Studies over, he moves to the big city, gets an apartment, a string of lousy apartments in fact, a batch of lousy jobs until things begin to improve. The boy has grown up. Finding bondage partners must be easier in the city, he figures, but isn't, as it turns out. The sense is if he ever did meet up with the perfect victim he'd probably be bored.
This is Rutkowski's second novel and is an amplification of the first, Roughhouse. He writes in vignettes, close to the bone with zero waste. There is greater depth in Tetched, bigger chances taken, more exposed. Here the S&M search becomes almost heroic, a search for the self—or the self that got twisted out of shape—and real emotional release. The further the tetched guy gets from the home front the freer he is to be something other than a wandering bundle of damaged goods. It's a genuine journey, genuinely worth the trip.
©2005 J. Stefan-Cole
Comments
I'd like to thank Janyce Stefan-Cole for a considered, reasonable review of a book about craziness. There are some nice details in the review, such as the mention of the Twinkie (a Eurasian halfie, or someone who is white on the inside, yellow on the outside). And there are some interesting questions that I wish I had answered in the book, such as is the father actually talented? I didn't see a mention of the chapter about an artists colony--it's perhaps one of the lighter chapters, and I read it aloud fairly often. I'll put a copy of the review in my press kit.
Thad Rutkowski
Posted by: thad rutkowski | October 17, 2005 10:40 AM