Walking Away

IT wasn't difficult to see the world of difference between my home and the secret society as a second family. I had a temperamental father, an emotionally weak mother and an aloof kin. Most especially, my brothers and I had to endure dad’s insensitivity and petulance, his ostentatious guidance and loathing of the miserable life without the comforts of wealth or power or influence.

Once, I displeased dad over an argument of some insignificant subject. He went ballistic and tore down my prized posters of Che Guevara and tortured prisoners pasted on the bedroom wall and smashed my guitar into several jagged pieces. After the incident, I just sulked and left the house thinking that Dr. Spock—with all his reputed expertise of child-parent harmony—failed to diagnose that a defiant teenager and an edgy father in mid-life crisis were indeed an explosive combination.

So to diffuse the ticking family bomb, I rarely went home and stayed instead at Regina’s place or at our society’s clandestine house and scrimped on simple amenities.