That was the beginning of Joe’s secret life of quiet rage and periodic violence. He grew up looking for a fight and usually finding one, but he chose the moment and the venue to ensure that his dad was unlikely to learn of it.
Frank was a roofer, but there was no scrambling up ladders and hustling from eaves to ridgeline with one leg. He was loath to take disability from the government, but he accepted it for a while, until he found a way to turn a talent for woodworking into an occupation.
He made jewellery boxes, lamp bases, and other items inlaid with exotic woods in intricate patterns, and he found shops that would carry his creations. For a while, he cleared a few dollars more than the disability payments, which he relinquished.
A seamstress in a combination tailor’s shop and dry-cleaners, Donna came home from work every day with hair curled from the steam-press humidity and smelling of benzene and other liquid solvents. To this day, when Joe entered a dry-cleaning establishment, his first breath brought vividly to mind his mother’s hair and her honey-brown eyes, which as a child he’d thought were faded from a darker brown by steam and chemicals.
Three years after losing the leg, Frank began suffering pain in his knuckles and then his wrists. The diagnosis was rheumatoid arthritis.
A vicious thing, this disease. And in Frank, it progressed with uncommon speed, a fire spreading through him: the spinal joints in his neck, his shoulders, hips, his one remaining knee.
He shut down his woodworking business. There were government programs providing assistance, though never enough and always with the measure of humiliation that bureaucrats dished out with a hateful—and often unconscious—generosity.
The Church helped too, and charity from the local parish was more compassionately provided and less humbling to receive. Frank and Donna were Catholics. Joe went to Mass with them faithfully but without faith.
In two years, already hampered by the loss of one leg, Frank was in a wheelchair.
Medical knowledge has advanced dramatically in thirty years, but in those days, treatments were less effective than they are now—especially in cases as severe as Frank’s. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, injections of gold salts, and then much later penicillamine. Still the osteoporosis progressed. More cartilage and tendon tissue were lost from the chronic inflammation. Muscles continued to atrophy. Joints ached and swelled. The quality of immunosuppressant Corticosteroids available at the time somewhat slowed but did not halt the deformation of joints, the frightening loss of function.
By the time Joe was thirteen, his daily routine included helping his dad dress and bathe when his mother was at work. From the first, he never resented any tasks that fell to him; to his surprise, he found within himself a tenderness that was a counterweight to the omnipresent anger that he directed at God but that he inadequately relieved on those unlucky boys with whom he periodically picked fights. For a long time Frank was mortified to have to rely on his son for such private matters, but eventually the shared challenge of bathing, grooming, and toilet brought them closer, deepened their feelings for each other.
By the time Joe was sixteen, Frank was suffering with fibrous ankylosis. Huge rheumatoid nodules had formed at several joints, including one the size of a golf ball on his right wrist. His left elbow was deformed by a nodule almost as large as the softball that he had thrown so many hundreds of times in backyard practices when Joe had been six years old and getting into Little League.
His dad lived now for Joe’s achievements, so Joe was an honour student in spite of a part-time job at McDonald’s. He was a star quarterback on the high-school football team. Frank never put any pressure on him to excel. Love motivated Joe.
In the summer of that year, he joined the YMCA Youth Athletics Program: the boxing league. He was quick to learn, and the coach liked him, said he had talent. But in his first two practice matches, he continued hammering punches into opponents after they were sagging on the ropes, beaten and defenceless. He’d had to be pulled off. To them, boxing was recreation and self-defence, but to Joe it was savage therapy. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, not any specific individual, but he did hurt them; consequently, he was not permitted to compete in the league.