I was nine or ten when the lashings turned end of day ritual. Before each lashing I was to undress from the waist down—pants and panties—and bend over the edge of the bed they shared, my mother and stepfather whom I called Daddy. She was never in the room, my mother, always somewhere else in the house, doing something. I imagine her, now, drinking a cup of coffee or a glass of pinot grigio or folding laundry or cleaning the kitchen because that was what she often did, clean the kitchen. She liked a tidy home and was good at keeping a tidy home. We left our outside shoes at the door.
I could hear the slide of the belt behind me each time as he pulled it from his slacks. I still have one hanging in my closet, a belt, not the slacks. I don’t remember being whipped with that belt, in particular, but it became a talisman of sorts. It had personality, like an aging college hippie in bell bottoms and loose cotton shirt, the belt low on the hip, swaggering, holding it all together. It is brown leather and wide with a big metal buckle. I wore it nearly every day in grad school at Johns Hopkins then American University. I secretly called it Superbelt, my symbol, my token, my power stolen from his waning youth, reappropriated for my cause.
The Ritual
Daddy’s preferred belt was finer, smooth leather, meant for business. It was not luxurious. It was middle class appropriate. Brown or black, usually, whichever belt he’d chosen to hold up his slacks that morning, which is to say that it was always the belt he wore, never a belt from the closet. I sometimes wondered if he chose the belt in the morning with this in mind, feeding the belt through the loops of his slacks, visualizing ripping it out that evening upon returning home, an effective routine after a hard day’s work like a fresh cocktail waiting in my mother’s hand, a kiss on the cheek. I was the kiss. The belt was his unbearable virtue….
Read the full essay at Eckleburg: “Where Moral Authority Begins | Part V: The Unbearable Virtue of Superbelt“