“Don’t the sun look angry through the trees?” - Warren Zevon
My dad finally died which is something I’ve thought about for a long time. Not in an excited sense but in the wonder of “what happens then?” What happens when dad’s gone?
My dad was, at his level best, a bad uncle. He was like one of the relatives you’d be cautioned to avoid when extended family you didn’t normally see arrived for the holidays. Don’t get me wrong: he wasn’t the molesty uncle but the “let’s give the 13 year olds booze and weed” kind of uncle. I was 16 when my dad started giving us booze and weed, my younger brother would’ve been 13 or 14 then. For Christmas when I was 18 we each got a fifth of booze and our own personal flasks, you know, so we could drink on the go like we were beat cops about to retire in a 1970’s crime movie.
My dad was always good if you needed to get fucked up or needed to borrow twenty bucks, or just needed a couch to pass out on. He always had weird people coming and going from his life who only ever had first names, weed or pills, and eventually disappeared as quickly as they arrived. Mostly they were fat, drunk guys like him but sometimes they were teenagers. He had a succession of teenage girls living with him on and off for several years. One brought in boys when he had to go out town when my grandmother died and he told me his guns had been stolen when that happened. Another teenage girl who lived with him was, as he was fond of repeating “a lesbian”, which was something I’d never bothered to confirm or deny. She eventually left and when she bumped into my wife a few years later said she had to cut ties with him because he’d call her constantly to verbally berate her. I never fully knew the details of his relationships with these kids and probably never will but it always felt off to me. I’ll leave it at that.
My dad notoriously burned a four unit apartment down by dumping a pile of congealed bacon fat he’d been saving into a skillet, cranking the heat up to max and walking away. Turns out spattering liquid animal fat in large quantities can catch fire, although I’d always wondered if this was the cause given his habit of passing out with lit cigarettes in his hands. Anyways, he grabbed his dog and jumped two stories off the balcony after inhaling burning soot and was intubated and sent to a burn ward out of the area for copious skin grafts. Just so I’m clear: he wasn’t supposed to be smoking in his apartment or keeping a dog. My dad wouldn’t be controlled by the rules of polite society, a lifelong rebel without a thought.
He had learning difficulties as a kid, suffering from severe dyslexia and color blindness. I have to wonder if he had mental health diagnoses that, had they been addressed, may have helped him in later life.
The small Oregon town he grew up in was one of the beautiful to look at but hard to survive in places that populate the Oregon map. Lumber and mining was the bedrock of the economy and when those industries shut down my grandfather, a man who’s first name was the letters EB (not pronounced “ebb” but “eee bee” with neither letter standing in for any other name or designation), had a mental breakdown and was institutionalized when my dad was a boy. Eventually he came home but on a cocktail of heavy duty narcotics that kept him sedate and unable to work. He spent his remaining decades wandering in place and sucking down chewing tobacco when he wasn’t staring off into the middle distance.
My grandmother was a kind woman but one without any real control of anything, let alone her brood. My father was the last of five children: the eldest, Ernest, was a “jailbird” and had been in prison since I’d been aware of him and presumably he died there; my aunt Shirley married a series of abusive men starting when she was 15, one of her suitors being the only friend my mentally deficient cousin Doug had ever made and having his mom running off in a sexual flurry with his buddy didn’t do him any favors; my uncle Delbert was the success story of the group with a barber shop and other business endeavors, he famously divorced his wife at the same time his cousin was divorcing his and somehow they ended up marrying each other ex’s (and they say true love is dead); my other uncle Larry was the slimeball of the lot, when he wasn’t stealing from everyone to feed his speedball habit (fyi, a speedball is when you shoot up a mixture of heroin and crank, in case you weren’t white trash enough to know) he was beating the shit out of his wives, the last time I saw him I remember thinking “I don’t think I ever want to see this man again”, and thankfully I haven’t.
My dad was the last child of the family and in an economically depressed place with a tumultuous home life, difficulties at school, and whatever else he experienced that he took to the grave with him, it’s not a shock he resorted to getting fucked up as a kid. In that kind of environment substance abuse is two things simultaneously: an expected behavior and the only escape from the crushing boredom and depression.
My dad took that attitude with him across state lines and into California where he met my mother and tried to remake himself. He was “sober”, at least in the sense that he said he was, and he became a Christian. He wore that mask as long as he could until he grew to resent it and left. My dad was the kind of man who would’ve been a born coal miner a 100 years ago, one in a gaggle of nameless workers going from dusky mines to taverns then to cots and back again until black lung would’ve taken him at the age of 41, but in the Reagan 80’s that wasn’t a thing on the west coast, so he tried to be an upstanding family man instead.
Ultimately, my dad’s biggest sin was being himself. He was a broken, beaten child that never grew up. I don’t know what the chip was on his shoulder but it was a big one and he carried it with him everywhere he went. He was angry, never fully knowing how to connect to people and forever caught between needing people and hating them for being needed. I don’t feel bad that he died or that I haven’t talked to him in years; he lived his life how he had to live it and I lived how I had to live mine. We had divergent paths, and the man he tried to be and failed at is the man I’ve strived to become. He’s left me with a lot of bitter memories, very little of them good, but he did leave behind a detailed roadmap of where not to go and what paths to avoid when the inevitable fork materializes in the path. He was like the mirror opposite of John Bunyan’s pilgrim in Pilgrims Progress: my dad was a conglomeration of all the characters who attempt to lead Pilgrim astray. He lives on as a reminder of what not to do and where to avoid going if you want to flourish.
I don’t have any actual pictures of him and truth be told I don’t really want them, but I do have an image of him that lives in my mind, a school picture of as a boy of maybe 9 or 10. I remember it because it was one of the only pictures of him as a boy I’d ever seen; stuff like color photography and Kodak cameras would’ve been an expensive commodity in tiny Riddle, Oregon in the 60’s and 70’s, a luxury that wouldn’t have been considered. As far as I’ve ever known my dad’s family didn’t keep a lot of pictures.
He had deep, weary eye bags for a child that belied an inherent exhaustion kids don’t normally have. I believe that picture stood out to me then because it would’ve been the only time I would’ve seen him as an innocent person, just a kid who’s worst sin at that time would’ve been cursing or stealing coins from my grandmas purse. I knew him as the giant, hulking and angry thing that yelled at my mom, punched holes in the walls and threw shit at us; The man who would come home just to scream then storm off and disappear; The man who made my brother and I pack up our clothes into garbage sacks and load up in the car so he could go “sell us into white slavery” because we didn’t clean our room fast enough; The man who insisted on driving me to school one morning when I was 13 just to tell me he was divorcing my mom then dump me out of the car without another word, my world destroyed and P.E. starting in 20 minutes. But at some point in his life, before all of that, he was just a little kid who needed someone or something to intervene and direct him forward, and he never found it.
At some point when I was in my mid-20’s we were sitting around drinking in my yard. For a brief time we found some semblance of camaraderie in alcoholism, and when we were together we were drinking.
I don’t know what possessed him but he looked over at me and asked “I was a good dad, right?” I didn’t know how to answer, and I think I might’ve laughed. What kind of question is that? Why ask a question you don’t want an answer to? Are you joking?
I said something like “sure, dad, whatever”, and I guess that appeased him or at least gave him the ability to quiet the internal dialogue looping in his mind enough for the subject to change.
It’s weird having him gone now because we were estranged for so long that he became a non-person to me. After so many years of struggling with him he just became something I didn’t consider after I could finally loose myself of him, which was a source of relief at the time.
I don’t feel guilty about that but I do feel pity for him, I feel bad for that boy who had so much stacked against him and no one to help him grow into a functioning person and teach him how to be a parent or what it means to be a father. I think the core of my dad was that scared and exhausted child, and all the intervening years did was build up a grizzled man around that perpetual core.
Some peoples lives are suffering and pain and my dad was one of those people. I may not have been able to when he was alive but I feel like I see him clearer now, although the image will always be muddy. We may not have talked these last several years but I hope he can find some peace, and I hope that his suffering and struggle is over.
So, “what happens then?” I don’t really know. I expected some kind of revelation or understanding to wash over me but I’m left cold. I’m left with a sense of sadness for who he was way before I was born but not for the man he became. I’m left conflicted, and probably always will be.
That was my father, that was my dad as best as I can understand him.
Rest in peace, dad.
No comments:
Post a Comment