August 20, 2019
The thing I like to say about my dad is that he didn’t really want a son, he wanted a buddy. He wanted someone he could be smart with, or, failing that, be smart at. He wanted someone he could chill with and, at the end of the day, go home.
He wanted someone he could drink with. Someone he could take to the bar.
Yes. He seemed fundamentally uncomfortable with the fact that I was his offspring.
It wasn’t an always thing, of course. There were a few times we really connected.
Yes.
One time, we taped up glow in the dark stars on my bedroom ceiling and walls to make my bedroom into a night sky when the lights were out.
Yes.
One time, when driving you to school on a snowy morning, there was an accident far ahead and traffic was stopped on Highway 93, and I had to pee so bad, he had me just step out of the car and pee, blocked off by the door with my back to the car behind me. Traffic started moving then and I had to walk awkwardly to finish peeing before I could hop back inside the moving truck. We laughed. On days we knew we’d be late because of weather, we’d grab french toast sticks from Burger King.
Yes.
One time, we lay on our backs on a beach at Lake Powell and stared up at the real night sky and talked about the satelites that went overhead. We would try to guess, based on how fast they moved, whether we were seeing the same ones again later. He talked of his sisters, Patty and Sue, and how they were doing. He talked of his brother, Joe. He told me Joe was the trouble kid, how he got caught on PCP once and when grandma brought him home from the police station, he missed the door to the house entirely and walked into the door jamb and fell down laughing. Grandma kicked at him, cursing up a storm. He told me about his dad, blowing up an inner tube and floating out into the middle of the pond with a six pack or a bottle of liquor and drinking as he looked up at these very same stars, floating on his back. About how sometimes, his dad would fall asleep out there and grandma would have to throw rocks at him to wake him up the next morning so he could paddle back ashore and get to work.
One time, after you switched majors from biochem to music education, you went skiing with him, but had an upset stomach, so you stopped to buy some Alka-Seltzer tablets. You asked what kept them from fizzing until they were dropped in water, and he started to explain about buffers, then cut himself short and said coldly, “But you won’t learn about that, now. I don’t expect you really want to know.” He had you ski alone the rest of the afternoon.
Yes.
One time, you told your best friend in the area, Joseph, that you had rode your bike to the mall, Villa Italia, God rest its weary soul, and bought magic cards. He mentioned that while out with you and your dad, and your dad fell behind a few steps and kicked you. You rode home in silence. Joseph refused to ride with you again.
Yes.
One time, you kissed him on the cheek after he hugged you good night and he laughed in your face. “You thought I was your mom, didn’t you?” he said, then got up and left the room, shutting the door behind him. You thought, years later, decades later, that he really meant to say, “You thought I was your parent, didn’t you? Best buds don’t kiss.” You never kissed him again, and he never kissed you at all.
Yes.
When teaching you to read with the book Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss, he jokingly warned you never to actually hop on him or he’d kick you from one side of the house over the roof to the other, and then back again. Joking, of course, but you were already so terrified of him you believed every word.
He said the same during our one talk on sex. That if I ever got a girl pregnant and didn’t use a condom, he’d do it five times and then leave me on my own to be a dad.
He raised me, but the definition of ‘raise’ here is a very elastic one.
Dig deeper.