Chapter 1: I Wish My Father Was Dead

Bitterness would be a welcomed emotion. I would love to feel that, or anger, or sadness, or, God help me… joy! But the honest truth is that I feel nothing…absolutely nothing for my father. My recollection of him as a parent consists of a handful of fleeting memories, usually involving him giving me some breathy, bleary-eyed nudge or grasp of my shoulder. He would mutter things like, “You know you’re my buddy, right.” As a 6 year-old, I would stay awake until 3 or 4 in the morning watching extremely inappropriate movies involving excessive violence, demonic images and soft-core porn. If still conscious, my father would say, “you really shouldn’t be watching this.” But I’m fairly sure that was more him saying that to himself that to me. Besides, if he had been serious about me not watching those movies with him he would have demanded that I get into my room. Luckily for me, I was advantageous enough to have taken in masterpieces of the cinematic arts, such as Goulies, Goulies 2 and Sorority House Massacre before I could read the opening credits. How’s that for cultured!

Over time, I realized that my dad didn’t talk weird at night because he was tired. He didn’t avoid going to school events, soccer games and Sunday mass because he was shy, hated sports or was an atheistic. He didn’t go because he was a drunk. And a drunk doesn’t do much, other than drink… a lot. My earliest memory of the contents of our refrigerator was 20% dairy products, 15% fruits and vegetables, 10% meats products and 55% Coors. I will always have a rush of nostalgia when I see the yellow, red and silver of a can of Coors. There’s also the sound of the pull top breaking away from the top of the can. You don’t hear it much these days, but that unmistakable sound of a top being popped is etched into my memory. I’m not sure how much my dad would drink before passing out, but during my childhood, the image of my living room after 10:30 pm, every night of the week was our multi-colored couch, bathed in the glow of the television, my father sitting motionlessly on the right side cushion, a Coors in his left hand, the remote in his right, a glazed-over stare on his face, eyes half-shut and the theme song to Hill Street Blues reverberating off the drywall.

This is the image of my father. Not a violent tyrannical ogre storming through bedrooms, lashing out at his children, angry about his own life’s failings. My father was a motionless, half-dead drunk. If you’ve ever had a long-time family pet, you may understand the following concept. If you’ve only ever had rodents or reptiles as pets… first of all, I’m sorry… secondly, just bear with me.

Your 17-year-old golden retriever has degenerative hips. She was a present from Santa Clause when you were 4 years-old. She was there when your baby brother was born. She wore countless costumes to the delight of your sister and mother and to the chagrin of every male in sight. She used to pull you on your wooden sled across your frozen backyard in the winter. Now she can barely make it out of her smelly old doggy bed. What to do with the old girl… most people let nature take its course. Surgery is an expense you just can’t rationalize for a dog. But you feel guilty enough to buy a doggy wheel chair. Since you’re feeling generous now, you decide to buy her a new bed, because that old one really does reek. You also buy her the doggy treats she loves, a new rawhide bone… oh… and she’d love one of those pull toys that squeak! Then you get home and you set up all the new items you’ve purchased to make your dog feel better. But the poor thing's hips are still shot. She doesn’t want to move around, even if you sling her ass up in a doggy wheelchair. Her teeth ache all the time, so she completely ignores the bone and the toy. She looks up at you and then rests her head back down on the old smelly doggy bed, because it’s taken her about 10 years to get that sucker just right and she has no intention of starting over on that new one you just bought.

My dad tried alcohol treatment programs. By that I mean, he admitted himself into rehab at the request of his employers. He worked for a very prominent law firm in the accounting department and was known to take extended lunches and leave a little early to make it to the bar down the street. The last straw was the ticker-tape parade for the Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys in 1992. Apparently, some businesses don’t appreciate employees returning to work completely inebriated following a 2 ½ hour lunch. They couldn’t fire him then. There’s a process for these kinds of things. After all, alcoholism is a disease. If you fire someone because they have a disease, that’s grounds for a lawsuit. Surely a prominent law firm would have known that. So into rehab he went and once he was “cured” of his disease his employer was then given the green light to write the pink slip.

I realize that I’ve broken my golden retriever metaphor up by inserting that bit about my dad getting fired for being a drunk, but I promise it will be totally worth it in a few paragraphs.

So here was my father… a 36 year-old, unemployed alcoholic. Before his exit from the work force, he and my mother would drive home every night together. As soon as they got home, my dad would disappear into their bedroom and my mother would begin the process of cleaning up the destruction of 3 latchkey kids, left alone from 3:30 to 6 pm. Sometimes demands were made by my mother for immediate assistance, but often there were deep sighs of frustration, followed by the passive aggressive banging of cabinets and crashing of pots and pans as dinner was prepared.

This was our familial structure for the first 11 years of my life. Then one morning, dad wasn’t in the front seat of the car as my brother and I were driven to school by our mother. I don’t remember ever asking questions about causality and gray areas involving culpability involving marital disputes, but suffice to say it was pretty clear that the my mother was contemplating my dad's worth as a husband, father and man.

Before long, my dad did get another job. He was a movie theater manager, a position he had excelled at during his early twenties. I knew nothing of pride or job-related embarrassment in relation to my parents, so I just assumed everything was going to be fine from them on. Unfortunately, I was completely unaware at the time that a movie theater manager typically makes substantially less than an accountant at a reputable law firm.

Even before the dip in income, my family had always seemed to live paycheck to paycheck. At an early age, I learned not to ask for expensive items. (As a side note, if I ever get a Power Wheels Jeep for Christmas, all of my childhood fantasies might just come true!) The cut in pay leveled my parents’ already teetering relationship.

I never knew my parents to be affectionate with each other. In fact, my mother once showed me a photo of my parents at an office Christmas party that confused me to no end. My mother was sitting on my father’s lap with her arm lovingly wrapped around his neck like a scarf. My father’s eyes were not blurred or half-shut. He was smiling enthusiastically, genuinely. I didn’t recognize these people as my parents. This had to be some sort of performance they were putting on… some kind of play for the party goers. But it was just simply a singular moment in time, caught on Polaroid film with “Christmas Party ‘88” written in blue pen across the bottom.

My mom told my father to leave shortly after I started 6th grade. I’m not sure how he ended his career as a movie theater manager, but I know that his sobriety, however meaningful at the start, was extremely short lived. He left one afternoon. One day here the next day gone. The night before exiting stage left, he dramatically knocked all the family photos off the wall in the hallway outside my bedroom. It was late at night and there was a great deal of shouting from both my father and mother. My older sister, who at that point was a 19-year-old adult, trapped at home amidst the destruction, joined into the shouting as some point. My brother and I stayed in our rooms. Not wanting to enter into the argument. We simply wanted it all to stop.

We didn’t hear from my dad for a while. He called a couple months after he left to tell us that he had given away our dog. Our mother insisted he take our beagle with him when she kicked him out. She was more than a little annoying, as beagles can sometimes be, barking and howling at just about anything that either moved, made noise or existed on her plain of consciousness. My father has placed her in the care of some extended family members... which may or may not have been code for the pound or a grassy clearing off the side of the highway.

It was at least 2 years before I heard from him again. It was always a simple phone call from somewhere near Houston or San Antonio. It was always about how things were going well. There was always a few minutes of conjecture about the state of Dallas Cowboys Football. And at the end of every call, there was a tearful, “I love you” from my father and an awkward and forced, “I love you” from my end.

The summer before I turned 18, he called and asked if I wanted to go on a fishing trip with him and a couple of my uncles. We would be taking a boat out into the Gulf of Mexico, casting our lines into the brine, retying paternal bonds, listening to Harry Chapin Carpenter sing “Cat’s in the Cradle.” Instead, I spent the entire voyage experiencing sea sickness for the first time in my life. My father was a mixture of disappointed, guilty, embarrassed and fearful that I would never want to speak to him again after the episode. In reality, I just knew that I needed to take a Dramamine and stay on the deck at all times when at sea. I didn’t see him for 4 ½ years after that.

There were several periods of time between the ages of 12 and 29 in which I have thought to myself that it would be a lot easier for everyone if my father were dead. In fact, I actually did assume he died after the first multi-year silence. It’s easier to view yourself as the child of a deceased father than it is to see yourself as an abandoned child of an alcoholic. There’s less sadness it seems. It’s easy to play the what if game if you know for a fact that the “what if” would require some sort of miraculous resurrection from the dead. When the “what if” simply requires your father to drive 3 hours and stay sober long enough to have a conversation with you, it’s sometimes hard to make peace with the fact that it’s never going to happen. I have wished for my father’s death to come quickly, painlessly and with as much dignity and grace as any human could ever ask for. I don’t wish it because I hate him. I wish it because I keep wanting him to be more to me, but I know it’s never going to happen. I guess that makes me a bad person, but if you’ve ever had a 17-year-old golden retriever die after years of misery, the relief of not having to see your dog in pain every second of every day is worth the heartache of their death.

I know it's not a perfect metaphor, but the hidden meaning behind it is the truthful admission that I see my father as a less-than human creature who doesn't warrant much more than the dignity of a beloved family pet. Maybe that is what makes me a bad person.

In the end, I don't want to have to keep wondering if I have a father or not. If he were dead, than at least that question could be answered and I can move on with my other the stunted and unhealthy relationships in my life.

Epilogue: A Note about the Bering Strait

The saddest thing a person can realize about himself is that he is not as great as he once assumed. If you’re lucky, you realize it early on in childhood. Maybe you find yourself always being picked last for red rover. Or maybe you just can’t seem to finish your math worksheets as quickly as the other kids. As you go through life, you see the realization of ungreatness hit your friends. Some decide to listen to different music than you, or they kiss the first girl who smiles at them, just so they can achieve some level of self-confidence and a sense of acceptance.

It’s a rite of passage that every human being goes through. It’s the search and struggle for belonging. The simplest metaphor is the migration of the American Indian. Stay with me… it’s really not that complicated. Let’s say that the ultimate goal of every single person crossing over the Bering Strait in 15,000 B.C. was to make it to Rio de Janeiro. Everyone just assumed it was the perfect spot on earth, so that’s where they headed.

On the way through Alaska, some Indians said, “You know, walking really sucks… and I think whale actually tastes pretty good, so I think I’ll stay here.” Further south into Canada, some said, “Have you guys tried this hockey thing? It’s pretty fucking awesome!” Onward into the Great Plains, some stopped and said, “I think if we stopped in this general area… and then maybe moved east, we should find some pretty nice real estate that we can hang on to for a while.” Still some soldiered on, losing a few to the jungles of Central America, where sacrificing virgins on the tops of pyramids is not only accepted, but encouraged!

The brave few that made it all the way to Rio were certainly proud of their achievement. They managed to persevere despite the inviting allure of settling for “good enough.” But as they set their tent pecks and look around, they say, “It’s nice… I mean it’s a little colder than I thought… but it’s nice… not great but nice…”

Underwhelmed, they give their buddies in Peru a call, but they’re so coaked up, partying with their “Peru” friends that they don’t answer the smoke signals. They give their buddies in Mexico a call, but they haven’t really talked to them since their Pan American reunion last year and before that they had totally lost touch the summer they left for Columbia.

So the Rio Indians are the ones who achieved their goals in life, or at least THE goal set during the childhood. Now they look around and they wonder what the hell all that walking was for. Why didn’t they just stop in Arizona… it was a total party tribe. Sure they wouldn’t be schmoozing it up with other well-healed Rio Indians, but they could have partied like rock stars, gotten a BA and started their own adobe construction company.

So there it is. My metaphor for what it’s like being a middle class white kid. Everyone starts off assuming they’re going to be doctors, lawyers, professional athletes or, worst case scenario, the president of the United States. The vast majority will discover their own limitations before they get to high school.

When did I realize that I was nothing special… or better yet, where did my Indian metaphor decide to settle? I think he ended up somewhere in central Texas. See… he decided to take a shortcut to Rio once he got to the Rocky Mountains. He knew he didn’t have it in him to just walk his ass all the way to Rio, so he jumped on a log in the Colorado River, assuming that he could take it all the way to the Caribbean and then swim up the mouth of the Amazon River. He had it all planned out, but once he hit Austin, TX he realized that not everyone is meant to make it to Rio.