It's 10:28pm on Wednesday night, March the 9th in the year 2011. I'm listening to jazz on Pandora via my obscenely large TV and blu-ray player, and typing away on my shitty old Mac, trying to make sense of a text I just got.
***sorry 2 tell you that we had 2 call the cops & baker act ur dad 2 nite. told us he was going to die 2 nite. wouldn't go willingly. it is very sad situation***
It's from my aunt, forwarded to me by my sister. I knew this was what was going on behind the scenes since Monday when I spoke with my aunt. I know my relationship with my father, and he knows the relationship that he helped develop with me. Or lack thereof. So here I sit at age 34, trying to piece my life together and finally making headway with a solid job at the Daily News, a wonderful and supportive girlfriend, and a truly fun and loving apartment to come home to.
I'm IMing via Facebook with Rebecca, my ex from about seven years ago, who really gets the relationship I have with my dad more than anyone. He even blames her for my mom deciding to leave him nine years ago. Not the previous twenty five years of their marriage, but my girlfriend of three years who I was living with just a mile away. So when I tell her, she's not too surprised, even less so with my reaction.
And what is my reaction? It's definitely shock, that's for sure. It's the type of information that actually never really sets in. My father has lost his grip on reality and is delusional, manic, and suicidal. All the things that I confronted last summer while living in Harlem, sleeping on an air mattress in a small room, working the graveyard shift, cut off from all humanity, and devastated and broke from a relationship that went so far south that I have noticeable physical scars from it.
So I get it. I know where he's at. If anyone in this entire world could get through to him, it'd be me. We're fucked in the same exact way. He made sure of that. Or his father, and so on. But really we're just trying to co-exist with people that we can not possibly relate to or really ever understand.
"I'm an alien from Pluto", my father tells my sister, and even at so young an age, we understood it to be weird. This sci-fi loving sociopath raised me as best he could while somehow making me Darth Vader while he got to be the eternally youthful Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight. I was as dimunitive as R2, as spazzy as C-3PO, as dopey as Chewy, and none of the cool of Han Solo. I couldn't even have that.
He was an older brother, too old to really click with and too young to be into the same things, who drifted apart after he gave a speech to 10 year old me in the back room of our old house, where he, in so many words, told me that he wouldn't be around because he knew that my sister and I didn't want him around like some overly interfering father figure you see in the cinema.
He told me I'd never grow a beard. I grew a beard. Two years later, he grew a beard. It's just how it was. Though, he had his own creative mid-life crisis around 40 which brought him to stand-up comedy classes, headshots, extra work, screenwriting, and a dog (that I'm sure he psychically linked with, unable to relate to non-programmable human beings) named Einstein who recently passed away and probably played a huge role in this breakdown. Him and a woman he dated years ago used to call the dog my brother when I'd visit. My brother. A dog.
I hated it then, but oddly it sort of makes sense. I always had this sort of "raised by wolves" thing going for me when as a child I was attacked by this massive dog that was my best friend. We played together, ran together, slept atop one another. And then he woke up and clamped his jaws shut on my face one day. Kind of a sideways tangent, my dad did rush me to the hospital when I almost choked to death when I was barely 5 years old. I could have died then.
Or back when he was 17 and had gotten my mother, 16, pregnant. A musclehead dirtbag in 1976 with two older sisters and two younger sisters, long blonde hair, cowboy shirts and bellbottoms. If they had aborted me, had given me up for adoption, anything, then who knows. I used to obsess about the idea, but now I don't question it because it's so beyond my control and right here, right now I have things in front of me that need taking care of.
This is the time when I need to really take a long hard look at myself and ask "Who am I?" I write erotica now and getting feedback on my work. I co-created a digital comic with an amazing Marvel Comics artist. I've written a totally experimental Beat novel. I run the Tumblr blog for a friend's news site, and starting to write articles. I am trying to get back to podcasting with my oldest friend about writing and art in Brooklyn. I even have a new heavy metal-esque comic in the works and a few other ideas that're in continuous development.
And I've found the love of my life. I've lived enough of my life, made my fair share of mistakes, and now I can truly appreciate what's before me. And it's a best friend who really helps me through every obstacle in my path, and lets me do the same for her. I'm finally building a family of friends with her, and she with me. A life is growing in Brooklyn. And it's mine.
And it's good.
Sorry pops. I just have one last quote from you that you once spoke to me a Father's Day some years ago, when you lived far out on Long Island, and my sister and I came to go out to dinner with you, me from NYC which you had never visited after helping me move in, the one bit of fatherness I did get from you, well, at that Father's Day you spent 10 minutes telling my sister how great, amazing, accomplished, beautiful she was, reminding me of all the endless presents you'd buy for only her on every holiday and birthday, and with all of that resentment brewing inside me, and about four Scotchs in, you looked me in the eye and slurred:
"You? You're fucked."
Sleep tight dad. Hope the meds work.
We'll talk one day.
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