Recently I was taking a workshop on writing a YA novel. I’ve been trying to tell the story of the hotel I grew up in, and recently decided to make it for young adults. A pretty young teacher who had attended a great school made a jarring statement: after some pretty normal advice, she bluntly said: “Kill a parent, or better yet kill off both. This will make the main character a victim, more interesting, and in return cause your audience to root for them.” This pulled a trigger in me. It wasn't new information, it was just unexpected at that moment.
Losing a parent as a kid isn't how Disney movies depict it. There usually isn’t an adventure or a lesson to be learned. It hurts, and it keeps hurting. Honestly, it does make you a victim of sorts, but it can also make you an asshole, a drunk, or a liar. It stores a loneliness in your heart that can be occupied but never filled. The most exhausting part is all the things that try to rent that room in your heart.
When I was 15 years old, I was awakened early on a warm March morning. The clock read 6:00am. I knew something was off, because I heard my mom talking with another female voice in our living room. She would normally be at her gas station job in town. I laid in bed for a few moments running over who could be dead. Whomever it was, I knew the moment I opened that door, something was going to change forever.
Newark, New Jersey
A pool table
Massive heart attack
Your dad.
My mom and her best friend choked out the story between sobs. I stood in a Tasmanian Devil t-shirt and Old Navy pajama bottoms. My mom told me to get changed, because we were going to go be with the family at the mobile home park in town. As I walked down the hallway to the shower I pretended to cry because I knew I should be crying. Luckily, actual tears followed quickly.
I didn't even have clothes to wear to a funeral. We had to go to the mall, and my mom told every sales associate that I had lost my dad. I remember being so upset he was going to miss my 16th birthday. I just kept saying the word, “selfish”. I’m not sure I was talking about him or myself?
My most vivid memory at the funeral was that the smell was overwhelming. It was Easter weekend, so everyone sent lilies. Just a touch brighter than the formaldehyde, even now that scent turns my stomach. My stepmother had a face full of cold sores from the trauma and a baby on her hip. We greeted those people in his life who loved him. We listened to them tell us how sorry they felt for us, how sorry they felt for themselves. The funeral director told us there was a line that was around the block. Hug after hug, people told me I was the man of the family now. People I barely knew tried to reassure me of the love my dad had for me. As old ladies smashed me into their big tits, and my dad’s friends engulfed my hand in their calloused working- man hands, I stared at his motionless belly. I wondered if everyone would mind leaving so I could climb up and lay with him one last time. I wondered if my stepmother was still going to verbally abuse me, or if I would be able to watch my sister grow up?
I closed my eyes and rode a memory back to his ugly gray couch. To being a little boy laying on my father's stomach. I can feel his rough clouds of chest hair fill up my little paws and feel the warmth of a father’s breath on his son’s head. A big belly rising and falling, and me peacefully swaying to its rhythm. Watching some action movies in the late afternoon.
One of the most surreal parts of his death was how I was treated after. The pity and excuses that were made for me. Even the bullies stopped calling me a faggot that year. My friends pulled away, my mom took on another job. No one knew how to be around me. It felt like they were afraid to catch a dead dad. I failed algebra, but the teacher still passed me because my dad was such a good man. After the viewing, I didn't cry about him again for sixteen years.
It would take me years to properly mourn him. I hate to admit this, but the moment I found out he had died I felt a wave of relief. Not because he was gone, he was the easiest love in my life. But the person he brought into my world would be gone, and so would the abuse.
Every time my father took a shower or ran to the store and left me alone with her, she would verbally abuse me. As a shy, effeminate kid I already wanted to fade into the background. She would call me a waste and tell me I was only a charity to him. She would call me weird and fat. She would spit in my face while screaming. I would sit as still as possible and hold my breath until I had to gasp. When he would get home, everything would snap back to just where he left it like none of it ever happened. Even at 10, my secrets were starting to bury me. At 15 I was traumatized and emotionally wounded. When my dad came home, I would pray for him to notice the change in the room. I would try to give him small hints that I wasn't ok and she wasn't a good person. But he seemed blind to all of it. Maybe it was her beauty, or maybe it was the heartbreak from my real mother?
In my early thirties, I somehow convinced myself that it was him who had abused me. In a drunken sadness I confided in my partner a story that I vividly remembered every detail of. This story was not true, but everything in my being believed it. I was a ghost story I told myself to survive:
We were living in the old house on top of the hill, the one we moved into after the Kish. My mom had to go to Vegas and it was her first time on a plane. My dad had left me with a babysitter and he went to the bar to have a drink with friends. Very early in the morning I came down to get a drink. Milk. It was still dark in the kitchen and when I opened the door of the refrigerator I saw my dad was sitting in the dark. It scared me and I dropped the milk. My dad charged me and picked me up my night shirt. His eyes were black like it wasnt really him, like he couldn't see it was me. I kept saying I was sorry but he was in a blind rage.. He used my body to open the screen door and then he put me inside the old dryer we had on the porch. He shut the door and let me there until I found the courage to crawl out in the morning.
Multiple things in this story don't add up. My mom had not gone to Vegas at this point in life. And I would not have fit in a dryer at 7. When I tell you that I believed this story, I believed it with every fiber in my being. As I told my partner I sobbed and shook. I begged him to keep this secret with me. As the years passed I found the courage to bring this up to people who were close to me. One by one they tilted their head and would say this didn't sound like my dad. I told myself this story to justify you leaving. To make myself feel like I wasn't abandoned.
In my mid- 30’s I started thinking of my own mortality. I had his eyes, his nose, and his vicious ability to love people in a big way. Love comes from the heart, so I’m sure mine was breaking like his did. He was never sick, he didn't deteriorate. He just went to work and came back dead. He was the first person in my life to die. It’s not that I'm unphased by death, but when you lose a big one first your reactions just shut down a bit.
.
Now that I am 40, six years older than he ever got to be, it's hard for me to remember much. The sound of his voice is muffled in my memory, but I can still feel the specific bass of it travel down my spine like the way a car with the window down plays music a block or two away, echoing in past tense. It's hard for me to even view him as a father. Every other weekend for a very short 15 years doesn't add up to much. Sometimes I view him as one of my own past lives. We look so similar and the only things I can remember are the same characteristics that I share.
I think about the way he would counteract stress with adrenaline. When my mom would nag and grate on him, his temper would flare and he’d tell me to grab my coat. We would race off in his sports car and listen to The Cars. The destination was an icy parking lot or an empty cornfield. I would beg you not to do it, but secretly be dying with anticipation. I would scream and grip the door handle as you slowly drove the car to the far corner. You would lower the music. Sit in silence for what seemed like forever, slowly revving the engine as my heart raced.
1: He would put his hand on my knee
2: He would turn the music up so loud
3: He would look me dead in the eyes and floor the gas.
The minute I couldn't take it and would scream, he would cut the wheel and we would spin out in perfect circles. As the car floated this was my first hit of a high, causing me to laugh and applaud and beg for more. Funny, but this is the exact way I used drugs in my twenties and early thirties. A Fear. A rush. Letting go. Moments of Freedom. Beg for more. Even the contrast of getting in a stranger's car, buying a mystery substance, and then the first snort.
I often wonder how our tale would have played out. Would you have disowned me like your brother did? Would you have sent me money when I couldn't pay my electric bill in college? Would I have fought for you? The thing is, Chuck was never meant to be here for very long. He was too potent, and he never built a life with interest in sustaining it. When you spend most of your life without your dad it is hard for me to use the word “miss”. It’s more like an ache, the way the scar on my chest feels sensitive when it rains.
💓💓💓
Beautiful. Thanks for sharing your dad with us Shain <3