Dad stuff

content/dad/001.md

@@ -3,42 +3,74 @@ date: 2019-08-20
 weight: 1
 ---
 
-The thing I like to say about my dad is that he didn't really want a son, he wanted a budy. 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.
+<div class="cw">Self harm</div>
 
-> He wanted someone he could drink with. Someone he could take to the bar.
+It's not about the dress.
 
-Yes. He seemed fundamentally uncomfortable with the fact that I was his offspring.
+It's about that whole point in my life. It's about the way home ways. It's about the way I was left to my own devices. Every kid's dream, right?
 
-It wasn't an always thing, of course. There were a few times we really connected.
+I had no father. I had the angry, drunken man who lived upstairs. I have the man who woke me in the morning to drive me to school, who clearly showed up at some point during the night. I had this unpredictable animal living in the house that I had to please, and there were no rules for what would or wouldn't please him.
 
-> Yes.
+I was left to my own devices and there was always something that I needed to be doing and doing correctly, and I was never sure what it was. Do good in school, sure. Grow up to become an imortant engineer of some kind, sure. The details in between, though, were hazy.
 
-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.
+> The rules are made up and you're always in trouble.
 
-> Yes.
+Or about to be, 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.
+> You know now that he was flailing at life as much as you are now.
 
-> Yes.
+I do.
 
-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.
+> You know now that he was actually in quite a bit of pain.
 
 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.
+I also know that he would close out the bar that Julie worked out, drinking the whole time.
 
-Yes.
+I know that if I went with, I'd spent countless hours meandering between the corner booth in the bar and the Pac-Man and Millipede cabinets up front.
 
-> 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.
+> The owners of the restaurant would dote on you. They would give you free kitsch from the glass case by the register. Little sticky-backed calenders with tear-off months and pens to draw on the backs of the pages. They'd let you pick out the licorice breathmints from the brass bowl by the register, the ones shaped like chalky pillows. They'd let you play hide-and-seek with Kevin, the other kid being raised in the bar by a drunken father.
 
-Yes.
+I know that he and Julie had bowling league on Saturdays and I was left home alone.
 
-> 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.
+I know that if I went with, I'd be fed quarters in a steady stream to spend time in the arcade room or on the little toy vending machines.
 
-He said the same during our 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.
+> You would buy the little plastic snakes made from links that would let you bend them into squares and cubes. You would drink coke after coke. You would wonder how they managed to oil the lanes so perfectly up to the foul line and no further, and when you saw the machine that did so, you were entranced by its single-minded, track-bound life. You watched him sing Devo's **I'm Too Sexy** for karaoke, mincing about on the stage and producing gales of laughter in his parody of what he knew of gay culture. You were just starting to think of yourself that way.
 
-He raised me, but the definition of 'raise' here is a very elastic one.
+It was a spear through my heart.
+
+> Tell me about the dress.
+
+Left to my own devices, I prowled the house.
+
+I stole a beer. I stole some Kahlua. I stole a little bit of brandy, but I hated it. I stole some of his pot. I stole a condom.
+
+> He was so angry about that. He grilled you and you denied it.
+
+I realize, later, that the reason he was so angry was because, if I didn't steal it, it would've meant that Julie was cheating on him.
+
+> Tell me about the dress.
+
+I stole a paring knife and obsessively sharpened it. I cut at my wrists until, confronted with the realization that I would be asked about it, I stopped and cut on my big toes instead.
+
+> You told your friend, Julene. She had no idea what to do, confronted with such information. You were eleven.
+
+What does one say to being told that your friend is self-harming? I would never tell anyone about self harm again, I promised myself.
+
+> Tell me about the dress.
+
+I tried on Julie's dress. I tried on her teddy. I prowled, naked, through her rack of clothing in the spare room for things to try on. I spent a lot of time naked. I spent a lot of time masturbating. I wondered if I was gay because I tried on her clothing, or I tried on her clothing because I was gay.
+
+> You told your friends confidently in third grade that lesbians were just women who wanted to be men and that  gay men were just men who wanted to be women.
+
+Matthew said those things, but he had been dying since birth.
+
+> Tell me about the dress.
+
+I tried on Julie's clothes with a mixture of guilt and shame. It was titillating and humiliating. It was transgressive. At some point, I figured that, the ontology of being gay aside, I had better get used to wearing such, as that's just what gay men did.
+
+> Your anger is cooling down.
+
+Yeah, it is. I can't tell if it's you shifting it away from my dad and onto the dress, or if it's just getting the words out there that's helping so much.
 
 > Dig deeper.