In The Name of the Father

So at last we come to the core of it all. The culmination of all my pain, the last of the demons I must exorcise from my current life. Some may dismiss this post as just another whine. Some may not. I may have other posts about my past, and my life (my ex-wife would be a novel, for example) that may not seem very cheery, but this is the darkest post of them all.

It concerns a person that I look up to, yet despise for most of what he is. A person whom I love, but whose actions I hate. A person I find myself becoming more and more like as I grow older, but less proud of the fact that I am.

My father.

No, for all you Catholics out there, not the ‘Father who art in Heaven”. My biological father.

Our relationship has always been quite odd. But I wouldn’t call it good, no. Not by a long shot. In fact, if he came anywhere near close to treating my son, his only grandchild, anything like he treated me, he wouldn’t HAVE a relationship with my son. It’s good that he treats him like I always wanted to be treated by him…but I can’t help but feel a pang of regret. But it’s too late to go back…very likely.

I briefly mentioned my father in the last post. His barring me from the Arts Magnet, for a stupid reason. His real reason, the one he won’t fess up to, is jealousy.

With that last comment in mind, before you judge me as being high and mighty on myself, just hear me out.

I won’t bore you with my dad’s life, or childhood. I’ll just say that he had a perfectly normal 50s-60s nuclear family, with a mom that stayed home and a dad that came home every day at 5pm, and 5 kids who were eager to see him.

I grew up much, much differently. First of all, I’m an only child. My parents could have had another child. But they decided they just didn’t want another. I had friends, and my cousins, I suppose. Some say siblings are overrated, but for those who grew up close to their sibling, I know that’s not always true. Some are lucky enough to have a brother or sister who loves them, and in rare cases, even likes them. I led a lonely childhood in this manner.

My father, a product of the 1960s hippie revolution, was never a pothead (though he did try it once), but other than that, he was just a quiet, model student, graduated from high school in 1969. Married his high school sweetheart – that would be Mom. Learning that he was going to be drafted during Vietnam, he enlisted into the USAF and got stationed in Thailand instead, working on airplanes.

Now, I don’t blame him for this decision. He could have been drafted and sent back to his wife and son in a box like the other 55,000 that went to the front lines. He was protecting his new family. Oh yes, I was born somewhere in there. Mom stuck by his side during all of his training days until he was shipped out.

Eventually, Mom – having come from a shitty family of her own, with no place to go – was offered a home in my grandmother’s house in Dallas. And there we stayed until Dad came home from Thailand. It was during these very impressionable years that I formed a strong bond with Dad’s father. My grandfather. The person whom my son is named after. It was unfortunate, because by the time he finally got shipped back and they moved into their temporary apartment in south oak cliff, I had already bonded with my grandfather, who was the world to me.

At last, we moved into the house that would be my home until I was 22. I was 2 years old, so I guess that makes it a solid twenty years spent there. Dad used one of his 3 V.A. loans and paid a grand total of $13,000 for that house. It’s worth $90,000.00 today. Dad landed a job at a printing company, and finally began his career. I have vague memories of my parents, being really ‘together’ for the first time, doing a lot of fighting back then. Adjustment, I guess. I just remember several times my Mom almost leaving him. I remember the house was so barren for so long, we had very little furniture. But I do miss that big tacky red vinyl couch we used to have. Anyway…

Dad never liked his job, but he's there to stay, still works there to this day. It was a constant nightshift position, and that was the routine that as a small child, I got used to. But I began to form my relationship with him…and it was honestly awkward. He used to get so mad at me. I didn’t understand his anger. And no, I wasn’t abused. I WAS spanked, but the fear he struck in me of spankings was far more effective. He would get mad over the stupidest things, and as a result, I started fearing him so much I would hide things from him. I began as early as age 5 to develop a quite different relationship with my mother than I had with my father.

For example …

I could cuss like a sailor around my mother. As a kid in the 80s, it wasn’t as big of a deal as it is today (and my son gets into trouble if he even says a mild cuss word). Mom didn’t care. She thought it was almost cute. She let me do things Dad wouldn’t let me do when he was at home. When Dad was home, I was obedient…sometimes we had fun doing an occasional activity, but said events are few and far between. Dad was really obsessed with his 1963 Corvair convertible and getting it running again. So I got to spend a lot of time just watching him work on it (until he found me annoying and sent me inside). The other half of the time he spent his days off getting drunk….VERY drunk. And you know what’s sad about that…he was a nice, open and much more honest and caring person when he drank. The stuffiness he still displays to this day when he’s sober is unnerving to say the least.

I understand he had to support a family. I understand he felt all these obligations weighing heavily on him. I understand he needed his free time when he was not working. He would try and talk to me one minute, but expect me to stay out of his way the next, though.

For a brief period during elementary school, something I always feared happened. He was moved to dayshift, which means he was home when I was home. We butted heads like you wouldn’t believe. But I always seemed to be the one who literally was winding up against the wall. Sometimes he apologized for getting angry at me, sometimes he didn’t. But fear was always there, ever-present, always waiting, it seemed to lash out at me courtesy of him, every time I did something wrong. So I either did everything right, or just hid anything I did wrong from him as best I could.

But, I genuinely tried, unconsciously, to form a bond with him. I tried to understand him. I tried to get along with him. Subconsciously, I needed that fatherly bond with him.

As a child with primarily nothing but his own imagination to entertain him, I had a lot of ‘pretend’ time alone with myself as a kid. Some days I would be a king, or a sorcerer, an eagle or some sidekick to Indiana Jones, whatever struck me that day. I kept my playtime very quiet and very private when my father was home, though, for if he caught me, every single time I would be told to ‘stop doing that stupid shit and come inside’. And he had the nerve to wonder why I would avoid him at times. It was because of things like that, comments like that … that hurt.

That kind of venom he could put into a stinging comment about me, showing his disapproval of me being expressive or free, it infected its way into everything regarding my behavior. I was always told by my mother’s father (the biggest a-hole on the planet when it came to kids) what a well-behaved child I was. It was my childhood years that made me a very great little actor, both because I still valued my creativity being a lone child with no siblings, and on the other hand because I was always in danger of facing my father’s wrath if I was ever caught doing it.

Where was my mother in all of this? She let me be the real me when he was not around, when he was around she just said, “Do as your father tells you, son, I don’t want to listen to him bitch.” And so it went on like this for many years of him being on nightshift or swingshift.

As I finally entered into adolescence, I was already a pronounced self-taught musician. I had been picking things out on the piano since I was 3 years of age. I had already been in band 6 years in elementary and jr. high school, and they seemed supportive of it. I think my father viewed it as fascinating at first, but as I got older, bands like Van Halen started getting my attention, and eventually, at age 12 – The Beatles. Dad had a few guitars lying around and yes, he can also play a little, but not much. I think he views it as one of those ‘pain in the ass’ hobbies he enjoys but doesn’t want to make any real effort to learn.

For awhile I had a musical keyboard, and there was almost a bonding there. He would get out his guitar and we would try and play some things with me on my little casio piano and him on his arch-top. But something wasn’t working. I loved Van Halen and the Beatles a lot by then, so I started to pick things up on guitar, using my already acquired knowledge of things like scales in band. Then, a mutual friend of the family who also played guitar let me borrow a very old and tattered ‘Complete Beatles’ songbook, that had every guitar chord inscribed for every Beatles song there ever was. And therein I learned every basic chord known to guitar players by playing music I liked. It was all downhill for me after that. I remember trying to play Stairway to Heaven once when we were testing out one of his older guitars through the stereo. He recognized the song enough to say something absolutely discouraging. He said "Shit...Jimmy Page you AIN'T." That pissed me off and yet hurt me so much that I made it a point to learn Stairway to Heaven to the point where I can to this day, play it in my sleep if necessary. All of it.

I was also a heavy dabbler in electronics. I wanted an amplifier like the people on MTV had. So I tried rigging one at first with my stereo. I saved my allowance and bought a tie-pin microphone as a ‘pickup’ for the shoddy old acoustic Dad had had for a few years and had pieced back together for me. I still have a picture of it with the mic taped to it. Today it would probably sound like shit to me, but at age 13, the mic distorted so badly and I got some real buzz out of the thing – I was in Heaven. The day after Mom took me to Radio Shack, I came home from school to find my father in his chair, smoking a cigarette and staring at me. That usually meant I was about to get my ass chewed out, in the putting-down manner he always did. He told me he was confiscating the microphone, that I had no right to do anything of the sort like that with my money. It’s funny, because just before I did it I had talked to him of the idea just to test the waters (I did this a lot to see what he thought), and he seemed to think it would work, hypothetically. So, being the motivated person I was with the things I loved, I went out and bought it with my own money. Now it was being taken away from me. I didn’t have many amenities back then. Just that Casio keyboard and a crappy student guitar. Such were my humble musical beginnings. But I didn’t quite understand at all what I was being punished for. This was where my father would not openly admit his jealousy of what I was becoming.

Eventually I got the mic back, but his overreaction to it was what perplexed me. At last, after a year of proving myself more and more that I could play, Mom felt sorry for me when I was 13 and my first girlfriend had just dumped me. She bought me an early birthday present – an electric guitar…a used one, slightly worn, but I liked it a lot, and I played her to death so much she’s hardly playable today, but I still have her. Resourceful as ever, I had managed to procure a crappy amplifier from my cousin who agreed to let me use it because she didn’t use it anymore. It wasn’t a guitar amp, it was just a little microphone amplifier, ran on D cells. I soldered together a cord that would work, bought again with my own money from Radio Shack, and played away. Later that summer, an old friend from Middle School eventually sold me a real guitar amp. At that point, Dad knew he couldn’t stop me from playing if it was what I liked to do.
But he found other reasons and ways to punish me, constantly using music as leverage. That summer between Jr. High and High School was probably one of the worst I’ve ever had, other than receiving my first electric guitar. Mom was very proud of me at that point. She would tell family, friends, whoever, that my playing was becoming quite impressive, and that (sigh) I had ‘passed my father’s playing up in a matter of weeks’. She wasn’t helping an already touchy matter. I’m sure Dad felt embarrassed by it, but if it were MY son, I’d have played right into it and said “Yeah, he did pass me up, but glad I could help, yada yada." I would say it without hesitation. My father did none of this, he brushed me off to others with a "BAH" attitude.

By the following summer I had another guitar (which he constantly confiscated along with my first guitar and all my equipment if I did badly in school), and I remember just doing a general audio recording of one of my birthday parties (I loved playing with audio equipment). My father said something when I was outside that I will never forget. He was so standoffish and blunt about my playing that I just worked harder and harder. My cousin was messing with my newer guitar, and she was saying to my dad “Eh, I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t play.” My dad replied, “Well….neither can Stuart.”

Those words cut like a sharp knife. He had already banned me from going to the Arts Magnet. Is this how I was going to be treated? I began to wonder.

I was more than right.

Yet, when he got drunk, and it was just he and I, and he was in a good mood, I would be teaching him some Creedence song he really liked, or whatever. I liked those bands too, but that’s not the point. Behind the scenes, when enebriated, he acknowledged my talent quite openly, and enjoyed being taught a few things, which I was of course happy to teach him, because other opportunities were few and far between.

10th grade I finally formed a band… and about this time Dad conveniently really turned up the heat on me with the grades. Always punishment, always locking my musical equipment up for better grades, but conveniently doing nothing to actually help me with school, or even ask me if I needed help. Just telling me to ‘just do it’. But, whenever he got drunk, the musical instruments came out. Little did he know…when he was working swingshift, they came out then, too, because my mother just couldn’t enforce the kind of punishment he wanted.

But at last, the punishment came, and it came hard. During one of my groundings, it was announced he finally would be moving to dayshift as lead pressman. That meant permanence. No more shift-hopping. He would be on days for good. I didn’t think he would enforce the punishment that was supposed to be inflicted on me, but he did.

For three solid years of my high school life, I spent it in my room when I came home. I was to eat dinner, which my mother had to have prepared for me by the time I got home, then go to my room and do my homework first. If I got done with my homework early, I was to spend the rest of the evening studying something, anything. I had to sit at my desk. No stereo. No musical instruments. No coming out of my room unless to go to the bathroom. My bedroom door had to stay open at all times.

Now, I fully acknowledge being a fuck-up in school, because I seemed to be cursed with some kind of deficiency at mathematics. Maybe it was the piss-poor teachers in DISD who would rather throw an eraser at me than answer something I didn’t understand. Either way, I didn’t get help from my dad nor from my teachers when I needed it the most. So I just said eff it, and failed a lot. At last I had gotten a good teacher in summer school for Algebra I, wish I could have kept her all the way through high school, but it just wasn’t to be. Everything else I was good in when I applied myself. But no one wanted to help me when I was really in trouble, least of all my father. He would not be inconvenienced to look over my homework with me because gosh, that would be interrupting the evening news or the Cosby Show, or Cheers or Night Court.

I hated those years so much. I still tear up thinking about how lost I was…not able to find my way out. What was funny (funny meaning ironic, NOT humorous) was…his punishment not only didn’t stick, but it just made me more defiant. I not only didn’t do my schoolwork, but I did as much screwing around as a teenage male could do sitting at that desk (yes, even rosy-palms at the desk goes……my desk wasn’t in the line-of-sight of the door). I pondered suicide and running away a lot back then.

Oh, and when I was grounded for bad grades, that grounding lasted until the next report card…which meant the musical instruments were completely off-limits, even on the weekends.

NO kid at the high school I went to even believed me when I told them what was being done to me, not even my closest friends. And I didn’t have many friends at high school, mainly just the people that followed me there from middle school. As stated in the previous blog, the bulk of my friends went to the Arts Magnet.

Somehow, I managed to salvage the weekends when my father was drunk and the rare periods I wasn’t grounded, or when Dad worked late.

There were times when I would completely break down--try and reach out to him--and I once even defined his method of punishing me as ‘torture’. All saying this to him did was make him even more angry at me. How, as a kid, could I explain it to him in a way he could understand it? I certainly could explain it to him now, knowing what I know. But what does a 15-17 year old know about explaining to his father that he’s got a dream, explaining it to a father that didn’t care about fairy tales and dreams, but lived in what he called harsh reality?

I seem to remember those days I ate at the dinner table in the dining room, and my parents ate in the living room. I think the coffee table was too small for three people, and damned be it all if they didn’t get to watch the news. Joining me at the table was inconvenient. I was inconvenient, or I felt that way, at least. Who wouldn’t?

Oh, somehow, during that time, Mom went out and bought Dad a guitar that was really, really expensive compared to what she’d spend on me. Ironic she spent so much, I define that guitar today as a piece of shit. Oh, and Dad didn’t ask for these types of things, he never felt he needed them, Mom just got them for him. I knew where her loyalties lay. But I can’t fault her too much. She loves both of us, he just came first. It was just the way it was.

Let’s face it folks, the moral to this story is…my Dad was (and still can be when provoked)…an asshole.

By the time I graduated, I got my grades into shape for me, I had finally learned how to take care of myself, but my parents in NO way had any affect on me in that regard. I started to do those things for me. And naturally, my musical instrument privileges were restored. Dad was still a shit to people about my playing, though, and my band, who were also my good friends (one of them still is). I guess I have to give kudos to my parents for putting up with our noisy rehearsals, but still… if it was a type of music that they didn’t like (we were doing classic rock, but also getting into newer bands like the Cult, and Metallica), they would beat on the door to my stuffy bedroom and embarrass me. Such was life.

But by then, by the time I graduated (on the A and B honor rolls that year, btw) , the damage had already taken hold. I once again propounded the idea of a career in music to my Dad, who had offered to help me with college if it was what I wanted to do after high school. I was thinking of music IN college. You want to know what his reply was?

“Sure, you can do a nightclub gig if you think your band’s good enough and you’re brave enough to get out there.”

Obviously, he completely missed my point. I almost tore my hair out. The subject was never broached again. I didn’t get the proper nurturing I needed, so desperately needed in the transition from middle to high school, I didn’t get the emotional and financial support I would have needed for college at 18 when I was ripe and ready to be taught there. It was nothing more than a pissant hobby to him. Always has been.

Only recently, about a year ago when I had my back injury, did it dawn on me just how much the decisions my father made back then, so non-chalantly, affect my life today.

You may say to yourself after reading all this dribble…..”Surely there were some good moments, come on..”

Growing up, Dad and I had and still have a shared interest of how things work. Cars, airplanes, computer technology, electronics, you name it. If it ticks, we like to know how it ticks, and we talk about it endlessly. But Dad’s more like a big brother in that sense.

He owned a 71' Mustang. I liked it so much I went out and not only bought a Mustang just like it, I fixed it up exactly as he would have fixed up his if he had the time and the initiative. We both now own identical white lebaron convertibles. Hardly coincidence. We share a common interest, but it's also still a vague attempt at gaining his approval, about trying to spark his interest in me somehow.

We still have that bond when we talk. When my son was born, that was one of the rare times he’s actually hugged me as an adult. The other time was after his heart attack.. As uncomfortable as it was, and as painful as the fact that it was uncomfortable was, every time I saw him in the hospital, I forced myself to hug him and tell him I loved him.

Why is that so hard? A father and a son should be closer than this. My son and I are tenfold closer than this, and always will be.

I can’t talk to him about emotional things at all. When my grandfather died, he went into the shadows. He didn’t talk to me about it at all, except to say that after the funeral, it would finally all be ‘over with’, not bothering to explain to me that it would be okay to grieve after that if I still felt it inside of me. Yes, this was the same grandfather I bonded with instead of my dad in the tender years. I pent up my grief after the funeral for 14 years due to the misinterpretation of his words, and just lost it at his grave when I was 22. Only now, can I say I’ve properly grieved his death, 25 years later.

When I was going through my divorce, all he could do was be there to help out with my son when I was going through periods of horrible grief while my ex-wife was out having sex with God-knows-who. Having not been through a divorce himself, he not only didn’t know what to say, but also being my father, he didn’t even try to say anything. The most emotional comment from him was ‘no one said any of this would be easy’. Gee, thanks.

I’ve gone through spells in dealing with all of this, in remembering my past….where I’m very calm in explaining it, like I am right now, or in miserable grief, screaming silently through gritted teeth “I hate him.”

There was and is so much that will likely never get said between myself and my father before he (or I) passes away. He’s mellowed a lot in recent years, and my wife really likes talking to him, maybe it’s his way of making up for the fact that he never tried to get close to my first wife very much.

For any doubters or naysayers, I’m not whining in this blog. The point of sharing my life in this blog is simply this, things you can’t understand you just have to deal with on your own. Some terrible emotional things have happened to me in my life, and my relationship with my father is one of the biggest. But I am recognizing it and dealing with it for what it is.

In a perfect world, I’d like to hug my dad hello and goodbye, and make sure he knows I love him. I’d like to heal any rift that may remain between us. I’d like to CALL him Dad just once and not feel awkward saying it (no, I don’t call him anything…ever have a person like that in your life?). I’d like him to say he’s sorry for the things he’s done, that maybe although I was a tough kid to raise, just maybe he went a little overboard, too. I’d like him to be supportive of the fact that I’m working on a musical degree now…now more than ever, I need that support from all the family and friends I can get. I have it from every family member BUT him…and that little boy in me that wanted to please him comes out, crying to be heard by just him, wanting to be acknowledged positively. Like he acknowledges his grandchild.

And I’d like to see my son see that his old man and his Papaw get along before he goes. It’s the most important thing I could do. As it stands now, dad still has his little moments where he forgets I’m 32 years old and doesn’t show any respect for my age when he lectures me about something he doesn’t agree with.

And in spite of everything that ever happened, I never once, in my 32 years, as a child, teen or an adult ever said to him in a fit of anger, "I hate you." Saying that to him actually would have hurt his feelings, and Mom would have made me apologize. I made a conscious effort never to say it.

I guess I’ll do what I can. But I have a feeling I’ll be picking up all these broken pieces on my own. And having myself isn’t so bad, I guess it’s better than nothing at all.

However, as my friend whom I loaned a certain anime series to will soon find out, I believe that everyone needs someone close to stand by them in life. Of all the people I could have chosen to stand by me in my life with something this big, I wish it had been him. My father missed out on a lot in my life (some of it against his will, some of it his own choice), and I’m sure he regrets all of it to some degree.

Whether or not I will ever bridge that gap with him, only time will tell. But we are both pretty set in our ways now in dealing with each other. And he doesn’t drink anymore, so there’s no more chance for a heart-to-heart talk with him like I used to have.

Is your brain fried yet? I’ll stop. This is becoming difficult for me to finish, so I’ll just end it here. This post, as I said, was simply to exorcise my own demons. I’ve never actually written a topic on this subject, as it is very sensitive to me.