My Father was a Broken Man…

I had a conversation with my half-sister on Tuesday evening. She is 25 years old, married, and has two children. She also had a relationship, if a somewhat fractured one, with our father. But I believe all of my father’s relationships were fractured because, from the beginning, he was a broken man. I imagine he descended from the womb like that.

Those of you who know me are probably saying, “What?!? Sister? You? You’re an only child!” For all intents and purposes, this is true. I am the only child of my mother, who divorced from my father some time shortly after my first birthday. But I still have a picture of the split second following his moment of brilliance when he thought it would be funny to shove my face smack down into the cake’s center. Had I known then the things I know now, I would have been pissed. I should have screamed and cried and flung my limbs all about until someone took me out of that high chair. But I didn’t do this, so maybe I enjoyed it? That was a long time ago, and my memory is a little fuzzy. For the record, however, I never shoved my own son’s face into his first birthday cake.

I also have a picture of my father with my mother’s brother. They were close, and, to this day, Henry says, “Danny taught me how to be a man.” I wish someone could say the same for Danny. Hard liquor, Budweiser, cigarettes, and women: these were a few of his favorite things. He married five times before he died. Apparently, he was pretty magnetic and smooth—parts of him I never knew. Well, I never knew much about him anyway. But I know he loved his cigarettes so much that, in spite of having a softball-sized cancer tumor in his lung, he continued to smoke. Lung cancer killed him in February 2007. I have his obituary on my desk, which I printed out from a Google search. I was planning a reunion for Father’s Day that year. I thought it would be a good time for my 10 year old son to meet his grandfather. Well, you can’t have a reunion when the guest of honor is dead, and because we were so estranged, I didn’t expect to cry, but I did. A hard, long, guttural, lung-shuttering cry. It must have been the surprise of it all. He was only 50 years old. I tried to find him some years before, but that Google search only turned up information on his “fourth or subsequent” DUI. I chased that phantom-man around every jail and penitentiary in Northern Virginia, but he was nowhere to be found. He must have had a good lawyer and used all the back child support to pay the attorney's fees.

Habits die hard, and you can’t escape the double-helix. I didn’t even have to be around him to live his kind of life. I was a chain-smoking, drunken philanderer who tried to commit suicide and spent some time in a Psych Center—all between the ages of 15 and 30. But I’m trying my damnedest to turn over every green leaf in my path. I wish I could ask him the burning question, “Why did you try to commit suicide?” I will forever wonder what the answer would be, if it would be anything like mine.

I also have a half-brother who is 27 and another half-sister who is 20. Christmas of 1992, I went to visit my father, his wife, and my three half-siblings. I believe the youngest was just 2 years old at the time. I spent the entire afternoon at their house just catching up. My father was too embarrassed to drink his Budweiser or smoke his cigarettes in front of my legal guardians, one of whom was a preacher, so he would excuse himself to the fridge then head down the hall to his bedroom where he lit the stick. One time, I followed him back to that room, and he explained his embarrassment over the drinking and smoking. And he was nervous talking to me. It was as if, at any moment, I would morph into Medusa and command my head of snakes to bite his face off. That day, I think my father spoke the most honest words he would ever say to my face. Actually, that was the last day he and I ever spoke. I was 17.

Our father did the same thing to the youngest sister that he did to me, the whole out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality. She just wasn’t old enough to insist on a relationship like the other two could. And until I can talk to her directly, I’m just saying that by the time she was old enough and could rush to his side, she probably had no desire to do so. Anger is hungry and powerful. I know that by the time I was old enough, I lived too far away, and by the time I lived closer, before the days of the Internets, I didn’t know how to find him. I’m still angry with him to some degree, but hell if it isn’t hard to stay mad at a dead man. Besides, he’s coming to see me in my dreams, uninvited, of course. Sleep is hard enough for me to do on my own without him showing up all crazy hours of the morning.

Our father’s habits covered him like a thick skin, and he took pride in them like a Boy Scout boasts about each of his earned badges. Our father was famous for calling up to say that he’d “be there in a few minutes, get the bags packed, be waiting on the porch,” and then, he would never show up. I would sit outside on top of my suitcase on the wraparound porch for hours, watching the daylight fade to dusk and dusk turn night. I would insist that he would be there; “He’ll be here.” But he wouldn’t be here; he was always somewhere over there doing something other than that visitation thing, and my mother would drag me inside, eventually—all kicking, screaming, and flailing limbs against an ink-black sky. This was a pattern he repeated often, and he even repeated it with my siblings, too. Further, he was a chronic job-hopper. Always one step ahead of the Department of Child Support Enforcement, and if he wasn’t that one step ahead and they caught up with him, he certainly would be that one step ahead first thing tomorrow.

I’d like to know about the good things I inherited from him, if I inherited anything good from him. Maybe I’ll ask him one night in my sleep, and maybe it will be him and not just some figment of him, and maybe I won’t be so bitter and hardened because it really is hard to stay angry with a dead man who was born so broken in the first place.