GOOD
OL’ DADDY,
DADDY DEAREST!
I finally got my
father
to break down and
talk
to my
psychotherapist
of the early
Nineteen-
Nineties—
which he did, by a
long-
distance phone
call from
Ft. Wayne,
Indiana, to
Indianapolis. And in ten
minutes of
chatting, he made
quite an
impression on the
psychotherapist. As the
psychotherapist
related the
conversation to
me, after
ten minutes’ worth
of talking
to my father, he’d
concluded
that my father
was—
“just an asshole
out to vindicate
himself,” “an
ignorant fascist,” and
“a tyrant and a
bully”! Which is
really making an
impression!
Ah, but my father
had one
redeeming quality:
he loved God all
the way
down to his
asshole and below!
Yes, he was so upset when I
left the Catholic
Church and
became an atheist;
as he once
told me, he’d
preferred I be a
Unitarian, at
least. Just believe
in God, any ol’ god! But
believe!
He also didn’t
think much of
my collegiate
Marxism and
left political
radicalism, and
had a very simple
explanation
for why I’d become
such:
I’d been “duped by
communists,”
simple as
that. Yes, I,
National Merit I,
130+ IQ
I, scholarship I, had
simply
been so stupid and
naïve
as to be duped by
unsavory
foreign agents of
an alien,
un-American
ideology.
All there was to
it! End
of discussion.
When I was in
eighth
grade, and my
parents
were driving me to
the
eighth-grade
graduation
picnic, I casually
remarked
that I was a
“nonconformist.”
That one word set my father
afire with rage,
moving him
to scream at me at
the top of
his lungs for a
good fifteen
minutes on how I had to
conform! For fifteen minutes he
went on in raging
anger,
without
respite—and
needless to say,
not tolerating me
to say a word back
to him ever.
(I never ever was
allowed to say
anything back to
either of my parents
when they went off
in fifteen-minute
rages against
me—which was
frequently, and
which came out of
nowhere.) So there!
I had been told!
Conform—or
else! A very rare moral
values lesson from
my father! (He
usually turned all
morals, values,
education over to
the good nuns and
priests of the Catholic
school system.
In fact, he
usually didn’t talk to me,
period. And when he did, it was
usually to scream
at, rather than talk
to, me.)
But, lest we
forget his one redeeming
trait—my father
loved God all the way
down to his
asshole and below! (Jee-zus
Christ—could I be
dripping sarcasm
here?? Me?
Little ol’ me?!!)
Then, when I
didn’t graduate
from college as
originally planned—
but dropped out,
returning to college
(a different one)
several years later,
only to leave
campus and return
“home” (truly
deserving of quotation
marks in this
case) with Incompletes
hanging over my
head—he would
rage, along with
my mother, “You’ll
never
graduate! All that money we
wasted!” But then, when I made up
the Incompletes,
sent the work in, and
did graduate—not a
peep! Not even a
simple
“Congratulations. You did it—
as you said you
would. We were wrong,
of course.” No, it was not at all there
for either of my
parents to ever admit
they were wrong.
But let us not
forget or overlook—
both my parents
loved God all the
way down to their
assholes and below!
Surely, that
counts for something,
doesn’t it?!!
Then, I even got a
job that required
my new college
degree—in Indianapolis,
as a statistician
with the State of
Indiana, which
lasted all of six months,
and left me broke
and without prospects.
(I must admit,
taking the job for all the
wrong reasons—away
from my parents,
in a strange, new,
actually big—or so I
thought—city, I
could now freely drink
the indulgent,
continual way I wanted to,
without
interruption!) I now had a new,
unexpected choice
to make, and I made it—
I stayed on in
Indianapolis penniless and
without prospects
rather than crawl “home”
to my parents like
a whipped dog, tail tucked
between my
legs. Better to starve with a
modicum of dignity
that to eat in shame and
self-disgust. As a heroine of the Spanish
Civil War put it,
“Better to die on one’s feet
than to live on
one’s knees.”
Yes, I took Robert
Frost’s “road less
traveled”—and it
did make “all the
difference”! Made me what I am
today: poet, writer, stand-up comedian,
while also being a
worker, blue-collar
worker much of the
time, but for a decade,
white-collar
test-scorer using my college
degree—but always,
standing on my feet,
never crawling on
my knees! Yes, it was
rough, rougher
than I ever imagined it would
be. But I bore the cost—and today,
“sexist” as it may
seem, am a man, proudly
a man, not merely a boy in an adult’s
body!
Ah, but am I not
being too harsh on
my parents,
especially here, my father?
After all, he did, up to the day he died,
love God all the
way down to his asshole
and below! Surely, there’s some
redemption in
that? If there is, would
someone please tell me what it is,
and where it can
be found?!!
