Mark
I was over at Anti's joint today. Well not at his actual locale but rather at his webspace and I was checking out some older stuff that he has featured on the side bar and I came across this piece on his pops. That shit sounds pretty rude and it made me think of the rudeness that my own dad has perpetrated on me.My dad is a pretty dodgy dude, a shady character if you will. First off, he was a bookie for many years. To ya'll in Vegas and Louisiana I would like to point out that bookmaking is totally against the law here in Texas. Well dodgy I tells ya. Furthermore his front business and his current occupation is that of used car dealer. More general shadiness innit? On top of that he wears dark aviator shades pretty much at all times making him the sketchiest character in most any given scenario. Although he has never done anything like ruining my credit, ala Sir Anti's plight, he has been a generally neglectful father figure and an all around crappy dad. Don't worry, I have let him know about these feelings in no uncertain terms and more than not I am over the whole ordeal. I realize that its pretty candy ass to spend one's whole adult life going around blaming parents for one's own pathetic mental problems and overall shortcomings. I don't think that's what Anti's doing and I'm not doing that here either but the experience is pretty interesting and so I'm gonna tell ya'll a little bit about it.
My pop's left my mom when I was ten. He moved out and moved in with his girlfriend who was a perfume counter girl at Dillards. The description of 'perfume counter girl' should give you all the context clues you need but just in case you have never been inside any major department store I will fill in on the gruesome details. Platinum fried hair with some crazy 80's hairspray configuration, fake nails, too much make-up, fake attitude and expensive but slutty outfits were her main accoutrement. I remember that me and my sister had to go over to "their" house one Halloween to carve pumpkins. That was my worst Halloween like fucking ever.
That same year he brought her to his side of the families' Christmas celebration. That was some serious bullshit. They weren't even divorced yet and I wasn't the only one who thought that was totally inappropriate. The worst part was when my dad dropped us off back at my mom's parents house where we were now living, my mom peeked out the window and saw her in the car and by the time my sister and I got to the door my mom had come unglued. When I say 'come unglued' I mean hysterical screaming and crying. And when Holly and I saw her losing it we lost it as well and my grandparents had to clean up the mess. Worst Christmas ever.
The IRS was after my dad around this time. You see he had an obviously unverifiable source of income i.e. book making. So when they went to garnish his wages to pay for his back taxes they were unable to get to his funds cause he was self employed and all and so they went after my mom's paycheck. She was an ICU nurse. The fucking IRS, even though they were already divorced, garnished my mom's wages and left the three of us with a paltry 250 bucks a month on which to live. 250 dollars a month for a family of three, cha right, maybe in 1937. That went on for almost a year and then one day she started getting her wages again. It seems that our congressman Phil Graham had placed a congressional freeze on that account based on a letter he received from my mom. Thanks Phil Graham. So that was pretty shitty.
Through Junior High I drifted slowly away from my dad. I would only see him once a week. He would pick us up on Fridays and we would go do something fun. That was cool and all but the truth of the matter is that proper parenting requires more of an effort than just taking the kids to a movie once a week. He never picked us up from school or took us to the dentist or guided us in any appreciable way. We would rarely stay with him cause he always had a different girlfriend until he met my stepmom. They were married for about six months when my sister Ashley was born. I would like to take this opportunity to remind everybody that the human gestation period is actually nine months, so that situation was a bit fishy or once again quite dodgy. So at that point he had a new little family and his status as dad was pretty much downgraded to dude. Mostly as a dad he was just kind of MIA.
My stepdad moved us to Arlington from Lubbock when I was about to go into high school. I always wanted to attend high school with my old pals back in Lubbock so for my senior year I went back there and lived with my grandparents. That fall there was this period of time, like seven weeks, where I didn't hear from my dad once. I couldn't understand it. There we were living in the same town again after two years and he lets all this fucking time go by without so much as a phone call. To me that was the last straw. I wrote him this brutal letter that said things like "you are such a crappy dad" and "how come you haven't called me" and "please do not try to contact me ever again, I am dead to you," some pretty harsh stuff. I dropped it in the mail and about a week later my stepmom showed up at my grandparents house. She was all "you guys have to talk" and "I want you to come over for dinner" and she said something about "hard-headed people." I'm really glad she did that. We are hard headed people and who knows what would have happened if she hadn't made us talk.
I didn't really ever get a chance to tell my dad my true feelings until my college graduation night. He didn't help me at fucking all with college. Not only no financial help but also I recall very little general encouragement. I'm not even sure if he even knew what my major was. Anyways after the big all-family dinner which was too weird cause I hadn't seen my mom and pops in the same place in like 12 years, we went out for some drinks, just me and him. I remember this massive vodka martini in my hand and as I got hammered I began to lay it down. He looked so resigned to it all and in truth it seemed like he was genuinely remorseful. That was hella cathartic. Since then things have been cool. I was finally able to put that shit in the past and make friends with this guy called Mark.
I'm not sorry about any of that. Those experiences have made me the man I am today and I don't think I would trade them except for Cliff Huxtable as a dad. I do think I have some abandonment issues stemming from that time but C'est La Vie, we all got scars. Scars make skin interesting.
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