Sorry for any formatting issues, this is a throwaway account and I'm new to posting. Warnings for abuse (I don't think it was that bad, but it might hurt some of y'all), rape (not of me!), and death.
I'm not sure where to start with this. Stories start with the exposition, though, so I'll try from there. My father was a good man when he wanted to be good, and a bad man when he didn't. Funny as he could be. Easy to start a conversation with. He worked his ass off to keep me and my mother (to whom he was never officially married) alive—working overtime as a maintenance man at every apartment complex in which we ever lived. Thirty years experience in a field like that is better, almost, than any degree. And I'm convinced that when he strolled into Hell, the first thing he did was offer to fix the devil's air conditioner.
The problem is, this doesn't compensate for the times when he was bad. He never did me much wrong, at least, not directly. Some dogs bark worse than they bite. I could handle being hollered at every day of my life. I could handle the threats ("I'll bash your fucking head in", "you worthless piece of shit", etc., it's a tale as old as time, you get the picture). I cried when I was six and he nearly kicked me and my mother out into the streets of Baltimore City, but I got over it. I cried trying to fit all my stuffed animals into my first grade backpack, but I got over it. Even when he did draw a hand to strike me it felt more like absolution—as though his anger could outweigh whatever wrong I'd done. Frankly, I deserved it. I was a rat bastard of a kid. I said my 'yes sir's after my head slammed back into the wall from the blow as he frothed at the mouth, went to bed, and woke up the next day. I mean, you always wake up the next day, until the day you don't. Might as well suck it up. There were many times I stepped in, though, to keep him from going at my mother. And that's the hinge of my intolerance.
Like almost every man that gets this kind of fucking post written about them, he was a drinker. He was a dealer (crack and PCP), too, with felony charges, but mostly he was a drinker. It was worst when I was very young. I'm eighteen now and I've lived in three states, across fourteen different places (my mother and I figured this total out one day in the car, counting on our fingers). I've attended eleven different schools. I went to five different high schools across all three of those states, one of them an alternative school, because I dropped out and came back at one point. The only reason we moved so much was because my father couldn't keep a job, and the only reason he could never keep a fucking job was because of two things: the booze, and his anger. And because of the booze, when I was very young, he would come home drunk more often than not and raise the roof off hell. And—in retrospect I know I witnessed it, but was too young or stupid to understand—many of those times, he would rape my mother.
I love alcohol. My father and I have the same favorite drink—whiskey. I've been drinking (not badly) since I was thirteen. And on God, I still don't understand how it could drive a man to something like that unless there was something septic in him already. I've always reckoned it to be a kind of gangrene of the soul.
He would rape my mother, and I wouldn't notice. He would beat her, and I did notice. One time she took me to visit him at a bar and he forced us all to go home, and when we got home I watched him throw her over the sofa and strike her again and again. And that's a sin I cannot forgive. Whatever he did or said to me, all the times his own nature got us nearly put out on the streets, I don't even care. I just care about my mother. She was already fucking abused by her stepfather and her ex-husbands. She didn't need to put up with another lousy man for sixteen years. I didn't even know about the repeated rape or the drug charges, until she told me, after he died. That's how I learned how someone can hate and love at the same time, intertwined, both ideas tearing pieces out of the other.
Another thing, although it pales in comparison to what I already described: he was always cruel to animals. We've had a lot of cats in my life, because my mother loves cats. They're better at companionship than me (too withdrawn, too... orderly, not-understanding). They're everything to her, when my mother is the type of person to pour herself into her everythings. We had one we got when I was three, called Softie, because we got him when I was three. She rescued him herself. They would have conversations where she would talk and he would meow back. Who else would she talk to? My father, or her fool kid more focused on science than people? One night, when I was six or seven, Softie scratched my father (I mean, can you blame him?). It set my father off. I'm still not sure what happened, because I was in my room at the time, but I heard him yelling and rushing around, and my mother crying. I honest-to-God believed he was going to kill that cat. I did not want him to kill that cat. But when you're that young, that stupid, that loyal, your father IS God. So I stayed in my room, but I pounded on my door, screaming over and over again as loud as I could: "Daddy, don't kill Softie!"
He didn't kill Softie. He threw open my door instead, chased him into the refrigerator box my father had brought home from work for me as a toy fort, threw it up on its bottom, and left. When I went to play in that fort the next day, I found stains in the bottom where Softie had pissed himself.
Another time (I'm so sorry this is getting long), when I was five, I wanted to be a veterinarian. I love animals, and I love medicine (current career end goal is nuclear medicine technologist!), so to five-year-old me, it seemed perfect. Unfortunately for the squirrels that liked to eat the seeds out of our garden, my father did not like animals. So he went outside with a screwdriver and, I believe, smashed their fucking heads in. I was five and didn't quite possess the concept of this, but I knew they were hurt, so I wanted to take my toy vet kit and "fix them". My mother, in her infinite wisdom, did not let me do that. And then my father laughed at me for wanting to fix them, because sometimes you just gotta be a cartoon supervillain, I guess.
Our apartments were always shitty, in housekeeping and locale. One time we lived in a shithole in Park Heights, and our upstairs neighbor was busted for having a meth lab. The year we had a dog, our house was festooned in dog shit. All over the floor indoors. My mother had a job and couldn't walk the dog, and my father thought cleaning was a woman's job. I still don't know some things about housekeeping. I didn't know what bedsheets were for until my friend told me last year, and my teeth are in bad shape because nobody really taught me how to brush them.
You might be wondering where the death comes in, and why I'm still talking. When I was fifteen, on the first day of summer vacation, I walked into the living room, and boy was that a misnomer, because my father was face-down and dead on the floor next to his desk. I was home alone. I had heard a noise earlier through my music, but (does this count as irony?) I assumed it was him yelling at the cats and didn't question it. I'm a calm person in emergencies. So much so that it scares me, honestly—although my nonchalance is one of the reasons I think I should pursue the medical field. I went over (I assumed he'd had a seizure), rolled him onto his side, and took his pulse. Nothing. I assumed I was bad at pulse-taking. Called 911. Called my mother. I did CPR and heard things snap under my hands. You know how they tell you about people's faces turning blue? His was purple and warm when the rest of him was pale and cold. There was some kind of puke-adjacent fluid on the floor where his mouth had been and he'd pissed his pants. The EMTs got there and I saw the air change. In the moment, I told them I was sorry they had to tell me this. I still feel bad for them. Imagine being the one who has to tell some fifteen-year-old living in a rat's nest that their father just died! My mother got there and I heard her screaming in the hallway ("This wasn't supposed to happen!"), so I excused myself and left.
I was briefly and informally questioned by a very polite homicide detective, because my father had no medical history (we were dirt fucking poor for a while, and stubborn is stubborn) and I was in a rather suspicious situation. I sat on the curb during this and drank the coffee my mother (a Starbucks employee) had bought for my father. My logic is, well, he sure wasn't gonna drink it. After they did their business in our apartment, a (very funny and kind) cop led us back to my apartment. My mother went to lie face-down in the spot where my father died. The cop gave me a look as if he was passing some kind of reins to me, and I just nodded. And then me and my mother got shit-fuck drunk for like three days straight, because of course we did.
I'm really sorry that was so long. I should get back to the point of my title—the thing is? Knowing what I know now and having the life I do now, that wouldn't have happened if he'd stayed alive? I feel like a traitor, disloyal for saying this, even disloyal to my own moral principles with regards to human life, but even if I'd been able to stop it from happening... I don't think I would have. And honestly, when my mother told me that he'd raped her so many times, I was mad enough that I could have killed him myself if fate hadn't done it for me.
There's a nice ending, though: my mother's remarried now, to a very nice man. I live in an actual HOUSE with a YARD for the first time in my life. We have a dinner table, with a real actual tablecloth, and nobody threatens me while I'm trying to cook my own dinner, and nobody kicks cats into walls, and I don't have to clean up vomit or do first aid on my mother. I'm the second person in my family to ever graduate high school (after my mother), and with a presentable (if confusing, from the moves) transcript to boot. I plan on being the first person in my family to ever attend college, even if it's just getting my Associate's in Applied Science from a community college. I only have two friends, only one of which I'm really close to (I'd do anything for her), and they both understand exactly this kind of bad blood. Hell, you guys, in June we're going on a vacation for the first time in my entire life, and I'm not even afraid of how badly the road trip might go.
Sorry to eat your time. This was long, and possibly not coherent, but... I wanted opinions on the whole business here from people more grown than me or my friends. Feel free to say whatever, I probably want to hear any of it.
Submitted May 02, 2017 at 10:51AM by 090615throwaway http://ift.tt/2p0ivEZ offmychest
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