Sick Sons A Bitches

From my earliest thoughts, I knew without fail that my dad loved me more than anything else in the world. In all likelihood it's the first thing I knew.  While time flew by faster than any summer vacation and the rolling stone went from handsome and strong to what Johnny Cash once called "big and bent and gray and old," I never doubted. His once lightning-quick mind turned confused and addled but that love never wavered and I always knew it.

It's important to acknowledge that. The gentle sweetness I knew from my first memories are what I leaned on when I first became a father and every time I'd try  and every time I'd win over my own son.  Much of the  success I've had in fatherhood is in no small measure a result of my dad's love and devotion. My hope is how clear it is and  how deeply I mean that, if nothing more than to honor my dad for providing me with the first examples of unconditional love that I gave my own kids upon first laying eyes on them.

Of course,  valuable lessons are also born from watching someone's mistakes and I say that because Jesus Christ could he get up to no good when he wanted to. 

Like his capacity for love, my dad came by his proclivity for sin naturally and he honed both over his life.

If you prefer your sinning to be Old Testament, my dad is your guy. His favorite sin was easily the sin of vanity. Often, his vanity would manifest its self in standard fashion. He was handsome but maybe not quite to the degree he thought he was. Like many in his family, he was blessed with a surprisingly good singing voice. He was quick on his feet and knew he was hilarious. He loved to show these talents for the joy they brought others  but most important to him was the inevitable praise said talents would rightfully garner. By his own account a "terrific athlete," he would remind you of his ability on the football field or baseball diamond but seldom would you see a demonstration of that prowess as he knew that glory days will pass you by as promised.

As I grew older and more his son, the requisite amount and degree of hero worship  had been shown and gave way to the satisfaction in fucking with him. I was especially fascinated with his more bizarre idiosyncrasies as they stood, without the slightest hint of irony, diametrically opposed to who he was. 

At one time in his life he would disavow the existence of God and the next day cheer openly for Notre Dame because they were "A Good Catholic School."

Despite being  an unapologetic homophobic he loved to watch cooking shows and the movie "Breakfast At Tiffany's." He proudly knew the words to many Rogers and Hammerstein musicals.  He loved singing them loudly in commendable pitch and tune.  Any chance I could, I would match only the volume to point out the just barely latent homosexuality of these interests.

As I said, he clearly felt he was handsome and was willing to go above and beyond his normal disdain for even the slightest extra work to further that belief. He would dye his hair. He would work in his garden and mow the lawn shirtless for  no other reason than to comment how beautiful he found his tan to be. Once while doing this, a friend of my sister pulled into the driveway and with all the grace and delicacy of a goddamn jackhammer told my dad to "go put a shirt on. You look fucking pregnant." He was wounded and I was overjoyed. I didn't have to do a thing because for the next month he mentioned it at least twice daily. That's exactly what made the next piece of this mystifying. With the considerable primping complete he would put on one of a hundred pair of baby blue faded Levi's and then would  inexplicably and constantly conduct raids on my closet for a t shirt or sweat shirt. This might not seem notable except  that he was easily half a foot taller and a foot and a half more broad than I was. Yet, on went those Levi's just before he would stuff his 6 ft 3 and apparently pregnant body into what was more times than not a recently cast aside or worse yet slightly outgrown t shirt meant for a a 5ft 9 inch 150 pound scrawny teenager. It made no goddamn sense and I know it made an impression on people other than me who would inquire just what in the fuck my dad was doing in my old clothes.

One night he and my mother had plans to go to dinner at the home of one of my mom's coworkers. The woman, Karen, was an emergency room nurse. Her boyfriend was named Randy. I took some note of this because my dad kept saying the name derisively, accentuating the syllables in a high nasal tone. Admittedly his name sucked but I couldn't be bothered with that and frankly a guy named Duane Faye had little room to talk. But talk he did and as he did so, I began to pick up on a crack in the facade. There was something more to this. There was a threat to my dad that his vanity would not abide. As it turns out, Randy had a bit of glamour that my dad couldn't match. Despite that horrible goddamn name, Randy was something of a star around the hospital where my mom and Karen worked. Randy was front and center of a new philosophy in critical care. The philosophy was to get emergency personnel to patients and in turn get patients to the hospital as quick as possible to ensure the best chance for survival. What is an SOP now was brand new in the mid 80's This concept materialized in the form of a sleek new helicopter and sitting in the pilot seat and manning the yoke for these lifesaving voyages was none other than Randy. Butch would never admit it but I knew something was up. Perhaps, it was that lost athletic step. Maybe the increasing frequency of his dye jobs bothered him. Certainly the need for maternity clothes was upsetting news. The competition was at a new level. The competition was literally a flying lifesaving fucking superhero.  Where  my dad was terrified of getting in the cabin of a 747, the cockpit of a helicopter was not even available let alone goddamn feasible. This called for calculated, drastic, and flat out odd measures.  He might lose but  he would make sure Randy was going to need every bit of that fucking helicopter to get to the victory parade. 

.

What I might want was cast alongside his fashion sense as my dad told me to bring him my as yet unworn Michigan Wolverines 3/4 sleeve tee. That it was at best an 1/8 of a sleeve when stretched over his giant  torso  made zero difference. He was determined if he was going to walk into Race Bannon's home court he was going to do so in a beautiful brand new shirt that he didn't even buy for his teenage son and was no less than three sizes too small. I considered a valiant attempt of telling him him no. After all I had yet to wear the shirt and now I have to watch it be torn asunder as he squeezed it over his Frankenberry head and onto his Magilla Gorilla body. He gave me a look I didn't see much but knew when I did that  there was no goddamn point in arguing.  Lines were being drawn and choosing the line benefiting Randy and his helicopter would produce a goddamn fit that made no fifteen dollar shirt remotely worth it. I relented and watched the shirt I had coveted for months stretch over the torso of Grape Ape as he and his fragile psyche left to wage a battle that I was certain existed only in his mind against  Randy the helicopter pilot. You gotta hand it to him. The odds were stacked against my dad what with Randy's helicopter, Randy's home court advantage and what I could only assume were Randy's normal sized clothes meant for Randy or a comparable adult man of a similar size. In contrast the old man sauntered into Randy's lair with a skin tight shirt that only a few days prior hung somewhere between the sections catering to high school freshman or inordinately husky middle school nerds.

 The next memory I have of the night in question is waking up on the couch listening to my dad drunkenly heap praise on the ever present, ever loyal Duke. Sweet, stinky and huge in his own right, Duke The Dog was the closest competition I had for my dad's affection. The fact that my dad couldn't borrow his fur pelt probably put old Duke just off my pace through no fault of his own.

Less than half awake, I fumbled for my glasses. Once I found them, information started coming fast. First and foremost, I noted my mom was nowhere to be found. I started to ask where she was when I stopped in mid-sentence. My mouth hung agape and became incapable of forming another word despite the questions that started coming furiously into my brain.  I quickly surmised that either my dad had instead spent the evening butchering livestock or the battle with Randy and possibly several others, was way way more literal than I ever could have conceived. As feared, the once new blue and white 3/4 sleeve Michigan Wolverines T was compromised around the neck but this wasn't stretched beyond the capacity of the fabric. It had been torn asunder which, despite those exact concerns, still came as a complete shock and would have sent me well off the deep end had I not in the next moment gathered that the shirt was covered in blood. White and blue had turned red and purple over most of the front of the shirt.

Everyone knows the confusion inherent to waking up from a dead sleep. Add in the following variables: despite the fact I'd seen him drink nothing stronger than a Coke in ten years, here sat my drunken father covered in blood and what was left of my prized t-shirt, which could barely contain him when it was in one continuous piece,  now hung haphazardly in tatters about his shoulders which somehow now looked even more broad than they did just four short hours ago. Finally, let's not forget that I still had no earthly clue who's blood this was and finally, to put things as mildly as I ever had in my 15 years, my mom's seemingly conspicuous absence was stark and concerning. Any one piece of this terrifying new stimuli was bad enough. Thrown violently together when I had been sound asleep 45 seconds prior and it's a miracle I had anything other than PTSD. Somehow I retained a legitimate and clear memory. My memory stuck because I marked the occasion by swearing in front of/to/at my dad for the first time ever. Despite the increasing likelihood that my dad had murdered someone and I could not rule out my mother as that someone, I made the most of my opportunity stringing together a flurry of words as loud as I could muster, I  needed immediate answers to several pressing question in a clear order of least to most important

DADWHATTHEFUCKHAPPENEDWHOSBLOODISTHATWHEREISMOM?!?!?!

He laughed.

 From my perspective this is as bad as a response as could be given. I didn't know it then but he was not trying to be cruel or even evasive. He was caught off guard which is fair given he knew all the information I was demanding and from his perspective only had to focus on the fact that he just drunkenly witnessed me turn from a normal yet groggy teenager into a hysterical cursing banshee in the blink of a sleep filled eye.

I'm assuming I slowed my pace somewhat or maybe I dropped the secondary information for the clearly most pressing issue or maybe I did nothing different. Who the hell knows. I do remember two things as if they just happened. I remember the sense of relief that came when I realized I had not been simultaneously made an orphan and a ward of the State of Michigan:

Dad, where's mom?

She went upstairs to bed

Ok, that's fantastic news but considering he is drenched in the blood of a still unidentified entity I held at him in at least a modicum of suspicion.

Is that blood?

Uh yeah. That is Randy's blood

 And that was the other thing. I clearly remember his cadence. He paused dramatically between the words is...Randy's...blood

I looked down and saw my dad's mangled pulpy paw and despite all contrary evidence was now confident that my dad had not in fact joined the  goddamn Manson Family.  I don't remember doing so but at some point I repeated the last piece of information I was seeking. Exactly what the fuck happened between that time I last saw him- not unlike a ridiculous turtle native only to Easter Island-forcing  that gargantuan block head through the doomed neckline of a t shirt I was never meant to wear and when I awoke to a drunken wrap session with Duke The Dog  as the shirt he never should have worn in the first place and saturated with pilot blood, hung more over than on him.

I can't tell the actual events of what happened at Randy and Karen's as I wasn't there but was able  to patchwork the pertinent details together as new information presented its self  along with two chance encounters and details no father should share with his son, regardless of the near pathological lack of filter demonstrated by the former.

Apparently Randy turned out to be a legitimate asshole. My mom eventually confirmed this in spite of the fact that she could have cast all the blame and perversions at my dad's feet. From the night in question to a chance meeting a year later my dad had several opportunities to clean up his act and failed spectacularly throughout. Like any superior competitor he came by his debauchery and underhandedness naturally and with one last stage he sank to a new and totally unanticipated low that, in considering the totality of his actions, could have my mom justifiably murder my dad and never see the inside of a jail cell. Always the consummate responsible parent, my dad managed to shield me from information I need not know and shepherd me through the information I had regrettably learned and to his credit, he managed to do so for almost a day before he collapsed completely. My mom had told him that Randy was unable to fly as both eyes had swollen almost fully shut. My dad was giddy and even years later when Randy was brought up my dad said proudly, "I grounded that son of a bitch." It was that exuberance that led him to cave and I pounced for details. Again, vanity overtook him and I got the details I wanted at the incredibly high price of mental images of a parent that no child should ever have to process

So Randy and Karen had a hot tub and the initial intent from one of my parents was to use said hot tub for its intended purpose and only that purpose while it sounds like my other parent, unbeknownst to his wife, called an audible below the foamy surface. Their hosts (referred, henceforth save once and only once, derisively and accusingly by my dad as "your mother's friends.")  had designs to use that tub for something else-something that hearkened back to the 1970's. You could almost hear the telltale bass riff rising above all that steam. For reasons I couldn't comprehend as a son, let alone now as a father, my dad confided to his 15 year old child that Randy made a move by way of a hand slipped clandestinely under the bubbles and directly to dear old dad's unsuspecting nether regions. He said that once he got wise, old Randall and his flying machine went out of commission. My dad's penchant for Holly Golightly and surrey's with the fringe on top notwithstanding, I do believe this version in part for reasons above and beyond my bio hazardous t shirt. First, in what would not be their last chance meeting,  the couples met up a few days later at the hospital were three of them worked. . I had been treated there for spine and neurological surgeries and did not put two and two together initially. Despite training by way of a lifetime of awkward scenarios I simply looked at the mangled face beneath the sunglasses and thought "man somebody fucked that guy up" without even considering that somebody was my dad until he asked me if I got a look at my  mother's friends as the door shut and Randolph and his lady scurried away-likely to the nearest key party. I let myself down. I had an opportunity to bare witness to intently study the aftermath and while I didn't fully evaluate everything the mottled purple bruises clued me in enough to know something happened and over the course of that something  things went decidedly awry for Randy and his face. The final evidence that told me things went down largely as my dad had outlined fell into place a few days later. It had occurred to me that my dad said something in the details that I didn't clarify and it was bugging me.  My dad indicated just a small amount of time took place between when he felt the offending hand and commenced with Randy's asswhipping. The topic had begun to die down at our house despite  my dad still referring to the offending and clearly morally bankrupt couple as "mom's friends." Everyone in the house knew if anyone was going to run in a swinging crowd that my dad was far and away the most viable option and this probably included Karen and maybe even Randy. Young and foolish, I sought out this final bit of clarification.

"Hey Dad, you said it took a few seconds between when Randy grabbed you and when you hit him. Why did you stay in for even a second," I asked with honest revulsion.

In as casual and matter of fact a response as could be given my dad replied

"Thought it was Karen."

Jesus on the Christ.

 There wasn't  even a shed of jocularity there. The answer was a lot of things and none of them were good but one thing it wasn't was a lie.

My parents had one final run in with Randy and Karen before they moved to Florida (where consequently Karen took a drunken mid afternoon swim  in an alligator infested canal and was never seen again) Del Shannon was playing the Allegan County Fair. My mom and dad went with my mom's sister. After the concert, my likely disgusted and horribly uncomfortable mom and my certainly oblivious aunt found themselves in a conversation with none other than The Swingin' Pilot and Lady DownForWhatever. My dad had fallen a few yards back but saw what was happening and made a beeline for his wife and his sister in law.

 He stood once again at the precipice of redemption and once again my dad fucked up. He walked with purpose to the group and in one motion grabbed my aunt by the arm and ushered her away with nary a thought about leaving his wife to fend for herself with two complete reprobates.

" Come on Gin, you don't wanna be near those sick sons a bitches"

My aunt neither asked for nor was given further clarification. I have to imagine  that since easily the sickest son of a bitch she knew wanted no part of these people my aunt chose the devil she knew rather than The Devil (and Miss Jones) she didn't.