My rotten dad

 

January 28, 2008

 

You’re not supposed to have vivid memories that early in life.

But I do.

Perhaps it is because this is the only memory I have of my father, so my mind preserved it.

This is not a happy memory, and from what I can gather about my hard-drinking, hard-loving father, he wasn’t a very nice man.

Yet not until just before my mother died in late 2001, did I realize just how bad a character he was.

I had clues.

My mother and father fought a lot even before I was born, breaking up and coming back together, I supposed because they knew I was on the way.

The fact that Dad split and reneged on the $10 a week he agreed to pay in child support only showed he couldn’t be trusted.

My uncle Harry claimed Dad stayed around town for a while.

My mother fearing to go into one particularly neighborhood in Passaic thinking Dad might try to snatch me away – as if he REALLY had any desire to drag a kid around with him from bar to bar.

I must have sensed something wrong that day when Dad carried me down the alley to our 21st Street apartment.

I remember not his face, but his strong arms, and the narrow passage we traveled to reach the side door, behind which was a three room apartment with dark wall paper and a dilapidated stove.

I must have felt the tension in the room or feared I’d be abandoned, which is why I cried so loudly when Dad put me in the crib. The pictures of the animals painted on the crib were designed to cheer me up, but instead scared the crap out of me.

Someone – I still don’t know who – rescued me.

I don’t recall – or perhaps never got a good glimpse of my father’s face, except for the handful of photos my mother kept in an old shoe box, some from the wedding, but one or two later, showing him holding me in my grandfather’s yard.

Over the years, I thought of him from time to time but made no effort to look him up until a library computer system thought it located him in Wyckoff when I applied for a card in 1993.

This was, of course, a case of mistaken identification, but led my mother to wonder if I wanted to seek him out.

I never did. But learned a little later that my father had died in 1990, not in Wyckoff, but in Los Angeles, where had worked at a nurses aide for many years, had even remarried, though I could find no trace of other children. He died of cancer – perhaps the result of an assignment aboard the USS Yancey and some of the Atomic experiments the ship under-went in the late 1940s, I don’t know.

He had joined a medical corps at the beginning of World War II out of Boston, and was enlisted in the Navy as a mechanic when the Government took over operations. But he seemed to have nursing in his blood since this was the profession he took up after leaving the navy, meeting my mother at Graystone Park hospital where both were employed. He, however, soon worked for my grandfather in construction, and even went out on strike against him for more money (and succeeded in getting a raise as a result.)

Prior to the death of Uncle Rich, I learned that my father had often skipped off from work to go to a tavern in Haledon to drink, taking Rich and our Uncle Bill (Grandpa’s nephew) with him, giving the under age Rich his ID so he could drink, too.

This apparently started Rich on a drinking, binge, and my care for him during the final decades of his life when booze left him a wreck.

A few months before my mother’s death in December 2001, I learned her best kept secrets concerning my father, about how he had taken off with their wedding money to go to Washington DC to arrange for an upgrade to his dishonorable discharge, and how he had come home to her after more than two week of whoring – infected with VD.

I don’t know what his life on the west coast was like, though I have since learned about the places he lived, and the woman he married, and the jobs he worked, and how when he died, his wife spread his ashes over the water to reflect his love of the sea.

Maybe he was a reformed man. Maybe he thought of me from time to time, little realizing that our paths crossed in the late 1960s when I ran away to California, too.

I kept help but think I might have seen him on the street there while I was too busy fearing being caught by the police, and how if I had only looked, I might have some other memory than the one from the crib when I was only a few months old.

Over the year, my mother must have forgiven him his sins, grateful for that short honeymoon in Bayshore when I was conceived.