2011-07-10T00:57:00.000-07:00

“What are you doing calling me this late? It’s 11:30pm for Christ’s sake!”

“I – uh – sorry about that. I am feeling pretty confused and thought maybe you could help me.”

“Confused? What are you confused about?”

“I – well – I can’t – I kind of feel like I am going crazy and I needed to talk to you.”

“What? What the he - Ugh. Damnit. I was sleeping. I don’t have time for this. What the HELL are you doing calling me this late? You don’t call me at this time of night with that kind of bullshit”

“I, uh..." Silence on the phone for about five seconds. "I cant stop thinking about death. It just hit me all of a sudden and I got really freaked about death and dying and religion and stuff and - .”

“Jesus Christ! It’s too late for this bullshit.” There was a pause. “Call me tomorrow, ok?”

“Well, I kind of need to talk to you about it now. I am sorry I woke you up, but –“

“Alright. Give me a call tomorrow. Talk to you then, bye.”

…

The preceding was a transcript of a conversation that my father and I had one night when I was seventeen. The profound realization of eventual death had ungraciously seeped its way permanently in to my consciousness and I was beginning what would turn in to a four year investigation in to mortality.

My path would lead me away from my Catholic upbringing, in to Buddhism, back toward Catholicism, away from it again, then back in to Buddhism, and then in to some spiritually ambiguous middle ground that has me contented to this day with a few simple maxims. The maxims are simple. Living life according to them is another matter sometimes.

But that night I needed to talk to my father. I dont know why I thought he would have any answers. That conversation was not exceptional in its scope; meaning I should have expected no less.

He called me the next day, but I was tired from being up all night, shaking and crying. He left a message on my answering machine. I didnt call him back and never talked with him about it again.

...

As a boy, I sure that I was different. My father made sure to remind me of this often enough with his particular brand of subtlety.

“Worthless piece of shit” he said to me as a third grader one day when I brought home a failing grade in English. “Nothing you do is worth a good goddamn.”

I had no idea what he meant. Try as I might, he didn’t make sense. All of the rules for sentence structure and syntax that I was being freshly exposed in to school didn’t seem to apply to the statement. But, I knew it was insulting, and that was really all that mattered.

Hearing that as a child, I simply did not possess the mental tools to look at that behavior and go "Ah. I know what the problem is; YOU sir, are a dick!" Your mental image should include me pointing a finger in the air, 'Eureka!' style.

Nevertheless, I adored my father when I was younger. Probably the 'asshole effect' hard at work there, but we wont waste time examining it. I was on a pretty consistent mission to please him and every time he had something negative to say about my accomplishment or endeavor (which was every time), I would take it as a way to figure out how I could improve my next attempt.

...

The year that I was six. My father bade me come and sit with him to behold the modern-day right of passage for an average suburban male. Monday night football.

The game, however, made no sense to me. I told my father as much and he smiled and attempted to explain the rules. After he was finished, I tried hard to find the appeal in watching the game because it was obviously important to him. Minutes later, though, I had to cut my losses.

“This is kinda dumb” I said. I looked up at my father, who was looking back at me in slow motion with sacrilege in his eyes. “I mean” I went on “all they are doing is running that ball from one side of the grass to the other and back again, right? It’s a lot funner on my game.”

The ‘game’ I was referring to was a toy from Mattel Electronics. It was a handheld device wherein the players were represented by horizontal slivers of orange light. It featured six buttons, a LED screen, one sound, and two options for difficulty.

“Go play” he said morbidly. I leapt from the couch, grabbed a nearby action figure, and ran off in to the wild… unaware of the damage I had done. In that moment my father was sure that he had failed. I was a step away from the gay bars and dating black men.

Before anyone goes and gets offended; I am a straight male, yes. I dont give a shit about race or orientation, though. And gay bars are the best places in the world to go dance.

…

I was eleven when my father, in a hurry, told me to have the yard mowed by the time he returned from his errands. He pointed me to the ancient lawnmower that we owned at the time.

“Get it done” he said, and drove away.

I went to the oil and grass covered mower, primed the motor, grabbed the cord and gave it a mighty yank. Nothing. After a few seconds of recalling what my father did when he mowed the lawn, I adjusted the choke, pulled again, and still… nothing. Again, remembering actions that I had seen my father take, I removed the air filter, and held it up to the light. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but the act of looking at the air filter seemed important.

I should make it clear that I had no idea what priming an engine was. I did not know what a choke lever was supposed to do. I had no idea what an air filter was or what removing it did for the engine. None of these things had ever been explained to me. All I knew was that I had watched my father do these things and I repeated them, in order, the way that I had observed.

But all these efforts were fruitless, so I recalled the next fix on the list. “Son of a bitch” I said to the mower, out loud. “Goddamn piece of shit.” I gave it a small kick and then tried the cord again. Nothing.

Then I remembered a television show I had seen where a mechanic was talking to a pupil and giving him machinery altruisms. “A clean engine is a working engine” he said.

The mower definitely had an engine. And it was definitely not clean.

I set to work. Not knowing a thing about engines or mechanics, I made sure to remember where every piece connected to every other piece as I took the entire engine apart, screw by screw. Using old, ratty towels from the garage, I cleaned every piece of that engine as thoroughly as I could. For the hard to reach places I used q-tips. I spent hours cleaning that damned thing.

Eventually I found a small tube, clogged with debris, that was responsible for carrying who-knows-what to some part of the engine. I put the tube up to my mouth and blew in to it like I was trying to shoot a wad of paper out of a straw. A hard, tiny little chunk of solid crud shot out and on to the ground. I don’t know what it was that told me this was the problem, but somehow I knew it. I continued cleaning and, when everything was as spotless as I could make it, put it all back together.

When the reassembly was complete I walked to the convenience store located about a mile from our house and filled up our gas can with the money I made selling newspapers. I walked home, put the new gas in the engine, made sure that oil was fresh and the air filter was clean and dry.

I was screwing the gas cap back on after filling up the engine when my father returned from his day out. The look he wore was not pleasant.

“What the hell are you doing?” He asked. “Why isn’t the yard mowed?”

I should mention here that I had a mild stuttering problem when I was a child. My father hated this about me because he saw it as a way of me trying to evade guilt. Luckily, when I got nervous it got worse.

“I...I…I…I”

Clearly I was involved with something but was not able to communicate what. I tried a different approach. “The…the…the… lawn mow..mow...mower wouldn’t s-s-s-start” I stammered.

My father gave threw his hands up and marched to the mower, put a foot on the engine, and pulled the cord. The mower roared to life.

He noticed that it looked new and started better than it had in years. He guessed that I must have spent all morning cleaning it and looked at me, his face beaming.

Sadly, to the external observer, his pride in me and his congratulations of my effort would have looked like this:

“You see that?” he yelled. “You need to use your head.” He raised a finger and poked it at me with each word. “Your ugly, damn stupid dumbass head!” and walked in to the house.

I mowed the lawn. When finished I went in to the house, laid on my bed, and cried.

…

I am perhaps painting an unfair picture of my father. He did not drink, do drugs, or physically abuse me. He only raised a hand to me twice. One of those times was because I disappeared; at age eight, for hours to go jump on a neighbor’s trampoline. I had not told anyone where I was going. The other was because my sister held a knife to my throat. More on that later.

My father had three talents. One is that he was an excellent salesman. His tactic was to make you feel like you were wasting his time and the only way to make it up was to buy shit from him. He worked hard and always put 110% of himself in to being a productive member of the workforce. That was always important to him.

He was also bi-lingual. People who are able to speak another language have always fascinated me. Somehow it makes them seem more worldly and well-traveled. I thought for a brief period that pig-latin counted, but alas… no. He never taught his children to speak Spanish.

My father’s third and most prominent talent... He possessed an uncanny ability that exceeded almost every other human I have ever encountered. He could observe a situation and boil away all of the excess happiness and joy in a few moments. He was a master at finding the suffering in anything. Especially when it came to effort.

That may not make sense in light of already having said that he was a hard worker. The effort that I am talking about had only to do with his immediate family. He always seemed resentful at anything to do with any exertion outside of work.

As a result, we never had many things that a person of his income and capability would have been able to provide us. Things like paper towels, extra batteries, food we liked, vacations, braces for our teeth, school clothes, money for field trips, allowances, or anything else that required us as children to be recognized.

The year I was in second grade there was a school function called Track and Field (a series of outdoor activities for elementary-school children that pits teams against each other in events such as relay races, etc). The people in my school were asked to get tshirts. They were supposed to be colored a particular shade of blue with our team name and our last name monogrammed across the back. I told my father about this about two weeks, then ten days, then seven days, then four days, then three, two, one before the Track and Field. His assurance was that we would get the required shirt before the big event and all would be right and well in the land of Me.

The night before, as he was passing by my bedroom, he saw my light on.

“Why the hell aren’t you asleep?”

“I don’t have a sh, sh, sh, shirt” I said in my stuttering, poetic fashion. I took a deep breath to steady myself.

“You said we would get one.”

“What are you talking about?” he said. “What shirt?”

I again relayed to him the details. He stood at the door, his eyes growing soft with remorse.

“Damnit, son” he said, shifting his weight back and forth. “What the hell is your problem? You should have told me. You can’t expect me to be able to do anything about it now.” He looked at his watch. “It’s nine o’clock.”

I started to cry. My father always hated to see me like that and did his best to calm me down.

“Jesus Christ!” he said. “What the hell do you want me do now? I mean, shit. You need to tell me this stuff.” He turned to leave then turned back. “Would you cut that shit out, please?”

“I did tell you” I said. “I told you a bunch of times.”

“No you didn’t!” he shouted. My sister poked her head out of her room. “Go back to your room. This is none of your damn business.”

He looked at me, his eyes narrowed to slits behind his thick glasses. I don’t know how long he stood there, watching me cry, but he eventually spoke up.

“What color shirt did you say you needed?”

My heart nearly leapt from my chest. I always felt like my father held me in a consistent state of disapproval but I knew that he was intelligent. I was sure that a divinely inspired, miracle solution was about to spew forth on wings of wisdom from his mouth.

“Blue” I said.

“

Well, do you have a blue shirt?”

I did, but it was not my team’s color blue. And it didn’t have my name or my team name on it.

“I do, but it’s not my team’s color blue. And it doesn’t have my name or my team name on it.”

“Wear that, then” he replied. As he turned to leave, he said over his shoulder “How hard was that to do? Huh? Why couldn’t you have thought of that on your own, instead of turning it in to some big damn production.”

I sat in the middle of the floor of my room and said to the empty hallway “What about the color? Or my name?”

The next day on the way to school I sat silent, staring out the window. I felt my father keep looking at me. Eventually, he brought it up. “Would you stop that pouting?” he assuaged. “You’re going to be surprised how many kids are doing the same damn thing.”

When time came for the events, I was the only child not dressed the proper uniform as far as I could tell. Even Timothy, a boy in my class with a pronounced lisp who existed in a constant state of bad grades, runny noses and crusty eyes, had acquired a shirt.

I told my teacher I was ill. I stayed in the nurse’s office the entire day, feigning sickness and hating my clothes.

…

I am not by nature a materialistic person. I have always had a difficult time establishing a sense of ownership or permanence with anything.

Up until my twenties this was also true with pets. As a child I can’t name a single pet we ever had longer than a year.

There were legions of cats that we would get, only to have my father declare after some period of time “That goddamn cat. We’re taking and dropping that piece of shit off tomorrow.”

After many hours of painstaking research to determine where the felines would be cared for the best, my father selected the place he felt like had the most humane practices, the lowest incidents of animal cruelty, and guarantees that they were placed in caring homes. It was a field near our house.

The procedure was this; we would drive by the field, which in the days before it was overrun with development encompassed several acres, and my father would slow the car down. He would wait until we were even with the midline of the field and yell “Now!” I would then have to fling open the door of the car, cat in hand and car still moving, and drop the animal off in the shoulder of the road leading in to the field. The cats were often unhappy at being tossed from a moving vehicle in to unfamiliar territory and heavy scratches usually resulted.

I hated doing this. I hated that my father involved me in it, and I hated that no matter how much I tried I could not find anything redeeming in why he made it necessary.

I thought that my father was joking when he told me the plan the first time. I honestly thought we were just taking the cat with us because my father knew I was particularly fond of this one.

After I realized that he was not joking, I protested. “Dad, no! No WAY!”

“Don’t give me a hard time” he said. “You just do what I tell you to do.” He was smirking.

After mentally reviewing the order of events and the ridiculousness of his instructions, I could not believe that he was being serious and laughed at him. Try and picture it; a child sitting there in a car petting a purring companion. Then a booming voice shakes you out of a day dream saying “Hey! Pay attention! Get rid of that goddamn cat.”

The car pulled to a complete stop as my father and I sat staring at each other. His eyes were wide with disbelief.

“Son!” he said finally. “If I have to tell you again there’s going to be hell to pay. Put that goddamn cat outside.”

As a seven year old hearing that command from the mouth of your father, there is little choice. I couldn’t do anything about it. There was no contest of wills to be had. I knew my father well enough to know the iron handed resolve in his look.

I opened the door, crying, and held the cat up to my face.

“Bye, kitty” I remember saying. I buried the cat’s face in to mine and gave it a kiss. Then I unbuckled my seat belt and started to get out of the car.

“Son!” said my father “what the hell are you doing? Just drop that damn cat and let’s go. You’re going to be late for school.”

I leaned out of the car. I wasn’t tall so I had to let it go a few inches from the pavement. It landed lightly and looked around. Almost immediately it tried to jump back up in to the car. It didn’t make it, however, and its front paws hung on the edge of the door frame. I sat as if hypnotized, appalled by the ever-growing reality of what was happening.

My father heard the sound of tiny scratches and grew furious. He leaned over to my side of the car to assess the damage.

“Son! Are you stupid?!” he exclaimed. I snapped out of my daze, looking up at his scolding countenance. “Wake up! Jesus! That cat is going to ruin the paint.”

The car lurched forward as my father put the car in drive. He stepped on the brakes immediately and, as I am sure he intended, the cat dropped off the door frame and on to the ground. Probably not a moment too soon either, seeing as how the car slammed shut right before the cat fell away.

“Make sure he’s out of the way of the car” said my father. “I don’t want to run over his stupid little ass.”

Through welling eyes I looked in the side mirror and saw nothing. My heart skipped when the horn of the car blared suddenly as my father attempted to scare the cat away from the car.

Evidently it worked, because I saw the cat bolt in to the ditch that separated the field from the road. I looked at my father. “He’s gone” I said.

“Good” said my father. “Goddamn cat.” The car lurched forward again as he let go of the brake and stepped on the gas.

He looked at me as we drove to my school. “Don’t worry about it” he said. “We’ll get another cat.”

That was the first time in my life I would ever think the words “fuck you” to anyone.

Our next temp cat that we released from the bonds of domestication clawed me so badly through the denim of my jeans that thin lines of blood began to show almost before I could shut the car door. I was afraid to tell my father, but I needed to change clothes.

“Dad, I’m bleeding” I said to my father.

“What?” he said, looking irritated.

“I’m bleeding” I repeated. I pointed to my leg. My father looked down at my leg. He looked back at me.

“Shit” he said. “Now your jeans are ruined.” He made a big exhale and shook his head. “Don’t get any blood on my seat, ok? Goddamn cat.”

After a minute of silence, my father spoke up again. “If anybody asks at school, tell them that you did that with a pencil or something, ok?” Then, under his breath, “what the hell you doing letting that cat scratch you like that anyway?”

Several things came in to my consciousness at once. The first was that he had no intention of ever letting me keep an animal as a pet. It would take me years to realize that the reason was not because I did not deserve them, it was because he was a dickhead.

Second, I realized was that he was not joking. I was not going to be able to change clothes. I was going to go school with blood on my jeans close to my crotch and look like I had experienced some sort of weird male menstrual cycle.

Lastly, I was beginning to understand that my father was not a superhero in disguise. He wasn’t selfless, possessed of uncommon wisdom, generosity, or any other redeeming quality other than those that I mentioned earlier. He was exactly as he appeared to me.

I was disappointed, then, not just because he was a douche bag. I was disappointed because that meant that I had it in my blood to be a douche bag too. This poor example of a human being, an all too common representation of the male gender, this man who belched, farted, liked to watch football, berated his children, and made me throw pets out of a car to get rid of them, was my father.

…

While the story evolved over the years, the conclusion was the same. Only pets that required no maintenance were allowed. If anything, anything at all, happened to one of our pets the deathwatch would begin. When pets ran away, they were gone. There were no Lost Pet posters, no drives around the neighborhood, no door to door. There was no sense of urgency whatsoever.

The summer before eighth grade, I got a cat that I was really, really fond of, Max. He was a gift from my mother, probably as a way to make my father mad. In those days they were prone to such antics.

I had just moved in with my father to be closer to my brother and sister. It was a place in an upper class, predominately white, bitch ass neighborhood. Consequently, being a poor kid who had moved up to the deluxe apartment in the sky in the middle of summer, I had few options for a social life.

So I turned to my Max. This cat was the coolest animal companion I could have asked for. When I went for one of my many, endless summer walks Max would follow. When I went for one of my many, endless bike rides, Max would follow. He would sit in my lap when I read (which was often), sleep with me at night, rarely meow, but always purr. His black and white coloring bespoke of a genetic feline indiscretion with no evident breed, but he was smart, sweet, and he was mine.

My father, needless to say, didn’t like Max and, probably even more needless to say, was pretty vocal about it. As a sign of dominance, or maybe just because he was an asshole, my father would occasionally stomp a heavy foot at Max or shout loudly and send the cat running in fright.

One day, Max went missing. I was frantic. I told my father about it and as expected he responded with a mad dash to the car and tire marks in the driveway as he peeled out to begin the unrelenting search for my best friend. To the external observer, though, it looked more like calm indifference while he sat on his ass and ate cherry popsicles.

The entire morning and much of the afternoon were spent on my bicycle, searching the neighborhood and shouting Max’s name. Many of my future classmates were outside, doing kids-in-summer-things, and I am sure that the sight of a shaggy haired boy with cheap glasses and nose acne riding around on a second hand bicycle and shouting “Maaaaaaaax!” over and over didn’t do much for my to-be-determined popularity.

Eventually I had to admit defeat. I rode home with the sun setting on my back, listening to the emerging crickets and pondering the fate of my cat. I felt a little silly because I knew how everyone at home would treat my despair. My brother and sister would make fun of me, my father would look at me with disgust for being weak, and my step-mother would say “I’m sure he’s fine” with voice devoid of concern.

When I got home, I put my bike in to the detached garage and headed toward the house. Something in the wind made me pause and listen. More of a feeling than a sound, but eventually I did hear something. Soft at first, it sounded like a far away siren. I almost dismissed it as such until I got closer to the house.

There was urgency in the texture of it. Something desperate. I went around the side of the house and it became louder. I knelt close to the shrubs that lined the driveway and then I saw him.

Max was there in the bushes, lying on his side. His eyes were open and unblinking. His breathing was deep and labored. With each exhale he would produce the long, siren-like wail that I had almost dismissed.

“Max?” I said. My voice was soft and full of fear. Even though he was clearly breathing, my young and open mind thought maybe he was dead and this was some sort of nerve reaction.

At the sound of my voice, he stopped. He lifted his head and looked me, his eyes blinking. He looked around and then propped himself up on one elbow.

For a moment all seemed to be well. Then Max began moving toward me. Or trying to. It was more that he tried to move to me. He was only mobile from the chest up. Only his front paws worked. The lower half of his body was broken. He had been hit or rolled over by a car.

I remember thinking that his movements looked like a choppily edited movie. He was looking around and crawling toward me on his front paws, clawing at the ground and meowing louder and louder.

I cant say that I felt anything at all. This level of shock was new to me. I mean, sure I felt shock the first time I got beat up, or when my mother, brother, or sister hit me, but this was different.

Finally, watching Max move toward me with his choppy, mechanical efforts, I snapped out of my funk and said “I’ll be right back.” I ran in to the house yelling “Dad! I found him! I found Max!”

My father came out of his bedroom and looked at me. He wiped a hand across his mouth – his classic sign of irritation – and said “wait. What? You found who?”

“Max” I said. “I found him outside. I think he got hit by a car or something. Dad, come and see. He needs help.” I started toward the back door, but realized that I was alone.

My father hadn’t moved. “He’s outside?” he asked.

“Yes” I said, emphasizing the word. “He looks like his back legs are broken or something. Maybe it’s his hips or his back. I don’t know. He needs help. Come on.”

“Damnit, son” said my father. “I don’t know what you think I’m going to be able to do for that goddamn cat.” He threw his hands out in a show of exasperation. “Jesus” he said. “Just get him some water. If he’s really got all that wrong with him, then he’s probably going to die soon anyway.” Then my father turned around and went back to his bedroom. “Hey” he said, turning back to me “if he does die, make sure you do something with him. Don’t just leave him there in the bushes.” Then he walked in to his room and shut the door.

I stood there for just a second before I headed back outside. I expected exactly what happened, it’s just that I had hoped for more.

Later that night, I moved Max in to the laundry room of the house. I set him up in a cardboard box complete with a towel for a bed, some water, mashed up food, and placement close to the water heater so that he would stay warm. I made a small pallet near him for me to sleep and that is the way it stayed for a few weeks. I read, ate, and slept in that 8’x8’ room for the next 30 days.

In the days that stretched in to a month that followed, Max gained strength and mobility. I was eventually able to stop looking forward to wiping piss and shit off of his fur as he grew able to drag himself in to his litter box and then back to his bed.

After a few more weeks, he began to walk again. My father had since ordered me back to sleeping in my room and I found Max one morning standing at the door of the laundry room, meowing. I nearly cried because I was so happy.

He was never the same afterward. His left hip would flare out unnaturally with each step as his tiny bones healed incorrectly but enough so that he had a weird walk and a weirder run. But, he didn’t let any of that slow him. For the rest of that summer, he still accompanied me on my walks, and when I would ride my bike he would sit in my back pack, saying nothing but purring loudly.

When school started that year Max disappeared. I never saw him again, and the day he vanished I knew it was for good. I did the perfunctory reconnaissance but found nothing.

A few weeks later my stepmother got a cat. It was a Himalayan cat named Toby that was the evilest damn thing that ever drew breath. It would attack viciously anyone who dared for a late night drink of water and hiss at anyone but Cruella that tried to pet him.

One day my stepmother looked panicked. I had just gotten home from a friend’s and saw her bulging eyes bulging even larger as she sat at the table with the telephone cradled in her shoulder.

I went to my room, not really giving a shit what was wrong, but a few minutes later she came in to my room. “Hey” she said “I have to take Toby to the vet. He has this horrible crust in his eyes and nose and I’m worried to death. I’ll be back afterwhile.”

It was discovered that Toby had allergies. I imagine his allergies may have been exacerbated by the two packs of cigarettes a day my stepmother smoked, but that’s just a guess. I know that I hated it (the smoking), but I may just be prejudiced since I hated her.

Anyway, Toby had to get a daily injection for the rest of his life and frequent trips to the vet thereafter. My father showed the correct amount of sympathy and alarm when he got home from work and my stepmother told him the awful news. They spent the rest of the evening holding Toby, petting him and speaking soothing words to his mean little ass. A little while later, my father told me to make dinner. Cruella was very upset and we all had to be supportive.

…

My entire life I have given my father four hugs. The first time his eyes went wide and his body went rigid as if I had just rubbed my dick on him. The second time he asked me if I was a fag, and the third and fourth times were when I was an adult and done mostly just to make him feel uncomfortable.

Thanks for reading. I am not promising any sort of timeline for updates if anyone is interested.

This Hidden Truth