This is about one of my stepfathers, now deceased.
Dad had a kink. He liked girls, and he liked them a little on the young side.
He also liked massive amounts of porn, and drugs.
He didn't like me that way. He told me that once, when we were doing E together, when I was in my 30's or so. "I never felt attracted to you," he said, as if this was some sort of mysterious phenomenon.
One of Dad's ex-wives (now also deceased) wrote a book about him once. Very funny book, self-published; good luck finding a copy.
It started out with Dad's ex-wife #2 getting a visit from ex-wife #3.
Ex-wife #2 was a friend of mine; alcoholic and cigarette-addicted, but loving and kind.
Ex-wife #3 wasn't someone I was close to, but she was cool in a lot of ways. She was Dad's sex surrogate. He paid her for sex therapy, and then they got married.
Both of these women have been gone for a long time, like Dad.
The book starts out with ex-wife #3 soliciting advice from ex-wife #2 about Dad, who had asked for a birthday present. He would like two 16 year old girls.
Ex-wife #3 wasn't particularly concerned about the general form of this request, but could it not be two 18 year girls? 16 year olds are illegal!
A lot of Dad was like that. Like when I went to his new year's party when he was married to his fourth and last wife, and I passed out drunk on the floor of the office, and when I came to in the very early morning, found him masturbating in front of porn on his computer.
I wandered up, there he was. He didn't seem too disturbed by this. I let him know I was taking off. He was okay with that.
There were other times, though.
One of his favorite stories about me was about when he met me and my mom, and he went around telling his friends about how she had the cutest little red tennis shoes, and they all were thinking, WTF?
He was talking about me. He fell in love with me.
We were friends, I always thought, until the end when he disinherited us all. That went on and on. Another story.
And he didn't molest me. I will never believe that he did and that I forgot it, though he may well have molested other people. That's outside of the scope of this conversation.
Later, when I was working for him in a kind of a sinecure, he told me about how we'd been to visit his place of employment, and were walking up the stairs, when he met a colleague, who said; "No question of who's the father there!" Because we looked kinda alike; round/square faces, eyes with a slight downward tilt at the corners.
And because we were bonded.
He had a friend, whom I liked a lot, a colleague. Smart fellow; they were close. "Your father has a kink," he told me once.
Yeah, Dad had a kink. But still, there are things I can't forget.
Like the time when I was working for him, not too long before he died, when we were strolling around down Main Street in Santa Monica, and we suddenly decided that it would be cool to sing "America, The Beautiful." Right there in front of Santa Monica and Dog and God and everybody.
I did the descant part, which amazingly I still remembered from high school choir.
Dad held up well with the melody.
It was one of the finest moments of my life.
So, as you can see, dear Kossacks, there is a lot to be reconciled here. Dad hurt some people. I know that.
But he shaped me, and not all the ways he shaped me were bad. Some of them were truly magnificent. He helped to give me my love of honesty, even when it's scary.
I do not write this to forgive him. He did some things to some people that are not to be forgiven.
I write this to attempt to redeem himself in me. Because he was my Dad, and he did love me, fails and all. Though he was not my biological Dad, he shaped me so much. I cannot ever escape him. He will always be there.
He still shows up in my dreams a lot. In the dreams, he is not dead. In the dreams, I forget he is dead.
Because he is not. Because he is in me.