Father’s Day
Dad Was…Complicated.
Growing up in southern California, the first of two children born to two white, married, cisgender parents, I was part of the classic nuclear family. Dad worked, mom stayed home, we had a little house, I had a sister a couple of years younger. My sister and I went to good schools, we played sports, we went off to college, the end.
Of course, there was a lot more to my life with my father than just that. One of the terrible things that went wrong is that I lost my father when he was way too young; he died in 1996, at age 59, of glioblastoma, the terrible, fast-moving brain cancer that also killed Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy. The diagnosis is a death sentence; the only thing you don’t know if you’ll be dead next month or in 6 or twelve months. Dad lasted about six.
The last time that I saw him was about 3 months before he died. I was still in the Air Force, stationed in Hawaii. A few months earlier, I’d rushed to Phoenix, where my folks lived at the time, because Dad had collapsed in the driveway, and was now in intensive care in a local hospital, condition unknown. I, and my wife, and my sister, all went there, learned the diagnosis, helped Mom to work out a treatment plan that wouldn’t bankrupt them (they had no health insurance at the time), and then I had gone back to my posting in Hawaii. A few months later, I got a call from mom that dad was declining, and she needed help. I already had a scheduled business trip to Texas, so I changed my return to stop over in Phoenix and stay a few days with them to help out.
Turned out mom needed some odd jobs done around the house, mostly. The lawn needed to be mowed, there were some minor repairs that needed to be done. Dad normally did all that, but hadn’t, not in months. Mostly she just needed some familial support, and so I went. I’m glad I did because I got to have a few nice one-on-one chats with Dad. The surgery, chemo, and radiation had definitely affected him, but he was mostly all there still. I feel terrible that Mom had to support him solo in his final weeks and days, but I’m glad that my last memory of him is of him, not the shell of the person he was in the final days, just a few months later.
Dad was your prototypical “strong silent type.” He really didn’t say much, but when he did, you better listen because one, when he did talk, it was usually important, and two, he didn’t care to repeat himself. As a young child, I both loved and idolized him, but also feared him. He had a terrible temper, and it could turn on quickly, and from out of nowhere. And he was a big man. Tall but not overly tall at 6'-2", but very broad, especially in the shoulders. I remember once, when I was very young, like maybe 8, we had attended a Dodgers game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Two men sitting in front of us were being drunkenly obnoxious, and Dad politely asked them to tone it down. One of the guys turned around, stood up, and said, “Why don’t you fuck off?” Dad immediately stood up; the guy laughed nervously but sat back down and shut up until stadium security came and took him and his drunken buddy away.
He never hit any of us, not mom, or me, or my sister; but at times he would drink too much, and get very loudly angry, and yell and punch holes in the walls and doors and whatnot. Sometimes he would be angry for days or a week or two, and the household would be on edge waiting for the inevitable explosion. When I got older, maybe 15 or so, he started turning his ire on me directly. Again, he never hit me, but once when he was quite drunk, he invited me to resolve our differences in the backyard. I told him to fuck off, and ran off into the night — as if I was going to tangle with my old man! I didn’t go far — mom drove out and found me a block or so away a few hours later — and the next day he apologized, claiming to not remember anything about that night. Maybe that was true.
He was also one of those classic white guys who would say “I’m not racist,” but would drop n-words and viewed black people with contempt and suspicion. Interestingly enough, he worked closely with Hispanic men much of his adult life; in California, in the construction business, it’s unavoidable. He was close enough to some of those men that they were like brothers to him; to me, they were uncles. But he definitely had a thing about Black people — and it was that old trope of “there are black people, and they’re fine, I got no problem with them, and then there are (n-words).” But really, he wasn’t fine. The black people he was fine with kept their mouths shut, weren’t ostentatiously dressed (to his standards), and were properly respectful (to him).
Dad was one of those men who viewed calling a repair person — for anything — as akin to relinquishing your man card. He could fix anything and did — from our cars to the washing machine and dryer, to electrical, plumbing — whatever was broken. He could build anything, and he did, including an in-ground pool with wooden deck, a solar heater for our pool (in 1981! I helped.), minor (and major) carpentry, concrete patios, gas BBQs, painting, wallpaper — whatever. As a kid, I watched; as a teen, I worked alongside him. I don’t go all-in on repair or building — I know my limits — but I am pretty handy and I owe that to my dad. I still have the tools he gave me when I graduated high school, and a few years after he died, I took some of his tools and added them to my own, and it’s oddly comforting to see them in my tool cabinet. When my daughter went off to college, I created a little tool kit for her, with the basics I knew she’d need for an apartment dweller. Pretty soon she became known as the girl who had tools, and friends would come to borrow from her.
Dad worked long hours managing a family-owned hardware store, Mondays through Friday, and a half-day on most Saturdays. So Saturday afternoons and Sundays were his, and he guarded them closely. What he really wanted to do was watch sports on TV, or listen to sports on the radio. Every night after work, he’d go out to the garage and listen to the Dodgers, or the Lakers, or the Kings, on sports radio. During football season, Saturdays were for college ball, Sundays for the Rams. I played youth football and baseball, and then high school football, but I was not the fan of watching that Dad was. I liked going to see games, and we did get to go see a few. One of my best memories with Dad was getting tickets to see the Rams divisional playoff game against the Vikings in 1978 at the Memorial Coliseum, where the Rams demolished the Vikes 34–10 (the Rams being the Rams, they lost to Dallas the next weekend 28–0). But it was a lovely New Year’s Eve Day in Southern California, the Rams were dominant, and we thought they’d finally take it all.
But what I really wanted, throughout my childhood, was to do things on weekends. I wanted to fish, or camp or go hiking, and that just wasn’t his thing. I joined Boy Scouts, mainly because I wanted to go camping, not for all the merit badge stuff. He came with us on a camping trip once, and never again. Wasn’t his thing. Once I was old enough, I started going out camping on my own. I never really did pick up fishing, or hunting, or shooting — though we did go shoot a few times. He just didn’t want to spend his weekend times doing stuff he really wasn’t into. And what he was into was hanging out in the garage, his version of Brady Bunch patriarch Mike Brady’s den, listening to sports and drinking a lot of cheap beer.
My biggest problem relating to Dad, looking back on it, is he dealt with people much better when he was in a dominant position. He was great with kids; all the neighborhood kids loved him. And he was fine with me, up until I started having my own opinions about things. Rather than explaining his position, rather than talking to me about it, he would resort to his dominance. “Because I said so,” was his normal position. He also never really talked to me about being, well, a man. He didn’t talk to me about sex, about how to relate to women, about how to comport myself in society as a man. That iconic image from so many movies and TV shows, where the dad shows the son how to shave? Never happened for me. I certainly learned from him, many things, by observing him — some good things, some bad things that I had to unlearn. I had to unlearn the bad things because I swore I would not be him. I would take the good, and there certainly was good, and get away from the bad. Improve on the bad. I’ve met with mixed success, for sure. It’s a process.
Dad declined precipitously. He couldn’t sleep; he was restless all night. He couldn’t really think well, and he started losing control of his body. Mom called his doctor’s office; because it was glioblastoma, because they’d already done surgery, and radiation, and chemo, the doctor’s staff knew that was pretty much it. They recommended a hospice service. A couple of weeks later, I got a call from Mom; Dad was dying, and I needed to come back to Phoenix immediately. As I started to make arrangements for emergency leave for me and my wife, I got another call; he was gone.
It must have been tough on Dad, those last few months of his life. All his life, so independent, so much a loner, but now having to depend on my Mom, his wife, for so much, not being able to do what he wanted, eat or drink what he wanted, putter around the house and yard like he always did, it must have really been hard on him. Cancer really is fucked up. He never particularly liked candy, but a consequence of his surgery, which removed a chunk of his frontal lobe, was that he suddenly craved candy. When he wasn’t on chemo, he tended to really put on weight, because he would eat candy and ice cream — a lot — and Mom really didn’t want to deny him. One of Dad’s last acts of defiance: when he started to decline, what turned out to be his final decline, he was put on some chemo that he wasn’t supposed to eat chocolate with. A couple of days before he died, Mom told me he got up in the middle of the night, and got into the pantry, and ate an entire bag of Hershey’s Kisses. Dad: “Fuck you, cancer, I’m eating the damned chocolate.” That for sure was my Dad, shining through; he never did take shit from anyone.
