First of all, I do not call my dad ‘daddy’, but for the sake of the title, I decided to swallow the bile rising in my throat and just go for it. As you can probably guess, my relationship with my father isn’t a good one. In fact, it doesn’t exist at all. I haven’t spoken to my dad since my 21st birthday (which was almost five years ago. Don’t call me old, I’ll kick you), just before he stepped off the edge of the planet we call Earth and fell into the deepest, darkest pit imaginable. When I tell people what happened to my dad, some feel sorry for me, and others stare blankly in disbelief. Please don’t do the former because I might punch you in the face, and if you do the latter then I’ll still punch you for not believing me. Here’s the ugly truth (and no, I did not steal that from Gerard Butler’s movie, I came up with it first. No, that’s a lie, I didn’t come up with it, but I heard it somewhere else. Swear.) My dad became a drug addict, ruined his life, and disappeared. In a nutshell.
Alright, that’s not a very satisfying explanation. I can feel you throwing your hands in the air and saying, “That’s it?” So here’s the story: My dad was always a dick. A psychological mind-fuck who was bipolar as hell and never thought his actions needed any justification. He was ‘the-man-of-the-house’ and anything he said went. Right. At a very young age (I don’t know exactly, but my mom told me that I’d said this) I asked my mom why she didn’t leave him and get a divorce. Nearly thirty years after getting married, I know she looked back and asked herself the same question. He wasn’t abusive physically or anything, but he was definitely crazy and unstable. My friends were terrified of him, and some never came back to my house after seeing one of his explosive tantrums. Yeah, I didn’t have a lot of friends until middle school.
Naturally, if someone refuses to seek help with their issues, they deteriorate until they become a shell of their former selves and are so unrecognizable to friends and family that they no longer exist as that person. This was (is?) my dad. For whatever reason, he chose to drown his demons instead of facing them, and he allowed himself to become addicted to drugs. Addiction was not a new concept to him at that point, he had been addicted to food up until then. He was always a large guy at over 6’3” and 300+ pounds, but when he started dropping weight, it was a raised eyebrow that I threw in his direction instead of a congratulations. There was something odd about that situation, and I accidentally found out why when I was in the garage and happened to see a bag of pills he had forgotten to put away in his motorcycle purse, I mean bag (he always had that damn man-purse with him, and before then it was an embarrassingly expensive fanny pack. UGH). There were little blue pills, not the fun kind that older adult men use, but the kind that wreck homes, and also larger white ones with numbers on them (don’t remember the number, but my dad wasn’t a cheap man). I recognized them to be Valium and Oxycontin. I grew up in a small town and had seen some drug use (although not to the extent my father did) and so I knew what they were, and all of a sudden the reason why my dad had fallen asleep sitting up at the dinner table made perfect sense. No fucking wonder he’d basically passed out! Alongside the pills were a straw and a pill chopper. Oh, wow, classy, father, very classy. He snorted them! What? I took the bag to my mom and told her what they were and she sat there stonily staring, putting together the pieces in her brain, too. But for whatever reason, she didn’t kick him out or scream or yell. My mom believed to her core that she could help him and that the thirty years of marriage had to mean something since she’d stuck with him for so long. Do I ever wish she had just dropped him then.
That next year was some crazy shit. He went in and out of rehab, and he always found an excuse to leave early or, this one time (wish I could follow that up with ‘At band camp…’) he even pretended to be a visitor and hitched a ride with another patient’s visitor out of there. Only my father would do such a thing. For a few months after his mom died, he seemed to stabilize himself a little until his motorcycle accident… oh man. The doctors put him on, yeah, you guessed it, Oxycontin. Dun dun dunnnnnn. After that, it was all downhill, and he’s still falling (seven years later). He started messing around on my mom with one of her friends (I will not speak ill of her because her husband just recently died) and then he went on a drug buying binge-those pills are fucking expensive-and spent their entire life savings on drugs for himself and the other woman. The really fucked up thing was my mom didn’t kick him out, he left on his own accord! She must be pissed, looking back on that now, because she doesn’t even have the satisfaction to say that she kicked the loser out. Sucks.
He tried to stick around for a little bit (about eight months or so) but then he just became so consumed by his craziness that he disappeared. My mom would get the random phone call, I’m not really certain what he was saying during those brief calls because I was out of the house by then, but it wasn’t until last week that I found out where he was. I imagined him to be homeless in Seattle somewhere, begging on the street because of the burning of his connections to family and friends and sanity, but he’s actually not. To be honest, I’m a little disappointed. He’s actually…. Living with his drug dealer’s father.
Bahahahahahaha! I don’t know which is more pathetic, really, the fact that he’s living with his drug dealer’s dad, or the fact that his drug dealer’s dad is the same age as mine… I wasn’t fazed when I heard this tiny tidbit. The thought crossed my mind at how original that was, and I was surprised that he wasn’t an enormous cliché. He hadn’t married the woman who he cheated on my mom with and started a newer, younger family, or he sold everything he owned and moved to another country to become more spiritual and less empty person. Nope, he took the classier route. I think I laughed when I heard it. Yeah, I definitely laughed.
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