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By
Sugar
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ My Father ~
When I was 22, my father died from cancer. He was diagnosed in September of 1994, and died one morning in January, 1995. Depending on how you look at it, that could have been the longest 5 months of my life, or they could have passed in the blink of an eye. Some days it seemed like both. My fathers’ death had a huge impact on my life, as you can well imagine. Hopefully most of the readers of DRS could appreciate the particular viewpoint I’m about to share. You may think that death and dying of a terminal illness are subjects to be treated with the utmost sobriety. Not if you lived in my household. Death came to live in our house and we did quite a bit of laughing at him.
The earliest memory I have of my father involves a tattoo. He had a few – an eye on his forearm that he got in prison, a flower on his upper arm with the name Rose written under it. Rose was his first wife. But when I was very young, and I can’t remember exactly how young, he came home one day with a new tattoo. He removed his suit jacket and sat down in a chair, one leg crossed over the other, and that ankle showing a sheer black dress sock that disappeared into expensive Italian loafers.
“Come here, baby girl.”
He rolled up the sleeve of his dress shirt and pulled away the bandage there. It was a black panther, drawn to look as thought it was crawling up the inside of my fathers’ arm, it’s claws scratching him, its’ teeth bared. Its’ stomach was directly over the inside of my fathers elbow, whatever you call that section of the inner arm. I reached out, mesmerized by this art on his body.
“No, baby, don’t touch. It hurts, honey.”
It was a new tattoo, and his gift to himself to celebrate one year of being clean, and not using drugs. The panther covered the tracks of self inflicted injections. I didn’t figure that out until later.
I was still too young to know the term “junkie”. Or “hustler”. Or “pimp”. Or “convicted felon”. But at one time or another, my father had been all of those. When my parents met, my father was 27 and a pimp. My mother was 20 and a call girl. My mother would later say that Daddy wasn’t a very good pimp because he didn’t have the heart to beat his women, so he didn’t do it for very long. Their early years consisted of him being a bad motherfucker. He was a bad motherfucker, and if you had any sense, you stayed on his good side. I’ll give you an example. Early in my parents’ courtship, they were out one evening, and had just left a bar. They were walking down the street together when they were approached by a young man with a knife who demanded their money. He not only DID NOT get their money, and not only DID GET his ass kicked by my father, he wound up STUFFED UNDER A PARKED CAR. My father was not prone to violence, but there were 2 things you didn’t mess with, his woman and his money.
My parents ripped and ran all over both coasts of the U.S. for a couple of decades. My fathers’ specialty was B & E. He was also a wheelman. (That means he drove the get-away car. And yeah, he taught me how to drive.) My mothers’ was forgery in general, checks specifically. Eventually, they would both do time, although my father was never caught breaking and entering. He did time for possession with intent to distribute.
I’d love to say that they both got out of prison having learned their lessons and went the straight and narrow, but I’d be lying. Their drug use, abuse, and alcoholism continued, off and on, for the next 20-some years. The drug world would color who my father was, and who he was to me. I had a lot of unresolved issues most of my life about my father and who he was. We’ll get to how that resolved later. I just want you to know who he was, and I should explain that it never colored his ability to love me and my younger sister.
My father never failed to drive to me school in the morning. He never failed to ask me about my day and sound interested. He’d ask about my friends, my grades, my life in general. I was cursed with chronic bronchitis all of my life. Whenever I got sick, it turned into bronchitis. I would cough and hack and make the most horrible sounds every time I got sick. My mother would later tell me that every time I got that sick, my father would sit up all night, pacing the path from their bedroom to mine and she would find him kneeling on the floor next to my bed. He’d be feeling my forehead for fever, and holding my hand as I slept.
He was strong, smart, funny, sarcastic, kind, and he loved his family. You would never think so to hear his record of wrongs – everything from the aforementioned drug use to constant womanizing – but he did. It is a testament to the human spirit, the way we came together in the last months of his life. Death may be a mean bitch, but it brought us together as a family. All 4 of us, for the last time.
In the beginning, right after his diagnosis, my father seemed to simply accept his fate and went on about his life. He rejected the idea of chemotherapy and radiation at first. He went to work and actually used his illness as a selling point. My father was a car salesman. Prior to his diagnosis, his favorite way of greeting a potential car buyer was “How ya doin’? Have you been abused today? Come on. Let me abuse you.” Believe it or not, this usually worked for him. After he found out he was dying he would say “C’mon. I’m dyin’ here. Help me out, wouldja? I’ll die much happier knowing I put you in this car.” This goes beyond hustle. This doesn’t even have a word associated with it. He did eventually attempt a last-ditch effort at saving his life after having his palm read by a seer. No, I’m not kidding. The woman told my father that he would meet a doctor who would try to help him. The catch was that my dad was not going to go to the doctor, the doctor was going to find him. Believe it or not, 2 weeks later my father sold a car to a man who turned out to be, yup, you guessed it, an oncologist. My father believed strongly in signs, so when the seer’s prediction came to be, he took the opportunity.
The bout with chemo weakened my father dramatically and of course, caused him to lose his lions’ mane of hair. My dads’ hair was a source of strength to him, much like Samson. Chemo was his Delilah. I’d never seen my father ever wear a hat in all my life. He had gorgeous black hair that was starting to silver in all the right places, he always wore it one length, to his collar, gypsy style. When he lost it, “The Hat Period” began. My dad would shop for anything. His newfound baldness gave him a new reason to shop. Within a month he owned no less than 45 hats. Baseball caps, straw hats, African skull caps and, I wish I was kidding but I’m not, a pith helmet. I asked myself then what this crazy man thought he was going to hunt in downtown Ft. Lauderdale. It was not exactly a Mecca to the safari-inclined. But somehow, he made the look work.
When my fathers’ usually strong, able body began to weaken it sparked what my mom called “The Great Cane Campaign”. There would be no senior citizen scooting walkers for him, no sir. Again, more shopping! Dad eventually owned everything from the simplest curved handled wooden cane, to a pimp daddy cane, and even an Australian walking stick that was 5 feet high and had a whistle carved out the top. My mom bought that one for him, thinking it would come in handy if he was trying to cross a busy street, albeit slowly. He could blow the whistle to call attention to himself. Well, Daddy blew it when he crossed the living room. We soon developed a united opinion, my sister my mother and I, on what he could do with that stick and even plotted against it once. We never got anywhere with that.
As the pain became too great for my father, the doctors prescribed some very strong painkillers. At first he was very responsible with them, but eventually … He had been a drug addict for most of his life. His drug use soon turned to drug abuse and threatened the very foundations of the sobriety my mother was clinging to for dear life. Being able to go to meetings, and her circle of sponsors, sponsees and friends was all that was getting her through this some days. She prayed and prayed about this subject, begging God for guidance, but some days were obviously harder than others. I say this because I heard her tell him one night, “Either quit using or die! One or the other! You can’t have both!” Maybe you had to hear her sarcastic tone, or had to know the whole story, but I laughed till I cried.
When he became so ill that he was confined to bed rest, so began the “Medieval Cat Torture”. My sister and I each owned a young cat who got along swimmingly, considering they were both male. They ate together, napped together and terrorized my bedridden father together. Playtime for the furry felines included racing about the condo at breakneck speed after one another. They would tear up over the chairs, the couch, under the dining room table, through my parents’ room out to the balcony and back in again, crossing my parents’ bed and of course, my father. My father, helpless to defend himself against their antics would whine to my mother “They hate me! They’re trying to kill me!” My mother responded with, “You are dying. They’re not going to expedite matters any. Let them play and shut up.” My father would smile sheepishly and the play would go on. If the truth be known, the cats adored my father, and he them. They would lie in bed with him for hours, keeping him company and in his final days, they hardly left the bed at all. In that last week, you would have to move a cat to get to my father.
My fathers’ final wish was to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at sea. Since we were going to do this ourselves, we had to go pick the ashes up from the crematory. His ashes were given to us in a black rectangular box. It was really quite heavy. My fathers’ sister had flown down to Florida from New Jersey for the memorial service. When we returned home with our Box O’Dad, my sister had come home from work and in true family fashion asked me, “What’s in the box, bitch?” This was a variation of one of my fathers’ habitual phrases for my mom when she came home from shopping – “What’s in the bag, bitch?” Maybe you had to be there. Anyway, when I told her what was in the box, her eyes widened and she said “I wanna see.” Lucky for her my mother and I are both blessed with a morbid sense of curiosity and sick sense of humor. My aunt was outraged and disgusted and began spewing off about appropriate behavior and the sanctity of the memory of her brother and on and on and on. She was still in mid-rant when my mother, my sister and I all turned in unison and left the room. We settled ourselves in my parents’ room, the three of us grouped around this box. It took a few attempts to pry open the lid, which we were trying to do oh-so carefully, fearing that if we popped the lid too hard, ashes would come flying out and Daddy would wind up in the vacuum cleaner. We needn’t have worried. Inside the box was a bag, inside of another bag, and a little twist-tie at the top. Not at all what I expected. We regarded the bag of white ashes for a long, solemn moment in silence, until my mother reached out, squeezed the bag and said “There. One last hug.” We had to laugh. It was better than crying, which we would do much of, for the rest of our lives.
Here’s what I wish to leave you with, dear readers. In the weeks leading up to his passing, my father was on a crusade to spend as much time with all of us as he could. We talked a lot, during those days, my dad and I. He wasn’t worried about dying. He wasn’t worried about my sister. He told me what he was worried about was me.
“I want to know that you’ll be okay, baby. I want to know that you’ll be taken care of and safe. I worry about you, baby.”
He was dying. He was leaving this planet forever, and what he was worried about was me. In that moment, I finally saw him. I saw him without being colored by the anger I’d had all my life about who I thought he’d been. I realized that my father was human, and that I should have allowed him to be human. I’d built him in my head as a monster because of all the adjectives I’d applied to him all of my life. Junkie. Alcoholic. Cheater. The bottom line is that he loved me. Or as he used to say “I love your dirty drawers, baby. Nothing will ever change that.”
On the morning that my father died, I rushed to my parents’ condo to see him before they came to take his body. As I knelt next to him, still warm in his bed, crying and saying goodbye, I heard my mother in the shower. The way she was crying... I pray to god I never hear anything like it again. It was the sound of true heartbreak; of her soul ripping apart. It was so hard to hear.
All those sarcastic comments in this piece, they don't paint an accurate picture of the love that my parents shared. He was the first major love of her life, having met him when she was only 20, and the last, too. They survived 30-something years of drug addiction, alcoholism, homelessness, infidelity, nearly divorced once, but at the end he died in her arms.
She's nearing her end now, her health is declining quickly and in the next year absolutely, I'll lose her, too.
What his death taught me, was that everyone should be allowed to be human. No one should be put on a pedestal so high that when they fall, they shatter in front of you. Everyone in your life is in your life for a reason, and that reason will be shown. Open yourself to seeing why. Open yourself to what Life might be trying to show you, before Death does.
He is waiting for her now, I think. He knows that more than likely before this year is out, she’ll be coming to him, and they’ll be together again. One morning, I will stand on the pier on Serenity Beach in South Florida again, to scatter ashes again. And Death will have come to live with us, again.
