Way to go, Dad.

As a kid your parents are usually the only fans you have. Maybe a grandparent that calls you by your cousin's name, maybe an affectionate uncle (hopefully not too affectionate), but usually the only people remotely interested in your life are your parents. Because they love you, everything you do, no matter how menial, is fascinating to them. (Also because to the world you are a walking billboard of their DNA, and they are desperate to see some sign of greatness in you that will prove to them, and their friends and coworkers, that they really are genetically superior). I wish I could go back in time and repay the favor, be my Dad's cheering section on a couple of occasions, because looking back he had a few moments deserving of a high five and a trip to McDonalds.

My parents divorced when I was 8, or at least began to. I believe in was in my early twenties by the time they had reached an agreement on child support. Obviously that's an exaggeration, they have yet to agree on anything. In reality I was close to 11 when the case finally wrapped up in court. A staggering amount of misconceptions about the impact divorce has on children abound in the child-worship era of today. Divorce doesn't necessarily screw a kid up, remarriage, however, almost always does. Living with one parent instead of two is much easier than one parent and an extra adult you don't know very well, which is how these things work out. You weren't getting to know this new person over strawberry margaritas at the Mexican place by Walgreens. You were at home, hopefully not with the too affectionate uncle. The other potential pothole is the way the divorce is carried out. My mom left my Dad by means of a note. He never saw it coming (though the recent "business trips" might have been a clue to a more suspicious man), in fact he would often say later that if someone had told him the day before that he would one day be divorced he would have laughed out loud. No fights, no tension, no warning. He didn't take it too well.

Dad was a school teacher, and was home in the afternoons when I got home from school. I can remember coming in the house and seeing him sitting in the basement, rocking in his La-Z-Boy (loved that chair), with the lights out and shutters shut. At night I could hear him on the phone with people, sometimes crying, and he lost a bunch of weight. That is very telling when you're thin to begin with.

I think this happened in February or March, who knows, but when the weather started to get warm he put a basketball hoop up on our garage. Being a teacher he was off summers, and that summer I would wake up in the morning and hear the basketball bouncing off the backboard. I was too young to be able to see shooting baskets 8 hours a day as a means of coping with emotional turmoil, I just liked him available to play whenever I wanted to. Nice having someone cheer when you make a good shot.

Drama aside, I'll let you in on one of the coolest things a kid could hope for. Our house was about 3 miles from 6 Flags Great America (marriotts at the time, to be technical), and like most people in our town we had seasons passes, and the season parking tag. We were both off for the summer, so in the evenings after dinner we would cruise over to Great America, ride a few rides, stop by the root beer stand, and go home. That really was awesome. We went to Six Flags the way most kids and their parents go to a park or maybe a Dairy Queen.

Back to hoop dreams. My Dad grew up in rural Indiana, so basketball was in his blood. Shooting baskets, anyway, he wasn't driving the lane. He was like a white Larry Bird, and after a few weeks of practicing a mere 16-18 hours a day he had a damn good shot. One night we were strolling around Great America, and as we walked through the games section we spied a basketball shooting game. A dollar per try, sink the shot you win a stuffed basketball. They had five different styles to choose from. I asked Dad to win me a ball. (Ok, I made have made that part up, it may have been his idea to try, but it sure sounds nice this way). We walked up to the counter (this part is 100% true) and Dad gave the guy a $5; and proceeded to sink 5 straight shots and get me each ball. Right the fuck on!

Those games are not meant to be easy, everybody knows that, but years later I did business with one of the top execs from the park, and he told me the games got harder after noon. Most every game had a small adjustment, so people would win early and carry around huge stuffed animals, leading people to try their hand at a contest whose odds had already changed. With the basketball game the rims go up, I don't remember how much, but it wouldn't take much variance to throw someone off. Shaq has been shooting at 10 foot rims for years and still can barely hit 50%. My Dad handed the guy a five at night, the harder time, and was straight money. Oddly, I still have all five stuffed basketballs. I have very few possessions, so many moves, so much irresponsibility, foreclosures, evictions, rehab, bankruptcy, and yet I still have those balls. Way to go Dad. Way to ball.

My Dad and I lived together, just the two of us, for seven years. Seven great years, really. My mom lived close, I did the dual family kid every other weekend thing, so I still saw her quite a bit, but my Dad and I were super close. And I had a few friends, rotating through best friends as I advanced through elementary school. When I was 11 or 12, my best friend at that time had the same name as me, Hoi (haha). He had a sister who was a year or two younger than us, very sweet girl, and a brother who was about 5 when I met him. His younger brother was a sociopath. Ok, maybe not an according to Hoyle sociopath, but something, criminal mind, borderline personality, or in those days just crazy. I don't remember many specific examples to give you of his behavior, other than to say he was usually very nice but would do very damaging things out of the blue, calmly. No lack of comprehension that what he did caused damage or pain or whatever, just no emotional reaction. I wish I had a good story about him killing small animals or something, but I don't, all I can say is that you just knew it about him. Everyone around him knew it.

Aside from having a sister and Ted Bundy for a brother, he had a Mom (apparently more than half the people in America at that time had mothers). Well, he had a MILF, really. At 11 or 12 I was at a unique age when it came to the opposite sex. I knew his Mom was pretty, but I was never attracted to her. A couple years later and my best friend's hot mom would have been fantasy material. My Dad, being a few years ahead of me, was at that stage the first time he met her. She was single, like him, and had been divorced twice. Her first husband, and the father of my friend and his sweet sister, had killed himself. Car running in the garage. At the time the story my friend and his sister had been told by their Mom was that he accidentally fell asleep, but I remember the day they told me, and I remember then not believing that, young as I was, and I remember knowing for certain that neither one of them did either. Her second husband, and the father of Dahmer, turned out to be an abuser. She took the kids and left him, left the entire country in fact, they were Canadian. She had a pretty good job as a chemist, so that may have spurred the long distance move. On the other hand, having met the walking billboard advertising that man's DNA, she may have just wanted to get as far away as possible.

She and my father saw each other a lot dropping us off and picking us up from sleepovers at each others houses and things like that, and they started spending more time with each other. It didn't really change much for me, I still slept over at my friend's house on the weekends, only now my Dad was coming with. He slept over too.

Again, 11 or 12 is a weird age for sexual awareness. My friend and I both knew what it was, and that our parents were doing that at night, but it wasn't something we thought much about. A year or two younger, we would have been clueless, a year or two older and it would have been a big deal. As it was we existed in the balance between awareness and giving a shit, and this unique perspective made possible a hilarious scenario.

His house had four bedrooms, one for each kid, and one for his Mom. His room had bunkbeds, so it really worked out great for us to stay there, which we did, a lot. We made up a pretty good dynamic, the lot of us, got along well and had fun together, took some small trips. His brother wasn't that bad, not at that age, and he wasn't mean, per say.....just wired wrong. You felt angry with him and bad for him at the same time when he did things.

One Friday or Saturday night my friend and I were in his room trying to go to sleep, but we couldn't help but clearly hear....Ok, two things, one, she had one of those old fashioned brass beds that will sound like a porno is being filmed on it if you so much as roll over, and two, she was a screamer, or at least a loud moaner. I can't believe I didn't appreciate the magnitude of the moment, neither of us did. He should have been totally creeped out hearing his Mom getting off, and I should have been totally aroused. I kind of am just thinking about it now, like I said, she was hot and she was loud. Yum.

But we didn't grasp the weight of the situation, we were just annoyed that we couldn't get to sleep. I was laying there awake, staring at the ceiling, when I heard my friend whisper to ask if I was awake. I said yeah, of course, it was loud (tile floors in the hallway and not much distance between rooms, that brass bed echoed something terrible). He agreed, and we were silent a moment. Then he asked me if I thought we should say something, and I said yeah go for it. So he yells out, "Excuse me, could you please quiet down!" and the way he said it, not angrily, but forcefully, firmly, and plenty loud enough to hear.

Instant silence. We didn't give it another thought, didn't talk much more, just went to bed, and woke up the next day thinking about other things. It was years before I happened to remember that, and fully appreciated the incredible awkwardness our parents must have felt. I can only imagine how mortified they must have been. Late at night, been doing it for months, caught up in the moment, forget your kids are about 15 feet away....and then hear one of them politely ask you to quiet down....wow! We didn't think about it at all the next day, but I bet they were embarrassed as hell to sit with us at breakfast, probably were dreading leaving the bedroom that morning. haha!

Like the basketballs, I appreciated what my Dad was doing on a much smaller level. I now appreciate how hard it was to hit five straight shots, at the time I just liked getting the stuffed basketballs. At the time I just liked spending more time with my friend and his family, but now I appreciate how hard my Dad was hitting that very respectable Canadian ass. Way to go Dad! Way to ball.

A footnote: I don't know if I will ever write about them again, so I'll mention that my Dad dated her for about two years. They broke up, and he met my next step mother ( I have had a couple, I'm issuing trading cards for them) and, obviously, married her. He would soon, and forever, regret that, at least the part about my step mother. I'm not sure if he wished he had stayed with the Canuck. I know this though, he loved my friend and his sister, really did, but he was not at all sorry to not have to deal with the little brother growing up. Like I said, you just knew, everyone did.

My friend and I lost touch, and I went a good fifteen years without seeing anyone in his family again. Then one night I went into a bar that was about 3 blocks from the apartment I had been living in for the last six months. I'm sitting at the bar with a friend, having a beer, and I keep looking at the bartender. There is something familiar about her, but I can't place her. She did, though. It was weird and so out of the blue to see her. We were very close when we were young, she really was like a sister to me for two years, and my Dad and I kind of left her, her brother, and her mother. I never really looked at it that way, but I did the moment I realized it was her, and it flustered me a bit. I talked with her and found out her older brother, my friend, was married, house, young kid, doing well, as everyone knew he would. Her mom had remarried as well and was apparently doing well, but I could tell that even all these years later she was hurt that my Dad had left her Mom, and her I guess too. Her Dad had killed himself, her step dad beat up her Mom, she meets my Dad (who really is a great guy) at age 10 and at 12 he's gone. Even worse, two years later she is attending the high school he teaches at, and sees him and talks to him frequently (in passing, not confiding), so that wound must have never really closed. My Dad had mentioned a time or two that he saw her and her brother around the school and they were doing well (we had moved to another town to live with step#1), so I had all the facts to deduce that she was really hurt by that situation, but....I was young, and had a total nightmare of a woman in my life to deal with. Never occurred to me. So like I said, I was flustered, and I didn't really talk as much to her  as I would have liked to, and I'm sure didn't seem very interested in seeing her, even though I was.

Drinking at that time had started creating real problems in my life, it was an odd night, a slip I guess, that I went to a bar at all, the one she worked at or any other. I didn't think to mention that, but I did mention that I lived within shouting distance. So when I never went back there, what might she have thought? My Dad bumped into her some months later, and she mentioned I had been in. And never been back. He said she looked hurt by that, and he didn't know what to do. One the one hand he wanted her to know it wasn't that I was avoiding the bar right outside my house because she worked there. On the other hand, explaining why I shouldn't be at a bar in the first place was a long topic for a chance meeting in a grocery store or wherever. I have no idea how he handled it, I hope he made it ok. She wasn't an emotionally feeble clingy person at all, just a good person who had been the victim of circumstances beyond her control.

The $10,000,000 dollar question. When I saw her at the bar that night, she told me what had become of her older brother and mother, but what of her younger brother? I asked about him. She looked down briefly, shook her head a little, and said, "Exactly what you thought would" or something to that effect. She mentioned him being in prison, either at the moment or already had been and was out. I didn't press her on it. It was too sad, at that moment, to think of the five year old boy that I had spent so much time with, baby sat for, taught to throw a football, turning into the dark character that had always been inside him. Despite the efforts of so many people who had loved him and done all they could to save him from that. I know perfectly well that my Dad and I staying with them wouldn't have been enough to help him, but at that moment, I felt horribly guilty. We would have helped her.