dad
I’ve been thinking about my father lately. Not sure why. Maybe… probably… possibly because of watching Ad Astra has become part of my bedtime ritual, or because I just finished River, which could have stirred something I didn’t expect. Might be... I don't know.
I think about the way he exist in my life, as a Draculia like shadow. Floating... hovering... he was never fully present, but never truly gone either. He occupies a strange purgatory in my heart... an emotional no man’s land.
In the movies of my mind, I watched his character drift from one reel to another, never quite anchored in any steady form. First he was somewhere between Frank Serpico and Carlito Brigante, then slid into the desperate schemes of Howie Ratner and Stu Shepard, later drifting between the chaotic ambitions of Lalin Miasso and Morris Kessler. In recent years, he lingers in the third acts of Blow and Donnie Brasco.
Lately, he inhabits the life of Marty Hart after the fallout with Rust and his family, still stuck with that egotistical head shoved so far up his own ass he can’t see the wreckage around him.
Weathered. Pot belly. Faux leather jacket. Counterfeit Oyster Perpetual. Studio apartment. TV dinners on a foldable plastic table. A cup of plain tea with sugar and stevia because fuck diabetes even after the doctor said otherwise. A pack of Rothmans Blue because fuck his heart, even after a scan that could be used as the updated version of those warning images on cigarette packs.
That's my father. My dad. My Ol' man. My pops. My guy. My Superman. Just... existing, I guess. A modern day Sisyphus. Rolling the boulder with an albatross swinging from his neck and dragging a cross all at once, yet somehow it’s never his fault. Responsibility is his Achilles’ heel, and accountability is his fucking kryptonite.
Despite his failings, I have always carried a soft spot for him... and it bothers me. Like a frame that is ever so slightly off axis by a couple of scanlines, no matter how often you try to straighten it. Why is it that I'm unable to summon the same decisive repulsion I feel toward my mother? After all, they were a "unit", even across the scattered stretches of separation. Why do I keep weighing mistakes against merits, as if life were some ledger that could ever be neatly tallied?
For all the light he brought into my life, he also cast shadows. He brought me to cinema, to songs, to music, to lyrics, to poetry, to art, to paintings, to instruments. He imbued me with the realms of creation, fragments of which I have bequeathed to my daughter.
And yet, he nudged me toward dark passages, and I walked them. Recklessness abound, fully committed and foolishly chasing a presence that was never there. Like a stray dog searching for a master, desperate to earn favor in exchange for filial loyalty. I searched every nook, every shadow, in every face, in every fleeting encounter for the father I never had... or a version of him. I don't know man. I stumbled often, learned to lick my wounds, and learned to keep it pushing.
What frustrates me most is that, unlike the other corners of my life, where I stand firm and make my choices, with my father I’m caught in his pull. He’s always somewhere between here and gone. He disturbs that clarity. The clarity I spent years building with the care of others, and somehow it shifts and bends when it comes to my father. He scratches at the parts of me I thought were solid, and for reasons I can’t fully explain, I just… can’t decide. I drift, stuck between anger and attachment, unable to land. Fuck.
Thanks for reading,
V.