There he is, again, on the caller ID. That's the third time this week his name has popped up on my phone. I look at it and hesitate. Do I really want to talk to my dad? Now? Ever? My girlfriend asks me why I don't want to talk to him. That would be a very long conversation. I have been having it with myself for over thirty years.

He has a photo of the two of us in his living room. I must have been about two years old, all chubby cheeks and blond wispy hair. He's a young man in his twenties and looks quite handsome. I am dressed in a navy blue sailor's uniform and the two of us look just liked we're supposed to look. I'm a little kid and that's my dad. I feel very ambivalent now when I look at that photo. All the promise contained in that picture never really materialized. Some years down the road he forfeited. He threw in the towel and just walked away from being a dad.

He was there in the beginning though. He went to my events and he coached one of my first soccer teams. Even at a really young age I realized he didn't always get along with the other dads but it didn't mean much to me at the time. He was my dad. He was the example of everything I wanted to be when I grew up.

Dad didn't get along with a lot of people but it mostly started and ended with my mom. They fought all the time. Bickering back and forth was a constant state until one of them would flare up and walk off. It was usually him. My sister and I laugh because we have a collection of family vacation photos from when we were young of just me, her and mom. Dad would be off somewhere else angry and cooling off and we would have strangers take a photo of the three of us. There we are at Disneyworld. There we are at Six Flags and there's our summer in Ruidoso, NM. Dad is nowhere to be seen in these photos because he stormed off angry. Sometimes he wouldn't storm off.

My parents' bickering at times turned into full-on Tyson / Holyfield matches. They had the kind of fights that weren't acceptable to the nice older couple who lived next door. So, sometimes during their fights the police would arrive. The police always did a good job of remaining neutral and making sure everyone was alright. To this day I have a soft spot for cops because when I'm talking to one I flash back to the scared little kid with tears in his eyes and the nice man telling him everything was going to be ok.

During one of their bouts, my mom pulled me aside and told me he was not my dad. She explained to me that he couldn't produce children and so she was artificially inseminated. I was seven at the time but I understood. I was a really bright kid. She was hurt and was just trying to tear back at him but everything she said was true.

He was crushed but I was ok with it. He might not be my father but he was still my dad. Besides, that opened a world of possibilities for me. At that time, our second grade teacher would take us once a week to the school library and we could check out a book. Most of the boys were reading books about Reggie Jackson or the Dallas Cowboys but I had been obsessed with mythology for some time. I read every book on Greek mythology in our library and then moved on to Norse and Polynesian. Greek was my favorite and in my youthful way, I identified with the demigods who didn't know their fathers either. I imagined my dad was busy making the sun rise or hurling lightning bolts. I imagined that meant I was destined for great things. Even in more realistic moments, I thought my father could be anyone from Elvis to Captain Kirk. As a young boy you can only imagine being as great as your own father and mine could be as great as I wanted him to be.

So Dad wasn't the greatest guy but he was around. He taught me throw a baseball and a punch. He built me a really cool playhouse in our backyard but then at some point he started to check out. He checked out right about the time a young man needs his dad the most. He was in absentia at the time I was hitting home runs, running for touchdowns and scoring goals. In the fifth grade, I hit the first out of the park home run of the little league season and as I rounded third, I scanned the bleachers for my parents. Mom had to work. She often worked nights. That's the kind of thing that happens when you drop out of school at sixteen to get married, but I thought dad might be there. He wasn't.

My senior year in high school I was president of the National Honors Society. I told you I was a really smart kid. I gave a speech one night to a packed auditorium of parents, teacher and new inductees. The speech was really well received and after the ceremony, one of my teachers came over to me to congratulate me. He asked me where my parents were. I told him my mom had to work. He asked where my dad was. I didn't know what to tell him.

The truth was he had run off the year before with his secretary and he and mom were in the middle of a nasty divorce. I still saw him fairly regularly but had learned I couldn't rely on him. He would be there for me when it was convenient but I couldn't expect anything of him. Luckily, I was leaving for college soon so I didn't really care. I still haven't fully recovered though from leaving my little sister in the middle of that mess.

It was a big deal for me to go to college. Dad had attended night school at a local community college and he was the first person in the family to get a degree but I would be the first person to attend an actual university. My grandparents were ecstatic. I breezed through college right up until my senior year. My mom had remarried and gotten a better job, which was fantastic, but that impacted the financial aid I received. My tuition was going to be $2,000 more than it had been in previous years. I had a pretty good scholarship and with the combination of financial aid and a student loan, I merely had to work about 20 hours a week to pay for my expenses like rent, food and books. However, when I went to register for my senior year they told me I couldn't attend class until the the $2000 was paid. I was devastated.

I called my dad and explained the situation to him. He listened and then asked me what I was going to do. I told him I didn't know. He wished me good luck. I didn't bother calling my mom because I knew she didn't have the money but I knew my dad did. He just didn't want to part with it.

I was sulking when my childhood buddy Daniel called. He could tell something was wrong so I explained to him what had happened. He told me he would call me right back. When he did call again, he told me his mom would loan me the money if I promised to repay her within six months. I took an extra job and paid her back within three. That woman is a saint.

Right after graduation, Daniel was killed by a drunk driver on a lonely Austin highway. I spoke at his funeral and stayed up late nights crying and drinking wine with his mom. It was the hardest thing I had ever gone through. In a whirlwind of emotions and with no idea what my next step was, I stayed with my dad for a while. I suppose he felt he needed to console me and offer some fatherly advice. By this point our relationship was mainly one of obligation. I had to have him in my life because he was my dad.

He became frustrated that I wasn't more receptive to his gestures of consolation and that escalated into a disagreement. He began yelling at me the way he used to yell at my mom and literally backed me into a corner in his kitchen. I was crying and frustrated, confused and lost. He grabbed my face so I would have to look at him as he yelled at me. He's not a big man. I'm not a small one. My punch sent him sprawling about three feet onto his back. He's the only person I have ever hit.

I moved out and started moving on, without him. Each year it would become slightly easier to exclude him from something. I still saw him at the holidays and still called him on his birthday but the pressing sense of obligation began to mitigate. I started loosening the chains. I occasionally, and inadvertently, would refer to my stepdad as 'dad.' He was more of a father to me than my dad had ever been. In fact, a lot of men had been.

When a boy doesn't have much in the way of a father and desperately wants one, older men can sense that. When that boy works hard, does well in school and is an all around good kid, other men are inclined to lend a hand when they can. I have collected over the years an assortment of surrogate fathers, from professors to employers to friend's dads. It still happens to this day. It's like having a wound that won't heal and people can see it.

Now the actual dad is coming around again. It's just been over the last five or six years I've become comfortable excluding him entirely. I don't call him on father's day or his birthday and I've gone years without seeing him. He apparently has dropped all the pretenses as well. He stopped making efforts to stay in touch with any of us. He completely ignored the birth of my nephew, his first grandchild. That kid is the most beautiful kid I have ever seen and can light up a room with his smile. You can't be around him for more than a minute without falling in love with him but my dad didn't bother seeing him until third birthday.

My sister tells me dad is making more of an effort these days but this isn't an event where you get a ribbon just for showing up. This is our lives. I get annoyed with the way she has been so accepting of him. I have enjoyed filling the void he left with a life full of people I love. I'm a grown man now. I don't need him to help me work on that piece of shit Camaro I bought when I was sixteen. I could fix it myself now. I don't need him to build me the bookshelf he promised me when I was twelve. I built one last weekend on my own. Well, me and Ikea did.

Regardless, I've come a long way from the kid who was searching the bleachers hoping his dad saw that hit. I just got used to not caring and now he's back and he's on the phone. He wants to talk. He wants to know what's going on. He wants to know whether I've hit any home runs lately and all I can think is 'why the fuck should I tell you?'

So the phone is ringing and my beautiful girlfriend who adores me even though I had a shitty dad, looks at me and tells me to answer it. I answer it and we talk. It's the stilted conversation of two people who don't really know each other very well. One of them is desperate to communicate and the other is waiting to disappointed again. We have a few more conversations over the weeks and they become less stilted but are a long way from resembling the banter of father and son. He's more like an uncle now. Someone I talk to occasionally but hasn't really kept up with my life.

I'm conflicted after our talks. People tell me it's good that he's trying but I can't help feeling he has always called all the shots. He decided to become my dad. He decided to leave us and he decided to be an asshole. Now, after several failed marriages, he's decided he's lonely and wants to make amends. Well, what gives him that right?

Then I settle down. He is trying. He's never going to be Atticus Finch but he is my dad. In some ways his glaring failures have made him one of the more human people I know and he did set an example of the kind of man I don't want to be. I obviously haven't forgiven him yet but I am trying. I not perfect either. At some point, I guess we will find a rhythm and move forward from there. For now I'm just a guy and he's my dad and we have to figure out what we're going to talk about.