My Two Fathers...

I know it's late in the game. I know I won't win anything for writing this, but I have to write it, because who knows when the chance will ever come again.

Hopefully, I can paint the picture with quick broad strokes and be mercifully brief... but if not, please forgive me.

So on this Fathers' Day, I'd like to tell you about My Two Fathers...

Unlike most people of my time, I had not one, but two Fathers.

One was a warm, loving person with a passion for music and creative design. A gentle man with bright eyes and a very weird and hilarious sense of humor.

He was the man I think of as my Good Daddy, the one who sang to me when I was a baby and toddler -- especially when I was sick -- the deep vibrations of his baritone voice soothing me, healing me, as I lay in his lap with my head against the warm sounding box of his chest.

He was the Father who played the piano, composed his own music and played wild games with us children as if he were a wonderful, fun-sort of big brother instead of a father; a playmate instead of a stern authority figure and disciplinarian. And being only 19 years older than I -- the oldest of his 7 children -- that's pretty much what he was.

I loved him. No two ways about it. My Good Daddy, I adored him.

Sadly, he disappeared at some point when I was very young, and I saw him only very few times for the remaining the years of his life.

My other Father was a cruel, crazed wraith of a man who beat my mother and us children mercilessly, a hard, precise, exacting engineer of a man who demanded perfection and absolute obedience.

If he told us kids to do something, we must do it immediately and without question. We could not even ask where the items and tools -- to do whatever job he required -- were located. We must just jump to and do it. To do otherwise was to be stalling -- a highly punishable offense -- as were anything he regarded as back-talk or lack of proper respect and humility.

We had to know by observation where, for example, any cleaning supplies were located after the last time they were used. We were to understand there was a place for everything and everything in its place. We could never say that we had to have anything for school, but in what he considered a proper display of humility -- in the overly stilted way that he insisted on -- we had to say that the teacher would like us to have whatever it was, and did he suppose we would be able to have it, please?

This was the Father who threw my Mother over a radiator onto a square frame with nails poking out of it, used back in those days to stretch chintz curtains, catching her upper arms and ripping them open as she slid downward.

But when I scrambled upstairs and called the police, I was foolish enough to tell my Mother she would be alright because I had called them, and then, don't you know, she put on a sweater and met the police at the door, telling them that she and my father had been arguing loudly and had "frightened the child." The child? It was me, her hero against this monster, it was me she was betraying! Of course, she said this with her husband, my Father looking on. What else could she say?

Then, once when I was taking a nap, I heard an intensely loud noise in the bathroom -- like an explosion had gone off -- one of the loudest noises I'd ever heard. And I heard the man I called my Father ranting and... weeping... I was afraid to find out what it was, so I stayed frozen in the bed for what seemed like a hundred years until later when my Mother came in to talk to me.

Your Father, my Mother explained, had to put the puppy out of his misery because he had distemper. I asked what she meant and did it have anything to do with the noise in the bathroom? And "Well... yes," she told me, "your father had to shoot him." Like "Old Yeller " or a Dog named "Red Wull" who got rabies and had to be shot. It was the only kind and merciful thing he could do, she said.

My mind was a dizzy boggle.

I knew the dog really did have distemper, because I'd heard my parents talking about it... but he was just sick, not vicious with rabies... and my Mother was a nurse and could cure anything, I thought, why not my dog? Why did THAT MAN kill my dog?!

In my mind's eye I pictured my dog, whose name was "Yip-Yip," lying sick in the tub and my Father shooting him there so the blood would go neatly down the drain... it was a very long time before I found out that my Father had stood in the tub and shot him out the window as the dog convulsed from the distemper in the yard. And that as much as he was capable of loving anyone or anything, he loved that dog.

Then, during the "Red Scare" of the 50s, my crazy father was sure Communist Agents were going to come get us while we were asleep, so he would march around the house at night -- with his gun -- when he thought we children were asleep, but I wasn't asleep and could hear every word of him telling my mother that the best thing to do -- what they would HAVE to do if we were invaded -- was to kill us all so that the Communists couldn't make us slaves -- "One little bullet" he'd say, "One little bullet for each little head! One little bullet for each little head..."

And he had threatened to kill us all many times before, and God knows, I believed him, I believed he'd kill us, because he shot and killed my dog!

Somehow, thankfully, however, by the grace of God, that didn't happen.

But, see, the thing is, I never knew when it might.

And one of the last acts of violence he committed while I was still living at home, was when I was a junior in high school. My Father started a fight with my Mother... or maybe she started the fight with him... and he began to beat her... as usual. He beat her to the floor and she was on her knees and he was beating her in the head... and I got in between them and started fighting and biting with my eyes squeezed tight closed.

At one point I actually bit my poor Mother's finger because I thought it was my Father's finger, and then I bit him and clawed him and he threw me to the floor and bashed me in the head with something so hard, that it sliced my scalp open and the flap of scalp flew forward over my forehead and the blood rushed into my eyes! And I thought. "Oh. My God, he's blinded me! I'm going to be blind for the rest of my life!"

Somehow I guess the shrieking from me and my Mother and the other kids, and the blood all around stopped him and he ran down into our cellar, and my mother got us kids into the car and took me to the emergency room, where they cleaned up the scalp, shaved some hair away from the gash and the doctor stitched me up, as I watched him work on my head in the large shiny buttons on white his doctor's coat.

My mother asked if I was alright and if I would be alright staying there overnight or at least until she could get a neighbor to watch the other kids.

The doctor told her I'd be fine, to go and do what she needed to do.

She went home and checked on my father who had gone down into the cellar... with the purpose, she discovered... to hang himself. Fortunately or unfortunately, he was only blue, but not dead... She cut him down and called the ambulance.

My Father spent all the rest of my junior year in high school in Willard State Hospital (for the Insane) in Ovid, NY.

I won't tell you that they cured him, or how they supposedly cured him enough to leave -- which they did -- very poorly -- and My Father did leave to go home, where he was very quiet, and largely medicated, throughout my senior year and then I left to go to college... not wanting to leave my Mother and siblings behind with him.

But I can and will tell you that's the Father I grew up with.

Now, you may wonder, what of my Good Daddy, the one I loved so much? The one who after some point only made occasional appearances in my life?

What about that Father, the one who played piano and taught me to play and compose, the one who paid for piano and dance lessons for me and my siblings? Where was that Father who taught me valuable life lessons, my favorite of which was this which he said to me on more than one occasion:

"One must want the consequences of what one wants."

If you are going to do something, he explained, despite any and all advice, be sure you want whatever comes of and with that, because surely there will be consequences.

Where was the man with the huge sense of humor (which was like a cross between Jonathan Winters and Victor Borge)?

What happened to HIM?

Oh... you know... I may have neglected to mention... that my two Fathers were one and the same -- two vastly different personalities in one body -- two diametrically opposed halves of the same man.

My Father was one man who was really two, and the two of them were my one incredibly brilliant, sad, funny, gentle, loving, harsh, twisted, schizophrenic Father.

And some people may find this very hard to understand but, yes, despite my finally telling on him, finally wrapping words around all those things he did, finally getting his madness out of my system, regardless my indictment of his dark side, his bad half, his abusive dominant personality, I loved My Father.

Despite the hurtful, destructive things he did to my Mother, my siblings and me, I loved him.

I loved him regardless.

My Father was a man all-too-wretchedly human, divided and conflicted, in pain and causing pain to those around him, but I loved him.

I loved him through knowing him as my first Father -- the Good Daddy -- who my second Father, the Other One, kept locked away inside himself. Buried under a pile of confusion and depression, cranked by too much stress and other things too numerous to mention, and labelled mental illness, was my good Father who was only allowed brief appearances and few.

I loved my Father because his blood, mingled with my Mother's, made me.

Amazing as it may seem, I loved him.

I LOVED HIM!

Happy Fathers' Day to You, My Father who is now in the Next World. I hope that Death and the Angels of Fate freed my Good Father and healed my Other Father so both of you are now ONE.

And I'm sorry I couldn't be brief with this, but an extra Father, requires extra words.