An open letter to Richard:
I am just recently back from a run, a short one, but fraught with memories of you and the so-called-life that we had as a short-lived family back on Long Island. My earliest memory or perhaps at best recollection is me at my grandparent's house. I will not describe this memory because it is dear to me but perhaps most tumescent about this memory, and what makes it the happiest, is that it excludes you. In looking for an appropriate definition as what you were to me, I liberally grant you the title of natural father, which is defined as the male progenitor of a baby. I fear that you can never get to the level of birth father, because at best you only taught me inductively how to behave: by not doing the things that you have done.
I have no recollection of you ever holding me and very rare memories of you telling me that you love me or giving me encouraging words. I will save those to the end of this letter, so that I can make some apologies for you and perhaps give you some grace as you are not extant, so you can't possibly defend yourself.
I know several painful facts about myself now. Most of which, I hid for 30 + years. I fear the dark. Not because of some monsters lurking there, nothing like that. I fear the aloneness that the dark brings. I fear the shadows that envelop the house as night falls or as curtains remain undrawn. I know the aloneness of hiding from you when you were angry –uncontrollably so. I fear being alone with only the thoughts in my head because most times, these thoughts are far too loud echoes of your condemnation of me, mom, and Angela.
I remember you sitting alone in the dark, smoking your unfiltered Kools or Camels, drinking scotch, waiting for us to come home. Like some predator, you would slowly rise, I remember the red tip of the cigarette like some one-eyed monster coming toward us, growling and cursing for no apparently reason other than for sport or to release your own inner-demons upon us like some unholy purge. I could never understand then why you did what you did and now I cannot comprehend the demons that plagued you.
You struck violently and you struck often mom and Angela. Rarely would you hit me. It shamed me to no end. In the beginning I feared the pain, but learned that it was fleeting: today I know that pain is temporary and pride is forever. However, how pitiful that sounds and the words fall dead even before they leave my lips. The scars I bear are not from the pain you tried to inflict whether you used your hand, the brush, or your belt. Worse yet were the things you would say. Having been through SERE training and having been a Psychological Operations officer, I know rationally know what you did to me. However, I can't rationally dismiss the pain I feel deep in the heart of me.
Some of what you did was unconscionable. I have the sounds and voices of the 911 tapes you would play loudly over the stereo seared into my head. I heard my first person die at the age of five. I remember the woman's pleas and screams as her husband shot her dead and calmly hung up the phone. Why would you do such a thing to your own family. Did it bring you pleasure? What were you thinking? You would scream at mom for no apparent reason and say to her things no boy should ever hear about their father and mother. I am so ashamed that I cannot even write them down now because they shame even me to this day. It wasn't even me who said them but you make me feel the sins of my father, branded into my soul like some Mark of Cain. You were a bastard.
Living with you was like living in hell. I remember getting off the bus and peeking around the corner to see if you were home. I would not come home until you left for work. I always hoped that you would be killed in the line of duty to at least restore some virtue. I cannot watch the movie the Great Santini without feeling a close connection with the family. You were mighty in your own mind because you terrorized the castle. You terrorized us.
Did you not know that I could hear everything that you and mom yelled about? Did you not care that I cried myself to sleep so many nights wishing for nothingness? Would it have killed you to find another outlet for your anger other than upon your family? We were not perfect, but we did not deserve you.
You were the destroyer of worlds. You taunted everything and everyone. You were a bitter, acrimonious, misogynistic, racist pig. I can remember nothing that you spoke kindly about. I remember sitting at the dinner table for four hours because I wouldn't eat onions. You couldn't let it go. I ate everything else, but I hated onions. I remember you throwing food at me because I wouldn't eat meatballs. Your face twisted in demented rage at something I could not understand. Was it me sitting there or some mental projection of your own torturer? I remember running downstairs with my sister as you poured your hatred and vitriol upon us for eating one too many pork chops. You hurled anything that you could get your hands on down the stairs. Would you have cared if you hit one of us?
I remember always running or hiding from you. I remember mom hiding us behind the Venea's property for hours and we begging her not to return. We wanted to run so far from him. Always running and always hiding. To this day, I cringe whenever people start fighting or yelling. I hate arguing and I get nauseous whenever I get angry.
After a time, your screams and threats and vomitous rage began to fade as I stood there silently or so I thought. It built and built. Your final acts of childish lashing out at your family caused me potentially the greatest damage as I realized that I wanted to kill my own father in order to protect the rest of the family. How sad that you were able to dement a little boy to know such feelings? A lost childhood over what?
Over 30 years have past and you have long since died. Your death came as no surprise to me, no one could have lived long, living like you did. The pain, suffering, and humiliation was divine retribution for the equal amount of pain, suffering, and humiliation that you inflicted upon your family. Ironic that you should die as alone as your father did. Was there anyone at your wake? Did someone raise a toast in your honor with honesty in his or her voice. In those final years, did you find any salvation?
As I promised, I will end this letter with some memories of good times. I distinctly remember you asking my forgiveness after one of your rages at me for performing poorly on a test. I received one hell of a beating and verbal barrage about my lack of worth as a person, but I did better in school. Goin on to capture quarter after quarter on the honor roll and making National Honor Society, and two Student-Athlete Awards. I have two master's now and I am finishing my third this year.
In your absence, I had to take care of mom because she was a wreck. I learned early how to do laundry, cook for myself, clean, and dismantle an oil burner to repair it. You left mom poor and we all suffered for it. However, I can now face any tangible adversity with a calm, detached, logical, and unrelenting tenacity. To me, there is nothing that can't be solved with hard work and determination.
I still cannot stand to be alone. You occasionally infest my dreams with your ill-presence. Your mocking words still echo daily in my head, taunting me to fail and condescendingly reminding me that it is okay, I am stupid and worthless, so I am expected to fail. I feel and have felt each failure in my life like a knife in my heart. I became OCD about success and trying to fix everything.
I have ruined almost every relationship that I have ever had because I tend to smoother. I try to erase your evil with an unsustainable amount of good action and an overwhelming amount of kindness. I remember telling myself, if I could do one thing in my life, I would want to help as many women as I could become better than they are. I overwhelm them and they leave. I can be too kind. Rejection of my kindness is hot-wired into my brain as a rejection of me as a worth-while human being. I cannot fathom that maybe a person doesn't like me because they just don't want to and that I have done nothing wrong. There is sometimes fit and sometimes no-fit. I can rationalize it here, but I can't believe it in my heart. However, Richard, I am learning.
I had thought that this letter would be filled with curses and hatred. However, I can feel only tinges of anger at you. You are dead and the dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive. For the past three years, and sporadically even further back, I wanted nothing more than to cease to exist. I found it increasingly difficult to keep those memories separate from me as a whole. Greg and military Greg are experiencing a painful integration, but one that is long overdue. Sure the anger comes in spurts, but mostly, I feel pity for you as the child. You must have been tortured mercilessly to become the monster that you did. I hope that you found peace in the end.
v/r
Greg
