One of the strongest memories I have about my father is this huge discussion, where he told me I had to get baptized and spend the next two years going to church on Sundays until the day of my confirmation. You know, tell the whole community that you accept Jesus as your lord and saviour and all that nonsense. I was about 14 back then, didn't believe in god and had never been religious or baptized or anything. But he had just hooked up with my next stepmother tobe and since she was into keeping up appearances and shit, she wouldn't have any non-Christian children in the house and that was that.
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| I came to confirmation day in a Sucker brand shirt and blue sneakers |
Here's another fun memory: I was insanely car-sick as a kid. Ten minutes on the road and I'd throw up. Without fail. And I wasn't done there. Give it another ten minutes and I'd throw up again. And again. I could throw up on an empty stomach, I'd always find some chunks and/or bodily fluids to vomit into a bag. So what did he do? Took me on a vacation to Spain. By car. From Germany. I thought I was gonna fucking die. Heck, he thought I was gonna fucking die, but vacation is more important than the health and safety of your firstborn child, right?
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| Everyone loves a roadtrip! |
We fell out a few months back when he started bragging to me about his new 20 year old girlfriend. I'm paraphrasing a bit here, but basically he made her out to be a total bimbo, but a great shag. You know, the guy who divorced my mother and two stepmothers, forced me into divorce trials in court when I was six years old and turned me into the miserable fucker I am today. The guy who broke apart the shitty excuse for a family we had because of his WoW addiction. Bragged to me about his young, sexy, if somewhat moronical girlfriend.
I didn't wanna hear it. I was shocked and disgusted. And I told him. And that's when he questioned my intelligence, told me he didn't wanna come here because I share my house with vermin (referring to our snake and the lizard) and threatened to cease contact altogether. Because not only was my father a tyrant, a sadist and a self-centered jerk, but he'd blow up at the slightest provocation and then he'd aim to hurt people as best he could. He was great at that. He knew exactly what people's weaknesses were, what they loved, and he'd ridicule that, make fun of it.
It didn't even hurt back then, because I had been used to this kind of abuse for all my life. If anything, I felt sorry for him. I didn't even argue. I just asked him to look at all the things he wrote to me in that toxic email. And why. Asked him if he couldn't understand my reaction one bit. He was my father, for fuck's sake, he was supposed to be somebody to look up to, a role-model. And he bragged to me, his oldest son, about some chick he was banging, who wasn't just young enough, she was fucking younger than his own children. And that's the way he responded?
"Perhaps keeping in touch isn't such a good idea", he said in that email.
"If that's the way you see it", I wrote back. "If you're aware of the consequences and you're sure you're willing to accept them, then yes, perhaps you are right."
There was another stupid thing we argued about. His diabetes. My old man held up a strict diet of caffeine, sugar and nicotine. For as long as I've known him, all he ever drank was Coke. I haven't seen a bottle of water in the house until I was old enough to buy my own.
He switched to Diet Coke and ultimately water a few years back, but to make up for it, he had tons upon tons of instant extra creamy cappucchino. With extra whole milk and with chocolate on top. He could also smoke his way through half a dozen packs of cigarettes per day, which certainly didn't contribute to his diabetes, but it wasn't exactly great for his health. Or mine, for that matter. He smoked when I was in the car with him, smoked during dinner, smoked all the goddamn time. And then I allegedly had "chronic bronchitus" by the age of five. Yeah, you go figure out the rest.
So, let's just say that, to nobody's surprise, he had severe health problems and eventually got diagnosed with diabetes a few years back. My brother would tell me that half of the time our father was so messed up and in so much pain, he couldn't even leave the house. Because he didn't take his medication and didn't give a shit about his condition.
When I asked him about it, my dad told me he had those amazing pills, which basically allowed him to live a normal life, eat and drink whatever he wanted and he was perfectly alright. So yeah, great news to all you diabetics out there - apparently there's a new wonder drug, which practically cures all your problems!
Of course I called him out on this nonsense, told him to be more careful, of course he got angry again, telling me it's none of my business and all kinds of nice things like that.
I got a phonecall from my brother last night. Asked me when I had last heard of our dad. Told him it was months ago and asked whether he was in jail, homeless, dead or any combination of the above. Because frankly, I had been expecting that kind of thing for a while. We all had, but I'll get into that later.
My father died at age 58, in his bed, of natural causes. They didn't get any more specific than that, but it's a relatively safe bet that it was his diabetes. Completely avoidable. He knew about it, he chose to ignore it no matter how many times we asked him to be more careful and now he pegged it.
And the vast majority of things I'll remember about him are bad. His legacy is testament to the kind of man he was: Two years worth of unpaid rent, a rather impressive pile of unpaid speeding tickets, another ten grand he had borrowed from the company he worked for - and that's just the stuff we're currently aware of.
How anyone can borrow 10,000 Euros, drive a company Audi, get a free Blackberry and all the luxury of a good job and never pay any rent, speeding tickets or any other bill is beyond me. But my father has always been excellent at living the big life and piling up debt. When his third marriage began to fall apart, my stepmother told me that he had ruined her and that she felt sorry for my previous stepmother and my mother before her, because he had ruined them as well. Basically, whenever I run into some old acquaintances of my father, the first thing I'm told is that he had somehow ruined their lives.
I'm not making this up. When I was unemployed a few years ago, the lady at the job agency turned out to be one of my father's former colleagues and she literally said that the man had ruined her life. And I also hear that sort of thing from my uncles and I used to get it from my grandparents when they were still alive. I don't know the details, because I never ask and because I don't want to know them. I didn't choose my own father, but I have to live with him and some things I just don't need to hear. But I dread to think about all the crap he must have been involved in.
Whenever shit got REALLY bad - I had to answer the phone and the door and tell people who wanted money that he wasn't there - he'd say stupid things about what he'd do to get the family out of debt. Imagine your own father telling you he'd kill a man if it was paid well enough. When you're ten years old. My dad was a drama queen and he loved to shock people with stupid shit like that, but let's just say it can leave a bit of an impression on a kid.
I had to interrupt writing this for a moment when my brother messaged me just now. It looks more and more like our father wanted this to happen. Apparently he told my brother that "when it happens, at least I can say I have truly lived." Great. Go you, dad! You've been in the band, you got laid, you had a massive house and a whole lot of really amazing cars once. And you're leaving behind an estranged family and two sons, who have no fucking clue what to say in your eulogy. He borrowed ten grand from the company and never paid any bills or rent. He didn't take his medication. He wasn't just careless. He knew exactly what he was doing and he deliberately went there. He gave up on everything, stopped caring and let his condition do the rest for him. He took the coward's way out. What an asshole.
How stupid is it when your own father dies at a relatively young age and the one thing you can take away from this is how he should serve you as a bad example? My brother asked me how I was feeling today and right now I'm just really, seriously angry. My father only lived for himself and now he died for himself. Took all the money he could and just went on a self-descructive joyride. Fuck your landlady, who is sitting on years worth of unpaid rent. Fuck your boss who will never see the money he gave to you. Fuck your family, who get to pick up the pieces. Fuck everyone but yourself. You died exactly the way you have lived. A selfish, immature asshole, who hurts everyone around himself with his greed.
I wish I could tell him.
I'm sure you know those cheesy shows on tv where a character's parent dies and they're all sad and heartbroken, because the last thing they said to the dearly departed was mean, rude or entirely meaningless. I'm feeling like that right now, except I wish I had known what the fuck the old bastard was doing. I wish I had the chance to make him see what he's doing to people by acting like such a stubborn, immature, idiotic, self-centered prick. And that's probably why.
That's probably why he did it. Because everyone felt that way about him. His third wife had left him, the family had completely broken apart and he had to start from scratch. I find it difficult to feel sorry for him. He had a chance for a fresh start. He got a job with a big real estate company. They gave him a car. They gave him a ton of money. They even gave him a fully-furnished apartment. All he had to do was go to work.
Fuck! When I had to make a new start in the UK I had nothing. I had to leave most of my stuff behind, I had no money, all I had was Claire, her family, the roof over our heads and an underpaid job as a freelance writer.
Today I'm a relatively well-known critic, I make enough money and I get so much work that I can cherry-pick all the nice, well-paid stuff and ignore everything else. We're sharing the house with some really amazing animals, Claire and I do what we love for a living and we've built up a nice life together from the ground up. From absolutely nothing.
My old man had money. He had a free car. Free Blackberry. He had the properties he was asked to sell handed to him. All he had to do was go out there and do his job. Fuck, before he had an amazing opportunity like that, I even offered him to come over here with me, make a fresh start together. Tons of real estate places around here constantly looking for skilled people.
And he chose to off himself on a sugar rush. Just couldn't be arsed anymore. Easy mode wasn't easy enough for him anymore, so he just quit. Damn.
Now I'm supposed to give a speech at his funeral. Can't wait. Anyone got any great ideas what to say? Can you swear in church?
The one good thing I can say is that he made me what I am today. No, not fat, pale and balding. A gamer. A writer. A comedian. I'm eating a giant steak, paid by a column about airplane and dinosaur porn. I'm not kidding - if you're anywhere near Germany right now, go and buy the current issue of buffed magazine right the fuck now. Look for my column. Not only do I write about dragons literally fucking cars, but I get to write about how I can look at these things for work, describe them to my audience and then I get money for it. It's fucking surreal - and it's the perfect life for me.
All this shit my father had forced me to do - get baptized and tell the world I accept Jesus against my will, say "mama" to my third stepmother (or go to boarding school), go to bible camp in summer so he could run around the house naked - all this bullshit made me hate, reject and rebel against authority so much, I can't keep a proper job until this very day. This is why I've become a writer. The folks I work for know my style and they let me get away with whatever crazy bullshit I come up with, because they know it's good and they know people read it. I'm my own boss, I get to do whatever the fuck I want and I do it for a living. So yeah, thanks for that one, dad!
And the "comedy" that pays my bills? I'm a fucking cynic. Grow up with a father like mine and you have no choice but to become the biggest cynical bastard. You have no idea how easy it is to write nasty, hateful reviews and columns (the kind everybody likes to read), when you genuinely hate everything. When you're convinced that everything is shit and everyone around you is an asshole and/or a complete idiot. So thank you for that one.
And then there is ambition. You can't succeed in life, be good at what you do and pick yourself up whenever life kicks you in the balls if you're not ambitious. I was in the band. I was in school plays. Held graduation speeches. I wrote a fucking novel when I was 18 years old. He was never there. Not fucking once. The one thing I wanted, more than anything else, was to be noticed. To impress him. Fuck, it would have been enough if he had shown up and at least acknowledged that I was there. Thanks. Thank you for making me try my hardest and for never making me feel good enough, no matter what I did.
Look, I'm 32 years old now and I've long stopped caring about what he thinks. You don't want to impress somebody you have little to no respect for. But somewhere beneath all that selfishness there was a kind man. Sometimes. He was the only one who was there before I left the country. Helped us with the shopping, drove us to the supermarket and let us get a trolly full of stuff when he didn't even have enough for himself. The rest of the family didn't even talk to me before I left and he shared what little he had.
He was a gamer, waaaay before it was cool. We had everything from an old Atari to a Japanese TG16, Japanese Megadrive games, all you could ever dream of. He got me into Ultima, Phantasy Star, Shining Force, Bard's Tale - he played all of this stuff and it was great to feel enthusiastic about these games together. It was the one thing we truly shared. He wrote massive walkthrus and sent them to magazines for a bit of extra cash, which helped him buy even more games. We had some epic adventures together on World of Warcraft. Well, before that game took over his life and destroyed the family, I suppose.
I can't fucking believe he's not there anymore. It seems so unreal. For some fucked up reason I had always hoped he'd come to the UK someday, see that I've turned things around, see that we're happy over here, talked about games, music, the few things we had in common. I never seriously believed he'd make it here, but it was a nice thought. Haven't seen him in over four years and I had last heard his voice ages ago, probably when he called on my 30th birthday or something.
His apology for my fucked-up childhood was that he'd been born and raised that way, himself, and that it never mattered how the kids felt or what the kids wanted. So how did that make him feel when he was a kid? Didn't that make him want to do a better job at being a father?
I'm not sure he ever grew up, himself. That's what it all comes down to. He was a big, stubborn, spoiled child.
He told me he wanted the good old days back when we argued about his stupid new girlfriend. When life was better, easier, he was young and nothing seemed impossible. Ya know, midlife-crisis and all. But to just abandon all responsibility, to not even fucking try anymore, to just absolutely ignore everything for a last couple years of fun until the inevitable would happen... damn.
You have to understand that this guy was the only "constant" thing in my life. He broke up with my biological mother when I was six, then I went back and forth between them for a while until my brother and I ended up with his new wife and her daughter. And eventually that went bad as well and I went to yet another new "family", as wife #3 also had kids of her own. I've been to twelve or so different schools, which looks amazing in my CV, let me tell ya!
So, while he was the reason for all this shit in the first place, he was the only one who was always there. I never had the same friends, teachers, neighbourhood or even fucking siblings for long, but he was always there. He was the only "role-model" I had, even though nowadays he reminds me of all the shit I hate about myself. And while he most certainly was a liar, a scammer, a con-artist, who cheated countless people out of their money, he was always a big child, not capable to deal with any responsibility. He'd spend countless hours gaming, all day and all night, staying up longer than any sane person should. And sure, we'd bond over that, because it's the one thing we both enjoyed.
But damn. "At least I can say I have truly lived." I despise him for that. To have hurt so many people, to have touched so many lives in such a bad way, to leave absolutely nothing behind but bad memories and a massive pile of debt... and to be proud of it. Sure, it was probably just talk. He'd still be alive if he was really happy with himself, right? I mean, you don't just give up on everything when you look back at your life with pride, do you?
You know what the weirdest thing about this is? I don't think I can explain this in words that will make sense to anyone, but let me try - for the first time in my life I am "me". I don't live to meet my father's expectations. I don't do anything, hoping that one day he'd stop feeling sorry for me, because of the life I chose to live, because of what I do. I don't have to prove myself to him, I don't have to wonder anymore what he'd think whenever I achieve something, have my name featured in a cool article or whatever.
But I also feel like my "roots" are gone. Like my life before England had become eradicated, doesn't exist anymore, doesn't even matter. I was never very close with my "family", but now they don't even exist the way I remember them. My grandparents are gone, my father is gone and I haven't heard from my biological mother in nearly two decades. I do get the occasional email from my son, but let's just say that things are a bit complicated. Don't get me wrong - I have a nice, happy life over here in the UK. But Germany is over, it's not coming back and what rare, few nice memories I may have, are exactly that. Just memories.
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| Okay, now we're just getting cheesy. |
-Cat
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