Oh Honestly, Erin

Yesterday was my Pappap’s birthday. Or, would have been. I did really well until right before bed and then I cried myself to sleep because sometimes you just need to let it all out. Just let it all out, it’s ok!

I woke up with a terrible headache.

I would say it’s gotten easier since he died in 1996, but that’s not entirely true. In a lot of ways, it’s gotten so much worse. But I can at least make it through entire days at a time without falling down the rabbit hole of ugly mourning.

Having a child makes it kind of harder to ignore that slow-burn, sinking sensation inside my chest. Because now when I watch Chooch attempt to hit targets at amusement park shooting galleries, it makes me think of how he will never know how much my Pappap loved those things. Or how my Pappap would always let me blow out the candles on his birthday cakes and would 100% let Chooch do the same.

Or how he was just the best guy I have ever known. I never thought I would meet a guy even half as great as he was, until I met Henry. I hate that my Pappap never got to meet Henry.

I have been in a really weird place lately, family-wise.

I just really miss him a lot, still. I miss my whole family.

People always say they’re sorry when I tell them Paul is dead. That’s nice, thank you, but I wasn’t ever really sorry about it. I was just about to turn three when it happened, so I barely knew him. And based on everything my mom and her side of the family told me, it was better that way.

He was an addict.

He was abusive.

He was a monster.

He was my dad.

One day, my step-dad had grown exhausted of all the “YOU’RE NOT MY REAL DAD!”s I would verbally smack him with, so he made me sit with him in his truck while he told me the things my “real dad” did to my mom, things with steel-tipped boots that would require her to have pictures taken of her face at the police station. I should feel “lucky” he had died so that he wouldn’t have abused me, too.

I spent a lot of time as a teenager wondering if my mom regretted me, if every time she looked at me I reminded her of the traumatic years she spent married to some guy she was terrified of. I wondered if she wished he had died before I “happened.” When I was diagnosed as bi-polar with explosive anger disorder, my mom spat, “You got this from your DAD.” The way she looked at me that day is an image I will take to my grave, like I was a monster that simultaneously disgusted and horrified her.

I have four pictures of Paul. It’s surprising they even still exist, considering how my family doesn’t like me to have anything. Looking at these now doesn’t exactly trigger any memories for me, but for some reason, “Eye in the Sky” by Alan Parsons Project brings back a vague recollection of being in a restaurant with him. There were also these visions I’d have that I always felt were flashbacks. It was the same scene over and over, from a third person’s point of view, looking up at the steps in the house I grew up in.

It’s night time, and suddenly my mom appears at the top of the steps, holding me as a baby, and she’s running from Paul.

The subject of Paul was pretty taboo in my household, but one day when I was in middle school, I had the balls to tell my mom about this flashback.

She laughed bitterly.

“Things like that happened all the time when your dad was alive, so it’s probably real,” she said, telling me about a time when he chased us out of the house and then followed my mom as she drove us to his mother’s house, where he proceeded to hurl a glass pitcher at us in the kitchen.

“It missed your head by this much,” my mom said, her thumb and forefinger almost touching.

Paul died in 1982 because he was drunk driving and crashed into a tree in South Park. He was in a coma. I don’t know for how long, or if my mom pulled the plug. I just know that it wasn’t a dinner table conversation. The few times the topic was broached, it was always quickly silenced with a sympathetic “You’re better off for it.”

My childhood didn’t necessarily feel affected by his death. My mom married my step-dad when I was 4 and to me, that was the real start of my life.

My step-dad even legally adopted me when I was in fourth grade, at which point I officially began to call him “Daddy.” Sure, we didn’t have the greatest relationship at times, but it was alright.

Better than if Paul had survived, everyone would remind me.

However, the only real father figure I ever had in my life was my Pappap. He was honestly my hero and the only person who loved me unconditionally. He always made me feel like I wasn’t the product of my mom’s horrific marriage, but maybe I was—GASP!—the silver lining. I don’t remember him ever saying a bad thing about Paul to me, and I feel like if it weren’t for him, I would have grown up with a(n even bigger) chip on my shoulder, that maybe I would have let Paul’s death define me.

My Pappap gave me normalcy in an otherwise emotionless vacuum. I couldn’t get that kind of stability from my mom and I was never close enough with my current dad to go to him if I needed to talk.

So, I guess you can thank (or hate) them for my constant need to put out all of my thoughts and feelings for public consumption.

****

My mom was pretty damaged from her time with Paul. I couldn’t see that then, obviously, but the pieces started falling into place as I got older. It was like she had emotionally shut down after that, and she was never really present in her marriage with my new dad. I mean, they had two kids together, but looking back on it, I can’t recall a time when I caught them laughing together or talking to each other about things that didn’t involve work, finances or what to do with their crazy ass daughter who was skipping school and doing all of the drugs.

(I wasn’t actually doing drugs but they were convinced. Also, that I was trying to commit suicide every time I shut my bedroom door.)

They ended up divorcing years later, but he is still the only man that I have called Dad. His name is on my birth certificate, after all.

****

My mom sprung the news on me right before I turned 20. It was summer and I was living in my second apartment when she came over to tell me that I have an older brother from one of Paul’s previous relationships. His name is Shawn and she wanted me to meet him immediately rather than risk me “accidentally meeting him in a bar and going home with him” someday.

That might have been one of the grossest things she had ever said to me. She’s always been so great at making awkward situations even more uncomfortable.

So I met Shawn. He apparently always knew I existed and had been in touch with my mom for quite awhile. He told me that he would sometimes go to her office just to talk, which blew my mind because I couldn’t imagine ever going to my mom “just to talk.”

Shawn didn’t really have much to say about Paul, but he went on and on about how wonderful that side of the family is, how Paul’s mom Lois practically raised him, and how sweet our aunt Charmaine is. I had this whole family that I had been kept from and I was starting to get pissed.

****

After Paul died, my mom extracted herself from his family. She told me once that it was because they were all Jehovah’s Witnesses and she just didn’t want to deal with that. I can remember shopping with her at Hills, sometime in the mid-80s, and having her practically toss me into a rack of clothes because she saw people she knew and she didn’t want them to see us. Once we were safe in the car a few minutes later, she told me that it was my aunt and grandma we were hiding from.

This was normal to me: hiding from relatives in department stores, running up to the attic window to see who was ringing the doorbell, answering the phone for my mom because it might be Donna Thomas calling with PTA bullshit.

No wonder I get such anxiety when the pizza guy knocks on my fucking door.

****

I grew up thinking my family consisted of my mom, my current dad and my two younger brothers, Ryan and Corey. I had two sets of grandparents: one on my mom’s side and one on my dad’s side. That was my normal. That was all I needed.

But now I had this older brother, and he really wanted me to meet our Grandma Lois. Shawn and I didn’t talk or see each other all that often, but when we did, the subject always came up. He gave me her number, but I didn’t call. I was so weirded out by all of this, because while this was going on, my mom was also reuniting with her daughter she had put up for adoption pre-Paul.

I started to have a major identity crisis.

But finally, after about a year of persuading, I went to meet my Grandma Lois and Aunt Charmaine. I can tell you that it was 2001 and I was wearing an autographed Nickelback shirt because I was clearly going through a really awful (yet thankfully SHORT) phase. It was just an all-around really bad time for me, you guys.

Lois and Charmaine pulled out photo albums and spoke glowingly of Paul. “You look so much like him!” they kept saying, and well, I wouldn’t know because my four photos of him weren’t exactly professional head shots.

I learned that he was funny and smart but just never applied himself. That he loved my mom but they were volatile. That they were actually separated when the accident happened, but that things had been getting better. That my mom was an absolute basket case in the hospital after the accident.

They told me that when he met my mom, he wanted to marry her so much that he would say things like, “I’d marry you in Alaska in a snow storm if you wanted.”

But….drugs and alcohol, you guys.

This was the first time I wasn’t barraged with anti-superlatives about him. I started to see a different version of Paul after that. He was someone’s son. Someone’s nephew. Someone’s friend. People loved him in spite of his addiction.

And, for the first time, I saw the accident as a tragedy and not just a Thing that had Happened. I began to feel angry that everyone had told me my whole life how I should feel about it. How I was better off. How did they know? I came down with a case of the Dreaded What Ifs.

What if he had gotten clean?

What if he and my mom just weren’t meant to be with each other but it turned out he was a fucking fantastic father?

What if my family was exaggerating?

I left Charmaine’s house and went straight to Jefferson Memorial, where I sat next to Paul’s grave and cried about him for the first time in 21 years.

I found some pictures I took inside my grandparents house from 2007-2008. It’s mind-blowing to me how a house that was once so open and inviting (to family, anyway; most of my friends were afraid of it) turned into a bolted-up, secretive fortress. I haven’t been inside there since 2010, and that was for about 30 minutes before Sharon was shooing me out.

This painting was supposed to be mine. This was all I wanted, plus all the old photo albums. I don’t care about the money. I would rather continue living in pseudo-squalor than taking their handouts.

Chooch in the Clown Room, standing near a sharp-edged glass table, wooo parenting!

Master bathroom, one of my favorite rooms as a kid.

Someday I hope to have a house to cover in strange wallpaper.

Chooch in the kitchen. I just wanted to post a baby picture, that’s all.

WTF.

Someday, before the house is gone, I want to break in and take more pictures and just get one good, long look at what seemed so normal to me as a kid.

I spent some of the best days of my life at that house, watching “Golden Girls”, “Empty Nest” and “Hunter” during Saturday night sleepovers, eating grilled cheese, and playing PacMan in the game room while “She Bop” blared out of the jukebox.

It really depresses me to know how Grey Gardens it all has become.

(Susie, if you’re reading this and you have any photos of the house from when you were a kid, I would love to see them!)

The beginning of November always weighs heavily on me because it’s when my pappap’s birthday falls. I try not to let it bother me, but it’s like his ghost is always there, hovering. It’s not like I don’t want it to be, though, but that doesn’t make me feel any less sad. Part of me doesn’t want to “get over it”, no matter how many “friends,” family members, or therapists tell me to, because the hurt in my heart reminds me of who I am and where I came from.

I had wanted to post this photo last week on his proper birthday, but I couldn’t find it.

I tore through all of my photo albums, to the point where I started to think that I had constructed the photo in my subconscious, and started to panic because I’m afraid to start forgetting things about him, like his loud laugh, or the way he would tap his pinky ring off the church pew and say, “One day this will be yours” (for the record, it’s not mine). I don’t want to forget about the time he got pickpocketed in Rome and remained so calm, yet lost his shit when some asshole grabbed the cab we were waiting for.  How we would go on family vacations to Wildwood, NJ and he and I would sneak out for ice cream after everyone else went to bed. How he would listen to his Mike and the Mechanics tape in his truck and say, “This song reminds me of my father” every time “Living Years” came on.

And my photos of him, don’t even get me started on my photos of him. My aunt is so afraid I’m going to raid my grandma’s house of all the Lalique and jewelry when all I would actually take is every photo album I could carry in a potato sack. OK fine, and there’s the fucking fantastic sculpture of Marquis de Sade that I have always had my greedy eye on. I recently asked my aunt Sharon for the purple heart that he earned in WW2 and she got completely spastic on me.

I don’t have anything of his. I don’t want it for materialistic reasons, for greed, I just want to have something that he once held. I don’t care at this point if it’s a scrap of a shirt. My family won’t let me have anything and that’s a hard pill to swallow sometimes. I guess it’s my punishment for being the black sheep.

But I finally found the birthday photo the other night, in this big red velvet album full of my baby pictures. I’m guessing from the not-yet jaded look in my eyes that this was back in 1980. Chooch and I sat on the couch and pawed through the album and every time we turned a page to find his face perma-glued onto the yellowed backing. I would proudly say, “That’s my PAPPAP,” like a kid boasting the best toy ever during show and tell. And that’s what makes it suck even harder lately, not the fact that I don’t have that shiny toy to brag about anymore, but that Chooch never got to know him. And those two would have been crazy about each other.

My pappap was the one who made all of my birthdays amazing. He raised the bar so high that sometimes, in his death, I don’t even want to bother to celebrate my big day. And looking back, I realize that aside from a lousy birthday cake, no one ever really did anything for his birthday. If I could have one last chance, one last opportunity to light up some trick candles, I’d make sure he knew for real how much everyone loved him. I guess he did know, even in the absence of actions, but still. He deserved a party. A really fucking lavish party. With clowns and twenty bottles of Dom. Or, at the very least, a card with all these sentiments scrawled in ink.

He never expected anything from any of us: my brothers, my mom, my aunts, or my grandma. All he wanted was happiness for everyone, and it seemed like so much of the time, someone was always mad at him, always for materialistic bullshit.

This was Halloween, 1983. I found it during my search for the birthday cake photo. I can guarentee that whoever took this photo, whether it was my mom or grandma, someone was pissed that my pappap was walking past in the background. I’m certain there was an annoyed hiss of, “You ruined the picture, John!” but for me, I look at this and think, “Oh good, another picture of my pappap,” and I bet the rest of them would think the same thing.

Every Saturday night, my Pappap and I would go to church. Sometimes we were joined by other family members, or my friends who were looking to score a good meal afterward. (I maintain that this is the sole reason why my Pappap was so adamant, religious if you will, about attending mass every week.) If my step-dad was in tow, that meant we couldn’t slip out after Communion, but instead were forced to return to our pew, pasty wafer refusing to dissolve before first gagging us and adhering to our uvulas, until the priest formally urged us to go unto the Lord. My aunt Susie would join us if she had a hankering for osso bucco and Naple’s was the restaurant of the night. I never wanted her to go because it always turned into a tense night of us vying for my Pappap’s attention. She’d pinch me under the table when I was young and humiliate me in front of cute bus boys when I was older. My Pappap had forged friendships with the owners of some of the best restaurants in town. Fortunato’s was one of those restaurants. I would always order Veal Denny, which was stuffed with crabmeat and had a delicious fromage sauce ladled upon it. It was served on a silver plate flanked with slices of marachino-marinaded apple rings. I loved those apple rings. It was hard to say what my Pappap would order, but it was always Lambrusco filling his glass. There was a whole group of us there one night, a long time ago. Susie was teaching me how to turn ordinary wine glasses into melodious instruments, hoping it would chagrin my Pappap. But the chagrinning would all go to my step-dad, who became obviously flustered as the owner emerged from the back and approached our table. "Oh Jesus, would you knock that off?" my step-dad begged. "You’ve made the owner come out now!" The owner was a robust man in his fifties with a stern face. We had eaten there often enough for he and my Pappap to form a friendly rapport with each other, and I was afraid I had managed to ruin that with my unruly tableside manner. When he reached our table, he brandished an enormous crystal goblet from behind his back. "Try this," he said with a sly smile. That thing produced the deepest, bellowing hum and I have yet to replicate it to this day. My Pappap leaned back and grinned, taking joy in the fact that someone else was able to please me. The owner died sometime in the nineties and his restaurant has since become some run-of-the-mill Chinese dive, which has a really delicious dessert of fried bananas but Henry and I have never gone back. Sometimes I think about that Veal Denny and I wonder if I’d have succeeded in being a vegetarian for so long if Fortunato’s and my Pappap were still around. My guess is no.