Logan Robertson
What was it like to know Steve Beggs?
As an exercise suggested by my therapist: a kind of eulogy for my father, Stephen Lee Beggs.
Steve was not an easy man to know. I mean not easy to be around. I mean not easy to know about. He was forthcoming about himself in fits. Convulsions. Asides and mutterings. He was angry, regretful, resentful. Prone, through drink, to blubbering self-pity.
He was “wicked smaht,” as they say back east: insightful, cutting, probing, curious. He could be charming and funny. He loved food but hated to eat. He introduced me to the true happiness of anchovies on pepperoni pizza. He had great taste in music and loved the blues. Me too. He had a longing for spiritual connection—something we share—and an interest in New Age spirituality, vague gestures toward Eastern religion and the I Ching, and he loved drugs that hasten the way into mind or, as I think of it now, un-mind.
As my dad, he loved me in some kind of way. Or I think in some way he genuinely wanted to love me. I admit, I don’t really have evidence for it. You’d have to be me at five years old and eight years old and 11 and 16 and 18 and 21. There was some affection. There’s an effervescence between two people. You’re around someone and you feel, you know, this guy likes me. What else is there, really, between two people?
Of course to be me at those times you’d also have to be me in the years in between. Each span an abandonment. Me wondering, will he call? Will he send a card for Christmas? Will he remember my birthday? (he never did) Why is his phone disconnected? I wonder where my dad is. And if you were me in those years in between, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking, “You know, this guy doesn’t love me.”
And yet, I think he did. I think so.
Steve was an alcoholic and a narcissist. That’s the long and short of it really. I could have begun there. He wasn’t a “man afflicted by alcohol dependency,” alcoholic. He as a “Goddamn it Otto, you have Lupus,” alcoholic. At least that’s how it was from where I’m standing.
He fucked up his own life. Fucked up his relationship with my mom. Fucked up his career as a PA by performing pelvic exams on women who didn’t need or want them. What a very clinical way to describe sexual assault. Quite a thing to learn Googling your dad.
He was a shitty father and somehow an even shittier human being. He fucked up his relationship with me by just being himself.
You know those wooden blocks little kids play with? The ones with letters carved into them in relief and painted primary colors? My earliest memory is my blocks swirling around an in-ground pool drain with a dead frog. My next memory is asking my dad for help getting my blocks and him shrugging me off. That’s the kind of guy he was. I was, at the oldest, three and a half.
You could color pretty much any interaction I had with him with the same brush: baby blocks and a dead frog. At some level I was always three years old asking for help, and at some level he was always shrugging me off.
When I was 15 or 16, I gave him an ultimatum: disappear again for any amount of time and I am done with you. You don’t know when you’re a kid that you don’t want to be in a relationship with someone you have to give an ultimatum. But you learn fast.
The visits and the phone conversations between 16 years old and 25 were painful consequences in the wake of that ultimatum. Major regret. Steve, it turned out, was not a person I wanted to know. Very soon I learned this guy doesn’t have the blocks to give me. He never did. The rest of them were back at mom’s house in a drawstring bag made out of an old pillowcase.
There was a last straw. Remember back when you could run out of cell phone minutes? He called. I couldn’t answer. Then a series of increasingly drunken, angry, accusatory voice messages. It was my turn to disappear from his life. A couple years passed. Then he had a big heart attack and died, thank God.
What else to say? His death was and continues to be a massive relief. Dying is the best thing he ever did for me. That’s what it was like to know him.
One of my theological bugbears is “what if” theology. Someone will suggest an ideal, usually a belief or behavior, and ask, “What if we all believed/did that?” It almost never goes beyond that. Just a cold, dead fish laying on the table. What if this fish was alive?
Look, See. I Have a Bible
Mr. President felt himself pressed into the generous seat of the black Secret Service special order 2020 GMC Yukon Denali with its head-turning three-dimensional grille, HID projector beam headlamps and distinctive chrome accents. During the short drive he looked out the tinted windows of the vehicle, tugged on his blue tie and readjusted his suit jacket around himself. He pulled the seatbelt away from his torso and let it embrace him. The smell of sweat and aftershave of the Secret Service detail assigned to keep him, the leader of the free world, safe mingled with the smell of the perforated leather-appointed seats which featured a unique Fractal stitching.
The country needed him he knew. He was told that he needed to show the country leadership in this trying time. From his study of Fox News over the years, Mr. President knew that religion was important to the people who elected him. So he told his staff he would go to the nearest church and give a short speech about what was going on and how he would respond.
Mr. President didn’t quite know what people did in a church, though he had been to churches, stood with pastors and had them pray for him and for the country. But he wasn’t very comfortable with it. Whatever it was it had something to do with something much bigger than him and he had trouble with that. He liked to be in control of what was around him and even in churches full of his fans there was something out beyond him that he couldn’t describe.
Still, Mr. President would go to the church. He was glad he had a Bible with him and he absently leafed through it now. His supporters talked about the Bible and how important it was a lot. He felt they would like to see it now. He would be standing outside of a church after all. The two things went together. The GMC Yukon Denali rolled to a stop on 22-inch bright-machined aluminum wheels with painted accents. He tugged his tie and adjusted his jacket. Waited for the go-ahead from his Secret Service detail to exit the vehicle.
Mr. President held a Bible in his right hand and felt its weight as he approached the place that was prepared for him in front of a sign reading, “SUNDAY SERVICES ONLINE ALL ARE WELCOME.” The June day was hot and muggy and the leather binding of the book in his hand was moist and slippery. No matter how he moved his fingers to get a better grip on it, the book slipped and shifted in his grasp. As he waited for the signal to begin from his staff he inspected the book. Does this thing have a front, he wondered. There was no title. Shouldn’t it say “Bible?”
He quietly held the book aloft, near his head, in his hand and showed it to the people who were allowed to be there. Look, see. I have a Bible here in front of this church.
A woman shouted, “Is that your Bible?”
“It’s a Bible,” he said.
“What are your thoughts right now,” asked another person in the gathered press.
As he composed his thoughts and took a breath to speak, suddenly his breath caught. He thought it was strange. He felt the need to cough or to clear his throat. He tried but couldn’t quite catch his breath. What’s happening, he wondered. Just be calm, it will pass.
He coughed a little and dropped the Bible at his feet. Mr. President looked down at the book open where it had tumbled to the ground. He glanced back up to check the reaction of the press and was shocked.
Suddenly, there before him was a gigantic woman. Like the Statue of Liberty, he thought, except she was dressed in a white robe and a sky blue shawl, like his tie. He craned his neck to look up at her. Her head was covered and her deep brown skin glowed. The sky darkened as light seemed to gather around her. His vision narrowed until all he could see was her hugeness before him. She tilted her enormous head at him and raised her eyebrows, considering him standing there before the church sign. She made a pained face and Mr. President felt he would like to know her better, to ask her what it was like to be so big. Then she quietly lifted her calloused, sandaled foot and stepped on him.
