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.