2001-02-12 - 23:59:57

Why I Hate Mondays

Mondays - Ick. I hate them.

There are lots of people who hate Monday because it is the beginning of the work week. I hate it for a different reason - Monday is the day that I have to go visit my father. He's currently living at an adult home on the eastern edge of Frown Town. I live on the western edge so it's like a ten minute drive.

I haven’t talked much about my father here, mainly because it’s a complicated subject that makes me feel bad. I did go into it in some detail here. Even though that entry was done in a somewhat joking style, nearly everything in there is 100% true.

I am terminally pissed off at my father and bothered and annoyed by the fact that he is now, essentially, my charge. In his presence I am extremely uncomfortable, turning into the surly adolescent that I never really was. This, of course, increases my discomfort until I am ready to just about jump out of my skin. I try to spend as little time in his presence as I possibly can.

As far as I can see, I'm the only one on the planet who feels this way. Everyone else thinks he is a lovable, but senile, old foof. He seems always to be in a good mood, and he seems happy to see everyone in a puppyish sort of way.

I'm not sure that I have the wherewithal right now to explain my father here. I will try, though. I will do my best to not meander, even though dozens of other stories almost beg to be spun off from this.

I tend to despise people who blame all their problems on their parents, and I also think that relatively wealthy folks who complain how they have it SO BAD are not much better. I know plenty of people who have it much worse than me. And yet he is my father and my cross to bear. I can't help bitching about it.

I was a child of the sixties, being born at the very end of the 1950s. It was considered standard procedure for fathers to have little to do with their children: they were always off working. I don’t remember seeing much of him as a young child. I also remember that my father, even from my very earliest memories of him, was considered a little eccentric. For example, he liked to wear pajamas and undershirts that were worn almost to wisps of thread, even though we had plenty of money. In a lot of ways he seemed like a charming little boy that nobody wanted to discipline.

When did he stop being like other fathers? When did he become more than eccentric? I can’t recall clearly. That was one of the bad things about life at home, it slowly got worse and worse. There was no terrible defining incident that made people say: "Stop, enough."

In 1968 we moved to a bigger, more expensive house in the far suburbs of Frown Town. We started seeing less and less of my father until he virtually stopped coming home. Starting in 1971-72 he began sleeping elsewhere. This was never discussed around the house. Eventually my brother and I discovered that he was sleeping at the Holiday Inn in downtown Frown Town. It made no sense that he should live there - he had a perfectly nice house just 10 minutes away, but that is where he slept until I moved him out myself in 1996.

I think it took us kids a while to realize that something wasn't right. Dad used to accompany us on family outings and trips, but after 1972 he didn’t even do that. Our mother essentially became a single parent, and still I don’t remember noticing anything amiss.

Around this time we got a dog, a big one. I don’t recall any of us clamoring for a dog, but we got one anyway. I think it was for "protection" since there was pretty much no adult male presence in the house. Not that my Dad, a flabby pencil-pusher, could have done anything physically about an intruder.

Mom did the single-parenting thing for awhile, but eventually got depressed, or got tired, and quit. She secluded herself in the back room of the house, reading romance novels. She only went out to get groceries, and had no friends come to visit. We were essentially living in a zero-parent household. Actually, looking back at it, we pretty much ceased to be a family altogether. Everyone stayed in their own rooms, and we hardly interacted at all, except at dinner. We saw Dad occasionally on weekends when he would show up randomly.

When I got to be a sophomore in High School I started to see a lot more of him for some reason. I was constantly staying late to work on the computer and he would always pick me up and drop me off at home. I was puzzled by his sudden attention. I liked it at first, but slowly I began to find it creepy. He was constantly complementing me and it made me uncomfortable. It was almost as if he was trying to sell me something, like life insurance. I generally found him embarrassing and inexplicable. It was like he was trying to be my buddy and buy me off. Generally I let him, but felt ashamed about it.

I remember admiring and liking him as a kid. When did that admiration fade?

That process pretty much continued when I was at college. Being away from home for long periods of time gave me an appreciation for how fucking weird our house was.

Sophomore year of college I met Anne, my major college girlfriend, and on breaks I went down to visit her family with her. She had a brother and four (!!) sisters. They squabbled occasionally, but it was plain they all liked each other. Their cramped, noisy house made my parents' home seem like a dusty, deserted mausoleum, which is what it was.

Once I became aware that there was something wrong at our house, I thought it was my responsibility to fix it. I felt terribly guilty that I never could. Looking back I see that I didn’t have anywhere near the right skills for that task. Never mind that it was NOT MY FUCKING JOB. I was just a kid.

One time, on one of the trips to college, I actually worked up the nerve to ask Dad why he moved out of the house.

His answer absolutely shocked me: "I don’t know."

I think I went through the rest of the trip in stunned silence. He didn’t know?!?!?!?!?

Looking back on it, I really think that it's possible that he didn’t know. He just found living with my mother uncomfortable, and since he hated scenes and untoward displays of emotion, he just became absent.

He paid all the bills. He sent my brother and me to college, but he was mainly never around.

It was also impossible to have a serious conversation with him. He'd tell stories about things, but I can’t ever remember having a real heart-to-heart chat with him. Also, talking with him was difficult. He'd tell the same stories and jokes over and over again.

After college I moved back into my parents' house, but the atmosphere there was poison. Eventually I wound up opening my own business in Frown Town and moved out. I tried to avoid my father as much as possible. He gave me the creeps.

Occasionally he'd show up at the store, or at a comic show and I couldn’t avoid him. I would twitch with embarrassment while he beamed at me or complimented me to the skies.

One time I was set up as a dealer at a comic show and some guy was, in typical fashion, haggling with me about some books. To my utter astonishment, Dad stepped into the conversation and offered to pay the difference between what the guy wanted to pay and the price I wanted. I was mortified.

Dad just seemed to be a guy that just didn’t get it.

He also started acting weirder too. He'd be dressed in nice clothes, but they'd be stained or impossibly threadbare. I knew that he was making good money, but the car he was driving was a pile of junk: a collection of rust flakes in the shape of a car. What was going on here? He was starting to look like a genteel wino.

Maybe that was it. My father always had an amazing capacity to consume alcohol. I remember one time I took him and Lilac out to dinner and she and I watched in amazement as he put away six gin martinis without seeming to be affected in the least. Often he'd come into the store, and I'd smell gin. Maybe all the martinis are what caused his personality to dissolve.

For a while, when she was living with me, Lilac got a job working as a secretary in Dad's office. She would come home and regale me with stories of his odd behavior. He seemed to be slipping off the rails and everyone in the office was covering for him.

But what I found most disturbing was her reports on how he was handling his stock brokerage accounts. She called him "Mr. Churn and Burn." A broker "churns" an account when he makes a lot of sales and purchases to no other end but to get a lot of commissions. He tried to do that with my modest stock account for a while until I told him, in no uncertain terms, that I wanted to stick with what I had. He seemed so desperate for cash.

In the end I would up wishing that Lilac had never worked for him. I would have rather kept my illusions of him as a competent broker.

In the early nineties Harry and I would have serious discussions about what was the matter with Dad. We started seeing more and more signs that he was losing it. When we tried to talk with him about it, he'd brush us off.

We also saw signs that he was having financial problems. These, also, he would not discuss with us. We suggested that he should move back into the house because staying at the hotel was costing him over $1,000 a month. He either put us off with promises of "soon" or angrily refused to discuss the situation.

That all ended in August of 1996 when my Mom died. That's probably a story I should tell in more depth later but there is one little piece that I must relate now.

As you might imagine, it was a dreadful day. She died unexpectedly at home, and suddenly there were a hundred little things that needed taking care of. After what seemed like an eternity the funeral home people took my mother away, and the police and the emergency medical people left the house. I was not feeling at my best. My father, however, was as chipper as a little boy at Xmas time. He suggested that we should go through Mom's purse to see if she had any cash.

I think that was the last straw. I think that was the moment when I realized that there was really nobody home, or at least nobody that I cared about. And I also realized that this 72-year-old child was now my responsibility. I'd been dreading that day for years, and it was finally here.

As I did the work of settling of Mom's estate, it quickly became apparent that she had been shielding us kids from a lot. Dad seemed to be incapable of the least bit of self-maintenance. Even something anything as simple as balancing a checkbook was beyond him. I also sat down and had a good look at his finances. What I saw shocked the hell out of me: in spite of earning a six-figure salary for most of the last 20 years, Dad was broke. Worse, he was also deeply in debt. His only tangible asset, the family house, had a huge line of credit on it that he had maxxed out. He was awash in red ink.

Where did all that money go? I really don’t know, but I have a good idea. He was living the life of a big child, paying others to do the simplest tasks for him. Always eating in restaurants, living in a hotel so he never had to do housework, taking all his clothes to a dry cleaner, etc.

He also blew a hell of a lot of money on the stock market. Wall Street can be as bad as the race track if you are a gambler itching to throw your money away. According to Harry, who did his taxes one year, Dad had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock market losses.

Over the next two years, I gradually assumed control of all his finances and put them in order. It was not easy and it was not fun and he fought me every step of the way, but I did it. I won't go into detail, but imagine what it would be like if a six year old had a line of credit, a checkbook and a wallet full of credit cards. That's pretty much what it looked like.

Dad was senile, an elderly child. He'd been depending on sympathetic strangers to take care of him for years and he found them at the Holiday Inn, at local restaurants, at the local country club he frequented, at the banks he visited. He'd bring his bills to them and they'd fill out the checks for him, and he'd sign them. They could have been robbing him blind for all he knew.

Shortly after Mom's death Harry and I made him move back into the family house again. If he was paying for it, by God he was going to live in it. When we cleaned out his hotel room we found all sorts of signs that he wasn't right in the head. He was an incredible packrat, never throwing anything out and he must have had some sort of special arrangement with the hotel maids. For example, I found 122 disposable razors in various places around the room. The drawer in his bedside table was full of nothing but after-dinner mints. Apparently he'd take a handful every time he'd leave a restaurant and put them in his pocket then when he got back to the hotel he'd put them in the drawer. Imagine that: twenty years of after-dinner mints. The ones on the bottom were nothing but yellowed crumbs. Made the room smell nice and minty, though.

After we moved him out of the hotel, I took care of him myself for the better part of two years. I don't know how I lived through it. He seemed to go downhill rapidly after that, but I let him do pretty much what he pleased, within reason. Finally, around Xmas time, 1997, it became plain that he was too unsteady to be driving a car, so I had to take away his car keys. Thereafter he was housebound and I had to cook meals for him. Seeing him twice and three times a day stretched my tolerance to the breaking point. He absolutely refused to do anything to take care of himself. It wasn't clear if this was because he was too befuddled to do anything or because he simply liked people waiting on him.

Eventually I found an adult home only a couple blocks away from his favorite country club and I moved him in there. I sold the family house and either sold or threw out everything in it. That, also, is a story for another day. It was like performing intestinal surgery on myself, without anesthetic. Again, I don’t know how I was able to get through it.

While I was cleaning out the house I found answers to some of the questions I had, but the answers made me sorry for my curiosity. I found letters of censure from his employer, and love letters from his secretary. I found a lifetimes' worth of crap, and it told the story of an utter stranger. Who was this man? He seemed to not know himself!

I did some talking to my brother and sister and found more pieces to the puzzle, none of which made me feel any happier. He had been a really shitty, oblivious parent, especially to my sister. For more information on the non-fatherly way he treated my sister, look here.

And now we come to the bottom line. How was I able to deal with all that shit? Simple: I was being paid. I made sure, from the first, I was getting a weekly salary from him. Actually, it was his idea! He was always bribing us when we were kids, so it seemed natural to keep things on a cash basis. When the money was tight for him I wouldn't pay myself for months on end, but when things loosened up, I made sure I got my back pay.

At some time, I'm not sure when it was, I had to make a decision. I remember saying to myself: "If it gets too bad, you can walk away." It was very important to me that I was not doing all this shit because I HAD to out of some family obligation, but because I CHOSE to. This made what I was going through voluntary and somehow more bearable.

The reason that my brother and sister have no objection to this arrangement is that they are getting a cut, too. Now that Dad is situated in an adult home, he's actually in the black. Thanks to his pension and Social Security and other income, he now turns a small monthly profit. After my salary is deducted, the rest is put into an account under the name of us three kids. If Dad needs it the money is there, but it really belongs to us children.

Do I sound like an ingrate, a bad child, an opportunist, a mercenary? It a deal I had to cut with myself to keep my sanity. There were times I could feel it hanging by such a slender thread. But I made it through somehow. I know it scarred me, and I still am healing from it.

But dealing with him is still very hard for me. I have so many issues with him and so many questions and none of them will ever get answered. Like, where did all the money go? And: why did you abandon us? And: how much of what you did was selfishness and stupidity and how much of it was mental illness?

I'll never know any of those answers, and it pisses me off. But mainly, I'm angry at myself.

I'm angry at myself for not having the balls to DEMAND the answers when he could have answered me. I'm mad at myself for letting him get away with all that shit. And now, by straightening out his finances and finding him a comfortable place to live, I've made sure he will never be punished for what he did. And after all these years I'm still taking his dirty, guilty money.

I can avoid thinking about this crap every day of the week, but one.

And that's why I fucking hate Mondays.