Toad Appreciation and Other Fatherly Instructions for Life

I started this blog to help me unload some of these really heavy bags I've been carrying for most of my adult life. I figure if I get these thoughts out of my head they won't keep bouncing around in there.

My heaviest baggage are the ones I carry for my father.

I am an only child. I was raised by my single mother with some tremendous assistance from my grandparents, aunts, one step-father(more baggage to drop on him later), and various other adults in accompanied roles.

My mom left my dad when I was still an infant. She left him because he was physically and verbally abusive, adulterous, and an all around schitzo Vietnam Vet straight from the war. She fell in love with him because he seemed like a "wounded baby bird". She felt bad for him and wanted to nurse him back to health. The only issue was... he was fucked up before Vietnam EVER got a hold of him.

My abusive father was the son of an abusive father. I've been told stories that when my dad was just boy his father would beat him mercilessly while shouting that my dad wasn't his son, that he was a worthless piece of trash, and that he was the bastard child of the "mail-man". whoa...

Most of who we become as adults is informed by our parents. My dad was FUCKED from the get go.

My dad went to Vietnam to escape. He went to war to escape from home. He had pictures of John Wayne in his head. He wanted to come home the hero. That didn't happen. Instead Vietnam pushed him further into his own personal little Hell that he carried with him until he died. He told me stories of the fights and scuffles he got into while he was there but the weird thing is none of the fights or scuffles ever happened with the enemy. They were always with his fellow soldiers.

I never "KNEW" my Dad. Total amount of time spent with or around my father from my birth to his death= less than a calendar year. I stayed with him for a few weeks as a small boy, several months in fourth grade, and a couple of months when I was 18. Yeah, much less than a calendar year.

The time I spent with him when I was very young, I'm guessing I was four-ish. I was with him when I first learned of the concept of death. My mom and I had a cat that got run over when I was visiting him and my mom called to let me know about it. I started crying and my dad told me to stop crying, don't be a pussy! That was probably the first of MANY references my father would make about how my mom was raising a "Faggot" or a "Pussy". HEY ASSHOLE! I'M A FUCKING LITTLE KID! MY CAT DIED! I'M ALLOWED TO FUCKING CRY ABOUT IT! FUCK OFF!!! That particular event had major ramifications as I got older. I can remember as I child crying myself to sleep repeating over and over "I dont want to die. I don't want to die." I started having panic attacks in my late 20's about my eventual demise. I still have them occasionally.

My mom would always try to use my father to manage my behavior. My dad was the evil specter I should NEVER want to become like. If I was being lippy: "You're acting just like your Father!" What the fuck does that mean? She built this image in my head of all the horror stories of when they were together and these commandments not to "be like him" that the fear and wonder of him was really all I knew of him until later in life. My mom had taught me to be scared of him before I ever even knew him. The story she told me the most often was the one where she made the decision to leave him. She has told me this specific story very early in my childhood and repeated it many more times throughout my life. Its pretty pivotal to her story and to mine.

My mom had caught my dad red-handed with other women several times. This fateful evening while my dad was driving they passed the house of one of his "girlfriends" and my mom, sitting in the passenger seat holding my infant body in her arms, made a snide comment about his "bitches". My father unleashed hell and started back-handing my mom, punching her in the face. She used her arms and shoulders to protect me and it left her face exposed and he beat her until her nose broke and her eyes were blackened. She decided then and there that that was not an environment suitable for the up-bringing of a child.

I think she still uses it as "Do you see what I went through for you?" leverage. I know that sounds way muffed up but you'd have to know my mom to get the full appreciation. My mom "keeps score."

During fourth grade my mom had met a fella. She really liked this guy. She was also in the process of opening a business. I was 7 or 8 and wholly in the way of both the fella and the bidness. I was sent to spend some time with The Evil Specter! She wanted some alone time to get her shit together and she felt it was time for me to get to know my father.

Most of my memories of this time are still pretty vivid. We lived in a trailer in the woods by a lake. We had a dog and a cat. My household responsibilities were to put trash in the compost pile where we picked worms for fishing and to feed the cat by fishing using the worms from the compost pile. My dad was industriously lazy and cheap.We would go squirrel hunting a couple times per month for dinner. We went fishing in the lake not only for the cat but for ourselves. There were some neighbor kids but most were either several years older or younger than me so for the most part I was alone. Alone in the trailer, in the woods, by the lake, with my dad and his girlfriend.

My dad had pornography EVERYWHERE! It was on the bookshelves, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, in piles and stacks, posters on the backs of doors, EVERYWHERE! I had free range to look to and peruse at my leisure. I saw and knew more about the female anatomy than most 4 graders. Yep! Boobs and vajayjays everwhere! Most of the hardcore stuff he kept in his bathroom.

We didn't have TV so we would play Rummy, Crazy 8's, Go Fish!, or Poker to pass the time after dinner. During gameplay if I had an especially good hand laid down my dad would respond by saying: "You little cocksucker!" Again, I'm in FOURTH GRADE! I don't have the slightest idea what a "cock" is or what a "cocksucker" could even be. I just thought it was something my dad said in fun. I learned quickly that it was not something to say in mixed company when over at a neighbor's party I was chasing one of the other kids around calling them a "cocksucker" at the top of my lungs. Monkey see, monkey do, Dad!

Those are what I would consider the pleasant memories. These are the not so pleasant...

I had to go fishing every other day to feed the cat. Feeding a cat a live fish is definitely something everyone and every cat should get to experience once in their lives. ITS FUNNY AS HELL! At first the cat has NO IDEA what the hell they are supposed to do with the wet, flopping animal that has been presented to them. They figure it out eventually. Especially when there is no other food source.

On one of my fishing expeditions some of the older neighbor kids told me that if I used toads that I would catch bigger fish. This made sense because I had seen the rubber frogs sold at bait & tackle stores. They instructed me that I had to hook the toad in through the belly and out through the chest so that the toad would look like its "swimming" across the water. After collecting a bucket of toads (I lived in a trailer, in the woods, by a lake, with no television. I had already accomplished this activity out of boredom several times before) I set to fishing. I didn't catch a goddamned thing! NUTHIN'! SQUAT! ZILCH! ZERO! I tried more than one toad to see if there was a problem with the toads. I used small ones and big ones. The big kids swore to me that this worked. I saw the rubber frogs in the store. The story had a grain of truth. NONE OF THE TOADS CAUGHT ANY FISH! I wasted and entire afternoon using these toads, that would quickly die once pierced in this manner, trying to catch fish to feed the fucking cat! I came home empty handed and the cat went hungry.

Somehow my dad caught wind of this experiment. He was NOT happy about my afternoon of toad torture, maiming, and killing. I had spent many hours "collecting" hundreds of toads before this failed fishing adventure. I could go out into the woods and collect several dozen toads at any given moment of the night or day. I guess I'm trying to say that I didn't really fully appreciate or value the "Life" of a toad. My dad was here to put me on the straight and narrow path of Toad Appreciation.

He picked me up from school. Now this in and of itself is a truly heroic feat. I'm not sure if I've fully drawn the picture of exactly how remote this Kaczynski-esque "cabin in the woods" really was. We were part of what could be considered a neighborhood in the fact that we DID have neighbors. But each trailer was on several acre lots many hundreds of yards away from each other. One of the main roads into the the neighborhood was a dirt road that I've driven as an adult that took at least 20 minutes to drive down. All the internal roads were dirt and I had to walk at least 30+ minutes to get to the school-bus stop. The bus ride to school was an hour. This place was R.E.M.O.T.E!

Soooo...Like I said, he picked me up from school, EARLY! The ride back to the trailer was a quiet one. But once we got inside... I don't remember much if any of what he said but I remember very vividly what he did. He grabbed me by the back of the head, shouting something about "How does this feel!?!" and shoved his hand into my stomach and curled his fingers under my ribcage to simulate what I had been doing to the frogs. I was in fourth grade. Maybe 8 years old at the time. It knocked the wind out of me and hurt like hell.

I once asked my wife if she had ever been spanked. She had to think about it. Nope! You've never been spanked! If you have to think about whether or not you've been spanked... you never got spanked. You remember every lick. You remember like it was five minutes ago. The burn of your skin. The salt of tears as you sob uncontrollably for mercy and apologize for things that you had nothing to do with. The first lick was never the worst lick. That one would be buried under the sear of the ones put on top of it. And God save you, if ever their aim was off and they caught a piece of your thigh. Those cut to the bone.

I don't remember what I did but the worst beatings I took from him was when he beat me with the sticks that come with novelty flags. The little knobby tip of that fucking flag left the BIGGEST welts. I fucking hated that flagstick. I would conspire at night on how to get and destroy that flagstick. But I knew deep down inside that he would just replace that stick with something that had a deeper bite.

We had a big live oak tree in the front yard that had big sprawling arms of branches. I tried climbing them on several occasions but the angle of incline and height would unnerve me. My dad, who was 6'4" with long arms and legs had no issue climbing this tree. He once chastised me in front of the neighbor kids for being to much of "faggot, pussy" in not trying to conquer this tree. He sat on top of the arch shouting down at me: "JUST CLIMBING THE FUCKING TREE, YOU PUSSY! IS YOUR MOM RAISING A QUEER!?! CLIMB THE MOTHERFUCKING TREE! GET YOUR LAZY FAGGOT ASS ON THE BRANCH, PUT ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER, AND CLIMB THE FUCKING TREE!WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH YOU!?! ARE YOU FAGGOT COWARD THAT'S AFRAID OF CLIMBING A FUCKING TREE!?!" This went on for what seemed like an eternity in front of his girlfriend and the neighbor kids. I of course being overwhelmed with embarrassment and humiliation left crying just like the pussy my momma raised me to be. That was the last time I attempted to climb that tree.

One eventful night I got to witness a fight of epic proportions when my dad and his girlfriend got into a huge skirmish. He chased her around the trailer(it was a double wide) while she threatened to mace him. "I'VE HAD A BAZOOKA SHOT AT ME! YOUR FUCKING MACE ISN'T GOING TO SLOW ME DOWN!" They chased each other around in this manner for a good long while. Scary shit.

He always talked shit about my mom. He would call her a "miserable cunt" and talk about how he could feel it in the air when ever she was close. Cunt was just one of several colorful terms my father would use in reference to women. He would also employ: "Gash", "Slit", "Whore", "Bitch", "Slut", "Cum-Bucket". Most of these were made in reference towards my mom but, she didn't have the patent on them. Any woman was a target for these terms.

I watched my dad beat the hell out of some dude that was defending his girl's honor when my dad had tried making moves on her. It was like watching a rabid gorilla just wail on a dead rival. The guy he beat the shit out of was just as big as he was and went down like someone just turned his switch off.

My dad would fly into a rage at anytime. His face would scrunch up, his eyes would darken, his shoulders rose and came forward, his elbows would rise up and out like a swing would be taken. He was like one of those lizards that puffs up to defend itself. Except, imagine that lizard as a 6'4", PTSD, alcoholic, with rage issues. Egg shells don't even explain the half of it. You never knew if something you said, an expression you made, a response to a question, an error in judgement, or just the stars and clouds in the sky were going to push him off the plane of sanity and send him into a rage black-out. Those black-outs were bad. He would scream. He would profess how he could destroy buildings with a single touch. He would name-call. He would chastise relentlessly until you either made right or whimpered away. He was the kind of guy that would scream at you for asking questions or directions on how to do something. Then when you learned the lesson not to ask questions on stuff you had no ideas on and would then jump head first into it and try figure it out and when the inevitable fuck-up occurred he would scream at you for not asking questions. DAMNED IF YA DO, DAMNED IF YA DON'T!

Not long after the Mega-Fight between my dad and his girlfriend my mom came and got me. My dad's girlfriend had called to warn my mom the the atmosphere had soured and that it was a good time to get me out. My mom and her fella came and got me. That fella eventually became my step-father and adopted me. I have his last name.

TO BE CONTINUED... My Father and My Teen Years