Orthodontia

My daughter lost her retainer, and I replaced it today at a cost of $550. As I pondered whether or not to take it out of her allowance, I remembered my orthodontia experience. My parents left my braces on for four and a half years after I stopped seeing an orthodontist. Apparently they could not afford to continue the payments to the good doctor and refused out of their own embarassment to see him one more time and have the braces removed from my teeth. And so I went through high school with crummy braces on my teeth, and was too embarassed to ask girls out on dates. I also got used to having the braces dig into my upper and lower lip when I got punched in the mouth in a fight or checked while playing soccer.

Looking back on it, it makes sense. My father was drinking heavily at this point and barely working. He'd hit his medical office at around 11, take lunch at noon (and stay in the lunch room drinking coffee to get over his hangover and discussing his ultra right wing view of workd affairs with doctors for an hour and a half, sitting there when one group would leave to go back to work waiting for the next group to come to lunch), then take off from his office around 2. He couldn't have been making much. And of course, the family ethic was to hide the dysfunction at all costs. They never would have had my braces removed because they never would have admitted to anyone that they could no longer afford them.

Before I went to college, I pulled the braces from my teeth with a pair of pliers, and scraped the orthodonics cement off my teeth with a small screwdriver.

I didn't take the cost of the new retainer out of my daughter's allowance.

Ether

A few days have passed since my decision to ignore my father's continued existence on this planet, and I feel fine. I roll the proposition over in my mind less and less as time advances. My predominant emotion is that of relief, as I continue to reach the conclusion that shutting him out of my life is a good thing for me. The only thing I've missed is a marathon two hour conference call with my father, his rehab doctor, his social worker, and his other children about where he was to go next.

After all of the pain, frustration, embarassment, and self doubt he has caused me, it's nice - very nice - not to live with him as a focal point. I've not been able to do this before, and I can only do it now with the knowledge that I will never permit him to intrude upon my life again. The bad memories are starting to seem distant and to be subsumed by the superb experience I'm having living and being with my own family. I apologize for not having the maturity to forgive him and to forget about all of the things he's done to me. I know that my inability to do so is a failing on my part. But it feels right, and I intend to continue until it feels wrong.

Judge and Jury Walk Out Hand In Hand

I've been thinking today of the lesson my father wanted to impart on me by locking me in a room for three days, forcing me to memorize a random page out of my history book, and terrorizing me every hour on the hour he was at home. For the purpose of discussion, let's take the interpretation of this event that is most favorable to my father.

Let us assume that he went nuclear because he feared I was going to fall into a trap he had fallen into - fucking around and poor grades - and wanted me to avoid the kind of hardships his mistakes presented to him. This is plausible enough - he went to Duke University at a time where it was antisemitic, had a miserable four years, and did not do well. To get into medical school, he had to complete a master's program and use his father's influence with the state governor.

And when I consider the event in this light, I think OH MY GOD. Being able to get cranked up to do something perfectly is a useful skill, I will admit. In a very few times, it has served me well. But oh my God what kind of parent wishes to beat the ability to be perfect into his child? What the fuck kind of warped value is that?

I worked my ass off when I had to, and I got rather far in life, but I have to say that all in all I would rather have been less prosperous and happier. It's hard to be happy when you work 20 hours a day. It's hard to be happy when everything you do has to be perfect. Perfection is an insane standard to teach anyone, particularly a 13 year old boy. You don't have to be perfect most of the time. You can't be perfect most of the time. Shit happens. Fortuna spins as she wants.

And what right did he have to impose such an unrealistic standard upon me? It's not like he ever obtained perfection - in everything except, perhaps, his profession. I'm going to assume he was a good physician. I have no evidence to the contrary. But he royally fucked up his life for reasons I still find mysterious but that had nothing to do with perfection or the lack thereof.

Self knowledge isn't his forte, but he probably had some idea of what he'd done wrong in life. He certainly didn't have a clue about how do live life in the right way. He was miserable by all appearances. He was a drunkard. He was trapped in an unhappy marriage. His parents didn't give a bloody shit about him.

It seems to me that a rational person, confronted with this dilemna, might be irrasible, insecure, and utterly fucked up. I was. But why would you assume that what followed from your experience was perfection as an empirical truth? How would you know?

Seems to me there are a wide variety of reasonable alternatives.

I'm sick of thinking about this already. A friend of mine from college apparently wrote a moving eulogy to his dead father. I didn't read it; I glanced at it, and saw it spoke of his father as a partner in life. Mine wasn't. In the early years, he was a tormentor; as I made the more important decisions in life, he was an obstacle; later he was to be avoided by living in a different city. Every single piece of original advice he had ever given me had been wrong.

I guess I should be thankful that he created me and that he didn't molest me. Even if I was borne out of bottle.

I don't even want to imagine having a father as my partner in life. I can't even contemplate it. It is foreign to me. At this point, I'm not even sure I'd want it.

I don't want to think about this anymore. I've thought about it alot over the past four decades. It's been a central theme of my life. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of being fucked up over it. I'm tired of my head hurting. I'm tired of the incorrect instincts I have as a parent. I just want it to be over.

And for now, that's my answer: I just want it to be over.

Round Up And More Family Jewels

I used the term 'family jewels' in the CIA sense of the word. A new CIA director once ordered the entire CIA to write down all instances where CIA operatives had broken the law or killed someone. The resulting telephone book of offenses were known around the CIA as the 'family jewels.' I like the analogy.

So I've been writing about my family's family jewels. This is all the crap that we all hid from everyone else for decades. This is all the shit we're all so embarassed about. I have to decide whether it's better for me to ignore my father for the rest of his life or persevere and keep taking shit from him. He just can't help himself, I'm afraid.

I used to think he didn't like me. I considered the possibility recently that he liked me too much; that he liked me so much that he wanted to keep me out of the path of all of the difficulties he had encountered in his life. I think I've concluded that my brothers and I were his show dogs; we were to excell so as to draw attention away from the deficiencies in his character and life.

Of all of the things he did, the drinking, the fighting with my mother and older brother and his parents and nurses and school teachers, and the rest of it, the thing that damaged me the most was being locked in a room for three days to randomly memorize a page out of a history book perfectly. It was absolute insanity and I sat in that goddamn bedroom with pink shag carpeting for three days, trapped, missing school, being terrorized every hour when my father was at home, wondering if it was ever going to end or whether I was going to have to kill myself or run away to make it end. This was the most powerful statement ever made to me about life; and unfortunately the statement made was that life was completely random, you just couldn't tell when your father was going to go psycho on you and shake up your life, and the lesson it tought me were the limits of my capacity to tolerate abuse and that there were no limits on the psychotic behavior man could devise.

In retrospect, I wish I had run away from home, just fled out the door one of those three afternoons while my father was at work; just blowing past my mother. I wish this for two reasons. First, it would have been great to fuck them up, and they would have been fucked up if I had just split and disappeared into some inner city somewhere. They fucking deserved it. Second, my life would be completely different, and I'm curious to see how it would have gone.

But they would have caught me, and they probably would have physically killed me for running away.

There are a few more family jewels and I will just spit them out randomly, to be organized at some later date. I want to get these down before I have another cerebral vascular accident that strokes out my memory.

Mom drank. She bought bottles of Lancers white wine at the grocery store and went threw one or two of them a week. She drank alone, in the afternoons, while we were playing.

My father hated his mother. When he was a child, his parents ignored him -they would give him a quarter and tell him to get lost. He could not stay in a room with her for more than five minutes before getting infuriated, screaming at her, and stomping out of the room. Years later, I caught myself running a similar routine on my mother. Whenever she came over, all I could talk to her was why she didn't divorce my father and why she didn't stop him from going mental on my ass and why she jumped right it after him. It used to make her uncomfortable, and she would leave in a very polite way when she'd had enough.

We were fat kids - surprise, surprise. My older brother was a lardass - 143 pounds in sixth grade. Our parents put all of us on diets. I remember being hungry all of the time. My father was on our shit about being fat.

He sent my older brother and I to Camp Deerwoode, a farm for fat kids located in Brevard, North Carolina. It was horrific. The camp owner was a redneck named Bill Mayes, and he was psychotic like my father. He got angry at me twice during that session and scared the hell out of me. I wanted to go home, but my parents would not let me come home.

My counselor was Kent McCullough, a homosexual who liked to watch the little boys in the showers. Kent used to force me to eat foods I disliked, and this culminated in me projectile vomiting all over the dinner table after eating some cantaloupe. My father boasted to me over the telephone that he had "stood up for me." I felt loved until I read the actual letter a few months later when my father brought it home from his office. He had written McCullough that I knew everything there was to know about diet and nutrition but was too stupid to eat properly, and he ought to leave me alone instead of continuing to flog me.

There were a number of occasions that come to mind when my father drove us children to apartment complexes we'd never really noticed before and left us in the car while he went inside one of the apartments. He would come out sometimes reeking of perfume. Mother used to find lipstick on his shirt from time to time.

I sensed my father was taking up with other women. I definitely got that impression on the few occasions he made me go into one of these women's apartments with him. I felt uncomfortable and queasy as I watched him being too familiar with the young woman who lived in the apartment.

As a child, I liked to build things. I built furniture and multistory tree houses. I knew to ask my father for money just before he passed out on the couch. He would get angry at me any other time.

The Family Jewels - Part Seven

One summer night, our father picked us up from an overnight camping trip. We asked where our mother was, and he said she had an operation and was in the hospital.

Over the next few days, our father took care of us, drove us to school, and picked us up. We begged to see our mother in the hospital, but he refused.

A month later, our mother came back home. She never said where she had been.

The Family Jewels - Part Six

My father's cars were always beat to shit. He drove drunk every night coming home from his office, so it wasn't a surprise that he dented his cars all up.

The trunk of his car was filled with empty vodka bottles. He would drive to a liquor store, buy a quart of Smirnoff, drink it while driving home, and put it in his trunk when he was done. Bottles were stacked under his bed. Bottles were stacked on the top of his closet. All empty. He would disappear into his closet to take a stiff belt once he got home.

In later years, he abandoned all pretense of hiding his drinking. He could come home, pour an ice tea glass of vodka, and slug it down in one shot. He'd be asleep on the couch a half hour later. The fighting would start when he woke up.

The Family Jewels - Part Five

My parents fought every night. Every single night. And during the day during the weekends. Most weekends we wound up being taken by my mother to a big park in a rich neighborhood.. We would play and she would sit in a park bench and cry. Some times she's stay in the station wagon.

She'd usher us into her station wagon, and when we asked where we were going she'd say we were going crazy.

The Family Jewels - Part Four

We came from from grocery shopping with my mother one Sunday, only to find my father passed out in his bathroom, bleeding from the head. My mother put him to bed. It was a small bathroom, with small baby blue tile, and a hard white ceramic sink with chrome legs.

He used to keep lots of pills in his medicine cabinet. Lots and lots of pills.

The Family Jewels - Part Three

My parents used to lock their bedroom door and fuck occasionally. Usually on Sunday afternoon. One Sunday afternoon they were fucking and my older brother wanted them, so he threw a log through the bedroom window above the bed. Glass rained down on my parents.

I was three, and my older brother and I heard my parents arguing in their bedroom. Then we heard my mother scream for help. We came in and my father was punching my mother. We managed to stop him.

I found stacks of hundred dollar bills in my mother's closet. It was about 10 grand. She told me she was keeping it for one of her friends.

The Family Jewels - Part Two

Shortly thereafter, my brothers and I were fighting as brothers do. My father, enraged, lined up up, oldest to youngest, in a straight line in the family room. He instructed my older brother to fight me. My older brother promptly knocked the shit out of me. He then instructed me to fight my younger brother. In a blind rage, I flailed at him. My father quickly stopped the fight because I was about to do some damage to him.

The Family Jewels - Part One

I was a B- student in high school. I made straight A's like my brothers until seventh grade. The school went to modular scheduling, rendering me an hour or two of free time a day, and I used my breaks to sneak cigarettes, looking at Charlotte's tits and nipples, and dreaming of running away or killing myself.

I came home with a 76 on a history test, and my father went wild. Trembling with rage, he picked up my history book, flipped to a random page, and told me that I was going to be locked in my room until I memorized the entire page perfectly and recited it perfectly to him. He told me that I was going to do something perfectly once in my life.

And so it came to pass that I was locked in my room for three days. He was enraged and out of control, and he tested me and then terrorized me when I failed every hour he was awake and not at work.

When he was at work, my mother had no sympathy for me. She wouldn't let me out of my room. She made me study memorizing that history book page. I don't remember much else about it except wondering if I was going to have to kill myself to get out of this insanity. I didn't study very much. I fantasized about killing him, killing myself, running away.

Bad Craziness

This past week: Time for Father to leave the facility he's in. He is adamant that he is going home with round the clock help. My brothers and I have a number of conversations with his physician, his nurse, and his social worker. We determine, independently and objectively, that he would be better off going to a non acute rehab facility than home.

He could have his bed moved to the ground floor, and he could shit in a porto john. His house isn't set up for a handicapped person save for the wheelchair ramps (which we built for my mother five years ago). I don't see how he's going to be able to take a bath. He will get drive by rehab three times a week, but it won't be very thorough. And it's going to cost $72K a year.

At the nonacute rehab facility, he will get comprehensive therapy four times a week. He could get stronger, be fitted for a prothesis, learn how to walk with it, and then go home with some assistance. Cost is probably the same, but medicare will cover it.

Which is a good thing, as he is running out of money. His burn rate is significant, because he refused to sign up for medicare and has been paying for my mother's nursing home out of his pocket (80k a year). He runs out in three years if he doesn't sell his house or go on medicare.

And so we reported this to our father Thursday morning by conference call, and let me tell you that he was loaded to hunt bear. He was just waiting there, in his hospital bed, stewing and thinking about how we was going to let us have it. It was the rudest conversation I've ever had, and I didn't say much during it. He was unrelentingly hostile. He mocked my older brother for making a recommendation to him, the physician, when we were all mere lawyers. He claimed that live in help at his home would cost him $6,000 per year which was imminently affordable. I pointed out that worked out to $152 a week, considerably less than the minimum wage, he took my fucking head off. "OK Mr. Lawyer, I made a mistake. I don't know shit." And he set after me.

My older brother tried to cool things down by asking both of us to stop fighting. When he wouldn't let me speak, I screamed "FUCK" in exasperation and told Lee that my father never liked me, does not like me, doesn't listen to me, doesn't know how to behave and doesn't even want to try - and this was all a fucking waste of my time and not to rope me in to this shit again. And I hung up.

My father called yesterday morning to summon me to his bedside to resolve things between him and me. I've been through this particular exercise quite a few times with him over the years.

The first time, he said he did not remember specific incidents of abuse, and that most of what I remembered did not happen. I was infuriated. I did make sure to check with my younger brother to verify that I wasn't crazy and all the shit I remembered - the empty bottles in the trunk of his car, under his bed, in his closet, being locked in a room for three days.

I think the single most traumatic memory I have is of being locked in my room for three days and being forced to memorize a random page in a history book so that I would "do something perfectly once in my life. He was enraged and out of control, and he tested me and then terrorized me when I failed every hour he was awake and not at work. I had come home with a 76 or 78 in a science test.

When he was at work, my mother had no sympathy for me. She wouldn't let me out of my room. She made me study memorizing that history book page. I don't remember much else about it except wondering if I was going to have to kill myself to get out of this insanity. I didn't study very much. I fantasized about killing him, killing myself, running away.

Last time we had "the TALK" he was going into the hospital to have his big toe cut off, and he told me he was sorry that he was such a shitty parent. He said he didn't realize he was being one while he was being one. I gently told him to worry about his health instead of his failings as a parent. I even said "It isn't like children come with instruction manuals." I was trying to be polite.

A week later, he was yelling at me again.

So I wasn't anxious to have "the TALK" again. In fact, I wasn't going to have "the TALK" again. I told him I wasn't going to visit with him. He asked why not, and I told him that he was unremittingly rude, that I'd warned him that I wouldn't help him if he was abusive, and I was done. He asked me if I'd ever considered the possibility that some of the things I remembered didn't happen, and at that point I lost it.

I told that he could be as hurt as he wanted to be, and could get as made as he wanted to get, but I'd been apologizing for him all of my life, from during my summer jobs at the hospital at which he practiced to the current medical care regime, and I'd spent decades trying to please him only to fail because he didn't know what he wanted. I told him that he enjoyed being rude to people. He told me he didn't want to lose a son, and I told him that he already had. He said "well, that's certainly clear enough." I told him his legacy was one of failed marriages, infidelity, drug abuse, and nomadism among his children, and to be proud of it. I told him that if you kick a dog enough times, he'll bite, to which he said "I know that from this call." He said "OK, you blame me for everything." I said "no, I don't, we are responsible for what happened in our life, but you helped cause it. He told me he was shocked by this news - absolutely shocked. I asked him if he really thought that his yelling at me all of the time really was going to endear him to me? I told him I couldn't be responsible for his delusions. Then I hung up.

Later in the day, my father decided that he wanted to go to a nonacute rehab facility. He scheduled a conference all with his children this morning. My older brother asked me if I wanted to participate, and I declined. He said that was probably for the best, since my father had said he wanted to have "the TALK" with my older brother and said a few provocative things.

They had the call this morning, and my younger brother reports that he was well behaved, and tried to ask him what "was up" with me. I chuckled. I don't think I could have been any clearer.

And here's where we stand in life with father. It's bad craziness, and it's ugly, and it's insane, and I JUST WANT IT TO STOP. I wrote all of this shit out with the thought that I'd read it tomorrow and start to determine whether I'm being an asshole or whether I'm justified cutting off my relationship with my father because he really is a "toxic parent." But now, at 3 in the morning, I just want it to stop. I don't want to have "the TALK" with him. I don't want to hear that the evil I remember never happened. I don't want to have to listen to him yell anymore, and I don't want to clean up after he's shit on something again.

I also wrote this shit out because I just can't believe that this kind of crap goes on in any other family. This is seriously fucked, from my father's behavior, the trama I feel when he cranks up his war with me, and the dissipation of his fortune because he's afraid the other Jews in town will gossip if he goes on Medicare. It is at times like this, and they are increasing, when I wish I was part of a different family.

Is your family like this? Do the members of your family treat each other like shit? Do you have a serial adulterer in the house? A recluse? A morbidly obese asshole?

Ambivalence

My father is infirm, terrified of the future, and has been through a significant amount of trama over the past 7 weeks. One day he had a life, miserable as it was, living alone, with two cats to love, a car to take him anywhere he wanted, and the freedom to watch TV deep into the night. Now, a mere seven weeks later, he's had body parts chopped off of him on an emergency basis three times, he's lost his fucking leg, and his life as he knew it is over. He hasn't completely accepted his lot, and he is scared of the future.

I realize what he is going through in my more rational moments. At times, I even have empathy for him. Unfortunately, more often than not my empathy is replaced by a stronger malvolence due to his drinking, his abuse of my mother, his abuse of me and his other children, and his continued habit of walking this earth feeling entitled to cuss out anyone who tells him something he does not want to hear. He is a bully, a coward, a fucking dry drunk, and genuinely not a nice person.

I find myself wondering if he was ever a decent person. I wonder what it was like when he loved my mother. I wonder if he always resented my presence on this earth, or whether he acquired his hatred of me after I was born, and if so, I wonder what prompted it. I wonder what caused his misery. I wonder what caused him to destroy his life and to attempt to destroy those around him in such a spectacular fashion.

I tell myself at times that it doesn't matter how I treat him now; he will be dead and it will all be forgotten or buried, and what's meaningful after you die? At other times, I tell myself that I ought to visit him and do what I can for him just so that my children do not hate me and ignore me when I am old. I'm still not able to grapple with the notion that I ought to visit him and do what I can for him because he is my father, period.

My older brother once stole money from me, and told me that I should not be angry at him because he was my brother. His theory was that he got a pass because of our familial ties. I disagreed - I thought that a higher duty was owed me because of our familial ties. And when someone tells me to forgive my father for his transgressions, I think that he owed me a higher duty because I am his son. God knows I lived up to that duty to him. I never got arrested (unlike my brothers), never got suspended from school, never got into any trouble, graduated from college on time, and was financially independent the day I finished school. And I ask what it was in me that made him despise me so much.

Daddy Dearest Ratfucking My Mother...Again

Got the news today that Daddy Dearest won't be walking again. He, of course, told them that he wasn't going to a nursing home. He insisted that he is going back home with full time help - at a cost of $144K per year.

Hello....Daddy Dearest doesn't have that kind of money. At that burn rate, he will run out in three years. Leaving my mother, who is in a nursing home, penniless. That, of course, doesn't bother him in the slightest. Not a surprise, since it is all about him all the time. He's always been a selfish bastard.

Of course, when my mother became wheelchair bound due to a massive cerebral bleed, he instantly said that he couldn't afford the help necessary to keep her at home. He planned to leave her in the cheapest dump possible, and live with his mistress who the family affectionately calls the Office Whore. We, his children, thwarted him by threatening to sue him on our mother's behalf and to ruin him. Of course, that didn't stop him from putting her in the cheapest dump possible - where she did not get any rehab at all during the critical first six months of her recovery, thereby insuring she would remain crippled - but we did manage to get him to put her in a better nursing home (which has banned him, by the way, insuring that he will never live with his wife again). And I still pay for her rehab.

It's going to be interesting to watch my brothers tell him that he's going to a nursing home. Perhaps the best strategy is to express great pleasure that mom is finally going home to live with him - which I think is the last thing he wants.

The Shit

I took a power shit this morning and my asshole emitted this foul, black diarrhea. The stench was unbelievably horrific. I carried the stench of that shit in my nostrils all the way to work.

An hour after getting to work, I felt ill - very ill - so I left and drove home. Why is it that the urge to shit becomes more and more unbearable the closer you get to your home toilet? I walked through the door, ass cheeks pressed tightly together, holding the shit in. I had to let er rip as I was swinging down onto the toilet. A big pile landed on the toilet seat, and I promptly sat in it.

And again, the stench was unbelievably horrific. I scrubbed my ass cheeks and thighs for half an hour after finishing the shit, and I still smell it.

Fini

Went to see the old bastard, powers of attorney in hand. A few weeks ago he asked that we take over paying his bills for him. When I told him (nicely) he had to behave, he flew into a rage and threw me out of his hospital room.

So I went to see the old bastard with the powers of attorney for him to sign. I did it because I promised my brothers I would do it so that they could take over his financial affairs. Turns out the old bastard wants to stay in the hospital he's at - it isn't so bad after all. Of course, he wanted me to call all the people he'd cussed out to get the transfer voided, and of course I declined. It will do the old bastard some good to have to deal with the bad feelings and ire he has caused.

This past weekend, my father called my wife - who is spending the summer at the beach with my children - and asked her to bring him some diarrhea medicine. When I was in college in the north, his mother called me to tell me that my grandfather had fallen and broken his arm three days prior - instead of calling her son the doctor who lived three miles away. Sound familiar anyone?

It feels good to finally be done with the old bastard, although my older brother keeps calling me and urging me to reconcile with the old bastard yet again.

In Hiding

I've spent the weekend in hiding from my family. I don't want to have anything to do with my father, and he's currently in one of his rages which can last for weeks. Every single time I decide to break with the asshole, one of my brothers convinces me that I am being immature and should reconcile with him. And every time I reconcile with him, he cusses me out again shortly afterwards. I don't think he can help it; I don't think he has ever liked me.

I used to see a shrink. 12 years of the shrink, in fact. The shrink was well known; he was the shrink that put Ted Turner on Lithium. The shrink was initially hired to teach me to be charming, as I had been an asshole at work much like my father. So much for role models. The shrink pointed out that my father was insane. He also speculated that I was illegitimate and the product of an affair my mother had; it was a ready explanation for his distemper and his distaste for me. Could very well be true. It's not like I even look like any of my brothers...

We're A Happy Family

My father had his right leg amputated last week, and he's been a pain in the ass ever since. My father has been an asshole his entire life. He was a physician, and he stomped around his hospital, an angry little man, cornering nurses in private and chewing them out so thoroughly that their cheeks were still flushed when they got home. He made lots of them cry. I worked at that hospital a few summers as the chief mahoot, and the hostility that greeted me when I first started working there because he was my father was beyond belief. I spent the first summer trying to defend him, but realized that it was indefensible - I certainly did not enjoy being the subject of his absolutely out of control wrath - and gave up.

So my father had his right leg amputated last week, and he's been a pain in the ass ever since. To be perfectly frank, he's been a pain in the ass since he called in the beginning of the summer and announced he was having his big toe amputated. Each of his surgeries had to occur on a Friday, knocking out the planned weekend at the beach. Getting him to the hospital was hellish. We walked into the house to find that he had fallen, upstairs, next to his bed. His house was a fucking disgusting mess. He had had grab bars installed up the stairwell and down the upstairs hall to his bedroom, and getting up there at night and coming down in the morning was a terrifying high wire act. He smelled bad, and his clothes were filthy.

Before the first surgery, he discussed his 'bucket list' gleefully. True to form, one item on his bucket list was to chew out a doctor who had paid him some imaginary slight 20 years ago. He asked me if I would pursue it, and I told him I wouldn't. He looked puzzled when I explained in response to his question that it just wasn't worth the effort. Of course, he called, and of course the doctor had died five years ago. And I thought: what kind of monster has "bitch out Dr.Wilson" written in his list of things to do before he dies?

He wanted to have a big family conference before he had the first surgery, but neither my brothers or I was interested so it didn't happen. He told me that he was sorry to have been such a shitty father; that he didn't even realize he was being a shitty father; and that "he did it all for [us] guys." I just told him to worry about getting well because I didn't want to talk about it. His apology was insincere, I knew, though I did enjoy the Jewish guilt he hung on the end of it.

After his first surgery, he went home instead of to rehab. I had my maids try to clean his house; after three days of work, they quit. The air quality inside his house was very, very poor after they vacuumed, and it made them sick. Hell, it made me sick too.

So his foot got infected at home, and they brought him back into the hospital and lopped off the front part of his foot. The nursing home at which my mother resides refused to take him because he had been abusive to every single staffer at the place. I told him of their refusal and their reasons, and he began talking about how "all of those incident reports were bullshit" because they did not reflect his side of the story.

It was then that I told him that he could not be verbally abusive towards the people who were trying to help him. I told him he did not have the right to yell at anyone, or make them cry, or make their cheeks flush when they got home. He replied that he paid them good money and he was entitled to scream at them when they fucked up. I told him that it was very sad that a man his age didn't know how to act, told him that I was done because he was never going to change, and I walked out on him.

I didn't see him for a few weeks. Various rehab institutions called to advise me that he had checked out against doctor's advice. I declined their invitation to speak to him or pick him up. The hospital called to tell me he had checked himself back in. I asked them what they wanted me to do about it. They said he needed family support, and I told them that he was alone because he wanted to be alone.

Then he called my wife and told her they were going to amputate his leg. He demanded a meeting with his three sons before the surgery because he wanted to dump his bookkeeping on us. We decided before the meeting that we weren't going to help him because he was abusive.

But when we walked in, he looked so sickly that we all thought that we ought to help him. We left the room while he took a shit, and we all agreed to help him, and carved up responsibilities. We also agreed to tell him that we would quit if he was abusive to us.

So we walked in and sat down among the shit stink that lingered in the air. Being the middle son, and the son he never listened to, I outlined the division of responsibilities and then asked him to behave. And boy he was launched. He screamed at me (and I told him this was why I asked him to behave), then disowned me (and I told him that was perfectly fine) , then started bawling like a boy (because he said he had nothing to hold over me), then threw us out of his hospital room. My older brother stayed, and my father yelled about me for a half hour.

And so I was admonished by my brothers for being unkind to the old man.

So the old bastard had his leg chopped off. And I made it a point to visit him daily, which he seemed to appreciate. And it came to pass that it was time for him to leave the hospital, and they found him a bed in the best rehab place in town, and he refused to go because he did not think he was ready. And they kept the bed open another day, and he refused to go, cursed out the hospital social worker, and threw her out of his room.

Then he called me, angry as hell, and told me they were putting pressure on him to leave when his doctor said he could stay for a few more days. And I thought to myself why is my father acting like the hospital is a Riveria resort hotel? I called his doctor to report his distress, and he interrupted me and told me, quite coldly, that he was going to talk to my father and convince him to go to rehab at the best rehab facility in town.

My father called my older brother and told him he was going to the best rehab place in town. He was actually excited, my brother reported.

Well, the room at the best rehab facility was not open any more. And the hospital social workrr, who my father cursed out, booked him into the worst nursing home in town - a place my father had sworn he would never go to consistently during the 50 years I had known him - and when the ambulance picked him up, they took him to the nursing home - which was expecting him. And she didn't tell him he was going to the nursing home. She didn't want to see him again, much less talk to him.

And I thought to myself: Could you really blame her for fucking him over?

She fucked him over good, too. Since you cannot transfer a patient from one acute care facility to another under Medicare regulations, he was legally trapped at the shitty nursing home. He told me that he had been sent to the wrong place at midnight last night. I called the supervisor of the hospital's social services department first thing in the morning, spoke to her and told her that my father had not consented to go to the shitty nursing home and that, in fact, no one knew he was going there, and she said she would investigate and call me back.

My father called me and told me to sue the hospital. I am a lawyer, and my law firm represents the university that owns the hospital. In fact, one of my partners is the Chairman of the Board of the university. So I told my father that I could not ethically sue the hospital. I'm not even a litigator. My father got angry, told me I wasn't doing shit, disowned me again, and asked for my older brother's cell phone number. I told my father to look it up in the goddamn phone book, and hung up on him.

The supervisor called back and told me precisely what had happened. I apologized for my father acting like a horses ass, and politely leaned on them to fix their mistake. After all, they hadn't even told my father where he was going. They looped the nursing home's social worker into the call, and she said that Medicare prevented them from transferring my father to the best rehab place in the city, where he thought he was going. I politely leaned on them again, and they called back with a room in the best rehab place in the city that would open up on Monday.

So I called my father, who cursed me until I told him what I had arranged. I told him the nursing home social worker would be by to talk to him about it, and that this was the best I could do. He said he would listen to what she had to say, and hung up.

An hour later, my older brother called my father. My father told him that I had not done shit, and should have gotten him admitted to the best rehab place in the city now, on Friday afternoon, after five o'clock.

I don't feel any better after writing about this. I don't really know why I wrote about this, except that dealing with my father has fucked up my entire summer. Everything has been extremely difficult because he keeps cussing out the people he wants to help him, and then they try to fuck him over. And since he's a octogenerian gimp fuck, they can.

So welcome to my life. C'mon in. Take your shoes off. Come set awhile.