Briefly: I’m considering cutting off all contact with my father because the miserable self-righteous ignorant son of whore called me a thief and then, when it was demonstrated that no theft had occurred, not only refused to apologize but criticized me for asking for an apology.
And now the long version.
My dad’s in his mid-70s. I’m 40. He’s lived alone since my mother died. As he doesn’t cook well, and as I do, against all logic, love him, I cook him dinner a couple of times a week. Sometimes I cook it at my place; sometimes I do it there. I have a key to his house, as do all his eight children and his 4 adult grandchildren.
Last night I brought dinner over. Dad said he wanted to talk. He began my reminding me of some financial problems I had last year. Said problems arose because I had to pay a lot of medical bills and had to work a lot. He offered to lend me some money; I refused to take it because I’m forty goddamn years old and don’t need to be borrowing money from a retiree. He offered more than once; each time I refused.
Anyway…Dad, for reasons known best to him, is in the habit of keeping somewhat large sums of cash in his house–four or five hundred bucks, say. (I didn’t know this, incidentally.) He told me that he keeps this money in a drawer in his guest room and gets it when he has to pay his car insurance or whatnot. When he went to get that money this past Sunday, he could not find it. He asked me if I took it.
I asked him why he would think such a thing. He pointed out that I have a key. So do about a dozen others, I replied. And there’s a certain woman from your church you’ve been keeping company with, and she has a grown child,and they’ve both been here. Did you ask any of them? No, Dad replies,and he’s not going to, because they’re SAVED. By SAVED, of course, the miserable goat-felching bastard means they go to HIS church. THE CHURCH OF GOD IN CHRIST. Only people who belong to COGIC are going to heaven,and anyone else may be presumed to be a thieving, lying, wife-beating faggot.
Let’s go look in your bedroom, I ask Dad. So we do. He’s got a full-sized dresser, two chesser drawers, and a filing cabinet in there, and we go through every single drawer in all of those, slowly. Well not every single drawer, because after about two hours we find the money, which the stupid self-righteous arrogant bastard had simply misplaced.
I hand Dad the envelope. “Do you want to apologize?” I ask him. “No,” he says, “I don’t need to say I’m sorry.” “You called me a thief,” I say. “No I didn’t. I asked you if you stole the money,but I didn’t SAY you stole the money. The only reason you think I need to apologize is that YOU’RE not right with God. YOU’RE the one letting the Devil tell you what to do. You don’t EVER ask your father to apologize, boy, you RESPECT your father! Don’t walk out on me! Don’t you walk out on me!”
Obviously I was walking away from him during those last two sentences. I’m still furious at him now, and I was ten times more furious at that moment, and since among the things we’d found in the drawers was a 10-pound barbell (no, I don’t understand that either), I decided I shouldn’t be in reach of any sort of bludgeoning device.
So I go home. Before the night is through I get a call from three of the five sisters. The insane bitch thinks I need to apologize to Dad on account of him being a saint in everything. The mostly-sane-except-for-her-ongoing-war-with-the-bitch thinks I should just PRETEND to apologize to keep the peace. Little Sister just wants me to be calm and do nothing rash.
Well, I feel like being rash. I really do. I’m so goddamn tired of this arrogant supercilous stupid self-important motherfucker that no amount of primal screaming will help. He’s an idiot. It’s imposible to hold a conversation with him, because if he constantly interrupts and insists that he he knows everything youwere saying even though he clearly doesn’t. I spent my childhood being terrified of him. This dogfucking pigsucking twit who thinks he has God’s ear seems to delight in making me miserable. When I was a kid he thought it was appropriate to deal with my bedwetting by beating me with a belt every time it happened, because of course I was sinning by doing it, sinning against God. He thinks that he’s right about everything he holds an opinion on, regardless of whether he actually knows a fucking thing about the goddamned subject, because he doesn’t need KNOWLEDGE to know the truth,he only needs WISDOM and the FUCKING WORD OF GOD. This isn’t the only such interaction we’ve had since my mother died,just the most egregious.
So I’m sick of him. I want this fucker out of my life. And it’d be easy. But the repercussions are just as easy to predict. People will take sides. I know the Rhymers, they’ll take sides. I can tell exactly how it’ll shake out. I’ll lose all the sisters except my baby sister, who demonstrates her positive genius by living in another city and coming home only at Xmas. I may even lose my stepdaughter. I won’t be able to blame he if she chooses him, if it comes to that, because she’ll think, “Well, Skald’s been good to me as an ADULT, but Granddaddy’s been good to me all his life, and if I have to choose I have to choose Granddaddy.”
And Granddaddy willwant her to choose, on account of being a son of bitch.
But you know, every time I see this fucker, every time we’re in the same room, he insists on picking, picking, picking. I figure each interaction accelerates my inevitable stroke by another week.
Tell me if I’m overreacting. And I am not given to asking rhetorical questions, because I am not a goddamn COGIC goatfucking minister who thinks he knows everything. I am asking because I am so fucking angry that I don’t’ trust my judgment. So tell mem what you think.