The Men Who Raised Me Are Gross
I walked in on my birth father and his father doing something no one needs to see
First, I want you to take the image of your dear grandpappy out of your head. And replace it with a consistently cross troll of a raisin who didn’t have a kind thing to say unless it bought him a free lunch or kept him out of jail.
He wore suits that lazily hung from his stumpy Frodo frame. And flaccid, burgundy ties that were too long and as crooked as he was. He was publicly cruel to his wife who drove him around wherever he wanted to go. And his passenger seat was always pushed back far enough for the grandkids to have to sit with their knees under their chins.
He was such an unsavory human that at his funeral, all they could come up with was to wax awkwardly about his little league coaching career, and that one time he returned a 94 yard touchdown for the win at the college down the road.
Or at least that’s what I heard; I didn’t go to his funeral.
He’d been dead to me for awhile already.
He died when I was vacationing in Mexico and I got the news from my favorite cousin through text. Just sitting at breakfast about to dive into some huevos, and there it was. I wasn’t sad or moved to feel any sort of way. We hadn’t spoken in over a decade after he chose to keep my rapist in the family because ‘it looked better’.
I was happy he was dead.
No. Happy isn’t the right word.
I didn’t care that he was dead.
No. That still sounds more than I mean.
I was indifferent to his death.
I finished my eggs.
All of the cousins would spend a lot of time at the grands’ house in the racist, rich, white part of the city. The house was massive. Bigger than it needed to be and never as clean as it could have been. It smelled of black mold and willful neglect. The bedrooms were haunted, dust snowballed in the corners, and the water tasted like pennies.
I never remember being loved there. I only remember being dropped off and tolerated there.
Like most of my childhood, that house was as confusing as it was uncomfortable. But also interesting enough as a kid to sneak around and play detective.
The front door opened up to a mahogany stained, girthy stairwell that coerced you to the upstairs bedrooms. You had a couple rooms on the right, one on the left, and then the next door down was the master. My memory of the floor plan stops short at the master bedroom… and it’s probably because one of the most regretful things I ever had to witness happened in there.
I was so small I didn’t even know what he was doing to himself.
I can’t recall who else was in the house with me that day… a couple of cousins? A sibling? Uncle Rapist? But it was definitely not a secret that guests were about.
It was broad daylight and I walked upstairs alone. And from the middle of the staircase, right there on my left, was this lump of a man on top of his bed with a hand full of himself.
He was just jiggling it about like it was a timid snake he was mildly interested in catching. I didn’t know what I was looking at. The sunlight of Spring shining in from all the windows in this white castle; bedroom door completely wide open with the prospect of people passing by… and this pasty mold of flesh decided now was the time he’d treat himself to a late morning delight.
As what usually happens with young kids when they come upon something strangely mature and unfamiliar… I had the sense this was not something I was meant to be seeing, so I quickly headed back downstairs. I imagine he may have even heard those decrepit stairs creak.
It wouldn’t have mattered.
It took me many years to realize what it was I had seen… I couldn’t have been more than 5. As with all core memories with content yet understood, I had to first learn what self-pleasure was. Then watch a couple movie scenes for it to click that I had watched my then-grandfather masturbate in his master on a Monday.
It also took me years of separation from him—and the rest of my immediate birth family—to realize that narcissists are very likely to do such a thing. It’s not that every narcissist wants to pleasure themselves in an open space with the hopes of getting caught. It’s not that deep. That would require forethought and calculation.
No. The run-of-the-mill narcissist is only thinking of himself and what it is that he wants. And those blinders prohibit him from thinking of the possibility that what he may want right now may not be conducive to his current environment.
Or maybe that’s just the breed of narcissist I had the misfortune of being raised by.
Because that slap-happy crab apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
I was in high school — maybe 16 or 17 — and was upstairs doing my homework one night. My birth mother was either already asleep, or out. The sibling was at the movies. It was definitely known that I was home.
This house was a lot smaller than the white castle in the city. It may have been as old, but it was the kind of house where you couldn’t round a corner without bruising a bone on a table. It was a different kind of uncomfortable here, but uncomfortable nonetheless.
The front door faced Main Street and was flanked by floor to ceiling windows encasing the living room. But, as visible as it was to the street, no-one used that door other than maintenance men and trick-or-treaters. We only used the back door which opened up to the staircase that led upstairs to the kids’ quarters. My room was directly above the living room.
I walked down the stairs for a drink of water with the clunky gait of a teenager. And about halfway down, I looked over to my left to see my birth father splayed out on the living room couch. He was watching Law & Order and playing with himself under the overhead lights. He didn’t even seem to be that invested in it; same as his pop. It all just looked so…carelessly languid.
Main Street was directly in front of him; his free-ranging kid either above or directly behind him, and none of that seemed to be of concern.
Even if he had chosen to close the door like his father never did, that door was made of glass. So this potato of a man was performing the most intimate act one can perform on oneself, with all the lights on and nothing but glass separating him from the town. And merely air separating him from his kid.
I’d at least have preferred the gesture of the closed door.
I don’t know which is worse — the open doored bedroom or the open aired living room, but I do know that’s not the integral detail to be trying to workshop in this memory.
I went back upstairs and filled my cup with bathroom sink water.
The man who raised me was a lot like his father, and he loved to add me to that equation. Gross people feel less gross when they travel in packs.
But I never felt anything like my birth father, or the man who came before him. I always felt like I needed to perform for them in order to be accepted by them, and I knew that role very well. They were both pretty easy to please. The main thing was to make sure they always felt right, and in charge.
I needed to be as athletic as they were, but know when to turn on the lady charm in order to be submissive to them and also attractive enough to be seen with. Both men called me sexy and commented on which pants made my butt look better. My birthmark near my belly button was sexy. I heard sexy come my way a million times before I even knew what sex was. I saw, and was a part of a lot of things surrounding sex, before I even knew what sex was.
Both men were crooks; they just had different ways of being one. My birth father liked to say he was smarter than his father — and his brother who also wasn’t great at by-the-books-business — because he didn’t get caught.
It’s funny to me that he thinks he was never caught doing something wrong.
It’s hard to say what’s the weirdest or worst about any of this incredibly odd thing I have to continue to live knowing. But it’s certainly not normal that I now know that both of these men do… all of their business the same exact way. And no kid should ever know that, let alone have visual proof of it.
I’m not a father to a son and I don’t know how those coming of age conversations go, but is it customary to give a demo? Or is it just something that’s silently genetic?
I still have not come across one other example of their technique, and that has to be metaphoric for something.
I can’t un-know what I know, or un-see what I saw. And the only way to make any sort of sense as to why it’s a part of my brain’s living space — with all of the other unsavory and nonsensical familial things that live up there — is to just add it to the laundry list of reasons why these people were never good for me.
I mean, you can’t make this up. It’s not even been parodied in a bad comedy. A girl walks in on both her father and grandfather? With all the doors open and the lights on?
Come on, I need some sort of trophy for this.
I have never ever walked in on anyone in such a private moment in my entire life… except for the only two patriarchs I ever knew in my birth line. And the odds of that are, I’m just gonna say, nonexistent.
I never knew my maternal grandfather; he walked out before I was born. So I only had those two men to look up to.
Both men taught me how to throw and catch a baseball, shoot a hoop and a jigger of bourbon, deliver a solid left jab, run sprint drills up and down stadium steps, knock over the offense on a soccer field, and hambone on my thigh.
I guess I’m grateful to know how to do those things? Although being taught how to hambone is one of the more racist examples I have in my familial history. But I didn’t need to be taught those things in order to be a better person. They could have done a better job with the limited time they had with me.
I don’t know what it’s like to have a good father figure, or a good father’s father figure. I see them in movies, and I don’t get sad. Sometimes I think about how I wish I had been dealt a better deck in the parental department, but it’s just not what was meant for me.
For some reason I may never know, I was meant to go through some terrible, scary and very weird shit for awhile. And then, sometime in my late 30’s, start to re-parent myself at the same time I’m being a better parent to my own kids. And I think I’m doing a pretty good job of it.
It’s not always easy being the kid and the parent inside your mind, but at least I know I’m safe.
I’m not strict on the tactical stuff. But I raise myself — and my children — with a few non negotiables. They are to trust themselves before they trust anyone else. They are to be kind, but unaccepting of cruelty. They are to be helpful to, and respectful of others, but never compromise their integrity in doing so.
And then, beyond that, we all have the freedom to wiggle and learn and make mistakes and get back up again to keep trying to figure out who we are.
It’s my job as their parent to fill in between all the big foundation bricks with the right kind of mortal mortar.
But one of the most important things I think kids need to know in regards to their parents, is that there is always an open-door policy. They really need to know that they can always come to you whenever they need you.
But for the love of all things sacred and potentially life-scarring…
I also absolutely believe in closed doors.
@Elaine R. Frieman ❤️
@Esoterik Espionage ❤️