::Fathers, Harems and Brown Eyes::

Ahh Fathers Day.
A day to honor the wonderful men in our lives.
The ones who have passed on their great legacies unto us. Given us their last names.
Provided us with a roof over our head and food on the table.
The ones who have sent us to therapy for our "daddy" issues. sidenote: Hello unavailable, emotionally distant, workaholic men. Please thank my Dad for making me fall for you. lol

My dad was very typical. Cold. Distant. Left all the "child raising" shit to my mother.
So I find it strange that he's actually had a bigger influence on who I am than she has. I find myself physically and mentally more and more like him every day that I get older.

I guess when you spend your whole life trying to chase after someone's love, you get to know then on a unique level.

I remember me going through his bookshelf. Reading every single book he had. Going through and stealing all his old records. Reading his old newspaper articles from the Korean War. Looking through his photo albums. Putting together the pieces to the puzzle. My writing, my sarcastic sense of humor, my love of jazz and blues, my need to be alone...even if it means pushing someone else away...that's all from him.

I respect my father more than anyone I've ever met. I respect how brief he is. In this age when things get talked about to death. When people go on and on and fucking on about thier "emotions" and "feelings" and "some things on my mind." I appreciate his old school stoicism. Like a tortured Russian author, he walks around with this permanent scowl. You know his heart has seen things that would break a normal person. Two of his brothers committed suicide. Wars in Korea, race riots @ the border in Berlin. How much death and hatred he must have seen. The very lowest of society's evils.
Even now working in a prison, it amazes me he could be around all that anger and repression and sadness all day, and come home and eat a turkey and cheese sandwich like it was nothing. He's never said one word about any of it.
For every problem he has a solution. For every insult he has a come back. I've never seen him weak. Never one tear.
And I know that that's not healthy. But there's something about it I admire.

Maybe it's because its the one part of him I could never get. IT's the one part of my personality that I get from my mother. The emotional shit. The crying. The wanting to make everyone love me. Wanting to make everyone love each other. The peacemaker. The going to the end of the Earth for some man who could give a shit. My loyalty. My weakness is from her.


So as I sit here, listening to my special Fathers Day Playlist (Hendrix, Muddy Waters, O'Jays, Parliment Funkadelic and on and on...) I think about my daddy.
Who didn't teach me how to ride a bike. Wasn't at any of my tennis matches. Never took pictures with me on prom night. Has never shown any interest in my writing, my job, my friends. Who blames me not having a man, on my weight. But who has always been there when I've been at the end. To snap me out of it.
At the first sign of a tear, he can cut it out of it with one word.
As much as I hate it, he is who I am. I even have his eyes. Which, are of course, the windows to my soul lol. He above all else, is my strength.

I remember one of the first nights I went out in NYC. I was about 18 and was hanging out at the time with a much older uber drug dealer from the upper east side.
We all went out to this club, and all of a sudden the doors closed and locked, all these curtains came down from the ceiling like we were in some Moroccan Harem. All these strippers came rushing in from the club next door. Plastic pants and 10 inch heels clicking and swishing all around.
Drinks started lining up on the bar. The DJ started playing some weird off beat electro-euro trash. And then the lines of coke appeared. Just a whole 10 ft bar long of it. And all of this laughter and smoke and drinks and sex was going on all around me. Me at 18. With my cute little bob haircut and my sensible flats. And my "boyfriend" picked me up on the bar,and looked into my eyes. And he told me to stop looking so scared. And i told him I wasn't. That I wasn't bothered by any of this. And he told me my eyes were too beautiful to lie. And I said that I hated my eyes. That I had my dad's eyes.
And he gave me a kiss and he said "no matter what happens in life, you can never show fear in your eyes. you have your fathers eyes, which means you can see the world through him. whenever you feel alone or lost always remember, you are your fathers eyes. And men don't cry."

lol which is actually funny in retrospect. And just some coked out bullshit.
But I felt it. And I use it to this day to get me through.