My Father

In my life I had the fortune (or perhaps misfortune) of having two fathers in my life. My first one, the biological one, met my mom in high school. She married him for no real reason. He was not smart, did not have an amazing personality, and generally was not the best person. I remember when I was little, we lived in a house together. My dad, the alcoholic he was, got drunk and through my brother out of a window. It was luckily only the first story but he still has a scar on his face from it. That was the last steady house I lived in for a quite a while. I would still continue to see him on alternating weekends, however.
 My parents divorced and my brother, mom, and I moved in with my grand parents. We were allowed a phone call to our father every night. The phone call was recorded, probably because my mom was hoping he would say something incriminating. At this point, I cherished him as my father; at that point I stayed really close to him because he was my father, and or that he did earn respect. He did not have many things keeping him along in life. Thinking about it now, I'm not exactly sure how he managed it. He was divorced from his family and lost his wife and kids, could not hold a steady job (I remember him working at Tire Stone for a while but not the other jobs), his family disowned him, and he did not have many friends (if he had any left by that point). His family, in turn after disowning him, disowned me as well. They never outright said “you are disowned” or anything like that, but they refused to talk with us and we were generally shunned from the family. I am not very concerned about that because they were and most likely still are incredibly classless people.
 My dad was the kind of person who would live life to his fullest. I remember he would do things like pop the car onto two wheels in traffic and scream out the window, while his family was inside. I was young and did not realize how stupid and reckless that was, all I know is that it was funny and kind of cool. The years since his passing I slowly realized how many different instances like that there are, where he is either reckless and stupid, or just incredibly crude and irresponsible of a person. To avoid child support, he claimed unemployment. At the time I assumed it was just legal thingies (terminology I used) because he made money making phone face plates and selling them on ebay. I never considered what a scummish thing he was doing. He rejected normal employment to avoid paying child support for me and my brother, and all he did was glue printed paper onto store bought blank face plates and put a glaze on them.
 When he left, he took my brothers pet poodle with him. He also remarried another women he met online, most likely just so he would not be alone. She was not really a bad person though. I never heard anything about her family, and almost nothing about the rest of her life, though. On Saturday mornings I would always wake up extra early, then me and her would play word puzzle games on the internet. It was simple, but I found a lot of enjoyment out of it, probably because I was treated equally when we were playing those games. Something I envied about them (especially the way they made money) is that they seemed free. They were not kept busy by a schedule they had to keep up with, they made their own rules. That is the way I like to live my life (to a limit) and that may be the one biggest thing I am truly glad I got out of this whole ordeal. The one gift I am glad my father gave me is my sense of freedom. I love going where I want when I want. I'm not keen on planning activities, and I love life this way. They did whatever they could to try to keep me, even though I did not notice or even feel like that was what was what was happening. I never complained though, that was the only time I could ever be spoiled.
 I do not even remember how old I was at the time, but my mom started dating my counselor at summer camp one year. I am still not sure, to this day, how that happened. She made quite the impression when they first met, not as an attractive single lady, but a bitchy Jewish mother. I do not even remember exactly how the earlier time of it went, but I did not realize how awkward that it was at first. Once in a while me mom would take me and my brother to sleep over my counselor, Greg's, house. I also did not realize what was actually going on and why we especially could not “wake them up” at night, I just assumed the ceiling was normally really creaky. I did not mind the nights over there, he had a Sega Genesis. To this day I am still an avid gamer, although underprivileged. I never got the latest games so when I got to play Sega, I was extremely happy. Games were also my distraction from the world and what goes on around me. Greg ended up moving in with us, and taking care of us physically and financially. His entire family, including him, is composed of music teachers. This fact in itself had a tremendous and irreversible affect on my life, the gift of music. Between my two fathers, I obtained the gifts of music and freedom. I never had the easiest time growing up, but if I had to choose a normal life without those gifts, then life better give me all it has.

I am a reader.

I was told to look snobby, so I went to Starbucks.