James

i never really knew James. all my life i heard about how much of an asshole he was. the stories were always about him being drunk and trying to fuck someone up. it seems like my mom was on the receiving end of most of his beat downs. i will never forget the story of x-mas eve. he came home drunk off his ass demanding his dinner. at the time my mom was up on a chair decorating the tree. she told him that the food was on the stove and she would get it for him as soon as she was done with the tree; wrong answer. he smacked the shit out of her, knocking her off of the chair and on to the floor. according to my brothers, that was common. there is even a story about him trying to shoot one of my brothers. one day, while beating my mom's ass, James was interrupted by my brother trying to stop the beat down. that nigga pulled out a gun and tried to shoot his own son. if it had not been for that car in the driveway i would only have two living brothers today. to the best of my recollection, he was drunk every time i saw him. his eyes were always wild and bloodshot. i can remember thinking to myself "i'm glad that he is not my father." "my father would never beat my mom."
i did not know him very well, but i knew that my father was Clarence. he drank gin on ice like it was water. to the best of my recollection, he was drunk every time i saw him too. but, he seemed like a good person. he was a hard working truck driver. his face seemed to light-up when he saw my mother. he was always happy to see my brothers and me. he usually gave me money and gifts when my mother took me around the beer joints to see him. however i always wondered why my father did not come around much. i knew that he lived about twenty miles away, "so why didn't he come and see his son?" "is there something wrong with me, or is it my mom?" i remember feeling sad that my father did not want much to do with me. i loved him. i loved him for the simple fact that my mother said that he was my father. i would ask myself "why don't he love me back?" "why don't he ever come and take me to stay at his house for the weekend?" "why don't he ever send cards on my birthday?" "what did my mom do to make him stay away from me?" i was twenty-five and a new father of a beautiful baby boy before i found out the truth. Clarence came to visit me and my wife shortly after my son was born. i started a conversation about being a father and he dropped a bomb. Clarence said that i was at least a year old when he met my mom. he was not my father after all. he was just one of the many men from my mom's past. she thought it would be good for me to grow-up thinking that Clarence was my father instead of James. she never got around to telling me the truth. James is my father, I am his son.
I took my wife and son to see him a few months after my shocking revelation. He was living in a nursing home a few hours drive away from where we lived. It was one of the most disappointing days of my life. James was in a wheelchair, unable to walk due to a history of strokes and other ailments brought on by years of alcohol abuse. But, that was not the disappointing part, he had lost the ability to speak. In fact he had to be fed through a tube. All he could do was look at me with those wild, permanently bloodshot eyes. When I introduced him to my infant son he looked as if he wanted to say something. I got a pencil and a piece of paper and asked him to write what it was that he was trying to say. Unfortunately he had lost the ability to use his hands to write.
I was crushed. I thought that I was finally going to get some insight. I had a million questions to ask and none could be answered. Sometimes life really is fucked up.
I did not bother hurt myself anymore. The hole in my heart that had been there all of my life was left permanently agape. I felt like crying. I felt like I did so many times as a child when I would sit and wonder why my father did not want me. I caught myself feeling sorry for myself, then I looked into my infant son’s smiling eyes. At that moment I knew that I would never get any answers to the burning questions that I had been carrying around like a plague. I had to move on and be a father to my son.
I left James that day, never to see him again. About four years later my mother called me one day and told me that my father had died. I wish that I could say that I felt some kind of remorse. I felt nothing. It was as if she had told me that a stranger had died. In actuality that is what he was to me, a stranger.