Happy Birthday Dad in The eye of every storm

16 April 1959

I’m not here, but my father cries fervently from a California hospital as his umbilical chord is cut. He’s checked out, wiped off, and cleaned up and passed to my grandmother. My Grandfather, he’s deployed somewhere in the pacific, and he probably doesn’t even know this is occurring. Military families now are so blessed with the luxury of technology, but back then, my grandfather swatted blood sucking pterodactyl sized mosquito’s from his arms and face in some jungle he could give two shits about just because he had a since of discipline and national pride.

It would be an entire year before he met my Father. Maybe that’s what is so wrong with him, but I don’t know these things yet. I’m not even born. I’m not even there. These are just stories. They may not be real.

Sometime after he was born, my grandmother moved from California back home to Augusta, Georgia, her hometown, with a screaming, crying, needy and aggravated baby. There’s a snow storm in Dallas, and the way she tells it, in the middle of the blinding white night, they spun in circles a solid four times across a Texas bridge before coming to a rest in the median in what is dolefully classified as a bonafide miracle instead of amazing car handling.

That’s where I’m at now, Dallas.

It doesn’t snow here in April, or May, or certainly not fucking June, but the way my grandmother tells the story, my father was still just a very small baby. These are just stories. Like I said. Let’s not get to attached to the characters.

Eventually my father met my grandfather. Paw Paw (grandfather) became a police officer in Augusta after the service, just in time for the race riots. Above the piano, there is a black and white framed portrait of my grandmother, looking all Lana Turner, holding my father, standing next to her husband, sitting astride a Harley Davidson, proud to be one of the cities’ first motorcycle police officers.

This was back when gasoline cost about nine cents, when we believed oil was vast and unlimited, but Coca-Cola was an entire dime; definitively limited.

I imagine on April 16, there were birthday parties. My dad is pretty fucked up in his head, and he’s an artist, so that leads me to believe he had a perfectly fucking normal childhood. There was probably cake, friends, bells, whistles, clowns, and a goddamned elephant for all I know. They probably changed, year after year. I know at one point, my dad spent a birthday at a Lynard Skynard concert fucked up on acid, because that’s what he told me, and I believe that.

These are just stories.

So my dad grows up and becomes a police officer. On April 16, 1984, I’m about eighteen months old and aggravating the hell out of my mother when Dad is directing traffic on Washington Road instead of celebrating his Birthday. This old man who can barely see plows into him with a pick-up truck, sending him to the hospital and into a coma for several months. Amazingly, he makes a full recovery. Pretty ballsy if you ask me.

April 16, 1985 my mother serves him with divorce papers. I don’t know. I guess these things happen. I know the dude she was cheating with has been my step-father for twenty eight years, but I still hate cheaters more than anything on this entire fucking planet. Probably has nothing to do with it, I swear.

My father and his father both started drinking heavily at this point, but not for the same reason. I think Paw Paw had PTSD, but my grandmother was too grandiose, glamorous, or interested in being featured in Southern Living to give a shit, and at that time, being a man just meant suffering and drinking your troubles away. I guess not much has changed. Dad barely maintained his job as a police officer.

The last time I saw my Father in police uniform was on his birthday, April 16, 1988. He came over to my grandmothers big white house, and me and my mom were sitting there in the living room when he walked in, and I ran and hugged his brown uniformed leg. I don’t think I said happy birthday. I doubt I even knew it was his special day.

My grandmother handed me a plastic package, and inside contained a toy indian head-dress and a tom-tom drum that she and my grandfather had picked up the weekend prior on a trip to Cherokee, North Carolina. With tears in her eyes, she handed it to me and said she and Paw Paw got it for me the weekend prior, when they were there.

She handed my father a present, but he dropped it, and I guess what was inside was very fragile, because my grandmother stated it was “tore all to pieces.” His birthday present sat there, and I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, so I grabbed it and handed to him and sat next to him on the couch and asked him to open it to see what was inside.

I don’t even remember what was inside.

The couch we were sitting on:

My grandfather was found dead, about seven hours prior to us sitting there, lying on the couch. He was with friends, drinking heavily, and taking heavy opiods. He died, and his friends panicked, drove his corpse home, fished out his keys, drug him in the house, and laughed about him “sleeping it off.” An hour or so later, my grandmother came down stairs to make her coffee, yelled at his drunken, lazy ass, and became worried that he didn’t respond with some shitty, sarcastic comment. She called the ambulance, but he was dead, and had been dead, and when you see dead people that have been dead, calling the ambulance is a learned formality with absolutely zero hope.

These are just stories. I wasn’t here for all of them, and many of them I’ve pieced together from my grandmother. She’s a story teller, and with that there are embellishments and elaborations that may or may not be true.

April 16, 2004

Some of you may remember this from Open Diary. My dad was riding on his motor cycle, drunk as shit, during a storm. He skidded and slid crossing a bridge, but not on the bridge, but just before the bridge. Somewhere around forty miles per hour, he fell at just the right moment where his face smashed into the guardrail, breaking every single bone, most of his neck vertebrae’s and several places in his back. The whiplash forced his body to fling around 180 degrees into the guardrail, where his ribs cracked and splintered, piercing his lungs in several places.

They helicoptered him to some special hospital in South Carolina. I was with my girlfriends family in Southwest Georgia, several hundred miles away. I made the six hour drive in about three, speed metal and slayer and energy drinks and emotions mixing with the gasoline.

I thought I was going there to watch him die but he didn’t.

He never does. He is perfectly fine, sane, and now sober for the first time ever, and about to fulfill his lifelong dream of opening his art gallery.

I’m so distant from him and it makes my heart hurt .

Anyway. April 16th. Happy Birthday Dad.

Last updated April 21, 2015