October 3, 2009

They can't make me pay forever.

Well, my life came full circle last night when I offered my father money to pay for his new apartment. Whew.

I don't think we need to go in to anymore detail about me & my father's...interesting relationship. Or maybe for this one instance we should just so you can see the subtle SADNESS.

Anyway, it's true that once upon a time my father was a hardcore alcoholic & drug fiend...as, apparently, drug fiends tend to do, he's often "borrowed" money from me AND my mother (and others) or just flat out robbed us...one instance I'm going to paraphrase for you now. It was the beginning of the end for he and I...

For up until that point, although I was in middle school & this had been happening for years, I still trusted dad. I thought, some day he'll get clean and pay us back all the lunch money and jewelery he'd stolen. Right. Well...one night I was asleep in my room, in our old house. I slept with no TV, no lights, just a fan near (or sometimes in, don't ask) my bed and sort of backwards at the foot...and a nightstand where I usually collected my life's savings. Well, it was an old record player dad had given me for some odd reason.

In any case, I think I'd had a late night and I finally went to sleep, when in the wee hours of the morning I'd woken up and saw my father! Who no longer lived with us at that point--we'd kicked him out for stealing an old VCR player.

He was collecting change off my nightstand. Still groggy, I still managed to flip and ask what the hell he was doing at my nightstand. He explained that he'd thought he saw someone sneaking around the porch and realized the door was unlocked and just helped himself inside. This I actually believed since, although we're not prone to leaving the door unlocked, I sometimes forgot to lock the door. And later there was no sign of forced entry so oh well.

In any case that still didn't explain what the fuck he was doing robbing me in my sleep. And he didn't exactly give it back. I remember sitting down immediately & writing an entry about it in my journal and I called mom about it, and well whatever emotion & trust I still held on to at that point was pretty much broken. I'd often been derided for loving a junkie so much that I would actually give him my money if he asked--no one understood why--and it dawned on me that I had indeed been made a fool out of for years now...he was going to make me pay forever. I didn't want to.

And so last night, dad's once again trying to get himself on his own two feet and though he wants to be patient about it (I'm really the only one considered patient in this house) he's having a rough go at it...and really it's minuscule money but when you're broke and on fixed wages nothing is "minuscule". On a whim I offered to help out.

I didn't actually explicitly offer money but I think he knew what I was getting at...he of course declined. What ever would I voluntarily offer him money for anyway? I should feel like a fool, I really should.

Anyway, it got me thinking of the F Scott Fitzgerald short story Babylon Revisited or else I probably wouldn't have bothered with yet another contemplate-my-navel entry. I was so disturbed when I had to read this for American Literature II earlier this year because it hit just a wee bit too close to home for my liking. In fact it made me downright depressed, and if you want to feel low like I am right now you can read it here. Except this clearly ain't Paris and I don't need anyone to fight for custody over me anymore...I'm grown. I still need parents though. It's interesting that even though the perspective here should technically be my father's...I still see it.

He went back to his table. His whisky glass was empty, but he shook his head when Alix looked at it questioningly. There wasn't much he could do now except send Honoria some things; he would send her a lot of things tomorrow. He thought rather angrily that this was just money--he had given so many people money. . . .

"No, no more," he said to another waiter. "What do I owe you?"

He would come back some day; they couldn't make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn't young any more, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn't have wanted him to be so alone.

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