My brother and I used to count the number of houses we lived in when we were kids. After my parents divorced when I was in fifth grade, my mom’s tally reached three before she finally bought a house, but my dad’s climbed ever higher, north of twenty. We lived in apartments, townhouses, a singular haunted house where the sound of a ping pong ball dribbling against the rooftop kept me up at night, and even attics and basements. I lived with him and didn’t at the same time. He bounced from job to job, all around the city, and once left for four months to work disaster relief for Sandy when it hit the northeast. That was when I was fifteen. After he came back, and me not seeing him for nearly half a year, he moved illegally into a storage unit where I was unable to stay with him for even longer. It got to a point where I fought the idea of staying with him. My mom’s house became my home, and I didn’t want to leave because I didn’t really know exactly where I would be staying when it was with my dad.
Eventually, after being home for a couple months, he got a stable job and moved into a small condominium across the street from my high school. I remember being relieved at the idea because the last place we were at before the storm was about three miles away. Not a far drive, but quite the run when you’re a lowerclassman. I know this because one day I’d been playing basketball after school when I received a text from my dad asking where I was. He’d been out of town at the time, and I didn’t think anything of it, so I texted back, writing that I was at home. Big mistake. He’d driven back from the bay a day early, so he, unlike me, actually was three miles down the road at our apartment. Furious, he drove to the school where I was shooting hoop. From there, he kept a consistent fifteen mile per hour speed as I ran behind his car. I was an athletic kid, but he made me keep my jeans and backpack on as he screamed at me out of his rolled-down Jeep Liberty window for the entirety of the 5k home. Half hour later, he yells at me to take a shower. And an hour after the whole ordeal started, I tip toe down the stairs to find that he’s made me and my overly anxious and nervous older brother some of his homemade tacos.
That was my dad: a walking contradiction who lived off an unhealthy diet of contrarian beliefs. He was an avid student of Buddhism, but the moment a man flipped him off at a four-way stop, he’d jump out of the car in a fit of rage. He was a fighter in many ways, a rebel who embraced anarchism, whilst employing conservative benediction whenever curses or unsavory language was used. And above all, he was a jock, D1 athlete, and former football coach who certainly lived and embraced the vulgarity of the locker room, only after—in the quiet of his home of which he so craved—studying quantum physics as a premier hobby.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t give my twenty-seven-years-in-the-making hypothesis of why he became such a hypocrite. You see, my dad didn’t have a great life as a child (though he’d most definitely say he did). My grandfather was abusive both domestically and abroad. My grandmother was poor—a child of Italian immigrants who thought it a good idea to settle in the desolate Eastern Great Basin of Nevada. At a young age, my dad moved from Reno to a farmstead in a small town called Fallon. Fallon sucks, by the way, back then and now. My grandfather’s harsh lessons on that homestead forced my dad to harden in ways I’ll never experience. And at the age of eighteen, his only way out of that town was an athletic scholarship. But, he didn’t go straight to the big city, no. He went to a small junior college where his teammates consisted of men in their mid-thirties. But my dad was already a grown man by the time he got there (thanks to my grandpa’s nature), so he thrived despite suffering through knee surgeries and concussions for two years. And after, he finally got his big break.
That came in the form of an official offer from a big school. Reno has a Division 1 school, shit I went there and so did most of the people I know. But my dad is my day, so he packed up from that junior college or from that farm town where he was staying during the summer and headed for Chicago. More specifically, he targeted the town forty minutes north of the Windy City—Evanston and the University of Northwestern. There, he spent two short years playing in one of the biggest conferences in the country. He lived on the outskirts of the third largest city in the US, and even though it was only two years, he’d talk about it as if it were fifteen. Later in life, maybe five years before I was born, he became a coach. He won state championships as the defensive coordinator for two different high schools in the area, and led one to state as the head coach as well. And boy, did he use that coach’s mentality to raise two boys.
Whenever my brother and I got into a fight, he’d have us box with the big gloves on. Whenever I was hurt in football practice, he’d yell at me to get up and run—a prime example coming from my eighth grade year where I broke my elbow in practice. He wasn’t my coach then, but he would come to watch and after seeing me not partake in conditioning that day, told me, “Your arm better be broken”. It was. During a rough game my sophomore year in high school, he remarked that he’d rather “slit his wrists” than watch me give no effort on the field. I thought he was a jackass and, boy, did my mom agree.
One day, I’d gotten a text from him to come home immediately after class. Two-thirty was our out time, so right when that afternoon bell struck, I beelined it for the condo across the street. I was a junior, and my brother a senior. I remember wearing my forest green New York Jets hoodie and basketball shorts that most definitely did not match. He sat us down on the couch in the living room and told us that he’d gotten a Facebook message from a woman named Audrey. This woman, in her early thirties, claimed to be my dad’s biological daughter from a previous teenage relationship. This would be a significant event for anyone, but more so for my dad because his biological father had left him the night he was born—a fact my dad found out on accident sometime in his mid-thirties. There’d been a couple—I think at a wedding or something—that had let slip that there was a man named Chuck who’d turn out to be my biological grandfather. Chuck, we’d later find out, was in prison for blowing up an armory in San Fransisco whilst being in the possession of heroin.
As you can imagine, this messed my dad up big time. He’d been under the impression that he’d “broken the cycle”. He’d been there my brother and me, hadn’t he? And while we didn’t project that sentiment, our dad definitely did. Later on in life, he’d talk to me about how he regretted not being that hard on us. Nevertheless, I, a sixteen-year-old boy, found out I had a sister. The following years would prove rocky for the relationship between my dad and his estranged daughter, and I really think that’s where things would start to turn.
Moving to the year 2016, a certain president would be elected into office of whom my dad most definitely voted for. “He’s a shift from the norm,” he would say as I sat across from him in a diner in the middle of town.
You see, my dad was always an asshole. He was always a rebel, contrarian, and purveyor of uncertainty. But he’d never been a conspiracy theorist. He never entertained idiocy or tolerated nonsense. He dealt in hypocrisy, yes, but it usually came from a place of expectation for his children in a pseudo, “rules for thee, but not for me” sort of way. In 2016, and later in the hot mess that was 2020, he’d change.
I remember going to work for him in 2018. He owned an asbestos abatement company, and I, a full-time college student, worked part-time for him as an accountant and bookkeeper. We butted heads over political issues stemming from the previous election, and I never fully enjoyed pulling up to the office to work. We were the only white-collar workers, for a lack of a better term, in the company, so the office consisted of just us two. At first, I was taken aback by his political beliefs because I always viewed my dad as an anarchist, a man who lived in poverty and worked through hard times. But I eventually came to the conclusion that he was more of a libertarian. He cared only for his own freedom and ability to act without overarching governmental regulations. It made sense because of his starting a business and roots in a small farm town.
I respected his views—or at least tolerated them for a while because I’d always viewed him as an intelligent man. To me, he was the typical archetype of hyper-intelligent individual who possessed limited emotional capabilities. It only made sense. That view lasted for a few years of working for him—even after the Trump administration—because I thought there was no way my father could become a brainwashed “Q-Anon” human being. How wrong I was.
Covid hit, but business boomed. My dad remained open during lockdown as buildings were torn down around the university and the ever-expanding Midtown district in Reno. I took online classes while working harder and more frequent than ever. Even in the off days, I’d meet my dad at a breakfast spot in the middle of town to discuss the latest comings and goings of OSHA regulations and Air Quality observations. Real invigorating stuff, I know. That was until, one day, I walked into a diner one morning. My dad had gotten there early. He had his tablet out, as was usual, with a black coffee—no cream, no sugar. He looked up at me with a typical smile, and typical blue eyes behind reading glasses.
“Have you ever heard about the Freemasons?” he asked.
Following this question, my dad proceeded to talk to me about ancient knowledge hidden by the Catholic church regarding Satanic sacrifices that only the 1% knows about. I asked him where he got this information, to which he simply replied a documentary. Only later would I find out that this “documentary” was in fact a multi-hour long YouTube video made by who fucking knows.
This discussion would only bring about further conversations regarding Fauci, Hillary Clinton, and the “Global Fascist Regime”. Couple that with the invasion of Ukraine, my dad would continue to push the agenda that Putin was fighting a “New World Order”. Later, he talked to me about “grounding” oneself and eventually ran a wire from his bed to a patch of grass in his back yard. He would employ the Keto diet for weeks at a time before relapsing, talk about being “Sigma”, and meditate with distinct frequencies in each ear because the left and right brain required different sonic waves to make peace as a whole.
All this to say, I finally went on my first plane ride with my dad. Or so I thought. There are two stipulations to that statement. The first being that I rode in a plane with him as a newborn, so technically it isn’t true, and the second being that he told me in the airport, forty-five minutes before takeoff, that we actually had different flights. Both absolutely okay with me. You see, I’d been talking up forgiveness regarding the man because I’d seen other children of malevolent fathers relinquish hatred toward them, so I figured why not.
I started this story on the plane to Chicago and I finished it soon after I got back. We were visiting my brother for five days and it’d been the first trip of any kind I’d taken with my dad in about a decade. He’d lived a hard life. He’d been a hard father to both my brother and I. But still, I thought he really needed this; I thought he really wanted to change. He’d never apologized for being a dick my whole life, but I was okay with it because I hate holding onto grudges. I could accept him as a hard ass who never really understood the psychological manipulation and abuse he inflicted on others, but as he explained to me in the airport the ancient teachings and freemason or religious knowledge this new sci-fi show had hidden within its meaning, I realized I’d never accept the insanity.
Covid hurt so many. It killed all over the globe. But if you were to ask my dad, he’d say it was as real as empathy. And I don’t know if I could blame him for it because I know so many other children have seen their parents go through the same thing. Social media is a plague on intelligence and rots away at validity. My dad saw a single video on the internet and from there, he was gone. Gone was the anarchist and contrarian who believed in Buddhism and Quantum Physics. In his place was a husk of misinformation who indulged in conspiracy theories and faux science aplenty.
My dad isn’t dead. He wasn’t ripped away from me as so many were from their families. I could never imagine losing people who I care about to a disease so few believe in. That my dad doesn’t believe in.
All I wish is that I could have the asshole back in his place.