Why Should I Care?

[Elspode]

My father was a slut. Even when I was seven or eight years old, it was pretty clear to me that he wasn't going to be the guy who drove me to baseball, taught me about girls or made sure that my injuries got healed. No, it was inevitable that he was to be the guy against whom all "normal" sorts of familial infrastructure was to be measured...with him on the negative side of the scale.

How I didn't end up a flaming homosexual was always a subject of puzzlement to both my mother and myself. I was raised by *extremely* strong willed women...women who could either purr and coo to bring a man to them, or shuck the sonofabitch and do the oil change themselves. Women who could wither a man just by dint of their desireability and self-assurance.

My father, being led by his dick, was always "out of town" during my youth. Every event of significance was attended either by my mother or my grandmother. If it was my mother, she was almost certainly hanging on the bare edge of her capacity. If it was my grandmother, she was probably schnockered, and working up a whole litany of criticism for my mother for the lack of being there.

In retrospect, having earned a bit of experience, which allows me some adult perspective, I'm pretty sure that my dad was out having his helmet polished most of the time. It was the Sixties, and he strove to fit the archetype of the besuited and closely coiffed young apprentice, even if the price of his suits meant that Mom and I went without food or lights for a few days.

He was a handsome bastard...short, stocky, and well-muscled, a devotee of Jack LaLanne. I have memories of female impersonators hanging around the house...they were my mother's best friends. Her best girlfriends. The only reason they were there at all was because of my father. They wanted him at first, but later, having met my mother, became entangled in the reality that was the Chambers household.

My father flitted easily from drag bar to bowling alley to the corner hoodlum drugstore to the fire department to the checkout line at the all-night grocery...and never once showed that he was anything but in control. It was only thirty years later that I was able to understand that Chuckles was bisexual. It was only because of the memory of the sheer loving humanity of all those fading transvestites that I was able to understand what pure acceptance meant. It is only because I was surrounded by people who had been rejected by "proper" society that I was able to grasp that love had nothing to do with parentage, and everything to do with who was there when the chips were down.

We were too poor for babysitters most of the time, and too socially isolated for real family friends to watch me. Because of this, I was always brought in tow as my folks traversed the Kansas City nightlife, doing whatever young adults do in search of entertainment, amusement, opportunity. I remember hanging out at "the drug store", a remnant of Kansas City's mob days...a place where the hopeful Goodfellas bought their tobacco and scandal sheets, drank coffee, scored junk, and waited for an opportunity to be somebody. I remember being given sodas at the counter, and reading scandal sheets when they were really, really vile...two headed babies, hermaphrodites and graphic murder scenes in black and white splashed across the front pages. I remember falling asleep in the back seat of a borrowed car while my drunken father asked my mom if he could "hit her in her box", and wondering just why it was that my mom had to drive home, anyway.

My parents came squarely out of the last remnants of KC Jazz Age turmoil. My mother's best friend was to eventually inherit Milton's, the absolute last edifice of KC's true jazz heritage. Milton Morris was the first guy to book Bill Basie, Charle Parker, endless others, into the Kansas City bar scene. Milton's first storefront was on Vine Street, long before 'Kansas City' entreated us to "stand on the corner at 12th Street and Vine." Before they died, each of these legends would come through KC, do their gigs, and end up at Milton's at 32nd and Main in KC, and chat up the old fucker. And sometimes...they would play. At the very least, somewhere in a suburb of KC, there is the most amazingly unexploited collection of jazz vinyl in the entire country, right now.

Milton was my "Aunt" Hazel's blood uncle, and she nursed him through to his last breath - each sickening, flaccid, whoreborne, twenty dollar blow-job, eighty-year-old, one-leg-cut-off-by-a-cable-car-when-he-was-a-kid remaining day of the son of a bitch's life. It was into this "marijuana could get you fifty, glossy porn 3 x 5's gets you life" world that I was pulled for want of a better place for me to be most Friday nights. It was drag queens who brought me coloring books and toys when I broke my leg two days after my seventh birthday. It was flaming queers who dried my mothers' tears when my father failed to show up three days after he was due. I walked up the stairs to their $40-a-month flops that are now trendy Midtown lofts when I was five or six years old. I asked my mother unanswerable questions about why men would want to be women.

It was my domineering grandmother (whom I kicked in the ass one day when I was nine because she badmouthed my worthless father when he called to say he couldn't pick me up one weekend) who laid it all out for the man I was to become. She looked me square in the eye, and called me an "ungrateful bastard"...ungrateful, because I lived with her, my mom and my grandfather, and apparently didn't grasp that my father was a waste of space. A bastard, because...that's what I truly was. I still have the forged Tijuana wedding license that shows my parents' anniversary to be two months prior to my birth...even though I know it to be a fabrication.

My father is pushing 70 now. My mother died 13 years ago. They were divorced when I was 10, and no one will ever know whether or not they were the better for it. My mother married a copier repairman who proved to be a capable motorhead and an abusive asshole with a penchant for affairs...women who would call at 3:00 in the morning, demanding to speak to him. I learned things from him...how to use a wrench, the fact that malfunctioning doesn't equal broken...but mostly, he was a child molester - the man responsible for screwing up my half sister.

I 've just spent a couple of hours trying to run my father, Charles Chambers, down on the Internet. His poverty keeps him moving now, makes him hard to find. Why do I want to contact him? That's easy.

I want to tell him that I'm better than he is. I want him to know that I have fought the battles that he ran from, and I am a better man for it all.

Is that wrong?