My Father's Gun

My father died Wednesday, July 29, 2020. It's been a while coming, and while it sounds like a weird statement to say it out loud, I'm glad the day has come.

That's not a statement of hate, though. There's a sense of relief that, after a period of intense suffering, mental deterioration, and emotional pain, he's finally at peace. He was a good father, a faithful husband, yet he was troubled, tense, uncomfortable in his world. He loved the house he built in in Tennessee, the property he bought to preserve and share with his family. He really enjoyed cooking, and I think it bummed him out that he could only eat fries when we'd come to town and he could sneak them out of our bag. He was also a self-medicating drunk who got physical with me, who accused me of being a "fag" with my next door neighbor, who told me to apply for welfare to make sure I had food in my fridge. He almost certainly was a child of emotional abuse, if not worse, who had no plans to have kids, yet made sure when they came, they were always secure, fed, educated. The Deep South was his birthplace and his home, and late in life he fell in love with the mountains of the Wasatch Range. He struggled and sweated and worked and answered the call until his brain and body gave out, until the years of brain injuries and alcohol abuse left him reduced to a shell in a hospital bed by the French doors he hung by himself.

Since I started blogging again, it's been a point of pride that I've written and shared something almost every day. It's one of the many traits I took from my dad: get up and do the work every day. There are days where it's been easy; there are days where I've struggled to get out a hundred words; and there have been a few days like Wednesday, when I've not been able to get anything out. It's those days that feel the worst: another trait from dear ol' Pop. A day without work was a day without meaning. It's taken unemployment, a pandemic, and therapy to separate my self-worth from the work I do, and, even now, I still feel that sting. I felt it Thursday. That conflict will be with me for the rest of my life.

So many of my positive memories with my dad revolve around music and film. It wasn't with my buddies that I snuck beers into the theatre with; it was me and dad sneaking a pair of tallboys into "Phantom Menace". It was Christmas morning, him making sure I got the new Bobby Brown tape in my stocking and my first boom box under the tree. It was listening to Michael Jackson on the way to the bus stop in his Corolla, right before he stopped short, that motorcyclist rear-ended us, and rolled all the way over the car and onto the hood. It was him coming downstairs to the basement, my girlfriend and I having stayed up all night watching blaxploitation, and him smoking with us and watching the last 45 minutes of "Coffy". It was watching YouTube footage of one of my first shows and seeing that mix of envy and pride as I "stalked" around the stage. He jammed Little Feat and the Allman Brothers Band and Spanky and Our Gang on the cassette players in his car, gave me "Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" with my first CD player. He pointed out why Hendrix mattered, and that Elton John and Leon Russell should be studied.

In hindsight, I think a fair amount of the tension that he and I suffered had to do with an element of jealousy on his part. I think he got shitty with me because I was everything he didn't get to be: someone who chased their own vision of the world, and didn't see any point in compromising. As I got older, and took bumps he'd never experienced on his own, I know he began to offer his admiration. And, likewise, I'm better able to appreciate where he was coming from, even when I was a kid. I mentioned it somewhere else on the Internet: he'd let his kids fall, but never bounce. That's a tough one to get when you're young, what with the figurative scrapes and bruises you inevitably suffer in life. But he also saved my life on more than one occasion. He showed up immediately when my ex-wife left me whilst having a mental breakdown, and paid for the moving truck when I moved out in shame. He never broke my balls when I failed out of college and wasted about $10 grand of his money in a year, but he also made me take out loans in my own name when I went back to school to finish my degree. Help and guidance were always there, but I knew I had to ask and work for it.

I volunteered to write his obituary; this is obviously not that. I just wanted the chance to remember him unvarnished, this person who I've fought against being a part of and ultimately been formed by. I think he'd feel real gratified knowing that so much of my love of music came from him, that he is the reason music mattered so much to me.

It's the first of the month, and I'm trying to do mixes for the first of each month. This is all music that reminds me of my dad. This is my father's gun.

Click here to download.