POV

Brian’s POV…Dad

When I think about Jack I get so many fucking images in my mind that I’m not sure if I’m thinking about the real man who owned a house and had a job and drove a car and ate dinner and all that normal shit or if I picture the monster who would beat the crap out of me for forgetting to tuck in my shirt or leaving my shoes somewhere.

 

Is he the man who liked to bowl with the boys or is he the shit who shoved me down the stairs then refused to take me to the hospital for the ribs that had been broken?

 

He was my father, though, for better or worse, as they say.

 

Whatever. I know that there was a Hell of a lot of worse.

 

Well, maybe not actually a hell of a lot, but there was worse. Believe me, I know.

 

There was the time when I was, I don’t know, maybe eleven and he caught me smoking out back. That was the time he held my hand over the stove to let me know that fire was bad. I thought that was a stretch to tie the stove in with smoking, but I wasn’t really in a position to argue.

 

Then not let’s forget the time he took the bike chain to my back because he thought I had told the guidance counselor that he was hitting me. I hadn’t, but there you go. Don’t confuse me with facts, thanks, my mind’s made up.

 

And you know, I guess that all I wanted was for him to love me.

 

Now think about that.

 

I wanted him to love me. I knew that he didn’t, but I wanted him to. Talk about a man’s reach exceeding his grasp.

 

I always knew that he didn’t want me around, that he hadn’t wanted me at any point along the line.

 

You know something? I used to think that I might be gay just because I knew it would piss him off so much. Fine, that’s not the reason, but it sounded good there for a while.

 

OK, sure, of course that’s what I wanted—him to love me, I mean. He was my father, I was his son. We were supposed to love each other and bond doing all that guy shit.

 

It never happened, of course. We all know that. I wanted it to, but it never did.

 

After I clued in to the fact that Jack wasn’t like the other kids Dad’s I started trying to figure out why. I mean, what was it that made him different? Or, if you prefer, what was it about me that made me different from the other kids?

 

I started watching how he was with Claire and Mom. He didn’t treat them the way he treated me. No, he wasn’t the fountain of kindness to them, no, but he didn’t hit them and spit at them and kick or slap them. He didn’t tell Claire that she was a worthless shit or that he was sorry the fucking rubber broke or that she should have been aborted.

 

Did you know that I was the only kid on my first grade that knew what the word abortion meant?

 

No shit. I was.

 

Pretty good vocabulary for a six year old, if I say so myself.

 

Anyway.

 

It was different with me, he did treat me differently than other kids got treated and I spent years trying to get a handle on that.

 

It’s not easy when you’re like seven and your father treats the dog better than he treats you—and he didn’t like the dog, either.

 

After a while, when I got a little older I would just sort of disappear for longer and longer periods of time. At first I would just go out on my bike or for a walk. Later I would go over to Mikey’s house for the day or the night or the weekend. That was where I’d get that week’s bruises taken care of.

 

Deb was pretty good about that. I have to hand it to her. She sure as shit didn’t have to take me on with all the other crap she had to deal with and she did. She let me know where the back door key was hidden and she made sure I knew that I could use it anytime I wanted. I really did try not to take advantage or dump too much on her, but it was just so much better here than at my house. I felt like I could breath there. Really. At my house I was always holding my breath, waiting for the next shoe to drop. At Deb’s I could just hang out.

 

I think that’s a big reason why Mikey and I are friends. I mean, it’s not like we have all that much in common.

 

Yeah, I know that.

 

I’m a lot smarter than he is and I’m more assertive.

 

I know, no shit.

 

And I’d never work at the fucking Q or uproot for some guy who I didn’t even love. Someone once told me that he was still friends with some of the people he knew from high school mostly out of habit. They’re friends because they’re friends.

 

I think in a way that’s partly how it is with me and Mikey—except we went through so much together and I can’t count the times he’s picked me up off the floor or wiped up the blood or took me to the emergency ward.

 

He took care of me when no one else gave a shit.

 

Now I take care of him. That makes it sound like a payback—I don’t know, maybe partly it is. I’m comfortable with him, though. He knows almost everything there is to know about me and still keeps coming back for more. Not many people I can say that about.

 

If it hadn’t been for Deb and Mikey, I don’t know that I would have made it. You don’t forget that. Sounds pompous, doesn’t it? I don’t care. You don’t forget that stuff.

 

Anyway, getting back to Jack.

 

So why was he the way he was?

 

I knew that he felt trapped by all the shit in his life. He didn’t want to get married but then Joanie turned up pregnant and what’s a nice catholic boy to do? Then he sure as Hell didn’t want another kid, but there’s that catholic thing again. So you’ve got this guy who should never have gotten married in the first place. He’s married to a bitter, frigid bitch who probably didn’t want to end up with him any more than he wanted her and then he somehow ends up with another kid and a job he hates and a house that eats up most of his paycheck and then he looks in the mirror and he sees that his hair is gray and his gut is hanging over his belt and his big night out is bowling with the guys.

 

Sucks, I know.

 

You know what? I don’t fucking care.

 

He made his own Goddamned bed. He could have said no at any point along the line and he didn’t. He made his choice and then he stewed in it and blamed me—and you know what? It wasn’t my fault.

 

I know that.

 

I may not believe it, but I know it.

 

Fucker.

 

I hate the son of a bitch, always have, always will.

 

I think that I would have liked having a father—and a mother, too while we’re on the subject.

 

Water under the bridge.

 

 

Justin’s POV…Dad

I guess my favorite memory that I have of my father is when we went to Disneyworld when I was ten. Molly was still really small, only three, so they pretty much kept her in the stroller and Mom was mostly stuck with her while Dad and I got to go off together. We did all the water parks…the big slides and the wave pools, the snorkeling reef…all of it, while Mom just sat under a palm tree in the shade reading a book that she had brought with her.

 

I ended up with a sunburn—I’m so fucking pale, then spent a couple of days throwing up, but I didn’t care.

 

He even did the big rides with me, Space Mountain and the Tower of Terror and he was great—I didn’t even knew that he liked stuff like that until that trip. He was so happy and the thing that I remember the most is that he kept putting his arm around my shoulders and saying how the men were going off and the girls could stay where they were and relax.

 

Even Mom didn’t seem to mind that, she’s just smile and tell us to go have a good time.

 

It was great.

 

He tried to take me camping the next year, but I didn’t like it as much and he was pissed because I think it cost a ton of money—we had gone all the way out to Colorado—and then I was probably pretty pissy most of the time. I was afraid of the river when we went white water rafting and I hated the bugs and some other shit kid who was with us kept trying to scare me with stories about bears and mountain lions.

 

The next year he tried again, this time hiking part of the Appalachian Trail, the part that goes through eastern Pennsylvania, but that was pretty much of a bust, too because my allergies kicked in.

 

He sort of gave up on the outdoor stuff after that, but he still spent a lot of time doing other things with me. He thought that Scouting was important, so he made sure that I was into that. He even signed up as a troop leader and arranged all kinds of stuff for us to do. He used to show me his old badges from when he was an eagle scout. It’s not the kind of thing I would have thought that he would have been into, but then there was a lot about him that surprised me.

 

You know, it made me really happy when the other kids would come up and say something about how they wished their Dad’s would do things with them like mine did. I pretended that it was like no big deal, but I loved when that happened.

 

They used to tell me how pretty Mom was, too—and she is, but Dad always seemed more solid, I guess. Mom was just—Mom. OK, until later when everything happened and I found out that she was the one who really held it all together.

 

But, like I was saying, I was so proud of him.

 

I’m not sure when things started changing. I guess that it was around when I turned fifteen or so.

 

That was when I started to notice more about the boys in the locker room when we changed for gym than I did about the girls who slipped me notes in English.

 

At first it really scared me, you know? I tried to talk to Dad about it, just sort of hinted around the subject a couple of times, but he pretended that he didn’t pick up on what I was getting at and I never had the nerve to push it.

 

I guess that maybe I should have.

 

I wanted him to understand—fuck I wanted to understand and I guess that I wanted him to tell me that it was natural and alright to think about cock instead of getting a piece of a cheerleader.

 

I never did, of course, and that’s when the trouble started.

 

Looking back, I think that he knew. If he didn’t know, he must have suspected, at least a little.

 

He told me once, in the middle of one of our arguments about it that he used to worry that I’d get Daphne pregnant since we spent so much time together. He just sort of assumed that we were doing it. In fact, he had one of those talks with me about a week before Mom told him that she had found out that I’m gay. He gave me the lecture about being safe and that I shouldn’t just use a friend, or any woman just for sex.

 

I agreed with him and made some comment that he shouldn’t worry about it.

 

Talk about your understatements.

 

I wondered when he first knew about Brian and me. Mom said something to him, I know that, but I wondered when it crossed over for him from ‘maybe’ to ‘oh, my God.’

 

You know what I think? I think he saw us at Woody’s and that he followed us to Babylon and somehow got in and then saw us dancing and making out. It would have been the night he attacked Bri outside. I’d never seen him do anything like that—he could cut you off at the knees with just a look, usually—just like Brian, but I’d never seen him use his fists. I didn’t think he ever would. Really, I didn’t.

 

Just something else I was wrong about, I guess.

 

You want to know what else I think?

 

I think that there’s a part of him that’s jealous.

 

I think he’s bent because his little boy can get the hottest man around and hold his interest longer than anyone else ever has. I think he gets a mental picture of what Brian and I do together and he is sort of turned on by it.

 

You think?

 

Well, I do.

 

I wish that he could deal with it. I hope that at some point he’ll be able to talk about it with out wanting to hit someone, or me.

 

That day Brian tried to drop me off back home—Dad almost seemed to have a bigger problem with the fact that it was Brian than with the idea that I’m gay.

 

If it were another kid, someone in school, then he would have had the upper hand. You know? He’d be able to mark it off as just a couple of kids jerking around and experimenting and that it would pass, like a phase. The fact that Brian is—Brian, moved it into a whole ‘nother reality.

 

I love Brian. I want to stay with him and live with him and I’d go up to Vermont in a second if he ever asked me to marry him—not that he ever would, but God, wouldn’t that be a pisser?

 

I wonder if Dad is so upset because I’m gay or because his son is a fag.

 

Get the difference?

 

Wouldn’t it be the cherry on the whipped cream if Molly turned out to be a dyke?

 

But you know what? I miss my Dad. Brian tells me to forget him, that he’s an asshole and it’s no loss, but he’s wrong. I want to be able to pick up the phone and talk to him and have him come over and I want to hang out with him again.

 

And you know something else? I think Brian wishes that he could do the same with his father, too.

 

But we don’t talk about it.

 

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