“When my father went to his AA meetings, my brother and I would go into his room and laugh at his Playboy magazines. “

My Father

by Bob Shaggy Crawford

Photo @shaggysk8es/twitter.com

My father was not the best father. He was a wife-beater and an alcoholic. Eventually, when he left our home, he graduated to deadbeat dad.

My father was into porno. He had a walk-in closet where he stored all of his porno mags. Instead of talking to me about the birds and the bees when I was a child he let my brother and I watch porno movies with him. When my father went to his AA meetings, my brother and I would go into his room and laugh at his Playboy magazines. His buddies at AA called my father “Wiggy,” but my father would never tell us why they called him that.

My parents divorced when I was 4-years-old. I remember times when my father would come home drunk and beat my mother. He would grab her by the arm and swing her around the house. My brother and I would hide under the bed when these horrible events would happen. The cops came plenty of times and my father would be back in about a week and pick-up where he left off.

After my parents divorced, my brother and I would see him once a week on Saturdays. My mother would go to court a lot because my father refused to pay child support. My mother always explained everything to us. She told us never to hold this against him, which we never did.

The only thing that sucked when my father moved out was that my mother wasn’t working and had to go on welfare. My mother always sent me to the store to get milk and bread. Even though I was a child, I was embarrassed to use food stamps.  So, before I walked into the deli, I would wait outside until there was no one left inside. The court system never did anything to my father and my mother was never able to get child support. Eventually she gave up on the court system because they were not helping. The only thing they did was keep warning him.

The only time my father took us shopping for clothes was the beginning of the school year. All the clothes he got us were from Kmart. They were cheap and tacky. Most of the clothes I got that I actually liked were hand-me-downs from my friends. I never had any money and never asked my mother for it because I knew she didn’t have any money either. When my sister got a job she had to pay most of our rent. I got free lunch at school with my lunch card. I was very fortunate that the system helped me out. Without help from the state, I wouldn’t have lunch because our refrigerator was always empty. We couldn’t afford to go food shopping once a week like most families.

Eventually, my dad met a really nice lady named Janet who did all the cooking and cleaning for him. My father had a refurnished apartment with nice furniture, wall to wall carpeting, cable, VCR, cordless phone, etc. Meanwhile, the house I was living in was really old and falling apart.

Even though my father stopped drinking, he was still an asshole. The only time we were able to get money off him was whatever change fell out of his pocket when he got up from lying on the floor watching wrestling. But, most of the time, he would notice his change falling out of his pocket. I am pretty sure he carried his whole bank account in one pocket.

Janet always cooked dinner for us and served our food like she was my father’s maid. My father was a male chauvinist pig. When we were watching wrestling in the living room, Janet would serve us dinner. Then, she would eat in the kitchen alone. She was always the last person to eat, plus she would always wash the dishes. So, basically, if a woman wanted to marry my father, she would have to become his slave.

The sneakers I wore were always worn out with holes in the bottom. My socks would get ruined from the holes. I remember those frigid winters when my feet were always cold and wet. There was nothing I could do. I was too young to get a job.

During the holidays, my father would work for his buddy that owned a florist shop. He would bring me along and we would deliver flowers in a van. I would bring the flowers to the door and ring the doorbell. So, I got tot keep the tips.

One time, a woman answered the door and I could see a German shepherd in the background running right at me. The fucking lady tells me not to worry, that the dog doesn’t bite. Nevermind being bitten, the dog was hell-bent on attacking me.

I went to jump over the rail, but before I was able to get my second leg over it, the dog bit me underneath my ass. The lady locked the dog up and I had to pull down my pants in front of my dad and the lady to show them my wound. It wasn’t that bad. The lady gave me a shitty tip and I still have the scar to this day.

When I would go to my father’s house on Saturdays, he would sometimes drive us to the other side of town to rent videos. He would sometimes bring the neighbor with us who was a couple of years younger than me. When we went to the video store, the neighbor accidentally knocked over the videos. I was joking with him and smacked him with a glove. I accidentally hit him in the eye and he started crying. My father went to grab me by the arm to swing me around the store like he used to do to my mother. I was able to prevent that by wrestling him to ground and pinning him down. I also recall him grabbing my brother like that once because my brother was pissed off at me. Seeing someone being swung around the room by one arm is kind of scary because you don’t know if the person is going to be smashed against a wall.

So, I pinned my father down against the ground to prevent myself from being swung around the video store. I recall the other customers’ frightened facial expressions as if they never saw anything like this. I got up and attempted to run to the door. From behind me, I heard him yell, “Not this time, buddy!”

He grabbed me, put me in the car and drove me home. My mother was wondering why I was home early from my visit with my father. When I told her the story, she laughed. My sister told me that the only time he actually hit me was when I was 3-years-old and he gave me a black eye. She made me promise not to tell anyone.

My father lived on the second floor of a house next to a railroad bridge. At night, he would engage in creepy behavior. He would sit in the kitchen window with the lights out, face pressed against binoculars, watching the long hairs smoking weed and drinking on the tracks. I used to steal his Playboy mags and sell them to the kids in the neighborhood.

Another time, I was skating with a friend who was smoking a cigarette. My father drove by us and screamed “I caught you, buddy!” out the car window. My friend had no idea what was going on. I screamed, “Fuck you!” back at my father. When my friend asked me who it was I said, “Oh, it’s just my father.”

My father was also a very slick bastard. He showed up unexpectedly at a bank parking lot where I used to play baseball with my friends from the neighborhood. He told me and my brother to get in his car and that we were going to the Jersey Shore to his wife’s friend’s house. When my brother and I asked if he talked to my mother about this trip, he said he did. When we asked him if we could pack some clothes, he told us he already had clothes packed for us. My brother and I didn’t think twice about this because we never thought our father would actually lie to us.

My father’s idea of a vacation was crashing at his wife’s friend’s house and mooching off them. They never said no to my father because I’m pretty sure they were frightened of him.

During our couple of days at the Jersey Shore, I only remember two incidents. The first one was when I went to get my father’s wife’s cigarettes from the car. The car was parked on a hill.  I sat with the key in the ignition listening to the radio and shifted the stick from park to neutral. The car started to roll down the hill backwards. Luckily, there was a car parked not far from it that stopped my father’s car from rolling all the way down the hill. When it slammed into the other parked car, I put my father’s car back into park, got his wife’s cigarettes and went back inside the house as if nothing happened.

My father never noticed anything out of the ordinary like the time, not long after the car incident, when I put my foot through his glass door. However, I recall hearing the couple that we were mooching off of complain that my father parked his car right up their ass. Of course, they never confronted my father about the parking incident.
The second incident I recall from that trip was when the two kids of the family we were staying with were screaming at each other in their room. My father kicked down their door, grabbed them by their heads and crashed their skulls together. This resolved the argument quick. Once again, their parents didn’t confront my father.

My father eventually drove us home. I later found out he never told my mother he was taking us to the Jersey Shore. My mother was worried sick for those couple of days hoping he would return my brother and I back home safely. She didn’t call the cops because back then the law didn’t or wouldn’t do anything about the situation.
As I got older, I grew away from my father and didn’t talk to him. I didn’t hate him, but just didn’t want anything to do with him. He eventually passed away and he knew his children wouldn’t go to his funeral. But, my father had the last laugh.  In his will, my father wrote that if my brother wanted the family ring that has been passed on through generations he would have to attend his funeral – and my brother did.