Memoir: Perfect Peter, Prologue- Installment 1, My father

One reason I’m sharing my memoir is because I have realized as a health coach, often, when we are struggling, like when trying to be healthier, our childhood may be holding us back. Until we address our past, our present and future may be affected.

Another reason is, when I shared it with friends, many said, “I feel the same. Can we talk?”

And maybe the most important reason; Right now, somewhere, an adult is harming a child. I pray it stops.

If what you read affects you, please reach out to me via email or phone, or leave a comment. My hope is to connect authentically with you, so we can support each other.

Caution, Dear Reader - Some of the content is graphic, and I have been told, disturbing at times. My goal is not to upset, but to share honestly. Only reflection and honesty have helped me glimpse what has eluded me for 50 years-happiness. Please read at your discretion. 

*Most names have been changed.

Installment 1

One of my first memories of my father is a good one. I’m small sitting on his big lap. My eyes level with the dimple on his chin, I focus on the small black hairs poking out of it. He pulls me close. The hairs scratch my cheek, but I don’t mind. Right now, I’m all that exists for him, and he for me.

I like his scent. He’s been gone 33 years, yet I can still smell the blend of his musty sweat from painting houses all day in the hot sun mixed with masculine aftershave. Shirtless, his skin is clammy, not in a gross way, more like; he came inside out of the summer heat and is sitting by a metal fan with his shirt off. I stick to him.

His strong arms hold my soft three year old skin tightly against his. His wide thighs underneath my bottom feel solid. He squeezes me; I feel sheltered from the world. He bites my cheek so hard I cry. He stops just before I think his teeth will tear my skin and make me bleed, and says, “Papa do gaga [bite],” in a Greek accent. His voice vibrates in my chest, I smell what he’s drinking. He tells me, like he tells my older brother Chris, and younger sister Tula, many times in Greek, “You came from my arhedia [testicles],” laughs, and hugs me again. His laugh is loud and defiant, like he’s not afraid of anything in the world. I lean the cheek he bit on his hairless chest. He is all mine. Sitting there, I know, nothing can hurt me. 

That is how my young mind remembers my father, burying the other side for years. Now, he won’t stay buried. For the first time, I see the side of my father that almost destroys me, like it did him. This side terrified my mother, brother, sister, and me. I learn it terrified most people who got close to him. When he hurt them they told him to leave, eventually calling the police, including his mother, my mother, his second wife, neighbors, and strangers. 

At the end, he is alone, except for me. I’m 16, sitting on the couch in his living room, scared. It’s the only night I spend alone with him; he’s slumped at the kitchen table, drunk, bottle of whiskey in one hand, glass in the other, arguing with himself, raving. He’s come up with a plan. We are waiting for the police to bang on the door. I don’t know this will be my last memory of my father, except for the hospital bed. He will kill himself two days later.

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Bella, my 16 year old daughter, knows I’m writing about my childhood. She says, “Dad, I know about the fire.” She’s six feet tall and built like a dancer, as perceptive as she is tall. I describe her to my patients as one long graceful muscle running from her toes all the way up to her head. People call her an Amazon, but I know she’d prefer Greek Goddess. We talk and she reveals the insight of a 65 year old Park Avenue psychoanalyst, “Dad, we’re clearly both having tough weeks and we’re taking it out on each other. Realistically we should be helping each other. I’m sorry tho.”

She has an older sister Kara, 19, who’s gentle soul is anchored by empathy. After I tell her, when I was young, I got a free lunch ticket in school because we were poor, that empathy fills her eyes full and flows down her cheeks. They have a younger brother Nicholas, 12, the one who said, “Thanks for taking me to the baseball game, dad. This is the best day of my life.” His innocence and sincerity affect me so much, I pull him close so he can’t see his dad crying in Yankee Stadium. 

I know in my eyes my children’s good qualities dominate, but I’d rather focus on their good, because my whole life, I have focused on my bad, and I know where that gets me.  Abraham Lincoln said, “If you look for the bad in mankind and expect to find it, you surely will.” Actually, Lincoln never said that; a Disney screenwriter did, but I’ve learned, all that matters is what I believe to be true. So If I’m being truthful, and grateful, I can see that my children have had a pretty normal childhood compared to mine, up until last year, when their mother and I separated, amicably. 

Bella and I are taking the 30 minute drive to my brother’s house where I have lived for the past year since the separation. She asks again about my father; “Dad, why don’t you just tell me what happened.” So, I finally do, except for the fire and sex. As we drive through the snow, I start to fill in the stories she’s heard bits of over the years. When we pull into the icy driveway, she says, “Dad, your childhood wasn’t normal. It sounds like a movie, or like when someone’s describing surviving the holocaust. I’m surprised, and think, Is she being dramatic? The same question I ask myself daily. I know my childhood was different from my children’s, but it was the only one I knew. To me it seemed normal, until now.

Bella makes me think, If I had to liken my childhood to any event, I’d say it resembled more a Greek tragedy than a holocaust. There was death by burning, but it was voluntary, and not in an oven, and there was persecution, violence, suicide, reflection, forgiveness, and love, revolving around a tragic figure, who my therapist said, “Had to die so that you all could live.” 

Walking into the house, Bella sits at the counter and the light from the bulb bathes her face, making her dark mediterranean skin glow gold. I make her our invention of a Greek salad sandwich; a good baguette spoon filled with ripe tomato, cucumber, lettuce, feta cheese, drizzled with olive oil, dashed with vinegar, and sprinkled with sea salt, slice it on an angle, place it on a plate, and slide it in front of her. She lifts her head, her black hair falls straight behind her long neck to her shoulders, and says, “You’re special for having survived it.” “I don’t think so,” I say, and hide behind her for a moment, surprised by the tears in my eyes. I don’t know if my tears are from embarrassment, pride, or my daughter’s acknowledgement that what my mother, brother, sister, and I survived was, like Bella says, “not fair.” 

My children don’t understand why a parent would harm their child. The last time Nicholas slept over, he asked, “Did your father beat you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry he beat you dad. I don’t know why he did that. You’re a nice person.” Then rolls over and goes to sleep, safe. 

When someone mentions my father, Kara instinctively walks up to me, places her head against my chest, and says, “I’m sorry daddy.”

I show Bella a picture of my father. “You’re better looking than your dad,” she says. For the first time, I realize she doesn’t say grandpa. I’ve kept my father away from my children, even in death. They are the three most important people in my life, and that makes me relieved my father is dead. The fact that they have Jewish blood mixed with Greek would make him angry, that what he taught my brother, sister, and me did not take hold. He taught us, amongst other things, “Hitler was a good man. He should have killed all the Jews.” 

Bella’s comment about my father’s looks brings him back to life. It’s 1977. My father’s 41. My brother’s ten. I’m 7. We’re working with him during summer break. It’s a few minutes before he goes into one of his rages. He’s about to destroy wood projects he helped us build, adding another reason for me to fear, and later, secretly hate him. He never apologizes. Yet, I admire him. Contrary to what Bella said, I always thought he was handsomer than I turned out. 

He’s walking up the long driveway of an old Victorian mansion we are helping him paint in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. His strong, tanned arms hold a brush in one hand, paint can in the other swinging at the end of his long arm. His confident strides are accentuated by his white painters pants with cool pockets for brushes and scrapers, and a loop to hang a hammer. His blue collared short sleeve work shirt is unbuttoned, flapping with each step, revealing his white tank top underneath. Lost in thought, his brows are furrowed. His thick black curly hair hides any trace of the metal plate in his skull my mother says he got from almost being beaten to death by police back in Greece. 

We follow him to the back of the three car garage. He unzips his pants, pulls out his penis and starts to pee on the foundation. My brother and I follow his lead. When I look over I see his giant penis resting in his big hand and a powerful jet spraying from it. He sees me looking and smiles, “One day, your poutso [penis] will be big like mine,” and laughs, tilting his head back. He smiles, making his eyes open wider, startling me. I rarely look him in the eye. I’m excited by his prediction, that my penis will someday be big like his. There is a strange feeling in my chest that I don’t feel often, a warmth, when he says, someday, I’ll be like him. 

Because my parents are divorced, we spend Sundays at his house. He wears dress clothes; grey slacks and red, big collared shirts, or suits when he takes us to the mall. He wears old work clothes when watering the lawn, changing the oil of his car, and preparing magnificent feasts we look forward to. For breakfast; fried pork sausage patties, crispy bacon, homefries, rye toast with melted butter, Lender’s mini bagels with Temp Tee cream cheese, orange juice, and mounds of the yellowist, fluffiest scrambled eggs I can still taste. I’m thankful he makes enough for an army. When my kids ask, “Dad, how did you learn to cook so well?” I wish I could say it was my father. When my sister’s five, he sits her at the kitchen table, places a large bowl of garlic bulbs in front of her, and says, “Peel these.” He tells my brother and me, “that’s a woman’s job.”

I know he has charisma before knowing what that is. When he speaks, people stop. Six feet, three inches, handsome, confident, funny, and loud; he’s giant to us as we hang from his biceps. He lifts us off the ground effortlessly. “Again,” we say, amazed by his superhero strength. I know he’s strong, but when I see him lift a teenage boy over his head and throw him into a dumpster, I’m proud, and scared. 

My parents are mismatched. Quiet, and small at less than 5 feet, my mother stands in the shadow of her husband’s warrior frame. Ironically, she’s the one with Spartan roots. She’s as pious as he is lewd. I’m used to her buttoning her blouses up to her neck and telling us, “Don’t have sex, “it’s bad.” That’s why her friend Athena confuses me. Athena reminds me of Raquel Welch; large pendulous breasts with cleavage spilling out, dark skin and hair. She tells me with a sensual voice and playful look, “Your father is a therio [giant] and a teras [beast]. Even though I’m young, I know she’s not talking about his height. The look on her face when she talks about him is like Marylin Monroe’s when that subway breeze blows between her legs. I sense she’s known him, and wants me to know. When I’m 14, she walks into our bathroom and offers, “Can I help you wash your poulí [bird].” I panic and say, “No.” I’ll replay the scene in my mind with a different ending for decades. Years later my friend says, “You did the right thing saying no.” I’m not convinced. 

Not quite a Greek God, my father stands with good posture, trim and handsome in a leisure suit when we are young, then weathered with bloated belly from drinking and bingeing by middle age. He reminds me of Elvis stuffed into his white jumpsuit a couple of weeks before he’s found dead on his bathroom floor. Elvis is 42 but looks at least two decades older when he dies. So does my father. When I’m seventeen, a year after my father dies, I see the documentary, This is Elvis on HBO. I’m standing in front of our Zenith TV, paralyzed, tears running down my cheeks, he looks that much like my father; big sideburns, bloated, sweating, hair disheveled, high, slurring, remnants of a once handsome man discernible. When he opens his eyes, you see him, the scared little boy. 

He smells of cigarettes and whiskey, except in the morning when he smells like coffee. Then he doesn’t smell like cigarettes anymore, just whiskey, after a doctor tells him he’ll be dead in six months from cancer. We see him cry for the first time. The world becomes more confusing and scarier. He grits his teeth and declares with his accent, “I no gonna die from cancer.” He doesn’t die from cancer.

At the end, sitting at his kitchen table, he resembles the shark hunter, Quint from the movie Jaws; weather beaten, wild curly hair, loud opinionated voice, broad shoulders, strong arms and calloused hands from physical work. He’s drunk and has that crazy look in his eyes. Ironically, they both die gruesome deaths; Quint, swallowed by a shark. My father, by fire.