-Chest is open-
I am really open.
Sometimes, I talk too much about myself and never ask questions. People like it when you ask them questions, but I always get caught in a loop about my own world and perspective. It really is all I have, and everyone else's seems so far away that any amount of interrogation or inspection will never bring me as close as I am with my own mind. Perhaps that is a foolish premise to believe. The whole idea I could ever be as deep inside someone's head as I am in my own.
I recently found out from my sister that my dad nearly killed my grandfather. While defending one of his younger brothers from their father's abuse in his youth, my dad put my grandfather in a headlock. He held onto him till he turned blue, and moments before it all ended, he let go as if some sudden emergence of utter shock pulled him away. As my sister was told, supposedly that is the moment my dad's connection to the outside world ended, and he retreated so deep into his own head that even he couldn't pull himself out. When people ask me about my parents - how they are doing - I can only speak of my mum because I know who she is. I've never known my dad; I've never been in his head, not even been gleaned truth from anything he's ever said or done. Mum and Dad separated around 2007. At the time, I took it in stride. All my friends' parents were divorced, I wasn't unaware of the concept, and it was evident to me even at twelve that my parents were distant in many ways. 'Sure, ' I said, sitting on the living room floor, holding my siblings. Our parents spoke to us all.
My brother, the middle child, may have understood at the very least that dad wasn't going to be around, but having autism may have made that difficult to grasp. My sister was still a toddler but precocious and I don't doubt that husky voiced little girl got the message. My efforts to understand my dad are a mountain range of high peaks and low valleys. I'm in the most prominent valley right now; I haven't spoken to dad in months, nearly a year. The peaks are not anything to write home about, however. I define those peaks mainly through the merit of having a lot of news I'm excited to tell my dad, which is, again, just me talking, just me wafting away all my life while my dad makes noises of shock or surprise, holds his breath or says 'yeah?' I could ask him a question but it’s the same answer; work. Work and work and work.
But I feel bad. A cousin of mine has a father who routinely finds himself in a cell, and here I am complaining that my own father is a bit of a dope. Is my thinking misplaced to be unhappy that I have no idea who my dad is, that his presence in my life is that of a blood-tied babysitter? I could call him right now and have a conversation, but it wouldn't be between father and son. It would be two people who, through the family's obligation, know each other in name alone. There was one singular moment when I saw my dad, actually saw him. For a fleeting moment, I was in his head. At my grandfather's funeral, all my uncles and auntie stood at the podium to say some words, even I read a passage from the bible (it was a catholic gathering), as did my cousins. My grandmother was beside herself, and her children were by her side. my dad did nothing. He did not cry or speak; he was so eerily stoic. He didn't say words because he never dared, but I could feel it.
'Goodbye dad, I never liked you.'
He was in a whole other pain that did not have a physical manifestation. It was not anger; my father was slow to fury. It was not sadness; hardly anything ever bothered him as such. It was something I can seldom find a word to describe, a feeling of relief maybe, a weight lifted from his shoulders. After the coffin went to the ground, Dad stood outside on his own, divorced from the proceedings at the after-party. He leaned on a power box across the road while everyone else conversed over finger food. He was still smoking at the time, so it was a good excuse to remove himself from everyone. You learn a lot of family secrets at funerals, such as my grandmother's origins on some island where donkeys reigned as transportation, where my great, great grandmother was a holy woman who healed the sick but never quite had the fame of Mother Theresa. Or that my grandfather was one of many children, whom I never met, who never came to the funeral. Were they all dead, too? I never found that out.
I heard stories about my dad when he was young, the Italian club dances and formals for the community, and his rapscallion ways. My family is rather un-Italian, though. The sense of togetherness and family ties are absent. I pull the 'hey, I'm Italian' to other Italian families, but it's not a badge I wear. It's a hole. Dad bored it out in me over the years; he never told my siblings or me the cousins were going away and asked if we wanted to go. We saw him only at Christmas, and usually, it was a begrudging thing for him to do. We were not a concern; as long as we were not all dead or dying, it didn't matter.
I wear the subject of my dad on my sleeve, know me for a moment, and without question, a joke about him leaving for milk comes out, apt given my love of milk. I get by on the funny side of things, seldom getting bogged down in how sad it is that my paternal relationship has slowly evaporated. It is the hand dealt and the one I have to play. But how does something that I tote to be so blasé occupy my head? It is a bad smell, and it started to rot a long time ago, attracting flies and maggots, and now this thing on my sleeve has become a malignant mound of putrid flesh.
I was sitting at a bar with friends, talking about our lives and all the things happening in them. One of them spoke humbly about their parent's personalities and interests. It reverberated through me, this wave of envy and misery. When I look inward to talk about the great things my parents are known for, all it comes to is a single mother grappling against an emotionally distant ex. my dad helped build the MCG, Southern Cross Station, and that wheel that broke almost immediately. He's a boilermaker, a welder that's been putting metal to metal for as long as I can remember. My mum has never had the city-changing job my dad has. If she is comfort, a rock you grip on a cliff face, then dad is the boulder Sisyphus endlessly rolled up the hill.
Dad used to pick me up from swimming lessons off Ferntree Gully Road. There used to be a health club with a pool; Mum would drop me off, and Dad was there to collect me an hour later. I was young enough to be so excited to see him, to show off my backstroke. We'd get home and go through the laundry door near the garage. After dad left, I stopped using that door, Dad's door.
Dad later only used the front door to drop off child support payments and pick us up every two weeks. It was bittersweet to visit Dad because he never actually endeavoured to make it pleasant. He went from Mum’s house back to his parents; understandable at the time that when he moved, having a place of his own would be a work in progress. My grandparents' house is old. A villa in Springvale built circa 1940 or 1950; the bricks are this black-pocked yellow colour, the furnishings are dated, the carpet and the tiles just scream 1970. Cooing pigeons filled a pigeon coop which my grandfather tended. It made me nervous because I knew that my dad spent a night as punishment in that coop. It was the first piece of knowledge that beset my soul with frustration. My first cocktail of shock and curiosity for a cruel and unusual method of discipline. Dad never made us sleep in there.
I slept alone in a tiny single bed nestled in the corner of a room with the highest ceiling in the whole house. The opposite corner had a wardrobe with a mirror, so at night if I peered up, with a smattering of moonlight, I could see my silhouette self. The owners of the rooms cycled, so to say who used to sleep in that place before me with certainty was not possible. My siblings slept together in a giant bed, something my dad enforced. As we got older, we started to abhor these arrangements, my brother most of all resented sleeping next to my sister even if the bed was giant. I was a teenager, I wanted to be alone and was afforded it, but my brother and sister had to endure. Dad then found a partner, and he moved in with her. We were so relieved to be staying elsewhere than our grandparents; bless their hearts, but that house sucked. The foray away from my grandparents was fleeting, and eventually he returned, while my siblings and I slowly weaned ourselves away.
How could I sit in that bar with friends and spill this dreary news of my sleeping arrangements, metallurgy and pigeon coops against the grand tales of mothers on archaeological adventures in Syria? I realised then that I am deeply adversarial, secretly competing with everyone to be seen as someone with more than just flesh under my skin. To be human in more than just physical definition but rich inter-generational history. And I am; my mother's family tapestry is rich, and it is humble, but all of us are made of two halves, and while I know one is defined, the other remains broken.
So I show the sleeve I've painted bright colours, which reeks of perfume to mask the sight and smell of decay. I want people to say 'Hey Luke; there is a rotting corpse on your shoulder.’ And all the same, I just want to reply, '’I know, it is my brand of cologne called;’
Remittance by Luke
‘He loves you, kids; I know he does.’ My auntie told my sister the day she learnt what my father did. She brought the news to Good Friday.
‘Wishful thinking.’ I said at the dinner table, a paraphrase of a monologue.
Everyone describes my dad in a lot of ways. When I was young, my friends called him intimidating; he hardly spoke to them, just standing and instilling fear through his presence. Mum calls him all sorts of names; stupid, clueless, dumb, fueled greatly by their admittedly pointless marriage. My brother echoes mum’s sentiments, but he quotes others as he tries to find a middle ground in his head from time to time. My sister is most sympathetic, and she hears the most and is involved the most. I only know a handful of opinions from my aunties and uncles, and it’s all conflicting.
I like to liken my dad to a computer (something I also comment about myself). He is always on, prepared and running calculations to keep himself going, but he does not act out of turn unless there is input.
IF <Hey Dad, can you pick me up>
THEN <Yes, what time>
IF <Hey Dad, can you help me with something>
THEN <Yes, what time>
It isn’t a fault. Computers are ingenious machines, but they are machines, an antithetical property for a person. Machinery is also iterative; the transistors become ever smaller, the power increases exponentially, and in 3 years, what was cutting edge is obsolete. My father needs an update, but the hardware is too old. At least a computer can open up. You can replace the parts and clean the board. My computer even has a glass window for me to peer in and watch the fans whirr and the lights flash. Dad is a real black box problem; things go in, something happens, something comes out. I just don’t know what happens.
So then people start to describe it, this process they can’t define with all sorts of emotionally charged prose that says more about them than my dad. My auntie, the wife of an uncle, embodies positivism and adoration. She has a bias formed by her will to see what she wants to see. Likewise, my mother, born of resentment, has her own. I’ve had such grappling with how I choose to describe my dad and been in the crossfire of my parents’ ire or by admissions of other family members. Who is the authentic voice of my father? It is undoubtedly my dad himself. But for him to say anything, he would need input. The computer analogy will now break because this is not a binary process.
IF <Who are you dad?>
THEN <Error>
IF <how do you feel?>
THEN <Error>
I want to be wrong, but the black box is unknown to me. I just see what comes out. Dad can say things, but they sound hollow, just like AI can mimic a conversation to appear real. Dad was beaten as a child, bad enough to be put in the hospital. He was robbed of something, then, the ability to understand his black box. That’s the belief I have about it. Maybe it is unfounded, but how can I believe something like it didn’t affect him? To fit it all in to make sense, he must be human.
Knowing what I know of my father, I struggle to resent him. I resent that he was never there as my dad, not like other dads. I resent that he often misunderstood who I was. I resent he never gave my siblings, and I, a home with him. I resent he never calls me out of want. I resent that he values material things. I say those things only to demonstrate that I'm caught in a contradiction. Many moments in my father's youth moulded him into the stone golem he is, things that I never experienced because Dad was determined to never replicate his father. But that single goal engulfed everything so profoundly that I grew up longing for a dad, and now I strive to be nothing like him. I am his iteration and yet, I think I am so deep in my own head. I am so caught in my mind because I am trying desperately to prove myself to him and the world that I am a good man, a good iteration, so that when I finally sit in the pews of my father's funeral, I can weep and say;
'Goodbye Dad, I'll miss you.'
-Heart Failure-
Writing this bio proved difficult for Luke, his schema often works against concise self-descriptors. What words could consign him to any particulars when those particulars are particularly partial to change? Today, Luke might be an introspective writer concerned with his own thoughts and feelings, but tomorrow, he may be a furious world-builder, manufacturing universes for his all-consuming fiction projects. One thing, however, remains constant; he will write about it. Read more from Luke at The Kings Cup.