by Edward Champion

The Murder of Jordan Neely

Jordan Neely’s murder by a sociopathic ex-Marine not only reveals the funhouse mirror of all of American’s problems, but begs the question: When do we riot in the streets?

Any true New Yorker knew who he was: a lean and beatific dancer who you would see around Times Square mimicking Michael Jackson’s moonwalk. He built up a graceful and resplendent performance from a well-known repertoire that Neely owned with his supple and silent dignity. Even if you were in a rush to get somewhere, you’d still need a minute to quietly collect your jaw from the ground after catching the blurs of his flying feet in your peripheral vision. If you were really lucky, you’d be able to see Neely bust out his steps on a subway car barreling between stations, watching him somehow sustain his center of gravity as the train swayed and careened and buckled. All this made him much more than a casual showtime busker hustling for a few bucks. He epitomized the true spirit of this city. And he deserved to live.

Tourists adored him. Gothamites respected him. There is no known method of quantifying the smiles he put on so many faces, but the tally surely must reach into six figures.

What few people knew about Neely — and the sad and enraging thing about this goddamned barbaric business is that it took a murderous Marine with a sick smirk and a passion for chokeholding for us to really know — was that the man was significantly troubled. He was betrayed by a heartless and broken system that left him for dead and that looked the other way as he lived with his pain. It was a pain that broke him. The emotional burden of living with hard and cruel knocks that all New Yorkers know, but that, without resources, becomes an abyss that is almost impossible to climb out from. A pain that had him screaming at the top of his lungs in a subway car on the first night of May, telling anyone who would listen that he was hungry and that he didn’t care and that he wanted to die. The trauma involving his mother being taken from him by a killer who was so cold that he packed her corpse into a suitcase. A pain that involved forty arrests for disorderly conduct, fare evasion, and assault.

But on Monday night on the subway, Neely was loud but not violent. He was a soul screaming for help. Help that he would never receive. Because the American experiment had rendered him invisible. And that’s when Daniel Penny, an unremarkable blond-haired thug from West Islip on his way to a date, decided to stub out this promising yet troubled light. Penny put Nelly into a chokehold for fifteen minutes. I called a friend trained in hand-to-hand combat, who informed me that you never put someone in a chokehold unless you plan to do serious business to a man. And with this disturbing intelligence, I can only conclude that Penny really wanted to kill a spirit that he savagely and sociopathically considered to be a nuisance. Penny was white. Neely was Black. So he also had that to his advantage.

But Penny also had the American climate in his favor. When a homeless man begs for help in a major metropolitan area, most Americans look the other way. When it comes to mass shootings, we offer “thoughts and prayers” instead of making legislative solutions happen. Lacking a pistol, Penny had his homicidal hands as well as two unidentified aides-de-camp holding Penny’s body down. He also had a scumbag “freelance journalist” by the name of Juan Alberto Vazquez, who never put his camera down even as Neely’s legs stopped twitching. “I witnessed a murder on the Manhattan subway today (there’s video!),” wrote Vazquez on Facebook while caught in the immediate afterglow that a used car salesman feels just after selling a lemon to some gullible mark.

In a just world, the murder of Jordan Neely would stain our city and our culture as much as the Kitty Genovese incident in 1964. It would shame us into actually doing something about it. But we don’t. Instead, we tell people to fend for themselves, accuse the indigent of being lazy and not looking for work, and we reduce SNAP benefits and cut homeless programs instead of putting everything we have into helping the most marginalized members of our society. We endure a colossally stupid and wildly arrogant mayor — the most insipid motherfucker we’ve ever had sitting adjacent to Park Row, a crooked former cop who has deluded himself into believing that he’s “the Biden of Brooklyn” — who has placed a substantive amount of the city’s money into cops — including a projected $740 million in NYPD overtime last year — rather than libraries and parks and affordable housing and mental health services and pretty much any program that would arguably reduce crime more effectively than broken windows bullshit. What was this putzbrained dunce’s remarks after the murder? “Any loss of life is tragic.” “There were serious mental health issues at play.” Followed by self-aggrandizing lies about his administration’s “large investments” in mental health. Which includes, for those not paying attention, authorizing his boys in blue, who aren’t trained to deal with those enduring a mental health crisis, to arrest anyone they deem to be fitting the profile.

Daniel Penny killed Jordan Neely. And he was not arrested. And his name was kept out of the newspapers for three days. Neely didn’t have that privilege.

What makes the Jordan Neely murder so unsettling is how it is the perfect amalgam of problems that our politicians refuse to tackle: racism, white privilege, the mental health epidemic, casual vigilantism, and, of course, the American bloodlust for violence. Republicans and Democrats have badly fumbled the football on these systemic ills and they choose to perceive this tableau of endless suffering as a game rather than a series of events that destroy and even end human lives. In these trying times, anyone with a moral conscience should be seriously considering hitting the reset switch and starting over, letting all these incompetent bastards pay the price in every election across the land. Because if this is who we are and this is what we now casually accept until the next tragedy happens, it’s clear that the status quo isn’t working. We are capable of building something better than this hideous funhouse of endless anguish, but we refuse to learn from France and revolt against these cruel and vainglorious aristocrats until they feel the palpable reality of losing political power.

by Edward Champion

An Angry Copy Editor on a Lonely Wednesday Night

A parable about online rage, revenge, and judging people

Her 37-year-old boyfriend was passed out on the fraying sofa. Too much CBD. And he had only had one gummie. But, hey, it was legal now, wasn’t it? The copy editor looked at her sexually inexperienced boyfriend. She was not inexperienced. But her boyfriend’s body now resembled a fuselage with four stringy limbs in lieu of wings. So she was bored. And angry. Very angry. Despite the regular CBT sessions, the fury had somehow calcified and strengthened in her fifties.

A lifetime of perceiving nothing but disappointment will do that to a miserable person. Just look at Donald Trump, Jr.

Aside from her much younger boytoy, the copy editor’s life was largely joyless. She was a frustrated novelist working in a throwback publishing joint adhering to the finest workplace standards that 1998 had to offer. All handwritten work. It would be so much easier to do it electronically! And she tried to keep the peace in the office. She so wanted to be liked. But she knew that most of her five co-workers hated her. She didn’t know the exact number. Everyone, after all, played a chess game. It was all obliging smiles in the cubes and teenage titters during some of the post-work happy hour sessions that she’d reluctantly attended to show her fellow drones that she was a team player. But she knew they were talking about her behind her back. And it filled her with hate.

Hate. Forget about what Bukowski had written about it. Oh, she hated that misogynistic dirtbag. But Bukowski was small-time. Her hate was in the big time. It was the kind of hate that is impossible to shake off past the age of fifty, when you can’t find happiness or career fulfillment and your boyfriend’s mom somehow ends up being eight years older than you.

She had learned fairly fast that you needed a grandiose hate to work as a copyeditor. The copyeditor was the sworn enemy of the writer. Even the polite and obliging ones who had boned up on Strunk & White much like law students prepping to take the bar.

Hate was the greatest currency in the publishing industry. I mean, she had to spend all her long dull afternoons striking her pencil against ever-thinner sheets, masticating upon the eraser as she bemoaned yet another badly written piece from yet another doddering writer. A younger writer.

She had more of that to face tomorrow. But tonight was a different story. No, tonight, she would look for a main character. There was always a main character: someone who the Internet was presently ganging up on. And if she could find tonight’s main character, she would summon every ounce of hate she could about a stranger she didn’t know.

She hit TikTok, Twitter, Metafilter, the Fediverse, and Blue Sky. Where was he? Tonight’s main character? Where the fuck was he? And then she saw him. Or rather someone who had once been the main character ten years ago. A comment from that turd.

Did emeritus status apply to main characters? Sure. Why not?

And she moved in. Summoning all the hate she had in the tank. Because she didn’t have love. I mean, what she doled out to the 37-year-old was little more than the usual cultural reference bullshit, which always worked for younger and more gullible types, but never men her age. What she doled out to him was not love, but rather the very strong like that the dating scene in her city was all about. The very strong like that gives you the loophole to say “We’re moving in different directions” at brunch while one of you sobs uncontrollably after making the unfortunate mistake of catching feelings.

And he was there. His prose was still the same. Still hopped up on ten-cent modifiers and crunchy vitriol. It had to be that fucker. Sure, what she knew about him had happened ten years ago, but let the fucker die. Her fingers banged on the keyboard like thugs pelting crouched innocents with steel baseball bats. Kill him with words. Did she know a guy who knew a guy who could really kill him? Oh, she’d like that very much. The dopamine like that comes from hate!

She claimed that nobody liked him and that there were people far more successful than him. And that he would do nothing and be nothing.

What she didn’t know was that he was something.

There!

And she logged off. And she was bored and angry again.

But the subject of her hate was not angry at all. He had built up his own dossier on this troll over the course of a car ride in which he had little else but his phone for company and he had found her. And he decided to spin some of this into a goofy story and laugh his ass off while writing it, knowing that the copy editor could not know what he knew. Because in his tale, he had only doled out only a small parcel of the considerable information she had revealed about herself. Now if he were a cruel man, which he really wasn’t, he would have sent this dossier to human resources so that they would know the full extent of her abusive online behavior: the messages etched with the telltale sentences of self-loathing and hate directed towards other people. But, no, he didn’t want to get her fired. He only wanted to settle the score with the tale.

Now maybe this mischievous writer is talking about someone real. Or maybe not. Maybe some of the details are fudged. Maybe not. A writer draws from his own experience and weaves lies into the mix to get you to care about subjects that you would normally not give a fuck about. A writer also knows what questions to ask, what phone calls and emails to make, what people will be on his side, and, perhaps most vitally, he knows that anyone who is so keenly fixated on a perceived enemy likely has other enemies because of the same glaring character flaws. (Writers, in this writer’s experience, tend to be the easiest marks. This writer, however, while taking egregiously gauche liberties by referring to himself in the third person, is not arrogant enough to discount himself as a mark.)

But, in the end, we ultimately know nothing about people we haven’t met or taken the trouble to know. And without that, all words are fiction marked up by a perfunctory shadow equally meaningless in her rage.

by Edward Champion

The Content Trap

Every artist repeats himself. But when is creative repetition accessible? At what point do artists fall into the “content trap,” the creative moment in which originality and innovation are abdicated in favor of corporate whoredom, filthy lucre, and formualic mediocrity?

Every artist repeats himself, often without being cognizant of it: stylistic tropes, character archetypes, peculiar metaphors, and distinct storytelling moves. The more prolific the artist, the more likely the artist will repeat himself. I think of how Joyce Carol Oates — herself astonishingly voluminous — mentions the soothing comforts of vacuuming in the aftermath of grief in her memoir, A Widow’s Story, while drawing a similar comparison between death and vacuum cleaning in her short story “Cumberland Breakdown” (contained in I Am No One You Know).

So given that repetition is a creative inevitability, how do you avoid it? And when is repetition acceptable? These are vital questions to consider in an age of franchise fatigue, in a time in which an audience is now asked to devote its entire life to consuming endless reboots, remakes, and spinoffs that offer little in the way of originality.

Speaking for myself, the only way that you could get me to watch another bloated three hour Marvel Cinematic Universe movie (Three hours? Come on! You’re not Tarkovsky!) — whereby the now tedious destruction of New York is now an annoyingly guaranteed and yawn-inducing cliche — is if you locked me in a hotel room with a group of sinuous, supple, and wildly inventive lovers. And even then, my attentions would be more fixated on the far more rewarding existential variations of tendering affection and satisfaction to each and every sybarite who drops by for a mutually beneficial afternoon delight rather than the bullshit spectacle of Manhattan once again — for fuck’s sake, not again! — being reduced to rubble.

It is not that I am against genre. (I have always loved genre passionately!) But artists who work in genre tend to be the worst transgressors of the problem I am addressing here. Furthermore, I am strongly opposed to being bored out of my fucking mind. MCU movies bore me. As do the endless iterations of Star Wars rehashes and retreads, which now fills in every goddamned ambiguity that initially captured my imagination with an indefatigable series of cheap narrative disappointments. (Did we really need to see Boba Fett escape from the Sarlacc Pit? No, we didn’t. Boba Fett was a marvelous invention, the perfect side character who said very little and, before Disney+ turned this bloated and ever propagating franchise into a bland carpet rolling endlessly down a Poltergeist-style hallway of limitless length, Boba Fett’s laconic presence invited you to speculate about just why he became a bounty hunter. I’ve been told that Andor actually breaks out of the formula, but I am frankly too fatigued by all the George Lucas wankfests to dive in.) I could not give two fucks about The Walking Dead, even though I enjoyed the flagship show in its early seasons. Characters move from one location to another, kill zombies, fend off some villain of the season (such as Negan or The Governor). Lather, rinse, repeat. Same shit, different day, different television spinoff.

But Fringe? Farscape? Twin Peaks? Issa Rae’s great series Insecure? They ended at just the right time. No problems there! For that matter, Better Call Saul struck a heartbreaking note of artistic perfection while also neatly aligning itself with its cousin, Breaking Bad. Twin masterpieces! Both shows in the Alberquerque universe arguably represent some of the best television of the last twenty years. Because the writers knew when their time was up. They knew the precise point when they were about to repeat themselves. I have great hope for For All Mankind, which possesses enough of an imaginative arsenal to run for multiple seasons without becoming dowdy, largely because of the innovative way in which the show jumps forward a decade each season with its “What if?” premise.

Brian K. Vaughan is one of the best living comic book writers working today. Why? Well, it’s largely because he knew when to wrap up Paper Girls. When Saga hit a heartstopping cliffhanger in Issue #60, Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples took a four year hiatus and didn’t return until last year. And Saga has sustained its high artistic quality because this dynamic duo knew that they couldn’t repeat themselves and that they needed a long break to get it right. But Dave Sim? Jesus Christ, what a tragic fall from grace. The man who changed the possibilities of what independent comic books could be succumbed to distasteful misogynistic incel rants. All because he was so singularly obsessed with hitting Cerebus #300. Imagine a world in which Cerberus stopped at Issue #150. Dave Sim would be a hero rather than a well-deserved pariah.

At 75, Stephen King may be the best example of pop fiction staying power that we have. While there are undeniable King tropes (the dangerous religious zealot, the endearing simple-minded sidekick seen with Wolf in The Talisman and Tom Cullen in The Stand, and an empathy for blue-collar types that has rightly caused his books to be revered by many), the man is still successfully working in other non-horror genres such as crime (Billy Summers) and dark fantasy (Fairy Tale). And while he has been self-effacing about declaring himself the “literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries,” his capacity to grow as a writer in his seventies and still win us over would suggest very strongly that he’s a lot more than this.

The excellent audio drama Wolf 359 knew when to quit. As did Wooden Overcoats. The Amelia Project? Nicht so viel. It is now a stale and uninventive retread that no amount of new characters or talented actors can salvage.

Trevor Noah knew when to leave The Daily Show. As did Jon Stewart. At least initially. But after taking a few years off to write and direct films, his ego became seduced by the fame, attention, and money that emerges from churning out more of the same. He returned to the airwaves with the same schtick, vastly eclipsed by the far more thoughtful and more hilarious approach of John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. (I truly hope that Oliver knows the precise moment to quit. Because it would be a pity to see him transmute into a disinterested has-been hack.)

The Who and Led Zeppelin both ended at nearly the right time (although the less said about everything after Who Are You, the better; opinions vary on whether or not Zeppelin’s final album, In Through the Out Door, was entirely necessary). Had Keith Moon and John Bonham lived longer, I think it’s likely that they would have turned into 1980s corporate rock sellouts that Gen X punks like me would have justifiably ridiculed with formidable sneers. And while John Lennon’s assassination by Mark David Chapman was truly terrible, imagine (har har!) what kind of hideous reactionary Lennon would have transformed into in the 1980s. Or Kurt Cobain. Or Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix. This fun but unsettling speculative game — which I personally guarantee will enliven a dull party — is what Billy Joel (who quit writing songs long after his talent was tapped, but who at least had the decency to spare us further River of Dreams drivel) was referring to when he sang about “the stained-glass curtain you’re hiding behind.”

In other words, every artist has a finite amount of talent and imagination. Sometimes it extends within a given project or a stylistic approach. Sometimes it’s represented in an entire career. I used to love T.C. Boyle’s work, but now I find him insufferably repetitive. Why? Because Boyle hasn’t changed his formula much in the last ten years. It is highly doubtful that we will get another novel on the level of World’s End or The Tortilla Curtain from him. And that’s a damned pity. At some point around 2014, Boyle stopped caring about whether he was evolving as an artist and started to phone it in.

Lost? Battlestar Galactica? Both shows lasted at least one season too long. They were both wildly popular and didn’t seem to understand that the creative well had run dry. Imagine if they had ended at the right time.

The artists who didn’t know when to stop or change things up fell into what I’m calling “the content trap.” The content trap is what happens when something distinct and original becomes wildly successful, but corporate greed or an artist’s narcissistic need for chronic adulation gets in the way of knowing when the jig is up. Ego prevents an artist from knowing when it’s time to end things. And what we usually get are inferior repeats of the same stories that initially captured our imagination. Let’s be honest. If Douglas Adams had actually confined his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series to the trilogy format, what would be so bad about that? I think Adams knew that So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was never going to live up to the three books that preceded it. He was so impaired by the need to write content for the fourth book that publisher Sonny Mehta had to move in with Adams to make sure that he finished the novel. Douglas Adams — for all of his wit and radio drama innovation — fell into the content trap. On Community, Dan Harmon had a running joke in which characters suggested that the show had “six seasons and a movie” of material. And had Community been renewed for a seventh season, there is no way that its formidable writers could have summoned anything as brilliant as “Remedial Chaos Theory.” Dan Harmon didn’t fall into the content trap.

John Cleese — a genius whom I worshipped as a teen — hasn’t been funny in years. His best days are far behind him. Why? Because he fell into the content trap. He’s bringing back Fawlty Towers decades later and it’s completely unnecessary. On the other hand, I had thought that Star Trek: Picard was a dead retread incapable of further innovations, but the third season has somehow found new life under showrunner Terry Matalas. Here was a show that fell into the content trap, but that somehow clawed its way back, even resolving an Ensign Ro storyline from decades before. In other words, it’s not impossible for a content trap victim to reverse course and find a vital reason for creating new art. (Witness the surprising endurance of Doctor Who over more than fifty years — although its recent partnership with Disney+ does have me greatly worried — or Philip Roth’s multiple periods of resurgence. Or how about Tina Turner’s Private Dancer (after four dismal solo albums)? I’ve lost track of the number of comebacks that Miley Cyrus has had, but you’d be hard-pressed not to groove to Endless Summer Vacation.)

Most artists find it difficult to escape the content trap once they fall into it. But here’s the good news: everyone loves a comeback. And if we start demanding higher standards of the work we love and that goes on on and ever ever on rather than accepting bullshit like some hopelessly compromised head-bobbing fanboy who settles for, well, anything, then even once beloved artists have a shot at surprising us with the imagination and talent that is buried somewhere within them. That is, if they can successfully resist the large bags of money that corporate overlords continue to wheelbarrow into their palatial estates so long as they continue to offer us more of the same.

(Special thanks to my friend Tom Working, whose insightful comments partially inspired this essay.)

by Edward Champion

Pamela Paul, The Gray Lady’s In-House Transphobe

Pamela Paul continues to reveal herself as the most transphobic staffer at the New York Times. The time has come for the Gray Lady to cut this disingenuously hateful thug loose.

As I write these words, there are a series of bills under consideration in West Virginia that would “protect” minors from any “obscene performance and materials” — which would, of course, include a transgender mother picking up their kid from school. These paleoconservative bigots have reframed such a common act as an apparent act of flamboyant exhibitionism, if not a new form of edgy performance art that will somehow turn every schoolkid into a gender-bending sex kitten. It is estimated that 1.6 million Americans identify as transgender. 19% are parents. In 2020, the murder rate of transgender people took just seven months to surpass that of cis counterparts. In other words, we have a moral duty to stick up for trans people, to respect their pronouns, and to ensure that they are able to live safely and without hate or targeted violence in our society. They are human beings. Just like the rest of us.

In such a dangerous and dehumanizing climate, it would seem quite logical to a surly and aging punk rock humanist like me to devote your newspaper pages to showing the impact that such harmful legislation will have on people. But that’s not what The New York Times is doing. Instead, it has permitted Pamela Paul — a smug and privileged dunce who was once married to an equally hateful and reactionary bedbug — to spew forth all manner of hateful columns against the dignity of trans people. Much like a 1960s white supremacist defending George Wallace, Pamela Paul wrote a repugnant and clueless column detailing how liberals could “learn” from Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor apparently “knows what he’s doing” in targeting trans healthcare, invading the privacy of trans university students, and otherwise declaring a war on trans people. Despite all these clearly horrific moves to dehumanize trans people which have been denounced by nearly every LGBTQ organization, Paul claims that DeSantis “may not be” transphobic and that any protest against this evil is merely “adopting a stance of moral superiority” that will “do us no good.” In other words, Paul’s hopeless head nods like a FOX News-watching bobblehead, approving of these cruel and discriminatory practices against people who have rich lives, promising careers, and big dreams.

But today Pamela Paul doubled down on her casual hatred for the “other” by writing a risible column defending J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter writer who has ignobly morphed into one of the most prominent transphobes in Western culture. And in case the phony persecution complex wasn’t telegraphed strongly enough, Paul even compared the justifiable pushback against Rowling’s hate to the stabbing of Salman Rushdie, perpetuating the shitty stereotypical trope of trans person as murderer that was played for cheap titilation in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill more than forty years ago.

In other words, Pamela Paul is an intolerant dinosaur cynically disguising her enmity with false parallels who simply cannot understand what is so fucking easy for the rest of us to understand. She actually has the temerity to write, “Nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic.” Really? Beyond Rowling’s recent novel, which was a lengthy transphobic diatribe disguised as fiction, what about Rowling’s odious remarks about “people who menstruate”? Her pathetic Twitter performance last year on International Women’s Day? I’m a cis hetero man and I’m also angry about this. Rowling’s thoughtless and hateful remarks have been enough to warrant vociferous pushback from many. Is Paul trying to gaslight this response? It’s fairly effortless to imagine Paul stumping for George Orwell’s fascist nation in 1984, claiming that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Two hundred staffers and contributors have signed a letter condemning The New York Times‘s commitment to transphobia. What many of them have outright refused to do is call out the names of hateful demagogues who are spreading this noxious and completely unacceptable bile.

Pamela Paul collects a regular paycheck for spewing obfuscatory hate in a newspaper that reaches 8.6 million paid digital subscribers. Given that reach, I don’t think it’s a stretch to call Pamela Paul the transphobic answer to Charles Coughlin, who famously used his radio broadcasts to preach anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

The time has come for Pamela Paul to be fired from The New York Times. Let her join her fellow fascist Bari Weiss outside the Gray Lady’s walls and be truly free to reveal the hateful and intolerant conservative she truly is.

by Edward Champion

My Father is Dead

Three weeks ago, I learned that my abusive father had passed away. This is a reckoning.

My father is dead.

I learned the news three weeks ago. He had been dead for a year and a half. Nobody had thought to inform me about this until a legal matter forced certain third parties to inform me.

My father was a monster. He choked me. He bit me. He pressed the embers of his unfiltered cigarettes into my pale sensitive skin. He saw a scrawny underfed kid, a bright and budding soul that he had sired, and he knew that I was white trash. He memorialized it with his abuse. I wore long-sleeved shirts to school to cover up these burns and bites. I got into fistfights with kids who bulled me. Kids unaware of what was happening to me at home. The girls, at least, were sweet and sympathetic to my shyness and they detected my sensitivity. Women have always understood me better than men. Most of my friends now are women.

I returned home from these scuffles with black eyes and gashed knees and scrapes and bruises. It’s amazing in hindsight how both of my parents looked the other way. Why did my mother stay with him? Well, I’ll deal with her when she dies, as we all eventually do. She had her reasons and she’s a piece of work too. People who have never taken the time to get to know me have sometimes declared me a piece of work. I can’t say that I blame them.

We are all some inexact sum of our parents, but we are different. It took me twenty-five years to learn that.

I have never wanted anyone to feel sorry for me, but I have insisted on respect. You would too if you had lived what I went through. I despise being a victim and I am often fierce towards malefactors to ensure that I am not a victim. I would rather burn a bridge with the fiercest fire rather than endure any further maltreatment. I’ve had enough abuse and hurt to last four lifetimes. I wouldn’t wish any of the pain I carry on anyone. But what makes my vengeful impulses any different from my father burning me with cigarettes? These terrible lessons I practiced in most of my adulthood were planted by the people who were supposed to take care of me. Who were supposed to love me. I sought father figures in my adulthood. And when these men wouldn’t do, I turned to dead male writers to learn how to become a man. An imperfect resort, but books have always saved me during every downward spiral.

I wasn’t much of a man for a very long time. Not until after forty, when I lost everything and I was left for dead by those who were closest to me and I rebuilt my life. I’m still not sure where my stubborn tenacity comes from. I suppose it emerged because it was the only way I knew how to survive. Or maybe it was a better version of the unearned stubbornness and the shameful entitlement that my indolent do-nothing sad sack of a father always had. Knowing I could never count on anyone other than myself. Or so I thought at the time. I have since learned otherwise. I have learned that more people love me or wanted to love me than I was willing to perceive or admit. And for the ones who I scared away, I am so sorry. You didn’t deserve that. I am still trying to understand why anyone would love me, but I am getting better at accepting that people do love me. I built a new family from my friends. I remain grateful every day that I have this. I remain especially grateful to those who stuck it out with me for the long haul and who continued to see what even I couldn’t see. Blindness and obliviousness to my positive qualities has been the way I have always survived. Because I truly didn’t want to become like him.

Before I learned that my father was dead, I had not seen or spoken with my father in more than two decades. When I told my closest friends that my father had died, I was stunned when they reached out to me and they let me ramble about my conflicted feelings. Boisterous friends spoke in soft voices that I had never heard before. I told them, “No, he hurt me. He abused me. He warped me. He taught me the wrong lessons. He was a monster. He was an asshole. But he was still my father.” And they sweetly offered me drink and pot, which I politely declined. Because I had to consider all this with sober eyes. And on the night that I learned that my father died, I went to the karaoke bar and sang all the songs that he had once sang to me in his better moments. I hadn’t heard many of these songs in more than two decades. Corny songs from the 1970s. I somehow still knew all the words by heart. And I cried as I sang.

At night my father would drink. And I would be beaten again at night. My father at night. The kids during the day. There was a shed in the backyard of one of the homes we lived in and I recall nearly passing out from the redolent waft from all the empty beer bottles horded there. I binge drank as an adult to deal with my demons. And I was often mean and unpleasant. Like my father. Though not like my father. I didn’t physically abuse anyone. I was more interested in hurting myself. There was something strangely magnetic about creating scorched earth. These days, I don’t drink nearly as much as I used to. A few beers on the weekend and frequently none at all. But I do have to be careful.

His brain wasn’t all there. He had been in a terrible car accident because he refused to wear his seatbelt. And it impaired him. Fremont’s answer to Phineas Gage. The abuse escalated not long after this. But even before this, my father hurt me. When I was an infant, he tried out a homemade baby formula that sent me to the hospital and nearly killed me.

He was tall and lean. Like me. Although I’m still saddled with the belly on my mother’s side that I can never entirely melt down with brisk exercise. He was near-sighted and wore glasses. Like me. While my expressive face largely came from my mother’s side, the highly focused and contemplative look I have is definitely his. I inherited his reedy voice, which helped me in various creative capacities as an adult, and helped to cancel out some of the regrettably forceful qualities of my voice that I inherited from my mother’s side. But I suppose it all works out in the end.

The memory of his nimble hands. Like mine. But worse. He played the guitar. I learned to play the guitar because he had played the guitar. I became a better guitarist than he had ever been. And I have written countless dozens of songs on that guitar. But those same hands tried to suffocate me. Those same hands grabbed a pillow and smothered my tiny face. Those same hands delighted in the horrific sounds I made when he choked me. I still remember all the terrible times in which I couldn’t breathe and I suspect this is one of the reasons why I never entirely took to neckties as an adult. (Bright floral shirts? Happy red shoes? All the way.)

So how I can still mourn him? Stupidly. Maybe I mourned what I didn’t have.

When I learned that my father had died, I began making calls. I wanted to know when and why and how. And the details were sad. Dementia. 71 years old. He was not the only family member to suffer from dementia. Is this my future two decades from now? Jesus Christ, I live by my wits. Physical decline. No real reason to live. He had accomplished nothing. His domicile was little more than furniture pocked with cigarette burns. I guess he always needed some object to burn, even if it meant objectifying his own blood. An aspiring writer. But I actually got published in magazines and newspapers. He never got to tell his stories. But against all odds, I did. When it was clear that none of my work was ever going to be published in book form, I wrote scripts, created a rep house of dozens of actors, and produced my own audio drama and won awards. My seven part epic tale, “Paths Not Taken,” which spans nearly thirty years, is the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. And I still get emails from people about it. I hope I can do better.

I telephoned my father’s brother, who I had not seen or spoken with since I was a child, and asked him questions and told him that my father abused me.

He refused to believe this.

He blamed me for cutting off ties. He blamed me for never reaching out to my father or my father’s side until he was dead. Somehow it was all my fault. When my father’s brother gave me a sad story about how my father couldn’t find work, what I didn’t tell him was how I had applied to 1,500 jobs during a rough time and somehow didn’t give up until I landed a decent paying job. Not only was my father determined to be a victim, but his family was determined to paint him this way.

I asked my father’s brother if he had ever thought of me.

“To tell you the truth, he didn’t think about you at all.”

And that’s when I knew I couldn’t speak with my father’s brother again.

Here’s what my father couldn’t do and I did. I learned how to be humble and gentle and empathetic and positive. I learned to love in ways that were beyond him. I learned how to take care of others, to put aside my own problems to be there for other people when they needed me, and to do any number of secret good deeds which nobody knows about.

I want to be clear that I’m no hero. But I did something that a lot of people couldn’t do in my situation. I became a better man than my father. And I’m only just getting started.