How far can sadness and sexual frustration drive people?
David always had to deal with the trouble of having sleepless nights and restless days. Fueled by caffeine and the utmost dedication to make ends meet, all he knew was bore himself with overt...
I leaned against the train's metal handle and watched the small monitor's unending loop of depression hotline advertisement. The coaxing message was reassuring and informative.
There were some things one man can only learn from others. Dad was a great teacher. A handsome hunk, too. He influenced me with the most direct ways to make me feel like shit. To deal with dad's attitude, one must have a strong shell and a high tolerance for visceral disgust. In my case, I had no choice, he was my father and I loved him. Love was the emotion least understood by all—I, included in the consensus. Life had many annoying truths—the most annoying was it was always true that you would love people whom you deemed unlovable.
His mood was a spinning wheel, whirling wildly depending on the weather and the day of his in work. I never failed to include in my prayers that hopefully, dad's boss had told him, "Darion, job well done," so that he would not flip me and Davion's ass like patties on a burning skillet. To the best of my knowledge, nobody else had succeeded in flipping my world more than him.
So, love was the art of understanding things we couldn't conceive. It made me realize Dad’s outlook in my kind with his favorite joke: "AIDS is the new thing for a dead man walking. Anally Injected Death Sentence.” Hahaha, let's all guffaw at such an A-grade side-splitter.
He had dozens of similar, caustic wisecracks. Homophobic shit fired out his mouth like ballistic missiles. However, even though he was aware of my sexual orientation, aside from his typical misdirected self-hatred, he never broached the subject with me. That was a given, and I could have dealt with it and not cared if only I wasn't stupid.
In the deep, blue sea of my adolescent memory, there was an invisible golden age of my self-worth that rapidly eroded along with the bond of kinship that once held it. Our family fell apart because of my coming out. Who would have thought that a fourteen-year-old boy could manage to make himself comfortable in one moment just because someone offered puppy love? That was how powerful it was—it made the gullible in me believe that love could shape my hulking father— make him know that a gay relationship was dandy.
His joke about a disease should've made me know better.
Anyway, I still tried. You've got to be prepared to sacrifice something for something so that you'd make it to the goal. If you wanted to change other people's perception of what was acceptable, one way to begin was knowing rejection. His lessons included rejection, and his other lectures became more extreme and he discovered that there were other ways to communicate after he rejected me. One of them was to hit your child with the nearest shit you could pick in front of you. At times, he could do it simultaneously with me and my brother as he looked me in the eyes and say, "this would hurt, worse than a dick up your arse."
