Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟯𝟮 father!

𝙓𝙓𝙓𝙄𝙄.
FATHER!

──────

IT'S SO EASY to fuck up a kid.

Parents have it hard, the whole ideal of raising a child is stacked against you. 

According to psychology you were fucked from the last push; attachment formed quickly and infants picked up your little charming traits from the moment their little eyelashes parted. Before you know it, your alcoholism has been passed down onto your youngest daughter and you're the one paying for her five separate stints in rehabilitation centres.

As kids grow up, they learn, their eyes are wide and attentive and they drink in the world around them. They pick up the way that you smile and the way that you speak and even the way you're not there sometimes. Some of these guys believed that a your experiences in childhood mould your whole life.

Personally, for me, that explained a lot.

***

My Mom always hated my Dads car.

It was a navy blue 1977 Pontiac Firebird, a car that my Dad often treated better than all of us put together. For such a strong-headed and masculine man, I'd seen him shed a few tears over a scratch. It was a bachelor's car- a single mans car, as Bizzy Forbes had always called it. 

It was the sort of car a teen would drive around the streets after dark and drive up to dark haunts to fool around in.

Instead, my Dad would drive to work; he'd set off in the morning and take off into his little private practice on the outskirts of Riverside, Connecticut, and return in the evening with dreary eyes and a bag of pastries from the bakery downtown. 

Sometimes he'd take his kids- Addison, Archer and I would all bundle in the back of the car and roll down the windows as far as they would go. Dad would blast whatever chart-topper it was that day on the radio and we'd all chase the Summer weather until we were parked outside the ice cream parlour with greedy eyes fixed on the neon signs.

I spent a lot of time riding around in that car. I was much younger than my other siblings and sometimes it acted as a refuge; while Addison poured over her textbooks and Archer set off on his adolescent adventures, I was still doe-eyed and stumped, staring over at my Dad as he revved the engine in the driveway. He'd look over at me and smile.

"C'mon Betty," He was the only person who could call me that. A name like Elizabeth had a thousand possibilities and Betty had been his. I'd give him a wide gap-toothed smile and he'd grin, ruffling my hair with his free hand. "Let's go on an adventure."

He liked to be called "The Captain" and in those days it made sense to me. 

We'd go on adventures with him at the wheel. We'd drive around Riverside, sometimes with my siblings, more than often without, and we'd spend the days before I was sent away to a boarding school in a little suspension of paradise.

But my Dad always joked that his best skill was driving drunk and he eventually wrapped it around a tree on the outskirts of town. Bizzy got her way. It was scrapped. The Captain just about managed to salvage his career in his private practice. He got off with a rap on the wrist in the way privileged white people always seem to do— but I never forgot that little 1977 Pontiac Firebird.

Maybe because it served as a refuge, a sanctuary for when everyone was growing up faster than me and I just needed a moment for fantasy and childishness.