The Man My Organic Father Could Have Been
When I moved in with my organic dad, he made full use of me before the other kids came along. I was his little buddy, his sidekick—so long as his wife wasn’t tagging along. Sundays started before the sun. “Let’s go, let’s go,” he’d say, dragging me out of bed while the world was still asleep. I’d pull on shorts, socks, tennis shoes, barely awake, and pile into his little yellow pickup. The truck was spotless, smelled clean—he wasn’t a dirty man, kept things lasting forever. Part of that tight wadness, I suppose.
AM radio on, KFWB News 98, the hourly beep signaling a reset on the world’s tragedies. We’d tear down the empty streets, past newspaper boys, milkmen, the hum of small deliveries. It was peaceful. Long Beach University had a set of racquetball courts, a cement box, no ceiling, just walls. My uncles—Rich and Lee—would already be there, rackets in hand. I wasn’t great, but I played. My dad had a talent for it, knew how to spin the ball, hit it right in the crevice so it would ricochet like a possessed bullet. My Uncle Rich wasn’t flashy but never missed. I, on the other hand, was all enthusiasm and no grace, forever in the way, my big frame blocking shots like an accidental goalie.
For a couple of hours, we played like we had nothing else to do in life. We yelled, we laughed, we cursed, we admired a well-placed shot. It was the best version of my father—the version I rarely saw at home. The man stripped of his layers, free from the watchful eye of his wife, free to just be. After the game, sore and sweaty, we’d walk to a coffee shop, grab two donuts each and a cup of coffee, sit outside in the perfect Southern California weather, and just exist. It was one of the few times my father looked happy.
Of course, happiness is always short-lived. His wife would get bitter, left alone at home doing nothing, and I’m sure she let him hear it later. Why do you get to have fun? Why do you get to do things and I don’t? I imagine that was discussed in a hushed, resentful tone in the bedroom.
One day, after a match, we found a discarded tennis net in a dumpster at the college. It took all four of us to pull it out—cables threaded through the top and bottom, heavy as hell. We shoved it into the back of my dad’s truck and raced to my grandmother’s house. That backyard, her backyard—an oasis of greenery, a towering mint tree casting shade, avocado trees off to the side, an old chicken coop in the back—became our makeshift volleyball court.
Grandma’s house was the hub. Weekends were spent there, eating community breakfasts, gathering as a family, pretending like we had it all figured out. There was love there—real, overwhelming, unconditional love. You could feel it in the air, woven into the games, the food, the laughter. But slowly, like everything good, it slipped away.
Now, my organic father sits alone. No weekend visits, no kids piling into his truck. No racquetball games, no coffee shop donuts. No calls to his grandkids, no Christmas gifts. Just a quiet, shrinking man watching time strip everything from him. He had everything his mother once had—a family that loved him, weekends filled with people and noise and life. But he let it rot. He let her rot it.
You’re only as good as your better half. And when your better half is a black hole, you end up right where he is—sitting in the silence, wondering where it all went.
