People ask me about my father. Not the organic donor, the “Whack Job” who shares my DNA and got me out, but the man who actually stood in the doorway for the formative years. My Stepdad, Jim. The man I call Father.
He wasn’t a saint. Let’s get that straight immediately. He was a mixture of Old School grit, functional alcoholism, and a rigid code of conduct that didn’t always make sense.
To understand him, you have to look at geopolitics. Think of Saddam Hussein. He was a dictator. He ruled with an iron fist. He squashed dissent. But under his rule, the traffic lights worked and the power stayed on. Then comes the vacuum—the divorce—and what do you get? Insurgency. Chaos. ISIS.
That was the dynamic in our house. Jim was the dictator who kept the chaos at bay. My mother was the insurgency waiting to burn the city down. And when he lost his grip? The city burned.
The Enforcer: Beets, Scrubbers, and Sheriffs
He was a typical Alpha. He worked nights at the Post Office because it paid the differential. He brought home the check, bought the new truck, bought the house in Whittier with cash because he didn’t believe in credit cards or debt.
But inside the house, he was the Law.
Discipline wasn’t a conversation; it was physics. He wouldn’t hit you in the face, but he would grab your arm out of the socket, drag you to the bedroom, and deliver a spanking that didn’t stop until the tears started. That was the metric. You cry, he stops. You hold it in, he hits harder.
He had rules that defied logic. One night, he demanded canned beets. My mother served them—vile, purple, gelatinous discs that still held the rib-marks of the tin can. I refused to eat them. He went ballistic. He screamed. He forced that purple shit down my throat while my mother watched, helpless.
And the knees. God, the knees. I have naturally darker skin on my joints. He saw it as dirt. He saw it as a lack of hygiene. He forced me to sit on the toilet with a green scouring pad and a bar of soap, scrubbing until the skin was raw and bleeding. When I was done, the skin was still dark. He didn’t apologize. He just walked away.
But he was also a tank.
I remember a night when the yelling got too loud. The neighbors called the sheriffs. My room was next to the front door. I heard him tell the law to fuck off. I peeked into the hallway and saw a scene from a movie. Four deputies were piled on top of him. Four grown men trying to subdue one Post Office worker. One of them was cracking a baton into his ribs, trying to break the engine, but he kept fighting. He wasn’t a criminal; he was just a man who didn’t like being told what to do in his own castle.
The Code of “The Mother”
Then came the affair. Barbara. An old high school friend. He found an exit door, and he took it.
And that is when my mother transformed. She went from Leave It to Beaver to the Disco Whore of the neighborhood. She brought the chaos home. She brought the drugs, the booze, the neglect.
And here is the mystery. Here is the question that haunts the timeline. Why didn’t he stop her?
Ryan was his son. His blood.
Every weekend, Jim would pick us up. He would see us—dirty, traumatized, hollow-eyed. He knew she was abusing us. He knew she was breaking our toys and our spirits.
I looked at him once, after a particularly bad week, and said, “She’s not a mom. She’s Bonnie. I’m calling her Bonnie.”
He almost knocked my head off. “Don’t you ever call her Bonnie. She is your mother. You do not disrespect your mother.”
This was his fatal flaw. The Old Code. The Godfather Code. Even if the mother is a monster, the title is sacred. He exhorted. He took her abuse—she would scream at him in the driveway, calling him a homosexual, a deadbeat, humiliating him in front of the neighborhood—and he would just take it. He wouldn’t hit back. He wouldn’t defend us. He would just load us into the truck and drive away.
The Cheapskate Adventures
He didn’t save us from the fire, but he gave us the weekends.
He was cheap. He was a millionaire in the making who lived like a pauper. We didn’t go to Disneyland. We went to the weird shit. We went to the “Oldest McDonald’s.” We went to the botanical gardens because they were free. We went to gun shows where we could touch the merchandise. We lived off coupons and Taco Bell.
But it was time. It was oddball, character-driven time. He didn’t drop us off at a play center; he dragged us along on his life.
The Escape and the Abandonment
The end came fast for me. My mother and I got into a fistfight. I had to get out.
My Organic Father—the biological one—stepped in. He spent the $500. He hired the lawyer. He got me emancipated.
I remember sitting in a donut shop with my Organic Dad afterwards. I was free. And I asked him the question that haunts me to this day.
“Can we get Ryan? Can we bring him too?”
My Organic Dad didn’t hesitate. “Hell no.”
Ryan wasn’t his kid. He was Jim’s kid. And his new wife barely wanted me; she certainly didn’t want the flat-headed, feral little brother who didn’t share the bloodline. Legally, he couldn’t take him. Emotionally, he didn’t want to.
The Verdict on Jim
So that leaves Jim. My Stepdad. Ryan’s actual father.
Why did he leave Ryan to rot? Why did he let his own son stay in that house of horrors?
It wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was that he believed he didn’t have the right.
He felt guilty about the affair with Barbara. He felt like the villain for breaking up the family. And because of that guilt, he allowed my mother to hold the moral high ground. He let her keep the house. He let her keep the kids. He believed that the Mother owns the children, even if the Mother is insane.
He was paralyzed by the idea that you “just take the punches.” You let the woman hit you. You let the woman ruin you. You don’t fight back because that’s not what men do.
He was a gladiator in the streets who could fight four cops, but he was a pacifist in the divorce court who couldn’t fight one drunk woman to save his own son.
The Legacy
I escaped because my Organic Dad had the money and the lack of emotional attachment to cut the cord. Ryan didn’t have that option. He was left behind by his own father to pay for his father’s sins.
But despite the beets, despite the scrubbing, despite the abandonment… I loved Jim.
He gave me unconditional love. Not the mushy kind. The “I am here” kind. He never treated me like a stepson. He treated me like his blood, even while he was failing his own.
He wasn’t perfect. He left us in a burning building because he was too polite to break the door down.
But he was a good man. And to a kid who had nothing else, he was a Great Man.
