Joe Rappise......

The hatred I had for my father growing up was unintentionally installed by my mother at a very young age. It wasn’t her fault. She did her best to raise me with absolutely no help from him. To this day he still has never paid my mother a dime of child support for the years he was never in my life.

It was Christmas 1978 I believe... I spent most of my Christmas' at my real father Joes parents house in Garfield NJ, which is where I spent weekends when I didn’t go to Woodstock with my mom. The guilt my real fathers parents carried because their son was a deadbeat dad / raging alcoholic must have been a heavy one. I woke up while it was still dark out in hopes of catching Santa eating the cookies I had left out the night before. I ran down the hall and woke up my grandma Agnes, with grandpa Jim slowly following behind her. As aggie lit up a Marlboro 100 grandpa grabbed a wrapped box from under the tree and brought it over to me. It was wrapped in gold and red patterned wrapping paper and had a big green bow on it. The tiny folding card taped to the box said, "open me first!!"... I remember the pattern of the wrapping paper oddly matching the dark yellow (or maze if you will) rug and the green plaid couch covered in plastic.... As I ripped away at the box with a big smile on my face I looked up at my grandparents. They were both smiling nervously and looking at me in eager anticipation of my reaction, Aggie smiling with smoke coming out of her nose like an old Italian dragon…

As I ripped away the carpet paper I saw the words “POLAROID” across the box. My eyes lit up like I just did a huge shot of pure coke and my mouth dropped so far that I almost got cigarette ashes on my tongue from the ash tray on the kitchen table...... The card on the inside said "TO MY SON....LOVE DAD...I MISS YOU!!"...... I knew my mom was wrong!!! All those years of calling him every name in the book under her breath as she worked two jobs and went to night school to give me a better life, I knew she was wrong about my dad! Maybe all the child support checks she never got were just going to the wrong address? Maybe he had the wrong number when he tried to call on my birthday? Every.....Year.....Aaaanyway...

I was more excited to get this shitty Polaroid camera from my father than I was to get the huffy with the big number 59 in the middle of the frame. I took pictures with Aggie and Jim and they said they would send them to him.. I quickly changed out of my one piece green Whinnie the Pooh footy pajamas, and changed into my church outfit. We took pictures to send to dad in wherever the fuck he was shoveling cow shit that month for beer money.

I wondered why he never called or why I could never call him to thank him.... A year or so after that me and my mom were walking through the Paramus Park mall and we walked past a shoe store. My mom started laughing and said, "hey...you want to see your father?" And low and behold there he was in a cheap blazer jacket on one knee measuring some old mans foot just like Al Bundy.... The fraction of that memory that I have in my brain from that day is my mom laughing under her breath as we were leaving the store. I love my moms laugh….. She has the cutest snicker..... Every time I cry when writing I think that maybe I wasn’t ready to write this certain passage....but I guess its better than sitting here saying I don't give a shit when it is very obvious that I do. And it only took me about eight or nine years to have the revelation that my grandparents bought that camera and signed my “fathers” name..... Not him…..

So apparently Joe was back in town for a while…. I can only assume now that the reason they were hiding him from me was just to keep some sort of decent memory of him for me while I was still impressionable.

It turns out that being a parent to him was taking me on a beer run… Come to think of it, I believe that was my first trial run at lying and being deceitful. After our father son time walk to Foodtown to get a bag of chips and a six pack of Strohs beer. While grandma went to get her hair done and grandpa tooled around town in his little blue car looking for broken televisions on the side of the road he could fix in the basement. The whole way back telling me not to tell grandma where we went or he would get in trouble…. Even at that age I knew he was too damn old to be talking like that, that was the kind of shit I said… and I was nine.

He hid the beer behind the iceburg lettuce under the bag of tomatoes in the crisper, inside the big white metal refrigerator smothered in family pictures…. With only one of him when he was in the Marines, thank god I didn’t get his ears.... We sat on the couch and watched game shows. I didn’t know my father was an alcoholic. I didn’t even know what an alcoholic was, I was very young. But I was old enough to know that what he was doing was bad enough for him to have to hide it. Making me get him a beer every twenty minutes or so until he fell asleep in the chair.

When my grandmother came home you could see in her face that the house smelled different. She went right to the fridge and started snooping around until she found the last beer under the bag of tomatoes. I was terrified that she would ask me what happened, and when she did I told her we went to the store, but I didn’t remember daddy getting any beer. It was one of the first lies I ever told.

Grandma walked into the living room as he snored on the green plaid couch at three in the afternoon whistling beer fumes out of his nose for the whole block to smell. I quickly sensed something was wrong and went into the attic to play with my G.I. Joe’s.

My father was a horrible drunk. He was always gone so I never really witnessed it, but the few times he actually did come home I remember. One 4^th of July in uncle sonny’s back yard, he got so excited when they brought out the Coor’s beer ball. You could the mood in the family air go from happy barbecue funtime to “oh fuck…Joe’s drinking”.

These were my first real experiences being around my real dad, he left when I was two and I was about nine at the time of his return. Being rushed into the back seat of my cousin Donnas car as we sped off to go see the fireworks. Right before we pulled off he kicked open the screen door screaming and slurring because we were leaving without him. Donna’s eyes in the rear view mirror as she stared back at me will be forever burned into my brain. I wasn’t supposed to see that….

It was in that same patch of time that I remember him living in the back garage at uncle sonny’s place, I’m pretty sure that’s where it was anyway.

Dad was at “work”. I don’t really know what that was, But I remember a girl there with longish kind of curly dirty blonde hair and glasses… I’m pretty sure it was his girlfriend. She was vacuuming the house naked and dancing around. She told me to get naked as well. So there we were, dancing around naked in the house together while she vacuumed the rug. Laughing and carrying on… I was having a really fun time.

She ran over my big toe with the vacuum and it started gushing blood. While I sat on the counter not knowing being naked with this woman was wrong. I kind of figured it out though when my dad walked in and she was putting a band aid on my foot completely naked. I don’t remember anything else about that part of him being in my life, so I’m guessing he disappeared soon after all that went down. Because I didn’t see him again for years and years.. not a letter, word, or phone call... and definitely no checks.