My Father and I

Since my own awakening I have been moving closer and closer to making sure that my father knew that I had truly forgiven him for what I remembered as the traumatic abuses of my childhood. One night a few weeks ago I called him and we talked and I think he really heard me for the first time…and it shook him. The next night he called me. And the story he had to tell was so brave of him and so beautiful that I felt it ought to be included here. Of course, there’s quite a bit of preamble before we get to the actual story, so please allow me to amble for a bit.

Apparently there were three brothers who came to San Francisco from Boston; Bill, Frank and Steve. Bill died when a house fell on him…and I was named for him. My grandfather, Francis Anthony Costello, was a charter member of the San Francisco Press Club. He was one of the reporters who covered the San Francisco earthquake. He later worked nights in a law office to study for the Bar Exam and eventually became a lawyer. Rumor has it he was a famous blind lawyer for many years.

I probably only met him two or three times. I remember a smart collie named Prince that served as his guide. And I remember he used to sit and listen to baseball on the radio (My Grandfather, not Prince.) Mostly, we kids were warned off. I don’t remember if he ever spoke to me or if he even knew who I was. I was maybe six or so.

I don’t remember Gram at this point. I remember her from much later after Grandpa died.

(I also remember my cousins Peg and Mary from this period. They were older, so we expected them to be snooty but they were so kind to us that I remained impressed for all of my life. The two girls were just incredibly gracious. They also seemed to be having such infectious fun between the two of them.)

Our family lived up in the San Francisco area (I was born in San Mateo) and we lived in Oakland until moving to Bell Gardens when I was in the third grade. As a result, we also felt like black sheep and were sort of removed from the San Francisco Costello’s. That is, we didn’t really get to know any of them very well.

Although I have many vivid memories of time spent with my mother’s parents when I was around 5, I have great chunks of memory missing from my childhood. I remember Bell Gardens just a bit. I remember what the little house looked like; white with blue trim surrounded by a bush that was known to have poisonous spiky berries. I got my appendix removed when we lived in that house.

I don’t really remember my father or any interaction between the two of us until we lived in that house. I just remember him spanking us (mostly me) fairly regularly,

There was one other incident that took place there. A couple came to visit us but I don’t know who they were. I don’t remember anyone else ever being in that house except this couple. They were on their way back from Tijuana because they had various tourist souvenirs including this big sombrero.

For some reason this couple paid a good deal of attention to me…and I was so terribly starved for attention. It was as though I really had no human contact ever. These people actually talked to me. It was so incredible and I felt so flush with the emotions that flooded through me.

In the midst of all this intoxicating attention, I simply had to find a way to keep them with me in some way. Not knowing better, I asked them for the sombrero. My parents were mortified and started to explain how utterly inappropriate I had been; how this was so rude and so terrible. Of course I was embarrassed beyond words, especially since I committed this great social blunder against these people who now meant so much to me. The internal pain was excruciating; that awful twisting in my gut. I should remember whether it was my mother or father who had been explaining the magnitude of my social thoughtlessness but maybe it was both.

I never really got over that; my first experience of how utterly painful embarrassment could be.

My real relationship with my Dad started after we moved from Bell Gardens to the brand, new 4-bedroom house on Beckner Street in La Puente where I grew up.

I would get home from school and try to spend time avoiding him. In a sense, it was like coming home and locking yourself into the tiger’s den. The tiger could be aroused to great violence at any time for any reason. He’d sit at the end of the dining room table and I’d wait to see how long it took before there was a beer in front of him. Once he started drinking it seemed like just a matter of time. I’d get whipped with his Marine Corps belt (like a razor strop) about three or four days a week. I could be exaggerating. The truth is long gone. There is only what “seemed to be”. We rewrite history with our pain.

I do remember one afternoon when I was maybe nine or so. Dad was well on his way to being plastered and he started this monologue. “I could have been somebody if it wasn’t for you. I could have made something of my life, but then you came along,” he droned. And then came the killer, “I wish you’d never been born.”

Yeah, I knew he was drunk. And in my heart I knew there was something “wrong” with him. But still, those words cut me to the quick. I had heard many variations over the years I suppose but they were never spoken with such intensity and malice.

It could have been that the start of my dismantling had been growing all along and it merely became cemented at this time. I had been so entirely neglected for so long before that afternoon. I seemed to have grown up feeling as though everyone else had a right to be here except for me. They had a right to breathe air that I really had no right to. For some reason, I didn’t deserve to exist. I grew up feeling “unloved and unlovable.”

These feelings could have been instilled all along or they could have all come from that afternoon. Also, I may have been merely seven that day and not 8 or 9. It’s so hard to know. It may have been (for all I know) the very first time that my father actually talked to me as if I were a person.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but Dad seemed to start talking to me a lot, mostly about how stupid I was. He seldom missed an opportunity to berate me in one way or another. It still seemed as if I’d get whipped three or four times a week. He’d slip up occasionally and grant that I did have a certain kind of intelligence, but absolutely no common sense, which of course he had in abundance. He just never let up and I of course was never allowed to speak.

He taught me to play chess but after the fourth or fifth game he couldn’t beat me anymore so we stopped playing chess.

I was often amazed at how this monster could sit beside his record player and listen to music with tears streaming down his face. How could he conjure up such sublime sensitivity from such cruelty and hatred? But somehow he passed his love of music down to me. I grew up on Erico Caruso, Mario Lanza, Phil Harris, Sinatra, Guy Mitchell, Eddie Cantor, The Andrew Sisters, The Mills Brothers and so many others.

When I was ten or twelve, his whippings turned into beatings where he’d beat me with his fists. I’d slump down into a corner of the room and he’d stand above me and work me over with his steel-toed work boots. Is this all true? It is exactly how I remembered it. But I also know how easily perception of the past gets flawed.

I do remember feeling what I perceived as having cracked ribs but he never did the kind of damage that would call attention to me, just bruised shins and sides. He never burnt me or anything too crazy like that.

There was actually a certain benefit to all those beatings I took. That is, I also became fairly adept at avoiding serious injury. I was very quick to cover and protect. My reactions were very fast and I could absorb a good deal of pain…all of which served me well over the next few years. Odd how I can justify that those beatings actually worked on my behalf but they made me stronger.

As I look back on it now, I have to consider the following. I don’t remember being bloodied. I was never in the hospital. I never had any broken bones. He must have out weighed me by 50 or 60 pounds. How was it that was never really hurt?

I was the second largest guy in my eighth grade class…and I was tough.

When I was 14, I was a varsity football player and a member of the varsity wrestling team. The following year at fifteen I was the San Gabriel Valley wrestling champion and life at home was intolerable.

It came to a head one night. Dad had me up against a wall in the living room, beating me with his fists and I’m just letting him beat on me. And then he says, “Don’t try any of that wrestling crap on me.” And I had to wonder. At this point he’s hardly doing any damage at all, but why should I just stand there and let him wail away on me? So I grabbed him, took him down, wrapped him up with one arm and drew back my fist. He was completely at my mercy in less than ten seconds. His face looked up at me with such panic and fear.

I could have messed up his face so badly. Mom was screaming in the background.

But I just couldn’t do it.

I left home that night and didn’t return for more than ten years. During that next ten years, particularly during my days in the Marine Corps, I would lie awake at night and spend time simply hating my father. It was almost as though I set aside time to actively hate him. It was downright weird. My jaws and fists were clenched and I just hated him…for all the pain and misery he caused me for all those wasted, cruel, tormenting, brutal years.

After Vietnam, after college, Himself (my first spiritual teacher) gave me an assignment to go visit my parents…if for no other reason than that this was something my Ego would least like to do. I approached the door on Beckner St. with great nervousness. Dad sat at the far end of the dining room table facing me with my back to the living room. Dad didn’t recognize me so Mom stepped in to introduce me. But nothing really happened that day. The old hatred was still around but mostly dissipated.

Actually, during my work with Nita, I came to feel as though my Dad wasn’t really as bad as I made him out. Lots of fathers beat their kids. I also felt that I was a unique and strong individual. That I was a sword that had been tempered in the fire and that I wouldn’t maybe have been that guy who won the Silver Star that day had I not “gone through the fire”.

Also, I had heard rumors of how my father was sent to religious boarding schools where he was whipped repeatedly by Franciscan brothers; whipped with ropes while tied across a rack. Rumors.

And more rumors about getting an extra check in the mail from the VA for being “shell-shocked” as a Marine at Guadalcanal. That is, he probably had a taste of the same PTSD that I was diagnosed with just a few years ago. No, I don’t really know anything concrete; just rumors.

The thing is, between the various things I learned about his life, I got to feeling that he never really matured beyond a certain age. That the damage visited upon him was far worse than my own.

I came to feel that Dad did the very best that he could with what he had to work with. The day he told me that he wished I’d never been born, he was sitting there with hardly any education, no career to look forward to except manual labor and three kids in the house…and drunk (which didn’t help matters much.)

I’d stop around once every couple of years over the next ten or twelve. There was even a time after I moved back to Los Angeles that I moved in to their guest bedroom for a couple of weeks.

After I married Teri and Chime got a little older, she had a certain need for family and we would drive the 25 miles from Eagle Rock out to the Glendora trailer park where the family would gather. Pretty much it was Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas…with another weekend or two thrown in.

I didn’t allow any of the old hurt or hatred to surface, but it would certainly gall me to see how easily Chime got along with her new Grandpa when she and I had such a difficult time together.
Of course time had turned the old tiger into a toothless tabby and he’d still get drunk enough to embarrass everyone occasionally. But there was never any attempt at violence.

And that’s pretty much how things were. We’d still see each other occasionally through my time in the psych ward and during my divorce. Mom and Dad were both supportive of my moving to Hawaii, although I was surprised to see from the look on his face that Dad was sincerely going to miss me.

After my awakening I knew that I couldn’t hold on to any shred of those old resentments and I started finding ways to let him know I’d forgiven him without actually saying it. I think that if I actually said that I was forgiving that we’d have to address the past and might embarrass him.

But I actually got around to saying it about a month ago; that I wasn’t holding on to anything and that I truly loved him. He thanked me and told me that he loved me too, but I could tell that there was something else. He rang off, obviously shaken.

The very next night he called me saying that he needed to talk. He told me that he had done something to get himself convicted to a child detention facility and his father ended up having to take him there. It was on the way back that the train was in the accident that blinded his father. So not only did he feel that he had blinded his father, the rest of the family was made to feel that way too, mostly at Gram’s direction. According to Dad, Gram would hit him every time he entered the room.

When he was released from the correctional facility, Gram paid for local thugs to come over and beat him up on a regular basis. I’m serious. Gram paid for regular sessions where grown men would come over to the house and give Dad a beating.

Dad was very near tears as he told me this story. And then he told me how sorry he was that he had let his violence cause him to hurt me so much.

I don’t think I’d ever heard words so brave and courageous and sincere.

I let him know that it didn’t matter anymore and that I truly loved him.

I called him again last night to ask if I could tell this story and he readily agreed. And then he added something maybe almost as beautiful.

He said, “I started out real bad, but I kept getting better.” And he was so right. He really did just keep getting better. Most people just keep getting worse.

Imagine what a beautiful world it would be if everyone started where they were but just kept getting better.

You done good, Dad. You done real good. And I love you deeply.


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You might note how my earlier writings on cancer being such a blessing. Although all hostility and resentment had been eradicated from our relationship, the final chapter in our saga didn’t have time to play itself out until just a month or so ago. I’d have never gotten to the end of his story…nor truly finished my own.

If you and your father or mother or son is in similar circumstances, find a way to talk. Get the unfinished business resolved.

This is the blessing of cancer: time.