Real blog false memories

He’s been dead f******n years. It doesn’t get easier. Over time you forget a person’s failures and only remember the sound of their voice. Especially if they are laughing. The sound of my father’s laughter will always be with me. He is still around. You can feel him sometimes. No one warns you that the dead can visit. No one warns you that you can create a false memory. That is where I am shaken.

I created fiction to cover up the horror. I had to break my mother’s heart and she had to break mine. On car rides we talk about what we lived through. It is hard to imagine we made it. She misses him so much even though the cancer made him insane. She recently found out he gave her HPV and she could die of cervical cancer. It soul crushed her. They married before her senior prom and no other man had her.

I told her once he was sleeping with the servers where we worked. With tears streaming down her face she asked me if I was positive. It hurt me to tell her yes. Missy was her name. I knew she was fucking him by the way she wept his last day of work with a death sentence. My momma didn’t cry for him like that. Maybe she should’ve. Over the years he got cruel and mean. She was ready to divorce him weeks before we found out he had pancreatic cancer. She wouldn’t leave a dying man. She probably fucked him one last time and got missy’s STD. His affair could kill her. Then she had to break my heart. She didn’t do it on purpose.

Some things are too painful to remember. The year he was dying was too brutal for words. All he did was shit and spray peach air freshener. I graduated and he lasted a whole summer. I blocked most of it out. He would scream in pain. His agony made me hate God. He was no good father but watching him die like that made me lose my religion. By the summer he looked 85 not 50. He was a carcass.

I blocked out what I did for him. I loved him so much. He wouldn’t say the words to me but I told him I loved him over and over. My mom was working that night as a nurse. They were so understaffed she couldn’t leave even though I called her and begged her to come home. I thought he overdosed on purpose. I kept my hand on his pulse and watched his chest rise and fall. I kept his airway open and I called my mom and begged her with all my heart and soul to let me call an ambulance. She refused. I hated her that night. She had her reasons. There was heroin, crack, meth, d**g needles and oxy s**ttered all over the place.

She tried to calm me down and told me she couldn’t take care of me if the paramedics saw what was in her house. She called my brother. I don’t even remember him being there. We must have both sat on his bed fighting back the tears. I hate my brother for so many reasons. He left me there alone to go home and sleep. Even my mom knows that act of cruelty is something we can’t erase. My dad loved my brother and he hated me. When my brother left I was holding his head upright while I bawled that the man dying in my lap loved the wrong damn k**.

It was even more grotesque. My dad had just had surgery to unblock his stints and the blood just gushed out of him. I remember pressing towels on the wound and getting covered in blood. Would you leave your little sister surrounded by d**gs covered in your dying father’s blood? His whole body was shutting down and he just started leaking shit that was truly a part of his flesh. I will never forget the stench of death shits and blood. I blocked it all out.

My mother nearly soul crushed me when she told me I spent that last night at home with him trying to keep him alive. She told me brother left me there to do it alone. I wept as the memory came flooding back. I had no memory of that night with him. I only remembered my mom coming home. She told me he was in a c*** and I have spent all these years with the visual of an ambulance pulling in our back driveway. I didn’t think a mind could provide such relief.

I remember the paramedics. I remember him wheeled to the ambulance. It wasn’t real. There was no ambulance. My brother didn’t even come to help. He barely weighed a hundred pounds. He was like a bag of sticks leaking blood and shit all over us. We had to wrestle his lifeless body into the car. I sat in the backseat and kept his chin lifted the whole way to the VA. I had no memory of being there.

My mom made my brother drive us home because I didn’t sleep all night and I was covered in shit and blood. My mom was so embarrassed. She is a damn good nurse but he had such bad bed sores they couldn’t give him medicine through an enema and she felt such guilt. She refused to let them put a tube down his throat because she knew how painful it was. We thought he had hours to live.

My grandma was grieving so bad looking at her made me cry. When I got home my dad’s best friend was in the yard. Anger saves me sometimes. I confronted him with some weird sense of urgency. I asked him what the fuck d**gs was my dad using. His answer was everything. Heroin, crack, meth, but he relied on pot. I asked him if he shot up and he said yes. I can be a cruel bitch. He was my father’s best friend. I told him my dad’s little d**g habit ruined my life. I told him I would kill his ass if he showed up at the hospital, the funeral or my damn yard ever again.

I laughed at him when he asked if he could get his tools. I told him to take his junkie ass out of my yard before I beat him bloody. I was serious. The idea of my dad shooting heroin and crack made me homicidal. His d**g buddies were on my hit list. My brother has no soul but he was even pissed that junkie told me what he did. I was in a rage. I was also exhausted. I also didn’t want to be at the hospital when the fucker died. I took an oxy and went to bed. It saved my life. It saved my grandma’s life.

I did drag myself to the hospital to be with my grandma. My mom and my brother left. I offered to drive her home so she could be with my dad longer. They got in a major car crash on the way home from the hospital. A drunk driver flew through a light and he truly ripped the car in half. I saw pictures. No one in that backseat would have survived.

I had been dating the man I planned to marry two years. Our house was so dangerous he moved in. My dad was such an asshole he wouldn’t let him sleep in my bed and tim slept on a futon in my attic. I have told this story before. It is one of the highlights of bullshit mountain. My dad lasted five days in a c***. When my uncle went to visit him and saw what he became he passed out. I couldn’t look at him. It was this strange living dead combination. I spent five days of purgatory in the hospital waiting room.

Tim was no man. He didn’t visit once. He had already found my replacement. We truly planned a life together. We signed up to go to the same college. Time stopped at six am. Two things happened. The phone started ringing and the alarm went off for our first day of college. I answered the phone and got the news he finally died. I told tim nothing would make us miss our first day of college together. I wasn’t sad. I was at peace. We had one day of college as a couple.

My mom didn’t want the whole damn family to swarm our house. She buried him the day after he died. It was kind of cruel but it was the only way we could cope. While tim was out drinking with my replacement I did something beautiful. I poured through old photo albums and blew up pictures to put on poster boards so you could see his whole damn life on display. I loved him that much. My daddy wasn’t going to be a cremated corpse with nothing to look at but a podium.

My mom picked the music. She was heartbroken. She loved him so much all she wanted to hear played at his reception was soothing irish mourning hymns he would’ve hated. I knew I was losing tim. I was so scared I asked him not to leave me until after the funeral. He showed up in the suit he wore to prom. I wore the yellow dress I bought for my honor’s banquet my senior year. My dad broke me that night when he refused a father daughter dance. I knew he would never dance with me at my wedding. I didn’t realize he would reject me at my own banquet. I wore that dress in revenge and I looked gorgeous.

My cousin thought I ate an overdose of Xanax I was so calm. I was as sober as a jaybird. I was happy. I knew he wasn’t suffering anymore. I didn’t shed a tear. My millionaire uncle gave the eulogy and damn could he speak. He told stories about my dad in basic training that made me love him. I also realized why that rich man let our family live in poverty. He was jealous of my father. People liked him. He made people laugh. He was skilled at so many things. He also had a son that wasn’t schizophrenic and a daughter so damn smart she scored off the charts. He was jealous of our little family. That is why he wanted us to crumble. He wanted to see my dad break.

I could tell it by the way he gave the eulogy. It gave me closure. All those years I wondered how on earth someone could buy a town and not give their sister more than five hundred bucks for groceries. My dad went insane. But before the cancer and d**gs ate his brain he was brilliant and he was always laughing. We were in the parking lot when tim busted out with the classic lie ‘I have to go home and study for my astronomy class.’ We went to college one day. He didn’t have no fucking homework. He needed to get drunk. I was content and at ease and he needed jack daniels.

You would’ve thought he sat through his own dad’s memorial. The irony is he tells my cousins I am the reason he is an alcoholic. It’s bullshit. He was drunk and I kept him sober two years. At the same time he’s right. After that summer living with my dying father he needed alcohol more than food. I’m not exaggerating. He drank so much he became a brittle diabetic that ate a salad every night so he could overdose on insulin and get drunk. I didn’t need him anymore. I didn’t even bitch at him.

I made the stupid mistake of getting in a car with my mother and brother. My mom had no choice but to buy a new car when hers was totaled. All I said was at least we can clean the garage out so mom can have a nice place to park the new car. My brother is a psychopath. He lost it. His tirade about everything in the shop being his property shocked me. He told me he would fuck me up if I touched one of his things. Then just because he could he had to tell me ‘dad never loved you at all. He wouldn’t want you to own any of his things.’ My mom was too beaten down to defend me. She didn’t even reprimand my brother. She just said ‘no more fighting.’

That’s what made me cry. My brother was allowed to say that to me on the way home from the funeral. I ate an oxy and went to bed. I am deviant. The night he went to the hospital I raided the secret lair in his shop. I inherited so much porn it filled a truck bed. I inherited a tackle box of d**g paraphanalia. I inherited an once of pot and my dad’s homemade pipe. I took the five dollar bill out of his wallet and I still have it. He did make me pay him a grand to keep his most cherished possessions. It was money well spent. He didn’t love me but I loved him and I wanted the artifacts he brought home from Vietnam.

I have blogged about this before but the final insult happened day three and four after the funeral. Me. my mom and my grandma went to Atlanta on vacation. While I was gone tim smoked my dead dad’s pot with my replacement. He ripped out every porn centerfold and collaged everything in eighties pussy. He still loved me but he loved my replacement and she let him drink. He bounced between us almost a full week. We both contemplated double suicide with a loaded pistol. I was ready.

Luckily I met up with the girl jen who taught me how to use hot rollers and I moved her in my dad’s old room. We were such a pair. We did have the time of our lives. He fucked me one last time. He called me when I was at jen’s house. He had to tell me the night before he had our friend tell him he was blacked out at a bar fucking sherry. I puked in her yard. It was payback. I drove to where I knew he would be. He probably expected tears. I threw a wicked ass punch and busted his damn lip wide open. He was stunned. Years later when we got back together he told me no other chick ever came close to a punch that hardcore.

Then jen and I went to Walmart and bought the biggest plastic boxes we could fit in her Saturn. We went to his house which was really a three story tower he built just for me. His dad tried to stop us at the gate. I scare people. I told him he wasn’t getting my dad’s shit. I told him he doesn’t have anything I want. I dared him to stop me. I let him know I kept his son sober for two years and he could call the damn police or just deal with me getting my shit. It was hilarious. It must have taken us thirty minutes to haul that much porn into her Saturn. His dad was such a dick he stood there watching like he was getting off on it. I had to leave him some porn because the Saturn was so full we couldn’t see out the back window.

Then I had my real revenge. I ripped down every single centerfold. He was not getting one image of my dad’s pussy collection. We had a song. Lynard skynard’s Tuesday’s gone. It still breaks me to hear it. I grabbed a marker and wrote ‘Tuesdays gone with the wind’ covering the whole damn wall. The pot was miraculous. I never took another oxy except for times of extreme pain.

I nearly broke my ankle once and my mom sent me to school so loaded on oxy I drooled. She had her accidents. One time she fell off our front porch and bent both her legs in ways I can’t fathom. She was loaded on oxy for weeks. We both bust our ass in the shower. Those were oxy moments. But I never took the d**g to extinguish mental pain. I used pot instead. I had some amazing adventures.

I still have to describe the house of syn. Writing is therapy. When I told Jaime what really happened the night my dad went comatose those feelings of horror escalated and I am still so shocked by my distinct visual of the ambulance. I know my replacement spent eight years with an alcoholic that treated her like shit. She met an old friend on facebook. He used to have a major crush on me. They got married and they have two precious k**s. We became good friends. Karma is a bitch though.

Her husband fell in love with my writing and was one of my biggest fans. I visited once and he gave me a hoard of comic books. I accidentally stuck his pot pipe in my purse and I had to meet up with him to return it. She was nice about it but she asked me not to be around her husband if she wasn't home. But the girl that smoked my dead dad’s pot has to deal with her husband’s fascination with me.

I know what it is. I am just like my father. I’m always laughing and making other people laugh. It was torture to remember trying to keep him alive when my brother wouldn’t stay. If there is a way for a father to see his grown c***d he watches me and loves me for the woman I became. Even on that awful car ride the only rational my mom could give for my dad’s abuse was that I was too much like him. I was his little female equivalent.

He died too early to see me follow in his footsteps. I know he would adore my art. I discussed my artist signature with my mom. She told me how much it meant to my dad that we had the same initials. She loved the way he simply wrote lem instead of a signature. I inherited his skills and I am the c***d that will give him a legacy. When I was looking for that picture of me in the safari dress I found one of my dad’s love letters to my mom from Vietnam.

I could have cried. There were those three lower case letters that he gave me. It was worth remembering that night feeling his pulse and covering towels in blood and shit to know I was the c***d that loved him the most. My brother never took a damn thing out of that shop. He can’t use tools. My mom keeps the lawn mower there and we collect cool tin signs to hang on the wall.

Whenever I need to release tension I go into my dad’s back room. There isn’t much left. I usually go for the handcrafted toy box my brother left behind. I open it up and pick out something like a star wars toy and pitch it in the creek behind our house. I’m saving his sacred valuable Charlie brown lunch box for a special occasion. It will end up in the creek. I don’t care if it’s worth five hundred dollars. If it belonged to my brother or my father it belongs in the damn creek.

I will sign my name just like he did. That is my revenge. My brother became a nurse. my father despised my mom when she became a nurse. He would despise his son for making the same mistake. I may not be an angel. But I fought hard to save a man that abused me a lifetime. I’m proud I kept him breathing all night. I’m proud I got him in the car carrying him like a baby. I was a great goddamn daughter. Sometimes you have to let the false memories fade away so you can know your own strength. I made it. I flourished. The people who hurt me suffered. I found my faith in God. He never abandoned me. He just made me the strongest woman he could create in a way that leaves me speechless. Welcome to bullshit mountain.