Kill Your Dad For Lent

We are culturally Jewish if religious unbelievers. Lent is not our thing. But the idea of killing for spiritual sacrifice has such emotional resonance.

On the day that changes my life forever with the magical, Oedipal gift of Mom being mine alone, our dad Adam arrives breathless after his drive from the Hill Country ranch he is building. Adam always drives like a bat out of hell. He says he once comes in third in the Mexican Grand Prix. He tells us seat belts are dangerous. He is a car screamer. I forget which half brother utters his first words, moyah hoyah, an attempt at mother fucker, the words we all hear most often in the car from our father.

Adam does not have to be in the car to scream. When we live on one of his ranches I get up to catch the school bus very early, so I usually cook my own breakfast. Often he will be up early as well, on the phone with some of his mysterious (Palestinian?) business associates. One morning he is screaming on the phone in the kitchen. I creep in to fry up some eggs. I must stop to think before acting: If I crack the eggs against the side of the pan it could make the pan clatter loudly on the burner. But if I crack them on the counter I might drip some of the egg whites. I choose the latter plan, resigned to my fate as he takes time away from screaming on the phone to scream at me that I am a fucking, cocksucking idiot, why is it I cannot see I am dripping fucking egg all over the goddamned kitchen, and what the fuck do I think I am doing. He does not hit me. He rarely does, maybe only three or four major times in my life, but I always think he will.

On the night of the Demented Inner Child Oedipal wish coming true Mom and Dad say they need to talk to us because Aaron, the middle brother, met a woman on a Greyhound bus while traveling from Austin to see our grandmother in San Antonio. He returns to Austin that afternoon, telling Mom about the woman he meets, and in turn, Mom calls her ex, my father, the one who will die for Lent. The stupid, unbelievably coincidental way it happens is that Aaron and the woman on the bus are chattering away when she apparently realizes she knows him, met him as a baby, because she is a former friend of his mother, Helen. My mother is named Sally, Aaron says. Not Sally, says the woman, You know, your real mother, Helen. You cannot make this shit up. The meeting is totally by chance. Adam is in his best, most genuine, most concerned mode, explaining how their mother, the other mother, the mother who makes my mother mine alone, is sick, and that he and my mother spent two and a half years in Mexico so my (half) brothers will be safe. Huh? I knew there is more to this story. But Adam just assures my brothers (again: half brothers!) over and over that they are loved, and that my mother is still their mother, while inside I scream with glee: No she is not! No she is not!

Finding out she is mine gives me hope. Adam will not let me live with her but since she now belongs only to me it seems destined that we will one day be reunited. The fact that I often see her on weekends and summers makes no impression on the drama of my longing for her. It is always as if I have not seen her in years. When Adam first moves us to Texas from New Mexico I am only six and I do not know where my mother is for a whole year. That is exactly how I remember it and how it feels. It has been pointed out to me many times that this is patently untrue. I only go a few months without seeing her. I am told all the time when I ask that she will be moving to Texas and I will see her soon. I do not remember that. She is missing. Stolen. I am kidnapped.

I never will know exactly how Adam got me away from Mom. The law is not a consideration in our numerous households. Ever. He just does what he wants, teaching us a deep disrespect for any form of authority and encouraging a disorienting kind of lawlessness that makes no sense, since when we live with him it is like being in the military. His rules are seemingly ironclad but they change according to his mood. In the guise of celebrating the last dregs of some variant of Flower Power we live under a reign as paranoid as anything Nixon or Bush II could think up. I am a political prisoner without a political cause. Occasionally, like when I am eight and our dad inexplicably keeps us cooped up at the Palace of Caesar in Las Vegas for three whole months, I up my classification to concentration camp victim. Nazi Germany and three months in Vegas. Before they died Susan Sontag or Hannah Arendt should have written about how similar the two experiences can be.