4:30 a.m. 8/15/73.  I am sleeping restlessly in the first bedroom with my two older brothers, and mother sleeps (also restless) on the living room couch. Father slips through the front door, quiet as a man half his bulk. Mother doesn't wake up until he has already gone to the master bedroom and fetched his gun. When he tries to leave with it she stands between him and the door. I walk out into the living room and stare at him as he pretends to shoot an imaginary man across the room. If anybody tries to stop me, he says (winking, cool, almost intellectual in his detachment) I'll kill them.
  
4:30 a.m. 8/15/73.  I am in the second bedroom alone because my brothers, who silently blame me for everything, have put me there. Mother, sobbing on the living room couch, is too tired to argue with them. We know something bad has happened with father, but only she is certain of what and why. Then he bursts in through the front door, slamming it so hard pictures fall from the walls. He does not see me peeking through the door as he goes into the master bedroom and fetches his gun. I follow him back into the living room, where mother has planted herself between him and the door. He notices me behind him, waves the gun in my direction, and then points it at mother. If anybody tries to stop me, he says (years of hate dripping down his face like sweat) I'll kill them.

4:30 a.m. 8/15/73.  I am in the living room with mother because she is afraid to be alone. My brothers, who silently blame her for everything, will not come near her. She counts on her rosary beads and occasionally clutches them into my hand, trying to get me to count with her. I can only think of father six weeks before, with me in the henhouse at an old country farm, smiling and sneezing and imitating the birds. Then he enters by the front door, grave and stern. He looks at nothing, says nothing to me or mother as he goes to the bedroom to fetch his gun. When he comes back I try to hug him, but he jabs the gun into my shoulder and knocks me back. If anybody tries to stop me, he says (his eyes as uncaring as the eyes of an actor who has played this scene a thousand times before) I'll kill them.

*     *     *

For some morbid reason writers like to talk about their childhood traumas, and this is the kernel of mine. Hours after coming home to fetch his gun my father tried to kill a fellow roofer in Paterson, New Jersey named Walt Suhaka. He was incarcerated at Greystone State Hospital and died quietly at Bergen Pines State Hospital on 1/10/75, after 42 years of unquiet life.

My memories of 8/15/73, like memories of childhood trauma the world over, were immediately and completely repressed. What I have in their place are not true memories but reconstructions of what I believe must have happened. A true memory is a mental photograph, an image burned on the brain electrically that, if tapped, opens the door to other such images. If you ask me to remember the beach at Ogunquit, Maine, dozens of images will make their way into my conscious mind; each of them, if I hold it long enough, will reveal hidden details that my conscious mind could not have remembered. But in recalling the events of 8/15/73, I can only reconstruct incomplete and non-organic images from what I know (or believe) to be the facts. 

There is a major physiological difference between the visual memory and the reconstructed one, not only in their makeup but in the act of their recall. Visual memories arise in the mind random and uninvited, their surprise amplifying their natural sweetness or shock. Reconstructed memories, much more schematic and logical, lack that immediacy and spontaneity; they arrive at your doorstep as romantic and full of joie de vivre as an IRS auditor.

Reconstructed memories are all I have left of my father, and by now fatherlessness seems to me sees a completely natural state. I am sometimes amazed when I meet the fathers of my friends, as if a father were something exotic that only a chosen few had. I have thought much (probably too much) about what having a father means, and the question has defined both my identity and the scope of inquiry as a writer. We are never far away from our childhoods, especially from childhoods that reverberate and grate against us in our everyday lives. 

A decade after 8/15/73, my friend and fellow-writer Geoff confessed to me that he envied me for my father's death. I would always be able to imagine my father the way I wanted him to be, whereas he had a living father whom imagination could not mold. At nineteen this sounded rational, almost desirable. At nineteen we constantly re-invent ourselves, linking back who we are at the moment to who we were in the past, what our parents were in the past. It seemed freeing and advantageous, especially for an aspiring writer, to have a father who existed nowhere but in the mind. 

But by my teenage years my mental father had already become nothing more than the sum of the strongest images of my imagination. My father does not grow or change; he does not learn with age but remains the same thunderclap against the same dark sky. He is static, without present or past. My envied freedom to create a father in my memory became the necessity to create a father in my memory, simply because I had no other. 

Boys seek validation of their own identities in the identities of their fathers; they want to see their own qualities reflected in history, want to be able to say I come from this. But when I felt the need for that personal validation I could not look to my father for it. For each new facet of my self that I needed to amplify or explore, I needed to invent a completely new father. One exemplified intelligence, one strength, one a silent doomed wisdom that only waited for the end. My friends had, in their father's faces, living precedents of male identity against which they could define themselves; for that I envied them far more than they could envy me the false liberation of fatherlessness.

Since my father's face was made of ether and not of stone I was unable to chisel my own visage against his, unable to use him to define myself. I spent all the psychic energy allotted to my father relationship simply trying to fill the void he had left behind. Over the years I invented and emulated dozens of fathers, each of them gross amplifications of one aspect of his personality. He was alcoholic, so I tried to become alcoholic; he was a proletarian leftist, so I became a proletarian leftist; he came from the wrong side of the tracks, so I lived on the wrong side of the tracks to flirt with poverty and violence. My father was like a limb that had been cut off of my body; I remembered it enough to know how it should be used, but could only use it in the world of fantasy.

Though this propensity for the fantasy life caused me more than a little difficulty in social adjustments, it was also responsible for keeping alive my juvenile interest in writing through the young adult years, when many would-be writers abandon the trail in pursuit of more tangible goals. And though American society places a heavy dismissive stigma on those who lose themselves most unproductively in fantasy, I saw no reason to abandon the world of personal myth that had served me so well when I needed to construct a bridge between my father's life and my own. 

This insistence on the mythical in my life causes some friction with my oldest brother Tom, a realist who has at times dismissed my memories of the past as melodramatic. He truly remembers, he tells me. He was 16, and I only 9. He was much closer to the truth while my memories were swayed by outlandish childhood fantasies. Though I have written much about the man who fathered us both--and I say about in the most literal physical sense, in that my writing has spooled around him like string spools around its core--I didn't show this writing to my brother when I was younger because I feared he would immediately dismiss it as false. Dismiss the memories as false, dismiss my literary pursuits as false because they have at their foundation memories he feels are incorrect and unnecessarily operatic.

What my brother failed to realize (and he is not alone) is that the memories of a nine year-old are infinitely more operatic than those of a sixteen year-old. The world of a child is black and white, full of those who love and those who take away their love, full of angels and ogres and hybrid beasts that switch from one pole to another at a moment's notice. The poetic and fantastical memories of the child are infinitely more powerful than those of the young adult who is just beginning to explore his powers of doubt and scrutiny. For the child there is no doubt, no perspective. Events strike the face like a fist; memory speeds to the center of the self and builds its home there, not to be easily dislodged by fact or time or persuasion.

*     *     *

8:30 a.m. 8/18/73.  After three days of complete isolation from the world--no television, no radio, no newspapers, no visits, no phone calls--I am allowed to leave the house and go to my summer saxophone class at the junior high school. I do not know how much my brothers know, but all I have been told is that my father is not coming home soon and that I must ignore what other people say about him. 

Mark Berman, who has always hated my entire family, starts chasing me a block from the school and catches me when I reach the flagpole. Not big or brave enough to knock my body down, he instead knocks my music books to the asphalt and yells at me: YOUR FATHER IS A MURDERER! The words find a home in my stomach, and though I will learn later in the day that they are untrue, I am still unable to eat.

Originally published in the journal Knot, Boulder, Colorado, 1996.