Prologue
They say the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
It’s what the cops and neighbors say when they’re summoned out to quell the latest hallway fight, the battering, the crashing, the screams.
It’s what the aunts and uncles whisper when called in to help, wanting, of course, to help, just trying to sort out truth from fiction.
It’s what Mother shouts. Mother, working-all-the-time, frustrated, angry, wondering when Daddy will calm down and what’s-wrong-with-all-my-kids. Especially the second one, the one in the middle. She lies.
I’m the one in the middle. The one who lies. It’s what they all say.
This is what I say: Here’s the truth. The truth about neighbors and cops, aunts and uncles, Mother, my siblings, the doctors and the social workers who lied.
Here are the facts about my elderly father, deemed so degenerate that in 2002 a caseworker from his Geri-Psych unit called me, and in sugared tones counseled: “Why don’t you just commit him to Bridgewater State Hospital?”
It’s a prison, in Massachusetts. A barb-wired, strait-jacketed, down-a-black-hole mental health lock-up for male sex offenders. Men who rape. Perverts. Sickos. Monsters.
In 2002 I was his court-appointed guardian. When I asked the caseworker why I should commit my father to Bridgewater State prison, she explained, indignant, that “he’s been grabbing his nurses by the vagina!” That’s why, she declared with force, he should be sent to prison!
A decade and four years later, another old man who grabbed women by the vagina trumped all to become President of these United States. But at the turn of this century, when I was 44 and my pussy-grabbing demented old father – diabetic, bi-polar, brain-damaged, psychotic, a veteran of the World War II naval force – was 75 years old, a social worker told me to send him to prison without delay.
“Has he been charged with a crime?” I asked.
“Well, no.”
“You can’t just put him in jail then. He has rights. Send me a list of locked nursing homes that will take him.”
She did. It was a short list.
But that’s how I found Westside House, an old-soldier’s home stationed on a side street in one of Worcester’s old neighborhoods. They took my father, a sex-offending old sailor not charged with any crime.
I lived 10 miles to the northwest in a small but venerable town called Holden, safe with my gentle spouse Paul Lolax. Our house was in a hidden neighborhood ringed with ancient woods and waterways. It was from this sanctuary that at first I traveled down-state to Brockton and Quincy, and then across Worcester, to care for my father. I spent four years ferrying him down a dark river of civic and familial hell to the end of his life in 2006, when like a pirate cornered he cursed his captors, fought back, and died without surrender.
He died in hospice at Westside House, cursing the nurses who gave him morphine for the pain of a gangrenous leg, and offered food he refused to eat.
“Fuck you!” he would assert when they, as part of their legal obligation to care for him, asked him to eat. He bellowed it out, sitting up from his pillow, during his first days in hospice. In his last days he croaked it out, struggling to raise himself on an elbow to make his point to the paid caregiver who knelt beside his bed.
When he died, all my father left us was a debt. If there was any treasure left among his effects, it was lost, awash in a sea of administrative morass, obfuscation, and theft.
When I told my mother there was nothing left, she told me to prove it. My sisters still argue with me about it, refusing to believe that my father left us nothing but a story.
This is the story. This is the truth about how I took care of my father, the abuser, the monster, the sex offender, and why I offered to do it.
