*Part I of The Dope Letters*
*Part II of the Dope Letters*
However, a few months after my mom’s funeral, my father ambushed me when I stopped by my grandmother’s house. I didn’t even know that he was out of prison. There had been a traitor. Someone had told him I was visiting. When we pulled up, he came running out of the house. Attempted to hug me. I flinched. He tried to touch my stomach—with his dead hand.
When I was 12, my dad’s right hand was mangled in a commercial fishing boat accident, one of the few legitimate jobs he ever held. He chose to keep his hand rather than get a prosthetic. The thumb was cut off, the fingers were fused together at an awkward angle and the hand quickly atrophied. It creeped me out.
As he reached out, I threw my hand over my protruding stomach, jumped back and shook my head no. Emphatically, no. He was not going to infect the perfect creature growing inside me.
I stomped up the steps to my grandmother’s house. Bristling. He followed closely behind.
He asked if he could talk to me—privately.
I sighed in frustration, but jerked my head towards gran’s bedroom, strewn with her ever-present piles of clean laundry. He asked me, “Why do you hate me so much?”
“I don’t even know you. You’ve barely been part of my life, And, let’s face it when you were around it was pretty shitty. You’ve never done anything for me and you don’t just get to decide that you want to be part of it now that I have clawed my way out and put together a pretty good life.”
“Well, Sosh, I was in prison. A lot.”
“Holy sh*t! Is that your excuse? You aren’t Nelson f***ing Mandela! Yep, you’re right. You were in prison. A lot. Let’s see: when I was born, when I graduated high school and when mom died. You were a junkie and a below average drug dealer who got caught. A lot.”
He shook his head, “You and me are a lot more alike than you know.”
I snarled, “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me. We are nothing alike. Not one fucking bit.”
I dismissed him. I concentrated on bringing my baby into the world and shoring up my defenses so that she would never know about monsters like my dad. However, his words, “we are a lot more alike than you know”, would creep out of the dark corners of my mind.
I would grit my teeth and shake my head, assuring myself that he was just a desperate old man who would say anything to get me to pay attention to him.
I ignored him until another death, this one more repulsively unfair than the last, brought us into each other’s orbit again. Two years and 10 days after my mom died, my green-eyed, kind-hearted baby brother died alone on the cold slab of a holding cell of the Bluefield Police Department.
After delivering my brother’s eulogy, my father who blubbered and sniveled a few rows behind where my family sat approached me and said, “What you said up there was beautiful. Just so you know, I wish it had been me, Sosh.”
“Just so you know, so do I, Steve.”
A little less than two months later, my gran called on my 34th birthday. After a few minutes of pleasantries gran assumed her single barrel scotch voice, the one she uses to let you know that she’ll be dropping some knowledge and that you just need to buckle in and shut up.
“Sosh, I’m going to tell you something. You’re not going to like it, but you need to know. Darlin’, you’ve got to forgive your dad. Not for him. For you.
You’re never going to be truly happy until you get rid of this black hate for him. It’s gonna consume you one day. I know you, baby. Better than you think I do and I know that there is a burning anger simmering right under the surface for you.”
“I don’t hate him! I just don’t care about him. I’m indifferent. He’s basically a stranger.”
“Darlin’, we both know that is complete horse sh*t. You’ve hated him all your life. You’ve blamed him for taking your mom from you since you were seven years old. You may not think gran notices things, but I do, Sosh. You always loved your mom so intensely. Even when you said you hated her, you loved her. Craved her. You hated that man from the jump…never mattered to you that he was your daddy. And, as much as you don’t like it, he is your dad. You gotta let it go, baby. You got forgive him before it eats you alive.”
I hung up with her. Hot, angry tears slid down my face and pooled in my cleavage.
Later that day, I wrote him a letter.
He wrote back.
We started a tentative back and forth of mailed letters – the only way he could communicate as an Inmate of Potomac Highlands Regional Jail.
I took note of his grammar and spelling. They were solid from his years of reading one paperback after another.
I had a raging internal debate about sending him our personalized family Christmas card. The Christmas spirit eventually caught up to me and I sent it. He sent me one back – something generic from the commissary. It had a bible verse and a watercolor of the baby Jesus in a manger. We had never attended church.
His letters were filled with guilt and regret. Tremendous, soul-shaking guilt and regret.
The last thing Zack said to me was, Pop, give me $20.00 and I’ll go get us a pizza.
He gave him the $20.00, but the pizza nor his son made it back.
He asked for forgiveness. Asked about Conley.
I swear she looks just like you did at that age. I mean, her hair, even the way she stands. I know she is all of your world.
After a few exchanges, I decided to ask him to take over my mom’s lost project.
Part IV of “The Dope Letters” will be published on January 29, 2019
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
