My Dad

I found his Merchant Marine cap in the closet today. It’s always been with me through storms, dead calm, confusion. He was more than anyone could ask for and then some. He made my Mother the happiest woman alive, which would have been enough, but he loved me, too. He became my Dad when he married Mom. I was 18 and had a son of my own, but I was his daughter.

I knew this man since I was two. He, his wife and son lived across the street. He was so big – a gargantuan 6’4” 250lb. former football player. To me he was always larger than life. He had a powder blue 1957 Thunderbird in his driveway, a built-in swimming pool in his back yard and air conditioning in his house. These were rarities in our 1959 New Jersey suburban neighborhood.

We all wound up there from various cities. We were from Newark and he was from New York although he was born and raised in Superior, Wisconsin. That would become fodder for many jokes after he and Mom married.

I remember him teaching me how to throw M80s into his pool. Not today’s version of a legal firework, but the ones that contained roughly 2,916 milligrams of a pyrotechnic explosive. I swung my five-year-old arm back with this hissing, burning mini-bomb in my hand and dropped it on his foot. In one fell swoop, he jumped up, grabbed me and jumped into the pool just as the explosion sent the leg of a redwood deck chair soaring over the fence.

His son was the same age as my big brother and they played baseball at the bottom of the hill where Saw Mill Drive and Arden Court met. They would let me play outfield once in a while with my tiny glove.

This larger-than-life man cried like a child when my brother was killed in a horrific auto accident at 17.

Oh, yeah, he was an alcoholic. He wasn’t a mean-spirited, abusive alcoholic. His alcoholic antics kept us laughing for years. One Christmas he decided to decorate his roof with sparkling garland and lights in the spirit of the season. I came home from grammar school and asked my Mom, “What does N-E-O-L spell?” She corrected my “error” with the proper spelling of “NOEL”.  I replied that, “well, Mr. Peil has N-E-O-L on his entire roof.” His response to our outbursts of laughter was to leave it as is and laugh it off with the rest of us.

I often think of that time, and the fact that we were in the flight path of Newark Airport, so hundreds of passengers were treated to our inside joke.

We never let him forget it. Every Christmas he knew it was coming, and yet took it in stride.

So many changes took place over the years; it’s hard to recall the details. Mom was never a good judge of a man’s character. Two divorces and a relationship with a real loser were her claim to fame. She fell for the romance every single time. She even lugged the loser to a long-distance relationship with her when we moved to Florida in 1973.

Sometime around 1976, she got a phone call from New Jersey and a dinner request from the now-widowered Duane Peil. She hesitated. I bluntly scolded her, “After all the shitty decisions you have made in your life, you’re going to let this golden opportunity just pass you by? And you’re going to continue with this idiot off-again-on-again what’s-in-it-for-me horse’s ass? Go! It’s dinner with an old friend. GO!”

The story goes that he asked her to marry him that night and promised her “she would never be beholden to anyone – ever.” She agreed within 10 seconds.

And I got my Dad at 18. My son got a grandfather. My mother got the love she so richly deserved.

He profoundly changed all our lives. He encouraged me to join the Merchant Marine when I was turned down by the Air Force for being too short. He even set up an interview at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy. He told me, “If you can sail the Great Lakes in November there is absolutely nothing the ocean can throw at you that you won’t be able to handle.”

“Great Lakes? As in icebergs on Lake Superior in August? You do realize I am a Floridian. I don’t even own socks, Dad,” I said.

“Oh, you want to join the warm water Merchant Marine and sail the Caribbean?”

His words, as always came back to haunt me when I sailed my 50-foot ketch through a tropical storm on my way to the Bahamas. My foul weather gear was filled with puke and pee when I reached my destination. The whip lines holding me to the wheel also burned my hands. And when I tried my best to sail through the Mona Passage as splinters and various boat flotsam floated past me in the treacherous eddies that claimed more lives than any other slice of ocean.

“If you can sail the Great Lakes in November…” I thought. It had to be tough if this is the soft Caribbean. I still can’t shake the thought.

But, I had his cap with me.

Mom stood with him through a hospitalization and recovery for alcoholism.

She was mortified when she came home one day and found us both drunk on beer while fishing on the lake behind their house.

She became absolutely livid when we came home from an all night party boat fishing trip and never made it into the house. I think he and the captain downed enough vodka to fill a bucket. I was not to be without sin, I confess. The last thing I remembered was piloting the party boat and all of the passengers through Baker’s Haulover and hitting one of the two docks I was trying to focus on while my Dad and the captain sang sea shanties sitting on the deck of the wheelhouse. Unfortunately I hit the imaginary dock. Dad warned me that, “you have to close one eye. That’s how I made it home from the Herald-Tribune every night. When I went through the tunnel, I kept one eye closed so I would see only one center line.” His wisdom never ceased to amaze me.

It took Mom no time at all to get him into another program. It worked. And many years of sober laughter ensued. Although he played bartender to Mom’s occasional drink, he never went beyond black coffee.

And he shared my passion for cooking. A great thing since my Mom cooked only when she had to and cut so many corners the outcome would sometimes be… well… not so appetizing. He loved to grocery shop, too. Another thing Mom detested.

He once asked me what I wanted for my birthday supper and I flippantly told him I would love lobster thermidor. I arrived early to find several very large, very live Maine lobsters crawling around the kitchen floor. “I wanted them to enjoy a little freedom before I cook them,” he quipped. I replied that I was really glad I didn’t request steak. Mom would have flipped to find a steer and a chainsaw in the kitchen!

He adopted me when I was 27. It was shortly after I had an aneurism and Mom had a lung removed. Cancer. She quit smoking the day she was admitted for surgery. Dad didn’t. She drank and he smoked…the perfect combination.

He was a printer and pressman by trade, even though he was really, really colorblind. He left newspapers and books behind and took a job printing phone books using hot lead type. My son and I would visit him at the shop off Bird Road in Miami. He would let my son cast his name and use different inks to print it.

He retired, sort of. He bought an industrial blade sharpener and set up shop in his garage sharpening press blades. I would love to sit there and soak up the scent of hot oils, black coffee and Chesterfields while listening to talk radio.

He would tell me stories of being in the Merchant Marine during WWII running supplies through enemy blockades and getting shot at all the time. It bothered him that he wasn’t considered a veteran even though he sailed in every theatre of battle. I wrote to the Department of Defense and still have the letter they sent thanking him for his service. Unfortunately it was before the Merchant Marine fell under the Coast Guard so my Dad was not considered a veteran.

He was so proud that I graduated college and became a journalist. He subscribed to every paper I

worked with even when I became a city editor and rarely wrote a word. He gave me my first pica pole and scaling wheel. He even taught me the formula for cropping and scaling art knowing I sucked at math.

His relationship with his son was difficult. I never asked questions. We did get into a screaming match when Dad was battling cancer. The prognosis was not good and I chided my stepbrother, now my half-brother that he needed to spend some time with Dad. He accused me of trying to muscle in on his “inheritance”. I made it perfectly clear that what he and Mom had belonged to them. The only thing I wanted was the Merchant Marine cap that had traveled the world.

I hated my half-brother that day. He had such a wonderful father all his life. I had not been so fortunate. Estranged from my birth father since the last drunken beating in my teens – the one that had me cleaning up my own blood from the walls and floor - I had no desire to even hear his name. He never even met my son and seemed not to care. My Dad deserved so much more from his flesh and blood. Could this be the same person who played baseball with my brother? The same quiet kid across the street? I knew I would never see him again when Dad died and I tried to make peace with his decision to not speak with me again.

Mom, Dad, my husband Vern and I would go out to dinner for our anniversaries. Their anniversary was Sept. 26 and our anniversary was Halloween Oct. 31. We got married in their living room. Not a word was spoken about the cavernous age difference between us. Vern was 54 when we married, I was 23. Vern was one year younger than my mother. It took her a while to get over that fact. But my Dad always welcomed him with a booming, “Hello, son!”

One anniversary dinner date something went terribly wrong. Dad was having a hard time swallowing. The air hung heavy around us as we feared the worst, but no one dared to utter a word. Dad thought this was a cold he couldn’t shake. It turned out to be inoperable esophageal cancer. I think he had quit smoking a year before, but I can’t recall. His doctor cut to the chase, “All those years of alcohol and cigarettes have taken a toll on you.”

I was home when I heard the news. I slammed the door, went to the deck behind my house, punched the fence until my hands bled and threw a tantrum that could make a two-year-old proud. I calmed down enough to grab my cigarettes and a bottle of spiced rum and sat on the deck until I could breathe. My hands were bloodied and sore, but my heart was broken. It was January and it was cold and I wanted to just die.

I loved him. He taught me so much. The most important lesson being that I did not ever have to be a victim to any man – relative or not.

What followed still haunts me. Doctors promised him “new” treatments that “could” extend his life. Too many trips to hospitals and too many surgeries ensued. Feeding tube in, another tumor out all the while he was laughing. Mom brought him home from a chemo treatment one day and she got out of the car screaming for me. I rushed to the drive to find my Dad catatonic covered in vomit, urine and feces. Somehow, we got him in the house, cleaned up and on the couch. I held his hand. It was much thinner than I remembered.

A rush of anger washed over me and I ran out of the house to my truck with the intent of killing the doctor. All I could do when I got there was scream like a crazy woman, threaten him and grab all of my Dad’s files on the “experimental” treatment. He called the police. I was long gone when they arrived, but they did track me down. All the officers had to do was look in my red, swollen eyes and tear streaked face to know there was no punishment worse than what I was going through.

Watching his body deteriorate was excruciating not only for adults, but also for my 15-year-old son. He came to me one day and said, “Ma, I just can’s go see Grandpa anymore. It hurts too badly. Will he be mad at me?” Reassuringly I explained that we all understood how he felt and there was nothing in the world he could do that would ever make his grandpa angry.

Sometime after a first non-barbecue Labor Day, Dad told me he had had enough and wanted Hospice care. Mom tried to talk him out of his decision, saying it was “too soon.” He was persistent. And he prevailed.

What followed was a litany of actions. Hospital bed set up off the master bedroom in his office, people coming and going, Dad telling a priest that he wanted to go wherever Mom was going or he wouldn’t go. His brothers and sisters came to visit. He stopped eating. A man who loved food so much couldn’t eat. Sad, sad irony.

On one visit, he pulled me aside and asked for a vodka and tonic. I obliged. Mom was angry. I reminded her that he was not going to be here for long and if he wanted a drink, I would give him a drink. She was the one who withheld his pain meds because she was afraid he would become addicted. I intervened. I told his nurse. Mom lost again. It seemed she had very little control over this situation and it was wearing thin.

I visited every weekend and several times a week until, in November, Mom asked me to stay. I moved in. I sat with him and told him how much he meant to me and thanked him for everything he ever did for me. I could hear his stories of the sea, places he had been, and things he had seen. He slipped into a coma.

I stared at the lake. I recalled all the times we got into trouble together. We always were in trouble. We put my son on Dad’s Jet Ski when he was five, gave him a few instructions and set him free. Mom went ballistic. I could hear her yelling, “Duane, Denise is Wayne out on that thing alone?” We looked at each other and both answered in harmony, “No! Of course not!”

We were fishing for bass one day and one jumped on the dock. “We didn’t catch that one, Dad.” That glance said it all. I picked it up and threw it in the bucket.

One night his breathing just stopped. And the man I called my Dad was gone. He had withered to 120 pounds.

“My Dad is gone.” I cried to my husband. I don’t know how to not have a Dad.

It was the fourth major loss in my life and the most profound at the time. Even after 34 years, the hole in my heart still burns. And every time I visit a large port, I watch the harbor pilot being escorted on the harbor pilot’s tug to a tanker, cargo or cruise ship. I imagine the pilot relieving the captain and taking control to guide the ship through the channel and to safe harbor.

“Great Lakes Maritime Academy,” I think. If I had listened to him I would be that harbor pilot. And I would be able to take anything the ocean could throw at me.

©DD Corbitt