My father was named Leon Chaykin. He was a cruel and nasty piece of work, a little man, as I would learn many years later. He was the sort of fellow who slapped me hard across the face if I got an answer wrong on my homework, and mocked me for my interest in comic books, in movies, in daydreaming.
Leon made a marginal occasional living as a produce guy in supermarkets, but most of his money was made as a bagman for local criminals. He hit the bars and restaurants in walking distance of our tenement apartment every Saturday night, with me occasionally in tow. He’d park me on the bar, or on the frame of a pool table, and do his business with the boys.
I came home smelling of cigarettes and scotch. He rarely came home with enough money to cover our lives, as a guy who never heard of a bet he could say no to.
I have two younger brothers. My middle brother took the brunt of my father’s berserking, which took the shape of physical abuse and outright public humiliation. He left me fucked up enough, and I never caught half the shit my brother took. I cannot imagine the psychic toll this abuse took on him as a man.
My youngest brother escaped the real shitstorm of Leon’s rage, as my mother left my father when he was four after what turned out to be the last straw of domestic violence, and managed to protect him to a greater degree than she had me and my next youngest sibling. His recollections of Leon are almost entirely screened memory, filtered through my mother’s loathing for her husband.
Somehow, through some legal machinations and shenanigans, my mother had Leon declared legally dead seven years later, since he’d fled the city and was in the wind, no one knew where. I understand full well that it might be hard for us, in our post privacy society, to imagine such a thing being possible, but there it was.
My mother, a miserably unhappy and disappointed woman, raised me and my two brothers on welfare. She did the best she could, which, to be cruelly honest, was none too good. The three of us were constant and unpleasant reminders of her life befouling choices, and she did everything within her power to see us as little as possible.
I went off on my own just before I turned eighteen, leaving for Chicago, leaving behind a pregnant girlfriend who made the right choice and dumped me days after giving birth.
So, I was fatherless from the age of nine, and accepted this fact of life, despite the hole that I knew existed in me. This vacancy is certainly a contributing factor to the meandering mess that was my existence until I hit my early forties and began the process of straightening out my life that continues to this day, thirty years later.
Shortly after my forty fifth birthday, it became clear that my mother would be dead within months. I did what I could to repair this long-damaged relationship as I had been taught by the spiritual fellowship of which I was and remain a member.
Concurrently, I was inspired by a long conversation with a colleague who was in the process of reestablishing a relationship with her father, a man she had not seen in two decades, and decided that I would find my father, having no idea whether he was still alive.
I hired a private investigator, a fellow member of that spiritual fellowship, now dead himself, to find my father, with what little information as I had.
To my shock, thanks to the nascent internet of the mid 1990s, he found him, alive and well, living in a retirement assisted care facility in Phoenix. Address, phone number, the whole thing. In fifteen minutes.
I called Leon, and arranged to meet him a few weeks later when he came to visit San Diego. My wife and I had a long lunch with him and his wife, a woman who could have played my mother in a TV movie. He was a tiny shriveled little fellow, who looked like a miniaturized Iron Eyes Cody. He was also utterly unrepentant, dismissive of the wreckage he’d created.
Suffice to say, I left the lunch restive, unsatisfied, and angry.
I stewed on this, and spoke to my brothers about my meeting. They had no interest in, were to be sure outright hostile to the idea of seeing him.
Ultimately, I flew to Phoenix, and had it out with him. I vented the years of unacknowledged rage and came away at genuine peace.
My mother died a few weeks later, never knowing I had seen Leon again for the first time since August of 1960.
A few months later I received a phone call from a cousin of mine on his side of the family. When my mother took us and scampered off, getting a temporary restraining order to keep him at bay, she cut off all ties with our kin on my father’s side, so this was a woman I’d not seen or spoken to since 1960.
She indicated she’d heard I’d been to visit her uncle, and mentioned, matter of factly, as if I should have known all along, that Leon had adopted me when I was three.
Needless to say, I was flummoxed. I called a cousin of mine, a woman then in her fifties, the adopted daughter of one of my mother’s older sisters. She was surprised that I had no knowledge of this—and had assumed, as everyone in the family had, that my mother had hipped me to this decades ago.
She further went on to tell me that my biological father was named Norman Drucker. She wasn’t certain whether this Drucker had ever had any part in my life, or even acknowledged my existence.
The upshot of all this was that I was born illegitimately, finally explaining to me why I had been birthed in a New Jersey hospital far away from prying eyes.
When I called Leon, he tried his best to deny it, then just hung up on me. We never spoke again.
I hired that private detective pal of mine to do a hunt, but Norman Drucker is just a far more common name than Leon Chaykin, and he gave up after he received no replies from a number of queries.
So, to sum it all up, my biological father has never had any place in my life, either by his own choice, or by the choices of that difficult and damaged woman who gave birth to me, and never felt it was worth her discomfort to tell me the truth about my birth.
The man I thought was my father took me on as his responsibility, and acted on his resentment at that responsibility through enormous mental and physical cruelty directed at my mother and her three sons.
I have never raised a child of my own. My only biological child, a daughter, was adopted by a family which gave her the kind of love I know I never could have in that time and in that place.
My wife has children from previous marriages, nearly adults when we met, now well into middle age, with children of their own.
Their children are my grandchildren, if not by nature, then by nurture. I love them all dearly, as a gift I have never done anything to deserve.
I say all this to you with fathers, living or dead, with whom you had complex but ultimately satisfying relationships.
And to fathers, who have successfully weathered the challenge of raising and living alongside complex offspring.
I can say with neither shame nor fear that I envy your experience, and hope you cherish that experience to your core.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Chaykin…a Prince.