Birth of the Blues

I’m not sure at what point it became clear to my mother that my biological father (father #1) was not going to make good family material but a clear indicator might have been the occasion of my birth.

As my mother tells it, he was around briefly for the actual birth but sort of dropped the ball after that point. Why wouldn’t he? By this time, even though I was my mother’s one and only child, my father had already cranked out 3 others in a prior marriage, so I guess you might say that the novelty had worn off. You know; you’re in, you’re out and then chance lays a kid on you or not.

To prove to us that he didn’t have the ‘right stuff’, he left the hospital not long after I was hatched, with the words: “I’ll be back tomorrow”, and then, of course, he never showed up again and my mother was unable to get him on the phone for the next 3 days or so. In the meantime, she needed clothes for me and herself that were back at their house and and would be necessary when she was discharged from the hospital.

So, she did the only thing she could do and that was to enlist the aid of one of her brothers to perform a little B&E and crawl in through their bedroom window, get the clothes and bring them back to the hospital, which my uncle did.

‘Where is this guy?’, she’s thinking, and I’m just hanging around in my diapers thinking the same thing…’I've just about had enough of this hospital and I’m ready for my new digs’. Wherever he was, it was apparent that he wouldn’t be answering the phone. Distraught and befuddled that her newborn’s father went AWOL, she eventually transitioned from worried to pissed and on the day of her discharge, much to the consternation of the nurse on duty, she called a cab.

As hospital staff escorted us out of the hospital and into the waiting cab, ‘husband of the year’ appeared. Somehow, without ever communicating to my mother, he had found out the discharge date and worked us into his schedule.

By the time she opened the front door of our house it was clear what the problem was, since there were wall to wall musicians and their instruments to navigate over and around. My father had gone ahead and scheduled a jam session with his bandmates, effectively driving me and my mother straight into the bedroom for the evening.

As we slipped past the horn players and my dad’s drum set, my mother gave him the stare from hell, the guys in the band were looking at each other uncomfortably, and even I mumbled something like “asshole” as we passed by on the way to my new crib, although I hadn’t quite mastered the English language yet and perhaps it was just angry gibberish.

To add insult to insensitivity, while most of the musicians would finally leave, one of them, eighty-sixed from his own house, took over the guest room for the next month until my mother forced him out.

From then on, for the next couple of weeks, on those rare occasions when my dad was in line to change my diapers, I made sure there was a little extra chef’s surprise in the gift wrapping. None of it mattered though because, in his disengaged head, he was already planning the escape route and looking forward to the next conquest and knock-up.

He was just a guy who liked to make the babies but didn’t want to have much to do with any of the rest of it. You could sort of understand it if I was, say, a Bassett Hound or a goldfish, but seeing that he had no intention of caring for a small human like myself, well, it was pretty pathetic.

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