Fifteen Years Later

It’s his funeral, for God’s sake. I’m supposed to mourn. I’m supposed to cry. I’m supposed to wear black. So I do.

I’m doing pretty well, actually. I introduce Jenny as my friend. Those who don’t know better don’t care anyway, and those who know the truth pretend not to. I hear my Aunt Betty, my favorite aunt, whispering to a family friend whom I don’t recognize: “It’s such a shame. I don’t know what could have happened to make her that way. No one else in the family is a gay.”

I have to laugh, really. I am a cliché. The sexually abused young woman who “became” a lesbian. Honestly, though, I don’t think Daddy had anything to do with who I am today. Maybe that’s not true. I don’t know. A therapist could tell me, if I had one. Therapist. The rapist. Ironic, isn’t it?

Jenny seems to read my thoughts and squeezes my hand in hers. I love her deeply, more deeply than I ever thought possible.

Look at him there, in his plain pine casket, wearing jeans and a “Big Johnson” t-shirt. That’s a big scandal with the rest of the family. They all wanted him buried in a suit, something I only ever saw him wear once (that I can remember, anyway—there’s a lot I don’t remember). That was Daddy’s uniform for the last 10 years. A pair of jeans and some crude t-shirt. He wore his “Happiness is a tight pussy” t-shirt—the one with a cat jammed into a whiskey bottle—until it literally fell apart. I think of the irony of that shirt, not the obvious, but the fact that Daddy was such a complete loser of a wimp, and he was always drunk. Happiness is a tight pussy.

For a long time, I didn’t realize there was anything wrong with the elephant game, or any of the other funny little games Daddy liked to play when he was drunk. I thought all little girls played those games with their fathers. Then, when I was in second grade, I mentioned something about one of Daddy’s games to my teacher, Mrs. Green. I told her about the submarine game Daddy liked to play in the bathtub. Mrs. Green went very pale and stuttered a lot. A couple of days later, some men came and got Daddy, and I went to stay with Aunt Mary for a long time.

When Aunt Mary died, I went to live with Daddy again, which was a real hoot because by that time, Daddy was collecting disability and was drunk most of the time. He still liked his games, but I didn’t like playing them anymore. Eventually, Daddy stopped playing games. He started drinking when he woke up and drank until he went back to sleep. He left me alone, he left life alone. From the age of 8 until last year, when I met Jenny and got the balls to leave him, I took care of Daddy like he was a baby or something. When I left him, he started dying.

In the car after the service, I break down. The pain and grief and just missing Daddy slam into me like a sledgehammer to the gut. I hyperventilate, cough, choke, and I shake so I can’t hold my cigarette. Jenny’s driving, but she pulls over to the shoulder in heavy traffic and grabs me into her arms as I sob. Angry drivers pound their horns as they pass, not understanding that my heart has broken and I am scared to death by the fact. I have never cried so hard. How can you love and hate someone so much at the same time? Daddy’s gone, and I’m free, but I miss him so much.

Jenny holds me there, on the shoulder of the road, for an hour or more. She kisses my forehead and strokes my hair and coos words of love and reassurance to me like a mother I don’t remember. Afterward, I am so tired, so wrung out, that she has to help me out of the car at Daddy’s apartment.

As we’re going through the few things that Daddy had left, Jenny finds a tattered old picture. In it, I sit on Daddy’s shoulders. He has an arm around a woman who looks a lot like I do today. I haven’t seen her in all these years. I wonder if she knows. I find a t-shirt and hand it to Jenny. “Here you can have this.”

Jenny gives me a look—maybe I need some nerve pills or something. I giggle at her, dismissing her concern with the wave of a hand. I’m better now, the pain lifted from me by my episode in the car. The t-shirt is like new, a replacement for the original. I guess Daddy bought it when the old one fell apart. It says “Happiness is a tight pussy.”

See, I’m not fucked up—not much, anyway. And maybe I am a cliché. I loved Daddy, despite the things he did. I needed to love him because he hated himself so much. And I love Jenny, not because she’s not a man, but because she makes me whole, and because she loves me back, and because we like the same games.

© 2025, Brian G Parker