My junior year of high school, I began to notice a certain pattern in the way my days went.

3:30 — Ride the bus home. I hadn’t gotten the job I’d been wanting and hadn’t gotten the car I’d been promised, so I was stuck riding the damn bus. At approximately 3:30 every day, we would pass by my dad’s shop on the corner where kids got off. Some days he’d be there, some days he wouldn’t.
4–5:30 (approx.) — I’d get home about 3:40-ish. Somewhere between 4 and 6, my dad would come home, drunk, and ready to eat.
10 min. later — Either the whole family—my mom, sister, and me—or just my mother and he would go out for dinner. The alcohol gave him the munchies, I guess. There were occasions where he didn’t want to go out but would instead bring home $15 worth of chicken strips from the gas station up the road from his shop.
20-40 min later (depending on where we ate) — reached destination restaurant. If we went to the Lighthouse Inn restaurant across the river—which my sister and I both hated—it took about 20 minutes. If we went to the Mexican restaurant Dos Primos or McDonald’s—ech—in the next town over, it took a bit longer. Occasionally we went to this place Krystal’s there also, which had some decent food, I thought. We would eat—always getting an appetizer with cheese sticks and onion rights (another ech)—and leave immediately afterwards.
6-8 pm — get home. My dad would promptly crash in my parents’ room. He’d sleep between 1 and 2.5 hours, then get up and watch TV til midnight. Then go back to bed.

One thing I forgot to mention about the trip over and during the meal—my dad, when inebriated, was a talker. Usually, he was pretty quiet and polite, my sister getting her hermit-ness from him. When he drank, though, it loosened his tongue. You just couldn’t get him to shut up. He would tell stories from when he was a kid, or from when he was in the navy, or from before either we were born or were old enough to remember. Sometimes his stories were entertaining, like how the U.S. government did a background check on my mother. Sometimes they were stupid or pointless, but he told them all the same.

But most when he was intoxicated, he liked to pick on people, namely his only family. (Us.) He was a strong man, well-built with a bit of a gut, I suppose, but he was below average height—about 5’6”, just taller than Mom—and he’d been teased about it his entire life. He also wore his hair long—he being almost full Cherokee, which caused an uproar in the conservative area in which we lived. He wasn’t the only person in town with long hair, but he was the oldest, as far as I remember, the others being just older than me. If there were other older men with “hippie hair,” as my dad’s hair was often called, they must’ve known better to stay in their homes, away from the public eye. My father, however, decided to start a business and pursue his dream of being a musician, which only added to the hippie-hair-metal mentality people had about him.

Anyway, I guess he had a lot of pent-up anger or something, because he always took it out on us. He never hit anyone of us, even when he was angry. (My mother once told me he’d been abused as a child, so maybe that was why.) Emotionally, verbally, though, he held us hostage. It wasn’t abuse, really, just teasing that sometimes had an edge to it. A hostility, maybe. He’d joke around with things about my mom, things that made her embarrassed or uncomfortable. He liked to belittle all of us, be condescending, as if he was some cruel god (not that he thought that) playing with his toys. Nothing we said was right—like if I was talking about something in science, perhaps—and after proving our point, he would suddenly say that that’s what he’d been saying all along.

He’d dropped out of school at some point—I’m not really sure when—and so he hadn’t really studied math or English. He was supposedly bad at math because he was partially dyslexic and got his numbers confused—something my mom told me, and something I inherited myself. His English was very good when he was sober, but he deferred back to his childhood-learned Okie accent that he worked hard to hide, and that reminded me of the bigoted “hick-billies” (my sister’s word, not mine) but I hated so much. So, when the subject of math would come up—my mother had been an incredibly smart kid; she’d originally gone to school to study languages before being forced to drop out by her cheap asshole father—he would spout some story about this or that from when he took math, or how he couldn’t do much more than add and subtract. He liked to change the subject a lot too, and arguing—a “sport” my mom and I “played”—seemed to bore him.
Now, that’s not to say that I didn’t love my father. I did, with all my heart. But like in the Simple Plan song “Perfect,” I wasn’t perfect and neither was he. I just wished that we—I—could’ve been more important to him. I adored him, tried everything to make him proud, but like all ignorant father stories, it seemed nothing I could do could make him satisfied to just enjoy being with his wife and kids.