Did you ever know that you're my hero...?

What if your greatest villain was supposed to be your biggest hero? I mean heroes are supposed to be guiding lights in the rough patch called life whereas villains are there to throw you off course. How can this supposed hero so quickly turn to a villain? It’s easy; they leave. My dad is that closest thing I know to a villain, a person who never saved the day.

In 1991 my dad was found out. He had been living one of those lives to supplement his inadequacies that he suffered when he was a kid from his own parents. There was a girlfriend on the side with a three year old, not his, and one on the way, his. She was everything that my mom wasn’t: a drinker, a smoker, a liar, and all around irresponsible. And even worse, they worked together.

We used to think he was a great father. Every once in a while he’d take my brother and me to the local motorcycle races. We’d be sitting right on the track watching motorcycles rip around turns and fly over jumps. We were so focused on the races that we failed to notice that he’d disappear for thirty-five minutes at a time. He’d leave a five-year-old to watch the four-year-old while he found a place just secluded enough to break the sixth commandment. I was his cover. He was posing as good guy while doing all the things that bad guys do.

There were always weird trips that we would take at the spur of the moment. One day we’d go to the movies and the next to the putt-putt course. We’d find our way into a game room where we were given five dollars apiece and told not to spend it all in one place. All my memories of my best times with my father aren’t actually with my father at all. The first time I actually won a stuffed animal from one of those claw-grab machines, I was greeted with a congratulatory cheer from my brother and a pat on the back from some old man. My first strike in bowling was only appreciated by the dancing pins on the screen above where we sat. He was always there, just never in sight.

Then it happened, a few weeks before Thanksgiving in 1991. We were watching some PG movie in a blacked out theater. We were sitting by ourselves, something that we had grown used to. Then there was a tug on our shirt. My mom was pulling us away from our seats with tentative tears resting on her cheeks. She didn’t want to make a scene. We began walking up the stairs to the exit, and standing there was the six-foot-four-inch image of what I thought was a man. As she slammed the side door of our stained Dodge Mini-Van there were pleas of, “Please, just let me explain,” and, “It’s not what it looks like, I promise.”

Finally the last image of a father I’ve never known. Him standing outside our broken home like Lloyd Dobler from Say Anything with a radio blaring a static-filled “Wind Beneath My Wings” by Bette Midler. Screaming that all he needed was a second chance, that he could change, that it was a momentary slip up. My brother and I lay in the bed wondering what was actually happening. Six-year-olds don’t really understand divorce.

I don’t know what’s harder, being six and hearing your dad scream from outside to be forgiven, or being twenty-one and knowing that the only memory you have of your farther is that grown man pleading for a second chance. He disappeared that night, and only shows back up as random phone calls on odd dates, and checks deposited at the same time every month, the remnants of his guilt. The last time I saw him was on that date in 1991. If you were to put him in a lineup next ten other men, I'm not sure I could tell you who he was. He has become a mere association. The dancing pins and lone stuffed animal are all symbols of him. Perhaps that's better, only knowing him with good times; it lets me not focus on the villain that he truly is.