If the name Robert Kaufman doesn't sound familiar, I didn't talk about him very much to anyone. He was my father, and I last saw him when I was 13 years old. I spoke to him again when I was about 14 or so on the phone, and that was the last communication I had with him. This weekend I found out that he passed away.
It's not every day that your dad dies, and certainly not every day that your estranged father dies. It's left me with some odd feelings, and I felt the best thing for me to do was to write about it, and to write about him.
His parents were Genevieve and Abraham Kaufman. Abe served in North Africa in WWII as a surgeon, and went on to head Penn State's Cardiology program. He was one of the people who helped create the angioplasty. Robert had three brothers, one of whom became a radiologist, another an anesthesiologist, and the eldest brother a cardiologist.
Then there was my father. At the age of four, my mother came home to a note on the fridge that said "Sorry, I can't handle it anymore. I have to go". The house was in foreclosure, and he left my mother and I to fend for ourselves. Before that, there was a great story that really explains a lot about the type of person my father was. He embezzled money from his employer in Philadelphia, claiming it was for some client up in Canada (I think, but definitely north of Philly). His boss called him out on it, and Robert agreed for the two of them to take a plane trip and meet the imaginary client. They got on the plane, landed, got into a rental car, and started driving. From my understanding, it wasn't until they got into the city that Robert pulled over and told his boss the truth.
That was the level this man would go to in order to fraud you.
He then came to Phoenix, where I was then living, and I think I saw him every now and then in some sort of joint custody arrangement. There was some seriously venomous stuff going on between my mother and father at that point, and you could wonder why he came back to Phoenix (where I was). Was it because he had nowhere else to go? Was it because he wanted to try to be a good father again?
Fast forwarding a bit further, he ended up in jail in Nevada for fraud I think. Nothing big, just petty stuff. He was a gambler for a while or at least that's what he told me, but he knew a lot about Texas Hold'em and Omaha, and could tell you how many cards were missing from a deck by holding it in his hand and weighing it.
He was a con, a cheat, and a swindler. But not even that good of one. It's one thing to be a con artist, but it's another to be a bad con artist. I remember us going over to people's houses to get loans, and I remember him crying a lot with new friends he would constantly make, all of which seemed to want to help us. Not for long though, as his talent-less con skills quickly exposed him for what he was.
In one rather infamous episode, he had a car (that others helped him buy), that was "stolen". As a child, I didn't know any better, but now that I'm older I can see the holes in the story. It wasn't "stolen", it was either seized by someone he owed money to, or sold on the down low so he could make some money.
I spent a year of my junior high life with him, and I remember sitting in the apartment with people pounding on the doors numerous times. They were there to collect the furniture and appliances that were rent-to-own, and we would have to sit in the apartment quiet as mice to make sure they went away. I remember listening to the excuses he would make as to why things were late. Often, the people would pound on the door for a good thirty minutes before they would leave.
The year I lived with him in junior high, we didn't have a lot of money obviously. We would make huge pots of spaghetti, which sometimes would burn at the bottom, and eat that for days straight. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
When the house of cards finally came tumbling down for him, as it always did, my step father Lou (who I generally refer to as "my father", although because of the clarity between the two individuals in this article I'm separating them) dropped him off at the bus station to send him back to Philadelphia to live with his parents.
Imagine the scene. My step father, and my father. My father is probably in his 40's at this stage in his life, has once again left a wake of hell in his trail. He's getting sent back to his mother's (who must have been in her 80's) to get out of town. He says to my step dad "The funny thing is that none of this is my fault."
I could continue to tell you some wonderful gems of parenting that my father committed, but I'll spare you anymore details. Let me spin this story around, however.
For all of us, I am convinced that any introspective person will eventually realize that there are three versions of yourself. For me, there is the Eric I want to be. We'll call him ideal-Eric. He's fit, sailing with his family, financially secure, has lots of friends, and does it all with a winning smile. There are more details, but essentially it's the Eric I want to become.
Then there is the Eric I don't want to become, and we'll call that bad-Eric. Bad-Eric is a fat deadbeat with no friends, no family, no boat, and financially ruined. Bad-Eric represents all the things that I'm scared of becoming.
Then there is the real Eric, also known as me. This Eric is repulsed by bad-Eric, and when I see elements of bad-Eric attributes in my life I run the other way. I am also drawn towards ideal-Eric. Anything that can make me more like him, I'm going to gravitate towards. And that, to me, summarizes most people. We as individuals are in flux, constantly trying to become one thing and avoid becoming something else.
I don't know if the tools needed to move in the ideal direction, and stay away from the bad direction, are provided by nature or nurture or both. Certainly anyone with children knows that some of them, I hate to say this, are smarter than others. Some of them have a natural advantage, and others don't. With my father, I believe he didn't start the race until a minute or two after the gun fired. Those tools to deal with issues that so many of us have, he did not. Coupled with that, he was born into a family that put an equal value on the achievement of success as it did on the weight of guilt. Catholic guilt might be more popular in society, but Jewish guilt is the original product that dates back to the dawn of western civilization. It is not a stretch to say that the Jews literally wrote the book on guilt.
I told my boss and my team about my father's death, and took off this afternoon. I actually spent two hours this morning with my friend Ryan, talking to him about it. But this afternoon I decided to head down to La Mesa, and go back to my old school and look into my old apartment. Everything was the same, from the crappy apartment complex, to the parking spot where his car was "stolen" from, to the middle school that I got beat up in.
Now, I'm going to switch focus once more.
For any woman that is reading this post, how would you feel if you went out on a date with someone who's father was a felon con artist. Would you treat them the same as someone who's father was a teacher who worked at the local school and went golfing on the weekends?
People can blow sunshine up my ass all day long and tell me that you are not guilty by your associations, but you are. Just like Obama and Ayers, you are judged right along with your associates. Will people cut my slack because he's my dad and I didn't have a choice? Maybe. But as a high school kid, sue me if trying to hook up with my girlfriend, race my bike, and have some fun were on the top of my priority list.
I didn't want to have to talk about my father. I didn't want to think about him. I didn't want his name to come up in conversation. I wanted a dad that was like all the other dads, and I wanted a family that was like all the other ones as well. I didn't want to explain that I had two dads (three if you count my biological one), because why the hell should my family story have to sound like poorly written drama while everyone else go to focus on being a kid? I know other people had messed up childhoods, and I'm not putting myself up on a cross here. But what I had to do was block him out of my head, and my life.
Not only did I not want to be judged by him, but I didn't want his actions to stain my life. I already know they have, in many ways. When I see a letter from a collection agency, I seriously just throw it away. I don't care at all, ever. It doesn't bother me. Credit problems? Ha. A jury summons? Please. Let me tell you how far you can go down a rabbit hole in this world before things go really wrong for you. Until there are people with guns and badges at the door, I don't worry about "officialdom" anymore. I'll stop from incriminating myself, but for those of you who know me personally, my complete disregard for the law probably has something to do with this lesson I learned from my dad.
So in order to seal off my life and prevent "lessons" like that from getting into my head, and then eventually into my new family, I erased him from my mind. I don't remember his birthday, his middle name, his age, his favorite food, his voice, or what he looks like. As much as a human being can consciously scrub their father from their mind, that is what I've done. Was it the right thing to do? I don't know, but I think I had to do it in order to keep my sanity.
Changing topics again...
When I went back to my old apartment, where the people would pound on the doors to repossess the furniture every couple of weeks, I went by the park nearby. I saw the trees that I used to put my tent under, and I remember going with him there to hang out. I remember us watching TV together, and I remember him doing my homework for me.
In my mind, I have to ask myself if he was really trying to be a good father and just had absolutely no idea how to do it. Worse, I think he knew a way he could survive in this world, and old habits die hard. It's easy for those of us with the tools and resources to look at someone who doesn't, and judge them accordingly.
So much of the anger that I felt towards him when he was alive seems so very petty and trivial in his death. I don't know how he explained that his son didn't talk to him anymore, but I imagine he would say it had nothing to do with him and that my step father and mother had poisoned my mind. The last time I talked to him, he told me that part of the reason that things fell apart for him was because I did a few things wrong too, when I was twelve years old.
The story of Robert Kaufman and his mark on my life has taught me numerous lessons. One is that not all of us become the person that we want to become. In deciding to erase him from my memory, I learned that often you must choose from bad or worse; often there is no good option.
But most of all I learned that the world is not a Hollywood movie. People are not the Joker or Batman, not pure evil or pure good. People are shifting dimensions, with different aspects of their personality coming in and out of focus throughout the years, depending upon conditions and time. Our abilities to identify what ideal should be and to pursue that ideal are not common across the board; some of us are better at it than others.
And some of those who aren't so good at it have children. Robert, if I can get a message to you, I'd like to tell you this. I am very happy with my life, and I try to make others happy in whatever way I can. Certain lessons you taught me have saved my hide in some tricky situations, many of which your lessons got me into in the first place.
I pray that you are in a better place, and that when I go past the final door in this life, maybe you and I can sit down and play a game of Texas Hold'em. But I'm checking the cards first.
Sunday, October 18, 2009 at 20:23 ;)
It was one year and seven months ago that our mast was removed. About a week ago, I got a phone call from Fritz over at Pacific Offshore Rigging letting me know that he was ready to step the mast.;)
don't know if you know the feeling of being on the lame duck boat for such a long period. All your hopes, dreams, and goals are separated from you by unknown timelines and unknown quantities of money. Bad enough, but remember you're still living on a boat. Which can be a royal pain in the ass sometimes. So it's sort of the worst of all worlds. You're stuck in the limbo (for over a year and a half) where you have to deal with all the problems related to living on a boat, with nothing but a shrinking memory of the joys of sailing.;)
We did the right thing as well with the main sheet. Rather than just bend it on like normal, we opted for laying it out in a very convenient little grassy spot barely a few minutes walk from the slip. We put blue tape on anything that looked weird, flipped it over and did the same.
f;)
;)
Eric
