My Micronesian Stepfather was a White Supremacist Amateur Elvis Impersonator

Yes, it was Confusing. That was the Point. Reflections on Race, Racism, and the Complications of Knowing Actual People

“Inmigración! Vamos! Inmigración!”

The kitchen emptied itself in seconds. Hispanic men, some barely more than boys with peach fuzz mustaches, dropped knives, abandoned hot cooking surfaces, or hurriedly threw heavy plates on tables. It was haste like you see in movies. There was really no place for them to run because the town was so small there was nothing outside but wide open and exposed parking lots. Still, they dashed out the front and back of the restaurant depending on where they happened to be standing. One of them ran by me with such speed that I could feel wind from his passing.

I was thirteen years old and this was the first time I’d ever been in a restaurant kitchen. In one hand, I held a bucket with an octopus inside. Disturbed by the commotion, the octopus pushed against the sides of the bucket causing it to jerk in my hands. The octopus had mostly given up the fight so it wasn’t much force. It had been days since Mike had first found it looking for an easy meal in a crab pot and I think it must have accepted the inevitable.

Mike —my stepfather— bent over laughing so hard it looked like he was about to throw-up. Red-faced and crying, he slapped his leg. The restaurant owner glared at him even as he told everyone it was a false alarm. Immigration was not coming. No one was being deported. It was all safe. All of the men who ran were too relieved to be offended. Not so for the restaurant owner who was completely furious. He had to take a minute to run around outside to call back all his workers. Mike could’t stop laughing so the owner glared at me instead as he passed us by. This would be a repeated experience throughout my life. Shame seeks a source and as Mike was shameless, the shame found me instead.

I looked down at my feet and mumbled apologies. It was among the first of the countless times that I’d apologize to some wounded party on Mike’s behalf.

After a few minutes, Mike was able to stop laughing long enough to wipe the tears out of his eyes. A few men made their way back to the kitchen after realizing that there were no government vans outside waiting to take them back to Mexico, El Salvador, or Honduras. Work slowly began again. The whole thing was “just a joke.” Finally, Mike saw the restaurant manager and his face quickly matched the anger he found there.

“Calm down,” Mike said, with violence in his voice, “that was fucking hilarious.”

Mike took the bucket with the octopus inside from my hands and held it forward. The restaurant owner tried to explain the disruption to the service, even though the restaurant was mostly empty. The fear that Mike had put into the young men! They had families! The sheer rudeness of it. Mike had no time for any of it.

“Oh, come on! Don’t be a crybaby. Do you want to buy this fucking octopus or not?”

Mike gave him a deal. Ten dollars off. I think he pocketed sixty dollars. I still have no idea how much an octopus is supposed to cost even today, but it was as a big one that filled up two gallons of a five gallon bucket. Mike had been sure he’d make a fortune from it. We left the bucket by a refrigerator and we walked back to Mike’s beat up truck. My guess is that the octopus didn’t survive the day.

“Fucking Mexicans,” Mike sighed as he lit a cigarette. “They’re lucky I don’t call immigration for real.”

He talked at length about the ingratitude of Hispanics in general while cigarette smoke filled the cab of the truck. Their unwelcome entry into his country was an affront. The way they were lazy but also paradoxically taking everyone’s work. They should have been more respectful toward him, laughed at his jokes, deferred to his views. Paid more for his octopus. Their disrespect was totally out of line given he could deport any of them at a moment’s notice. Not to mention that he had a civic duty to deport them and it was only pure mercy on his part that stayed his hand. It was really a weakness on his part, to his thinking.

There is an image forming in your mind. It is not the right image unless you read the title. Or maybe you did read the title, and the image is still persistent. You are thinking of an under-educated Caucasian man, resentful of newcomers taking what he views as his rightful place. Maybe he has a confederate flag t-shirt he wears often. In that particular feature, you would be correct. Mike had just such a t-shirt, with the Stars and Bars displayed prominently on the front. You think of the hateful way the words left his mouth to cause pain to those less fortunate. You imagine a whole history of racial prejudice passed down from father to son for generations. You can see this guy in your head. You’re almost exactly right. Except that this man? This man is Micronesian, an islander. From an island called Ponape. No, to your next thought, he did not “pass” as white. Not even from the perspective of someone who didn’t know him. I’m sorry. He just didn’t.

In the Lovecraft mythos, Ponape is the island closest to sleeping Cthulhu in R’lyeh. In my youth, before I had complicating adult thoughts like there being other perfectly decent people from Ponape, I found that fact strangely fitting. That is the part of his heritage that he identified with most and for a long while the association was so strong to me that I could not hear about the Mokilese people or the island of Ponape without a scowl. The other half of him was English by way of Canada, with a wild family claim to be distant cousins to Tolkien, which I disbelieved without principle primarily because I liked the Hobbit and did not wish to contaminate my affection. To Mike that made him better than any American. He was also, in ways both apparent and subtle, dangerously mentally unwell.

My mom blew up her marriage to my father shortly after meeting Mike one night at Karaoke. Mike was obsessed with Elvis and apparently did quite an impression of the singer the night they met. With his forelock curled just the right way, Mike was certain he could have been the Micronesian version of Elvis in another life. At times during my childhood, he’d lick his palm, slick his forelock, block the hallway and jiggle his legs while doing his best Elvis snarl. I’m still not quite sure how long the affair lasted before my dad figured out and blew it up. It was a whole to-do, with my dad hiding himself in the back of my mom’s van under some blankets one afternoon when she left work early to go and meet up with Mike. Ugly confrontations followed.

My mother was obsessed with fame, and it wasn’t like she hadn’t ever cheated on my dad before but this time was different. This time she had stars in her eyes. She’d always fancied herself a singer, and made sure we all knew she would have been famous if not for her children holding her back. In the day of corded phones, she’d sit an entire ten feet away from us kids, imagining us to be beyond hearing, while complaining to her friends that we ruined her shot at stardom. Mike liked to put himself at the center of attention by any means necessary and he would drag anyone with him to that center. For my mom, when he did this on Karaoke night, I think it probably felt like being “discovered.” Why, anyone at all could be at a Karaoke night, including agents looking for talent. You’ve heard of them right? The talent scouts that go looking for singers in bars in small log towns a two hour drive away from anywhere?

I think that’s why I’ve always distrusted the desire to be noticed by others without some sort of productive purpose. It does also make me question anything I do that seems to fit that pattern, such as writing this piece right now. There are a lot of dark moments where I look at the wall in between paragraphs and think, “to what purpose and profit did you just record that information?” We shall return to this idea at the end. For now, onward.

What must have only been a few months after the restaurant incident, although to me it felt like an eternity, Mike pulled his truck over by the side of the road and rolled down my window. There were no power windows so he had to lean across my lap to do it manually. That sort of rude, unthinking, intrusion was something to which I quickly grew accustomed. He thought nothing of leaning across my lap and repeatedly hitting me in the stomach with his elbow so he could roll down my window. He called out to Crazy Mary, the town prostitute, and asked her if she wanted to suck a thirteen year old’s dick. He clapped his hand on my shoulder. I gasped in surprise. For this, he would pay her a hundred dollars.

“Money is money,” Mary said, with a gap-toothed smile.

I panicked as she drew closer to the door. I don’t think I managed to say one intelligible word. Just lots of words all mixed together into nonsense. Please don’t. No thank you. What are you doing? All combined into one sound that didn’t mean anything.

Mike put his foot on the gas pedal and splashed a full western Washington mud puddle all over her when she was only a few feet from the door. In my memory she was opening the door handle, but I’m not sure if that happened or not anymore. He laughed his hyena laugh when he saw her covered in mud in the rear view mirror. I remember that part clearly. In between giggles he kept saying, “oh man, your fucking face right now, dude.”

I yelled at him.

Like a foolish child who expected his feelings to matter and damn the consequences, I yelled at him both for what he’d just put me through and what he’d just done to poor Crazy Mary. My father had once held up all traffic on the bridge to give Crazy Mary an umbrella. It was the most Christ-like act of my childhood, even if the way my dad relayed was to say, “Always fucking looking out for people who don’t fucking have anyone to look out for them.” Maybe he couldn’t fix what was wrong with Crazy Mary, but he could give her something to keep from getting rained on so much. That had meant something to me.

And now she was on the side of the road, covered with mud out of deliberate cruelty.

Mike’s face became instantly furious and he pressed his foot against the accelerator. Soon we were going fifty, sixty miles an hour. Through a small downtown area. Blowing past red lights and over that same bridge. He whipped the steering wheel back and forth.

“You like to yell at me, white-boy?” He seethed.

Mike couldn’t tolerate any back-talk. He was obsessed with the idea of disrespect. Or “disrespeck” as he constantly called it, given his inability to pronounce the last “t” in any word. A perceived slight would stand out in his memory for months and sometimes years. A decade might pass and no matter what else he had done on his end, he would always view matters on equal footing given the time you said something that could perceived as rude when you weren’t paying full attention. If you ever told him to “shut up” or mentioned his mom in any manner, violence followed. I have since learned to look for that obsession as a sign of danger in those both mentally unwell and abusive. Even years later, when you’d think wisdom might have caught up to him and I finally just beat the living shit out of him while he was in the middle of hitting my mother, his ability to process justified resistance as an unprovoked assault remained fully intact. Days after that incident, he complained I had strangled and punched him incorrectly because it turned his eyes red. Even then, his view was that it was none of my business since my mom was still his wife.

A stream of racial filth I am too wary to record spewed forth from his mouth when we hit the bridge. None of it was new to me, unfortunately. He assailed himself with every possible prejudice, and by implication put the words into my mouth. The words “shit-skinned” were joined together repeatedly. Looking back, he was clearly out of his mind on meth but we liked to pretend he wasn’t actively using back then. It was more dignified to say he was recovering and I was still young and dumb enough to believe my mom on the subject. Even white trash families like mine had our pretensions.

“What do you think they’d say if I drove us off the bridge right now?” He asked.

His thinking was that it would be a headline about how a crazy brown man killed a white boy with high potential. That’s all anyone would care about even though I was such a rude piece of shit when all he’d done was make a harmless joke. How smart could I be if he could just kill me right then and there? He asked me if I agreed. Insisted that I agree with him. All I could think about was driving straight off into the water.

I was so scared I don’t think I said anything. Just held onto my seat belt for dear life.

Then he laughed and told me I was way too uptight and took his foot off the accelerator.

Before I got big enough for it to be a problem, he would sometimes chase me with a booger on his finger. Which at least allowed me to have some illusions of dignity. Even if he held me down and laughed as he dangled it over my face I would tell myself it was only a booger. No worse than a sneeze gone wrong. Sometimes he’d chase us with dirty toilet paper he’d just used, which left no room for dignity imaginary or otherwise. All the while chanting “white boy” or otherwise stating the only reason I could possibly have a problem with any of these tactics was that I was too uptight. Just way too fucking uptight. People on Ponape were more relaxed about these things. Not like white people. Too officious. Too uptight. Too fucking white.

Do well in school? White people bullshit.

Not immediately agree with something he said? Soft white people, living sheltered lives could not be expected to know any better. Only his knowledge, forged from a childhood spent on Ponape, and teenage years in rural Michigan, could be correct.

But express any sort of sentiment that all men were equal? Unrealistic white nonsense, because some people were definitely better than others. And him, better than all the rest.

In our current age, I have at times felt like Tom Hanks in the film Forest Gump, pulled out of the hospital bed by Lieutenant Dan. The scene where he is challenged in anger by an amputee to give forth testament if he knows what it is like to not be able to use his legs. Except now the question is, do I know what it is like to be discriminated against on the basis of my race by someone with more power than myself? And the answer, bewildering and jarring as a ladle caught in a drawer that refuses to open against all expectations, is yes. Yes, I do. I mean, has anyone ever tried to touch you with their shit? Not that I would ever, ever say so in regular life. I’m not stupid.

It also at times felt like I was living in certain refrain scenes in the television series Roots. Except, instead of learning an African word for river, I learned a string of profanity in the Mokilese language. And only ever profanity. I know zero words that don’t have a crude meaning except that if you know someone well that you add -way to the end of their name to note the connection. So that Bob becomes Bob-way. Also that they have no word for love, that it is not gay for two men to hold hands or have anal sex with each other as long as they don’t “act gay” about it, that there is a common game that involves bouncing bundles of stick as high as possible. There is also a mentally handicapped man named Esa who sometimes walks the beach naked and masturbates for several hours at a time. Everyone leaves home alone.

Tun-Tun, which means “penis.”

Massay-punan, which means “you have shit in your eyes.”

Bwi-Bwi, which means “shut the fuck up.”

Cassarotay, which also means “shut the fuck up” but is more serious.

These chapters of my life left me with tremendous sympathy for anyone caught up in a difficult situation for which there is no widespread cultural precedent or understanding. There is no support group of reservoir of stories to draw upon if your step-father is attacking your specifically from the context of a culture most other people aren’t even aware exists. Mike hated me for being white. He also hated my mom, who became his wife, for being white. And himself. And his children.

At the same time, Mike could never let the subject of Hitler or the Third Reich pass without loudly vocalizing his approval. They’d done an outstanding job. He would recite you something he’d just found online proving this point. Their inventions and science were unique and their achievements alone. Their accomplishments unparalleled by the United States. Nazi Germany was clearly the best military organization in modern history. Hitler had been a genius. It had only been some sour luck that saw him defeated. Mike loved to play Call of Duty, and as an imaginary soldier, he had a high esteem for any man who had fought and died under the Swastika banner.

I remember one day he called my mother Hitler and I am almost certain that was the start of his fixation.

Mike was tempestuous when hungry. So many fights happened in the hour just before meal times. His fights with my mother were always mean and ugly. The sort of nasty and vicious affairs where you’d need to pick up the babies and go for a walk so they wouldn’t see. Sometimes bad enough you’d call the police from the phone downstairs on the way out to the park with a stroller. Anything at all could set the two of them off, and I credit my bizarre sense of humor to repeated attempts by myself to snap them out of whatever doom spiral they were determined to let draw them into hell. Oftentimes, asking them both in the middle of an argument to speculate on the ability of a centaur to masturbate was enough to gum up the whole argument. To confuse them and muddle them and take them out of the script of their drama. Unfortunately, not always.

One time, Mike slapped her repeatedly after a thirty minute shouting match over who was the biggest “Dilly-Dallier.” The preceding thirty minutes included long examples of “dilly-dallying” by them both. My siblings and I were all called forth as witnesses and if we refused, any instance of “dilly-dallying” we had committed would be brought up by Mike as a sign of genetic impurity. Dilly-Dallying was in our very blood-line, in our very culture. And when my mom called Mike’s mom a dilly-dallier he had absolutely no recourse but to slap the mouth of a person capable of spewing such filth. Call him a dilly-dallied and he could be merciful. But his mother?

One of their ugliest fights, the first in which I ever called the police myself, occurred when they disagreed over where the nutritional label was usually found on a carved ham. One of them supposed it was on the flat, cut part of the ham. The other, on the rounded part. The police temporarily detained him but ultimately let him go since that argument never had the chance to get physical. I blamed the police call on the neighbors when questioned. She called them often enough I was believed.

The day Mike called my mother Hitler, he took a bite of pizza and immediately thought better of it. Better to eat pizza than get into a fight about if my mother was Hitler. You could see the thinking on his face as plain as day. So obvious it was like his head became clear and his brain spelled out the words in electrical sparks.

“Continue fight or eat pizza?”

And he chose pizza.

When my mother rose to the challenge, he quickly demurred that Hitler had been a genius. He meant it as a compliment. Couldn’t she take a simple compliment? Calling my mother Hitler was awesome! She should be proud. For ten minutes, as he kept eating pizza, he insisted that he meant calling her Hitler as the greatest possible praise you could give to another person. Why, he himself wished that one day he could do something good enough to be called Hitler. One day, he hoped his kids would see him as the new Hitler. My mother thinking there was something wrong with being called Hitler was just foolishness.

I’m not joking. I know it’s funny. And I know it’s horrible, too. It’s horrible and funny mixed together and one doesn’t negate the other. I apologize because that paradigm makes up so much of my youth. It was funny and awful at the same time. I remember this vividly. And I remember it because it is one of the dumbest possible trajectories of thought I have ever witnessed a human mind take and I remember that I knew so at the time.

This strange thought-loop never went away. Sometimes, he would stare out of a window and wistfully sigh. And if you ignored him, he would sigh even louder and even more wistfully. Then he might cough and laugh to himself. And if you ignored that, he would throw something at you until you finally asked him what he was thinking about.

To which he would reply with, well, lots of things. Anything to piss you off or get under your skin.

Sometimes he would declare, for no reason, “Retardation setting in. Must be midnight.”

Others, he would ask you where something was located, and if you didn’t know he would reply, “If it was up your butt you’d know.”

Oftentimes that wistful thought was:

“Oh nothing. Just thinking about how much I love Hitler.”

It didn’t end there. It wasn’t a casual interest. I can’t stress that enough. For years he would do what he could to research Nazi gold coins. For all I know, he’s still doing it. You would find multiple tabs open on his computer with auction sites for Nazi gold that he had shown to no one, and considering he showed everyone everything all the time I found it very telling. If only he had the money, he lamented, he would own as much Nazi gold as possible. Nazi art. Nazi coats. Nazi everything.

His use of the n-word became ever more liberal toward the end of his marriage to my mother. And I’m sorry if this doesn’t track with your personal experience, but it’s a big world so I’m not saying your experience contradicts mine, but every single white person who ever heard him say it tried to get him to stop saying it immediately. Even the most white trash, almost definitely a racist white person you’ve ever seen, would stop and tell him that it was inappropriate and it made them uncomfortable. Maybe they might not have done so if he’d said it with less venom, but he always made sure to hit every syllable in the most offensive way possible. It only ever encouraged him to keep saying it. They knew he wasn’t supposed to say the n-word, so they knew to tell him to stop.

But mostly when he did something racially offensive, people did their best to look away or around it. If it didn’t fit some very particular mold, nobody knew how to respond. This above all, and repeatedly throughout my childhood, taught me the lesson that people can only really notice things they have been taught to notice. Or rather, there is a safety mechanism so deeply imbedded in most people to avoid aberrant behavior, that they protect large parts of themselves even from unpleasant awareness. And that mechanism told everyone to do everything they could not to engage because with Mike the moment you engaged, you’d lost. Engagement was what he was looking for the whole time. He didn’t want money or power or anything like that. He wanted to exist inside of your head, supremely, over all other things. What is love if not living inside of someone else’s mind? Well, there are many ways to exist in other people’s mind and Mike had an endless appetite for that love.

Mike’s problems with race were strange and atypical. That’s obvious. They nevertheless inform a lot of the way I think of modern racism in today’s world. It took a long while to get cause and effect straight in my head. Mike wasn’t obnoxious or an asshole because he was racist. He was racist because he was an obnoxious asshole. He went looking around for something useful to piss people off and found racism there before him, ready-made to help him accomplish the task. That was why none of his beliefs had to make any sense if held together or tested. The point wasn’t to have a belief-set that held together. The point was to build a series of tools to ensnare people’s attention and make them angry.

If he threw a sieg heil in public, which he did often, it delighted him to know that everyone around would find it so discordant that they wouldn’t know what to say to him. The discomfort was the goal. The knowledge he could go anywhere and just mess up everyone else’s day. He may not have received engagement but everyone paid him attention. He walked around with his chest puffed out, just waiting for a chance to corner some unsuspecting do-gooder who might challenge him on the subject of white supremacy.

And he would vigorously defend the people who, to him, had invented everything, done everything, and built everything. And if you put him in a lie detector or hooked him up to an FMRI, he would show the full conviction of those beliefs. And if you gave him some time for the mood to change, he would also acknowledge that he despised, spit on, and hated white people the same way he hated everything. And he would also pass any possible test you could give for sincerity.

Hate was the point.

Attention was the point.

And while there’s so much more, I also have to bring this to a point.

The problem with Mike is that there are too many stories. Too many interesting things. And when I go to pull one down from the shelf of my memory, all the others try come along. If indulged, we would soon find ourselves in a trap and spend all our time chasing small glittering oddments from one to the next. He lived his life to deliberately do that sort of thing to people, although these days I hardly think of him at all.

Let us put aside the time he found a crate of dildos floating on the ocean. It’s too tempting to pause and reflect on the character of a man that became so excited by such discovery that he threw a hook into the ocean to pull that crate aboard. Other men might have thought about doing it, laughed at the mere idea of doing it, and yet my stepfather was the kind of man who paused the operation of a whole crabbing boat to see it done. We might be forced to wonder for long paragraphs how long after he pulled those dildos aboard it took him to dream up burying several of them in my grandmother’s vegetable bed as a joke.

So we will simply dance around the way he collected spare change for years. Collected every coin he found, not to spend it on a vacation or a nice gift, even for himself, but so that he could bring it to a furious boil in a crab pot. Why? So he could throw it all in front of a homeless mission when there was a long line waiting for the doors to open. His only goal to leave burn scars on the fingers of the town’s homeless population shaped like the faces of dead presidents. Or the time he went to parent-teacher conferences and wrote me a love letter from a girl he knew I liked and left it in my desk so that I’d try to talk to her about it the next day. That one burned me up for years. Even how he became transfixed on the scene from Stark Trek VI, where Uhura flashes one of her legs from behind a door in a cunning ploy to distract an enemy, so that for decades after he would roll up his sweat pants and enter a room by performing the same maneuver. All while panting “Such freaking primo svelte calves, dude.” That, too, we will leave aside.

Let’s end this with lessons about love, life, and forgiveness.

The children were the reason I endured all this for as long as I did. Sometimes I thought about running away or living with my grandparents. The babies pulled me back. My mom and Mike’s babies. Even when they got older, that’s how I saw them and still see them to some extent. Just little babies. Kids. When I held my sister at thirteen, I stopped being a kid all the way. I hadn’t been just a kid for a long while, but that snuffed out the rest of it. Childishness, thinking everything will be okay, someone surely will help if you just wait long enough. All that just up and died. I felt it happen. Knowing what kind of parents that defenseless, innocent little baby had to look after her murdered all the kid left in me. Knowing she wouldn’t have anyone else to look after her and that my grandparents were both getting older was holy terror.

And well, good. I’m trying to make this something more than a whine. Something better than a “poor me.” You’re not supposed to keep being a kid when circumstances no longer allow or you grow beyond it. That’s a sickness everywhere in our age, and I’ve been thankful that it passed me by. In my middle years, I am even grateful for the experience. I got through it early and that means since I know nobody is coming to help I can go out and do something. It still makes me nauseous when I hear a forty year old talk about being young and I worry about whatever nourishing pain was withheld from them that allowed the bones in their spirit to grow so crooked. I worry about that a lot at the societal level. How do you get people to experience the optimal discomfort at the optimal time so it doesn’t just crush them and causes them to grow up instead?

A lot of people thought I was an underage dad in a mixed race couple. That was another odd experience, but I didn’t care. Let them think what they want, in my little sister’s eyes I was a hero. I’d never been someone’s hero outside my imagination. Pulling her to the video rental store in a little radio flyer wagon my grandparents bought, well, I could have been Superman. Grabbing the same Barney’s Magical Adventure cassette, it was like I was giving her eternal life. Carrying her and holding her hand to walk to the playground was everything to me. Then again when my little brother was born. Two babies, one on either arm. Luckiest high schooler in the world. Wake up early, watch them in the morning while my mother got ready for work. Go to school. Come home, make dinner, and be with them until it was time to sleep. Watch Mulan four-hundred times.

We were one of the only “mixed-race” families in our overwhelmingly white town. Which is one of the reason why I roll my eyes a bit when people talk about single-race utopias. Aberdeen, Washington is basically all white, and it’s no utopia. And it certainly doesn’t make racism go away, either. Not enough non-white people? Well, we all just hate the nearly identical people of the neighboring town of Hoquiam. Their stuck-up air, thinking they are better than anyone, just because they are better by most metrics. If that sounds like an exaggeration, every year when the high school football teams would face each other we built a straw man to represent one of the vile Hoquiam players and burned it in effigy. Johnny Hoquiam, we called it, and the night Johnny Hoquiam was burned we’d all go into Hoquiam and do our best to trash the town. Well, I mean, I personally was at home reading Fantasy and Science Fiction novels. But the royal we went out and did it.

In the early days, when I still clung to the illusion that my mom was someone to be counted on and who was there to help me, I’d call her work cellphone to see when she was coming home to put the kids to bed at night. She’d leave me home babysitting while she went out to sing Karaoke on the weekends. It would sometimes get to be two or three in the morning and I’d get spooked. One particular time, I remember it was six in the morning before she came home. She never answered. There would always be some excuse. Battery died. Phone left in the car. Cell phones were new and my mom was lucky to have one so it was all plausible to me. But after a few weeks I got the message. She was determined to have her own life. The new children were fun but inconvenient. She wasn’t going to let having kids hold her back again. It was only fair she have her own time and her own life back and she’d raised me so it was only fair I raise the next children.

Oh, I’d be so afraid in those first months because my mom went out even if my little sister was sick. That was fear like I’d never known. Holding a baby burning up with fever and only a few months old and she wouldn’t take a bottle, and her diaper was clean, and then she’d start shivering even though she was warm against me. No reason I could find for her to cry and yet she wouldn’t stop. I was too young to drive. Too young to have ever done anything like that before. And my mom still wouldn’t answer.

I loved my mom enough back then to imagine that something must have happened to her that kept her from her cellphone. She wouldn’t simply leave me alone. She wouldn’t leave a thirteen year old with a newborn she knew was sick and no way to get ahold of her. She must be dead to still be out after so long, I’d think.

Knowing she’d be angry if I called 9-11, but after three hours of screaming, crying, and my mom being almost certainly dead —and damn her to hell for not picking up her phone if she was alive— I called my grandparents at two in the morning. My grandma answered on the third ring. If she hadn’t, I think I’d have a bit more forgiveness for my mother. I’ve often thought that if my mother’s parents had been the kind of people you couldn’t rely upon that I’d understand her better. Find it easier to forgive her, although I’d like to think that I have. That’s been a constant paradox for me, knowing that my relationship with my mother would be better if it was also worse. My grandmother and grandfather got there as soon as possible. I let them into the house like they were angels, which is what they were in my young life.

My grandma did some old lady trick about putting a single drop of warm olive oil in a baby’s ear that stopped the crying right away. Something a man could never do because he’d always be worried the olive oil was too warm or not warm enough, or he’d use too much or too little oil. She did it easily. A bit of magic that probably came to her out of Norway from her mother that let her do it just right. She helped me with my sister and that soothed me so much I cried as I thanked her. She told me I’d done the right thing and she helped me get the infant Tylenol measured out right because no one had ever shown me how and I’d been terrified at getting it wrong.

This part isn’t a story about how Mike showed his true good character when he got back to the house with my mom. Which they did at four am to my recollection. This digression had another purpose. They both yelled at me after my grandparents left for embarrassing them. Had they left another newborn with a newborn? I was a teenager not a baby. Thirteen! I could take care of a sick newborn overnight. Did they really need this after they had both worked so hard during the week? Mike was on unemployment, yes, but the principle was the same. Why was I going to my grandparents for help? If I had put the baby to sleep the right way, there was no reason we would both be awake at four in the morning in the first place. The baby wouldn’t have even been sick if I’d done things right. This whole thing was my fault for overreacting and they really wished I could be more reliable.

You’re hopefully thinking “oh poor kid” and “oh poor babies.” And you’re thinking how much you don’t like Mike and how he deserves being written about here, and all those things that I was hoping you’d feel. That’s what I wanted you to feel, but not for me. I’m doing great now. Really, I am. I wanted to help you get to those feelings to help you get to something harder and further out. Take all of that sympathy you have for me and imagine a little kid, younger even than I was back then. Ten years old or thereabouts by the pieces I’ve put together. He’s being told his family is moving far away. There’s no more work for his dad and they’ve got to go live with relatives.

The father is a little crazy so he doesn’t respond to his unemployment situation quite the way you think he should. Doesn’t go job hunting or house hunting, or any of the other things a provider should do. He becomes fixated on the family dog and what they should do about the family dog. How do you get the dog off the island? Will they even let you go to Michigan with a dog from Micronesia? Do they check for diseases at customs? There’s no veterinarian on the island to take the dog to get shots. Too much to think about and there’s no one who knows. Can’t afford to take it to the vet or even on the plane, besides.

One day that kid opens the oven and the finds the dog severed head inside.

The dog they’d had for years and years. The family dog. His dog. Its head is sitting inside the oven because where else would you put it? Oh, of course the garbage, the dad admits, when confronted. Smart call. Totally forgot. You know, being from Canada your father has never eaten a dog like your mom has. People on the island eat dogs all the time although less now than in the past. He wasn’t sure what to do with the head. The dad got curious and wanted to give it a try. That’s what’s cooking outback. That smell. It’s the family dog. Their pet dog they’ve owned for years.

This is only the beginning of that little boy’s dad going completely, totally, out of his fucking mind.

I believe it’s true because when Mike’s sister told us —after she’d visited for too long and grown tired of Mike’s antics— Mike teared up and denied it ever happened. And also when I asked his other brothers they said it was true. Mike was always happy to claim lies if they brought him attention. But not that one. That one he wanted no part of because his dad was awesome and so was his mom.

When I later met his mother I was struck by her utter selfishness. Her annoyed expression when Mike broke down, begging and pleading, asking why she’d never loved him and her holding out her palm, telling him she needed money. Or was he too crazy to work anymore, like his father? His mother had something like a half dozen children by four different fathers. In a culture where such things are unheard of. And she gave all of them the same affection she would give to an ATM.

I used to think forgiveness was something idiotic. I thought forgiveness was a thing where you closed your eyes real tight and said “I’m not going to think at all, and I’m going to let this person do whatever they want.” So, of course, I never wanted to forgive anyone for anything ever. The thing about true forgiveness is that it’s hard and when you understand what it really is, you know that it’s the right thing to do so deep down you can’t escape it, but it’s so hard you also understand why you worked for your whole life to not really understand it.

Forgiveness is seeing yourself in the other person and giving up hate. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Just don’t hate them. Wish they could be better than they are even if you wouldn’t put money on them succeeding. It doesn’t mean you don’t have other obligations. It doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to stop someone from hurting people because they were hurt once, or put them in prison, or any of that other stuff. You still have that obligation. Forgiveness just means you’re not supposed to hate that person while you go about it.

Aren’t I obnoxious the way that Mike is obnoxious? Hell, read a story here. Don’t I cough in such a way by posting something ominous and then revealing some strange truth when they ask further? Didn’t I go through a long spell as a kid where I wanted to turn Ponape into a sheet of glass if only to make Mike shut up about it? Wasn’t I prejudice against all of his relatives? Don’t I want to be famous like my mom even if I’m obviously a lot more conflicted about it? Maybe it got twisted a bit further in Mike or my mom than in me, but the root is the same. People like attention and we’re all people. If you can remember that, remember the person you’re looking at who did something so bad was an innocent baby once, maybe punishment can even be a gift to that child? Something given to reassure them “No, we won’t let you be so terrible. We’re going to give you as long as we can to get this right, and we’ll keep you from hurting people while you do it.”

I am different today than I was yesterday. So are you. So are we all. I wasn’t born knowing the right thing to do all the time. And there have been lots of times in my life where someone was nice to me when I definitely didn’t deserve it, a sort of credit extended to someone still buried in debt. If I can forgive Mike, if not for whom two of the people I love most in the entire world would not exist, then maybe we can all be a bit better.

That doesn’t mean I go to Christmas dinner when he’s wearing a pistol and holster after his last felony conviction when he’s definitely not supposed to have one. It doesn’t mean I don’t yell at my mom for letting him move back in after I went through the effort of doing the paperwork to mediate their divorce. It doesn’t mean I let him sleep on my couch. But it does mean I remember that he was an innocent kid once and it means I don’t hate that kid just because the dice got tossed a certain way this time around. I still get to have the sense that God gave to a horse. If you’re struggling to accept that, read the part where he chased me with his shit again and tell me I don’t mean that, or that your situation is different because someone said something mean to you on the internet.

Let’s end this with a few paragraphs of something I am unambiguously proud of and which go to illustrate the point.

Mike was blind for about a week when I was a sophomore in high school. He got a job working maintenance on some boats at the docks. Someone came with a welder and Mike, too good to listen to any warning, stared at the pretty blue lights while the work was being done. His Micronesian eyes would be immune to things like ultraviolet radiation by his reckoning. Well, they weren’t. It’s called flash burn if you didn’t grow up around the trades, and it usually gets kids who are too dumb to listen. Mike must have been close to forty.

He walked around our house, at first comically, enjoying the attention that his bandages garnered. He made sure to touch everyone’s face and then demand all kinds of favors. Then my mom began to take advantage of the situation to get back at him for all of their many arguments and he wanted to see again after that. Being blind got boring. He was in the basement, trying to do laundry when I spotted him. My mom had yelled at him to make himself useful and Mike got angry enough to actually do something productive. Which may have been one of the few true healthy angers I’ve ever seen from him.

Except he was in the basement and he was scared and he was oh so close to the utility sink and the big open hole where the drain went under the foundations of the house. All I had to do was nothing and he was a few seconds away from breaking a leg. All I had to do was shut up and not say anything. I could tell he sensed something bad was about to happen to because he seemed panicked. Like he’d gotten all turned around down there, forgotten to keep a map in his head, or else lost track of it.

I went out and grabbed his hand and pulled him away.

He cried like a little kid and clung to me and said he’d never had a truer friend in his life. And the hell of it is that I think he was telling the truth. I think that might have been the nicest thing anyone ever did for him.