It is a long and often painful tale. Don’t read it if you are leading a normal, happy life in a functional family, unless you want to know about places where you would never choose to go – places where you wouldn’t want anybody to go. Apart from its most obvious intention, as a message from a father to his estranged teenage daughter, this book is directed toward the millions of men (and their families, friends and relatives) who have journeyed through the terrain the story attempts to depict. It is a landscape of America at the beginning of the 21st century, the heart of the greatest empire the world has ever known, which is inhabited by a population living in a culture of hypocrisy and denial, in a society littered with fatherless children and the corpses of broken families. The book attempts to reach out to all men who have ever been defamed as Deadbeat Dads, as the lowliest of social scum in the popular culture, and to all people who have found their strange childhood origins transformed into troubled adult relationships, and who then have sojourned through various levels of hell, in the world of difficult marriages, divorces, child-custody battles, and paternity suits. The message of the book to all such people is that you are not alone, and that there are ways to resist being destroyed.
The story is told as the chronologically straightforward memoir of an anonymous man who thinks he might speak for many other people. The narrative is highly subjective and full of closely detailed experience and psychological analysis. Beneath its surface presentation, the individually unique story seeks to validate the pedagogy of "single case-study analysis." That which is unique attempts to elucidate an entire class (or two) of cases, in description of several developments that have become major features of the American social landscape. These developments include the explosion of divorces initiated by women, the concomitant expansion of non-custodial fathers’ ranks, and the untold escalation of paternity suits, all of which have unfolded in relation to wide-scale defamation of men in general and fathers in particular, under the onerous institutions of the American government and court system. Because it is told as an experiential and psychoanalytical memoir, the story attempts to capture the crises and emotions of fathers who lose their children, children who lose their fathers, men entrapped in child-support servitude, and women whose control of family relations is rooted in the heart of militant feminism.
There are many stories related between the covers of this book. The reader is challenged to suspend judgment of the author’s character until the main story is told out. The author does expect to be judged severely in the end, but the reader’s biggest challenge will be to decide if the story should ever have been told at all. The author was trained as an artist and presents this work as a large canvas. Paragraphs can be compared to brush-strokes and stories and themes flow in patterns that cannot be understood in their full dimensions until the book finally ends. Look at the work as a painting, and allow the inter-related stories to unfold in their own way, blending into and out of one another, conforming only to the messiness of life’s spiraling path. Don’t try to comprehend all the patterns along the way; instead, rest assured that eventually all loose strings will be tied together. Think of the work as a New Age soap opera, and as a father’s protest against militant feminism, especially as the second half unfolds. Understand the long letters, when you get to them, as words that changed the world. Finally, don’t expect to find no light at all in the dark tones of painful experience, because there eventually is some brightness in the gloom, and that is a big part of the message.
In your little girl’s mind, I’m sure you just wanted everything to be okay. Out in the world of those who knew nothing, I heard some voice telling me I should "just take it like a man." And I had lost track of right and wrong, up and down, in and out, back and forth, and every other neat distinction between opposing ideas. I was scared out of my mind. I was feeling no pain, only fear.
The decision I faced was going to stick with me for the rest of my life, and it was going to profoundly affect everybody with whom I was related, starting with you and Gray, but also including Sondra, Desire, Mom, and God-only-knew how many other people. No matter how I looked at it, it was a disaster and a tragedy, and the damage from it was going to spread beyond my own life. Having a child was supposed to be about joy and hope. How could things ever have gone so wrong?
I couldn’t blame anybody but myself for the mess I was in. Nobody had forced me into bed with Sondra. I had chosen to be there, and now it was right up there on the list of the biggest blunders of my life, and I had to face the consequences. I thanked God that if I had to have an accident in my emotional free-fall from divorce, at least it had resulted in the creation of life, rather than in its destruction. Things could well have been much worse than they were.
One day, I was waiting at a bus stop on West Colfax, and I asked an older man there if he had change for a dollar for the bus fare. He looked like a homeless bum, a total wreck, with teeth missing, a grizzled face, shabby clothes, and generally down-and-out. I sat with him on the bus and he started talking to me about how he had once had a family, a home, and a life, and how he had fallen to pieces when his wife left him and took his kids away from him and strapped him down with back-breaking child-support payments. "I don’t know what hit me," he said. "I landed on the street."
I felt a huge amount of pity for the guy. I realized I could easily have been or might still end up in a similar place. I felt angered and determined I wasn’t going to let that kind of thing happen to me. No matter what, I had to keep Sondra and Desire from destroying me. I refused to be a victim. I was going to have a life, and the mothers of my children were not going to deny me that - or so I reasoned. I wasn’t blaming anybody but me. I just had to come up with a way out of the trap, without causing more damage than had already been caused. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I just wanted out.
The big problem was to understand the nature and dimensions of the mess, so I could figure out some kind of coherent approach to dealing with it. I had committed myself to a fight, but I didn’t really have much of a battle plan. I knew there had to be some kind of confrontation, but I didn’t know what form it would take. I prepared for non-violent civil disobedience and felt grateful for the years I had already committed to studying that form of political action. Kerouac and Thoreau both were telling me that I didn’t care what the law said. I had to be the master of my own fate. I wasn’t a victim.
I was going to find my most powerful weapon in the "Force of Truth" which Thoreau, Gandhi, King and Jesus all had demonstrated. I saw something terribly wrong with the political forces at work, and I was going to take my cue from those four individuals in standing up for principle - and then facing the consequences - just as I had done several times before. The most basic principle concerned whether anyone had the right imperiously to control or destroy the parental and reproductive rights of anyone else, whether anybody should ever be forced to become a parent under terms which were unacceptable.
My reproductive rights had been violated by Sondra, as my parental rights had been violated by Desire, and I wasn’t going to accept having my rights violated without a serious protest - a protest at least as serious as those which had landed me in jail in the past. All of my work in social protest and teaching politics had been based on the advocacy of personal empowerment. I felt behooved to deliver on my own principle and find enough personal power to determine my own destiny.
Kerouac was telling me that in the greater picture, all was fair in love and war, and I had to agree, given Thoreau’s understanding that there should be no violence. But basically, I agreed that in the Gender War, just as in the Sexual Revolution, there were ultimately no rules. So, like I’ve said all along, I did what I felt I had to do, and I don’t claim to have been an angel. You will ultimately judge me, I realize, and I don’t know what your verdict will be. I only want you to know what happened.
If the approach to non-violent direct action was to rely on the Force of Truth, then I was going to tell somebody the truth about what had happened with Sondra, though I wasn’t sure who that person might be - besides you and Gray. You both were going to have to know what happened with Sondra, and you were going to have to know what had happened with Desire, in order to understand what happened with Sondra, and vice versa. But you were too young to tell at that time, especially since things were so unresolved and unpredictable.
At age twelve, there was no way you could have understood the situation. I was very afraid of what your reaction to it might be, or how it might affect the already-confused battlefield I already had to face with Sondra. And I was forced to prepare for the possibility that Desire might decide to let you in on the developing story, to serve her own interests in the situation.
Meanwhile, maybe somebody else had to know the story, too. I needed to prepare to tell the story in court, and perhaps in public. After all, it was already out in public, just because it was already in court. It was already a challenge to manage the humiliation which came with that much exposure, and I could see that more of the same was on the way. I felt naked in public, like everybody already knew. I prepared to confess all my sins in public, in exchange for telling my side of the story. Maybe the whole game was going to be an all-out humiliation contest. I started thinking of ways to get the story into print, which included recruiting female writers to write it. But the fact remained that the story was still developing, and I didn’t know where it was headed.
