Skipping Appointments

I called Mom's doctor again this week. Her doctor told me something that really disturbed me. Sometimes he runs a little behind schedule because his office ends up slammed with people which obviously happens. If the doctor doesn't get to my parents fast enough, Dad goes into a rage about it in the waiting room and then hauls Mom out of the building before the doctor can intervene. He's impatient so Mom misses her doctor visit because Dad doesn't want to wait. What a fucking asshole. Those are her appointments that are an absolute necessity. Now Dad is screwing that up, too.

Mom's doctor seems like a nice guy. During my phone conversation with him after he mentioned Dad's temper tantrums in his waiting room, he asked me a question. "Why is your father so angry?"

"That's a long story. I think Dad has been mentally unstable his whole life. It's gone undiagnosed and untreated. As years passed he's become more and more messed up. His personality is also a factor. It sucks. Between that and the way he treats people Dad has pretty much driven away anyone who has ever cared about him. He can't figure that out so he's more frustrated. Everyone around him is the asshole. He can't stop and look at himself in the mirror even for a second and consider the majority of his problems might be self inflicted. There are a couple of incidents that helped push him over the edge though, Doc. His Dad killed himself. When emergency workers showed up at their house to take away the body my Pop had to clean up the mess. Grandpa Hal shot himself in the head with a .44. Blew his brains out all over the wall and the ceiling behind where he was sitting. My Dad was 23 years old at the time. I can't imagine what that must have been like for him to deal with.

Hal was a successful advertising executive in San Francisco during the 1950s. He came up with some heavy hitting ad campaigns for canned foods like IXL (later bought out by Nalley) and Fanta soft drinks. Problem was my grandmother thought as long as she had checks in her checkbook that meant they had money. So she kept writing checks all over the place and Hal ended up broke before his next paycheck arrived. That and grandma liked to stay hammered and smash up whatever latest cars they had. That kind of shit drove Hal into frequent brawls with her. Both Hal and my Grandmother were drunks, actually. Hal seemed like he was fun though. I would have liked to have met him.

Another thing that really put the zap on Dad's noggin was his first wife leaving him. Dad got married young. It was the early 1960s and he married a blonde bombshell named Charlie. She was hot. Charlie came from a dirt poor family in Texas. I say dirt poor because her parents lived in a shack with a dirt floor. They had like six or seven daughters and they named 'em all guy names. Harry, Tom, Charlie. Anyway they all ended up being airline stewardesses. After marrying my Dad and moving to San Francisco she got a job as a bank teller in the lobby of the Fairmont hotel. Lounge lizards who were playing the Fairmont usually hit Charlie up. I mean she was smokin'. She posed for Playboy. That also pissed Dad off as you might imagine.

A few times cabs were sent to Dad's place with a dozen red roses in the back seat for Charlie. It was a round trip cab if you catch my drift and that really burned Dad up. Anyway she finally ditched him to marry a rich guy and Dad ended up walking around on the streets of San Francisco going nowhere with a gun in his pocket. I think he had a breakdown then that he never recovered from. I used to feel sorry for him about the whole Charlie thing, but now I think Dad was an asshole to her all the time and it caused her to bail out."