He was a stinky concentrated form of pandemonium and I would no longer let him ruin my life. If the Inferno could break up with me, I could break up with him. I don’t care what anybody says, you absolutely can break up with family.

I went home planning to gather up all the particles of energy I could muster and release them right in his fucking face!

I marched straight into his house. The lights were off. I unlocked the door and sneaked in. I heard a strange sound from his bedroom. He must be crying again. But it didn’t sound like mere crying. It sounded like sobbing. Well, so what? I hardened myself against the lure of sympathy. I went and opened the door, and what I saw was so shocking, I didn’t have the common decency to close the door. Dad was in bed with Anouk.

“Get out!” he screamed.

I just couldn’t get my head around it. “How long has this been going on?” I asked.

“Jasper, get the fuck out of here!” Dad yelled again.

I know I should have, but my feet seemed to be as dumbfounded as my head. “What a joke!”

“Why is this a joke?” Dad asked.

“What’s she getting out of it?”

“Jasper, leave us alone!” Anouk shouted.

I stepped back out of the room and slammed the door. This was really insulting. Anouk hadn’t wanted to sleep with me and yet she had jumped into bed with my father. And ewww- with my condoms! And what was she doing with Dad when Oscar Hobbs had been trying to get into her bed? Was some pitiful soap opera going on? Dad was a man who had spent the majority of his life absent from human relationships, who finally embarked on one with his only confidant, merely to find himself as the dullest point of a love triangle where, if logic prevailed, he would lose her.

Well, this was no longer my problem.

The next morning I woke early. I decided the practical thing would be to find a room in a share house with junkies, something cheap and affordable so I wouldn’t drain my meager savings just on shelter. I answered a bunch of ads in the newspaper. There weren’t many that didn’t specifically ask for, in capital letters, a FEMALE. It seemed to be common knowledge that men hadn’t made the right kind of evolutionary leap, the one that allowed them to tidy up after themselves. The apartments and houses that did permit males to exist there weren’t so bad, but they all had people living in them. Of course I knew this beforehand, but it wasn’t until I was face-to-face with the other humans that I realized I needed to be alone. We were expected to be civil to each other, not just once in a while, but every day. And what if I wanted to sit in my underwear and stare out the kitchen window for six hours? No, the solitude of living in a hut in the center of a labyrinth had ruined me for cohabitation.

In the end I decided on a studio apartment and took the first one I saw. One room and a bathroom and a partition between the main area and the little kitchen, which ran alongside a wall. It was nothing to get excited about. There was not one feature of it about which you could say, “But look at this! It has a ____________________!” It had nothing. It was just a room. I signed the lease, paid the rent and the security deposit, and took the keys. I went inside and sat in the empty room on the floor and smoked one cigarette after another. I rented a van and drove home to my hut and threw all my possessions worth keeping into it.

Then I went up to the house. Dad was standing in the kitchen wearing his dressing gown that still had the price tag on. He was whistling atonally while cooking pasta.

“Where’s Anouk?” I asked.

“Not sure.”

Maybe with Oscar Hobbs, I thought.

The pasta sauce was spluttering, and in another pan he seemed to be overboiling vegetables so as to bleed every last nuance of flavor out of them. He gazed at me with a rare look of affection and said, “I understand you were a bit shocked. We should’ve told you. But anyway, you know now. Hey- maybe the four of us can go out sometime?”

“The four of who?”

“Anouk and me and you and your plaything.”

“Dad, I’m leaving.”

“I didn’t mean tonight.”

“No. I’m leaving leaving.”

“Leaving leaving? You mean…leaving?”

“I’ve found an apartment in the city. A studio.”

“You already found a place?”

“Yeah- put down a security deposit and the first two weeks’ rent.”

There was a shiver running through him, a shiver I could see.

“And you’re moving out when?”

“Now.”

“Right now?”

“I’ve come to say goodbye.”

“What about your stuff?”

“I hired a van. I packed everything I need.”

Dad stretched his limbs strangely, and in a dull, artificial voice he said, “You’re not giving me much say in the matter.”

“I suppose not.”

“What about your hut?”

“I’m not taking it with me.”

“No, I mean…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t know what he meant. Dad started breathing heavily through his nostrils. He was trying not to look wretched. I was trying not to feel guilty. I knew that by losing me he was losing the only person who understood him. But I was guilty for other reasons too; I wondered what was going to happen to his mind. And how could I leave him with that face? That sad and lonely and terrified face?

“You need help moving?”

“No, it’s OK.”

It was as if we had been playing a game all our lives and the game was ending, and we were going to take off our masks and our uniforms and shake hands and say, “Great game.”

But we didn’t.

Suddenly all my bitterness and hatred for him evaporated. I felt enormously sorry for him. I saw him as a spider who woke up thinking he was a fly and didn’t understand he was caught in his own web.

“Well, I’d better get going,” I said.

“Do you have a phone number?”

“Not yet. I’ll call you when I get the phone on.”

“Right. Well, bye.”

“See ya.”

As I turned and walked out, Dad let out a little rumbling grunt, like the sound of troubled bowels.

FIVE

Author’s note: My original version of this chapter went hurtling into the shredder as soon as I discovered among my father’s papers the first five chapters of his unfinished autobiography. I’d just finished pouring out my entire story and I was frankly annoyed- mostly because his account covered this period better than my version of the events. Not only was his version more concise, because it did not contain my long digression on the recent glut of calendars featuring sexy priests, but I was irritated that Dad’s version of events contradicted much of my own, and even some of the previous chapter (four), which I’d really labored over. Nevertheless, under the influence of my two guiding stars, impatience and laziness, I’ve not amended any part of Chapter Four, and decided to print Dad’s unfinished autobiography here, slightly edited, as Chapter Five. My version of Chapter Five is still around somewhere- I didn’t really throw it in the shredder. Hopefully, in years to come it will be of curiosity value- to the highest bidder.

My Life by Martin Dean

A Loner’s Story by Martin Dean

A Loser’s Story by Martin Dean

Born to Be Snide by Martin Dean

Untitled Autobiography of Martin Dean by Martin Dean