Snippets

Watching Better Call Saul has been really strange for me. In one sense, as a fan of Breaking Bad I just really love the show. I started watching the first few seasons during the initial Covid lockdowns and it was a lot of fun. It's one of those shows that really gets you to binge, with the endings set up just perfectly to keep you wanting more. 

There's a darker side to the show for me, though. The simple fact is that Saul Goodman reminds me a lot of my father. My father was a lawyer who also was a lifelong grifter and was always trying one scheme or another. The end goals were slightly different but still similar. Money. Prestige. Power. A love of all things gaudy. All fueled by arrogance and a desire to be better, at all costs, than others and to proove to all the naysayers just how much better. Saul was a bit more into women and less into drugs than my father was. But the resemblence is striking - even the attempt to cover up losing hair - that the show has resonanted with me in a lot of ways that I didn't expect.

A few scenes show a typical scene in Saul's office. A waiting room packed full of people, many of whom some may view as unsavory characters. People were waiting for hours to see Saul, but when the camera moves into his office you can see that he's not helping a client or working. Instead, he's using a leg masager, talking to one of his criminal accomplices, or bouncing a ball on his desk while he's thinking. People in his waiting room are agitated, but perhaps no one more than his secretary, who obviously loathes everything about the job but for some unknown reason stayed.

It was the same way at my father's law office. He would always double book clietns but then never see anyone until he kept them waiting at least a few hours. Most of the time while they were waiting, he wasn't actually doing anything. I got called in to his office to give him a foot, hand, or face massage on more than one occassion (something I hated to my core as a teenager at the time). If it wasn't me, there would be someone else in there doing it. Or he would be sleeping. Or claiming to be praying. Or doing anything but actually see the clients he had booked all day long.

My father had his office at a few different locations, and the second location was laid out so that the office where the waiting room was in the middle of the floor plan. At one end there were two offices with two people per office. My brother and I stayed in the far office. In front of the waiting room, there was the receptionist's office and my mother's office. Moving down a long hallway would find one office on the right, one meeting room, and my father's large office on the left. At the end of the hallway was the filing and copy room. 

This was the 90s, so there was a lot of filing and copying and printing going on. Whenever I had to print or file something, I had to get up out of my office, walk through a packed waiting room, go to the end of the hall, and then walk up back through the waiting room to get to my desk. The same was true if I had to go to the restroom. Many times I just could not show my face in the waiting room because I would be accosted by angry clients wondering why they took off of work to spend three hours in a waiting room.

These scenes in Better Call Saul brought back vivid and visceral memories of the long days and even longer years I spent working in my father's law office. Instead of going to middle or high school, I was there, many times six days a week and working late almost every day. If ever I left at 6pm, my father would make me feel guilty.

But never as guilty as I felt for those poor souls stuck in the waiting room of eternity.

Breakdown is, in my view, the most underrated Guns n’ Roses song ever written. From what little I’ve been able to learn about the song’s history, it was difficult to write and record. Maybe that’s why it’s only been played live twice in the entire history of the band (as of this writing).

My early teenage years were spent in the l ate 80s and early 90s. Music was a touchy subject in my house, because my father believed that only he knew what good music really was (basically anything he liked) and he also believed he was just as talented as any of the 50s and 60s stars he idolized. His musical journey is something that I’ll go in later in a longer post, but suffice it to say, I wasn’t allowed to listen to any music that didn’t meet my father’s approval. There was little that did, and while as an adult I became to appreciate some of the bands he liked, I loathed them when I was growing up.

Guns n’ Roses were a symbol of rebellion, and their songs really hit me to the core. Not all of them, but the ones that did - it was like they knew exactly what I was going through and that their words were written towards my father and the struggle I endured. There are so many lines in Estranged that encapsulated perfectly how I felt but couldn’t put into words.

It’s weird to think that GnR is classified as oldies or classic rock now. It’s amazing these guys are still touring, playing the songs of my youth three decades after they were written. I bought their albums in secret, and only listened to them at very low volume in my room or on my Walkman. 

Certain smells or weather bring back strong memories for me, as I’m sure they do for most. In November 1991, I was stuck in the cold outside painting the fence that went around our entire 8 acre property. It wasn’t the first chore or the last chore that Sunday morning. As I painted, Breakdown came on my Walkman. The rage, frustration, disappointment, angst, and wanderlust I felt was all encapsulated perfectly in this song. As I sat there in the cold November rain - literally - painting a fence for the tenth time, I thought about all I would do and see when I could escape the chains that held me.

Guns n’ Roses represented that escape. Whether it was a 10 minute escape through one of their songs or the escape that I longed for, they heard my cries and offered a way out. 

I’m sure everyone thinks the songs of their youth were the best. I like new music, but whenever I’m feeling a certain way I always gravitate to a band that got me through so much, even though they didn’t know it.

I was able to fulfill a lifelong dream and see GnR during their Not in this Lifetime tour. They weren’t the same band as I remembered, as we all age, but it was amazing to see them on stage and fulfill a dream I had when I was alone painting that damn fence.

For the entire time I knew him, my father would always claim he was on the brink of something terrible. Mostly related to his health, he was a hypochondriac but yet I never recall him going to the doctor or actually taking his health seriously. He never exercised and never did anything to mitigate his unhealthy life choices. He was always looking for shortcuts - like liposuction - instead of making meaningful changes.

I don’t know think he was actually ever concerned for his health. If he was, he would have seen doctors, tried to make lifestyle changes, or done something. I don’t think a month went by when he didn’t tell me at least a few times that he would be dead soon. But this wasn’t what he really believed. It was all for sympathy. He would tell you some elaborate story, look for your empathy (which was ironic because he was not an empathetic person himself), and then ask you for something. 

Looking over old emails and letters from him from the past 20 years, it wasn’t surprising for me to see that the things he was telling me 6 months ago were the same things he was telling me 20 years ago. I won’t make it to next year! I’ll be dead in a few months!  Someday it would be true, but he was the classic person who cried wolf a million times with the only reason being for personal gain.

Over the last few years, things got worse. At one point in 2020, he claimed to have all of the following happen in a three week period:

• He was in a car accident.
• Both his kidneys were crushed and he was in end-stage kidney failure.
• He contracted the second rarest strain of E.Coli.
• He was the first person in the US to get COVID-19.
• He broke his left hand.
• He broke his right hand.
• He broke his elbow.
• He broke his leg.
• He had second degree burns on his leg.
• He stepped on glass and needed 50 stitches on his left foot.
• He could not move his neck to the left or right more than 1/16th of an inch in either direction (oddly specific and a number that always changed).
• He broke his left shoulder.
• His left foot will need to be amputated.

It was impossible to know if any of the above were true. Maybe one was true. Maybe all had a little bit of truth to them and maybe he made them all up. The thing with my father, was that he was saying these things his entire life so it was impossible to believe anything he said.

He was always on the brink of his existence.

It had been over two months since I talked to my father. Thinking about it back then, it marked the longest I’d gone without talking to him since he was in prison.

It was refreshing and felt liberating.

Being a father myself, I hope my own son never feels that way about not talking to me. But I will never treat him the way my father treated me.

The longer I went without speaking to him, the freer I felt. My father beat into us kids - literally and figuratively - that listening to him and pleasing him was all that mattered. This led to an odd and strange sense of obligation for me. I don’t think my siblings felt the same. Maybe they did, but we all had such different experiences. Even though I knew logically all he brought me was misery, I still felt some strange feeling of obligation to my father. This meant I would continue to talk to him and have him in my life.

Shortly after I first left, it was much more than that. I was almost afraid of not receiving his approval, even though I had left his church and no longer lived in his house. It caused me to make many decisions I ended up regretting. The choices I made weren’t about what I wanted, but we’re about what I felt would make my father happy.

No, scratch that, I knew he wouldn’t be happy no matter what I did. But maybe he wouldn’t berate me and make me feel even more worthless than I felt almost every day of my childhood.

My father always taught us to think of other people first. But when he taught us this, it wasn’t because he was trying to instill in his children noble values. It was because he wanted us to think of him first and put him ahead of everything else. After all, he was a prophet and spoke to God himself. Putting our father first was therefore the same as putting God first, which was the most honorable and Christian thing to do.

Or so we were taught and led to believe.

But it was all lies. It was all to give my father control over us. And that control remained in many ways for years after I left.

I once tried talking to a therapist about my past. After hearing my story, he said that he believed deep down I still had the desire that everyone naturally has to please their parents. For most people this is fine. But for me, he said, it was causing me pain and said I should find a way to release myself from this in terms of my father.

At the time, I don’t really think I believed that was the case. Even years after leaving I was still encumbered by this lurking shadow, but I felt I freed myself from it years prior.

Yet, looking back on it, after I was able to stop speaking to my father, I realized that perhaps there still was some vestige of these feelings left deep inside that caused me to still have a relationship with someone who brought nothing good to my life and was only destructive.

It wasn’t as pronounced or harmful to my life as it once was, but it was still there, even if just a little. It’s why I still put up with the craziness that was always around my father.

As time went on, and the further my father was from me, the clearer I could see.

There was a paging system in my house when I was a teenager.

Each room had a speaker that was connected to one of the main units, one of which was in my parents' bedroom and another that was in my father’s library. Unless the speaker had the mute button on, my parents could listen in on whatever us kids were doing in our rooms through the paging system. The main system could page all of the speakers, and my father would do this whenever he wanted, really loudly through the entire house.

Sometimes he would ramble on about something stupid, or just to let them know some random apparent fact. Instead of actually taking time to spend with his kids, he would frequently page the house and say "I love you {insert kid's name here}."

There was nothing more embarrassing than him doing that while I was on the phone or when one of my friends was over. I always hated this paging system but was always able to live with it. But there were so many times I just couldn't take it and had to leave the house any chance I could get.

Whenever my father was home for an extended period, he seemed to live on the paging system, always talking about something stupid or asking for something from me, my mother, or one of my siblings. There was nothing worse than just sitting down to relax and then hearing your father’s voice really loud throughout the entire house asking you to go get him a glass of water from the kitchen, which was only about two meters from his library.

Even worse, you knew that once you went down the glass of water wouldn't be the end of it. Follow-up work was always involved, some of which was really awful.

If you were just looking from the outside, at the height of my father’s success it probably seemed like we were well-off. We had a huge house with nine bedrooms, four cars, two airplanes, and all sorts of modern early 1990s luxuries.

I use the term success loosely, however, because it was all about appearances and not real success or stability. Sure, my father drove around in his Mercedes and flew in his airplane, but he was on the brink of losing everything at any moment. For my entire childhood.

One thing he would do was buy us kids a lot of gifts for Christmas. Looking back on it now that I am older and wiser, I realize this was more a combination of compensation and selfishness than it was about making his children happy.

The compensation was for all of those times he was never there as a father. Never there as his children needed him.

The selfishness is equally as simple: knowing my father, he probably just wanted to make himself feel better and also wanted his kids to think he was a wonderful father because he bought them a bunch of stuff with money he actually didn’t have.

One year, he decided to take one of his missionary trips to Africa. He had been to Namibia a number of times and was going again. My mother also went and they decided to go over the Christmas and New Year period. Some church members lived in our house with us, and they would manage things and watch us kids while my parents were away. We were always happy, to be honest, because any time away from our father made our life easier.

My father always loved Christmas, but not enough to cancel his trip and spend it with his family. He didn't want to miss out, though, on all of the Christmas festivies. Instead of having an early celebration, he decided to make the family wait until my parents returned in the second week of January. But he wanted to make sure that the tree was full of presents.

Being only 8 years old at the time, I was conflicted. I was happy my father would be away, but it also felt like cruel torture to see all those presents sitting under the tree for weeks and weeks. We couldn't touch them, and if we did anything wrong while my parents were away, we wouldn't get to open them when they returned.

You may be thinking - what's the big deal? We were lucky enough to have a roof over our head and presents under the tree, so why should you complaing?

You're right, it's not a big deal, but I provide this as an example about what I felt was true at the time but couldn'd express, and so clearly realized was true when I became older: my father never really cared for others and his actions were only to benefit himself.

He could have celebrated Christmas with his family before he left. But he didn't want to. He wanted to make everyone wait for him, so he could have the celebration that he wanted to have on his own terms, regardless of what his family thought or felt.

From small and mundane things to big decisions, my father's first thought was always himself.

Immediately after stepping through the door Ben knew something was off.

Even though it was mid-summer it was only in the 70s outside but inside Ben was met with a rush of cold air. It was like being instantly transported to the middle of a harsh Minnesota winter. Just breathing the cold air can sting your lungs.

"What's with the temperature?" Ben asked.

"Oh, ah, well, you see, my dad he..."

Before I could get another word in my younger sister came down the steps, which were just in front of the entrance of our house. She was wearing a sweater, but that wasn't the weirdest thing Ben saw.

Her sweater was emblazoned with the words "Slave #5" on the front. She was only 7 years old, but she was already made aware of her place in the house and family.

Ben was speechless. I could see he was trying to think of something to say, but what words are there that would be remotely appropriate? Ben said a suspicious hello to my sister as she happily ran by to the kitchen, not even realizing how hurtful the words on her sweater were.

My father thought the sweaters were just an innocent joke and he bought one for everyone, with my mother being slave #1. He would make us wear them many times at home, even if people were over.

Then there was the library, which was directly to the left of the entrance. It was a separate room on the first floor in which my father would spend a lot of time. He would usually leave the door open so he could yell out to anyone passing by and ask them to do something for him.

On that summer day, with the air conditioning in the house blasting and every one wearing winter coats inside in the middle of July, Ben looked left and saw a roaring fire.

"My dad likes to have a fire going even in the summer, so he turns the air conditioning up full blast. It gets cold in the house, but his library is warm because he has the fire going."

I don't remember what Ben said after that, if he said anything. The look on his face, though, I will always remember. It was pure disbelief. I tried to shrug it off and just explain it as one of those quirks of my father.

But it wasn't just a quirk, it was selfish behavior that made everyone else in the house cold and uncomfortable just so he could enjoy his fire. Claiming to be a man of God that spoke to God himself, here he was putting his own desires ahead of everyone else's.

It was just another day in my house. Nothing new, just another thing that my father did to make himself happy without thinking of anyone else.

I never invited Ben over much again. We became really great friends, but we stuck to hanging out at the mall or at his place.

It felt so freeing just to have quiet.

No screaming. No arguing. No life or death problem that needs to be solved. No abuse. No hitting. Nobody trying to escape and then come back. Not being told you are the devil incarnate. Not being disowned for the 100th time. No psychological torment. No church services filled with rebuke at 6am and 7pm every day.

None of it.

Gone.

It was as if I could finally hear myself breath and think for the first time in my life. I was so happy to just have quiet and no stressful drama that culminated in hours of meaningless discussions just meant to build up one person’s ego.

Happiness can come in the smallest, most inconspicuous ways. For me, it was being able to wake up in my own apartment and know that I wouldn’t have to deal with all the stress that came with living in the same home as my father. I now had a new home, one that was mine and could be made as I saw fit. It finally felt like I was free, even though it would be years before I truly could be.

Finding happiness in just having a normal day was something that felt so pure but had an ugly side. It can lead to a habit of complacency. Looking back, I realize that being satisfied and being complacent are two different things. Satisfacton in your life means that you aren't generally expecting anything more. Complacency means that things are good enough for you to keep up the status quo, but it doesn't mean that you are completely satisfied. You can be complacent and dissatisfied at the same time, and the complacency only leads to more dissatisfaction.

I have some regret that I was too complacent with how things were and didn't more fervently strive to better myself or my situation. For example, I was working a job I knew wouldn't be a job I wanted to be in for the next ten years. Or even five years. But, the money was okay and in general I was just happy to have the basic things in life we all take for granted, so I stayed in that job longer than I wanted to or should have. I should have left and pursued my future more aggressively. But instead, I became complacent.

The habit of complacency can affect us all and can show up at any moment and very easily. If you are happy and satisfied with your life, then great! You are not complacent. But if you are just feeling "okay" about things and stay in your situation because it's the easy, familiar thing to do, you might be complacent. And that can lead to regret down the road and missed opportunities.

Enjoying the peace and quiet of a normal day in the beginning was okay. I had a right, I feel, to be complacent after I first escaped a cult I was born into. But years later, there were no excuses left, and I let my complacency fester into something that had a negative impact on my life. If I could go back and do it over again I would rid myself of this and at least try to do things that would bring more benefits to myself and my family.

In life there are no redos.

But I can help others along the way and end the complacency. In fact, that is a lot of what this entire experiment is about.

Growing up always fearful for your well-being isn't fun. There are different ways you can react to this environment. Some, like my brother Alex, didn't take all the shit that's coming their way and let it be known that what's going on, and the way they are being treated, is bullshit. This can cause a lot of pain in the moment, but doesn't make you anyone's...how shall I put it nicely...well, it doesn't make you feel as used and abused.

Others, like myself, just take it and hold things inside as a way to get by. Handling such enourmous stress and conflict isn't fun, and it can be easier in many ways to just take it and deal with all the shit that comes your way. Watching Trump's administration reminded me a lot of my childhood and the people around my father. Doing and/or saying nothing is in many ways less painful in the moment, but the long-term reprucussions are worse.

I've learned this and still struggle with it.

People have said I'm patient. You would have to be growing up in my family. But it goes beyond patience, and almost borders on masochism. How much abuse are you willing to take before you let out all of your anger, frustration, and despair?

I am patient, though, and it is because of how I grew up and probably my personality. And my choice to just take it and try and let it go. But what I've found is, it isn't always possible to really let it go, and it can come and bite you in the ass at the worst possible time.

All of the anger, self-loathing, sadness, and disappointment will break through sometime. In my life, there have been a few times this has happened and it's never actually been at the right time. I should have took this out on my father and those enabling him when I had the chance, not on my friend who didn't want to drink with me until 3 in the morning.

That's what happened, though, on a few occassions in my life I can luckily still count on one hand. Something would happen to me that I have a right to be upset about. Someone stole my shoes at a bar. My landlord never fixed something that broke in my apartment after they said they would. My friend said they would stay out with me on my birthday and didn't.

All reasons to be disappointed, but not reasons to let my past surface and say things I would regret. Essentially, I was wronged and had a right to be upset, but my poor response led to me being the one apologizing. I can now recognize that it wasn't the specific instance that led to my response, but it was because of a lifetime of holding things in and dealing with stuff I shouldn't have had to deal with. Especially not as a 9-year old kid. But I did, and I held the frustration and anger inside, and it came out at the wrong time decades later.

I haven't overcome this completely, but I am aware of it and try to do better. I need to pick and choose when I can be justified in the wrath I express, and when it is simply a manifestation of decades of abuse. It's not easy, but I'm learning and trying.

If I could go back and tell my 9-year old self to get angry at the abuse I endured - to follow my brother's example - I would. But I can't, and now I have to live with the effects.