Who’s Your Daddy?
I didn’t know until I was 23.
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I wrote this on Father’s Day several years ago (2018?).
“Oh my god, you’re just like your father,” my grandmother would say. My mother would say it too. .
I didn’t know what that meant though. My mother couldn’t tell me much about him, and my grandmother refused.
“All I can tell you is he was the most handsome man I’d ever seen,” my mom would say. My grandmother, if she was present, would suck her teeth and leave the room.
Our neighborhood was a working class suburb fifteen minutes south of Detroit, Michigan. It was heavily Catholic and most people were of Polish descent — lots of fair skin, blue eyes and blonde hair.
Our family was the odd one out. I don’t really recall how we wound up there, but my mother had grown up there, as did I. We were “Catholic,” but there was no man in the house, and at 14, my mom went to work to care for her mother, a woman who spent most life as I knew her wracked with mental illness.
My mom and dad were teenagers in 1972, and met at a Jesus People gathering. My mom knew she was cute — short, fair-skinned and freckled with dark auburn hair to her butt. She wore bell bottoms and platform sandals, loved Motown and folk music equally, and played guitar and sang. When my dad showed up, a seventeen-year-old bad boy with long black hair that fell down his back, she was apparently smitten immediately and slipped a racy little note into his Bible to let him know.
I was conceived three weeks later.
“Well, I guess we’ll have to get married,” my dad told her, when she told him she was pregnant.
“No way,” my mom said. “I’m not making two mistakes.”
And thus, another troublemaker was born into this world, a hirsute and dark little thing dropped into a sea of hairless blondes.
We were olive-skinned and dark-haired because my father’s family was from “the old country,” which in this case meant Syria and Malta. Maltese people, especially the previous few generations, were known to be deeply devout Catholics, even more so than the Poles we counted as neighbors.
Because I’d been born out of wedlock, my mother was terrified they’d try and take me. She hid me from my father, who eventually wandered off to live life. Thus began years upon years of wondering who this “just like him” person was. Was he a bad person? Because they’d generally tell me that when I was angry.
Periodically I’d ask again, always to receive the same response. My mother would say, “Well, I really can’t tell you much about him. He was gorgeous, and he had a temper on him, and long black hair.” And my grandmother, she would say nothing at all.
As I approached my 23rd birthday, dial-up internet had become a thing, so during a rare moment when I wasn’t occupying our phone line with it, my mother called.
“What do you think about trying to find your father?” she asked me.
I was ready. Apparently so was she. Finally.
It didn’t take long. An internet search, a phone call to a mutual friend, and within an hour, my phone rang again.
This time when I picked it up, it was him, sounding every bit like a late night radio DJ. We didn’t even talk, really, just long enough to discover that he was living an hour away in Philadelphia and hence, what time he would arrive the next day.
The following morning assembled my closest people, frantically cleaned the house, and paced nervously.
Back then I lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in a neighborhood that was still Sicilians and “social clubs.” My landlord, Mike, would come to the door on the first of every month, usually around 7am. He’d stand there in his track suit and yell in, “Yeah hey Daw-ri, where’s da rent?”
I’d pay him in cash.
They were a little suspicious of us strange newcomers at first, perhaps recognizing that we were the first drops in what would quickly become a massive wave of gentrification. Coincidentally, nearly any time I had visitors, my supers, Mike’s aunt and uncle, would somehow magically appear in the yard to observe. A Lilliputian couple, they had moved here from Sicily as newlyweds decades before, and for some reason Catarina took to me immediately.
“DAW-dee,” she’d yell over the fence. “Come in. I meka calamari.”
I realized I’d forgotten to take out the trash, and as I got to the curb, my father rolled up on his steed, a red Ducati motorcycle. He looked like a knight standing there in black leather, with a red bandana around his neck, shorty helmet and sunglasses. Vittorio, who spoke almost no English, just looked at him, nodded his head and smiled.
“Ah. Ducati.”
(After that, my social acceptance, as well as Catarina’s calamari invites, increased. I was still a curiosity but, ah, Ducati, at least.)
My dad was only 40 years old then, younger than I am now. When he removed his sunglasses and helmet, I realized, immediately, what my mother had seen in him. Even recalling it today it’s weird and uncomfortable to write, but yeah, my dad was hot (like hot enough that after we started spending time together, we’d go places and I’d see women staring at him, trying to figure out who I was).
“Well, I’ll have to call my mom and tell her you’re still gorgeous,” I said, because I am awkward and wildly inappropriate at times.
“Well,” he replied, “if I didn’t know exactly who you were, I’d probably hit on you in a bar.”
Because he, too, is often awkward and wildly inappropriate. Because I’m just like my father.
Despite the rampant Catholicism in our town growing up, there were lots of other kids who didn’t have fathers. Some dads were in jail, some had died or disappeared, but I didn’t know anyone who didn’t at least know who their father was. Not being able to explain things about myself (like why I had arm hair and an eyebrow) was not only a ripe source of material for school bullies, but as a kid trying to figure out who you are and why you are the way you are, not knowing where you came from can make that pretty challenging.
My dad had brought an extra helmet hoping I’d be into it. He gave me a crash course on riding on the back of a motorcycle and then we rode all over Manhattan, stopping for brunch at Lucky Cheng’s, at the time one of my favorite East Village destinations. Therapy couldn’t accomplish what that did in a single afternoon, as we sat at a table going through a list of personality characteristics and I examined the hair on my father’s knuckles.
“I’m her FATHER!” my dad told our drag queen waitress, before I breathlessly filled in the rest: “We just met!!!!!”
My dad and I have been in each other’s lives for over 25 years now. We are really close and understand each other very, very well. I’ve given him a granddaughter that he loves, and it thrills me to no end to hear him chuckle like a grandpa should.
When he hits the emotional lows I am all too familiar with, myself, I send him pics of her, videos of her dance performances, style choices, first and last days of school. Stay with us, dad. There’s still a lot to live for. And he does.
Especially as I’ve aged, I clearly see both of my parents in me, but overall yes, it’s true, I am “just like my father” in a million and one ways.
What an honor.
Dori Mondon fixes typos for a living and is an Ada Comstock scholar at Smith College, where she is an American Studies major with a focus on public history and creative writing. She currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts with her 11-year-old daughter and a teeny chiweenie with a very big attitude.
You can also buy me a coffee, if you feel so inclined. I really, really love coffee.
