Guilt and Revenge in Las Vegas: A Gen-Xer Goes Home

I never knew there was so much variety in the world of incontinent underwear.

Mom wanted a brand called Certainties, with Dad I could get the store brand version of Depends. Small/medium, which made me do an emotional double take because as a kid, Dad always wore extra large everything. But that was a long time ago.

So I got my parents their respective bladder control products, grabbed a Monster energy drink and a pack of Hostess crumb doughnuts and walked up to the cashier, who looked not unlike Wallace Shawn. It was my first time buying bladder control products. And I was buying them for my parents, who I had not seen together in the same room in 23 years.

1999 was the year Dad went batshit, threw Mom overboard for a woman 25 years younger Black woman. Her race is noteworthy because as long as I’d known him, Dad was an avowed racist. I grew up hearing racial epithets of various degrees. The year Stevie Wonder and the Harlem Boys Choir sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl, Dad, a good strong hardy Christian American white man if ever there was one, bellowed “How dare they butcher the national anthem?! It’s disrespectful!” Dad paused briefly, perhaps contemplating what he was about to say. And then…

“I’m not racist but think they’re a bunch of n — — -rs screwing up the country.”

I can’t remember who won the Super Bowl that year. I’m pretty sure that was the same year Michael Jackson did his halftime show. But all I remember distinctly about that day was realizing that my old man was a bastard.

So to recap: Mom and Dad split in ’99, Dad leaves Mom behind, all the dogs, the mortgage, everything and lets the house go into foreclosure. He marries his mistress Connie, and Mom married a distant family friend named Donald who was a widower. Both parties reunited briefly at my sister Beth’s ill-fated first wedding in 2007, where it was all forced smiles and generally a total family dysfunctional gong show of epic proportions. There was Dad, dressed in an all black tuxedo, and there was his wife Connie by his side, who had also created the wedding cake, which incidentally was dry as a bone. And there was Mom with Donald seated at the other end of the table.

There was my asshole brother Chad and his girlfriend Julie and their rambunctious daughter — and my first niece — Katey. And here we are watching Beth marry a guy who I took an instant dislike to because of how he wasn’t offering to help with an of the wedding prep. Beth and her girlfriends were treating the wedding for what it was — an event. And an expensive one at that. This guy just sat and played video games.

So this awkward as fuck wedding was the last time I had been in the same room as my parents.

Until now. Here it is, 2022. Mom and Dad got back together five years ago. Dad got dumped, Mom’s second husband died. They reconnected at my sisters and the rest is fucked up family history.

I do not like the fact that my parents got back together. At all. Their relationship was built on abuse, lies, and white yuppie bullshit. They were two not-very-bright people from not-very-bright families who in turn adopted three kids who they fed Jesus, Reaganism, and patriotism.

Most of my adulthood has been spent trying to expunge my parent’s influence from my person. I inherited Dad’s toxic masculinity and Mom’s BPD, with plenty of religion-based trauma and PTSD to go around.

But I’m here in Vegas in spite of my emotions and feelings. The truth is, I have nothing in common with my parents. Politically, emotionally, spiritually, nothing. I’m an avowed atheist with an open disdain towards organized Christianity, Mom asked God to forgive me when I tried vainly to explain to her that God was a man-made invention. She didn’t want to hear about it.

Dad has cancer. Bladder. And he has to have his organ taken out, damning him to a life of catheters. He shuffles now instead of walks, and now spends at least 15 minutes in the bathroom tending to his bladder control needs. He’s got two bionic knees, a bad back and severe PTSD courtesy of Uncle Sam during the Vietnam years. I know Dad is not going to be around much longer.

I pay for the personal care products and briefly contemplate asking the cashier if anyone has ever told him he looks like Wallace Shawn. But I don’t. I pay for the embarrassing items and hike back to the Travelodge, which sticks out like an infected pimple on the smooth skin of the Las Vegas Strip.

I get back to the room with the products and Mom thanks me. She excuses herself and goes into the bathroom. Suddenly Dad and I are alone.

“You know, son, I’m really sorry for everything I did.”

I look my adopted Dad in the face and I nod. I know he’s sorry. It’s too late to do anything about any of it, but I know he’s being sincere.

“I know, Dad. It’s all good. We’re good.”

I just want to get off the subject. I have no interest in doing a play-by-play rehash of our old fights. Dad had done the best he could. He genuinely thought Jesus really did love the little children, and as a combat veteran, he truly believed in the promise of Ronald Regan. Dad grew up in a time when it was truly a blessing to be a white man.

And I hate him for it. Because he infected me with a lot of bullshit that I’m still trying to untangle like some fucked up version of Cat’s Cradle.

And yet, despite my complicated feelings towards my parents, I’m glad I went to see them again. God bless them, those two misguided souls love the fucking hell out of me.

Thanks, Mom and Dad. For everything.