How I Remember My Dad

Happy Father's Day...

I wondered what the AI application Grok would write about me if I asked for a biography. When the results came back, they’d dug deep into my life and background, pulling from several sources—interviews, profiles, and my own writing. Somewhere in there, it said my father suffered from schizophrenia.

I couldn’t image, nor did I want to imagine, where that nugget of information could have possibly come from—was it people on Reddit ruminating on what could have happened to me, and was I now suffering from the disease, and could that explain my dramatic shift in politics?

It isn’t really true about my dad. He was diagnosed that way back in the 1960s when he was committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital and given shock therapy. That’s what they said he had, “mild schizophrenia.” He was out of his mind in the 1960s, to be sure. We knew that.

He was so heavily drugged while in the hospital that my mom and grandmother had to jailbreak him out, just to see him back to normal. Or something like normal. To me, though, he was a kind and gentle man who would take us to the movies and make the funniest oddest jokes.

My dad had an obtuse sense of humor. Things would just make him laugh, like the whole concept of a lizard. He would just say it sometimes, “a lizard.” He also had jokes he repeated often, things from old cartoons that made him laugh. He would always say, “I am your boss, this is champagne, Merry Christmas!”

We had no idea what it meant but it made him laugh so it made us laugh. He would say “a dog…” Just that alone was funny to him.

But to doctors, schizophrenia was probably the best they could come up with. How else to explain what my dad was. How he could leave for New York every time my mom had a baby. Or why he would sometimes drive around in circles in parking lots. I knew him to have paranoid delusions sometimes, where he would imagine things about other people that weren’t true. Sometimes, those would result in violent verbal outbursts.

He was functioning. The only thing that mattered to him besides us was playing the drums and his fantasies of being rich someday, be it by playing the lottery, or one of the get rich quick schemes he’d always fall for.

My mom was a beauty queen who had dropped out of high school and ventured over the hill from The Valley into Hollywood. She saw a brooding jazz drummer and she was hooked. “He had a Charles Manson-like hold on me,” is how she puts it.

I could never see him the way she did. He was calm and gentle around me. Maybe that’s because he smoked weed habitually. I rarely saw him when he wasn’t stoned. Gene Stoned, as they used to call him. He wasn’t into hard drugs or alcohol, just the weed.

Then again, he was also a jazz drummer and weed in the world of jazz musicians is not uncommon. Here he was playing the drums brilliantly.

And here's an interview someone did with Jake Feinberg two years ago. There are no comments and hardly any views. My dad wasn’t that well-known in the internet age but very well-known in the jazz world. If you ask Grok about him it will tell you he is a “lesser known” jazz drummer, living in the shadow of the more famous Gene, Gene Krupa.

I loved my dad. I accepted him as he was, even if he was never what he wanted to be. He was tormented by the idea that he was a failure in life because he had never “made it.”

The combination of being overly sensitive as he was, and as I am, and a lifetime of checking out with weed meant he would always hover on the fringes. I never judged him in terms of success or failure. I understood him as an artist. I also understood his gentle nature. He used to call me “Happy Sash” because it was his way of cheering me up as I was not the happiest of kids.

My dad came from a different generation than the one that medicates with Big Pharma, though I suspect in a different time and place, he’d have been put on psych meds. Maybe that would have helped him cope. I don’t know because he was the most stubborn person I’ve ever known.

My dad was so stubborn that when the doctors told him his cancer had returned and that he would need chemo, he refused. He said that he’d gone through his own holistic treatment that cured him of cancer, so how could it possibly be back? But it was back, and it would kill him if he didn’t do something about it.

He sank into dementia in his last year of life. I visited him almost every day in the VA hospital. One day, in a moment of clarity, he said, “I’m dying, aren’t I?” That was the first time he seemed aware of where he was and what was happening to him. I lied, because of course I did.

None of the hospital staff liked my dad because, in hospice, he could no longer smoke weed, and it made him cranky and mean. I think they pumped enough drugs into him to kill him in those last days, but I can’t prove it and wouldn’t want to try.

I walked into his room just seconds after he died. I was mad because the lights were too bright. It was the only thing I asked of them, to keep the lights low, but for whatever reason, they did not follow those instructions, so my dad died under a glaring yellow light.

I don’t see my dad as a failure. I see him as a success. Considering everything he was dealing with, I think he did pretty well. He was always kind to me, especially my daughter Emma, who grew up without a dad. He would visit and bring bags of groceries. He would take her to the park and the movies.

My dad died peacefully on May 19, 2018. He was draped in the American flag. For all of the things he was, and all of the things he could never be, in the end, he was given the highest honor by the military.

“I am your boss, this is champagne, Merry Christmas!”

Rest in peace, my dear father.

And the happiest of happy Father’s Day to all you dads out there.