Okay, I lied.
Well, it appears like I'm going to inherit another forty thousand dollars from the thrice-cursed relatives of my loving dead stepfather.
Well, thank you. I am grateful that you didn't figure out how to steal the rest of it from us.
Oh, you poor victims.
He was an interesting and powerful person. I still think he gifted me some things, but I'm having trouble sorting that out lately, because lately what I'm working on is how much he messed with my inherent modesty.
Yes, he did. I was a shy kid. I live in a prurient culture, and I've been dealing with that onslaught since I was in about fifth grade.
My first stepfather gave me the idea that it was good to be prurient, it was good to be a slut, it was good to submit to the sexual advances of anyone who offered.
Well, my dear relatives, I must say here that though that may be good for a lot of people; it was NOT at all good for me.
I don't want to castigate people for promiscuity, for prurience. I think that's wrong.
I think what is better is to try to understand where it came from.
I don't know where Dad's madness came from. That would be an entire story unto itself. Maybe it was about his mother's being afraid to address his father's prurience?
And yes, the drugs. We all know about the drugs.
Dad gave me and my first best girlfriend acid when we were thirteen years old. Just a bit.
Rachel was being sexually abused by men in my sight when I visited Mel when I was her age. They called that sex.
Poor Rachel. She never had a chance.
Mel told me once that he'd never been attracted to me, as if that was some kind of fluke. We were doing Ecstasy at the time, in his condo, the one his last wife pwned along with everything else.
At the end, she watched the TV and ignored him. A girlfriend of one of his best friends showed up to give him some Ensure. Well, cancer is kind of inconvenient for robber wives, no?
I liked that, doing E with Dad. It didn't feel about sex, for me. It felt about Dad.
At one point, we both got up and danced to "marat/sade"
It was incredible. Mel was incredible. He was an astonishly complicated, brilliant, and perverse person.
He was my best friend, at times.
Later, I become stuck with feeling like I'd been polluted.
Dad, you who are now dead, and have been for 16 years. You who were such a total perve, who did not ever understand for a moment how to protect your worrying daughter, you who abused other people's worrying daughters.
Dad, we had something going on between us that wasn't about sex. You taught me a lot. You taught me about freedom.
I'm just sad that nobody ever got it together to teach you about the freedom of modesty.
I strongly suspect somebody abused you too, Dad.
And if I'm right?
I'm so sorry, my dead first stepfather, who loved me so much.
I'm so sorry, you wonderful person who was so good to me in so many ways.
I'm so sorry that you got abused. Because I think you did. The older I get, the more I think you did.
It's Occam's Razor.
&&&
Love, Mel. Thanks for all your gifts. I'm sorry it was so hard for you, your life on this planet.
I will always remember you.