My father died in 1988 at the age of thirty-seven. I was eighteen years old.

He wasn’t around much. He floated in and out of my life. I was sixteen when I saw him last. He picked me up from an Upstate New York rehab center and drove me home. He told me to take care of myself and my mother and to stop fucking around. That was the only advice I ever got from him.

He was a good man. He tried.