by dropping by unannounced and demanding time with me; all I knew was that my father was at the door and he wanted to play, that he would once again, as he always did, sprinkle magic on what would have been an average day. Try as she might and despite my aunt’s pleas not to open the door, my mother couldn’t ignore the scene Dad was making, the banging and screaming. He even left and came back with a police officer, someone my father, who was working as a cop at the time, knew on the force. To placate him and keep my aunt, I’m sure, from becoming the laughingstock of the neighborhood, my mother finally, slowly walked to the front door, with me in her arms. “Look,” she said, seething, “you have got to stop it with all this noise. Please! You can see her for a few minutes, but then you have to go.”
Dad, burly and strapping, standing at well over six feet tall, didn’t give my mother a chance to put me in his arms; he snatched me and took off running into the winter chill, me dressed in nothing but those pajamas. Nothing could stop him—not my mother’s screams, not the neighbors peering out their front doors and rushing down their driveways to get a glimpse of the Negro theater unfolding on the street, not threats from his fellow officer, who’d pointed his gun and considered shooting my father. Definitely not common sense. Where, after all, was he going to go? His home situation was sketchy, his money was funny, and really, the chance of him taking proper care of a four-year-old was slim to nil. Yet none of that mattered. He wanted to be with his daughter.
I thought we were about to go on one of the many fun and funny adventures we always embarked on together, whether that was going for a ride on his motorcycle or taking a walk in the park; never once did it cross my four-year-old mind that something was wrong—that we were like Bonnie and Clyde on the run. When Dad took off down the street, I wasn’t scared; I was happy to be in his arms, so strong and thick and grand.
My father’s getaway was short lived, though. “I’m going to call the cops on your ass!” my mother yelled down the street after him as she and the police officer jumped in his cruiser. From the front seat of that cop car, my mother searched frantically for me and my father for hours, unaware that he’d stolen me away to a friend’s house somewhere in the same neighborhood. It was my dad’s friend who convinced him to let go of all that passion and make way for common sense: there was no way he’d be able to get away with stealing his daughter from his wife and he finally acknowledged that. Grudgingly, he brought me back to my pleading mother’s waiting arms. “I’ll come see you another time, baby girl,” Dad said as my mother rushed away from him. “I love you. Daddy loves you. Don’t you ever forget that.”
What he did was wrong—I can see that now as an adult. Still I hold tight to my belief that at that time, my father was a good guy who simply wasn’t very diplomatic about his wants and needs versus his rights, and a tad immature when it came to understanding how to get what he wanted from others. My mother was the one who would try to reason with him; she’d tell him time and again, “If you want full custody of your daughter, go to court and say, ‘I’m her dad and I deserve rights, too.’ But you don’t come knock on the door and run off in the wind with our daughter, because that’s not going to work. Get it together and we can talk.”
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As an adult, when I think of my parents’ polar opposite personalities, I say to myself, how in the hell did they ever meet? She’s quiet, thoughtful, methodical. He was loud and full of drama, quick to say and do the first thing to come to mind. He wasn’t trying to hurt anybody; it’s not as if he were robbing banks or knocking people upside the head and taking what was theirs. Quite the contrary: he was a Vietnam vet and an artist at heart, and when his finances were flush, he made good money as a metal fabricator,