The Cruelest Month, Part 2: Love Song to a Genie | MZS

Despite such madness, we were raised to believe Dad was the bad parent. We were told that he was a flake and a pothead and somebody who lived inside his own head and didn’t have much interest in, or talent for, fatherhood. All these things were true, but not nearly to the extent that we were led to believe, and I later found out that her most scandalous and often-repeated stories about Dad—like how he cheated on her, and that he was so incompetent with money that she’d give him cash to go downtown and pay the electric bill and he’d come back two hours later with a crate full of new albums—were things that Mom had done. (A few months before Mom died, we were talking in the nursing home, and she blurted out, “He slept with anything that moved.” I said, “Dad told me he didn’t step out on you until years of you stepping out on him,” and she laughed and said, “Well yeah, that’s true!”) We were also told, on more than one occasion, that Dad wasn’t wired right, that he wasn’t capable of love, that there was something wrong with him that prevented him from being a good dad, and that was why he wasn’t around much. With the fullness of hindsight, I now know that things were considerably more complicated than that—and that, like those tales of Dad cheating on Mom, and blowing utility money on vinyl records, there was a lot of projecting going on.

I got my first gray hairs at 12. By 16, I had salt-and-pepper hair and was going white at the temples. 

I took Bill’s last name in high school, in part to assure him and Mom that my allegiance was to them (“Whose bread I eat, his praises I sing” proclaimed a calligraphic card thumbtacked to the cork board over Bill’s desk). I definitely did it in part to hurt my father for not being much of a presence in my life. I didn’t have the guts to tell him, though. He found out at a fundraiser for the family of a musician who died of a heart attack. He was one of the performers. I painted a commemorative portrait of the deceased. When it was unveiled, the guests realized that I’d signed it “Matt Seitz” and gasped.

Dad got drunk at the bar.  

Not long after that, Genie called me and said, in so many words, that she was tired of Dad and me not getting along when it was obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that we’d be “thick as thieves” if we could just talk to one another honestly. 

I was taken back to be addressed so intimately. I didn’t have much experience around Genie. Jeremy had started spending time over there a couple of years earlier, when I was at college and he was still in high school, but neither of us had logged a lot of time in their house because it wasn’t that kind of parent-child relationship. I liked Genie a lot from the very beginning, even though I didn’t really know her that well, because of how Dad acted once they got together. Dad was a ladies’ man who had a lot of girlfriends, one after the other, in quick succession. He wasn’t a cad or a wolf. He was just good-looking and talented and single and a jazz musician. It was the ’70s. He owned a waterbed. Dad met Genie in 1978 and they became exclusive not long after that because Genie told him she didn’t want to share him with anyone else.