By Ted Gargiulo
My dad used to complain of horse pains. None of us knew what horse pains were. To this day, I haven’t met anyone outside our immediate family who’s familiar with the infirmity-except maybe a horse.
More peculiar than the condition itself was the pleasure Dad took in knowing that nobody understood him. You can ask my mom if I’m making this up. Ask my sisters about Dad’s “horse pains.” They’ll tell you how he cracked himself up every time he mentioned them, the way his face flushed like a beet when he laughed. And how he’d suddenly grow solemn and shuffle away, leaving the us baffled.
For years, I was convinced that Dad was laughing at me. Something in my eyes seemed to set him off whenever he stared at me. He’d start to moan and grimace, as though some dark force had overtaken him.
“Dad??? Dad, what is it?”
“Nothing. It’s just those pains again.”
“Pains? What pains?”
“Horse pains!” The rascal loved catching me off-guard. He’d laugh so hard, it’s a wonder he didn’t rupture a pipe in his head. A moment later, his mirth soured, and he was gone.
For the life of me, I could not fathom what Dad saw in me that was so painful, or so funny. Was “pains” a metaphor for “crap?” Was he telling me I was a horse’s ass? Or was I was just a pain?
My self-esteem suffered terribly. I spent my teen and early adult years feeling like the butt of a joke that made sense only to my dad. I didn’t dare confront him for fear of exacerbating his condition and inviting even more derision.
Too ashamed to share my sorrows with the family, I found solace in the company of cheap, older women who showed me enough respect to at least wait till I left the room before laughing at me.
I took up with thieves and lowlifes, who roamed the city in packs, plundering pay phones and vandalizing mailboxes.
I swilled wine on street corners, shouted the F-word at passersby, peed on the sidewalk whenever I felt the urge.
How many nights did I spend passed out on someone’s doorstep? Or in jail?
I began smoking cigarettes. Broke my mom’s heart. Did my old man care?
It wasn’t till I was older and my life in shambles that I experienced a moment of clarity that altered forever my perception of the bizarre little man we called “Dad.” I realized that I wasn’t the one he was laughing at. What the old man actually saw when he looked into my eyes…was his reflection in my glasses. His reflection!
All those years I’d been agonizing over my failures, believing he despised me for a worthless schmuck, the guy was laughing at himself. I couldn’t wait to share this revelation with the others.
That’s when I learned that both my sisters, who also wore glasses, bore the same emotional scars I did. Each blamed herself for Dad’s affliction, just as I had. Each had retreated into her own dysfunctional universe, raged at life in mysterious ways and, like me, never gave two hoots and a fart about the misery she caused our mom.
It was amazing, once we compared notes on the old man, how the pieces tumbled into place.
For the first time, I saw the psychological havoc that joker had wrecked upon my two screwed-up siblings. I understood now why chunky little Megan, who looked so cute at 7 in her ponytail and Coke-bottle lenses, shaved her head when she was 14 and defected to a convent. I recalled the starvation cults, the enemas laced with mescaline, the fires in the toilet bowl, trips to Tibet, to the emergency room; her lifelong fixation with sticking pins in fat people. There was that night she flipped out on Ritalin and stool softeners and tried to kill me! The angst, the rebellion: it made sense now.
And there was Leah, the eldest and most precociously disturbed of us three, who had her first mid-life crisis when she was 18. And who, in her quest to find herself, dredged up 11 different personalities. Unfortunately, none of them wore contacts.
A lifetime of putting up with Dad’s unmuzzled wisecracks left both ladies spiritually ravaged, emotionally barren, childless, friendless, clueless, and altogether hopeless. Afraid to love, too lazy to find meaningful employment, Megan and Leah now mooch off their mom by day, and sing in a rock band at night. The manure he made them go through was shameful!
Mostly, I pity our mom: myopic and four-eyed since she was 9, saddled with that animal for over forty years! How ridiculous and unlovely she must have felt every time he gazed into her soft blue portals…and laughed! What could those outbursts have suggested, but that her beloved stallion was trotting about in another man’s pasture, frolicking with some young mare, comelier and less amusing than herself?
Not once in our tormented little lives did any of us think to remove our glasses in the old man’s presence.
Dad’s Acute Obsessive Reflection Disorder (for want of a better term) might explain why he always cackled in front of the bathroom mirror while shaving. Or why he found a blank computer screen so amusing. Or why the only fun he had watching television was when the set was turned off. The guy would peer into the dark tube hours after everyone had gone to bed, and giggle himself into a stupor. He thought we didn’t hear him!
Oh, the sleepless nights our mom lay awake, waiting for Dad to come to bed, only to find him passed out in front of the dark set at 4 a.m., slobber rolling down his chin. I’d hear her hauling his tail into the bedroom. She tried not to disturb the rest of us, didn’t want us seeing our father in this condition. But we knew.
You’d never guess, from his spasms of hilarity, how humorless Dad was at heart. Nothing in life gave him pleasure. When he didn’t laugh, he brooded. He was either hysterical or morose; there was no in-between. Eventually, he quit smiling altogether. I’m not sure Dad ever really smiled. He only laughed. And no one could make Dad do that…except Dad.
The man became increasingly withdrawn, forced by “the pains” to leave his job. He no longer made eye contact with people, merely stared off into space for hours at a stretch.
Not even Mom could coax him out of his funk. His only companion was a small pocket mirror he kept inside his pants. Every evening after sundown, he’d lock himself in his office and whip it out, then work himself into an orgasm of hilarity that resonated throughout the house. The louder Dad roared, the harder Mom sobbed.
Who would imagine that one man’s humor could produce such anguish in others? I look back now on the years of therapy my sisters and I had to endure. All that money spent treating the wrong people!
One night, Dad went into a laughing seizure from which he never recovered. He ended his days in an asylum, a wasted, jabbering wretch who responded to nothing but his own reflection. So it was that the person who made us cry, laughed himself to death.
We should have seen it coming. Portents of Dad’s tragic finale had been literally staring us in the face since Day One. By the time we understood what was happening, the man had wandered too far out of his barn. There was no reigning him in.
The old man had busted his bridle. And the horse pains finally brought him down.
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Ted Gargiulo’s stories and essays have appeared in The San Jose Mercury News, The Monterey County Herald, Wilde Times, The Gamut, and The Fringe. Born in New York City, the former stage actor and prize-winning author now lives with his wife in Seaside, California. Ted is currently working on a collection of short stories. He In Me, available from PublishAmerica, is his first published novel.
