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Every Asshole Does Good Before Exiting
Jake Rhodes

Two months ago I was finishing up a season of Love is Blind with my girlfriend. Watching a bunch of twenty-somethings get betrothed after sharing intimate secrets and laughs behind a piece of foggy piece of plexiglass like some sort of weird, fucked up 21st century confession booth was good enough for me in terms of a distraction from what had occurred the previous two months.
My dad David (who many of you reading this may know as a weird trickster ambivalent demi-god character based on stories, posts, and podcast episodes) was nothing short of a force of nature. Those around him were often subject to his mood swings, benders, bad jokes, fuckups, and moments of both genetic and drug-induced psychosis. Throughout my childhood, he floated around like like a shithoused apparition. Plastered poltergeist. There, not there, door flies open, door slams shut, pan goes flying. “Anybody seen my cigarettes” would echo from nowhere and everywhere inside the trailer, apartment, or house that we called home for however long it took us to either get evicted, foreclosed on, or decide on a “fresh start” which was usually a 5 minute drive from where we had just left off.
There were a lot of bad moments, far too many to count or throw in a Google doc in a stupid, silly attempt at both something resembling catharsis and my lack of desire to put together a bed frame. But, there was a common theme. My dad was a profoundly unwell human being. His addictions aside (of which there were several) he suffered greatly from bipolar disorder, psychosis, paranoid delusions, and fits of intense depression that would leave him bedridden long after the drugs wore off and his tabs were closed out. In especially darker moments, he would tell my mother, brother, and me that the family was cursed. Doomed. That his soul was tainted by some dark, unknown force and that somewhere along the family line we must have angered a witch or some woodland spirit. Because we were forever and unequivocally fucked. Nothing to be done. His father, a mean as fuck drunk raised by someone ten times meaner and ten times drunker, passed when he was 9 years old of melanoma. And on and on back and back along the paternal line was suffering caused by either the consequences of a man’s birth or the stupid choices he makes when he drinks 28 beers in a sitting and starts rifling through medicine cabinets. Or both. In that way, I guess I could see why my dad would find himself believing that the family was “cursed.”
When I was 14, he admitted himself to a hospital and was moved around place to place for several months. He had “found god” prior to this, but not in a Hallmark way. More of in a desperate, dot-connecting, delusional way that sometimes sad people succumb to when they are looking for an answer as to why their brains don’t function normally. Why they can’t hold down jobs, love other people as they are loved, etc. In his delusions, he confided in my mother that the only solution was for him to kill himself. That would stop the curse. That would break whatever spell was placed on us.
After several months, the delusions subsided. Things got better. He, of course, was still Dave. The partying, hard-drinking hurricane of a man that I had known my whole life. As I reached my late teens I had such a deep resentment for him. I hated him for his behavior, for his treatment of me and my mother and brother, for his apathy and his anger, and all the things in between. I would find myself drunker than fuck, speech slurred, angry and hurtful words stumbling out of my mouth. And he would cry and say he was sorry. And we would be fine for a little while.
When I got heavily into drugs shortly thereafter, weirdly enough, we had established a type of common ground. At long last. All it had taken me was getting really into the medication they give to end-stage leukemia patients and, of course, cocaine. We built a rapport out of that and things were pretty good for a while. We worked a construction job together. Played music. Wrote songs. I eventually graduated with my Master’s and he was there with my mother and brother. A few pounds heavier and a few less teeth, but still there nonetheless. He was incredibly supportive of my band. My podcast. Stand-up. He would check in and ask how things were going. He’d text me just to let me know he lost another tooth eating chicken wings and that “he really only needed the back ones anyway” which I never quite understood. Through this new relationship born out of my own misery, bad decisions, and the consequences of my birth, I was able to better recall the nicer moments we had.
Starting around the end of May, early Juneish, my dad got really bad again. Worse than he was 14 years prior where he was convinced that the universe was hellbent on sending him to hell and there was only one solution. He would call me and tell me that he had spent the entire day drinking. From the moment he woke up to the moment he went to work. He would tell me that his sister was his handler. She was in on it and orchestrating the entire process. The destruction of him and our family’s souls. Now, I knew that my Aunt spent her days working admin for a hospital and putting up Greg Abbott signs as she had done for the last 10 years or so. And I would try my best to explain this to him. To tell him that he was withdrawing, that he was in fight-or-flight mode. His brain is trying to connect things that aren’t there because it is trying to find some “escape route” or solution to the suffering and paranoia. But, it got worse. I got him into several facilities. Bounced around from place to place for a couple months. Until one night, after a stupid season of Love is Blind, I got a call from my aunt telling me that my dad had hung himself. He left no note. He told no one. Got drunk alone and hung himself in the home of a family friend where he was staying while he adjusted to the new medication that he had been given at the hospital.
I spent the next month, basically up until mid August, hopelessly drunk, angry, and miserable. All the anger and resentment I had kind of stowed away somewhere in my head was thrust to the front of my mind. Why? Why the fuck would he do this to me. To my mom. To my brother. That eventually turned into hatred of myself. That I didn’t do enough. That I didn’t try hard enough to save my dad from this thing that he never really beat and mostly just kept quiet by feeding it alcohol and drugs his whole life. I found myself thinking I somehow should have known. Should have kicked the door down and saved him and it’s my fault that he’s dead.
And then that brings me to now. Writing this. I guess a lot of that bad stuff has mostly subsided. I have been able to find those good moments again. Listening to Metallica in a hot garage, stoned as shit, laughing until my lungs gave out because my dad was singing Master of Puppets in a Chinese guy voice.
My favorite memory I think I have of him is when I was about 9 or 10 years old. My parents had gotten into a pretty nasty fight and my dad had moved back in with his mom. I remember being frustrated, not at the fight weirdly enough, but at the fact that I couldn’t remember the names of the guitar strings and how to make chord shapes. My dad, a lifelong guitar player and a pretty good one, would sit there and repeat like a mantra “E A D G B E. It’s easy Jacob. 6 strings. 6 letters.” And I for the life of me couldn’t fucking commit it to memory. And my Dad, in his infinite childish wisdom, came up with a little sentence that has stuck with me forever and finally allowed me to remember the names of the strings. “Check this out. Every Asshole Does Good Before Exiting. E A D G B E. Think of it like that.”
Now that he’s gone, I can’t help but think it wasn’t just a stupid trick to get his son to remember the names of guitar strings.