Lemp, L-E-M-P

He pulls up to the corner and stops at the stop sign. He takes a swig from a can that I immediately recognize as being a Budweiser. I normally wouldn’t believe that he’d be so cavalier about drinking and driving, especially since it’s only 2 weeks after he was arrested in front of a 7-11 and charged with a DWI (an incident he would’ve failed to inform me of if a close family friend hadn’t see the arrest take place and told me to call him) but I do believe it.

This is my father, Thomas Lemp: avid gambler, functional alcoholic, addictive personality and general fuck up.

I know that is not a can of soda he is so openly drinking because I’ve seen him do this before, on one of those rare occasions where we actually saw each other. My parents have been divorced since before I can remember, theirs was not a romance for the ages and my mother had gotten tired of putting up with his various vices. Despite having an amazing memory he would always forget her birthday or he’d fail to remember to buy her Christmas presents. Growing up, he was never a dominant character in my life, I would only see him every so often at my grandmother’s house on weekends and often these visits were punctuated with long periods of absence.

That one random summer weekday he had called me up and asked me if I wanted to go fishing with him, and for some reason I agreed. Maybe I had nothing better to do, or maybe it was some weird filial desire to see the man who fathered, then basically abandoned, me. He had picked me up at my aunt’s house, where I’d been spending my break and together we drove to a beach entitled “Sore Thumb”, just off Ocean Parkway across from Robert Moses State Park.

He guided his white Ford Explorer through the normal summer beach traffic, blasting WBAB. As Lynard Skynard turned into Pink Floyd and then Led Zeppelin, he regaled me with his stories involving this beloved classic rock station. About the time he had seen a car fire, a carbecue as he referred to it, on his way to a “job” out east. He’d immediately called into the radio station to report it and they had put him live on air. He called in all the time, he said. I tried to act like I cared.

Oddly enough, on a road trip with friends to Boston a few weeks later, I’d heard his voice under the din of chatter and laughter in the car. “Tom Lemp, L-E-M-P, of Islip Terrace,” my friends and I heard him say to the DJ. I found it absurd that he felt the need to spell his last name out loud on the radio, as if anyone cared how he spelt it. He won a family four pack of tickets to see the Long Island Ducks baseball team. I had questioned whom he’d bring as his ‘family’. I knew I wouldn’t receive a phone call.

In addition to hearing about his radio fame on that brief car ride, I was told of the many jobs he held. He worked for a local landscaper, as one of few white men in a crew of predominantly illegal Mexicans. He referred affectionately to some piece of equipment that I assumed involved digging or movement of turf of some sort. It had been allotted solely for his use. It was his pride and glory and he’d hoped it was being well taken care of while he wasn’t there. I silently wondered if he referred to me with such pride and concern.
On the side, he installed pool linings, sort of his own entrepreneurial attempt. He had been out in West Hampton for a while. Did some jobs on the north shore, real big houses with real big pools. Last week he did some work for a mechanic friend, sort of a barter deal. He’d do the pool if his friend worked on his car, an old Monte Carlo that he was fixing up.

Before my dad told me it was a Monte Carlo he’d been refurbishing, I knew it was one. It had been his dream car all of his life. I know this, not from talking to him for hours about cars and engines and V8’s and all that garbage that I don’t understand, but from spite. My mother’s to be precise. She knew of his love, and had intentionally gone out to buy a brand new Monte Carlo SS when she could finally afford to do so. She drove all around town, hoping and knowing he would see her.

That was the thing about my mom. She loved him in some way, still does. But the fact that she’ll never actually admit to me, or anyone, is that she resents him. She resents the way he made her live while they were married. In moments of anger, or when she’s had too much wine, or when I’m complaining about my step-dad, my mom likes to remind me of the time she lived with my biological father. About how he had gone to OTB (off track betting) and gambled away the meager rent money for the shitty one bedroom attic apartment they inhabited and how for weeks at a time she could only afford pound cake to eat because they had no money. About the time when he’d stolen cash that was supposedly owed to him, from his bosses who turned out to be not-so-pleasant Iranians that called her and threatened to murder her, and me, and him. About how she’d worried that he’d been dead in a gutter somewhere, murdered viciously for what totaled up to $450. About how we’d never have anything we have now if she hadn’t left him. That is what her Monte Carlo represents in her eyes.


He talked of his job with such pride; it was as if he was boasting. While I heard about how good the pool he’d finished looked, he smoked his usual Marlboro Reds. Through my years I’d come to associate the scent of cigarettes with him, because he was the only one who smoked them around me. Apparently he’d smoked his whole adult life, even while my mother was pregnant with me. In my mind this is the reason why I’d always been so sick as a child, enduring years of ear and sinus infections. His car was littered with empty cartons, for as long as I can remember he’d saved up the labels in order to mail them in and receive free items. I can’t quite get over the irony of a Marlboro gym bag.

That week he was on vacation. He had wanted to spend his time off camping on the beach, but it had rained for the past three days. He’d bought all sorts of camping supplies and they were all shoved into the mess that was his backseat and trunk area. We arrived at the beach for a day of surfcasting.

I am not a fisher-woman. I am not what could possibly, remotely be called outdoorsy. The thought of touching an uncooked fish repulses me, so it comes as no surprise that I had never been fishing. He showed me how to bait the hook (although I never actually did it on my own, opting to make that his job) and then taught me how to cast the line. My first few attempts were feeble but I eventually got the hang of it. I like to think he was proud of me, or that he was at least proud of himself for teaching me.

It would be unfair to him to say that he had never contributed to my 21 years, because in addition to teaching me how to fish, he did teach me many other things. My first lay-up was performed under his fatherly supervision. The first time I ever truly rode my bike sans training wheels, it was he who had guided the bike and then slowly let go. Although he had laughed when the basketball bounced of the rim of the net and hit me squarely in the unsuspecting forehead, and when I’d teetered, tottered and ungracefully fallen off the bike, he was there patiently watching with some element of pride in the youngest of his offspring.

As we stood there on the windy, sunny beach drinking beers (his regular, mine the root variety) and reeling in fresh catches of seaweed and missing bait, but never actually any fish, I could not think of anything to say to him. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t anything to talk about, I’d just gotten back from a month in Spain (an ordeal which could provide me with several hours of stories and conversation), it was that I couldn’t think of any way to verbalize everything that I actually wanted to say to him. How do you put into words 20 some odd years of anger, resentment, pity, irritation, and unwilling love?

I couldn’t and so I had sat there listening to him tell me about how he took my cousins fishing that past weekend or how my youngest cousin, Brendan, had insisted on going crabbing and he’d obliged and woken up at six in the morning to go before work. I’d had an almost instantaneous flashback to the time he’d told me about taking his girlfriend’s daughter and her best friend to the aquarium out east. Or the several years where he’d dated a woman who’d hated me for no apparent reason and insisted that he not see me, but instead take care of her two sons. Regardless of his romantic situation, it seemed that other people’s kids were more important than his own.

I am not the only one of his offspring. There are two more of me out there, but older and the product of another woman than my mother. I met them for the first time when I was sixteen. They shared my height, my eyes, upper lip, and sense of paternal abandonment. He had left us all to be raised by other men who were, although very generous, not our father. If it had been them that he had taken crabbing or to the aquarium, I would not have cared. I would have applauded him for being an actual Dad. It wasn’t they who’d gone. In fact, they saw less of him than I did.

I do not want to be pitied for having this man as my father. Very rarely do I feel bad about the situation, unless it’s him that I am feeling bad for. His life never was easy. I knew my grandmother well enough while she was alive to know that growing up with her would have been trying. It was difficult to live up to her critical standards as a grandchild, being a child would have been much harder. While everyone else was proud of the fact that I got all A’s and one B on my report cards, it was she who demanded to know why that B was not also an A. Couldn’t I have tried harder? It was true that I probably could’ve done more and that I do have a tendency towards laziness that causes me to put things off to the very last minute, if I bother to do them at all, but she had seemingly overlooked the other classes which I had been attentive and diligent in. The criticism she dealt was usually earned to some degree, but I could not imagine constantly being surrounded by that.

She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s when I was in tenth grade. My dad forced me twice, and one time tricked me, into going to see her in the nursing home. I never wanted to, not because I didn’t love her but because it was too hard to see her look vacantly through me, with no hint of recognition. It was too hard to see her twitch uncontrollably, or hold the paper up in front of her, incapable of reading it. He smiled falsely, and tried to act like he wasn’t affected, wasn’t hurt, but the whole time I could smell the alcohol on his breath. After she died my freshman year of college, his drinking only got worse; now he had no one to answer to. My aunt, who’s a psychologist, told him he was depressed and needed to get treatment. He ignored her and treated himself in the only way he knew how.

My grandfather, who died when my father was still in his formative years, was no more pleasant. Although my dad never actually told me anything about him, my mom tells me he was an alcoholic himself and an abusive one to boot. The story that sticks out most in my mind was the one in which he went after my grandma with a knife in fit of drunken rage. My dad had bravely jumped on his back, to stop him from hurting her. I don’t know how he died, but I can only imagine it would have been a guilty relief for those who lived under him.


The day had grown long, and as the clock approached 5 pm, we started to pack up. Putting the leftover bait back in the cooler. Folding up beach chairs. I climbed in the car and waited patiently while he talked to someone on the phone. He hung up and I heard him open a can. I was a little surprised. I thought maybe we were going to hang out a little bit longer, but instead he climbed into the driver seat and placed his freshly opened Bud in the cup holder next to him. I looked at him skeptically.

“You’re drinking that?” I had asked him. He nodded. “But you’re driving.” He smiled sheepishly in response and put his truck into four-wheel drive and pulled off through the sandy pathways to the main road and I held my tongue. I held it still as we crossed the Robert Moses Bridge and he took a swig from the red and white can. I simply gripped the handle on the door, and prayed that he was in control. Bridges are a huge fear of mine. I held my tongue all the way home, and kept quiet still as I mumbled good-bye and hopped out of the car.

He turns the corner and pulls to a stop in front of my aunt’s house once again. He steps out of the car and I look up at him, his head roughly a foot above me, his eyes identical to mine, but with a deeper set lines and a hint of sadness that I don’t think is present yet on my face. He smiles a goofy smile, two of his teeth missing due to lack of dental insurance and years of toxin-filled cigarettes. This time I refuse to hold my tongue; he has crossed a line of idiocy that I can no longer bear. I immediately start yelling at him. He knows I know what that can was, and doesn’t even bother answering my question as to what exactly he was drinking. He gives me that same guilty smile as I inform him that it is no longer 1975, and this is no longer as acceptable as it used to be. All he can say in response is, “I can’t help it.” As though he couldn’t find anything else to drink but that beer, as though his alcoholism is an accident. I know there is no one else who will yell at him like this. The girlfriends he finds are as dependent as he is; the last one I met, rambled on about Vicodin and Percoset at my grandmother’s funeral. The girl before that could drink him under the table. His brothers and sister seem to ignore the problem or share it. His mother is gone.

To me, he seems to still be that child who jumped on his father’s back to defend his mother. He’s capable of doing good things, but his efforts to forget the past, to think about something else, or to not think at all, always seem to get in the way. I know he has the best of intentions with everything he does, and there’s nothing more I could ask of him, knowing all that I know. It’s hard to hate your parents, especially when they’re miserable.

Every time the phone rings late at night, and it’s a family member I assume it is bad news. More to the point, I assume it is bad news involving him. Every so often I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach that there is something wrong, but usually it turns out to be fine. Deep down I know, however, that of all my beloved family members he is likely to be the next to go.

And so I cannot hate him. I endure the rambling phone calls I occasionally receive, some sober, some a completely different person. I see him if and when I can, because I honestly do not know when it will be the last time. I love him regardless of what he did and what he does, simply because he is my father and there is nothing more I can do.