This is my true story about guilt. It was something my father Adolph specialized in and something that, unfortunately, helped shaped my life for ever.

The Gift of Guilt

The worst kind of guilt felt is when you pass your personal guilt onto another. He or she assumes your burden as you come up smelling like pure innocence. The very worst thing about guilt is when there aren’t any scapegoats around to assimilate your redirected guilt; bad for you, too, is when there are witnesses around to testify about your bad deeds.

I remember when I was four or five years old, my father Adolph labeled me as a “murderer,” a “killer” for over a month. He had just shoveled the six stillborn kittens and their mother, who also died, through the door into the licking fire inside our cellar’s furnace. As I sat on the stair’s top step, my gaze fell upon this home-crematory consuming the dead mother cat, and her six stillborn kittens.

As I watched the fire burn bright, I started to reminisce about how I had found Daisy myself, a huge, mostly all gray cat with a beer belly. She was my cat now, so I, all by myself, named her Daisy because daisies were my mother’s favorite flower. I was …

Bam! Adolph slammed and secured the furnace door, jolting me from my daydream. He saw me sitting at the top of the cellar stairs and said, “Don’t run away, Stashu.”

We left the cellar, but my father didn’t closed the cellar door. Adolph told me to go upstairs and get his razor strap from the bathroom. I cried all the way up the stairs, cried all the way down. I wanted to tell him, “Hey, pop, I’m just a little kid!” But before I could speak the words, he grabbed me and carried me back down into the cellar. I handed over his long, thick, double-belted strap and I got whopped. My father didn’t ask if I was guilty. He knew I was guilty. I knew I was guilty. Yes, I did kill Daisy and aborted her children. This whopping was my punishment. And yes, I know today it was wrong what my father did, and it’s called corporeal punishment abuse.

There was another long-buried reason I feared Adolph, so deeply buried that the memory didn’t surface and break brain-water until later in life. Once it did, I learned from memory how my father blinded me in my right eye, while I was a baby, to save me from being recruited to kill or be killed in any war in my lifetime.

Although this act may have saved me from the traditional militaristic wars, it placed me on the front-lines of a different kind of war. A war with my father, and a war with myself. And as I grew older, it seemed everything I did was at odds with Adolph.

The First Shot

I wanted to be a writer; it was no secret. Adolph didn’t like that, not at all. This was a his casus belli, his justification for war. He just mumbled in Polish and drank his beer with my mother nearby talking in Polish too but gently to calm him with soothing words.

I hated when they spoke Polish; I couldn’t understand a word of it. They tried to make me learn, but I wanted no part in it. When they said something to each other in Polish, I as a kid would plead, “Speak Cannonsburg!” Cannonsburg is the small town in Pennsylvania where I spent my childhood.

One summer vacation, I joined the staff of a group of very talented people at a theater-in-the-round off Route 19. I learned how to work the stage lights, the sound effects from the control booth, and I was the props boy for the plays. I not only loved it, but I was good too. The only complaint I received was that my real lettuce for the restaurant scene was too wilted and too brown when cut up. The actors wanted me to buy fresh lettuce every day. I can’t remember the entire title of the play, “(something) in New York.”

My father found out from my mom, Victoria, where I was driving the car every evening. Thus on the third day, the offensive began. Adolph could have ordered me not to use his car and that would have ended my theater apprenticeship, but he didn’t. My father wanted me to decide to quit on my own. So Adolph resorted to his standard brainwashing routine — verbal abuse; he would harangue me and my ambition to write. “You’ll never make a penny with that kaka! Nobody would give a fart for your writing. No money in writing, Stashu!” my father repeatedly barked. At times, alternating from English to Polish. Never any physical violence. There wasn’t any need for it. For Adolph, words were his hollow-point bullets.

My father always won with his type of words, almost all of which I didn’t understand. Eventually, I couldn’t take any more verbal abuse and had to drop out of the summer stock theater, as props boy, as potential actor, as budding playwright. Adolph was happy then. Very happy on the day that he won.

The Second Passing

Once decided upon San Francisco, I lived in a SRO “apartment,” and I had a cat I had brought across the country with me named Max. When I moved in, this guy named William warned me when he saw him that his own cat had been poisoned in this building. “Keep an eye on Max,” he advised. Eh, Max is different, I thought. One could throw a plastic fork or plastic spoon and Max would fetch it and bring it back to you like a dog. Since he was such a good cat, I always kept my room door open and allowed Max to roam the hallways for fun.

One day, a guy named Conrad from down the hall rapped on my open door, telling me something’s wrong with Max. Right away, I rushed out into the hall certain that Max had been poisoned by one of the tenants. Damn it! I should have heeded William’s warning, I was thinking to myself.

I looked for Max, found him. I checked him over. Conrad was right; something bad must of happened. Who in the world would want to poison my Max?

I called for help on the phone and was told it does sound like poisoning and to rush my cat to the clinic as soon as possible. I rushed down the stairs to outside to the street but could not find a cab. Midway down the block I ran into a hotel lobby and asked their receptionist to call me a cab. The whole time, I had Max wrapped in a towel, holding him cradled in my arms. The receptionist said it is not their policy to call cabs for non-residents, so bafungu you bitch, and then I ran back to the street.

Running out of the hotel I finally saw a cab and it stopped in front of me. I wrenched open the back door and there was a passenger already sitting inside. Startled from my panic, he yelling insults at me now. Instead of fighting with this guy, I rushed back to my SRO place and ran to the end of the hall to a bathroom and tried to get Max to regurgitate, even moving my finger around inside his throat. Nothing was working! I put his mouth under the cold water faucet tap even though I knew he was probably already dead. I thought to myself that maybe I could dilute the poison in his stomach, so I still gave him water anyway. I didn’t think about whether I could fill his lungs with too much water and drowned him, but no, no, he was unconscious and or already dead when I entered the building, right? ….

The Misdirection

Max was mine, and I was his. I was responsible for Max, and I failed him. He was buried in a pet cemetery outside of San Francisco, with a tombstone plate flush with the ground. “From my hands to His hands” is engraved in bronze for Max.

After burying him, the guilt and blame for his death needed a place. I could shift it to Conrad; I could shift the it to William. After hearing from another resident that William was seen kicking Max, I decided upon William. He carried the burden of my guilt for years even after I found out the truth. I avoided it for far too long.

The truth. That afternoon, after Max’s funeral, my friend dropped me off at home. It was a silent drive back from Colma. I entered my room and sat down in one of my two wooden chairs and tried to relax, to calm myself. I began to ruminate.

So there I sat in my wooden chair, overcome with grief, the chair before my computer and … Ping! … Ping! … Ping! … Ping! and I look up at my small round smoke alarm on the ceiling. That’s where the occasional “ping” is coming from. The smoke alarm is signaling that it needs a new battery.

The enormity of Max and everything else falls like that falling safe in those cartoons where the guy walking down the sidewalk is about to get clobbered! I roughhoused my chair under the smoke alarm and ripped it down, to stop that damn Ping.

I see it all now, the whole scenario. No one poisoned Max. Max was not poisoned. What happened is that Max heard that Ping, and ran out of my room into the hall, freaked out of his mind. Conrad saw him acting funny this way, and called my attention.

I had run down that hallway and found Max to be scared, I had been positive that Max had been poisoned. I had been told that such a thing had happened in this building. When I had not been able to find help for him and had assumed Max had been poisoned, I had to save him. I just had to. I couldn’t be responsible for another murder! I could hear Adolph again, “Murderer, cat killer!”

My Responsibility

I know today that Max was alive when I had put his mouth under the running faucet tap. Instead of becoming a hero, I had become a killer, a murderer, again. Oh, not again. I was one when I was four, and now years later, I had committed the same act. I became the self-fulfilling prophecy that my father bestowed on me.

My father had been dead and buried; my mother Victoria, too, in graves side by side. There remained my father’s guilt given to me like a family heirloom. This burden, it was now my own personal guilt to carry. The old man had fixed me good, my eyesight, my guilt … the prophecy.

Sure, I killed that first cat, the gray one with the beer belly that was pregnant. I loved Daisy so much; so much so, I squeezed her tightly, too tightly. I suffered my Dad’s strap because of it, the cries of ‘Murderer” and “Cat killer” from my father for weeks.

I resurrected this guilt and made it mine when I killed my cat Max. I still carry that guilt, to this day, some ten years later. Other people ease their guilt, bypass their sorrow by drinking alcohol, taking painkillers, smoking weed; this was not my way. It was for Adolph, but I am not him. Time might heal me, but I’ve come not to think so. Can I forgive myself? Where do I start?

Adolph, did he ever harbored guilt for any of his actions, his mis-actions, his non-actions; certainly not for partially blinding me. My father did keep me out of the Vietnam war. Do I forgive him? Should I forgive him? No. No way. He may have given me a long life, but at what price, with what honor?

I never could imagine myself ever forgiving my father. First, I would have to forgive myself…. Oh, Max. Oh, Max ….

–30–