Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 65       why the continual shit from my father?

A question must be asked of my father: if older brother blatantly stole Mom’s estate money, why would my father give him sole Trust responsibilities?

Why the continual shit from my father?

It surely was about my father’s life. He came up in Kansas during the Great Depression and the lack of money made him feel worthless … and his parents must have made him feel worthless … and he compensated by working hard and believed above all else that the stock market was the glory of American life.

… and he did well in the market, whereas I didn’t. I put my money into a paid-off house, and my father rang-the-bell in my face saying my house was a stupid move, and berated me for ‘not talking investments with him.’

He sneered at me for not following his advice and buying the most expensive house I could get a loan on. He said the value of the house would appreciate faster than the money owed on the mortgage. It mattered nothing that I was ill and wanted to create a safe position against economic ruin. It mattered nothing that I had the skill to build a house.

I asked him what would happen if my illness made it impossible to pay the house note? What if I had to pay fifty thousand dollars to get wheelchair accessibility put into the house I bought? But my father never wavered … it was all about putting money in the market, and leveraging your house to do so.

But in my mind, it is a rascal’s sham to pay the bank three times over for the value of your house. Especially when they force you to buy home-owner’s insurance to cover their risk … and then the insurance companies balk at covering the full value of your loss. Did you know if your chicken boaster shorts-out and burns your house down, the loss is not covered? Have you read your policy? There’s a whole lot of if-and-buts contained therewith.

And think about this … my father’s assessment of home ownership came from a banker’s computer … and every banker’s computer automatically tallies homeowner ‘interest paid’ and ‘taxes paid’ as a deductible item on your Federal Taxes … but the banker’s financial comparison of ‘stock market’ vrs ‘home ownership’ is falsely skewed …

… that’s because most Americans don’t pay enough ‘interest’ or ‘tax’ to qualify for the homeowner’s deduction on their Federal Tax.

Get this: the vast numbers of American homeowners don’t have enough qualifying items to ‘itemize’ on their tax return, and therefore they take the ‘standard deduction’ … but the standard deduction does not include ‘interest or ‘taxes’ paid on a house …

Only if you are forced in America to buy a house worth more than a half million dollars are you able to itemize homeowner ‘interest’ and ‘taxes’ on your Federal return. Otherwise you take the standard deduction which is the same dollar amount for all folks whether they own a house or live in a cardboard shack at the bottom of a freeway canyon.

And if you don’t believe the Great-American-Homeowner-Tax-Deduction-Lie exists, then call up H&R Block and ask them … and you’ll discover ordinary homeowners are being sold a bill-of-goods by banks and mortgage companies and home-sellers and your government … all proudly proclaiming the virtues of tax-deductible-home-ownership. But it’s a bright orange hula-dance in the smog, because only the rich people get the deduction.

I decided in 1987 to be my own banker and insurance company … and paid for my house outright and saved money by canceling the profiteer’s nut-chucker profits.

But every time I laid out my illness-factored approach, and my money-saving approach, my father came back with, ‘do you know what the stock market was worth in 1987?’

He wanted to push his own ‘investment’ accomplishments over me like a bulldozer heaving dirt over a painful memory … and no amount of dirt could bury it deep enough to stop the ooze from flushing back up.

I don’t know what my father lost to make a hole so empty that his middle son’s loyalty couldn’t muster a footing. I stood solid behind him when he left our family. I listened to his stories. I was patient with his arrogance, yet every time I turned my back he was knifing me over some silly shit.

There was an emotional parlay in his life causing him to swing wildly at his family, yet he wanted our love and respect.

My father’s hysterical push-pull worked like a ringing buzzer … the armature gets pulled by the electromagnet to strike the bell, but that action cuts-off the magnet so the armature swings away, which re-engages the circuit and causes the arm to strike the bell again. Over and over, the bell rang: bang, bang, bang, bang … I love you, you’re stupid, I love you, get away … and he couldn’t stop it.

My father gratuitously favored my older brother and dismissed the rest of us for being ‘like our mother.’ Golden brother was not a goon like us. Golden brother talked ‘stock market’ with our father, and that made him the best choice to handle the Trust … forget the fact that golden brother was a thief and a liar …

… but that was the story of my father’s life too: he was a thief and a liar like my brother …they were twin apples.
 
My father thieved money from his own brother’s kids ... right to their faces. And my father lied to our family about his affairs, and lied every weekend when he came home to kick-stomp the family tranquility because he wasn’t important enough or rich enough to leave us.

And that’s why I supported him when he finally left our family … I wanted him to feel better. I wanted the dysfunction to end.

But it couldn’t end, and he triumphed when Mom died, because that meant no more alimony payments for his new wife to dig over.

She said to my face once that she had to get up every morning and go to work just to pay-off Mom’s alimony … and it made me feel horrible to hear that shit … and my father tried to stop the payments several times, but Mom’s lawyer told her the agreement was ironclad.

What a ridiculous sop my family, but at least my father made the obligatory payments and didn’t hide his assets or fake his demise like other men do. Mom could not afford lawyers fees to collect the due, so my father paid the alimony because he honored the social code …

… which proves at some level, there was a respectability about the man.

Index of chapters