I found my father on Facebook on September 15, 2009. He responded to a private message I sent asking if he had a relationship with my mother during his time in the Army back in 1979. He responded that he had and immediately accepted me as his son. On June 4, 2021, just one month after I learned that he was suffering from stage-4 lung cancer, he died.
I knew my dad for less than 12 years after spending the first 29 years of my life without him. I will never see him again.
That hurts. A lot.
It hurts because my father never got a chance to be the best dad he could be. He didn’t know that my mother was pregnant with his son after he was deployed to Korea after basic training. My mother didn’t know how to track him down and alleges that the Army wasn’t much help.
No one ever said anything negative about the man when I was a child. Hell, no one knew him to critique his character. I just got used to not having a father.
But I learned what type of man Chris Truesdale was the day I searched his name on Facebook. I was in Ukraine on a Fulbright grant at the time and was hoping to move to New York City to start a media career. He never questioned whether or not I was his son.
“You have a home in the Bronx,” he told me on one of our Skype calls.
When my father picked me up from JFK airport on the evening of December 10, 2010, I was approached by an elderly woman who asked, “Are you my grandson?” I had just met my father’s mother for the first time. My other grandmother had died soon after I finished high school, so it was wonderful to have a grandma again. Minutes later, my father hugged me for the first time.
Now, here is the thing about meeting your father for the first time: You really don’t know what type of person you’re going to get. Yeah, it was heartwarming to embrace the man I’d always wanted to know as a kid. But I soon grew to appreciate our 29-year-separation. That Negro had issues and I learned about them as early as 5:30 a.m. the following day when I saw him slurping down Budweisers for breakfast. He was a shameless alcoholic and had bouts of rage that would seep into the most random of conversations. Our first week together, he’d help me out with Metro cards and take me out to eat—a generous and much-appreciated gesture as my pockets were light. It would be roughly another year and some change before I’d find a full-time job. Interspersed with those acts of kindness were the most rude, vulgar fits of name-calling (f*g, bitch, sissy, just to name a few)—just outright nasty commentary about how little of a man he thought I was.
This was our first week together. Lung cancer took him out a few weeks ago, but by the end of our first two weeks together I was ready to send him to Glory with a swift kick in the ass from a 20-story building. No one has evoked, in such a short period of time, more rage in me than my father.. You could not pay me a million dollars to pinpoint the genesis of his vitriol towards me—the source of those bouts of anger is a complete mystery. What saved me was the rest of my family politely explaining that he had issues that also drove them to contemplate bloody murder and that I should not take his insults personally.
Everyone has “a Chris story,” with them falling out and then making up again. The two of us would do that perhaps five times over our 11-and-a-half-year-relationship. One night, while I was staying with him, when things got really bad, I decided to quietly pack my bags while he was in a booze-fueled deep sleep. I took a taxi to my uncle’s flat in the north Bronx, near Westchester, and lived with him until my father got some act right in him.
When I called him from my uncle’s house to say why I left, he gave a classic Christopher Truesdale response: “It’s your choice” and hung up. It was such a chilly response that I started questioning if the man really loved me or if it was a mistake finding him. He did love me, a lot. He just had a fucked up way of showing it. My dad was a very macho man, one who did not care about checking in with his feelings or inspecting whether he’d hurt yours.
He boasted about being a Black man who worked for the mob, something family and friends said was true. (I’ll let y’all use your imaginations to determine what that work was.) If he was ever wrong, he’d just chalk it up to two men having their beef and then drop it. I didn’t like it, but I quickly accepted his form of reconciliation. It was clear he didn’t know any other way to work through conflict with his loved ones.
During the four months or so I stayed with my uncle, my father would check in on me through calls and texts with my grandma, aunt and uncle. They told him how I was advancing in my job search and that I found a gig that would soon turn full-time. He was proud of me and told everyone about his son, the news reporter who hit the streets of New York City hustling and never asked him for a dime. Everyone knew I was the Black Russian dude.
- Roots
