The Good Father.

A sauce packet detonates, exploding like a BBQ firework as it’s thrown against the wall. Wrappers and stray chunks of food litter the tables and floor. They yell over one another, louder and louder, a positive feedback loop that can only end in the rupturing of eardrums. One kid walks across the seat cushions right in front of me, from one booth to the other, like the floor is fucking lava.

As I’m mopping up a large drink one of the kids spilled, just beneath another litter-filled table, one member of this gaggle of giggling idiots darts by at Mach 10. In the process of doing so, he catches the leg of his shorts on the mop handle, almost de-pantsing himself in the process.

I bark, “Hey!,” and after stopping a moment to apologize and catch a breath, the jacked-up poster-child for pro-choice just picks up where he left off.

Where are the parents, you ask?

Probably at home, their negligent fathers still convinced their pull-out game is strong despite evidence to the contrary, so both them and the wives consequently busy making more unsocialized crotch-goblins they’re not prepared to care for.

No matter, they’ll just send their little sociopaths to the local fast food joint, where a 45-year-old, childless bachelor with bleeding ears and rising blood pressure will be forced to clean up after them and carefully bottle up his rage so he doesn’t go ape-shit on the little spidermonkeys.

I should’ve been a fucking librarian.

After wheeling the mop bucket into the corner, I take a deep breath, averting eye contact with anyone, and approach the door at the front of the building. Slipping out, I proceed to smoke a cigarette and reconsider my life choices.

A few puffs in, a girl walking down the sidewalk turns her head towards me, makes an “o” face, smiles, and laughs in apparent lunacy. Even given the tell-tale signs, it takes a moment for me to realize who this is, as I’m not accustomed to seeing her in anything other than her fast food costume.

It’s Psycho.

A pretty girl of perhaps seventeen years of age, she’s been a coworker of mine for the last two months or so. She’s prone to dramatic outbursts of energy which marijuana either serves to quell or exacerbate, depending on the day. As she walks up to me, I ask her why on earth she’d elect to come here on her day off, and she doesn’t hesitate to tell me that she’d much rather be here than home.

Then she bears all. Cliff’s Notes of her life story comes rushing out in firehouse fashion.

She tells me how her father and step father have both raped her. How her step-father would frequently do so when she took a shower. How her father would hold her and her nearly half a dozen siblings at gunpoint when any of them left the house. She explained how he’d walk behind her, keeping the handgun under his shirt, pointed at her back.

One day, she finally called the cops on him, and that’s how she escaped that fucked up circumstance and the state of South Carolina and came to live with her mother and her mother’s wife here in Ohio. Her mother who, while not physically abusive, at the very least, isn’t much of a mother, either. Her wife? Evidently a total bitch.

I know she’s not lying about any if this, and so it blows me away how she tells me all of it so casually, without teeth clenching, devoid of teared-up eyes. She just says it matter of factly. As if to say, hey, this is just what happens, isn’t life crazy?

It fucking breaks my heart. I feel myself crumbling inside.

It’s no wonder she has issues with men. It’s no wonder she gravitated towards that negligent and selfish bitch, May, who takes delight in lying and excuses her habit of constantly cheating on her girlfriends and obsolving herself of guilt by referencing her “abandonment issues” and other psychological glitches.

Shitty relationships is all Psycho has ever seen, ever known, and the familiar provides comfort, which is a more reliable source of psychological security than the risk of the unfamiliar, however much higher the odds of attaining happiness might be.

I was again reminded how some parents just shouldn’t be parents, which immediately brought my mind back to the circus of amphatamine-fueled midgets occupying the dining room on the other side of the window to my back.

Had my assumptions been too harsh?

When I was a teenager, I suddenly reexperienced — as opposed to simply remembered — something that had occurred earlier in my youth. This kind of thing had happened before, but this particular instance was different.

I was at my friend’s house, in the bedroom he shared with his four other siblings. It was a rare instance in which they were left alone, unsupervised by their strict parents, and apparently all the energy they’d been forced to repress had built up a surplus so that when they were finally alone for a brief period, it all exploded.

They were running around like lunatics. The youngest, a boy, climbed atop the toy chest, wrapped a blanket around him and lifted a flashlight high into the air with one hand, pretending to be the Statue of Liberty, and began singing the Star-Spangled Banner at high volume.

Given I knew what was coming, this must have happened before. I dropped to my belly, scooted beneath one of the bunk beds, and awaited the inevitable. I didn’t have to wait long until the door burst open and in came the father with his belt.

For all I knew, maybe it was the same with these kids. Maybe their parents were as insanely violent as my friends father was, and now that they were unsupervised, the volcano of energy erupted.

When the cat is away, the mice will play.

Maybe I just don’t understand because, unlike them, I had loving and present parents. It’s true that my mother and I had serious issues up until maybe my mid-30s, but it’s clear as day to me how lucky I was — how lucky I am — and certainly in a relative sense.

Many boys have fathers that are abusive, negligent, or altogether absent. I can say without hesitation that my father is and has always been my favorite fucking human being ever. I could never hope to express how much I love the man.

So yeah, I’m lucky, so maybe I’m just being ignorant given my different, personal, historical context and I really shouldn’t be mad at those untamed circus monkey children that invaded our fast food dining room.

Later, I was talking with Brian, another maintenance guy, back in the stock room. In the midst of conversation, he tells me he thinks I’d make a good father. This is a strange coincidence, as I’ve told him nothing about what occurred that day or the shit that had been going on in my head as a consequence.

My immediate response was that he shouldn’t say that.

I tell him that I’ve finally settled into the thought of being alone, and that it probably suited me best. I need my alone time, and that never went iver well on the rare occasion I had a girlfriend — it sure as hell wouldn’t make me suitable for a wife and kids, and at 45, I’d dodged all that thus far.

Come August, I’d be quitting this job, hopefully landing in a better-paying one, and moving into a trailer close to my family where I’d likely live alone until I die. I was good with that.

Maybe I’d get a cat, that was it.

I calmed a bit and thanked him, and confessed I’d been told that before, but it always perplexed me. Plus, I’m not sure I’d want to bring a kid into this world, particularly given it’s trajectory, at least as I see it.

He tells me that this mentality is part of the reason I’d make a good father.

Then he jokingly says this conversation almost seems like a flashback sequence. That we’ll both be looking back on this moment sometime in the future and laugh at my reservations.

“Oh fuck no,” I tell him. “Please, please don’t say that.”

I’ll settle for a cat. I’m just fine with a cat.