Charles Constantine, My father. Portrait of an Alcoholic.

As the Brown skinned girl began to grow up she had wanted to meet her father and thought of him as a magnificent man with deep brown skin like herself and with the depth of love and empathy that she herself had which usually came out in her love for horses especially her own. She got Buttermilk when she was only eight years old and loved her so much that the girl could not watch any movies on the television like Westerns or any other movies where they hurt horses purposely making them fall over and hurt themselves as it made her heart ache because the girl was filled with so much compassion especially for the majestic powerful horses who were made so vulnerable by the harmful hands of humans.

As the girl grew up and began wondering why her skin was so brown she couldn’t help wonder what ethnicity her father was. She had a lot of questions which included why he didn’t seem to want her even though her mother wrote him a letter telling the man of her existence and asking him if he would want to meet her, yet he never responded.

This was a man who was such a severe alcoholic that he, always drunk while teaching history to his college students one day up and left his job while drunk and flew out to the streets of San Francisco where he was found some months later passed out nearly dead in the streets of North Beach because what the man really wanted was to be a famous writer. He had walked off the campus of his tenure track teaching job back east for this.

Later the man claimed to have stopped drinking but he still carried in the behaviors of an active alcoholic by projecting his low and poor self esteem onto the girls mother by saying that she was promiscuous. And by saying terrible untrue things about me as if we were both unworthy of being both the child of his and my mother for having his child in which she shared with me happened from the result of a brief affair and he was a drunk the entire time and to her recollections, a sad empty shell of a man that she didn’t want her daughter to know as he is unworthy of her affection.

But when the girl’s, now the woman’s wonderful father, the man who raised her and loved her as if she were his own died from a sudden massive heart attack at only 61 years old, the woman devastated by her grief wanted to meet her deadbeat father even though he hadn’t contributed a penny to the woman’s life, something my mother never asked him for instead she only asked him if he would gracefully have the decency to meet his first born child. He never responded.

Sadly the girl now a young woman had a half sister who was aggressive and full of rage. She claimed to want to meet the woman but all she really wanted to accomplish was to procure her father’s love for her and to malign the young first daughter because she wanted her father’s love all to herself. She was the most evil, self serving, violently aggressive person the woman had ever known. The woman though helped her little sister to go to college, and the sister pretended to help her meet her father, their father. Instead because the woman saw right through her younger sister’s vindictiveness and fowl spirit the sister acted as ambassador to her father , holding her father hostage because of his alcoholism and because the woman wanted nothing to do with her jealous, mean spirited younger sister, the sister conveyed to their father that I was unworthy of him all the while pretending that her only desire was to have us meet. She lied. She also lied and told the woman that the father had raped her when she was 18, another sad story to which she had many.

The woman went on with her life until one day while walking her dog on the beach she saw her father, the relentless runner running by when she recognized him from a photograph. The father attempted to cover his face with his shirt so not to be recognized but the woman did and called his name out. “Charles” several times before he realized he was caught and had to meet his daughter.

The woman saw only hate in his eyes. A particular self loathing that comes with years and years of alcoholism, self abuse and abuse of other’s. He was as her mother said earlier, a tall, thin empty shell of a man so beaten down by his own self hate that he didn’t possess a single ounce of empathy or love for his beautiful first born daughter who was as dark brown skinned as he was, even more.

Why the man moved back to San Francisco where his daughter lived was unknown. He worked only as an underpaid adjunct teacher when he could have gotten tenure if he liked himself enough. But self loathing was written all over his face and he didn’t once say how incredible it was to meet the young woman who was a successful lecturer and artist having paid her own way through undergraduate and graduate school. He didn’t even remark on her similar physical attributes that were like his very own. He was not magical or magnificent like the woman always thought he would be instead he looked dead inside. 

For the full story read the first part, My father, portrait of an Alcoholic, Charles Constantin before this page.

Sadly the woman never heard from him again and he and his jealous rage filled daughter bonded like sick glue.

The woman kept safe the golden memories of the beautiful man who raised her who owned the seminal Shakespeare Books in Berkeley, California an iconic bookstore filled with intellectuals where my dad was good friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

Our house was always full of our friends and a regular hangout spot for the bohemians in the Bay Area, so I had the most interesting childhood of anyone I ever knew.

I became an artist. I exhibit my work internationally and my mother, a retired judge and we learned to live our lives without my father Bill Cartwright- my mother’s life partner and my dad.

But the father who birthed me lives on in a terrible memory. A memory full of disappointment and his alcoholism and all the damage it did to him, making him a calloused tortured soul and a man who isn’t man enough to claim his first born child.

The woman grew up to carry on her ancestral heritage, and to tell the stories that had been buried for years and years by him and his entire family of dark thorns that made all of their hearts blackened like his. He is like a cancer, his damaged cells spreading even to his own family and they like him are full of secrets and lies and darkness.

If only the girl could have known this early on which her mother warned her about but she couldn’t help but think that if he met her and recognized her beautiful heart that he would love her. This would not be the case and the woman when she was grown saw him running in the Berkeley hills. Tall, hunched over in self loafing defeat. This is the story of my father, Charles Constantin.