I never knew my biological father or the paternal side of my family until I was 30 years old and meeting them was the worst mistake of my life as they are filled with (Portraits of Dysfunction and Distortion of the Paternal Side of my Biology: Alcoholism, Addiction, Hyper Religion, Catholicism, Hate, Bigotry, Addiction, Meanness and Bitterness) of any other people I’ve ever met in my life. I have like everyone else some regrets and what I refer to as sad decisions rather than bad decisions in my life, though I can honestly say this was the most deleterious, damaging and heartbreaking choice I ever made, meeting them and the only reason I opted to was because my dad Bill had just died suddenly of a massive heart attack while playing tennis and I was devastated. I lost my dad and my mom lost her life partner. I also made this decision because I wanted to meet my father, who I would discover is a severe alcoholic and a sad shadow of a man, in essence, a failure. He is an empty soul, a calloused shell of a man who not only never wanted to meet me (subsequently he never contributed a penny to my mother during any portion of my life). The first and only time I did meet him, I recognized him from a photograph his sister had given me. I was walking my dog as I did everyday on the beach and recognized him as he was a jogger, always jogging and running away from his pain I imagine. He noticed that I recognized him and he abruptly put his shirt around his head, covering his face hoping that I wouldn’t recognize him! It was the saddest and most pathetic gesture I have ever witnessed in another human being, and he was my father! In years to come and without his knowledge, I’d often see him running in the hills. Tall, frail, nearly emaciated with nothing in his diet other than alcohol and adrenaline. And the bitter taste of failure. I never knew where he was running to, but I certainly knew what he was running from as it included me. He was not only an abject failure of a man, he was also a nasty, tortured soul as he was unaccomplished and mean spirited like most alcoholics, projecting their low self esteem onto others which is exactly what he did to me and my mother. He told anyone who would listen that my mother was promiscuous, “a loose woman”. as he referred to her, the mother of his first born child. He also spoke of me as being “screwed up”, which is odd considering that the second time, and the last other than my spotting him in the rear view window of my car, where he was a towering yet hunched over figure, encased in the smog of my old Mercedes diesel exhaust and the haze of both sunlight and fog that only in rare occasions collided, dimming him even more was the ending of the sun those days, where it slowly melted into the earth, and took pieces of me with that it would take the rest of my life to recover.  I saw my father one more time on the same beach in San Francisco, where I was born and raised by my mom, a retired judge and my wonderful stand in father Bill, the owner of the seminal Shakespeare Books in Berkeley where Bill stepped into my life and loved me as if I were his own until he tragically died of a heart attack while playing tennis at only 61 years old! Life is not fair, and it is so imperfect, a lesson I learned at a very young age. When I saw my father the second and last time (with the exception of the hills sightings where I flicked him off as hard as I could while driving by him leaving him in a puff of diesel smoke and exhaust. This time he was running on the beach, the same beach and I yelled out to him yet this time he didn’t stop, he just kept on running and running and running yet he had nowhere to run to as there was only one small hill and no other way to down, so he was forced to come back down, though if he could have hid up there forever and never returned, he would have taken that choice. By this time I had begun yelling expletives at him because no one deserved it more. A small crowd assembled, of mostly concerned women who stood there with me in complicit support and solidarity after I explained why I was screaming at him as I screamed “You deadbeat mother fucker of a dad! You Pathetic mother fucker! You pussy!  You are Pathetic! And I continued until my throat hurt. I suppose this is why he told his alcoholic sister that he thought I was screwed up! “Sicko”! I continued until my voice fell silent. I was crushed. I had always wanted to meet my father and had assumed mistakingly, that he had a sun sized heart and the innate kindness I have or that we shared the same sensibilities, the same empathy, but we did not. He simply didn’t have any. For the five minutes that we did talk I was painfully aware of how little connection I shared with him, and sadly, how little humanity and empathy he seemed to show. He just stood there like a mollusk. I heard he still runs even though he is now 90. If you happen to see an old man on the beach in an old broken down alcoholic and runners body, beaten down by years of broken sunsets, ruptured dreams and bitter self serving projections feel free to say hello to him for me. His name is Charles Constantin. Say it loud and clear because he is hard of hearing, and his meanness has eaten away at him, rotting his gut and his pickled liver and his weak, blackened soul.