It turns out you CAN go home again

Which in my case is not necessarily not a good thing.

The whole family is in Long Beach this weekend for my sister-in-law’s baby shower and to visit with my wife’s ailing grandmother. Since the baby shower is a girls-only affair, my father-in-law, son and I took advantage of the opportunity to head down to the beachfront main drag—the same strip where I worked for 12 years—pointing stuff out to my son (“...and that bar banned me for life...”), having a lovely time.

The Missus’s whole family LOVES to walk; apparently The Boy did not inherit that particular gene, however. This became painfully evident after the three of us had turned around and were headed back to where the car was parked and The Boy started fading fast. Belly-aching about the length of the walk, insisting we were heading the wrong way, eventually demanding to sit down and rest. So he and I sat down there on the very busy, very upscale sidewalk, our backs against a storefront and had a little talk (below). He reiterated his anti-walking stance and I explained that I understood, however the car was getting closer with every step we took, but we’d never get to it if we kept sitting on the sidewalk.

So he got up, and I got up and we kept walking.

We crossed the street at the light and we kept walking, but The Boy was slowing down again. Grandpa was about a half a block ahead of us by then. The Boy complained some more about the walk, and I said, “Suck it up, boy, we’re almost there.”

From behind us, I heard someone yell, “Hey, take it easy on him!” I turned around to see which concerned parent was butting into my fucking personal business to discover it was the pan-handler on the corner, obviously someone to whom any reasonable person would turn for parenting assistance.

And that’s when I ‘came home again,’ by which I mean, I turned into the aggressive, combative asshole I was when I worked at the newspaper on this street a lifetime ago.

I yelled back at him to butt out. He yelled back at me (we were a good thirty feet away from each other, with lots of yuppie bystanders between us), repeating his admonishment. I could feel my dander rising... So I shut my mouth and flipped him off behind my back as I turned around to walk away. He yelled again, “He’s just a kid!”

That’s when I lost it. I turned around on the very busy sidewalk and hollered back, “And you’re just a bum!”

He didn’t have a response to that, but just the same, somehow I knew it probably wasn’t my finest moment as a human being, let alone a parent.

All that work on repairing my karma from the life I led in Long Beach (and before), and in one moment of anger, I was right back to where I was 15, 20 years ago. Both literally and metaphorically. And it’s not like Tucson, where going there pre-pushes my buttons because I hated living in the place; I loved the hedonistic excesses I practiced while living in SoCal.

I suppose I should have ignored him completely—like we did when he tried to relieve us of our change when we walked by him earlier—but I was pissed before I even turned around to face my accuser. Whoever it was hadn’t seen me sitting down on the busy sidewalk with my son three minutes earlier and calmly encourage him to keep on trucking. They didn’t know that “Boy, suck it up” is a common, affectionate encouragement my son hears often. Frankly, they didn’t know a Goddamn thing about the situation and my first thought was just to give them the stink-eye. But when I saw who it was giving me parenting advice—loudly, in public, with no real justification based on my actions—I slipped right back into Bad-Fang Mode.

If the street-person hadn’t backed down, I was ready to go all-in. I just didn’t give a fuck. My trolley had slipped completely off its track.

In retrospect, I wonder if maybe the fact that I was that close to the edge wasn’t because of the uneasy night’s sleep I got last night, or the fact that I’ve been out of weed for days, or the fact that I’m always uncomfortable away from home... I’m thinking now it might be because being back in SoCal reminded me of how good I used to have it compared to the scary mess that is my life these days, and it forced me to contemplate the loss of that comfortable lifestyle, and it made me angry.

I don’t regret having moved on from Long Beach, but I do resent having worked so hard for so long to suddenly find myself on the short end of the stick, both financially and in terms of prospects for the future.

And now I’m even angrier because I made an asshole out of myself in front of my son. About 10 seconds after we resumed walking away from the confrontation, The Boy looked up at me and said, “I love you, Daddy.”

And I thought, Little Man, whatever for?