I only knew my father for 16 years, and I cannot describe how wholesome and warm he was during that time. His love for me was never hidden, and he was extremely gentle and caring.

I wasn’t the son he expected, but he never made me feel like it. My dad was a hard man, and the son he had before he met my mother, my brother, who is ten years my senior, is also a beast.

Even though I was nerdy, thin, and weird, my dad loved me all the same. Even when I wanted to play video games instead of throwing a football, he let me know I was his pride and joy.

My big, scary brother likes to romanticize my father’s previous life and repeatedly assures himself that our dad was unhappy with his new life. His new life with my mother and me. The hours I spent squished in the side of his big brown La-Z-Boy watching TV with him would indicate otherwise, but my brother wouldn’t know. He wasn’t there.

 My brother tends to rewrite history to his benefit, but it’s one of those things where we all just nod and smile while he goes off. Usually he’s hosting anyway, and his wife makes the best fucking French onion dip I have ever had in my life.

She can also make steaks that are so good that I happily eat them, and I rarely eat meat at all. My dad, funnily enough, was one of the only people that consistently called out his bullshit.

“That son of a bitch could sell ice cubes to the Eskimos” he would say. The silver tongue is a Cassidy trait, but I’ve become so comfortable with myself that I rarely need to bust it out.

When it comes to my dad, there’s more I don’t know about him and his past than I do.

I recently came across my uncle Tommy’s P.O. Box, and I would love to smoke him up all day and ask him some things. I have so many questions that I need answered, and who is better than one of my dad’s best friends?

The issue is, I haven’t talked to my uncle Tommy in years, and I don’t know how to broach the subject. “Hey, 70-year-old dude who saw all of his friends die, want to spend a day reminiscing about all the trouble you and my dad got into in 1970s Springfield, Massachusetts?”

I bet he would say yes, too, just out of respect for my dad, but I don’t want to disturb him. While this blog is fast and loose, I want to write something about my father’s life outside of this site, but I need to sit down with somebody who lived it with him.

One last thought on my uncle Tommy and then we will get to why my dad can fuck yours up. When my parents both had cancer, people didn’t come around very much. Being around sick people is difficult, I get it. When people came by, they would just be weird anyway.

Not Uncle Tommy, though, when he came through, you would think everything was great. He was one of the only people who consistently visited my father near the end, packing a six-pack inside his leather jacket and riding down on his Harley-Davidson Sportster, which he may still have. He would drink those beers, shoot the shit, and leave, and it was so important to my dad. He will never read this, I doubt he even has internet access, but seeing him do that and seeing how my dad would light up meant the world to me then, and it still does now. Uncle Tommy is a G.

So, my dad. My dad was short and squat. Built like a refrigerator, or maybe a dwarf, he had a massive beard, and he looked every bit like the 1%er that he was. When he came to grab me from school, he had my whole class in awe. Their dads must’ve been lawyers or accountants or something because they were really excited about how tough my dad appeared.

He cursed like a sailor with this gravely tough guy voice, and he was so crude that one of my friends asked if he was my stepdad because of “the way he talked to me”. That’s just how he talked. Just because I made him yell “Goddammit! Son of a bitch!” doesn’t mean he didn’t love me. He was secretly pudding on the inside, he just liked to swear.

All my friends who got to know him love my father, and everybody has a “Teddy story”. I also have so many stories, and writing this makes me want to share them, but that’ll be another time. I have to reel this thing back in and focus on my father’s badassery.

My father was a 1%er. What that means is that he was a member of an outlaw motorcycle club.

I want to say upfront that I don’t condone many of the things that clubs do or say. Nazi imagery has long been a part of 1%er culture, along with racism, sexism, violence, and the sale of both narcotics and firearms.

I never saw my father personally participate in any of these activities except for violence, and never against women or children. I did find Nazi imagery after his death and an old tapestry we had in a spare room had a tiny SS symbol on a motorcycle’s gas tank. The argument you will hear from 1%ers is that the Nazi imagery was for “shock value” but that doesn’t make it alright with me. I’ve spent years coming to grips with the fact that my dad was probably a racist or, at the very least, palled around with racists. I wonder what he would think of the Latina activism through literature course that I took and loved.

By my early teens, he was a jolly drunk, so I missed his glory years. That being said, he had the utmost respect for my mom, and I know with certainty he was vehemently against selling drugs so beating women and slinging meth were never an issue.

He also wasn’t wearing colors at any point that I remember.

I have pieced together enough to realize something went down back in the day, and my father somehow got out. From what my brother told me, his club didn’t step up for my dad in a situation in the 70s, leading to him being exiled from Massachusetts for a while. Crazy shit, I know. I just watched M*A*S*H* with the man, so this is second-hand information I’ve picked up over the years.

Even though my dad wasn’t wearing colors or riding with any group, he still hung out in seedy places, like the Italian American Citizens’ Club in Springfield (not Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, the one on Colton Street) or Dirty Louie’s Tavern in West Springfield. All that’s left of DL’s is a grassy lot on the corner of West School and Union streets.

Dirty Louie’s had been the site of multiple issues with my family. In 1990, my uncle Joey, my dad’s other best friend besides Tommy, shot and killed a man during a fight.

Uncle Joey was the man. He only called me “Short Shit” and he had a copy of Metal Gear on the NES with all the maps and everything. He even made photocopies for me, which in 1990 was a pretty big deal.

He did, however, kill a guy, and I wasn’t there when it happened, so I can’t say whether or not it was justified. Sometimes, life is like that.

A few years before this, however, my dad was at Dirty Louie’s when he too got into an altercation, one in which he was stabbed. The knife went under his left arm, missed his heart by mere inches, and gave him a weird bulbous hernia that moved when he coughed.

When he got stabbed, or so the story goes, he didn’t even realize it and started chasing after the dude until blood started spurting out. I saw the man pull out his own tooth after pounding down Canadian Club, so I believe it.

I have no idea how young I was when this happened; most of my early childhood is a blur. What I do remember is my mom washing my dad’s bloody jeans in our tub while crying. She hemmed his pants, and I guess didn’t want to waste the pair.

As I said, all of this happened when I was very young and my dad settled down in his 40s and 50s. This was also around the time that he and my mom really only kept in contact with close friends, who would often come by the house to hang out. These were the times that I learned about my dad and how insane he truly was.

See, he didn’t like to share his stories or glorify violence to his weird, skinny, nerd child, so anytime I asked, it was instantly shut down. On those long Summer nights on our patio, however, after a few rum and Pepsis (not Coke, never Coke), my dad would start reminiscing with all his friends about their adventures.

It was one of those nights where I learned that the scar under my father’s eye was from a fight and that his eye was supposedly hanging out a little bit at one point. The things you can hear from a cracked bedroom door in a one-floor house.

So, there it is, my old shirtless dad watching 22 News while drunkenly stroking his wizard beard was fearless, ferocious, and he could definitely kick your dad’s ass..

Sorry if this was all over the place, my dad fascinates me, and there is so much to tell.

Until next time, stay crescent fresh,

Tommy