"When he drank-and it was often---he turned grotesque. He loved to hurt people when he was drunk, because he didn't have the guts to hurt them when he was sober. When he drank, all sorts of terrible things gushed out. He'd say anything to anybody.
The several times I returned home, with my pretty wife and my good job and my healthy, pleasant life, he was simply gone.
I think he was cremated. I don't even know where the ashes are.
Yet I saw my dad a few days ago in some pictures. It was all there: the receding hairline, the thinning hair, a peculiar thickness between ear and crown; the funny way he had of cocking his head and squinting when he listened; the awkwardness of the body, held in tightly, the body of a man never truly at ease. The slight paunch, the sloppy clothes. He is holding a child-a son-and it's hard to read much from the relative postures of the figures. There's some awkwardness there, a little tension. The kid has a pugnacious handsomeness, a wildness to him, and the father is clearly a little unsure about the whole business---he doesn't know where to stand, where to yield.
But I like to tell myself there's some love in that picture too, and, I hope, enough to build on. Because it's my dad's face all right, but it's also mine, and that's my son I'm holding."
Stephen Hunter
"Father of Darkness"
21 June 1981