Diary of a Step Dad

“I took ‘dickhead’ to the park to play baseball today… the bastard is actually talented. He wouldn’t be so awful to live with if he wasn’t such a little asshole…”

The “dickhead” was Moe Greene, and he was only 9 years old at the time that was written. The author of that flattering commentary was Moe’s step dad Jim.

When I met Moe Greene, his family rented a house a couple streets down from mine. Nearly all of the neighborhood population was made up of old people. And by old, I mean elderly. They had already raised their kids, retired, and were now waiting to die. It wasn’t a very fun place to grown up. Out of the 200-300 houses in the neighborhood, there were actually only 20 or so households that had kids.

So when Moe Greene and I discovered each other, it was a little like hitting the lottery. We spent just about every waking moment, of every day, together. Life was that way for about a year until, one day, Moe was gone… He wasn’t on the school bus; I didn’t see him after school, he was nowhere to be found… Nobody answered his door, there were no cars in the driveway, they were just gone.

Then one day, my mom said she saw someone over at Moe’s house carrying boxes out the door. I ran over as quickly as I could and rang the bell.

Moe’s stepdad, Jim, answered the door… I should probably explain that during all my interaction with Moe, we were almost always at my house... His house was scary... We weren’t allowed to make any noise, or touch anything. This was because of Jim… I never saw him do or say anything mean, but for whatever reason, everyone was afraid of him.

“You kids better be quiet or you’re going to upset Jim,” his mother would warn us; or “You better not let Jim catch you messing with his stuff, you know how he gets…”

Moe always took the threats very seriously, so in turn, I did as well… I grew to be terrified of the man. He never spoke to us, he always appeared to be in a bad mood, and he had deep, sunken, serial killer eyes.

So you can imagine my fear when I knocked on the door in search of Moe Greene and Jim answered the door.

“Umm… hi, is Moe there?”

“Moe’s gone,” he replied in a somber tone. It was the first time I’d ever heard him speak.

“Gone? What do you mean?”

“They moved… he and his mother, they moved out…”

“But… where did they go?” I asked, now in a total panic. (Remember, Moe was my only friend and now he had mysteriously vanished)

“How the fuck would I know?” he curtly replied.

And then he shut the door in my face.

It would be a couple of months before I finally heard from Moe again. His mom apparently called my mom, and asked if Moe could stay with us for a week or so. It seems times were tough in the Moe Greene household. So he came to stay with us for a while.

Of course, I asked about what had happened. Where had they gone? Why had they gone? Etc.

For his part, Moe didn’t really have a lot of answers… all he knew was that his mom and Jim had a fight and they had moved out in the middle of the night.

After staying with us for that week, Moe and his mom would make sporadic appearances in our lives. We wouldn’t hear anything from them for a couple weeks… then he’d all of a sudden pop up and stay a few days… then he’d be gone again… They moved around a lot, rented rooms, stayed with friends, and finally they got their own apartment.

Around that time, Moe’s mom met a decent guy and they finally had some stability at home… but of course, this is when my home life started getting a little messy. All of a sudden it became my mom asking Moe’s mom to take me in for a week here and there.

Moe’s mom was about 5 foot tall, weighed 80 pounds, drove a car that the size of a parade float, chain smoked generic brand cigarettes, cussed like a sailor, loved telling stories, and was always trying to embarrass Moe Greene. So naturally, I loved her. As the years went by she became like a second mom to me.

Sometimes, when she was in a really good mood we would ask her about Jim, and the time they had to mysteriously move out in the middle of the night. Was he cheating on her? Did he get violent? Was he on drugs? What the hell happened?

The only thing she would ever tell us is that she found his diary and that it had some bad stuff in it… that was it… she wouldn’t say what the diary said, or give any indication as to what it was about. It was just bad.

Being curious kids, we of course obsessed about this mystery diary. We would come up with wild scenarios for what it might have contained… Maybe he was planning to rob a bank, assassinate a politician, or was a fugitive from justice… or maybe he was just gay… It was a topic of late night discussion and pondering for several years.

As we grew older, we stopped thinking about it so much. We never really forgot the diary completely, but we had girls, music, and sports to discuss… the diary just stopped being a topic.

And then one day, we found it.

We were going through some boxes in a closet of the guest room and there it was, the mysterious ‘Jim’ Diary. It had his name on it and everything. And technically, it wasn’t really a diary or a journal per say, it was more of a day planner…. He wrote a couple small paragraphs in the square for each day, and if I remember correctly, it actually spanned several years in one planner. We had stumbled onto what essentially amounted to 3 years of the man’s life.

We took the diary back to Moe’s room, opened it up, and started reading the passages out loud. The first one we came across contained the quote I used to lead the story… It called Moe a “dickhead”, a “bastard”, and “a little asshole”. This would prove to be a major theme of the diary. Page after page was devoted to Jim talking about what a little jerk Moe Greene was. Almost exclusively, he referred to him as “the dickhead”, “the asshole”, or when he was being nice, “the brat”.

Keep in mind, Moe was between the ages of 7 and 9 years old at the time. And to be fair, he really was kind of a jerk, as much as any 9 year old can be I guess. Moe was the type of kid that figured out in the first grade that he was smarter than all the other kids and probably half of the adults… but he couldn’t keep that to himself. He had to tell everyone else around him how dumb they were, pointing out their flaws at every opportunity. He couldn't turn that off. Neither could I. It's probably part of the reason we forged such a strong bond; nobody else could stand us.

He wasn't the ideal kid to get stuck with in a relationship. I mean, if you're going to date a single mother, you're hopping to get the kid from Jerry Maguire, not smart mouth kid who would make fun of the shirt you were wearing and snicker anytime you tried to tell him what to do… but then again, he was just a little kid. And it’s not easy to hate a little kid, but Jim did. In fact, he said as much at least two dozen times in 1989 alone!

But Moe wasn’t the only target of Jim’s hatred and resentment; his mother got her fare share as well. She was usually referred to as “the bitch”, “the hag”, or “the cunt”. He talked about how moody she was, how much he despised the sound of her voice, and sometimes, how much he wanted to get away from her.

But mostly, he just bitched about Moe.

Moe was always touching his stuff, leaving messes in the living room, and arguing with everyone… But what pissed Jim off most about Moe, was the fact that he was smart. It really bothered him that such superior intelligence would be wasted on a rotten, ungrateful child. Many times he wondered why he couldn’t have been blessed with the talents Moe had been blessed with. I remember one entry in particular where he marveled at Moe’s abilities in math; “if I had been blessed with a brain like that maybe I wouldn’t be shacked up with such an evil hag and working a crap job…”

As the months went on his entries went from anger, to jealousy, to utter depression. The guy really had a miserable life. It certainly wasn’t fair to blame Moe, but at the same time, we couldn’t help but feel a little bit of sympathy for him. Every single day of his life was reduced to short, single paragraph summaries like: “had a shitty day at work, got home, argued with the bitch about the asshole, he was messing with my baseball cards again, I wish this life would end…”

All of his entries had a similar quality where they were so pathetic, and so heartbreakingly honest, that they were actually funny. Reading the diary was like going on an emotional journey. We’d start out with outrage at what a prick he was, then we’d crack up for an hour so at how hilariously pathetic he was, and then we’d get depressed right along with him.

I was 17 at the time, and Moe was 16. Had we found the diary when we were younger, it might have left some emotional scars. As thick skinned as Moe was, reading that an adult/pseudo-father figure thought you were an asshole might not have been all that easy to handle… Not to mention all the stuff about his mom.

But like I said, we were at the right age. We could put it all in proper perspective. It taught us that adults were just people, and that they didn’t all necessarily have things figured out; they could be just as fucked up and clueless as we were… I think that’s an important part of the story.
Eventually, we ended up losing the diary… We would always put it back in the same place where we had found it, but then one day we went to get it out and it was gone. We had lusted after it for so long, finally found it, and then just as suddenly as it had come into our lives, it was gone.

I told Moe I was planning on writing about the diary for the blog. We laughed about some of the stuff that we remembered, and tried to remember some of the stuff we had forgotten. We’re pretty sure Moe’s Mom must have thrown the diary out when she was renovating the guest room. We decided that we would chip as much as $100 each if it meant we could somehow track it down. But we know, it’s probably lost forever.

When I think back on my fading memories of Jim, he’s still an adult, and we're still little kids… but in reality, he probably wasn’t that much older than we are now.

And of course Moe is a father now. He has 3 kids, a mortgage, and lots of adult things to stress out about. He has his good days and his share of bad days as well. A couple weeks ago, his pre-kindergarten aged son decided to practice his golf swing in the living room; he ended up smashing Moe’s beloved 32” wide screen HDTV.

If Moe had a diary, I wonder what kind of entry he might have written on that day? I'm sure he was angry. I'm sure he was frustrated. But he's actually a fairly patient and understanding father. I don't think he could write about his kids the type of things Jim wrote about him. He's a better man than Jim was, and probably still is. Maybe a small part of that is because we found that diary.

Sometimes, seeing a bad example can be just as valuable as seeing a good one.