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My father often said that I understood him better than anyone else in his life ever had. Although that was true, I sometimes wished when I was growing up that I knew a lot less about him than I did. Other times I was proud to know him better than anybody.
Dad went by two names, Daddy Boy and Creech, and those names sum up the extremes of his alcohol-ridden, drug-addicted self. When he was Daddy Boy, he was friendly, fun, and undependable. When he was Creech, he was just plain mean. I learned to smell the shift before it started, because he changed faster than Dr. Jekyll could turn into Mr. Hyde. Getting too comfortable with Dr. Jekyll was like sending a signal asking Hyde to appear.
Daddy Boy Creech had a favorite game: “Trust me.” He had favorite sayings: “I can feel for you but I can't quite reach you” and “Worse than useless.” It took me years to figure out what he meant.
If he was home when I was getting ready to go to sleep, he told me bedtime stories, long stories that were continued over many weeks. They were about him as a hero like Sinbad the Sailor or as a knight with King Arthur's court. He had good timing and knew how to grab my attention. He had an eye for the killing detail.
Some of those stories were not made up; they were about his job. In real life Daddy Boy Creech was a policeman, and he liked telling me about his work. He described what the torn body of a person looked like when he had been run over by a train or