Thom's Side of the Story

by Ellen Pepper

        

        None of it was my fault. I know what people say. Some tell me to my face. They don't get it. Nobody does. Nobody ever tried to understand me, especially my father Charles. We were expected to call him by his name rather than Dad, Papa, Father - any of the titles that would link him to us paternally. He thought it made him seem younger to not be a parent.

        Since I was the first-born son, I was groomed to join my father in the family business after finishing college - not that Charles respected education, because he didn't. He just thought it would look good to have a degree noted on the company letterhead. If he could have gotten away with pretending that I'd graduated, he would have saved all the money he spent on sending me to school.

        I married Rita right out of high school. She was always my favorite girlfriend - her family had money and property. We lived off-campus and started making babies.

        By the time I started working with Charles as his assistant, I was already a father of three very noisy kids. I never managed to get enough sleep at night - someone was always acting up. Sure, when they were a bit older, we'd go on family adventures to parks and what have you but that ended up getting too complicated after a while what with the kids coming down with allergies and arguing all the damn time.

        My job was okay, at first. It was great being the Boss' son, people would defer to me even though I had no interest in what I was doing and no clue as to how to do it anyway. I found it amusing to punk people just for fun. I fired the people who wouldn't play along. Especially the women who didn't know how to have fun, if you know what I mean.

        After a few years, the clients started being too demanding. Always wanting deadlines met and saying the accounting was wrong and blaming me. When Charles told me to start paying more attention to the job and to stop causing clients to  break contracts because of my so-called incompetence, I told him a few home truths about how it was his own fault for not paying enough attention to me when he was building up his ego all those years ago.

        That's when he demoted me to the loading dock. Sure, I'd be the boss there, but his new plan was to bring in one of my brothers to take my job as his assistant.

        I was so fed up by that point that after work on Friday I went down to the riverfront casino just for a change of scenery. A former client had taken me there once and I'd won a tidy bit of cash. I deserved some fun in my life, I decided.

        And that was the beginning of the end of my happy life. Such as it was. I lost everything because the games were rigged. I kept trying to get the luck to come back to me and I know it would have, if I hadn't run out of money. I'm sure of that.

        My marriage was ruined, my kids grew up without me, I spent time in prison for something stupid and now I live at the back end of the old Mercantile Bank that will soon be demolished. I saw one of my sons at the shelter one Christmas. We lost touch after that.

        I know people would say it's my own damn fault that I lost everything but what did I have, really? What did I have of my very own? Everyone else had something. I had nothing, not even myself.

©Ellen Pepper 2024