I often ponder the father/son relationship we talk so much about in the Silverfoxes Syndrome. Some people say that those who had a bad relationship with their actual fathers are compensating for it by constructing a relationship with another man based upon an ideal that eluded their reality. Others claim to reverse is true. I don’t know.

What I do know, however, is that I have been father and/or son in some of the relationships I have experienced no matter the age differences between us. I Have been father with a younger man, and son with an older, just as I have been father and/or son in varying circumstances with the same man no matter whether he was older or younger than I.

For me, unless a man were to be my biological father or son, it would all be a fantasy anyway. In the case of a biological son, I never had one, but I did have a daughter who died in infancy. I of course had a biological father. I never much liked him. Perhaps my distaste for him and what we were to each other made me what I am today - inclined to be paternal, but not controlling, nurturing, but not smothering. That is the way I see myself. Only others could tell me if it is true.

I have many recollections of my father, few of them pleasant.

When I was seven, I lived at 321 Custer Avenue outside Chicago in Evanston, a few blocks from Lake Michigan. That was in the earliest days of America's share of World War II. I remember that address so well because of the terrors I lived through there. Most obvious was my terror when hiding under the bed with my hands pressed to my ears to blot out the scream of the air raid sirens set off so the general population could practice for the emergency they were convinced would come when Nazi troops invaded from the East and the armies of Tojo from the west. Black-out curtains for Christmas in 1941 were standard under the tree.

The other terror walked on four feet - those of my father and the woman who tried to make me call “mother.” That New Year's Eve, he ran off and got married in Kankakee to the beautiful teenage model I had watched him fuck on the sofa through my barely cracked-open bedroom door when I peeked out on Christmas Eve to see if Santa Claus had already come. It wasn't Santa who came, but my dad, with more passion and ecstasy than I had ever seen in him before or would ever see again except when I had stood in my crib and watched him repeatedly beat up my real mother whom he divorced when I was four, accusingly her falsely as a whore.

Unbelieving of his claim after a sensational trial where I was forced to testify screaming on the stand, the court awarded me to her, but he kidnaped me, and I didn't see her again for thirteen years. When I seemed to have recovered from the trauma of the loss, living with him in hiding in a far-flung place, he administered the coup de grace and told me she was dead.

I was seven years old the night I saw him screw the babe who would help him rape, pillage and destroy all hope I might have left for a modicum of happiness in childhood. A desolate, lonely, solitary child, I had no friends but one.

There was a young man living in our building who was terribly ill. He had lost his hair. It was cancer, I guess. I remember that he was 19, twelve years older than I, but his own loneliness and festering terror made him childlike and trusting, as if he believed that clinging to youth and innocence might hold the hound of death at bay. He wore a baseball cap to cover his naked scalp of which he was so obviously ashamed. He wouldn't take off that cap at any time and dodged away from other kids and teens who taunted him when he passed nearby.

Like a hunted animal he was, running hunched over and close to the wall, taking steps two at a time to flee from the cries of “Freak!” and “Bald eagle! Ha! Ha! Ha!” He hardly spoke to anyone, but he was, oh, so good to me. He "babysat" me sometimes by taking me to his mom's apartment, where both she and he would lavish love on me as if I were one of their own. "That poor little boy," was the way they spoke of me. They were Italian, and she cooked spaghetti all the time. The father was dead, and she worked very hard to keep her son's expensive medications on the shelf.

On the day when I turned eight on March 31, 1942, he took me out riding to the lake, which was sparkling and clean in those days, and the beaches were snowy white. We rode on a double-decker bus and saw all the sights from on top. What a day that was, but he got me home late, and my stepmother met me at the door with a knotted dish towel in her hand and began to beat me about the face. My friend went to stop her, but my father, who had been lurking in the background, rushed into the fray.

Part 1 | Part 2