If you were to ask the IRS my, the first job I ever had was working at a branch of a franchise ice cream shop. I was 17 years old and it taught me early on to hate employment. Myself and the other young employees smelled a problem very early on… mostly when I found myself up past midnight being forced to mop floors on school nights. In my first world/fairly privileged mindset, this was something to be expected of illegal immigrants and Russian nationals only. When I mentioned that my mom wouldn’t allow me to work that late on school nights (neither would the state, but I didn’t mention that) I got a strongly worded email from my  boss, which I saved immediately, knowing that I would need something to read while Angry-Drunk in later years. I was asked to quit and gladly obliged but not until they tried to force me to work during my high school graduation.

The company owners opened their own company recently and were featured on a website I frequent – I hadn’t thought of them in years. Strangely enough their new business specializes in a certain type of booze that I fantasize about drinking at their establishment, then reminding them of who I am, proceed to get profoundly drunk and yell at them, starting every sentence with “AND ANOTHER THING…!” I’m not one for cliches and high school grudges though. But fuck them.

“I don’t need your reference you SHITTYASSHOLE!” *hiccup*

My first legitimate job came my way right before I turned 18 years old. I worked as a receptionist at an OB/GYN clinic on First Hill. I have three cousins who were born the same year I was and all of them, at the time, were working at either Abercromie and Fitch or The Gap; Christmas that year was awkward.

The doctor’s office was run by an “old school” doctor who was near retirement – in fact he retired while I was still working there. He did everything on paper, the only computer in the office was the one he used to play Solitaire while he thought we couldn’t see. By becoming friends with the office nurse I got to hear all of her disgusting vagina stories over lunch; how I managed to gain the Freshman 15 with all that going on I will never know.

After that I was a nanny which paid well and was easy, but I wasn’t well suited for it as I am famously disgusted by most children. Luckily after a breaking in period of me and the child staring at each other awkwardly over breakfast, we ended up bonding over the Graduation album by Kanye West. Letting him listen to woefully age-inappropriate music on his way to school and talk about it at great length was preferable to silence… which makes me the shittiest potential parent in the world. However, over the years he became one of my favorite people in the world and he has since grown taller than me which pisses me off and makes me want to cry proud tears all at the same time. Damn kids.

“Kids fuckin’ love me.” – Kanye West

Following the trend of me taking jobs I’m not suited for, I spent a short time selling espresso machines and accessories. I knew nothing about them, I’ve always been a terrible saleswoman and I didn’t drink coffee at the time. I lied about most of that during my interview and faked it as long as I could before it was suggested that I was better suited for the warehouse. It was a sharp observation on their part as I have long been described as having a “dark room removed from civilization” type of personality.

“I’ll just be back here… shoving things into boxes…”

During my stint in shipping I got to be a part of a mandatory barista training through our small company. I still hadn’t been drinking much coffee even though it was free at all times and I was scared to hear that we had to taste every espresso shot we pulled that day. I made upwards of fifty, but slyly tossed quite a few of them as I wasn’t interested in having my heart stop. Unfortunately enough made it through that I felt like my heart was going to hop out of my chest. I shipped more packages that day than I ever had before. Even at 6pm I was still so high on caffeine I could smell colors.

It was shortly after that I felt it was time to leave that job which led me to my current job – medical records for a nursing home. It’s a variation on the “dark room removed from civilization” theme which suits me just fine. People always say “Oh, you work with the elderly, you must have some great stories!” I do but most of them involve elderly people thinking they’re whispering when they’re not, which is always uncomfortable and hilarious. But those are stories for another day.

My Dad and I never got along. We didn’t really fight, but there was always this tension between us, a discomfort. It hasn’t been there for over a decade now. Ever since he died we’ve gotten along fine.

That is the kind of joke that would make some people squirm or sigh. I think my Dad would laugh at it. He had a pretty caustic sense of humor. Go figure. He didn’t laugh often, but he had much more of a sense of humor than I ever gave him credit for while I was growing up. After I moved out, I only remember him calling me twice. Both times he was crying. The first time he was telling me that my Mama had breast cancer and she didn’t want anyone to know. I was the only one he could tell, he couldn’t even tell my siblings. THAT was a game changer for me and how I saw our dynamic, but there aren’t as many laughs there so I’ll save it for the therapist’s couch.

The other time he called me, crying, was because he had just watched the “funniest movie I have ever seen”. He could barely talk about it, he was in such a state of high amusement. The movie? “Porky’s”. That’s right, my Dad who told all four of us kids we could only be a Doctor, Lawyer or Teacher (zero for four there Dad, sorry) and who loved to read but believed that reading fiction was a waste of time had just proclaimed “Porky’s” to be “the funniest movie I have ever seen”. And I think he was calling me, his movie-loving son, to try to bond after a couple of decades plus of having a difficult relationship. I was just born to disappoint this man.

Growing up, my Dad was an enigma. I got to claim my first GAY STEREOTYPE (I now own enough to be able to get a Gold Card, although I’m missing some of the more popular ones that seems a source of confusion or even irritation when some folks get to know me – sorry, I’m a slob and I can’t do hair) – the distant father. I’m sure he went through some kind of torment figuring it was his fault I was Gay. I hear parents of those like me have to deal with that. Truth of the matter is he got along with my brother just fine. They bonded. They talked. They did things together. Things that would confuse me. So, you throw the ball at someone, they catch it, then you throw it back and keep repeating that action? FASCINATING! Who needs that Joan Crawford movie that is burning a hole into our Black and White TV when I can be doing THIS all day? And you mean we can go to a big area of GRASS and take a steel pole and hit a tiny little ball until we get it to drop in a tiny little hole? Well let me stop doing this improv-opera on the driveway and hop in the car to join you because that just sounds like too much fun to miss!

I didn’t became Gay because my Dad was distant. My Dad was distant because I was GAY GAY GAY! Even if I had grown up to become romantically and sexually involved with girls and women, it wouldn’t have mattered. I didn’t like cars. I liked ART!

My Dad on the other hand liked horseradish, golf, Sophia Loren, cigars, his recliner, salami and history books. He was a curmudgeon, an atheist and loved to brag about his Socialist beliefs.

I didn’t get him at all. Not at all. And he clearly didn’t get me.

It happens to pretty much everyone, however, the experience I’m about to describe. You never see it coming. For me I was living alone in my studio apartment and making a lunch. I can’t remember what it was, but I remember reaching into the fridge and pulling out my well used bottle of horseradish, something I had started enjoying since discovering my first Jewish Deli a few years earlier. But while it was in my hand it hit me. HORSERADISH! I’m eating HORSERADISH! All four of us kids laughed at our Dad for eating that horrible stuff. It was just one more sign that he was a ridiculous man, and here I am eating HORSERADISH. And loving it. My. God. I said to myself. My. GOD. Mygodmygodmygodmygod…

Wait a minute. God. I don’t believe in him either. I’m an atheist! And I had just watched Marriage Italian-Style! And I believe that no human being should live a life of excess while others are doing without and that government should provide basics like healthcare and security to every citizen. I HAVE BECOME MY FATHER!

I had to sit down to try to calm myself. I sat. IN MY RECLINER! Near my stack of HISTORY BOOKS!

And I cried. I cried like I had just found out my Mama had breast cancer, or that I had just watched Porky’s for the first time. And I raised my fists and shouted to the sky “I WILL NOT PLAY GOLF! NOT TODAY! NOT EVER! YOU. CAN’T. HAVE. THAT!”

My Dad is now gone from this earth but clearly is still a part of me. That is not something I ever thought I wanted, but now it brings me comfort. I’m a Dad now. I’m even a Grandpa now. My son and I don’t usually see eye to eye and we share very few interests. We have had big blow outs and huge resentments, but I remember that in spite of everything my Dad actually was always there for me. He never understood me and at times he never really liked me, but he was always there for me. And I want to always be there for my son. And someday, I hope he is reaching for the horseradish and thinks of me.

Jeffrey Robert is a laughing curmudgeon, a nullified husband, a recovering father and the Lane Bryant of Comedy.

I talk a lot about my Dad in my act, but Father’s Day really gives you the opportunity to dig deep about the times your father really chalked up some all-Star feats of parenting. I didn’t have to dig far; when I was in middle school, my father was my softball coach.

I often think about what my Dad must have been envisioning when he offered to coach a team of 15 pre-teen girls. To hear him tell it, he wanted to teach us kids the joy and satisfaction that comes with winning a fair game; he probably thought it might have the earnest, all-American feel of a Norman Rockwell painting. What he got was much different; an obvious conclusion for anyone who has ever met a crowd of girls on the brink of full on emotional revolt against anything resembling authority.

Most of the girls on my team had grown up at my house. My parents learned early on that if I was going to be their only child that they were going to have to bribe children over to the house if I was ever going to stop interviewing my teddy bears and making faces in mirrors to entertain myself. My Dad generally stayed out of our way but allowed my friends and me to dress him up like a fairy princess while he was barbequeing and interrupt his couch-napping to bring him reports about things Mom wouldn’t let us do/eat/say. They were used to seeing my Dad as an easy-going, patiently involved and ever-amused placater of pre-teen non-sense. His role as an authority in their lives as a coach would always be tainted by his well-tested patience and easy amusement.

“Practices” and “games” were social activities for us; my Dad failed to realize that girls classified most extracurricular activities this way. We would leisurely toss the ball back and forth from an easy distance and indulge in gossip, hyperbole, disgusting joke telling and nonsensical laughter. He could only control two of us at a time as he reminded us to do things like “keep your eye on the ball” and “keep your glove up before you end up with a black eye for God’s sake!” His advice would be quickly ignored in favor of more insipid giggling; surprisingly there were only two black eyes our first season. This would be one of his greatest accomplishments that season. On paper, anyway.

Dad’s favorite question to ask when we really started checking out was “What’s going on ladies, are we just out here modeling the uniforms?!” The obvious answer was “Yes.” We would wear our jerseys to school every day; we had numbers on our backs, a team to belong to, “positions” to claim… In our minds we were fucking legit. That’s where our sense of pride in the game ended. As long as all the other girls (but mostly the boys) knew that we were capable of playing a team sport after school, nothing else mattered.

But Dad, bless his heart, wanted to win.

If we ever won a game, I don’t remember; which is probably almost as heartbreaking to my Dad as never having won at all, I’m sure. Little League Softball rules stated that once one team was up by 10 runs, the game was over. We got “ten-runned” a lot. It was the quickest way to get to the juice boxes and Quaker Oat granola bars, which was the other thing we came for. Unbeknownst to him, Dad was hosting a weekly cocktail party where the guests were attending only to see and be seen, wear their favorite outfit and stick around long enough for refreshments.

The day it started to dawn on him that he was fighting a losing battle, he decided to show us how to “run the bases like you mean it and stop sitting around looking like a horse’s ass.” We all gathered around in the dugout to watch him angrily run from one base to the next, lecturing all the while. Suddenly, his legs lost pace and he started to topple forward. Like all epic falls, it seemed to happen in slow motion. He fell, ass-over-teakettle, just past third base in a cloud of dust and flailing limbs. We were silent until one creeping, inevitable, excruciatingly stifled laugh/snort  consumed the entire dugout. Dad did what you have to do when you fall in front of a bunch of girls – he stayed down. Luckily, before long, he was laughing along with the rest of us. He knew from then on that his last opportunity to get us to appreciate hard work and sportsmanship had been used up.

But after a while, it didn’t matter. If we did well: great. If not, SUNNY DELIGHT AND GOLDFISH CRACKERS! Dad gave us a venue to get some sort of physical activity and gain some unearned but inarguable self esteem. As a man who read “Reviving Ophelia” the second I started to get even a little hormonal, he knew that the self esteem part of the endeavor was really the only thing that mattered.

Surprisingly, we all came back for multiple seasons; most of us played until we were too old for the league and were expected to join our high school teams. Dad coached yet another round of girls after we “retired”. I’d help him coach sometimes and I finally started to understand the source of his red-faced ranting and sideline anger-jumping. But, just like him, I found it amusing enough to keep coming back to help… if not just for the snacks.

I tried out for softball my sophomore year of high school but when the coach wasn’t my Dad, the sport lost its luster. Half the fun of softball was being able to screw around in the outfield and not give a shit; the other half was knowing that the coach was having fun too. Dad may have gotten frustrated with us and wanted to force the love of sport on us at all costs, but at the end of the day he always enjoyed watching us run the bases the few times one of us would connect a bat with a ball. Our small victories were huge to him and he made sure we all knew when someone was doing something great. When we failed at something, it was par for the course but when we were able to pull of something exceptional, he was always the one cheering the loudest.

“Exceptional”, of course, wasn’t hard in our case but Dad still sold it every time. So, a happy Father’s Day to all you dads out there whose patience has ever been tested and an especially happy one to mine.