A Complicated Man - John Albert Damitio Jr.
June 13, 1935 - January 2, 2025
It’s been a yer since my father died. John Albert Damitio, Jr.
We had a complicated relationship. When I was a child, he was my hero. I wanted to be just like him. I loved to hear his stories.
Of course, I couldn’t be just like him. He was like no one else in the world and for that matter so am I.
He was born at the height of the depression in Aberdeen, Washington. His father, a child of the pioneers who had settled the wild Washington, Territory worked for the utility company and his mother was Canadian blue blood from Victoria, BC who liked doilies and tea. That mixture actually explains a lot about him.
Dad was a hearty tradesman and a dandy. His workers used to mock his fancy clothes with one of them calling him (secretly) Gabardines, because of his fancy trousers. Dad liked to sing. He didn’t just like it, it was his life. I suppose the biggest regret of his life was that he didn’t become famous. He had the voice for it. In different circumstances he might have become one of the great tenors or a famous rock star. He tried. He sang at Carnegie Hall. His band once opened for Tony Bennet. His band played at the Playboy Mansion. He wanted to be famous for his voice but it never happened.
My mother believed in his voice and when I was about eight, she desperately tried to bring him the fame he so desired. She became his publicity agent and his publicist. She set up photo shoots, sent out demos, and supported him when he wanted to start playing in bands again - despite the fact that this heavily impacted the painting and construction business they had built together. He had built her dream house, a lakefront house in Big Bear Lake, California where they and their three children could live and have a happy life. Dad was ambitious though and convinced her to sell the house so he could build spec houses in a new and upcoming development. Mom, as always supported him.
It was all too much for their marriage. Dad began having late nights and lots of band practice. He started living his rock star dream a bit. Up to this point there had been lots of time for his three kids and wife but now - he was grumpy, tired, angry at not succeeding, lashing out, and drinking far too much. Most of my happy memories of Dad come before this time and there were a lot. In many ways, he was a model parent to me, my brother, and my sister. We loved him. Everyone did. Mom collapsed under the pressure.
What had been the happiest of homes became a hell for several years with drugs, alcohol, and loud fights replacing the dreams of what had been.
Dad’s stories up until that time, I used to beg him for them. Stories of being in the Army - briefly, he had a skin condition that gave him a medical discharge but not before he engineered spending his last six months as a lifeguard next to the base pool while he waited for the administrative discharge. His stories of working as a painter - and dangling from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. His stories of being the big man on campus at University of Puget Sound. He taught me to read time on my great grandfather’s pocket watch. He promised to send me to his alma mater, promised to pay for my education, promised to leave me the watch someday - and all of this with great morality lessons. He’d studied at seminary and then lost faith in God and became a parole officer in Los Angeles during some of the most turbulent times in that city (The Watts Riots). Were his stories true? Yeah, I think they were - but of course they were told from his perspective and to his adoring son - so of course he always made himself out to be the hero in them.
My parent’s divorce was messy. There were awful things said and done. We kids witnessed it all. Shortly after the divorce Mom left town with one of the worst human beings I’ve ever met - everyone who knew him knew this. She had won custody of us so we went with her. Dad watched all this happen and washed his hands of us. For five years we lived in a complete and total hell and he ignored it. Mom says he didn’t pay child support during most of that time. He certainly didn’t check on our welfare. He abandoned us while he rebuilt his life.
He started building log cabins. Beautiful custom log cabins. He found great success. When things reached their worst in Oregon, I called him and begged to come live with him. If it hadn’t of been literally life or death, I feel certain he would have said no. He was living a different kind of rock star life. He had a billiards table where a kitchen table should be, his best friend was the leader of the local Hell’s Angels biker gang, he had a boat and a lakeside house again. He brought me in on all of that. I was fourteen and vulnerable but I thought it was cool that I could snort cocaine with my dad and party with bikers.
I’d abandoned my little sister to escape. I felt guilty about that. He didn’t really want to talk about what was going on in Oregon. What had been going on for years. That was his way.
He built a thriving business but our relationship lasted only a year. Finally, I moved in with the cocktail waitress he had been dating when I got there. I called her mom. She made space for me because she knew that living with my dad was hell and because she saw how much I was suffering. It was a small town and it bruised his ego. He began to tell people that she was sexually abusing me to get even with him. That wasn’t true. Still, it made it so I had to leave. I bounced around a bit.
My mom had finally escaped from her monster husband and returned. My sister moved in with my grandmother. My dad kept building the life he wanted. He was winning with his log cabin business.
Around this time he met, Jeanne, his beloved future wife. She had some money and was a bit of a fancy pants, just like him. The two of them set off into the sunset, I think they may have been a perfect match. They drank wine, golfed, hosted parties, and built a life of luxury together. They took cruises, traveled the world, and allowed my sister to come live with them for a year - but she too had to move out before long and luckily had friends who took her in.
I tried many times to fix our relationship over the years. There was one moment in 2009 when he offered me a job helping him fix up a commercial center he had named after himself. We worked together for a few weeks and I genuinely fell in love with him again. He cried once, the only time I had seen him do that, and admitted that he felt immense guilt for abandoning us. We were drinking together and I think he was ashamed he had admitted it. He became distant over the next few days and then showed up at 7:00 am one morning handing me my paycheck and telling me to get out. We were both living on the job site. I had no car and nowhere to go. A friend and then my uncle and then my brother took me in for a few weeks while I arranged travel back to Morocco, where I was planning to get married.
My dad was a lover of science and philosophy. He introduced me to many of the ideas and concepts that I have found great joy and satisfaction in. He loved books and during the brief time I lived with him as a teen, we shared a love of the author Louis L’amour. We read the entire Sackett Saga and talked about how it was a bit like the story of our family as they traveled from Europe to wild frontiers in the USA.
He once visited my brother in Utah and brought a bucket of KFC. That was the only time he met my brother’s kids. When I moved back to the USA with my wife and daughter, I decided to repair the relationship so that my daughter wouldn’t grow up hearing how her father and grandfather despised each other - like I had. My dad hated his father and never missed a chance to tell me how much. I had a different relationship with my grandfather - my grandfather sent my mom money during the entire time she was struggling in Oregon. He came to see us and bought us new clothes for school. He told me a different version of the stories my father had told me about him. The truth likely lies somewhere in between. I’m sure the same is true of me and my father.
Dad and Jeanne came to visit us once when I established my family in Oregon. It was a short visit. Just one day. They rented a condo a day’s drive away. I took my daughter to go see him twice. The first time he was in rare good form. Things began to feel like they might normalize. Then covid hit and with it, dementia and Alzheimers that hit him hard. I think Jeanne tried to keep it secret, ashamed that this once powerful man was now forgetting who he was, what the year was, and who the people around him were. It became obvious on phone calls. Then I took my daughter to visit one more time and during that visit he forgot who I was, asked my daughter the same questions over and over, and told us about his mother who he spoke of as if she were alive, but she had been deceased since 1978. It was heartbreaking.
Then it became harder to reach him. He seemed to have lost his phone privileges. Last year, on the day before my 53rd birthday, my sister called to tell me that he had entered hospice and probably wouldn’t make it much longer. I thought that maybe he, like my grandfather, would surprise us all and push on, but it was not the case. He died January 2, 2025. There was no funeral. There were no letters to be read after his death. His wife informed us that they had set up a will where the surviving spouse inherited everything and then there would be a will after their (her) passing. She tried to give my great-grandfathers watch to my sister’s son, but my sister knew it had been promised to me and gave it to me. There is no grave. At my sister and my urging, Jeanne agreed to arrange a memorial service. Instead, it was little cocktail party where some of her friends came to pay respects. Before the service she asked that my sister and I go make sure the rental house was clean because she was selling it. Dad’s ashes sat on his desk chair in his office. My sister had prepared some words to pay respects to my father at the service but afterward said she felt like she was interrupting the boomers talking about their lives and politics. His brother, his sister, his nieces and nephews, his friends from throughout the years - they never had the chance to say goodbye. They weren’t invited to the cocktail party.
It seems kind of fitting, actually. I’m writing this a year later. It’s as true as I can make it. I’m sure the truth would lie somewhere in between if we heard my dad tell the story.