THanks everyone.
I've been debating what to talk about next. There's so much with this guy.
I guess let's start with some of the reasons I actually don't hate him.
The family history of this man is complicated. I only ever got it in bits and pieces, mostly when his son worked there (oh lord, his son...), but none of those pieces were good.
What I can tell is his parents were relatively high income people, but were extremely neglectful of him and his various sibilings. I'm not sure how many he had, because it was a complicated situation with the divorces and whatnot, and I suspect his stepfather was a bigamist and the two families he had eventually combined in one household at one point when he was older.
They were for sure drug abusers. They smoked like freight trains, drank whiskey like a fish drinks water, smoked pot (I am not inherently against pot because it's pot but they were giving it to 8 year olds, come on!), and there was heroin in the medicine cabinet.
So there's no telling what that was actually like. They had a veneer of respectability but there were some issues there for sure.
I know at a certain point, we have to expect people to move on from being screwed up by their childhood. All the same, this tempered my judgment of the man.
He married his first wife he had his two kids with. His wife left him, and her children, because "he was an asshole". Literally that's the reason. The divorce was "Give me the liquid assets and the car, keep the children, keep the house, or I will take you to the cleaners and put the kids up for adoption."
I know being married to this man can only be some kind of fresh hell, but all the same, that's f#cked up. And I heard from some pretty objective sources (people who called him out on any number of his faults) that this time the fault was with her not him.
Two people confided in me the first wife moved across the country and literally became a crack whore. I don't know if that's true or not but I do believe he made a terrible mistake in marrying this woman.
He was much younger then however, I suspect he was a better person at the time. I can believe he might have truly been innocent.
Now you combine that upbringing, with that woman's antics, and that's enough to screw anyone up. Not an excuse, but again it tempers my judgment.
What I can't abide by is that he was a terrible father. He did the same things to his kids his parents did to him. So often it goes.
His children are train wrecks too, perhaps another day we'll go into them.
Now I'm pretty hard on myself sometimes that I don't do all the right things. But I know I'm too hard on myself because I have the example of his son.
At one point his son, a true idiot of a man who literally had everything and threw it all away for some heroin.
I think that's when my boss went broke, trying to keep his son out of jail. He was successful, getting a litany of charges reduced to a decade of probation, but he lost his shirt doing it.
On the one hand, the fatherly thing to do would have been to say "Son, you done screwed the pooch, and you're a grown ass man who knows better. You have to take what you have coming."
But the tricky thing is, I think on some level my boss knew, could not admit, but knew, that he'd failed as a father, and felt like his son's misbehavior was his fault. Coming to the son's legal defense was his self assigned penance.
He would try, and I emphasize try, to treat his male employees like surrogate sons sometimes. He was just bad at it. Really bad.
I think his experiences with his own mother and his first wife and his second wife just left him with a complex about females.
His daughter didn't do anything spectacular, but her behavior wasn't really, uh, smart. She went to college for 10 years for a 4 year degree. She went through men like an allergy sufferer goes through pills and tissues. Two children, no idea who either of their fathers were (four paternity tests for the second child all came back negative and they gave up).
To her immense credit, she had a job. She was an elementary school teacher, for a time before that ended in flames. She kept employed though, I will give her that.
She siphoned about 30 grand a year from him, 30 years old too. He felt obliged to pay it.
His second wife, the true love of his life, now that's a story. She was from Harlem, and she was a real piece of work.
I don't throw the word "bitch" around lightly, I think it's a very nasty adult word for truly exceptional individuals. It's the right word this time.
They were married, divorced, together and separate many times. She worked with us for a while too.
I always could tell he really wanted to make it work with her, but neither of them had any emotional maturity to figure out how.
Did I mention he was white and she was black and both their families hated this?
I wish I could say that was proof the guy wasn't a bigot, but... well another day.
Anyway the point is, I always felt a little bad for him. I could see some part of him really did want to do right by these people. He was just inept at it.
