Bad Company ... And Good Company

Tonight I went to a concert with my brother, Josiah. Our dad bought us tickets and planned on coming too, but he works at a local prison and has worked 10 hour overnights for the last 21 days...needless to say, he was tired.  The concert was Joe Walsh and Bad Company.  Joe Walsh sucked, Bad Company put on a great show.  

I really like Bad Company.  I know all the words to all the songs.  Both my brother and I do, but we should, our step-dad used to blare the albums at home and in the car.  It's a wonder any of us can hear, he liked it loud, especially in the car.  While I was having a good time, for a brief bit I was taken back to those years when I had to deal with my step-dad.

He was a horrible person.  You're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but when they never did anything but be a shit to everyone, you just can't do otherwise.  My parents split the last day of 3rd grade, I was eight.  My mother moved in with Clarence (Ray) by the end of June.  She had all five of us kids with her at first.  We moved into a 1 bedroom apartment.  He didn't work.  He never held a job longer than a few weeks for the whole time I knew him, 24 years.

Everything revolved around him.  My mother was the one who worked, in crappy convenient store jobs.  I went to live with my dad before school started that fall.  Over the next couple of years, I lived with my mother for a short period of time.  And as a teenager and young adult always made the effort to maintain a relationship. She never tried to see me, didn't come to school events, never picked me up for visitation or holidays. I don't know if her failure to even try was her own personality trait or his influence.  I'll never know.  

Some examples of his awesome awfulness: kids did ALL the housework, stayed outside the rest of the time; since I was always an overweight kid, he suggested I start wearing sack dresses; the one time he had a short term job fixing someone's garage roof and they didn't pay him because the work was shitty, he went on a tirade of racist rants.  He pushed my mother into not letting my dad see my siblings if he was late picking them up, all the while never trying to see or pay child support for the four he had out in the world.

I haven't thought about him in a long time, but tonight, as my brother and I sang along to ALL the Bad Company songs, I was overwhelmed.  Not because of all the horrible memories of things worse than I would ever mention here, but because here I was with my brother, making new, better, memories and enjoying the music.  I had some really good company.