Leaving the coffee house was the easiest thing I had done since picking up the phone to hear of my father’s death a few days before. It was a brain-aneurism, stress-induced, that finally did him in. My mother’s one redeeming trait throughout the ordeal was that she was honest, torturously so, and to this day I thank her for it. Every fact was necessary, every tangent admirable, every word beautiful, and for the first time I understood that she had the capacity to care, if not for me than for somebody. That was all I really needed to know. I needed to not hate her so much.

My father was an artist, since before I was born. He was brilliantly unsuccessful and could hardly provide for just the two of us. I never saw him eat or sleep, only sculpt. We had a studio apartment that we shared with his friend Broli in New York City, so I could always watch my father agonize and yell and cry over every stab of his poker and stroke of his smoother. Every minute detail was a world of indecision and a lifetime of pacing. Back and forth and around he would move, cocking his head and bending his waist and knees to analyze every conceivable angle of his creation, making the slightest nick about every twenty minutes, often times followed by a cascade of obscenities and flailing, ungraceful arm movements. The figure, ever-confined to the size of his and Broli’s standard kiln, would rest serenely on a tiny table in the center of his workspace as the madman circled it with tribal intensity, staring hope and hatred into every contour, crevasse, and inevitable air bubble.

When a creation was done he would stare at it for nearly an hour, unmovable, arms crossed and with a look of utter disgust on his face. “It’s no Arbiter,” he would repeatedly say, “no Arbiter.” He would subsequently push the abstract clay form aside and start again. It was for this reason that he never sold any art: he couldn’t bring himself to display garbage and call it gold.

That’s how I knew my father: the tortured artist. I grew up hating him for being different, for not being a cubicle-slave like the other kids’ dads, which made me different, as well as for rarely ever finishing a sculpture. It was laughable to me that he was only able to sell a piece of art the days after Broli would yell at him for never having his share of the rent and bills, and even then he made sure that nobody in the art community would see it, for fear that its unbrilliance would ruin his reputation, or at least what reputation he thought he had.