Only His Victims Stayed

My father did favors. Enormous ones, sometimes — the kind that shouldn’t have been possible, that required pulling strings that most people didn’t know existed, that produced outcomes that, by any normal accounting of how systems work, simply weren’t supposed to happen. He could get someone a promotion, a permit, a job for their son, a problem quietly resolved by someone who owed him something, which was a long and varied list.

He did this constantly. For everyone. And what I observed, over years of watching it operate, was that the doing was never purely generous — it was always also a kind of investment. He’d perform the favor with what appeared to be genuine warmth, the pleasure of a man who enjoyed demonstrating what he could do. And then, eventually, in ways I only sometimes saw and probably often didn’t, he’d collect.

He never did any of this for us. Not for his wife. Not for his children. Whatever he could move in the world, he moved for everyone except the people who shared his address. I don’t know if this was deliberate or simply how his priorities were arranged — whether we were too close to be worth the performance, or whether home was just where the performance wasn’t necessary, where he could be what he actually was without the overlay of generosity. Either way, the result was the same: his family got the undisguised version, and everyone else got the favors.

The Relatives

What I watched, across many years, was a specific kind of relationship that I think is one of the more honest illustrations of what ordinary people actually are, underneath what they project.

His extended family — cousins, siblings, relatives of various kinds — tolerated him. Pretended, when he was present, to be warm toward him. Engaged with the performance of family, attended the occasions family attends, said the things that are said. And underneath all of it, running quietly, was a calculation: he was useful, he was powerful, and maintaining the relationship meant access to what he could provide.

They’d ask him for things. Jobs for their children. Permits from authorities. Promotions that required someone with connections to make a call. He’d deliver, because delivering was the thing he most enjoyed about himself — and they’d receive, and the performance of closeness would continue until the next time something was needed.

And sometimes, when he wasn’t present, they’d make fun of him. Not publicly — that could be dangerous, and they knew it, and that knowledge tells you something about the specific nature of what they were doing. You don’t privately mock someone whose retaliation you genuinely fear unless the need to mock outweighs the fear, and you’re confident the mockery won’t reach them. Which means the mockery was, in its own way, a kind of luxury they allowed themselves in private — the release valve for the performance they had to maintain in his presence.

Whether He Knew

I’ve thought about this a lot, and I genuinely don’t know the answer.

My father was, in his way, the most perceptive person I’ve ever encountered when it came to reading people. He built entire strategies around knowing things about people that he had no obvious way of knowing. He was constitutionally incapable of being fooled by performance in most contexts — he was too good at performance himself to miss it in others.

And yet he seemed, as far as I could observe, genuinely pleased by these relationships. The important man surrounded by people who needed him. The favors flowing outward, the gratitude flowing back, the sense of himself as the center of a web that required him.

I’ve considered several explanations. Maybe he didn’t notice — which seems unlikely, given everything else. Maybe he noticed and didn’t care, because the enjoyment of having power over them was sufficient, and whether they actually liked him was beside the point. Maybe it worked both ways — bad people using each other, a transaction both sides understood and neither side discussed. Maybe the performance they gave him was good enough, and he preferred it to the alternative, which was honesty that would have required him to reckon with something he’d rather not reckon with.

I don’t know which of these is true. I’m not sure it matters. What I know is what I saw: a man who moved the world for people who were using him, who gave nothing to the people who actually needed something from him, and who seemed, by every visible measure, to find this arrangement satisfying.

What Kind of Bad

I want to say something about the relatives, because I don’t think they were monsters in any technical sense, and I think saying so would be too easy and too wrong.

They weren’t driven by mental illness. They weren’t capable of what he was capable of, and they didn’t do what he did. By most social metrics they were respectable — functioning, contributing, the kind of people who appear at the right occasions and say the right things and are generally regarded as fine.

But here’s what they were: people who maintained the performance of a relationship specifically for what it produced, dropped the performance when it stopped producing, and never once turned that appraisal on themselves in any way I could observe. People who used a dangerous, damaged, genuinely harmful man as a resource, without any apparent discomfort about what they were doing, and without offering anything real in return.

That’s not the same as what he was. But it’s not nothing, either. The Gerald problem — the person who performs goodness as cover for something else — doesn’t only describe obvious villains. It describes people who are, in ordinary life, perfectly pleasant, perfectly functional, and who simply run a quiet calculation underneath it all that they’d prefer not to have named.

Naming it is what this is.

The End‍ ‍

He died old and diminished, as most people do eventually. The dangerous, foam-mouthed man I pulled out of a police station at eighteen — the one who’d bent institutions to his will for decades, who’d had nine officers standing in a circle unable to do anything with him, who’d held secrets that made prosecutors speak in careful, careful terms — that man wore down, the way even remarkable things wear down, and at the end he was just old and sick and in a small space, needing care.

The relatives didn’t call. The people he’d done favors for, whose children had their jobs and whose permits had been approved and whose promotions had come through — none of them were there. The web he’d built, over decades, out of strings he could pull and debts that others owed him — it had dissolved, the way those things always dissolve when the center can no longer pull anything.

My mother was there. His primary victim, across the full span of the marriage, was the one who provided what was essential. Who had the patience for it. Who did what was right for someone who had spent decades doing wrong by her, because that’s who she is, and who she was, and who she would be regardless of what he’d been.

I’ve thought about this more than almost anything else in the whole story. Not with surprise — I think I knew it would go this way, somewhere in the back of everything, long before it did. But with a kind of bleak clarity about what it illustrates.

The dangerous man and the good woman were, in the end, alone together. And all the respectable people — the ones who’d needed him, used him, tolerated him, performed warmth they didn’t feel in order to access what he could provide — they were somewhere else, living their respectable lives, probably not thinking about it much.

That’s why I’m proud, in whatever way pride is available to a person like me, of being a good bad person. Of being someone whose file is honest and whose actions, when they happen, aren’t running a calculation about what comes back. It’s not a high bar. It turns out it doesn’t need to be — because an extraordinary number of people, under the right conditions, don’t clear it.

My mother cleared it. She always did.

The rest of them were gone before the end.

Only his victims stayed.

The full account of who he was and what growing up with him produced is in Surviving a Psychopathic Father, and the “good bad person” framework — why the honest ledger is worth more than the performed one — runs through Confessions of a Good Bad Person.