Broken Man (rewrite)

This painting called 'Broken Man' was the first in a series I worked on between 2021 and 2024 called ‘Strange and Sometimes Troubled Memories.’ I would think of a memory, paint it, then write a quick blog post about it and hit publish, without editing.

I’m rewriting the original posts as I want to create a book featuring them alongside the paintings once I have the funds to do so. I’m not a writer, my meagre education fizzled out by the time I was a teenager, but I didn’t see myself as an artist either until I managed to wrestle all the self-doubt out of my failure-programmed brain and allowed myself to follow my dreams.

This series came about because I was trying to find direction for my art. I heard somewhere that you should paint what you know, I thought to myself, ‘what do I know? I don’t know anything.’ I started to trawl my mind and the things that had impacted my life in some way began to emerge. I wrote down a quick line for each memory in a notebook. The scrawled entry that inspired this painting read; ‘The last time I saw my dad.’

When I looked through those fragmented notes it dawned on me that my life had been quite a strange one and maybe I had something to work with,  I wasn’t sure if I could make good paintings out of any of the ideas but it was worth a go. As it turned out, I got a very positive response from people who resonated with the paintings and what I wrote about them.

For this painting, I started by bringing an image to mind of what my dad looked like at our last meeting... he was pale and weak; unshaven and uncared for, worn down from having been dragged through life in a state of hazy addiction. When I pictured him younger, I found him more animated, gesticulating in a ‘geezerly’ manner, ducking and diving his way through drunken monologues.

I also envisioned his home. He lived in a sheltered accommodation flat, paid for by some government benefit, where everything was set out at an accessible level for someone in a wheelchair, the light switches and kitchen work tops all sat down. The walls were painted in hospital ward green, it smelt of decay. Each room had a pull cord hanging from the ceiling which alerted some agency worker should the resident be in need of help. On more than one occasion, legless, my dad had pulled on one of these strings by mistake and then had been startled by someone letting themselves into his apartment to check on him.

I drew out the scene crudely in a sketchbook to give myself an idea of composition then began to paint. The room emerged as it had in my memory and my Dad appeared within those walls like a ghost. I was taken aback by how the small figure I’d conjured up was so completely him. I posted the picture on social media later and it halted the scrolling of people who had known him, one or two of them shed a tear as it dawned on them what they were seeing. What follows is the re-write of the original post.

‘Broken Man’

This is a painting about the last time I saw my dad, He wasn't a very good dad.

As a child I didn’t see him much at all. Months, sometimes years would stagger by between his visits, then he would appear, drunk, as if he were the most important thing in the world, like an explorer returning home from some toxic expedition.

He was an alcoholic, he was self-absorbed and mean, a product of an unfortunate life. When he was on form though, he was charming and funny, people liked him at that stage of drunkenness before he went too far, which he always did.

In much the same way, years later, I was always drunk and always went too far but people loved my company, not so much once I sobered up though. By then it didn’t matter as I realised that it was only through the veil of alcohol that I could tolerate the company of most people anyway.

One night my dad fell over, well he often fell over, (how can I look up to you when you’re always on the floor) but this time something odd happened, he passed out as usual, but on awakening the next morning, he couldn’t feel his leg, at all. His friends hoisted him up so that he had one arm over each of their shoulders and they merrily staggered out to a waiting taxi, bundled him in and took him to hospital. The doctors didn’t like the look of it, they needed to operate right away so they put him under.

He came around in the cleanliest bed he’d been in for years and at his bedside was the doctor in charge, his face grave. He spoke without feeling, ‘We tried our best but there’s nothing we could do... to save your leg. It was gangrenous and needed to be removed before the infection spread, it would have killed you.’

My dad looked down towards where his feet had become foot, looked back to the doctor and said with a straight face ‘I don’t suppose you want to buy a pair of slippers, do you?’

He didn’t seem to let the leg loss get to him, at least for a while anyway, he still had some fight left in him. I remember being in some stale smelling but lively pub where people were bunched together in rowdy groups around an ‘L’ shaped room with a brassy bar, talking over each other, exaggerating laughter, bonding through lairiness, they slurred and swayed... under the influence.

The most boisterous group was the one I was a part of, sat with my dad and his misfit cronies around a large wet table strewn with glasses and crisp packets. A chubby man with a mouth full of big tawny teeth was goofing around, dancing in front of my dad who told him to shut the fuck up and sit down. The guy blew a raspberry with his rancid tongue and fat lips, pirouetted and yanked the back of his jogging bottoms down to bare his flabby arse. Dad lunged forward and stubbed his cig right out on one of the spotty cheeks. The guy let out a yowl and jumped in the air, which everyone found hilarious except my dad. It seemed he had felt that this man had tried to make a fool out of him in some way, (in front of his son,) he was stewing and glaring at the troll who was still agitated over his charred arse, then all of a sudden, dad sprang up out of his wheelchair on his remaining leg, grabbed a hand full of the bloke’s t-shirt and cracked him in the jaw with a bony fist. The man fell back onto a green felted bench seat and was holding his face as his bottom lip quivered. He looked at me and said ‘I didn’t deserve that,’ I was half drunk and replied ‘I don’t know what the fuck’s going on, everyone needs to calm the fuck down’ and an aging Hell’s Angel gripped me firmly on the shoulder and said ‘Exactly!’

Dad gained a prosthetic leg which began where his real thigh ended and it wore a white sports sock banded with red and blue stripes around the ankle and a trainer to match the one worn on his flesh foot. One time he untethered it, mid conversation, whilst we were downing pints and without warning slung it at some poor stranger. He hadn’t liked their tone of voice or something and loved the idea of kicking someone in the head while remaining seated. Like I said, he was mean.

Eventually though his new situation wore him down. He had phantom limb syndrome which dealt him constant pain. Sometimes he’d get out of bed in the night to take a leak, forget he was an amputee and fall right on the throbbing stump. He never attempted to walk again, it seemed that he felt that his predicament sat well with the life he’d fallen into, as society really couldn’t expect anything from him now. He would stockpile morphine given to him by the doctors so that he always had enough tablets to trade with his ‘friends’ and keep the remaining, more potent, liquid variety to knock himself out with. I don't know how he managed to cache so much of it because he had drawers full of the stuff, he would also gift some to me for recreational use.

‘Thanks Dad!’

I enjoyed it every once in a while, I'd neck a couple with a can of lager, smoke a spliff, then fall into a warm cosy coma for around ten hours and have out of body experiences. Once or twice I woke up covered in my own sticky vomit. On one of those occasions I remembered getting up feeling nauseous and tried to make it to the bathroom but my hand would pass through the door knob like I was a ghost, then my eyes would flicker, the room would glitch and I’d be back in bed again and this would keep happening in a loop whilst the detached sound of my own throat gurgled in the distance. It felt odd waking up later and realising I was still alive, I’d heard about junkies meeting their maker after choking on their own puke in such states. I gave it a rest for a while after that.

Having the morphine with alcohol would make my dad so ill that he stopped drinking for the first time in his adult life. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him sober, I couldn’t remember ever seeing him eat... only drink. I think at this point he just gave up, he felt like his masculinity had been severed. In some recent past he had fancied himself as quite the lady’s man, now he was alone and housebound, he referred to himself as a cripple.

I couldn't believe what he was like on the last day that I saw him, he'd always been a screw up but now he was truly fucked. He had been lucid enough to buzz me into his flat and talked to me for a short while in fragmented whispered tones, he tried to make a little joke here and there, a shadow of his signature awkward naughty schoolboy smile flickered on his face. Soon though, he was drifting away, he started to hunch over, his head nodding down as he slipped in and out of consciousness.

I beheld this pathetic atrophied form, this broken man. He wore a black tracksuit, the top open showing a gold chain laid on his sunken chest above a pallid grey-skinned pot belly. One of the legs of his ‘tracky-bottoms’ laid flat and dangled over the seat of his wheelchair as he had long stopped bothering with the vanity of attaching his prop limb. 

Surrounding his remaining chalky and bloated bare foot which rested on the floor was a half-circle of worm cast ash piles and cigarette burns, showing where lit fags had previously slipped from his lifeless umber fingers.  Worn patches on the fire-retardant carpet looked tarry and slick as they caught the light from the window. Some of the burns were full cig length black channels, it’s a wonder he never burned the whole building down.

I stared blankly at him, feeling nothing but a sense of odd curiosity and some distant faint resentment deep inside my heart. There was no point in me being there. I took the cigarette out of his hand and placed it between my lips. rolled him into the bedroom and tipped his wheelchair so he fell forward on to the low unmade bed, he looked like someone who’d fallen off a block of flats. I walked back into the other room and pocketed two slim white boxes of morphine tablets, I took half of his weed, placed it in a brown envelope with a cellophane window which I found on a small side table, folded it up and put it in the inside pocket of my jacket. I looked in his wallet, he had a stack of fivers so I took three and I also took a twenty pack of cigs which he had loads of.

I wasn’t a very good son.

I left him and never saw him again, he meant nothing to me.

It's only when I look at this painting now that I feel sorry for him.

He was from a large family and was the last of too many children so his parents abandoned him in some orphanage to be raised by nuns. He hated his new ‘carers’, they treated him badly. I was once with him when we passed one of these birdlike creatures and he swore at her through gritted teeth, this little old lady, I thought how mean it was but figured he held a lot of resentment. He'd left the nuns and was out on his own in the world by the time he was fourteen, he told me he'd been drunk since then. He said his mum arranged to meet him in a pub when he was eighteen and had brought a gift of a 'Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band' album, he threw it across the room, walked out and never saw her again.

That's all I ever managed to pry out of him regarding his life and family, except that they were of Irish traveller descent. For a while I was curious about the grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins I'd never met. I was also aware that he’d spread more fruit from his loins which meant more half brothers or sisters. Then I came to my senses and remembered what a pain in the arse people are and was glad of having fewer relatives to avoid.

I can't remember how long my dad lived after this last time I saw him, but I think he died of throat cancer in the end, his body was found alone in its rancid dwelling.

I felt nothing when I heard. One of my siblings phoned and struggled to tell me the news between sobs, and I think I said something like 'I'm sorry for your loss'.

I didn't go to his funeral as there would have been too many people there that I didn’t want to see, I'd left my life in Bradford and didn't fancy going back.

Years later my younger sister rang me, she said she had taken dad’s ashes from my other sister’s house and asked if I could meet her in Whitby to scatter them. I called the cheapest bed and breakfast I could find and secured a room then got the train up from London, having to change a few times. My sister arrived the next day.

I'd been sober for two years at that point and I broke that sobriety to go and raise a few glasses at one of his favourite places on earth. He’d never been abroad.

We asked a shrivelled old sailor who ran tourist fishing trips if we could book a place on the next outing as we wanted to scatter our dad’s ashes. He said to come back in an hour and they’d take us out alone. We enquired to the price but he said they wouldn’t charge us anything.

Dad told us on more than one occasion, that he wanted his ashes scattering at Whitby Bay. Apparently, he’d spent many a merry time there crawling the beautiful dark old-worlde pubs. He always finished off his post-mortem request with ‘Don’t bother cremating me, just take me out on a boat and push me over the side.’

My sister and I had a drink and caught up, she showed me a beautiful little wreath she’d made in the florist where she worked part-time. We returned to the fisherman and his mate, got aboard the boat and set off bouncing along the choppy waves. Everything was so vivid as thoughts were washed out of my head by the unusualness of the situation. I felt so alive compared to my dead dad. The wind blew about us and I saw my sister smiling at me while her hair danced around her face. The harbour walls at either side of us fell backwards until we were in open sea, the droning engine spluttered and stopped, only the sound of the waves lapping against the boat remained. Our hosts sat facing away to give us the privacy they felt we needed.

We opened a can of lager each, cheersed them together and drank. My sister said ‘I miss you dad as she placed the wreath onto the green water and we watched it float away. She passed me the urn and I carefully twisted the top off. I said ‘Laters dad’ and attempted to empty the contents into the sea. A lot of him blew straight back at me and into my eyes, nose and mouth, what a twat! We were both appropriately laughing and I shouted into the wind, 'Nice one you old bastard!’