Bad Dads We Love: Substitute Father Figures

When I was 10 years old, I started taking karate classes, held in the evening at the local junior high. I loved it. I was young, flexible, and energetic, but more important, I loved my sensei, Grand Master Mumeet Shareef. A black Muslim in his mid-fifties, he could bench-press a couple of hundred pounds, treated us all with kind but strict discipline, and had his entire family around to help during class, from his sons in their 20s to his 13-year-old daughter—the very first girl I had a crush on. As I practiced dragon punches and held the horse stance till my thighs shook, I imagined what it would be like to be part of this well-oiled family system, to have the Grand Master as my master.

After a couple of six-week rounds of classes, however, by which time I’d attained a second-degree white belt, the Grand Master took a break from teaching. Word had it he was planning to open his own dojo in the next town over. But word soon faded, as did my enthusiasm for high kicks and katas, and my yen for karate (ha!) was soon overshadowed by a slightly shameful obsession with Dungeons & Dragons.

A couple of years later, I felt a pang of nostalgia and decided to put my gi back on. So I walked to the nearest karate studio to ask what had happened to Grand Master Mumeet Shareef. Oh, said the sensei, he had a breakdown a while back and had been committed to a mental institution. So, did I want to sign up here instead?

I left, shaken. What had happened to this man I had so admired? And why had I put so much faith in him to begin with? It’s not like my own father was a bad father figure. On the contrary, he was (and is) attentive, loving, a source of security, a role model.

But throughout my youth, I consistently sought out men as alternate father figures who then failed spectacularly. My first computer teacher was a man named David Sukal, a friendly and funny guy who showed me how to write programs in BASIC (10 PRINT “MATT IS COOL”; 20 GOTO 10) and who, more than anyone else, is responsible for my facility with keyboards and operating systems. (Ed. note: Writing a BASIC program that affirms your cool is, inherently, a paradox. Just saying.)

Less than ten years after I met him, however, David Sukal was shot to death by his grown son, a sometime friend of mine who, as a kid, used to hock loogies at the ceiling, then wait till they dripped back down and swallow them. It eventually emerged that he’d been beating his son and wife, and was a significant marijuana dealer on the side.

There were others, too, I’m sure—older men whose intelligence and charm masked their failings and fatal flaws. Thinking of them leaves me again wondering: Why? Why did I seek them out? And why did I have such unerringly poor judgment? Or was my judgment in fact excellent—in that I took from these troubled souls the best they had to offer, and then, when their true colors emerged, could see that, really, I had it pretty good at home with my real father?