The Work of My Father
Taking a deep dive into the 1,000,000+ words he left behind
In the years leading up to my father’s death in November 2014, he derived considerable satisfaction from following my writing career. As a man who spent decades "selling himself," he enjoyed when I would savage a former or current employer as a way of drawing attention to myself and my writing services. For example, he wrote this in response to a story I had published about my time at Abercrombie & Fitch:
Son u did the right thing stabbing those Abercrumby em effers in the back…………..There is no honor among thieves or whores in this world…..U have to do what u have to do to get ur name out there while u can for what ever you can…Fuck the rest….they are on the slow bus or short bus of history……I would and shld have done same to Chrysler Motor Co….Stupid…Ur story has sympathy but that is not it……It is a good story and real as we and I know for I lived wif u…….The wording and dialogue makes it come alive and they feel what u feel inside in the story…….A gift from u know who….Ancestors…..not from the coal patch nor the Czecho slav patch……And u put it together and gave them the POWER OF THE PEN…..as I did to Ragway Blood snatch in the good old days……I buried her 6 feet deep with the press and the power there of….Fuck them and if they are not ready to be buried or out with the tide they can go hide their head in the sand..Lead follow or get out of the way…U only have a few shots and must capitalize…The Abercrumby Prof….a nice ring a ding to it as a name and persona for the dossier…..When the times comes and u are on FOXNEWS or cnn a la Gut felt….Have the tux and black tie ready for the monumental occasion…??? Corsage…Shaved and perfumed…Teefus brushed…Wow…Just wade in their Son…Maybe u can cop some feels…Or they can…from both sides of the owl and aisle…Cold and rainy here…Good day for a nap…Which one isn’t??…..chuckle…
My father considered himself a frustrated "creative" — a talented artist, writer, singer, &c. who believed that pursuit of fleeting glory on the athletic field and then a marathon chase of the "god almighty dollar" had prevented him from realizing any of these ambitions. Much as I, a homeschool kid who rarely saw anyone else my age, lived vicariously through his long-ago exploits as an "All-American boy," he was fascinated by my journalism and academic work. This was not an interest of his that developed later in life; he had sent 10-year-old me to a clerical skills course so that I could learn how to type on an old-school typewriter.1
He had led a relatively exciting life — impoverished and fantastically abused child of a batshit crazy war hero who had helped kill thousands, washed-up NCAA athlete, petty criminal who always stayed one step ahead of John Law, sketchy bar owner, legendary drunkard, successful property developer, failed franchise car dealer, proto-PUA internet personals kingpin — and encouraged me to sell parts of this narrative to anyone who would buy it. In his later years, he’d taken — "borrowed," he might say — a substantial amount of money from me, along with a good deal more from others who had more to give, and he believed this was one way of paying it forward rather than back2.
Unlike parents who don’t think about how their kids will memorialize them, or resent how they’ve been chronicled after the fact, my father was asking for it. He didn’t care if I was kind to his memory as long as I "got that do re mi" for my troubles. He would, after all, be "deader than dead" when he was "sleeping the big sleep." I know this because he wrote some version of that to me in dozens of e-mails — dozens among the tens of thousands he sent me between 2002 and 2014. My own life, he believed, was boring: at heart, in spite of the various trials I’d endured, I was uniquely uninteresting, because all I did was work hard and overcome those challenges. There was nothing particularly literary about that, nothing in my character or my half-brother’s character that suggested we could be anything more than tactically successful yes-men or cat’s paws who "proved inevitably successful in all respects," as he put it. "Nobody wants to read or see that shit," he told me, answering the question of why I was doomed to remain both employed and "out of cite" decades before I ever posed it.
That said, between 2012 and 2017 I began to compile his emails into an archive I maintained on Tumblr. It was slow going, in part because I was finishing my dissertation and then working on other research and writing projects. However, thanks to the efforts of my friend Erik Hinton, it began to circulate3 among the circa-2014/15 "smart set"4
As a result of this, I landed a commission from Matter, which was the “flagship publication” of Ev Williams’ Medium publishing site,5 a sort of proto-Substack that apparently still exists yet has already been forgotten. For a nice sum of money, I wrote about the emails and then read the resulting piece at an event in the East Village. I enjoyed working on the essay with Rachel Syme, one of Matter’s editors, and the Matter design team did a nice job with the visuals.
However, the reading took place days before the 2016 presidential election, and at the eleventh hour, a message came down from the top — the "very top," wherever that was (Ev Williams himself?) — stating that this piece among all of the ones submitted for Total Power Move offered a golden opportunity to talk about "toxic masculinity" and "Trump," who, the cognoscenti told us, would go down in crushing defeat to HRC (I didn’t assume this, and had indeed written otherwise in VICE and elsewhere, but too much money was at stake for me to worry about that).
Thus, I rewrote the piece to incorporate "Trump material" in a way that struck me and my wife as fairly ham-fisted.6 My father was many things, but he was nothing like Trump, who is an interesting individual in his own right but one whose life experiences couldn’t have been more different.
In what follows, I’ve rewritten this piece to excise all references to Trump. I’ve done that because one of my resolutions for 2024 was to use the work of this Substack to revisit my father’s life and art. This is not just what he "would have wanted," as some people say of the long-gone dead, but what he explicitly requested. It is high time I honor his request.
I used to look up to my father. His name was Oliver Thomas “Tom” Bateman, and he was, for a time, as big as the whole world. He was built like a refrigerator. He was the man, the drake, the alpha. He was an ex-college football star and successful businessman who had all the answers. He flew planes, repossessed cars, and owned scores of firearms. Nobody screwed with him, nobody talked back to him, and nobody told him what to do. He was an irresistible force who won every fight, because he sucker-punched every foe.
Then, in 1994, while attending a convention for auto dealers, he encountered a warm white light in his hotel room. The light suffused his body. A lilting female voice with a Welsh accent assured him he would never have to work again.
When he got home, he assembled me, my mother, and my brother around the dinner table. “I have to show you all something,” he said, removing his t-shirt. “It’s absolutely awesome.”
There, on my father’s bare left pec, was a tattoo of a wolf’s head. He thumped his chest and pointed at me. “I heard my mother’s voice and felt her warmth. She told me I was free to be me. There are going to be big changes.”
“Why aren’t you at the dealership right now?” asked my mother. “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”
“I’m never working again,” he replied. “It’s not an option. But I am going to grow the ponytails I was meant to have.”
He was true to his word: He stopped running his business, which he left in the care of my older brother, and proceeded to grow a series of ponytails, each of which he eventually snipped and sealed in a Ziploc bag. He then more or less vanished for two years, traveling through the Pacific Northwest, and only occasionally bothered to send us support. After he left my mother, he seduced various women and stole their money.
My father started dating online in the early days of the Internet. I wrote his first Yahoo! Personals ad in 1996. I was 14 years old. The ad told would-be paramours that he had “arms you can get lost in and a gap-toothed smile as big as the whole world.”
While catfishing for sugar mamas on the World Wide Web, my father often mused about death. “I’m ready to meet my maker,” he declared, adding that he “didn’t care what happened to any of us.” His explanation: “Death will be the happy end.”
But he kept on living, and grifting, for far longer than he or anyone else expected.
Since he didn’t work, my father had unlimited free time and Internet access. All of the women he lived with sprang for high-speed because he couldn’t bear to wait while his favorite websites loaded. Following his fourth divorce, he used skiptracing services to locate his high school sweetheart, whom he had “dumped like a hot potato” the day he left for college.
He also relied on the Web to stay in touch with me after the two of them bought and furnished an expensive house — with her money and several credit cards he opened in her name — near Glacier National Park in Montana.
And by staying in touch, I mean he would send me two or three dozen emails a day.
Initially, the emails were innocuous. When I neglected to contact him, he would write, “Your fingers broke, Moses?” But as he got older and closer to the end, the emails became longer and darker in tone. He spiraled into detail.
He began exploring big themes, trying to impart what he believed were valuable moral lessons for me, a young man who was coming of age in a dangerous world. Between 2002 and his death in 2014, I received tens of thousands of emails from him, most of which I never opened. These emails were his legacy. They were scattered fragments of the world he had wanted to make for me.
An email he sent me in 2013 serves as a kind of overarching manifesto. He wrote:
Rambling non-apologies were sent one after another. He didn’t believe in apologizing, “because if you did it, you must have meant it.” Yet he began to change his tone. He began to assure me that he had “no regrets…except all of them.”
And what did he have to regret? Sure, he had abused me and my mother. A few times, when overcome by what he called “the demon rum,” he had beaten us black and blue.7 He concocted a scheme that led to her indictment by a grand jury on charges of child abuse. The case made national headlines. I was called to testify against her, reciting outrageous claims that he had fabricated. I was 14 years old.
He stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from those who were closest to him — including us. Sometimes the scams were big and egregious, as when he chose to stay married to his dying first wife for seven years after he moved in with my mother, just to collect a bunch of term life insurance payouts.And sometimes they were pathetic, as when he convinced me to give him the $2,500 I had earned from my first job, ostensibly so that he could help me buy a computer and a chair.
“It’s for safekeeping,” he claimed. “I’ll take better care of it than any bank, and you’ll get what you wanted.”
Sure enough, I got the chair and the computer — a crummy Gateway model that we used primarily for his online dating — as well as a credit card bill for over $3,000. He had pocketed the money I gave him, used my social security number to secure financing for the computer, and then neglected to make a single payment.
When I confronted him about having knowingly ruined my credit, he didn’t flinch. “You got the computer, right? That’s just life,” he explained. “We do what we have to do to survive.”
He had done all these things, he assured me, because he had to. He had to because he was arrested on assault charges filed by my mother and he needed to regain the upper hand. He had to because he was under yet another audit by the IRS. He had to because somehow he hadn’t paid taxes for 30 years. And he did it because he thought it would all work out in the end.
“I’ll go to jail, but I sure as hell won’t ever go to prison,” he kept telling me. “I’m not felonious like the rest of my fucking family of fucking idiots.”8
Once he wrote me this note, late at night:
Here’s the thing about these emails: They were gritty and unpleasant, but also filled with reveries. My father had an amazing imagination.
“It’s not true unless it’s true for you,” he’d write me. He would insist that only you could be the judge of the goodness or badness of your own actions.
In his later messages, he had developed all sorts of catchphrases and in-jokes. One of his favorites was: “Better to be subjective than subjugated.”9
The father I had always known was a vicious thug. He was abusive, miserable, delusional.
But the writer of these emails was someone searching for meaning.
This writer had hated playing football and only did it because it was a simple way for him to impress everyone else. He also hated “doing jobs” and “hurting people,” but did so because he was “always chasing a buck” and “it was easy for a big guy to do.”
Even as this guy dispensed pearls of wisdom about “killing or being killed,” he expressed dissatisfaction with his ruthlessness and bleak existence. What my father really wanted, deep down more than anything else, was to have had the life of Michael Crawford, right down to the Broadway performer’s thick head of curly hair. Or maybe it was to dance like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Or maybe to have a cooking show like Julia Child. In his wildest dreams, he wasn’t some self-interested tough guy. He was a singer, a dancer, a chef. He could let his guard down. He didn’t actually have to kill anybody, nor did he have to worry about being killed.
Looking at it all now, I realize that the manly world my father had tried to make wasn’t even a world he wanted to live in.
But he was so desperate for something, anything, to call his own — and he only saw one way. He couldn’t fill the gaping void in anyone else’s heart because a valve in his own heart was leaking.
This is a man whose own father’s last words to him from a hospice bed were: “What the fuck are you doing here, fat boy?”
He was blessed with bigness, but it was a big nothingness. He covered up this lack with a veneer of masculine aggression that almost killed me — and following a series of heart attacks, finally killed him. He grasped for the words to explain this empty ache in one of his final missives to me:
In my youth, my father bulked large and puffy in expensive power suits, wearing flashy watches with enormous faces that hugged his thick wrist.10 That time on his hands was money, and money talked, but he never had the time to talk with me about who he really was. That would come later, as the end neared.
By the very end, my father was 300 pounds of ponytailed, bearded weird, living on the Canadian border and using female shih tzus as pet mediums to commune with dead family members. “You have to use the female dogs to get through to the ghosts,” he’d tell me. “They conduct way more spirit energy.”
When I asked him what he had learned from these ghosts, he shrugged. “Not a thing. They were 110% assholes when they were alive, and they’re no different now. What do you expect?”11
His expectations were modest, to be sure. He had been the college athlete, the small-time tough guy, the slick businessman. Now he was wearing adult diapers, pulling his own teeth,12 and sleeping on rubber sheets. He summed it up this way: “Life’s a joke and it was on ME.”
My father never asked for forgiveness. But who needs it? An apology is just words. Death is an action. When I reflect on my father today, he’s no larger than the wooden urn in my mother’s garage that contains what’s left of him. In his emails, he begged never to be stored there. But my mother still keeps his ashes because they remind her that he too was a victim of his own life — of his crime, deception, and emotional abuse. He projected an aura of power, but he was a charlatan who couldn’t escape himself:
Oliver Lee Bateman is a writer, lawyer, and former history professor living in Pittsburgh, PA. He presented a version of this text live at Matter Studios’ “Total Power Move” event in Manhattan on November 2, 2016.
I wrote about this, of course ($350 in 2024 money).
“Pay you back? I can’t even pay my own bills!” he would joke, a topic I explored in a recent Splice Today essay I wrote about him: “The years have dimmed my recollection of this [incident], but I’m sure he lapsed into one of his extended digressions about how the debt problems of Charles Dickens’ father, which included imprisonment, gave the son the raw material needed for his own best-selling work. This was something about which he boasted in later years, believing that my surprisingly sustainable career as a writer was tied to his misdeeds as well as his insights (spoiler alert: it is).
At the time, I chalked it up to a lesson learned. He’d scam me like that a few more times over the years, but I was usually happy to fork over the money. He was wealthy once, and I’d lived a charmed material existence as a kid. During his decline, scamming me and other relatives gave him a bit of a thrill, made him feel young again. His life had begun as the darkest tragedy, turned into an against-all-odds, cracked-mirror Horatio Alger tale, and lapsed into bathos amidst the idiotic and completely avoidable plot twists that characterized his final two decades. He wrote it all down, far better than I could ever have hoped to do, and encouraged me to monetize the best bits (spoiler alert: I did, with my best payday clocking in at an absurd $5,000, counting travel expenses, and coming two years after his death in 2014).”
This, by the way, is that particular piece — the biggest payday I made off his work, though I did make about $1,200 from writing about the e-mails last year.
It’s not surprising. Surviving letters from college and advertisements written for his businesses show that he could be a perfectly normal writer when he had to be, but he preferred to write in this Hubert Selby, Jr.-esque manner (he would have said that he had no idea who Hubert Selby, Jr. was, and often proudly boasted that he never read a single book in his entire life, which was completely untrue).
Very few of these “smart set” people are still around, as this grouping appears to reset itself every 2-3 years like cuckoo-clockwork. Some, like the editor who commissioned this particular piece, were casualties of the “Shitty Media Men List” — small world, huh? — while others took on more serious roles, became normies and vanished from view, or (like me) continued to sell and write in a regular yet ghostly fashion (the dedicated author kept his views to himself by publishing them, my advisor used to joke).
What a place that was. Do read this tale of woe if you have the time.
Earlier that year, I had written about how I was never going to cover “Trump stuff” and “toxic masc” ever again.
And I do mean a very few times — one of which led to his arrest for aggravated assasult and precipitated a whole host of other madness — because he was a man who had been taught “by the professionals” never to leave marks (whatever that nonsense means; I always took it as idle Iceman Kuklinski boasting, though some new information I was given last year has changed my thinking somewhat) . In any event, my father rarely made mistakes, but when he did, he was always drunk as a skunk.
This anecdote, taken from his unfinished autobiography, tells the tale: “My father told me how [my uncle] Edsel Henry Ford got that name. Truth!!! Grandfadder laid that Nom De'Plume on him thinking that he would write the great Henry Ford and he would give him a car for doing so. He did write and he did get a response. It said THANKS. That is all I need say about that. What a fucking group of assholes. The sad part is that [my family] was in “"TOTAL DENIAL”“ of what their siblings did to themselves and their families and their children and others and on. I never heard anyone of the offspring tell them they needed help. Why was there such DENIAL?????? It is not just a "river in Egypt”. There is still today with the ones left here on this orb. Edsel Henry [name deleted], 79, of Whitsett, Pa., passed away on Wednesday, October 28, 2009.”
It actually read “Sub JEW gated,” but I kept what was quite possibly an anti-semitic remark — one could never be sure with him, given the lack of overt, basic-bitch IQ/crime racism in his writings — out of the final cut.
To let you know the extent to which I’ve cribbed from his writing, that paragraph, as well as most of the time-related lines in this UnHerd essay, were taken entirely from his e-mails. I have borrowed from his work for years, just as he borrowed time and money from me.
“I lived [with alcoholism] everday with the sociopathic narcissistic evil nasty alcoholic that I called and call father. My poor mudder, sister and kid brother had to tolerate him as well. In the 33 yrs I spent with my mudder in this life and times I never ever EVER heard her once say a disparaging and denigrating word of any of [my father’s family]. She truly liked all of them especially the girls. She loved my ass hole father and I do not know why. It took him a long time but he ruined hers as well as his Progeny’s love. She must have thought there was some goodness in there somehwere. There was none. His is another sad and long story. He was ruined and wraked by drinking as the rest of the people in Western Penna patches were and are but that is no excuse for him. There was and is no excuse. I will finish this story at a later date. I will state here though that he never ever had one good thing to say about anyone especially his siblings or their Mates. In mine, my sister, my brother and mother’s presence anything said of them was denigrating, belittling and inappropriate. How sinful. A shame. Shameful. I will save that for another day.”
Admittedly, these teeth were loose, but this was still no mean feat. That man was something else.
See, I don't talk much about my parents, but I also don't talk to them anymore.
I know that you and your family can't eat words of encouragement, but for what it's worth I enjoy your writing a lot, and I hope you keep doing it and that whatever slump you may be in currently passes quickly.