Tarnation is one of the best films I've seen in recent months (along with Kore-eda's "Nobody Knows", Nathaniel Kahn's "My Architect", Ron Fricke's "Baraka", and Tsai Ming-Liang's "A Wayward Cloud"). Tarnation is a film years in the making. Director Jonathan Caouette constructs a painfully honest film using video and film footage as far back as 15 years ago. It was while watching this film I realized that I haven't seen or spoken to my adoptive father in over ten years. Although we've never been close, I've put off calling or writing to him. A decade comes as a suprise to me. My father, like the Jonathan's mother in the film, has been for years in and out of institutionalization for paranoid schizophrenia and psychosis.

My father left the family when I was five and my younger brother was a year old. I wouldn't see him again until I was twelve or thirteen and then again when I was 22 suffering from a broken neck. I remember writing to him as a child. Sometimes he would reply to my letters with his other persona, Rusty Stone (my father's real name is Roger Streitmatter). And he would always draw the same cartoon head with a figure-8 cowboy hat, which I would often copy onto my school notebooks. I felt closer to the image of my father, drawn, rather than the man.

As I grew into young adulthood, my father would send me pictures, often of blue tarp tents he would construct during wandering and homeless phases. He would also begin to type his letters. A year or so before I left for Vietnam I received a box with assorted junk in the mail (assorted bibles, a broken pocket watch, a can opener). Inside the box was a typed letter saying that my brother wasn't his child but not to tell anyone. The letter was unsigned, so I couldn't determine if the writing was Rusty or Roger. As time goes by, the two become more or less the same person.

As for my biological father, I first saw him when I was twenty eight. At that time he was 80 years old. I was one of the last children born of my parents. A couple years later he began to develop Alzheimer's disease and now, at 85 he has lost most of his memory. I never had the chance to speak to him.

And for 10 years, between 11 and 21, I had a step-father. We never got along. He was humorless and had strange house rules. For example, we weren't allowed to walk around the house without wearing slippers. He was also a coward. After I was sent to the Middle East during my enlistment with the army, at a desert outpost on the Gulf of Aqaba, I received a letter from my mother. In the letter, she wrote that she and my younger brother had returned home one afternoon to discover that the house had been cleared out. Everything but the refrigerator. At first they thought they had been robbed but discovered a note on the freezer door explaining everything. My step-father had packed up the house while my mother was at work and taken my two other step-brothers out of school. He blamed the escape on my younger 17 year old brother but I knew it was long in the planning. Before basic training, he told me that when I returned from basic, things might be different. Nothing changed upon my return leave from basic training. But the first Gulf War had begun and I had orders for deployment. I knew once he discovered that I was locked down in the desert, he would make his move. He knew that I knew if I were in the US, I would have returned home and killed him.

I think about my life without father's and question my own ability to be one. I'm now 33 and have no intention to be one, but enjoy playing with the baby where I work. I look at my younger brother, now a father of a two-year old daughter, and having the same fatherless childhood, I can see that he's done a great job. And then again, there's the Na people of Yunnan Province in China: A society without husbands or fathers.

Further Reading:
Mosuo Society (Yunnan)