Dad & Disappointment

he other day my dad gave me the keys to his van and told me to unload some stuff he’d picked up. Shit, I was feeling energetic for a change so I obliged, grabbed the keys and walked up to his crumby red van.

The van wasn’t too far away but as I drew closer to it, a feeling of nostalgia hit me and suddenly I could remember the first time my dad trusted me with something important, and I remember completely fucking it up.

Well, I say important, but to you it’s probably trivial. See, when I was old enough to run around but young enough to be completely retarded, dad gave me his car keys so I could run ahead of him and unlock the doors.

“Whoopdy fucking doo.” I hear you say. True, whoopdy fucking doo. It’s no big deal now that I’m older, but back then it was the first time my dad let me do something that requires a bit of responsibility. Before he’d never give me the keys in case I was stupid enough to randomly chuck them into a river or start the engine when nobody was looking and proceed to run people over.

Back then my dad had a red BMW, I don’t really remember nor care what the model was anymore, but it was a cool looking car to me back then. We were heading back to it from an errand and I asked him for the keys so I could run ahead, because back then I must have been one impatient little fuck or something.

Anyway, I was expecting the answer to be ‘no’ and yet I still asked, but to my surprise the old geezer actually gave them to me! I was pretty fucking excited, obviously. I ran towards the car and thought about all the cool things I could do with these keys, like start up the engine and start racing around, y’know, I must have been off my tits on drugs back then.

As I was just meters away from the car, the excitement led me to drop the keys. No big deal of course, some precious seconds wasted bending down to pick them back up but it’d take dad another twenty seconds to get there before I could cause some mischief.

No big deal? No big deal?! I remember looking down and seeing no keys, but in their place, a fucking drain. Oh. My. God. I stood there staring at the drain for twenty seconds, dad finally catches up and tells me to give him the keys and get the fuck inside. I must have told him that I dropped the keys into the drain, but I can’t remember how I managed to word it back then. Even today, I’d have trouble mustering the courage to look him in the eyes and tell him I dropped the keys into a god damn drain.

My old man gets annoyed easily and it doesn’t take much to get him swearing at me, and when he does, nothing is sacred. So for the next few minutes, I’d like to say I got a lecture, but it was more of an explitive tidal wave. He’d given me a chance without putting much thought into it, and what he had always feared occurred: I fucked it up, like a boss.

So dad fashioned a hook out of…something, I don’t remember where the hell he found it, and so we spent an hour using this little hook to fish out the keys from the drain. It had rained earlier that day so we couldn’t see the keys, they were submerged in mucky-ass water, but eventually we got’em out.

The remote on the keyring to unlock the doors no longer worked as BMW didn’t design them to be thrown into drains, but my dad cleaned the keys as best he could and got us back into the car. I had to endure a few more hours of cursing all the way back to the house, and I soon forgot all about it, never to remember that day again until recently, as I walk up to dad’s red van and have it suddenly hit me after all this time.

It wasn’t the last time I disappointed dad, but having that memory trigger out of the blue made me wonder if that was in fact the first notable time I did so. These past few days I feel like bringing it up in conversation to see if he remembers, and if he’s still annoyed about it, but he’d just use it as an example to emphasize how much of an idiot I am.

He is a bit of a twat though.

Photo by mdoodlee

About the Author

Mustafa Unal is a blogger and YouTube commentator living in London, UK. His distinguishing features are never shutting the fuck up and having a terrible sense of humour. Also, he runs this bitch.