Someone once said, "Anyone can be a father, but it takes a real man to be a dad." The definition of a father is "A man who has begotten a child or children" (Webster's 493). The father I have known for the past 29 years meets this definition, but falls extremely short of my definition of a dad.

Kenneth David was born to a working class single mom in the run down crime infested neighborhood of Hamden in Baltimore City. Growing up, my father never had the luxuries that kids have today. From a very early age, he worked a full time job rather then attend school, to help support his six younger siblings. As a result my father wasn't a scholar, but what he lacked in formal education he made up for with his knowledge of the streets. The money he earned working full time as a fourteen-year-old boy wasn't enough to support his entire family, so he turned to alternative methods of making money. This resulted in many run-in's with the law ending in a two year sentence in a forestry camp for boys. During this time, my father turned to homemade alcohol as his only means of pleasure.

My father's passive non-defensive attitude at work lead to many stressful drunken altercations at home. He has always been a hard worker. Married at age seventeen, he had two children before he was twenty, so there was little time for anything else. Father worked ten to twelve hour days' six or seven days a week. As a result of his dedication to work, his family suffered. It's almost as if he lead two lives: his work life and his family life and in this order. At work my father is a very passive, patient non-confrontational man, but at home he is an aggressive, abusive, impatient, alcoholic. Coming home one day fueled by alcohol and anger from a mistake he made at work, he searched for someone to vent, I was always his vent. I sat on the floor watching TV; I accidentally spilled the glass of Kool-Aid I was drinking on the carpet. Seeing this, my father became enraged he began tearing doors off their hinges, and punching holes in walls all the time getting closer to me. I was crying and trembling in fear. Then when he was about ten feet from me, my mother jumped in front of him all the while trying to calm him down. Realizing he couldn't reach me from that distance, he grabbed a glass ash tray off the table next to him. Hurling it at me, he missed my head by a fraction of an inch.

My father's abusive and alcoholic lifestyle was not what I think a normal dad's should be. My father drank at least a case of beer a day. By the time he turned forty-five the combination of stress and his lifestyle caught up with him. He suffered a heart attack, but surviving this heart attack only caused more abuse. Depression set in and for the next year and a half, he became meaner and more physically abusive than ever. I was not allowed to speak with my mouth full at the dinner table. If I did my father would slap me. After his heart attack, he would find reasons to make me talk. My father would wait until I took a bite of food, and then he would ask me a question. If I answered him, I spoke with my mouth full, so I got