Editor’s note: Former State University of New York at Fredonia professor and OBSERVER columnist George Sebouhian was preparing to write his life story when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2013. He died three years later, having left behind hundreds of pages of research notes, poems and memoir vignettes. His son, Damian Sebouhian, has taken it upon himself to complete and share his writings through a series of theme-based articles, each of which represents a chapter in the life and times of George Sebouhian, in his own words.

Edited by Damian Sebouhian

In 1956, after leaving the military I moved to West Palm Beach, and entered the local Junior College on the GI Bill, fulfilling at least the start of my intention to “get educated”.

Meanwhile, my family back in Astoria, Long Island, wanted me to come “home” and take up the job I left in 1951, which would lead to a union job in photo-engraving like the one my uncle had. But going back to my family and the city still seemed like death to me. There were too many unresolved issues about how they had abandoned me as an infant, then took me back when I was 12, after I had finally found a foster family that I had grown accustomed to — even loved. So why should I go back to them when I was making a life of my own?

But the Sebouhians wouldn’t take my refusal without a fight. My father came down to spend several days with me, taking me to a hotel in Miami along Collins Avenue, which was OK except for the night when my father asked if I would like to “go to a queer bar.”

I spurned the offer, remembering how he used to mock me for “walking like a girl.” Once when I was still in high school, he took me to a bar in New York he was familiar with where actors sometimes frequented. We were sitting next to two gay men who were having an animated conversation, flavoring their talk with dramatic gesticulations.

My father laughed out loud at them, turning to me to share his humor, but I was embarrassed at his affront. I harbored no conscious prejudice; if anything I felt about gay people as I did communists and black people and other members of marginalized groups; they were people, not targets of disdain or comic rejection as my father seemed to view them.

Eventually we broached the topic, the one that had triggered his coming to visit. Although I didn’t trust my father, I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I told him I didn’t want to return to New York and that crowded three-room apartment and that job at the photo-engraving shop.

Furthermore, I told him, the city in general is greasy and dirty, especially factory buildings like the one housing the engraving shop. But possibly the most stinging to him was my confession that when I first met him and my grandmother, I immediately did not like them. They were strangers to me, and the fact they were supposedly my “blood” relatives meant nothing because I was 12, and I was being taken from a family I lived with for five years from the time I was 7. The whole situation had launched me into a deep pit of anger and despair as if all that had happened in those five years did not matter, the friendships, the values, especially those of religion fashioned mainly through my friendship with Eddie Keehan, the spaces of the house, the skies, the neighborhood, the smells, the sounds, the “relatives.” All taken from me by my “real” family.

To hear my father’s perspective, he assumed I would welcome them with love and exultation as would a captive slave freed from abandonment, given the gift of a real identity, and a name that meant Armenian language, history, friends, culture, belonging; but I felt nothing of that, but all the opposite, as if they were the conquerors of my life and identity.

“I don’t hate you,” I insisted to my father. “I just couldn’t bear what you had done to me.”

They had ripped me from a reality I had come to accept and even to embrace, yet expected me to welcome them as liberators. My father listened attentively, never indicating that he had objections, showing no emotion, this from a man who never hid his feelings, especially anger; he was physical and verbally abusive when he got angry.

Once, when my grandmother had forgotten to put the salt on the dinner table, my father yelled, “Where is the salt?”

My grandmother jumped up from her chair almost squealing that she would get the salt while declaring her guilt and asking forgiveness at the same time; repeating over and over, “I so sorry” in her broken English. This response triggered an intense loathing anger in my father that exploded in screaming insults:

“Shut up, shut up, shut uuuuuuup!”

Because he wasn’t responding in anger at my confessions I mistakenly thought he was finally understanding me.

Several days after my father left, on what I thought were cordial terms, my grandmother called, verbally attacking me for deserting them, and smearing their name, while preferring that “Italian woman,” Loretta, and her family to my own real relatives. She angrily ordered me to go live with the Italians and never associate with my real family any more. I could only guess that my father had emphasized that part of our discussion that dealt with my reactions to their assertion, made a number of times in the past when she was unhappy with my behavior, that everything they had was mine, if only I were a “good boy.” I must add that even though I had severe emotional issues as evidenced by my suicidal tendencies, I drew great strength from my need to be free of family, independent and confident of making it in the world, so that her warning that I would be disowned again was more of a challenge than a threat.

I accepted my grandmother’s rejection of me with some relief.

Damian Sebouhian, a former OBSERVER staff writer, is a Dunkirk resident.