Part I: Your Putative Father

Because you never asked but always wanted to know.

Dear Brad,

In one of the last communications from your wife, she mailed me a picture of a big elephant in a small room to remind me that she wanted more information about your putative father, Doug Sileo.  Never mind that you never asked.  She was always your proxy.  By that time, though, I was beginning to accept the fact that communicating with her was exceedingly unpleasant, so I ignored it. 

Both of you but especially your wife were constantly telling me about what you thought were my failings, about my life, incongruously, because you (either one or both) had been in my presence for no more than a few days at a time, perhaps once a year from 1999 (when I was 47 years old) to about 2009. Neither of you knew anything about me but you appeared to have made conclusions before I had even met you. The first thing I experienced of you both was your silent, sullen pout, as if my mere presence were an insult, and your wife’s aggressive demands for information about intimate details of my life in my home and in the presence of my husband and our children. We had all just met.

This confrontational, angry or sullen method of interaction continued, off-and-on, until, way too late, after I had invoked your insane rage because otherwise you would have had to admit that I was right about the source of your latest slanderous lies, we cut it all off.  Your response?  “If you stalk me I’ll have you arrested.”  That was certainly ironic since our entire history was of you first and then of you and your wife, stalking me or who you thought I was.

Back to that elephant in the room, though. Let me tell you about Doug Sileo, who was, for whatever reason the putative father you prefer, who you have never seen much less known, whose life, to the extent it had anything to do with me, you, with the help of various interested parties, have nevertheless fabricated a fairy tale about. 

From me, though, the whole truth.  You deserve it.

But wait, first:  After reading your gruesome autobiography, Part I, I finally started to understand what was behind your operation (undertaken openly by your wife) to defame me by making up a nasty summary of certain events in my life, your slander, of who I am, your trivialisation of my life.  You or your wife wanted to frame me as the person responsible for your tragic past, your unhappiness, your failings. Since you were an alcoholic drug addict, I must be or have been also.

However, now that Part I of your autobiography is out, the whole world knows that you were “such a victim” (as you both once called me) who almost failed high school because of a malaise and copious amounts of marijuana and hash and alcohol, and who went on from there to become a real, hard heroin addict, all while being a musical prodigy.  The main impression from the entire narrative is that you were always a profoundly confused, unhappy person with enormous problems in the human relations context. You like your audience but not the people in it.

In the book, you do invoke a “healing” from time to time, omitting the how and why, the when and from what ailment, amid periodic recitations of how you introduced a couple of people to heroin, who soon died from overdoses. 

The actual cause of your pain is muddy in the autobiographical telling but it does come across that everything went bad once you realised just how you were “different” because you were adopted:  you didn’t know who your people were.  So you must have gone home to mommy2 and asked her about your real mommy1, and she told you that your real mommy1 was “unfit” (the unconstitutional statutory language you used to tell me about myself 22 years later), such a bad egg, that she had had to adopt you, to save you. Of course I don’t know if she went into detail with that lie, but I know I was described to you in exactly that language because you smeared me with it more than once.

That was definitely the first in an ongoing, unending series of slanders of my person by a Mehldau.  Like your wife, your adopters also knew absolutely nothing about me except what they learned from the adoption agency which sold you to them as a freshly-birthed infant (there was nothing sacramental about the deal). The Mehldaus did know the statutory set-up for adoptions of white infants in Florida in 1970 (unmarried minor = per se¹ unfitness = no parental rights) but they also knew that I played classical piano, a lot, and that my father, an abstract algebraist and Mathematics professor, was not only gainfully employed but likely far better educated, not to mention intelligent (actually, I’m sure neither of them could comprehend that), than anyone they had ever known. (“We’ll take that one,” they said.) Aside from the complete inconsistency between Florida law and the information used to sell white babies to white, well-heeled couples in 1970, because it clearly never bothered those involved in the transactions, one does get the impression from your story that the Mehldaus had taken on more than they could chew.

So, after setting up the root cause for the unending drama of your early life, the autobiography details how, in your youth, while playing classical piano a lot, you picked out seedy characters as friends; boys from the wrong side of town; boys who were not only ill-behaved, sexually deviant, deceitful and mean but also, God help us, poor. You had certainly digested what the Mehldaus had taught you –that you were so lucky to have been saved from your poor, unfit family and Mommy1 and adopted by a well-off family because Mr. Mehldau was an eye doctor, and sometimes they even went to the Methodist church.²

Still, it was those reedy, mean boys, all perfect failures from the bad side of town, who you chose for friends, while truly enjoying Schubert and Brahms at the keyboard – the ecstasy of abstract form distilled to perfect beauty - because you assumed, from the Mehldaus’ telling, that you came from just such nasty, poor people.  From there it went downhill rather badly. There were rumors of your own deviant sexuality in middle school or high school which led to bullying, threats, fear and isolation and to a long-cherished fantasy of a gory, hate-filled fight with the primitive, stupid, poor school bully, which ends with you kicking him when he is down and pissing in his mouth.

It is clear from the totality of Part I of your book that shame was the crux of your pain, and pain and agony and the description of their endless hellscape are the plot of Part I. You even state somewhere that, after you learned the circumstances of your adoption, you felt you had been cursed with “Old Testament shame”— another indication of how they really laid it on, and you have apparently never been told of the New Testament.

The one on the ground with the piss on his face is the shamed one.

“ I just remember that feeling of wanting to be alone yet not really wanting to be alone, yet being too angry to go back to my friends.  It’s the same feeling I would have for years to come: black, black, black; upset by something, too proud to admit it, alone in a shithole.  But it was my shithole.  There was all this sadness and loneliness right under the anger.  Through my twenties, the anger calcified into bitterness towards people – contempt, judgment, a kind of early-onset misanthropy.” ³

So, you thought you came from such poor, stupid, violent, hateful people, and had to be rescued from them by “well-off” people, to whom you should be grateful. It hurt. You were, understandably, deeply wounded by the dissonance of those who said they loved you, those whom you had always been completely dependent upon, telling you that, at your core, you were from some shithole.

As you also knew, in that deep, wounded place, they were lying. Someone else put you in that shithole. Someone else made you the bully with his bully wife, with all of that calcified bitterness, and it was neither I nor anyone in my family.

In your dream about one of those poor boys from the wrong side of town⁴, you are at the same time of high school age and your age at the time of the dream, 30, immediately after we had met. The poor boy is high school age and you both are on school grounds, in danger of “getting in trouble” but you don’t know why. It could be for leaving school grounds. You say you aren’t afraid of being punished for leaving the established boundaries of what you had been taught but that the poor boy is afraid. You see a hearse across the street from the school, outside of school bounds; a hearse which you can see into, with no coffin but two levels. The top level is filled with golden musical instruments from antiquity spread on a red carpet. The bottom level is empty. The sight frightens your poor friend but not you.

You do not analyse your dream but, since you and your wife were always analysing me, I’ll take a stab at it here: Your poor dream friend is afraid because he is dying to being a part of you. Now, at 30, having met your original family, you know that he really has nothing to do with who you truly are. The self-destructive reason you sought him out (and all of the self-destructive energy described in your book) was based on a false premise. You are letting go of that deadly phantom, and he will fill the lower, empty level of the hearse. The delusional phantom must die so that you can rightfully claim the gift of your origins which is spread out like an invitation on a red carpet — the gift of Orpheus or Dionysus — Mother Nature’s Son.

You did not come from a shithole.

My father was an intellectual, whose hobby was the study of the early Christian church, which he shared with an adult Sunday School class he taught. His published mathematical theses were accessible to only a handful of people on the planet and are only now being integrated into applied mathematics. He marched in the south to support Martin Luther King in the 60’s and, with my second brother, worked on Jimmy Carter’s homes for humanity projects in the 90’s. When I was a child, I was in line with him at McDonald’s when he stood up for the black man in front of him who was being refused service. As an Elder, he brought black people into our white, suburban church starting in the 80’s, which the entire congregation did not agree was acceptable or required. He was for true and lasting peace, and he was the most honest man I have ever known. He raised all of his children accordingly.

My oldest brother, who became a medical doctor (internal medicine and infectious diseases) looks very much like you.  Like you, he was never a muscle pack, and he never fought in the school yard. That would be a losing game just based on his physical stature but also entirely contrary to his nature. 

The second brother, who looks like his Dutch ancestry and nothing at all like you, was blond, blue-eyed, tall and lanky with lips like Mick Jagger.  He is like you in many ways, though.  Among other things, he is a very good acoustic guitarist and singer.  He wouldn’t hurt a flea.

My youngest brother was smaller in build, like the oldest and like you.  He was a natural athlete, a gymnast and later a cross-country cyclist, very, very handsome and religiously dedicated to preservation of the natural habitat of North Florida, but, again, no alpha male and never violent to anyone. Neither of his sons are alpha males either but both play violin, one also plays saxophone and the other is also a fantastic pianist and guitarist, both acoustic and electric.

Certainly, your putative father never appeared to have had a self-reflective moment in his life, but I must say, for all of his faults (which you will hear about later), he was also never, in my experience, bitter, hate-filled or misanthropic.  To the contrary. But he was also not adopted, not violently separated from his mother and then subjected to a false, incredibly hateful indoctrination about his origins.

So, no matter who was the shamer and the shamed in your revenge fantasy, it is clear that your indoctrination by your adopters, a reflex of their own damaged egos, minor intellectual competence and fundamental guilt, was quite the curse. It almost killed you. What a waste of time. What a waste of a childhood and youth. Begs the question, of course, about just who is or was “unfit”.

But time’s up, and I’ll have to fill you in on the Truth about your putative father in the next issue. Stay tuned.

1. Per se is Latin, and means “no proof required”. In these cases it really meant no proof allowed.

2. Not that the Mehldaus were particularly high culture themselves. In your telling, you were first given piano lessons in popular music, rather than traditional classical instruction. Clearly, the Mehldaus knew they had a child musical prodigy but they either hadn’t the foggiest notion about how a real classical music education should begin or they were intimidated at the thought of their Schützling venturing into areas far beyond their ken.

3. Mehldau, Brad, Formation: Building a personal canon, part one (Equinox 2023), p. 38.

4. Ibid, p. 54.