11:29 PM, August 19, 2025. Freehold, New Jersey.
It’s quiet outside. I’m looking out the window, which is a sea of black. I can’t even make out the neighboring cemetery. I know it’s there, though; I think about it all the time. Its solitary silence at night gives me some strange type of peace. It’s almost like I’m comforted knowing that people won’t be walking through there at 1 AM, or 2 AM, or 3 AM. They won’t be walking next to my house. My house. The rooming house. If anyone is up to no good, they’ll probably conduct their mischief in places other than this graveyard. Even criminals and bored teenagers don’t want that level of spookiness.
I’ve been trying to sleep for a couple of hours now. I’m three nighttime Tylenols deep, yet still wide awake. I share a room in the house with another guy; his name is Rob. Rob is about 10 years younger than me and is living here in order to save money while he goes to graduate school. I think he’s studying to become some sort of psychologist. We don’t talk too much, other than passing pleasantries. In a setting like this, the house, you don’t want to appear too vulnerable, and it is also wise not to get too involved in anyone’s business. With that being said, I’m glad I ended up rooming with Rob. He’s going places. Moving forward, which gives me hope.
Our beds are perpendicular to each other in a room smaller than the one I grew up in as a child. Rob, he’s taller than me. Our feet both aim at the room’s door from different directions and hang off of our respective mattresses. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night to pee, I’ll accidentally brush against the bottom of his bare soles as I head for the bathroom.
Rob decorates his side of the room nicely, while my walls are completely bare. I don’t even have a picture of my kids up. Nothing on the walls, and nothing on the shelves. You wouldn’t even know I lived there if I didn’t tell you. Rob seems to have this calm acceptance of his situation, knowing he has a way out when he gets his degree. I’ve yet to find this type of embrace and haven’t even been willing to search for it. I just want out of this nightmare, and I want the timeline of my life to skip right over this period.
My roomie’s decor consists of this set of collectible championship wrestling belts and one framed picture of him and his kid. You know, I live 18 inches from the guy, and I can’t tell you if his child is a boy or a girl. I never looked at the picture closely enough, and I never asked. Maybe if I did, I’d feel compelled to hang pictures of my own kids. I’m not ready for that kind of permanence. The gold plates mounted on those wrestling belts, though, they shine on my face each and every night, speaking to my past, my future, and my immediate reality.
Elliot, my boy, he’s 23 years old now and lives out in California. He’s a recent college graduate who is trying to break into the film industry. I live with the delusional fantasy that someday he’ll want to make these writings into a movie. I’m a proud dad. A crappy one, but proud. The kids always laugh when I anoint myself with the title, “The Best of the Shitty Fathers.” If nothing else, I’m truthful when it comes to speaking about Jason Rogers. People often mistake these types of declarations for self-deprecating humor and then appear to get a bit uncomfortable when they realize I’m not joking.
My dear son, who looks like me and dresses like me and also writes like me, from the heart with no filter, except he does it better on all accounts, made a movie for his senior thesis; it’s about this guy who leaves his wife and young son to go chase his own professional dreams with no regard to those he left behind. The not-so-fictional father and husband is a professional wrestler in pursuit of the world heavyweight title. By the film’s end, the protagonist ends up broke and alone, with nothing in his life and is also NOT “The Champ.” He’s depicted in a self-help meeting, having become addicted to drugs and alcohol as the film fades to black. Hence those belts, shining so brightly and buffed and blinding me with the sad and distorted beauty of my own existence.
I was talking to Chloe the other night. She says, “Jason, you have to stop living in the past. You have to stop punishing yourself. We have forgiven you; now give yourself some grace. Rest your mind.”
So, here we are, the present, and my version of me “resting my mind” – 12:57 AM, in the rooming house, which is STILL in Freehold, New Jersey. I’m writing this piece sitting on a high and broken chair nestled up to a butcher block island in a dimly lit kitchen as various housemates stroll in and out. I’m munching on a bag of stale rice crisps and washing it down with a room-temperature bottle of water. There’s a guy loudly slurping on Raisin Bran directly to my left.
I’ve been clean and sober for a hot minute now. A blazing couple of minutes, in fact. Do you think I could write this crap high? No. No way. When I was messed up, I routinely entered cocaine psychosis. The bouts of paranoia were so intense they had me thinking everyone I saw was affiliated with the government and was out to get me, out to silence me.
I attended one of those self-help groups, as seen in Elliot’s film, tonight. When it was my turn to share, out came a story about my Baby C. Unplanned and unprovoked, it just happened.
Baby C, my daughter Cate, is now 20 years old and about to enter her sophomore year at New York University. I’ve called her Baby C since she was a little girl. She’ll always be my Baby C.
When Baby C was born, we knew there was going to be a problem. Abnormalities had shown up on an ultrasound, and the doctors had warned Chloe and me that Baby C would have to go immediately from the delivery room to the operating room for exploratory surgery. Born on September 15, 2005, Chloe and I held our just-under-five-pound beautiful newborn daughter for a couple of minutes each before we watched a team of doctors whisk her away, uncertain as to whether or not she was ever coming back.
Those next few hours were tense. Chloe and I sat in her UNC Children’s Hospital room in silence. We didn’t touch or even talk to each other. I’d get just the occasional glance from the corner of Chloe’s eye. Complete and total quiet without acknowledgment of anything or anyone. Nothing but nervous energy.
Sometime during the fourth hour, the Chief Surgeon entered the room. He came with an update.
“Cate has a blockage in her intestine,” he softly explained. “We are working on removing that part of the intestine now. When she gets out of surgery, the next 5 to 7 days will be critical and will tell us more about her health.”
As the doctor turned his back to us and was just about to walk out of the room and return to the task of fixing our daughter, I blurted out this question, “Excuse me, doctor, what causes something like this to happen?”
I don’t know why I asked and wish I never did.
“Well,” he responds, looking at me straight in the eye, “we usually see it when one or both of the parents are under the influence of cocaine at the time of conception, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with you guys. Just a freak occurrence; we’ll get her fixed up.”
He seemingly tried to spare me the pain of what Chloe and I already knew to be fact.
That meeting room tonight became as tense as the hospital room was 20 years ago as the Best of the Shitty Fathers wrapped up his disgusting tale of truth.
Baby C never heard this story, or at least I never told her, until right now.
Raisin Bran guy just looked in my direction and belched.
I’m living in the present.
It’s 2:02 AM, August 20, 2025, in Freehold, New Jersey…
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