Undergraduate / My Father Thinks He's Hannibal Lecter-Common App Prompt [4]

Option #3. Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.

This is just a first draft, but I'm just looking for some help on how to pull it together and make it less broad. I also still need to write a conclusion. I'm a bit of a procrastinator, so this essay is actually due tomorrow. Do I have a good start?

"See?" My father says gleefully, gesturing at the television screen where Anthony Hopkins is sauntering off into the sunset.
"Dad, you're not Hannibal Lecter," I reply, barely looking up from my book.
You see, in the past, he's tried to persuade me that he's all sorts of characters from Mickey Knox to Dr. X of Rocky Horror fame. He is one of the most creative liars around, but he wasn't always so easygoing. My father embodies the basic spirit of a child, both in the immature and playful sense. He changes his mind on a whim, stringent one second and neglectful the next. Every move my father has ever made has effected me in some way, both negative and positive.

When I was a child, he was more strict than any other parent I knew, and he did not tolerate anything but obedience. My siblings and I had daily chores; everything from scrubbing the wooden floors to hauling in wood for the winter. He often commented, in all seriousness, that we were born to weed his garden. I had to learn how to work with my siblings without fighting, a skill I used throughout high school in almost every class project.

Just after my ninth birthday, my mother died. My parents had been together for more than twenty years, and my father stopped caring about anything. He had always been a heavy drinker, but he became an alcoholic, flying into rages at a moment's notice. At one point, he had a rifle in his hands and walked about the house, insisting he would end everything right there, and went outside. I heard the gun go off, and I lay under the table in the living room, crying, feeling betrayed by the tiny sense of relief in my body. He came back in later, unharmed, but I stayed under the table, my eyes closed, hoping everything would go back to normal.

Iin fifth grade I started at Spalding Public School, which was twenty miles away. With my other siblings living in Spalding, my father stopped picking us up from school, assuming we could walk to a sibling's house. He caught me packing extra clothing one morning and he angrily dumped them out on the floor, assuring me he would be there that afternoon. Instead, he showed up drunk the next weekend, standing in the middle of main street and yelling at the passing cars. For most of my fifth grade year, I saw him only a handful of times, staying instead at my siblings' houses at random, hoping I had enough clothes to last the week. I was confident at first that he would be there, but that slowly changed over the coming months. Although my feelings have improved as I get older, I still have slight issues with trusting others, and I was shy for most of my high school years, afraid to rely on any of my classmates.

At the end of fifth grade, my father was charged with child neglect and I became a ward of the state, moving in with my sister Shane, whom became my foster parent. In the middle of seventh grade, he had cleaned up his act a bit, and so I was returned, along with my sister Honey. His father passed away when I was twelve, and with his inheritance, he fell back into the abuse cycle drinking heavily and using everything from marijuana to cocaine. The first day of eighth grade, I was back with Shane, where I stayed until the end of freshman year. I still saw him over the summer, however, and I grew to hate the sight of alcohol, and the smell of cigarettes makes me gag to this day. My father's vices managed to make me stay away from every possible addiction I could have gotten into.

When I returned in sophomore year, my father had become a different person. He still drank heavily, but things did not weigh on his mind as much, and he seemed happy with his girlfriend, Criss. It was at this time that my new, improved father began to emerge. We watched Rocky Horror Picture Show almost every night, singing along with Riff Raff and Dr. X. Without cable in the house, he instead bought Natural Born Killers and the Hannibal movies, and we'd sit for hours, quoting them back and forth to each other. He became this quirky, funny person, rubbing off his odd humor on me. We listened to NPR every Sunday, discussing everything from political views to what was happening in Lake Woebegon. No longer the two extremes he'd been in the past, he had worked out a sort of middle ground between a draconian demeanor and an apathetic attitude. "Your face." was his whimsical reply to everything.

"What kind of pasta?" I would ask in the grocery store aisle, and he'd grin mischievously.
"YOUR FACE pasta!"
He began making up all sorts of things and I'd play along, giggling at his silliness. I was able to loosen up and give into my silly side without feeling stupid. For instance, at one point, he very seriously informed me that Rachel, his pet raccoon, had not died from a misadventure with a passing car, but instead was working with soldiers in Afghanistan to fight the insurgents. Also, his dog Blue had not perished in an unfortunate run-in with the neighboring dogs, but had had a mafia hit put out on him and the neighboring dogs had simply filled the order.

He began working out of state Monday through Thursday, coming every weekend, and reverted somewhat back to his old unreliable self. I had no car, and so any time I wanted to participate in anything extracurricular I had to beg rides off of my friends or pay a sibling to take me the eight miles home. In Junior year, I got a job just to pay for rides home, and so most nights I sat outside Pizza Hut for an hour waiting for him before I walked the mile down the highway to my sister Sugar's house to stay the night. Some nights in the summer, it would be one a.m before he'd show up, tipsy and unapologetic as usual.

I can't remember one time that my father attended a parent-teacher conference or asked about my homework, but every time I brought a report card home, he'd read it over apprehensively, and then set it aside without a word. He crowed for days to everyone about my ACT scores, reported to his girlfriend about my grades, and grinned when I graduated, it seems he cannot directly tell me that he is proud of me. When my sister Sugar got an 85% on a test, he congratulated her. When I got an 85%, he threw the paper in the trash and told me I'd have to try harder. He always expected nothing less than perfect from me. I became determined to succeed as a result, working twenty-five hours a week to save money so I could become the second child in twelve children to attend college.

Growing up with my father was like riding a rogue rollercoaster, his mind changing sporadically with no warning, a comedian one day and a careless man the next. My father is a hard man to love, and a hard man to respect, and somehow after everything I've been through with him I can still do both unconditionally. I can forgive him for who he has been in the past and for who he may be in the future. He may be hypocritical, unreliable, an alcoholic, a chain smoker, racist, and contradictory. However, he is also hilariously creative, a hard worker, a great dancer, and a Vietnam Veteran. I am inspired to be nothing like his bad side, and I aspire to his better traits.. I have his sense of humor, his quirkiness, and his stubborness. I face the world, shaped and molded by his influence, determined to become somebody.