Folks say Papa never was much on thinking; spent most of his time chasing women and drinking

Full disclosure. I don’t remember my dad. I never knew him. For the first eighteen years of my life mom would claim he was one rockstar or another, usually one of the dead ones. At various times throughout my childhood I was told that my father was Ron “Pigpen” McKerran, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Richard Manuel, Keith Moon, all the members of Three Dog Night… well, you get the picture. To say that mom was heavily involved in the music scene of the late sixties and early seventies would be inaccurate. Pretty sure the relevant term would be “groupie slut”.

See, mom hung out around the Haight in the Summer of Love, and she was very much into the “free love” movement. She even did some time as a fluffer for Cynthia Plaster Caster, and at one point claimed that she hooked up with Charlie Manson, though she never said that he was my dad. In her own words, he was “charismatic as all hell, but creepy as fuck. And he stunk.”

On my eighteenth birthday I got my mother high and just put her on the spot about it. Who, really, was my father? After dancing around the question for a while and going off on a tangent about how Ronald Regan was the antichrist she finally admitted the truth: she had no idea.

I was fucking conceived at Woodstock.

“Honestly, no. I have no idea who my father was.”

“And how old are you? I wasn’t allowed to ask when I interviewed you, but knowing might help me pinpoint a few things.”

“Fifty-three this past April.”

“Miles, you can easily pass for thirty exhausted and caffeine deprived. When I interviewed you I was sure you were lying about your experience because I would have pegged you for twenty-five.”

“Well, yeah. I’ve aged well. Good genes I guess, one good thing from the sperm donor.”

“So your mother-“

“Died New Year’s Day, 2000. At 57. But I blame that more on the bullet she put through her temple than genetics.”

“Fuck. I… I need to look something up.” And with that, she buried her face in her laptop for the next twenty minutes. I busied myself with reading the various certifications on the walls and reading through the minor yearly changes in Minnesota’s insurance code, weirdly concerned that I might have just had my cock sucked under false pretenses and not entirely sure how to feel about it.

“Do you know what a gancanagh is?”

“Are you **** on something or just having a stroke?”

She sighed heavily, her brow furrowed rather cutely. “It comes from the Gaelic gean canagh or ‘love talker’. The Good Neighbors tend to follow specific patterns, and your father seems to fit into that category.”

“Good Neighbors?”

“It’s considered bad luck to actually name them as such, but yeah… faeries.”

“So you’re saying…”

“Miles, your father was a faerie.”

(Title: “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone” by The Temptations)