Here Comes the Son

A short story thirteen years in the making

For most of my early life, I was indifferent to the Beatles. I recognized their status as cultural icons, and I understood their impact on music. But there was something about their music that always seemed missing, something I could never quite put my finger on.

When I was seventeen years old, I met my mom’s lifelong friend Lee Lacy. He was an aging hippie living out his days in Las Vegas. He had long, grey hair and thin, round, silver-rimmed glasses that made him look just enough like John Lennon. He traveled everywhere with an acoustic guitar and an unflappable laissez-faire disposition. I didn’t know much more about him at the time.

He would call and talk to my mom on the house phone while my dad would work the night shift at Waste Management. A couple of times, my mom, after a healthy dose of red wine, would hand the phone off to me. Lee loved to talk to me, especially about music.

Those chats were a bit weird. Like, why the hell am I talking to my mom’s friend from middle school right now? But after a few minutes, I found myself really interested in our conversation. He had an encyclopedic mental capacity for ‘60s and ‘70s rock and roll, especially the Beatles. He could go on and on about the genius of Paul McCartney. Out of politeness, I never told him that the sound of the Beatles’ music made me want to stick my head in the garbage disposal in search of something less anodyne.

Apart from the sporadic phone calls, which became more frequent as my eighteenth birthday approached, I only knew one other thing about Lee. He was addicted to meth. My mother told me that in passing one evening, and reminded me to pray for him, but to do so in silence. We didn’t bring up Lee when Dad was around.

Sometime in early May, shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I found myself sitting across from my mom and Lee at an Outback Steakhouse down the road from our home. Lee was in town from Las Vegas and took us out for dinner. He seemed nervous, but my mom looked happier than I had seen her in a long time. I found the ordeal to be awkward. Like, why the hell are we having dinner with your meth-head friend? And why am I not allowed to speak a word of this to Dad?

A few months later my dad and I were replacing the fuel pump on my car. My mom was supposed to be home hours ago. I remember it was getting late. The darker it became outside, the more distant and worried my dad’s behavior became. We both had to be up early the following morning. He told me to go to sleep while he finished the repair.

After I went inside, he called my mom. No answer. He put his phone down and finished the fuel pump. When he picked the phone up again, he noticed a missed call and a voicemail. He pushed play and held the phone to his ear. The accidental butt dial of a voicemail he was about to hear would change the course of our lives.

The recording made from inside my mom’s back pocket was an admission of guilt. While she told her boyfriend that she loved him enough to leave the man she married, unbeknownst to her, the cell phone was transmitting that information to the mailbox of her already skeptical husband.

Lee Lacy was not simply a longtime friend of my mom. As an adult looking back, the signs were all very evident. But as a naïve eighteen-year-old, I never saw that coming. The news of Mom’s infidelity struck me hard. But the part that took the air from my lungs was when she told me she needed to swab the inside of my mouth for a DNA test.

The results came in and the walls came down. I was, in fact, not the biological son of Matt Bair, the hard-working mechanic. Instead, I found out that I was the son of my mom’s long-time meth-addicted friend, Lee Lacy. The guy who would call sometimes and talk to me about Ringo Starr.

This was news to Matt, who had believed I was his one and only son since I arrived on April Fool’s Day, 1993. My birthday now seemed like a cosmically sick joke.

Surprise gave way to shock. Shock eventually morphed into denial. Denial became anger. And finally, everything became entrenched in a filter of rage. A hostility toward Lee became a hostility toward everything. If I thought of him, which I did often, I hated him. I did all I could to be unlike him. On top of it all, I felt abandoned by my mother. The person who had instilled honesty and integrity in me betrayed me.

I planned on telling Lee to eat shit when he reached out to me. But I didn’t. I faced him. Inside the walls of yet another chain restaurant, Famous Dave’s, I broke bread (cornbread) with my biological father.

As much as I wanted to scream at him and cause a scene in this BBQ restaurant, I couldn’t do it. He disarmed me. I saw in him many parts of myself. I saw answers to the mysteries of self and personality that echoed throughout my entire life.

He apologized roundly for dismantling the entire foundation of my life up to that point. He offered to pay for my college and paid for another meal. It couldn’t have gone more differently than I expected.

I’d love to leave you with the impression that the story of my mom, Lee, and I played out happily, but it didn’t. I didn’t want another dad. And even if I did, two other boys had been referring to Lee as Dad since they were born. He chose them over my mom and me. And I don’t blame him one bit.

Despite an effort to pretend as though he never existed, Lee and I saw each other several times over the next few years. Most of which were weird. It was like placing a band-aid over a wound that had already scarred. But one fine evening, for about three minutes, my mom, Lee, and I got to feel like a proper family.

After my mom and my dad divorced, my mom lived in the bottom story of her friend Kathy’s house. I only went there a couple of times, but it never seemed like the living arrangement between my mom and Kathy was going well. Their relationship was transactional and displayed no illusion of friendship. And one evening, Kathy finally came unglued.

In her defense, I have no idea what time it was other than late. Lee and I had been passing his guitar back and forth, as we took turns singing songs. The two of us and my mom were really singing, might I add. Like some kind of primal familial howl that had been dormant inside all of us had found its way out.

We were singing along with Lee as he played what I fuzzily recall as “Reelin’ in the Years” by Steely Dan when Kathy stormed into the living room. She demanded we be quiet. My mother, in typical form, clapped back. They argued in the kitchen and agreed on one more song.

Still visibly agitated, my mom sat down, let out a sigh, and asked Lee to play a Beatles song.

He began strumming the beginning of “Here Comes the Sun.”

I rolled my eyes.

My mom’s blonde hair remained fixed from the amount of hairspray she always used, and the rest of her body began swaying to the song. She was singing loudly along with Lee—so loud that she sounded defiant, like she wasn’t going to let an awkward roommate dynamic disrupt a memory she had dreamt of for years.

I gave in to that moment and sang along, too. That’s one of the beautiful things about the Beatles’ music, you don’t have to like it, but if you’ve had a pulse in the last sixty years, you automatically know at least some of the words.

We sang together, we roared through Kathy’s house in a collectively cathartic “fuck you” to all the barriers in our lives that made moments like this one so rare.

Sure, it was surrounded by the trauma of a family falling apart. But right then and there in that basement listening to him play, my mother and I singing along, it was the most natural thing I have ever felt. And now every time I hear that sweet little melody coming from George Harrison’s guitar, followed by a “doo, dun, doo, doo,” I think I feel bliss.

An overwhelming sense of euphoria encapsulates that one real, untainted moment I was afforded with both people who gave me life. Looking at it now, I was starved of that moment for nearly two decades, and when I finally had it, I feasted.

So many people in my shoes go through their entire lives wishing that they had even one moment with their absent father. I received something so powerful that it would take Lee’s death to understand the whole gravity of that situation.

Lee did more than a lot of absent fathers. He tried. Maybe it wasn’t enough. Maybe I saw him as the person who made my life so much more complicated than it ever needed to be. Maybe I felt like I would be betraying Matt Bair for all the work he put into fulfilling the role of a father. Maybe his presence in my life was more confusing and angering than it was beneficial. Maybe I felt like I had to hate him. Maybe I wish I had tried harder to have a relationship with him before it was all too late. An infinite flow of maybes has blasted through my head since I received the news of Lee’s death last month.

But one thing is for certain. “Here Comes the Sun” will forever be my own little time capsule. My very own personified, individualized definition of peace. A moment existing outside of the events around it. A moment that made me a fan of the Beatles. A moment that I now get to relive with joy every time I play that song with my wife and our daughter. And maybe the newest baby, the one still growing inside my wife’s belly, can hear that song's muffled sounds and develop an idea of what it sounds like to be a family.

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Note from Author:

The original version of this story was posted in November 2024. It was received well by almost everyone who read it.

I am reposting this story because I deleted it after I was encouraged to submit the piece to The New York Times' Modern Love section. After several anticipatory months, the Times told me and my story to kick rocks. Instead of accepting defeat or swirling in discouragement, I remembered that the mighty NY Times doesn't always get it right. Their first written review of an up-and-coming political figure in 1930s Germany stated, “Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so violent or genuine as it sounded.” A little jab at the media behemoth is as good for their spirit as their rejection letter was to mine. Huge publication backing on my side or not, I know I poured every ounce of myself into this story, and I hope to see it move the people who read it. To those who did, thank you for spending a little time in the most tender parts of my mind.

I am writing this afterword in the late hours of May 14, 2025. My wife Karli and I welcomed our daughter, Penny Rosemary Bair, into the world at 10:43 yesterday morning. Tomorrow, I plan on pulling my faded copy of The Beatles’ masterpiece Abbey Road from the shelf, holding that sweet baby in my arms, and playing it for her. And when track number seven plays, the song will once again take new form.