I don’t mean that I took my father’s cremains, as they’re known in the parlance of modern undertaking. His cremains are gone. We dumped those in the lake where we always went for vacation when I was a kid. He really liked it out there, and my mother thought he might still, even though he’s no longer a person but rather a few pounds of ash that have the appearance and feel of fresh cat litter.

Well, actually, he was a few pounds of ash. I don’t know what he is now, since we dumped him in the lake. He probably no longer looks and feels like cat litter. I’d imagine that, in keeping with the spirit of scattering someone’s cremains in a body of water, he melded somehow with the lake, broke down further into the constituent parts that, combined, made him corporeal in the first place. Maybe by now he’s been transformed into a bit of aquatic flora, or else gobbled up into the creepy appendage-like mandibles of a crayfish that was, in turn, eaten by one of the chain pickerel my father and I used to catch when I was a kid, and so on.

My father is now part of the lake. Or parts of the lake.

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"Andrew Kirby said that he doesn't have to do homework tonight," she tells me on Dec. 11.

"Why?" I ask. Kirby's a middle-school classmate, a chunky wild man.

"Because he said to the teacher: 'Why bother? The world is going to end on 12-12-12 at midnight.'" She rifles through a Samsung Galaxy tab before she even gets her little ballerina arms through her NorthFace sleeves.

"The world doesn't end on December 12, 2012," I tell her, opening the front door to let her sister out into the cold. “The world ends on December 21, 2012. We have approximately 10 days left."

She lets out an exacerbated argh and climbs into the backseat of her mother's Prius with her younger sister in dance leotards. Ah, yes, the world may be coming to an end soon, but we are still trying to save her while sticking it to Exxon one mile at a time.

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A lot of crazy shit has happened since then. Samuel L. Jackson, Werner Herzog, Thandie Newton and an adorable Filipina grandma all did readings that went viral. Corporate publishers tried to buy the book away from tiny, independent Akashic Books for a lot of money, and we said no. Jenna Elfman randomly made a music video, and in return for our not suing her, met up with us in Miami with a plastic baby doll to speak to fans of literature. Time magazine named "Go the Fuck to Sleep" its “Thing of the Year,” presumably in a squeaker win over that bacon-flavored mayonnaise. Sam Jackson and I teamed back up for “Wake the Fuck Up,” a pro-Obama video that reminded America of the importance of voting and vulgarity.

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Almost six months ago I received a piece of troubling news that I have been unable to come to terms with: I am 100 percent sterile, due to what my doctor calls a "random genetic abnormality."

This revelation has sent me spiraling downward into a dark mood that I have been unable to lift since. I have always envisioned my future with a family of my own taking center stage, and now that vision has been shattered. It doesn't help that each of the three women I cared about began to shun me shortly after I told them, and as of this writing, still are. It's as if infertility has thrown some invisible barrier up between myself and the world of dating, leaving me to find solace in large amounts of alcohol and far too many pints of ice cream.

Upon receiving the news that my best friend's wife was going to have a baby, I congratulated him, only to feel hatred and jealousy bubble up inside me. He'll soon have a son or daughter that is his own flesh and blood, a precious blessing I will never receive, and as much as I'm trying not to, I hate him for it. I'll never hear the words "He looks just like his dad!" or "She has her father's eyes!" like he will, and I fear constantly that the growing animosity I feel toward him might tear our decade-long friendship to tatters.

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I have always been a loser. Wallets, cellphones, gift certificates, the “good” scissors. They all swim in and out of my life like migrating cod. One of the unshakable images from my childhood is of my mother, silent but vengeful, hurling a giant Hefty bag down the stairs to our basement. It contained all the GI Joe parts and Lego pieces I had ever misplaced or let slide between couch cushions. A few days later, she asked why I hadn’t complained about her trashing my stuff. “I finally know where everything is,” I told her.

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As I grew older, however, his silence became an invisible barrier between us. By 10, I was convinced he didn’t love me. Sitting in the back seat of our station wagon on a family trip, I made a bet with myself: If he said anything to me -- directly to me -- within the following 24 hours, it meant he loved me.

He went 41 hours.

I grew up, went to college far from home, worked hard at finding a career, finally returned to Los Angeles and settled down with a family of my own. My father and I spoke every so often, but usually just as a prelude to my longer conversations with my mother. We never called the other directly just to talk. There was a wall of silence between us -- but by now it seemed normal.

Then one day, 15 years ago, a call came from my mother. My father had fallen down and was at UCLA Hospital. I was used to the idea that he would die young of heart disease. His mother had died at 55, and he’d had two bypass operations, the first when I was 16. So I was unprepared for his diagnosis: He had a variant of Alzheimer’s disease.

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Me: “Do you want to have a special daddy-daughter morning together?”

Her: “Special daddy-daughter mornings suck.”

"Suck" is a word her 6-year-old brother taught her. My daughter is not ungrateful or spoiled. She is simply honest, and proud of an expanding vocabulary. Daddy and daughter mornings do suck compared with sister and brother mornings. I could never hope to achieve the comic brilliance or physical daring of a 6-year-old boy; I refuse to use the term “soapy farts” for cheap laughs, and I won’t jump from the top of the third-floor stairs while screaming and firing foam disks from a Captain America shield. No, I’m merely the “authority blob” until her brother arrives home around lunch. For her, the equation is simple: 3+6=PARTY, while 3+34=SUCK.

This is such a shift from my son. When he was a little boy, I was pressed into service as his constant companion, caretaker and general superfriend. But my daughter is more self-sufficient. Next year, she goes to preschool while my little boy heads to kindergarten. I’m glad they’re growing up, but I’m staring down big chunks of empty space. After years as a stay-at-home dad, I may be looking for a new line of work.

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Life and infectious joy pour out of my father. It is because of him that I believed in Santa Claus well into the seventh grade. His mother died of breast cancer in his junior year of college and during his first year of medical school he found himself frantically performing mouth to mouth on his dad while the distant shriek of an ambulance grew closer. By the time they reached the hospital the heart attack had finished its silent assassination, leaving my father to raise his teenage brothers. But he still tells stories of a perfect childhood in an idyllic Southern town. He still sees the world as a place filled with beauty and wonder.

I wonder if he’d still retain his positive outlook if the missing pieces of my story were filled in. What happened shook me, even though I talked to no one. For a while the experience felt uniquely mine, like a white-hot brand had been pressed into my soul. I later realized it’s sadly cliché. Many of us share such interior tattoos.

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I fought with my sister about this two years ago on Father’s Day, when I was back home in Seattle visiting her. We avoided the topic all day, until she came home in the wee hours from her bartending job at a gay bar.

“I was talking with Jean tonight about Dad,” she said. Jean was one of her transgender customers. “And Jean said, ‘Maybe you were never meant to celebrate Father’s Day, because your dad was always meant to be a woman.’” She looked at me as though this might be a consolation, but I was having none of it.

“That’s absurd!” I said, because I believe our dad was a man through and through. He was 6-foot-7. He was lanky, deep-voiced. I often described his personality as somewhere between Anthony Bourdain and Howard Stern. What was most damning, in my mind, was how physically abusive he was to my mother and me. Bridgette missed much of this. She was 5 when I went into foster care at 15. The court made my dad take anger management classes after that. “He was always talking about how he hated women,” I said. “If that’s the case, how could he have really been one?”

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I had so many other questions to ask: What did he do for a living? Did he have other children? Was he married? Did he drink coffee? Was he happy? Were there pictures of me -- a smiling, chubby baby -- on the walls of his home or was it easier for him to forget I ever existed?

But I could not ask him any of this, because we had not actually met in person. At the age of 27, I saw my father for the first time when I found him on Facebook.

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I didn't freak out when I found out my wife and I were going to have a son. But as the day approached, I had a crisis of confidence. We were living in a studio in Los Angeles, sleeping on a mattress that smelled like pumpkin beer from the previous fall, driving a two-door, 30-year-old car. How were we supposed to do this?

It turns out I was asking the right questions. We needed a new car and a new house; we got Ford’s least-monstrous SUV and a three-bedroom rental that cost as much as my old Brooklyn one-bedroom. And then, in the final weeks before our son arrived, we started watching "Game of Thrones." By the time our boy was born, I didn’t want to swaddle him; I wanted to thrust him to the heavens on top of a parapet and declare, “All this will be yours!”

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I’m not a sports fan, as a rule. My progressive high school required that girls learn to play football, and my main memory from those gym classes is that I could throw a football with no more accuracy than I could throw anything else. I haven’t learned much in the intervening years. I remain unclear on what “intentional grounding” is. I am unsure what a neutral zone infraction consists of, and how that differs from encroachment. I don’t know who’s in what division, including my own home team, the Rams, although I do know enough to lament them, generally.

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My father, dressed in jeans and a sweater with a pashmina wrapped loosely about her neck, walked ahead of me, her girlfriend at her side. My father’s extensive collection of jewelry and her outfits still startle me. Everything is so form-fitting! It is cheating, I think, to wear women’s jeans and not have hips.

“It’s not fair,” I told her once. “You get all the perks of being a woman but none of the pain. You don’t have to get a period every month.”

I was forgetting about the procedures, the hormones, the electrolysis. But still.

We were in search of breakfast, which with my father in San Francisco means walking for at least 20 minutes to reach a restaurant I have yet to try because a repeat visit is unthinkable to her.

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Oh, also, one more thing you should know about him. He won't crap in the toilet. I hate to be so crass, but that's the fact of it. Peeing? Sure. Put him in front of a urinal, and he'll spray that toilet with his lack of aim. But "poop in the potty," as they say in the parenting biz? Not happening. Ever. When he needs to go, he asks for a pull-up, goes about his business, and then gets changed.

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We've come a long way since then. My wife and I have a real partnership. We work together on everything, and try to do the best for our kids every single day. After years of failing to find work, I grudgingly accepted the new economic reality and became a stay-at-home dad. I like to think I'm a good father, a modern man, but even I have my limits. There is one thing I absolutely will not do. I will not do a play date.

The thing is, I don't like interacting with other parents. It's enough that I shop and try to cook a nutritious meal every single night. Now I have to yammer on about my girl's love of kitties or stuffies or the Wonder Pets? That's valuable time taken away from my rapidly shrinking male pursuits.

Even the concept of the "play date" rubs me the wrong way. When I was a young boy, you went over to your friend's house and hung out, until you heard your mom yelling down the street to get your you-know-what home. The moms and dads were never involved in this activity. Why would they be? I wouldn't have wanted Mrs. Krula on my dirt-bomb team for all the Fantastic Four comics in the world.

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My daughter and I were walking briskly through a gigantic amusement park, past a huge pegboard loaded with bizarre, oversized dolls resembling Sponge Bobs on steroids, when Alexandra popped the question I was dreading.

"Please, Daddy! I really want a Domo! Puh-leeze!"

In her six years on this earth, the word "Domo" had never before left my daughter's lips, not once, not ever, but that's the nature of the beast. Silly Bandz and Uglydolls yesterday, some Japanese TV mascot called a Domo today, a yet-uninvented fad tomorrow. But the problem wasn't my daughter's fickleness. The problem was something else.

I glanced at the arcade in front of me. Not one of those ring-the-bell-with-brute-strength things. Whew. I'm no weakling, but strength has never been my, well, strength. Nor, thank God, did it involve a hoop. The last time I played basketball, Captain & Tennille were topping the charts. And I was quite relieved to see this particular game didn't require shooting anything with a gun. My scientist father played tennis my entire childhood: white sneaks, white socks, white shorts, white shirt. An NRA family we were not.

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The barber nodded. With a sigh, I took a seat, and he wet my head with a spray bottle. It made sense at this point to close my eyes. Then my head began to spin. I was hung over, and the foul funk of grief burned in my throat.

Three months earlier, the doctors in Florida said my dad was very sick. On the X-ray, you could see a ghostly starfish wrapped around his neck, tightening around pipes connecting head to heart.

I was still jumpy. The sound of scissors -- click, click, click -- took me back to the hospital. Opening my eyes, I watched as dark chunks of my hair fell to the ground. The barber paused to remove a straight razor from a paper sleeve, and I thought I smelled disinfectant. Into a bone handle went the blade, and I nearly retched.

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I'm kinda fond of Hooters. As chain restaurants go, it is a fine establishment with a specific culinary point of view. Food-wise it never tries to be anything it isn’t. The food is deeply fried and tastes like shame, but the bathrooms are always very clean. The domestic beer is served in a frosty cold mug.

The service is spectacular, and I'm not making a dumb joke about boobs here. I've had waitresses scare me up cigarettes after casually mentioning that I'd love a smoke, I've had waitresses offer to watch my computer while I go have a cigarette or make a run to one of the pristine bathrooms, I've even gotten the rare corporate beer buy-back. But mostly, the service is attentive and friendly without being overbearing and obnoxious, which is sort of an amazing feat considering the dress code.

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I finally got a glimpse of who he was as a person, though that person had departed an hour ago. Despite walls plastered with awards, numerous bestsellers, bushels of adoring fan mail and the company of great men, his face was etched with disappointment.

As a boy, my vision of my father was hindered by physical fear. All I saw was a giant, one who would periodically strike me to unleash his rage.

Just as I became a man, my father, William Manchester, rocketed to international fame after the publication of his bestseller "The Death of a President." Now he towered over me in the world. All I saw was how much he had achieved and how little I had in comparison.

Just as my father reached the age I am now, 60, the mask of the famous author slipped and I saw a very different face, that of his shadow.

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Every morning at six, we'd gas up at a 7-Eleven and treat ourselves to a Diet Dr. Pepper to get our juices flowing.

"What's our saying?" Dad would yell as he turned the key in our old brown Dodge pickup.

"The early bird gets the worm!" we would shout in unison.

It was the early 1980s and the oil boom was in full-swing. Our sales strategy consisted of driving the back roads of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas and Iowa looking for prospects. We kept our eyes peeled for the lone gas station attendant or a do-it-yourself mechanic working on his car. But what interested us most were the oil rig sites where, at any given time, a group of two or three migrant workers could be found taking a smoke break or digging into the sandwiches they'd brought from home.

"These guys have so much money in their pockets they are just waiting for an opportunity to spend it," Dad would say as we pulled up to a job site. "Well, they are about to get their chance."

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