Mental Illness Took My Dad. After His Death, I Discovered His Secret Past Inside An Old Filing Cabinet.

In my memory, there are two dads: the Richard before mental illness — and the one after.

The Richard before never seemed very rock ‘n’ roll. He was just another workaholic father, keeping his brick of an early mobile phone close, even on vacations, and coming home late from the family business, the Great American Tent Company.

The one after ... well, I try not to dwell on him as much. But there was a third Richard I knew nothing about until after he was gone.

One day when I was 26, just months after my dad’s death from congestive heart failure, I visited to check on my mom. I found her at the kitchen table with a pile of well-worn manila folders fanned out in front of her, an ashtray nearby with a half-smoked joint still smoldering.

Mom was an old eBay queen from the ’90s — she bought and sold Beanie Babies for profit back when that was possible — and I could tell she’d hunted up something good. I looked closer. Each file had a famous name written on it in my father’s neat print: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Lionel Richie, Allman Brothers, Santana.