He sits on the porch and exhales a puff of smoke from his cigarette. His eyes stare at a baseball field across the street while his mind drifts into his past, an unscripted legacy of a life filled with fear, anger and courage.

This is the story of a father and his child who have both been challenged by a life-changing identity crisis. He’s known as Mark the Shark by his friends and by his competitors at the casino poker table where he has made much of his living. His cutthroat reputation as a professional card player is enhanced by a tattoo of a Great White on his left arm.

Mark is molded from a confrontational and confused childhood. “I was literally the smallest kid in my high school in Dover, Delaware,” he said. “I had to constantly defend myself from the big bullies.”

On the school bus one day, a bully was picking on Mark’s brother. “I jumped over the seat and grabbed him by the neck. Of course, he beat the you know what out of me.”

Another time a big athlete from the school’s basketball team bullied and beat him up badly. About a month later, Mark took a baseball bat to the school. He slammed the kid’s hands and kept on swinging after he had knocked him down. He never bothered Mark again.

He attributes his childhood fear and anger to the absence of a male role model in his life. “I had no father to teach me how to be a man. My dear mother taught me about kindness and compassion, but sometimes I still came home with a black eye or blood on my face.”

Mark was ambitious in his youth, cutting lawns with a push mower he hauled by his bicycle and by delivering newspapers on a 6-mile route. As a young man, he started his own painting business. He also had another business which was not only illegal but dangerous.

“If people lost money in a court case that decided against them, they’d come to me to get the money back. I had a couple of really big dudes who would find the people who owed the money and after some strong-armed intimidation, the pay back was made, which I earned half of as my end of the contract. If negotiations didn’t work, Plan B was to exert some physical force.”

Mark’s business came to a sudden stop one day when he was “kindly” told to end it by a mob crime boss who lived in the territory he had been working.

He learned to be adept at playing poker on the way to a marriage with two children that ended in a “messy divorce.” He was awarded custody of Melanie, his 4-year-old daughter.

He was a United States Poker Champion before moving from the Atlantic City area, seeking refuge from the big city problems, to Jim Thorpe where he carried a suitcase filled with his homophobia and a slew of other prejudices.

Mark raised Melanie in Jim Thorpe. He cared for her needs five days a week and when he gambled on the weekends, she was with her mother or grandparents. His fatherly influence suited his daughter just fine, but she was battling an identity crisis that he never did notice.

“I knew she was hanging out with girls from high school who looked more like boys. I figured since she was a tomboy, she had found other tomboys like her.”

The progression of Melanie’s transformation after high school became evident to everyone except her father until he saw a difference in her appearance.

“I noticed she cut her hair really short that made her look like a boy,” he said. “She had a bit of a mustache, too. So, I asked her, ‘What’s up with the look? Her answer was, ‘This is what I want to be.’”

Melanie never came right out to say she was gay. She was fearful of her father’s disappointment. Then, “Johnny Macho” as, he called himself, found out that she was living with a girlfriend in Florida.

He takes another puff of his cigarette. The guile Mark brings to the green velvet of the card table is what he lives his life by. He’s a calculator of character. He can read a person’s heart like he can detect a bluff by a poker player who risks all his chips with a desperate gamble. Yet the one person he had failed to read was his own child, his birthright daughter, whom he has loved more than himself.

“Being gay was one thing, but I was not expecting what happened next. Melanie became a transgender and her new name is Max.”

Mark returned from visiting her in Florida to Weissport, where he moved from Jim Thorpe. He sat on his porch and turned his mind over and over like he was shuffling cards, looking for the joker in the deck to tell him that his daughter changing herself into a man was only in his imagination.

“I was never prepared for her desire to be a man, but what father could be?” he said. “I didn’t even know what a transgender was.”

He recalled a time some years back when he felt he was at a crossroads trying to handle an acquired poker player popularity along with a potential criminality from enticing persuasions that had come from shady characters he got to know in the casinos. He decided to strike a deal, not with them and not with anyone of the human kind.

“One night, I took a walk out into the woods and had a two-hour discussion with God under the stars. I told him I will always be a sinner. That’s just who I am, but I promised I would never hurt anyone intentionally again. I’d be a man with moral values and know the difference between right and wrong. That two-hour discussion with God brought a radical change upon me.”

The first significant change he made was to look at Melanie, not as a gay person, not as a transgender, but as his child who has grown to become like her father.

She has a thick skin like her dad. “I raised her to never feel self-pity. Get up and handle your business.”

She respects his tough talk. When she introduces him to her friends, she doesn’t call him her father. “I want you to meet my dad,” she says. The difference in meaning between father and dad is greater than the 1,100 miles that separate them.

Melanie, now 23, continues to take male hormones. Mark speaks with her four times a week and the two have visited each other over the past three years. She is self-employed in a service business in Florida and her clientele continues to grow in numbers.

“People come to her seeking advice about their lives,” he said. “I taught her how to be a leader, but to use that power only to help, and not to hurt or take advantage of anyone.”

Mark does not refer to Melanie/Max in male pronouns or masculine terms. “I raised her as my little girl and that’s who she will always be, no matter if she looks like a guy now.”

He offers advice to fathers who are struggling with the issue of having a transgender child.

“It’s really a black and white decision,” he replied. “Avoidance is out of the equation. You have to face it head on and keep your emotions out of it. If you disown your child, it’s because of your religious beliefs or your selfish prejudices. You end up with a zero relationship with someone you raised for 17 years. Then, there’s the effect on your wife and the rest of your family. No good comes out of rejection.

“Acceptance not only keeps your child in your life, but it allows you to continue building a rewarding relationship. It’s very freeing for both of you to put aside any judgments.”

He contemplates how much his views on life have changed ever since that night that he had his talk with God. “I had been close to either ending a life or having an ending of my own,” he says. “Now I have a clear understanding of what’s important to me.”

Mark is a man with a strong will. He never quits anything that he decides to do. Yet, life experience and his rising age have softened what was an impenetrable shell he’s had around his heart for most of his life. As he moves closer toward his twilight years, he still puts on his poker face and plays the game he loves, but with the knowledge that life itself is a gamble and sometimes, all you can do is play the cards you are dealt.

He finishes his cigarette and checks his phone. She’s calling him tonight. They will talk about their week and laugh with a sense of humor that is a special gift between them.

When they text each other, she will say, “I love you, Dad” and his reply is always, “ditto” and then another “ditto.” His three dot texts are all that it takes to seal an unbreakable bond with his child.

“It comes down to how you feel about yourself,” he said. “I’ve made my share of mistakes, but the mistakes have helped form the man and the dad that I am today.” He pauses a moment and looks out again at the empty baseball field.

“I am happy who I am. My daughter is happy who she is. That’s all that really matters.”

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com